As you say. Terrorism is terrorism. Whatever the provocation it is unacceptable and all countries need to work together to stop this happening. That's what the UN is supposed to be for, but it seems a little limp right now. And whatever you think of England don't forget when the fight starts our forces will be the first in. We might be a small nation these days but we're not weak and we don't shirk our international responsibility as some countries do. We don't want war, but will do what is required.

As for English history...we recently had to apologise to an African nation for what happened two hundred years ago. Maybe we should ask the Italians to apologise for what the Romans did here? See what happens when you try to apportion blame - it never ends. So who is going to apologise for wiping out the Neanderthals?

Actually, the Neanderthals never died out - they just moved to Leeds... (If you're not from here, you won't get that joke...)

Fuzzy dodges an intense barrage of flying "wellies".

bakerstreet ..... if you regard CNN as a source of 'historical information' you are in serious trouble.
The points I make in my previous (and final post!) are facts, not "news".
You appear to have a problem linking cause and effect.
Who knows what the outcome of the Iran-Iraq War would have been if the US had realised that Khomeni was more concerned with destroying the greater of two evils (in Iranian eyes) and stepped back, and to make that clear, Iraq is and remains a greater enemy of Iran than the US.
In '87 the USS Stark was hit by two Exocets fired from an Iraqi Mirage, within 24 hours it was accepted by the US Administration as an 'accident', despite clear evidence it was not!
Government policy (in all countries) is one of convenience when it comes to oil.
The second Gulf War had NOTHING to do with 'liberating' Kuwait and everything to do with ensuring the continued supply of oil to the West, once the fires were out and the dust settled, the same old repressive regimes returned to their pre-war pampered and overpriveliged lives.
Women remain (I'm generalising here) second class citizens who are often excluded from education and can be executed by stoning on the basis of an accusation of misconduct, the wealthy are incredibly wealthy and the poor are shockingly so, Western technology is received as a matter of course but Westerners are treated with hostility to a greater or lesser degree depending on time and place.
The one point you seem to really miss re "your" (qv) "Allies" standing in the way of US (or US led) intervention is that it is not the UN, NATO or the Russians playing hard ball.
The Arab (generalistion again) Nations do not want any 'assistance' at this point in time.
Period.
I do find the cold war 'fading from memory' 1)offensive and 2)juvenile from one who has exhibited a remarkable capacity for selective memory, the final outcome of which appears to have escaped you.
The remains of the Soviet Union are now far more dangerous than the whole, not simply in a military sense but more to the point, an ecological nightmare waiting to happen.
For the large part of the population of the former Soviet Union, the economic nightmare has been a reality for over 10 years.
The person killing people around Washington is a 'jester'?????
I wouldn't use that term at all .... not even in a fit of pique!
Paxx, NO country 'deserves' to be nuked.
As for the cult of power status awarded to leaders of totalitarian states, agreed.
It's not new, and I'll risk the inevitable flames by saying the US electoral process (as do most) thrives on electing a national compere on 'personality' rather than policy.
I include my own country BTW.
Fuzzy, BB, the 'Jonathan Institute' has a reasonable definition of 'Terrorism' as such, like all definitives we can find glaring holes in it, however, the basics are reasonable enough.
Thak you umpires, thank you lines-men, thank you ball-boys.(political incorrectness reigns)

World War II had nothing to do with liberating France, it was about securing French wine and cheese.

The Korean war wasn't about freeing South Korea, it was about ensuring the steady flow of cheap South Korean rice.

There were a lot of reasons to free Kuwait. Oil was certainly high up there. But to trivialize it as a grab for oil is to ignore history. You can always, if you look hard enough, a self interested reason for doing something.

"if you regard CNN as a source of 'historical information' you are in serious trouble."

hehe, very true i can see CNN and CNBC (FoxNews is gone, was the most amusing one). sometimes it makes me think even Soviet Russia had a more critical media.

wombat....you CANNOT be an Aussie....saying we chose our leader on 'personality'....good grief, Little Johnnie, [Cardigan Man], [Mister Sheen], call him what you will, is but a Dork.

Back when Clinton was doing new and interesting things with a cigar, Howard would probably have just smoked it...

Two points:

Powerful and wealthy groups live pampered, overprivileged lives in every country of the world. Kuwaiti leaders didn't invent this phenomenon.

Many of those whom we might consider downtrodden and repressed do not view themselves that way at all, and they are very quick to straighten out those who would hope to "save" them from the "terrible oppression".

The US was invited to Kuwait to move the Iraqis back to Iraq. We never received any invitations to remodel the cultural institutions while doing the former. We went, did what we were invited in to do, and didn't do what we were not invited to do.

Oops. OK three.

wombat:

When I used the word 'jester' I was referring to Lecrayon, and his statements about the sniper that *you* seemed to offer justification for by listing assassinated leaders of my country.

I had a friend who was in the Gulf at the time of the Stark incident. I also seem to remember the USS Vincenes shooting down a Iranian airbus with 300 passengers a few years back. What sort of conspiracy could you attach to that? Did we want the scrap metal, or the jet fuel? Maybe they were really aliens...


everyone in general:

All I needed to know I learned on this messageboard
****************************************************

-I am not supposed to believe the press, and I am definately not supposed to believe the government, and that history is written by the oppressor, so it is false as well.

-We have been brainwashed by the US government, and that we subliminally yearn for the natural resources of every country on earth, and that is why we do *everything* that we do. Even your DIRT isn't safe.

-America has simultaneously butted into, and shirked our responsibility for, every major event in the last 240 years, and maybe even a couple before we existed.

- The Rules state that if you attack one bad guy, you have to attack them all, and if you do, you are bigoted because your idea of 'bad' is based on all that false information you shouldn't have believed in the first place.

-The only way to have any any integrity as a nation is to aspire to be nothing, since whatever you are aspiring to be won't *really* be what you are aspiring to be. Beyond that, you gripe a lot and do your best to know nothing at all, lest you be misled.

-When you finally have to go to war, you are evil. That said, make sure that everyone understands that they will never understand why it happened, and that only you will, and you will only educate them by disagreeing with everything they say. If they are good enough at binary mathmatics, they can divine all they need to know simply by adding all the 'false' answers.

This time I think I have built up the strength to avoid this insipid thread. I will consider it an awful, personal weakness if I fold and post again, anyway. I am gonna go and paint some lillies.

I love this site!!! We can talk about skinning, politics, NEVER religion, and why bra's are evil. Then we can talk about life in the fast lane or how pink is the best color ever made. Talk about science and art. A little history; then back to skinning.

I think as someone who is and has been part of the art community for a while, it is nice to see that artist have a opinion on something and poke thier heads out of the computer/canvas/drafting board to see what is happening in the world.

/me throws a 'wellies' at Fuzzy but does not know what it is

hobnailed Wellington boot. It's a sport, or martial art, or some such.

-I am not supposed to believe the press, and I am definately not supposed to believe the government, and that history is written by the oppressor, so it is false as well.

Now your getting it!! We all have to be critical thinkers and come to are own conclusion based on what we see and hear as evedence. Then be opn enough to hear oppossing opinions.


If my friend who is an accountant gives me 50 Dollars in cash in 5's, as much as he is an authority in money and I trust him, I am still going to count my money. He could have made a mistake, or whatever; who cares, I know I have my 50 Dollars because I counted it.

Believe NOTHING of what you hear, and only HALF of what you see.

Good luck on choosing the 'right' half.

And remember, it is better to be a pessimist than an optimist.

An optimist can always be disappointed, but a pessimist 'may' be pleasantly surprised...

Oh and by the way (BTW) I can't answer the other points bakerstreet made other than to say that there will always be someone who has the wrong infomation. There will always be a story believed more than a fact.

Right now there are beliefs that have some infomation and the rest is a story from the 'streets'. The news and goverment is never really understood until your actively apart of it and even then you can come up with some irreguarities.

WWII was about wine and cheese? Never heard that.

Civil War was about slavery? Or was it about not letting a part of the nation leave?

As I said (written) before, I can not think of any war that happened because of human suffering. It usually happens when there is an economical impact. The other reasons usually fall behind in importance for numerous reasons not just greed (human suffering has always been a complicated issue when it come to national affairs.)

I got to go study... crazy amounts of tests this week...

Seriously though. When in doubt whether a war was caused by money or by ideology, most likely it was the former.

I had a history teacher in college who used to say that no war in history was EVER fought because of religion or ideology. Always for money and power. Include the infamous crusades to (ahem) "deliver" Jerusalem.
Some wars involved spices, some wars involved gold, some wars involved trading routes and sea ways, some wars involved oil. Or some wars just involved an infinite apetite for power and domination - which in the end also boils down to more money.

It's all nice and comforting to speak of ideology, to think we fight for freedom and democracy. But the sad thing is our leaders don't give a hoot about it unless it brings something back to them. In other words, our leaders are not some much worried about democracy in foreign countries as much as they are interested in free commerce, therefore opening a new markets to the McDonald's, Walmart and Microsofts of our World. Money talks again. Not ideals.

Of course, in front of the TV, in their Speech to the Nation, that is certainly not what they tell us. No they call the sensitive fibers in us. Our politicians try to convince us that we need to send our troops there because it is our responsibility to defend democracy and freedom in the World, and yada yada yada... Sorry Jack. Koweit is no more a democracy than Irak is. It's just richer. Would it really have been the same if Irak had invaded Jordan for example? Much more a democracy than Koweit, but unfortunatly very very poor. Of course not.

Wombat: very nice post. And I agree, no country deserves to be nuked. Except North Korea scares me. I wouldn't be surprised it tries to invade South Korea soon.

Pax: speech out of my heart.
Joe: your positivism is a blessing to this site.
Wombat: very good points made. I am glad you are able to put history in its real context.

War.

It sounds kinda sad that it always boils down to economics and money. I think even with the best intentions it still come back to money. Freedom cost money, democracy cost money. Speading peace costs money. Sending soldiers in a country that needs to be 'freed' cost money. As a citizen, I have to admit I want most of my taxes to go back to infrastature and other needs of the country. I think I would be upset that Billions of dollars is going to another country when it is needed here. Also keep in mind that if a country unstablizes itself in order to be 'nice' to another country, it will find itself needing aid and the country it is trying to help will still need help.

This is why I say when it comes to human suffering and world issues it is always a tricky subject and not necessarily easy answers. By helping you could be hurting yourself and the people your trying to help (and maybe other if your not careful)

Now when it comes to money or economics it gets allot clearer. If a countries money is jepodized so is its people, armies, national security and any other country it is helping because it will no longer have the money to help.

If your country wanted to spend trillions of dollars to help another country that could not help in any way finacally would you vote for it knowing you would suffer in lack of resources (highway construction, food programs, health programs and anything else the goverment ran)?

"Wombat: very good points made. I am glad you are able to put history in its real context"
Lecrayon - Wombat does indeed do an excellent job of putting history into context, viewing accurately and faithfully reporting all of the negatives in a given situation. Whatever positives may also exist don't seem to be of much interest.

"And remember, it is better to be a pessimist than an optimist"

Jafo - you and Wombat should write a book!

Optimist: spends 90% of his time happy, 10% of his time being disappointed and devastated.

Pessimist: spends 98% of his time being miserable (along with everyone in his near vicinity), and 2% of his time being pleasantly surprised and happy.

I'm a devout pessimist and cynic, but I somtimes envy the optimists.

Oh, I am generally optimist about people and things in general. But I am absolutely very pessimist about our political and economic leaders. As far as I'm concerned they spend their days lying or trying to hide and/or distort the truth.

Politicians are monkeys - they do what we teach them to do. If we are so averse to confronting truth that a politician can only get elected by using lies, omission, evasion, and distotrtion, then the real blame should fall on us, and not on the organ grinder monkey who merely dances to our preferred tune.

Hehehe! Bangkokboy, if only it was that simple.

fight the good fight, bkb...the rest of us (with a similar view to yours) are dwindling off since you can't change someone's beliefs without breaking a few eggs, and words never get close to being those eggs...

almost like convincing a republican to go democrat, or vice-versa...

You're right, Kinrik. I think that this thread is slowly getting sucked over to the dark side, and it's time to bail again. Seems like most of us have sworn never to post on this thread again at least 2 or 3 times. I'm turning it loose ... there it goooooeeeees.

I've been staying away from this thread because I think my views would be wildly unpopular and offensive to many. However... I wish the perspective on the Iraq question would focus more on the world we are creating and the world our children will inherit from us. To me the most important facts about Iraq are what it implies about America's leadership, their goals and the methods they are using to attain them.

Remember the original push for war with Iraq was an urgent and immediate need to invade, enforce a regime change and install an interim government run by the US. The justification for this was the imminent threat of an attack by Saddam using "weapons of mass destruction". The evidence of his threat was being proclaimed by Bush and Blair using various documents and recalling various events. The nuclear threat was stated by GW Bush as being a capability to produce a nuclear weapon within weeks and was supported by a paper from the AEC. The AEC has since denied that any such document exists. The CIA has said that there is not really any threat from Saddam unless we keep pushing him into a corner. The evidence of Saddam's cruelty and bad intentions, while all true, is referring to events that are all around twelve years old. So you have to ask yourself, why now? Why is it so important that we rush into a war, without UN or world support, to neutralize a threat when there is no hard, current evidence that the threat even exists?

The Bush administration's original resolution before the Congress was for unprecedented dictatorial powers over the military. Bush wanted the power to declare war against any country at any time with no oversight or debate. He wanted the power to use pre-emptive nuclear strikes, invasion with regime change to a US run government, assassination of world leaders, and all as a unilateral force acting outside of international treaties, and outside the scope of international law.

Maybe a lot of you didn't realize this. The resolution as passed by Congress was changed at least 4 times to include many specific controls over this power, limiting it to dealing with Saddam's regime. It still goes way too far in subverting the war powers and safeguards of the Constitution. If any of you got to watch the Congressional debate perhaps you noticed in the Senate there was an impassioned plea to consider this matter for more than the allowed 48 hours. The implications of the resolution are potentially earth-changing if a war is mounted that broadens into a regional or even a world-wide conflict. The potential for use of biological weapons, escalation into Israel - perhaps dragging the rest of the region into the war, the cost, the structure and costs of the new regime in Iraq, none of these issues were addressed by the administration. The only evidence used throughout the debate in favor of the war was the same horror stories used by the administration, all of which refer to events from 10 to 12 years ago. Evidence of new WOMD programs in Iraq were circumstantial, hearsay and disputed by everyone who had been a part of the previous weapons inspection teams. Even Madeline Albright and Henry Kissinger in an information gathering discussion a couple days before the debate began, agreed there was no evidence of an immediate threat to the US and said Saddam's military and weapons capabilities were probably less than thirty percent of what they were twelve years ago.

It made no sense at all until a document surfaced that was apparently a blueprint for this administration's intentions: http://www.sundayherald.com/27735 In this document we see the blueprint for Bush's decisions, many of which were seemingly so out of character for America. Like the US's refusal to participate in the ban on biological weapons. I was deeply offended that my country was the only one of 170 countries to wish to continue bio-warfare research and deployment when the only reason given was as Bush said before the conference "This treaty would have a negative impact on the bottom line of a few American companies and I can't allow that". In this blueprint for the "Pax Americana" empire we see they intend to actively pursue biologics as a useful tool - "advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool';"

The real point (aside from the frightening implications and the similarities to the "enabling act" that gave Hitler his power to invade Poland) is that the administration lies about the real reason for this war. The war is about oil and US control of the vast resources of the Middle-East. So was the war in Afghanistan. Did you know the war was already under way before September 11th? Many outside the US are aware of this and the State Department even has an explanation. They say that someone in Pakistan's ISI let the Taliban know we were attacking Afghanistan in the beginning of October so they got binLaden to make a pre-emptive strike against the US. That's the official US line to respond to the revelation that we were invading Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban due to their unwillingness to allow the Unocal pipeline project to continue. The timing of Sept 11th was uncanny coming the day after our invasion force had been deployed to the Middle-East and so conveniently giving the US unprecedented world support for the invasion and regime change. A frighteningly perfect coincidence (when were they planning to sell us on this war?).

All of this plus the recent Plan for Strategic Security or whatever it was called, the document of pre-emption, which states clearly and unambiguously that America will enforce its control over any country that attempts to produce an economy or a military that would be considered a challenge to America's superiority. It states that pre-emptive nuclear strike warfare will be considered acceptable in cases where the threat is considered to include WOMD. It also states that America will not recognize any international court and will not be subject to any prosecution for war crimes. It and the above mentioned document flatly state that America is embarking on a program of conquest and empire and intends to control the world.

And this is all justified and pursued with lies at the frontline of communication both with the American people and the rest of the world. In the I-Ching it warns that beginning an enterprise with a foundation of lies will result in disaster.

Why retalliate when pre-emptive is so much neater?...