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Strike on Iraq
According to CNN and various other news sources, Iraq is now under attack by
the US. Here is a link to the current story running at CNN right now, but there's really not much except that it has started. CT Cruise missiles launched against "Target of Opportunity". The full assault has not begun. CT The attack was specifically intended to take out Saddam. CT Saddam appeared on iraqi TV to condemn the US, and Iraqi missiles have been fired at Kuwait.
Here's hoping it'll be over quickly with minimum casualties. My prayers go out not only to the allied troops, but to the Iraqis (Assyrians, Chaldeans, Kurds and Turkmen) aswell.
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no need. With games like SOCOM and America's Army floating around, people are joining the army like crazy. They're still turning most people down who want to join, so a draft won't be happening for a while.
I'm against the war, but I don't see being against the war as being against our troops.
There are a lot of good reasons we shouldn't have done this. Now that we're committed, though, I want the war to end quickly, and I want us to win. I figure that's the best way to minimize the loss of lives (both American and Iraqi).
But being against an unjust war doesn't make one against our troops.
This is the start of somthing bad. As a British parlament member said few days ago, The weakening of the United Nations and the European Union are huge casualties to have before a bullet has been fired. This is a perfect example of why everyone hates the US. We are arrogant and feel the rules dont apply to us.
Still, I'm secretly hoping Bush is saying to himself, "Damn. They called my bluff." But I know that won't happen. People are gonna die in this one, a lot more than last time. World war 3, no, but there will be blood.
If Saddam drags this one into the streets, it could get really ugly. Less chance of chemical bombs, yes, but inner city combat... Children with AK 47s that they found off their father's bodies, women and children getting caught in the crossfire. Bloody ugly.
Or everybody might just surrendur, the oilfields will explode, and Saddam will enver be seen again, aside from really crappy home videos of the type Ossamma is STILL sending us. Whatever happened to him anyways? Why have we stopped caring about him? I hear people saying "remember 9-11, go to war with Iraq..." and then I think about it, and it's so stupid. Saddam and Bin Laden are different people with different goals. Both assholes, but they are not connected really. I remember 9-11, and I don't want to see innocents get killed over something that has nothing to do with it. Sure Saddam is a despot, but HOW MANY FRICKING DESPOTS ARE THERE CURRENTLY IN AFRICA COMMITTING GENOCIDE, MURDURER, AND SPAMMING TECHNIQUES?
Grr.
From this single line, I can extrapolate Michael Moore's attitude, and deduce just about how much weight you can give anything he says (read: none).
The bottom line is that everything he says comes tainted by his axe-grinding over the outcome of the 2000 presidental election. Even if I were to ignore his mockery of 9/11 victims and other tragedies for his own personal profit, I can't take his rants against Bush seriously for the simple reason that it's obvious he simply hates the man.
My personal pet peeve is the "name" that each channel has, like Countdown Iraq, Zero Hour, Showdown With Saddam, etc. It's the friggin' news, and we know it's about Iraq, OK? No need to try to establish a "brand" here...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Saddam and Bin Laden are different people with different goals.
<sarcasm>Ah, but the Bush clan has had a long-term agenda with Saddam. Bin Laden only killed off a few Americans.</sarcasm>
I want to know how attacking Iraq is going to do anything whatsoever to reduce terrorism. I see attacking countries, occupying them, and setting up puppet goverments as having exactly the same effect it's had every time we've done it for the *last* fifty years, which is to piss people off much, much more and produce more people with dead parents/brothers/sisters/cousins/sons/daughters who are willing to die to strike at the United States. People don't just say, entirely unprovoked, "Gee, it's a rainy Saturday. I think I'll go blow myself up on a bus or crash a plane into a building." Getting in a war with a nation, as history has shown, is a fantastic way to produce long-lasting ethnic hatred.
I see the Saddam campaign not just unrelated, as you do, but actively damaging any effort to reduce terrorism in the world.
May we never see th
And the reason the Nazi's needed to be defeated was the fact that they attacked and invaded other countries, just as the US is now doing.
Once upon a time, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic. From where I sit, Dubbya and crew are a bigger theat to our Constitution than Saddam and his cronies. How come Slick Willy gets impeached for getting a hummer in the oval office while Dubbya gets away with wiping his ass with the Constitution?
I will support our troops -- several of whom are members of my family -- by insisting loudly and continuously that they be brought home immediately.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I think American's conveniently forget sometimes that we have weapons of mass destruction too. What's different about us? If we force other countries to disarm, we should as well. A world with NO weapons of mass destruction would be much better off. Iraq's weapons do need to go, but so do ours.
Iraq on the other hand was a chunk of land arbitrarily carved off the side of the crumbling Ottoman Empire -- for centuries it had been under the control of what is now Turkey. There are three major ethnic groups with no particular mutual loyalty. If it weren't for the Ba'ath party and Hussein's iron fist, the country probably would have falled apart decades ago. And even Hussein wouldn't have been able to remain in power for so long if it weren't for US support over the decades to prop up his regime as a bulwark against Iran.
In short, with Hussein gone there will be nothing holding Iraq together, and a lot of tensions pulling it apart.
So what then are the post war possibilities? Long term US military occupation to hold the country together? We could be there for decades. Spin down our involvement over time? If we leave the country weaker than it is today, it could end up being carved into Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish regions by its neighbors -- Iran may invade the south to protect its own stability, just as Turkey may invade the north for similar reasons. The middle could either remain independent & feeble, or be absorbed by a neighbor.
So many things can go wrong. This is going to be a fucking nightmare for decades. When your kids ask why we're constantly occupying chunks of the middle east, and why we're constantly worried about new terrorist incidents, why nobody can afford to buy gasoline anymore, etc -- remind them that this was the night it all started. :-(
Here's hoping that history proves me wrong....
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
On to a more cynical note. The war is only justified if it kills fewer people than would have died in the remainder of Saddam's rule. Over 150,000 Iraqis, military and civilian, died as a direct result of Allied attacks in the Gulf War. That's about how many Saddam killed himself in previous gas attacks against his own people. If this war truly is about the welfare of the Iraqi people, we have to make sure it doesn't make them suffer more than they would otherwise. And we have to be ready to follow up with massive amounts of aid. Not just food and medicine, but capital and technical expertise.
As for the other reasons that justify the war? They are nonsense. Yes, Saddam has WMD, and yes, he has used them against civilian populations. AMERICA has WMD and AMERICA has used them against civilian populations twice - in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We also used chemical agents in Vietnam that cause birth defects to this day.
In the end, I think that America is very vaguely doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. This should have been done twenty years ago, and the war now doesn't even begin to make up for America's failures in the past. Maybe things will start to change (but, to be cyncial again - OF COURSE AMERICA WON'T CHANGE. America doesn't give half a shit about the rest of the world). We'll really have to wait to see who is vindicated, and who isn't.
I am not against the war if it justified, but I hope that they have more information than just "he's a menace to the US". To me, that says nothing. Do they have some proof of operations Saddam is planning? Do they have proof of him funding al quida or something?
If not, I agree with Putin - he is not a threat to the US so why go in now? I agree that the UN is pretty limp, but I think that we finally had their attention and that another month would not make a difference. By that time, maybe Chirac would have gotten off his "I am france, I have veto power...let me use it before I give it to the germans" stance.
I stand 100% behind our troops and wish them the best of luck. We will be able to recover from whatever world opinion we get, but my biggest concern if for the general Iraqi populace. When the bombs start dropping, there will be civilian casualties. Hopefully they will remain small.
Too bad SAS or some other team could not have gone in and just taken out who we need to take out and that is it. A few apache's and low altitude jumps in the middle of the night and who knows what we could have done.
Best of luck to everyone. No matter where you stand on this issue, this is a dark day. War is never good.
Please, in this thread more than ever, concentrate on moderating up rather than down. This issue is bound to foster a great deal of passionate discussion on all sides. If you disagree with a post in this thread, post a reply or mod up a reply that represents your point of view. This is not the time to suppress opinions we disagree with.
Thank you for posting this. Seriously. I respect your views on what is happening in the world. And I have to agree with you, many atrocities in history were commited because of people just doing what they were trained to do. But people like me? I don't think that's a fair comment. You don't know anything about me. Please don't make presumptions just because I am in the military.
I'd like to quote Bill Maher to get my point going:
"As of this writing, the most depressing thing about war in Iraq was how easy it was to sell. Shouldn't it be a little harder than this to sell people a war? ... [and]how amazed I was that, of all the lies told by presidents in my lifetime, the one so many people couldn't get over, and which the media treats as the standard for mendacity, was: 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman.'
"Huge, astounding lies that affected each and every one of us in very real ways: that we were winning the war in Vietnam; that we weren't trading arms for hostages, and if we were it was a soldier's duty to lie about it; that global warming and marijuana needed more study before we could consider policy changes about them; that there'd be no new taxes; that Clarence Thomas was the most qualified person a nation of 250 million could find to sit on the Supreme Court...
"All these lies, all these giant, steaming-turd whoppers, and the one that broke the bank was 'Blow jobs aren't sex.' Wow, that's a stupid country."
Yes it is.
From Ted Rall: "Decades of budget cuts in education are finally yielding results, a fact confirmed by CNN's poll of March 16, which shows that an astonishing 51 percent of the public believe that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was responsible for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks."
Monday night George W. Bush, our legally if not ethically elected leader stepped up in front of the world and told us that Iraq had "ties" to Al Qaeda (and thus WTC responsibility) and that he was a danger to the world, though nothing has ever been produced to prove this (But it's okay, there are some things the government doesn't need to explain fully, they need their secrets right?). Saddam was a danger to Kurds, Israelis, Iranians and Kuwiatis because our government helped gain him that power (the only thing about the Iraq-Contra affair that this country remembers is that a brave man in uniform with an honest face was grilled in front of a big mean Congressional panel).
Afghanistan? An exit strategy was thought up as soon as we went in, and Iraq was it. This is public record. (see current Mother Jones issue). Also see the archived streaming video debate[scroll down] on the Christopher Hitchens Web against Mark Danner.
Everyone involved in Bush's world going back decades has been involved in Oil. Everyone in his government holding any kind of power is involved in Oil. We now have bases spread from Kuwait to deep ex-Soviet Territory in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.
Bush and his Puppeteers lied to us.
It's like we see but we don't see.
Putting up a bumper sticker or flag is our way of getting involved. Cafeteria Managers are renaming French fries. Major newspapers editorialize that the French are pissing on the graves of D-day soldiers. Most Americans don't approve a pre-emptive war, but since Bush's Monday speech his ratings are rocketing. Look, He's doing something. We're like predators only interesting in moving things, in action, overshadowing the consequences.
This is a stupid country.
In response to the pithy "then why don't you just leave" argument, I say:
Because it is the best going, and there's the logistics involved in repatriating. Also, I live on many different levels, in a community, a town, a state, a geography and ecosystem, in cyberspace. The notion of belonging to a nation is but one of many, but hardly my overarching modifier. Is America the best on its way down? Does being the freest nation on earth require colonial domination over the rest of the planet? If another country without the addiction to war and oil can offer the freedom
Why is it NOT okay when Saddam defies the UN, but it's okay when President Bush does it? Could someone explain that to me, please?
A fair question. The answer is very long, but the short version is this: Iraq is in defiance of the United Nations, but the United States and our parters are not.
In 1991, after the Coalition forced Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, Iraq signed a cease-fire agreement that has come to be known as the Safwan Accords. (Safwan was the closest town to the random point in the desert where the generals from both sides met.) One of the terms of the Safwan Accords was that Iraq would comply with all relevant UN Security Council resolutions to reestablish peace in the region.
On April 3, 1991, the UN Security Council (UNSEC) passed resolution 687 which, among other things, called for Iraq to produce, within 15 days, a complete and accurate declaration of all their chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and weapons programs as well as all ballistic missiles capable of flying more than 150 kilometers. Resolution 687 further demanded that Iraq, having made that declaration, then submit to the verifiable destruction of everything included in that declaration under the watchful eyes of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM).
Iraq never did make that declaration. They spent the next twelve years diddling around. They never complied, even partially, with resolution 687.
Now, UN resolutions come in three flavors. General Assembly resolutions and resolutions adopted by UNSEC under chapter VI of the UN Charter are not enforceable; the Charter provides no legal authority for any party, inside or outside of the UN, to enforce those resolutions. But UNSEC resolutions adopted under chapter VII are enforceable. The Charter calls on the member states of the Security Council to enforce chapter VII resolutions when the Security Council authorizes it.
UNSEC resolution 678-- not to be confused with 687-- authorized the members of the Security Council to use all necessary means to force Iraqi occupation forces out of Kuwait, and to enforce all relevant resolutions both existing and subsequent to resolve the conflict. Resolution 678 was adopted under chapter VII; the members of the Council were not only authorized to enforce it, they were actually obligated by the UN Charter.
So the situation in late 1991 was that there was a binding, enforceable UNSEC resolution on the books (687) with which Iraq was not in compliance, and another resolution (678), also binding and enforceable, obligating the members of the Council to use all necessary means to enforce that resolution.
Did anybody use military force during that period? Yes and no. The Coalition threatened Iraq regularly, and attacked Iraq on several occasions, most notably in December, 1998, during Operation Desert Fox. These threats and attacks were all perfectly legal, because of resolutions 678 (authorizing force) and 687 (with which Iraq was not in compliance).
Recently, certain members of the Council have expressed an unwillingness to pass another resolution explicitly authorizing the use of military force against Iraq. That's okay; we don't need one, because 678 already extends that authorization. Nobody on the Council has even so much as suggested trying to rescind resolution 678, so that mandate is still in effect.
Nor has any member of the Council suggested a resolution condemning the Transatlantic Alliance-- the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain-- for their actions in this war.
The net result? Iraq is in blatant defiance of the United Nations, but the United States and our partners in the Alliance are not. In fact, according to the resolutions we have on paper tonight, the United States is, in fact, acting with the full authorization and sanction of the Security Council.
Don't be too surprised if you hear talk about changing that situation with another UNSEC resolution in the next few days. But then again, Germany, Russia, and China are already giving us their tacit support in private, and France knows which side their croissant is buttered on, so don't be too surprised if you don't.
I write in my journal
Well thats easy when your definition of what is right is whatever it is your doing at the time.
even when their "allies" capitulate in the face of danger.
Wha... you think france is opposed to this because they are afraid of iraq. you think canada is afraid of iraq. you think germany is afraid of iraq. if they aren't fighting the big bad iraq it must be because they don't see it as the face of danger or they aren't afraid if it is. capitulate to what.
and remember these are countries (except canada) that have had their fair share of terrorist action over the years. so its not as if they don't understand the potential threat.
I was born in Louisiana and now I live in Virginia. I was 3 years old and living in Tehran when Iraq attacked. I don't remember the war as a series of news reels on TV. I remember the war as nights filled with bombs whistling down on me. I remember the war by the faces of the uncles and cousins I lost. I remember the war by the silent nights that punctuated the months. All this time I knew that I was American. I remember, when I was 5, I thought that America was going to come and help me. They weren't going to let me die.
My parents didn't want to explain the dirty truths of the world to a little child. I had no idea that the bombs being dropped on my city were guided by America, but they were. I didn't know that the chemicals being used against my drafted uncles and cousins were provided to Iraq by America, but they were. I didn't know that my life was not as important as providing more oil for America, but I was not important. I am an American. I am an Iranian. I don't hate Iraqis. I don't hate Americans. I don't hate Saddam. I don't hate Bush. Hate is ignorance within fear. Fear is the mind killer.
But all occupied people rebel against their occupiers. No matter how wonderful they may be treated, they will rebel. Not because they hate their occupiers. Not because "they hate our freedoms" as my fearless leader so arrogantly phrased it. They will rebel because they are Iraqis, not Americans.
Why did America support Iraq when it attacked Iran? Iran had the audacity to tell America to leave. Iran no longer wanted to be a puppet state, and Iran deserved to be punished for that. Iraq will be the same. Conquerors often cloak themselves as liberators.
It might be easy for the average American citizen to accept that this is a "Just War." But, for someone who has been on the receiving end of a missile, this coupling of words is a mockery of logic and respect for human life.
If you don't agree with me that is fine, but don't advocate war unless you feel so strongly that you are personally willing to run into a wall of enemy soldiers, armed with only a sword, knowing that you are going to die, and accepting it as the right thing to do. If you are not willing to do such a thing, then you do not truly believe that the fight is just.
But all that I just wrote is pointless because the spice must flow.
I urge all Americans to actively seek other sources for news, than CNN. please. You may be surprised at hearing actual news instead of propaganda but this is a good thing.
You may hear other sides, different perspectives, maybe things will start to sound really complicated, but thats how it is in the world.
The last media you should trust is your own. No matter where you're from.
> BBC is extremely liberal by US standards. They won't even bother hiding it.
Why should anyone hide being liberal "by US standards"? Most of the political spectrum is "liberal" by US standards.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It makes me really sad to see a bunch of Americans eat pizza, watch TV and joke over the war. And it makes me even sadder to see comments moderated as 'Funny' on this page. Folks, you have no idea what war is about.
In fact, no American (unless he has been in war) should express their opinions on war at all since their country has not seen a real war on its soil for a long time. My home country has suffered in quite a few wars, never willingly, and we've almost always lost because we are a small nation. We know the real meaning of war.
We know that war is not about brave faces on a TV screen, not about hi-tech and shiny metal.
War is about homes being destroyed, people crawling on the streets using only their arms because they have lost their legs, and children being burned alive.
And there is absolutely no justification for that as long as there are any alternatives.
There will be many many crimes on the soul of American government tonight.
When men used to be men