# Iraq: A Decade of Hell



## Makalakumu (May 15, 2013)

If you ever wondered what the real price of blind patriotism is, well, here you go.


----------



## Makalakumu (May 15, 2013)

1.5 million deaths: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq
*0. Economics of the War on Individuals *



_*
[*][h=1]Link (March 20, 2008) The Iraq war, for $100 month[/h]*_

_*- In a speech  on March 20, 2008, Obama, in the midst of his 2008 presidential campaign, stated &#8220;When Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you're paying a price for this war,". *_
_*
*_
_*- Book: The Three Trillion Dollar War, a new book by Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and Linda J. Bilmes, a former Commerce Department official from the Clinton administration who is now a professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.*_
_*
*_
_*- The book says the monthly operating cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is about $16-billion.*_
_*
*_
_*- "To think of it another way," the book says, "roughly every American household is spending $138 per month on the current operating costs of the wars, with a little more than $100 per month going to Iraq alone."*_
_*
*_


_*
[*]Link Cost per Person
*_
_*
The Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee, which estimated a $3.5 trillion cost through 2017, say the war will cost the average U.S. family $46,400. Per person, the total cost, given these estimates, would be $11,627



Link $13.2 billion per month in 2011, 10.5 billion per month in 2012 for U.S Military

Link $16 billion per month in 2008



[h=1]Link (October 2012) The real jobs numbers: 41% of America unemployed, 1 in 3 doesn't want work at all[/h]



Link U.S Population 313,847,465 (July 2012 est.)



Simple Math: 

All in the year 2012  (including government employees in sum of number of jobs): 

	Population(313,847,465) * Percentage Gainfully Employed(0.59) = 
Total Gainfully Employed(185 170 004)

Cost Per Month of Wars ($10 500 000 000) / Number of Gainfully Employed people (185 170 004) =  
Cost Per gainfully Employed Person Per Month ( $56.7)

All in the year 2008  (including government employees in sum of number of jobs): 

Link Total Gainfully Employed in 2008 (138 million)

Cost Per Month of Wars ($16 000 000 000) / Total Gainfully Employed (138 million) = Cost Per Gainfully Employed Person Per Month ($116)

Link Over 22 Million Government Employees in 2008

All in the year 2008  (not-including government employees in sum of number of jobs): 

Cost Per Month of Wars ($16 000 000 000) / Total Gainfully Employed (138 million - 22 Million Government Employess = 116 million) = Cost Per Gainfully Employed Person Per Month ($138)




1. The wastefulness and in-efficiency of the military


Link Total amount of money lost or unaccounted for from the Iraq War: 9 Billion

Link Total amount of money lost in unaccounted for or stolen equipment: $549.7 million

Link Iraq war costs U.S. more than $2 trillion: study
(Reuters published March 14th 2013) - The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said. 


Link Re-construction
Much of the country&#8217;s infrastructure remains in shambles as well. Critics point to corruption and the mismanagement of reconstruction funds: Of the $60 billion that Washington supposedly spent on reconstruction, much of that amount was squandered.



Link Total Waste
Members of the Wartime Contracting Commission estimated that a lack of oversight of private contractors, a lack of competition for winning contracts and a culture of corruption plagued reconstruction projects and battlefield support in both countries. Those failings cost between $31 billion and $60 billion, The Associated Press reported.

Link: As much as $60 billion in U.S. tax dollars -- or $12 million a day -- has been squandered through waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade from lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and corruption, according to an independent panel.




Link Total Waste: Story
	After U.S. and allied warplanes destroyed a key bridge carrying 15 oil and gas pipelines in northern Iraq during the 2003 conflict there, officials in Washington and Baghdad made its postwar reconstruction a top priority. But instead of spending two months to rebuild the span over the Tigris River at an estimated cost of $5 million, they decided for security reasons to bury the pipelines beneath it, at an estimated cost more than five times greater.

What ultimately happened there tells the story &#8212; in a microcosm &#8212; of a substantial chunk of the massive nine-year U.S. effort to reconstruct Iraq, the second-largest such endeavor in history (only  the U.S. investment in Afghanistan has been larger).
Studies conducted before the digging of the new pipelines started showed that the soil was too sandy, but neither the Army Corps of Engineers overseeing the effort nor the main contractor at the site, Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), heeded the warning.  As a result, &#8220;tens of millions of dollars [were] wasted on churning sand&#8221; without making any headway, as Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart W. Bowen Jr., described it in his recently published final report on the U.S. occupation.

By the time the digging effort was halted, and the old bridge and piping repaired &#8212; more than three years later &#8212; the bill had reached more than $100 million. &#8220;Because of the nature of the original contract, the government was unable to recover any of the money wasted on this project,&#8221; Bowen said.  More than $1.5 billion in oil revenues may have been lost as a result of the delays. KBR did not respond to a request for comment.




Link Destroyed Agriculture and more waste
The commission cited numerous examples of waste, including a $360 million U.S.-financed agricultural development program in Afghanistan. The effort began as a $60 million project in 2009 to distribute vouchers for wheat seed and fertilizer in drought-stricken areas of northern Afghanistan. The program expanded into the south and east. Soon the U.S. was spending a $1 million a day on the program, creating an environment ripe for waste and abuse, the commission said.

"Paying villagers for what they used to do voluntarily destroyed local initiatives and diverted project goods into Pakistan for resale," the commission said.



Link Giving the money to the enemy to justify a war
The Associated Press reported earlier this month that U.S. military authorities in Kabul believe $360 million in U.S. tax dollars has ended up in the hands of people the American-led coalition has spent nearly a decade battling: the Taliban, criminals and power brokers with ties to both.



Link Cost per hour
Iraq war is costing us 11 million dollars per hour.
$6,000 every second in Iraq

2. The environmental hazard that is the military


Link River damage, irrigation and drinking water quality damage, toxic bombed zones...

-  Four years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and despite 22 billion dollars spent on recovery and reconstruction, Iraq&#8217;s environment remains in disastrous shape.

- &#8220;The Tigris and Euphrates rivers are essentially open sewers,&#8221; Azzam Alwash, head of Nature Iraq, a conservation group based in Baghdad, told Tierramérica.

- Industrial waste, hospital waste, fertiliser run-off from farming, as well as oil spills plague the two rivers that define the Mesopotamia region and which provide much of the irrigation and drinking water.

- Many of those industries were devoted to producing military material, and have been bombed and looted, leaving the country dotted with highly toxic industrial zones. Other contaminated sites belong to the oil and metal industries.

- &#8220;Clean-up is needed on more than 500 state industrial plants. Each of these would be a &#8216;Superfund&#8217; site in the United States,&#8221; says Nature Iraq&#8217;s Alwash. The United States has 1,240 toxic waste sites called Superfunds, where billions of dollars are being spent on clean up.



Link Various effects of the war that cause massive environmental damage

Spilled oil in the Arabian Gulf
- The first Gulf War had a horrific effect on the environment, as CNN reported in 1999, "Iraq was responsible for intentionally releasing some 11 million barrels of oil into the Arabian Gulf from January to May 1991, oiling more than 800 miles of Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian coastline. The amount of oil released was categorized as 20 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and twice as large as the previous world record oil spill. The cost of cleanup has been estimated at more than $700 million."

Oil fields lit on fire by Saddam loyalists
- During the build up to George W. Bush&#8217;s invasion of Iraq, Saddam loyalists promised to light oil fields afire, hoping to expose what they claimed were the U.S.&#8217;s underlying motives for attacking their country: oil. Hostilities in Kuwait resulted in the discharge of an estimated 7 million barrels of oil, culminating in the world&#8217;s largest oil spill in January of 1991. The United Nations later calculated that of Kuwait&#8217;s 1,330 active oil wells, half had been set ablaze. The pungent fumes and smoke from those dark billowing flames spread for hundreds of miles and had horrible effects on human and environmental health.

- On the second day of President Bush&#8217;s invasion of Iraq it was reported by the New York Times and the BBC that Iraqi forces had set fire to several of the country&#8217;s large oil wells. Five days later in the Rumaila oilfields, six dozen wellheads were set ablaze. The dense black smoke rose high in the southern sky of Iraq, fanning a clear signal that the U.S. invasion had again ignited an environmental tragedy.

New Source: Rate of Oil burned in the first week of conflict Link 
- On the second day of the conflict it was reported that Iraqi forces had started to set fire to several of the country&#8217;s oil wells (Times, 2003). Five days later (25.3.03) in the Rumaila oilfields around half a dozen wellheads were blazing, at a rate of $12m (£7.6m) of oil an hour (Judd, 2003). 
- During the Gulf war retreating forces set fire to 736 Kuwaiti oil wells. The resulting smoke was enough to block out the sun (EMS, 2002).
- This resulted in the average air temperatures falling by 10 degrees C while the oil well burned over 9 months.
- Oil, soot, sulphur and acid rain came down as far as 1,900 kilometres (1,200 miles) away and the vegetation and animals were poisoned while the water was contaminated and the people choked (Kirby, 2003), The burning oil fields released almost half a billion tons of carbon dioxide.

- Link Worldwide, motor vehicles currently emit well over 900 million metric tons of CO2 each year. These emissions account for more than 15 percent of global fossil fuel CO2 releases

The CO2 produced from the burning oil fields is the equivalent to the sum of the CO2 output of all the cars in the world, for over 200 days. 

(Math: Oil field CO2 = 500 million  Cars = 900 million/365days
Oil field = 500/900 or 55.6% of the total output of the cars in a year or the output of the cars for 55.6% of the year. 0.556*365days = 202.8 days

Verification: For cars 900million/365days = 2.466million/day 
Oil fields total = 500 million | days to run cars to match oil field: 500/2.466 = 202.8 days)



Link  Most fuel Spend to deliver fuel 
Two-thirds of the Army&#8217;s fuel consumption in the war zones is spent delivering fuel to the battlefield.



Link The Department of Defense is the country&#8217;s largest consumer of fuel
Department of Defense has been the country&#8217;s single largest consumer of fuel, using about 4.6 billion gallons of fuel each year



Link War-Accelerated Destruction and Degradation of Forests and Wetlands
The wars have also damaged forests, wetlands and marshlands in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.  Radical deforestation has accompanied this and the previous wars in Afghanistan.  Total forest area decreased 38 percent in Afghanistan from 1990 to 2007.


Health and Environmental effects of the lit oil fields
- This smoldering oil was laced with poisonous chemicals such as mercury, sulfur and furans, which can causes serious damage to human as well as ecosystem health.

- According to Friends of the Earth, the fallout from burning oil debris, like that of the first Gulf War, has created a toxic sea surface that has affected the health of birds and marine life. 

Environmental damage and health effects directly caused by the U.S 
- However, the United States military was also responsible for much of the environmental devastation of the first Gulf War. In the early 1990s the U.S. drowned at least 80 crude oil ships to the bottom of the Persian Gulf, partly to uphold the U.N.&#8217;s economic sanctions against Iraq. Vast crude oil slicks formed, killing an unknown quantity of aquatic life and sea birds while wrecking havoc on local fishing and tourist communities.

Uranium bombings
- Months of bombing during the first Gulf War by U.S. and British planes and cruise missiles also left behind an even more deadly and insidious legacy: tons of shell casings, bullets and bomb fragments laced with depleted uranium. In all, the U.S. hit Iraqi targets with more than 970 radioactive bombs and missiles.


Long term consequences of the bombings
- When the tank-busting bombs explode, the depleted uranium oxidizes into microscopic fragments that float through the air like carcinogenic dust, carried on the desert winds for decades. The lethal bits when inhaled stick to the fibers of the lungs, and eventually begin to wreak havoc on the body in the form of tumors, hemorrhages, ravaged immune systems and leukemias.

Effects of the bombings 15 years later and more
- More than 15 years later, the health consequences from this radioactive bombing campaign are beginning to come into focus. And they are dire. Iraqi physicians call it "the white death"-leukemia. Since 1990, the incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600 percent. The situation was compounded by Iraq&#8217;s forced isolation and the sadistic sanctions regime, once described by former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan as "a humanitarian crisis", that made detection and treatment of the cancers all the more difficult. The leukemia rate in Sarajevo, pummeled by American bombs in 1996, tripled in five years following the bombings.

- Depleted uranium has a half-life of more than 4 billion years, approximately the age of the Earth.

Consequences of the destroyed infrastructure
- The destruction of Iraq's infrastructure has had substantial public health implications as well. Bombed out industrial plants and factories have polluted groundwater. The damage to sewage-treatment plants, with reports that raw sewage formed massive pools of muck in the streets of Baghdad immediately after Bush&#8217;s &#8216;Shock and Awe&#8217; campaign, is also likely poisoning rivers as well as human life. Cases of typhoid among Iraqi citizens have risen tenfold since 1991, largely due to polluted drinking water.

New Source: Bombing of chemical and biological weapons plants Link
- The military targeting of industrial sites and armament factories will cause acute pollution. Nine sites, expected to be targets, were named by the UK government as being involved in the production of chemical and biological weapons (McLaren et al, 2003).

Link Devastated Wetlands and the species that habitat them
- Thirty-three of Iraqi wetlands are considered of international importance particularly for wildfowl. They have been found to support at least seven IUCN Red List species of mammals and birds, over 60 waterfowl species and nine birds of prey (McLaren and Willmore, 2003). Before the conflict, the WWF said that 16 globally threatened or near-threatened bird species and three unique endemic wetland bird species would be further threatened (Star, 2003).

The root cause of child mortality in the 1990s; probably hasn&#8217;t changed
- In fact during the 1990s, while Iraq was under sanctions, U.N. officials in Baghdad agreed that the root cause of child mortality and other health problems was no longer simply lack of food and medicine but the lack of clean water and of electrical power, which had predictable consequences for hospitals and water-pumping systems. 

Link Enormous amount of fuel burnt
- The amount of fuel that is being burnt by military vehicles to keep the operation moving is massive. The US military has said that its planes, boats and tanks are consuming 15 million gallons of fuel a day. Britain will not say how much fuel it is using but it is estimated to be around a quarter of that.  To put this in context, the amount of fuel that the coalition is using in one day is the approximate amount that 1.1 billion people in India need to keep their whole economy going for the same amount of time (Brown, 2003).




3. The functional incompetence of the military


Link and specific Link Poor planning from the start
Post-war planning was non-existent. It talks about a meeting of war planners and intelligence planners in March 2003 (the month the Iraq war started) in which a lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing on the Pentagon's plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war could say only, "To Be Provided".
A veteran State Department officer involved directly in Iraq policy said, "We didn't go in with a plan. We went in with a theory."



Link Missing Explosives
We are learning (late October 2004) that 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives have been missing since April 2003, after the U.S. invaded Iraq. ANY Times article of 25 October 2004 says that the facility was supposed to be under U.S. military control but is now a no-man's land. The U.S. was warned about this stockpile of explosives before the war. Only incompetent planning could have led to such a fiasco, which puts the whole world in danger.



Link Progress in the military
1,188: Number of global terrorist incidents from January - September 11th, 2001. [American Security Project, "Are We Winning?," September 2007]
5,188: Number of global terrorist incidents in from January- September 11th, 2006. [American Security Project, "Are We Winning?," September 2007]
30: Percent increase in violence in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2007. [Reuters, 10/15/07]
21: Number of suicide bombings in Afghanistan in 2001. [Center for American Progress, "The Forgotten Front," 11/07]
139: Number of suicide bombings in Afghanistan in 2006, with an additional increase of 69 percent as of November 2007. [Center for American Progress,"The Forgotten Front," 11/07]


4. The evils of the military and the horrors it produces


Link Paktia Murders (warning really horrid)

On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager).  The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead males were &#8220;insurgents&#8221; or terrorists, (b) the bodies of the three women had been found by U.S. forces bound and gagged inside the home, and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of &#8220;honor killings&#8221; by the Taliban militants killed in the attack.

After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.

Or another account of the same incident... Link
Another example of expert incompetence occurred in February of 2010, when U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan. After surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, the soldiers shot dead two male civilians who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded. They then shot and killed three female relatives, including a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager. These U.S. special forces soldiers proceeded to dig the bullets out of their victims&#8217; bodies, then lied to their superiors about what had transpired.When the Pentagon issued a statement on the raid it claimed that the dead males were terrorists, the bodies of the three women had been found by U.S. forces bound and gagged inside the home, and it suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of &#8220;honor killings&#8221; by the Taliban militants killed in the attack. This was all a fabrication, and the Pentagon was later forced to admit as much..2 Such bumbling efforts by the American military are so commonplace as to be legion. One could write a book about them; in fact many people have, including David Swanson&#8217;s War is a Lie and Nick Turse&#8217;s recent Kill Everything that Moves.


Link Children Deaths
&#8226; 14,705 (13%) of all documented civilian deaths were reported as beingdirectly caused by the US-led coalition. The report notes thatOf the 4,040 civilian victims of US-led coalition forces for whom age data was available, 1,201 (29%) were children
&#8226; Of the 45,779 victims for whom IBC was able to obtain age data, 3,911 (8.54%) were children under age 18.
&#8226; Police forces have been a major target, with 9,019 deaths reported - byfar the largest toll of any professional group.&#8226; Baghdad, which contains roughly one fifth of the country's population,has suffered roughly half of the recorded civilian deaths, or about 2.5times more than the national average.



Link Children that have lost their parents
A 2011 survey conservatively estimated that between 800,000 and a million Iraqi children have lost one or both parents



Link Iraqi civilian deaths
The war has killed at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and may have contributed to the deaths of as many as four times that number, according to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
Another source: Link
The Iraq Body Count project (IBC), for example, puts the number between 110,937 and 121,227. But the Opinion Research Business (ORB), an independent polling agency based in London, has calculated the number of fatalities at over 1 million.


Link Poisoning Children
A World Health Organization (WHO) study published last year connected the grave situation with the effect of toxic substances prevalent in many conventional weapons. Hair samples taken from the civilian population of Fallujah showed levels of lead in children with birth defects five times higher than elsewhere; mercury levels were recorded at six times higher.


Link Soldier deaths
4,448 U.S. soldiers who died and the 32,221 wounded. At least 3,400 U.S. contractors died as well, a number barely mentioned or underreported.


Link Total percentage of U.S. soldiers wounded with serious brain or spinal injuries: 20%

Link Total percentage of U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq War who developed serious mental health problems within 4 months of returning home

Link Imprisonment and Torture
- In Iraq, over 100,000 prisoners have passed through the American-run detention system, with prisoners not having any effective way to challenge their detention.[1][2] In the first years of the war, many detainees were processed through the notorious Abu Gharaib prison facility, which housed over 8,000 prisoners at its peak in 2004.

- The International Red Cross estimated in 2004 that between 70% and 90% of detainees in Iraq were innocent

Link -  In 2004, accounts of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including the torture, rape, sodomy, and death of Abu Ghraib prisoners came to public attention.
- At least 108 such people have died in detention in the first four years of the war, [9] and at least 80 more have died in subsequent years. (Total wars, not just Iraq).


5. The fraudulent claims of the military 


Link Various Lies: 

LIE: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program ... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati.

FACT: Department of Energy officials, who monitor nuclear plants, say the tubes could not be used for enriching uranium. One intelligence analyst, who was part of the tubes investigation, angrily told The New Republic: "You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie."

LIE: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." -- President Bush, Jan.28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.

FACT: This whopper was based on a document that the White House already knew to be a forgery thanks to the CIA. Sold to Italian intelligence by some hustler, the document carried the signature of an official who had been out of office for 10 years and referenced a constitution that was no longer in effect. The ex-ambassador who the CIA sent to check out the story is pissed: "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," he told the New Republic, anonymously. "They [the White House] were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more strongly."

FACT: Link Additional evidence on this lie from a second source: 
In March, Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), tells the U.N. Security Council that the documents substantiating the claim of alleged Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in Niger were fakes (and bad ones at that) and that "these specific allegations are unfounded." The unnamed ex-ambassador whom the CIA sent to check out the story tells The New Republic: "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie."

LIE: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases ... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." --President Bush, Oct. 7 .

FACT: No evidence of this has ever been leaked or produced. Colin Powell told the U.N. this alleged training took place in a camp in northern Iraq. To his great embarrassment, the area he indicated was later revealed to be outside Iraq's control and patrolled by Allied war planes.

LIE: "We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established." -- President Bush, Feb. 8, 2003, in a national radio address.

FACT: Despite a massive nationwide search by U.S. and British forces, there are no signs, traces or examples of chemical weapons being deployed in the field, or anywhere else during the war.

LIE: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." -- Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5 2003, in remarks to the UN Security Council.

FACT: Putting aside the glaring fact that not one drop of this massive stockpile has been found, as the United States' own intelligence reports show that these stocks -- if they existed -- were well past their use-by date and therefore useless as weapon fodder.

LIE: "We know where [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat." -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003, in statements to the press.

FACT: Needless to say, no such weapons were found, not to the east, west, south or north, somewhat or otherwise.

Link LIE: MAY 1, 2003: Mission Accomplished
My fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. [Bush, 5/1/03]

Link LIE: DECEMBER 15, 2011: The US formally declares an end to the Iraq war

Link LIE: MAY 29, 2003: Bush: We found the WMD
We found the weapons of mass destruction. [Bush, 5/29/03]

Link FACT: Number of WMDs discovered: 0

Link LIE: MAY 1, 2004: Bush says &#8220;daily life&#8221; of Iraqis is improving.
One year later [after Mission Accomplished], despite many challenges, life for the Iraqi people is a world away from the cruelty and corruption of Saddam&#8217;s regime. At the most basic level of justice, people are no longer disappearing into political prisons, torture chambers, and mass graves &#8212; because the former dictator is in prison, himself. And their daily life is improving. [Bush, 5/1/04]


Link FACT: Captain William Ponce, an MI captain in Iraq, writes in an email, "The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken."

Now-Capt. Wood arrives at Abu Ghraib and recommends establishing area for detainees thought to have intelligence value. 

Bush designates six Al Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo eligible for military tribunals&#8212;the first since World War II.

MPs from the 372nd Company arrive to guard prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Spc. Joseph Darby later tells GQ he "saw like fifteen prisoners sitting in their cells in women's underwear.... This stuff was going on before we arrived. After we took over, it basically just escalated."

Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, a prisoner soldiers call Gilligan, is hooded and cloaked and made to stand on box as MPs attach dead wires to him and warn he'll be electrocuted if he moves.

Prisoners stacked into naked pyramid, made to masturbate and simulate ********. "A present for your birthday," Graner tells England, who is turning 21.
Washington Postreports that Gen. Sanchez approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use dogs, temperature extremes, sleep and sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees "whenever they wished."

Former Sec. Def. James Schlesinger releases report that blames poor leadership throughout the chain of command. But to reporters, Schlesinger emphasizes, "There was sadism on the night shift at Abu Ghraib, sadism that was certainly not authorized. It was kind of Animal House."



6. The lack of accountability for the military&#8217;s worst crimes


Link Wars let alone legal wars are no problem!
 MARCH 5, 2004: Former chief U.N. weapons inspector declares Iraq war illegal
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair. [Independent, 3/5/04]


Link War declared and continued on false premises
The United States opened a military offensive against the Arab Republic on the premise that the Baathist government of Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction.

One decade later, the global community is aware that the intelligence claims of Iraqi WMDs were patently false at least &#8211; and a blatant fabrication at worst &#8211; but this knowledge has done nothing to erase the damage of the conflict.



Link Ten years after, the justifications for the war detailed to the international community have been proven baldly false, but no decision maker in the biggest scam of the 21th century was brought to justice. On top of that, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair keeps getting generously paid to defend the rationale for the war in conferences and interviews, even if we now know the initial motives were deceitful.



Link Government can say something and do the opposite of it without hesitancy
$50-60 Billion: Bush Administration's pre-war estimates of the cost of the war. [New York Times, 12/31/02]
$12 Billion: Direct cost per month of the Iraq War. [Washington Post, Bilmes and Stiglitz Op-Ed, 3/9/08]
$526 Billion: Amount of money already appropriated by Congress for the War in Iraq. [CRS, 2/22/08]
$3 Trillion: Total estimated cost of the Iraq War. [Washington Post, Bilmes and Stiglitz Op-Ed, 3/9/08]
$5 Trillion - $7 Trillion: Total cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan accounting for continued military operations, growing debt and interest payments and continuing health care and counseling costs for veterans. [McClatchy, 2/27/08]



7. The non-obvious effects of military action


Link Cost per person
(August 2011) According to a recent Brown University study, the wars and their ripple effects have cost the United States $3.7 trillion, or more than $12,000 per American.



Link Rightfully infuriated population set for blowback
Approximately 2.8 million Iraqis, out of a population of 34 million, are displaced internally or into neighboring states

Approximately 1.4 million are refugees and 1.3 million are internally displaced

The UNHCR estimates that 90 percent of displaced Iraqis have no plans to return

The percent of Iraqis living in slum conditions tripled from 17 percent prior to the 2003 invasion to 53 percent in 2010

Crucial health indicators in Iraq have drastically worsened. The infant mortality rate increased 150 percent from 1990 to 2005, the worst retrogression in that basic indicator of well-being in the world.



Link Loss of professionals and academics
As of 2006, an estimated 160 to 380 Iraqi professors had been killed, and over 30 percent of Iraq&#8217;s professors, doctors, pharmacists and engineers emigrated between 2003 and 2007.

8. The rampant corruption within the military


Link Oil Smuggling
&#8220;Between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels a day of Iraq&#8217;s declared oil production over the past four years is unaccounted for and could have been siphoned off through corruption or smuggling, according to a draft American government report. Using an average of $50 a barrel, the report said the discrepancy was valued at $5 million to $15 million daily.&#8221; [New York Times, 5/12/2007]


Link 6.6 Billion goes &#8220;missing&#8221;
JUNE 13, 2011: Department of Defense announces that $6.6 billion dollars earmarked for Iraq has been lost with no explanation.
Link Potentially the biggest robbery in American History
Auditors investigating the disappearance of $6.6 billion in cash intended to rebuild Iraq's shattered infrastructure told the Los Angeles Times that the money may have been stolen, an occurrence that the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction said would be the largest theft of funds in national history.


Link Welfare for the Rich
Halliburton overcharges classified by the Pentagon as Unreasonable and Unsupported: $1.4 billion


Link Corrupt Contracting
The commission determined that contracting waste in Afghanistan ranged from 10 percent to 20 percent of the $206 billion spent there so far, with fraud -- which includes bribery and rigging bids -- comprised between 5 percent and 9 percent of the total.


Link Missing documents on massive expenditures
Pentagon-funded fuel purchases were particularly problematic: When Bowen&#8217;s office asked to see a logbook documenting $1.3 billion in fuel purchases by the Coalition Provisional Authority, &#8220;the log book could not be found.&#8221; Defense officials also could not produce documents supporting their expenditure of over $100 million in cash found in a vault at the Republican Palace, the gilded Saddam Hussein parlor that became a headquarters of the occupation.

Average U.S. expenditures for Iraqi reconstruction in 2005, for example, were more than $25 million a day. When Bowen&#8217;s auditors went looking for documents supporting billions of dollars of fund transfers to the Iraqi government in that period, they discovered the paperwork was &#8220;largely missing.&#8221;


Link Ridiculous Overcharging
Weak oversight predictably led to rampant overcharging. A firm based in Dubai managed to keep around $4 billion in Pentagon construction contracts, for example, despite routinely marking up the price of switches and plumbing parts between 3,000 and 12,000 percent, according to an audit Bowen conducted in 2011. 

9. Graphs 

Link
Link 
Link (That graph, which reflects Americans being asked if they think we did the right thing going into Iraq) 

Link (MotherJones)
Link


Link The Pew Research Center released its latest poll on American views of the Iraq war a few days ago and the headline number was that only 44 percent of Americans at present think the invasion was a bad idea ( 41 percent think it was a wise decision).
Link 
Link 
Link





Link More than 2000 participants across Iraq have been interviewed for this representative survey, often under extreme conditions, and many of the interviewers have been arrested. 




Link




Link




Link 




Link




Link A third of people in the UK think going to war in Iraq was justified, but six in 10 believe it was a mistake, a BBC survey suggests.




Link




Link




Link Link




Link 




Link




Link




Link







Link

Architects of war 
[url]http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/03/18/architects-of-the-iraq-war-where-are-they-now/[/URL]

10. Propaganda 


Link Mechanism of the Monstrosity

- Donahue and Bill Moyers, the last honest men on national television, were the only two major TV news personalities who presented the viewpoints of those of us who challenged the rush to war in Iraq. 
- General Electric and Microsoft &#8212; MSNBC&#8217;s founders and defense contractors that went on to make tremendous profits from the war 
- An internal MSNBC memo leaked to the press stated that Donahue was hurting the image of the network. He would be a &#8220;difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,&#8221; the memo read. Donahue never returned to the airwaves.
- Donahue said of the pressure the network put on him near the end, &#8220;It evolved into an absurdity.&#8221; He continued: &#8220;We were told we had to have two conservatives for every liberal on the show. I was considered a liberal. I could have Richard Perle on alone but not Dennis Kucinich. You felt the tremendous fear corporate media had for being on an unpopular side during the ramp-up for a war. And let&#8217;s not forget that General Electric&#8217;s biggest customer at the time was Donald Rumsfeld.
&#8220;Nobody sees the pain,&#8221; he said. &#8220;The war is sanitized.&#8221;
*_


----------



## Makalakumu (May 15, 2013)

_*double post*_


----------



## K-man (May 15, 2013)

Yes, it was a bad idea.  :salute:


----------



## ballen0351 (May 15, 2013)

Holy long post batman.  I'll get back to you in a week when I finally have time to read that.  But the graphs are pretty


----------



## Big Don (May 15, 2013)

The million and a half dead is akin to the number of smoking related deaths, in that it counts every dead Iraqi in the last decade, not just those actually killed by combatants...


----------



## Makalakumu (May 15, 2013)

Big Don said:


> The million and a half dead is akin to the number of smoking related deaths, in that it counts every dead Iraqi in the last decade, not just those actually killed by combatants...



It counts people who were killed as a result of the war, not just those shot. Imagine you and your pregnant wife needed to get to a hospital in order to have your baby. However, you are stopped in a cue for a checkpoint. The baby is born in the car...and dies. 

Under normal circumstances, even under Saddam's rule, that baby would have survived.


----------



## ballen0351 (May 15, 2013)

Makalakumu said:


> Under normal circumstances, even under Saddam's rule, that baby would have survived.



Tell that to the people he gassed to death..........Oh wait


----------



## ballen0351 (May 15, 2013)

An estimated 1million people in Iraq have &#8216;disappeared&#8217; since the 1960s, all presumed murdered or missing.
Human Rights Watch reported in its 1993 comprehensive report on Anfal in Iraq that at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds are estimated to have been killed at the hands of the Ba&#8217;ath regime.1* However, since then, several sources have stated that as many as 182,000 or even more people were killed in that operation
Gendercide: Throughout the Kurdish Anfal, men and boys of &#8216;battle age&#8217; were rounded up and &#8216;disappeared&#8217; en masse. Most of these men and boys were captured, transported to mass graves and shot in mass executions. Of the total victims of Anfal, an estimated 70% were men, approximately aged 15 to 50.2
Thousands of women and children also vanished. Unlike the men, however, they were taken from specific areas as opposed to throughout the region. Evidence also shows that many were taken to internment camps where they were executed or died from deprivation.3
During the 1980s, the Kurdish population was attacked with chemical weapons, killing thousands of men, women and children indiscriminately.
During the Anfal, 90% of Kurdish villages and more than 20 small towns and cities were completely destroyed.


----------



## ballen0351 (May 15, 2013)

Such a nice guy that sadam what where we thinking attacking that poor innocent man


----------



## billc (May 15, 2013)

Yes, getting rid of an entrenched monster is not easy or painless, that is why it is done so rarely.  Keeping that monster in power, as Ballen points out isn't a great choice either.  His time was up, and he is gone.  the Iraqi people have a chance to change their lives, and it is now up to them to use that opportunity created at great loss to the American people.


----------



## Makalakumu (May 15, 2013)

ballen0351 said:


> Tell that to the people he gassed to death..........Oh wait



Oh, you mean the people Saddam gassed with the stuff the US and the UK sold him...oh wait.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0908-08.htm



> THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
> 
> 
> Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs -- which oversees American exports policy -- reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.
> ...



I can't think of any other word to describe this whole situation other than evil.  The decades of brutality that the Iraqi people experienced under a US sponsored Saddam and then because of the various wars against Saddam are stone cold evil.  

Above *K-man* said that the Iraq War was simply a bad idea.  I think that is an understatement.  I think the reality that it reveals far uglier than simply being a mistake.  I think rampant systematic corruption and outright state sponsored psychopathic behavior is closer.  I wonder what would happen if the American people in general knew the truth about the sanitized version of the war they've been fed.  At the very least, I hope people will be a lot more skeptical of government in the future, whenever it tries to take the country to war.


----------



## billc (May 15, 2013)

and if we hadn't gone in, that whole family may have been " disappeared" by the monster or his monster offspring.

People have already forgotten that because of Colin Powell, we stopped before deposing the monster in the first gulf war...when there would have been a strong Bush lead coalition to put the country back together after that war.  we allowed him to sign the ceasefire to end combat, and then he broke every element of that agreement.  The Euoropean diplomats in the u.n. we're making a fortune off of the monster by looking the other way as he starved his people and every few months we had to redeploy troops to Kuwait because he moved his troops in a threatening way.  He blocked inspectors and at the time we invaded, the inspections, as laughable as they were, were about to fall apart.  He constantly attacked allied aircraft, again in violation of the ceasefire, and yet no one remembers these things.

The cowardly Europeans wouldn't do anything about him, Clinton didn't, do anything about him...and then 9/11 happened...remember?  he time for codling monsters had come to a brief end...and he was hung and his monster children were killed as well.  If the Iraqis fail to make something better out of their country...that is on them...they were given a chance...at a horrible cost to our people.


----------



## ballen0351 (May 15, 2013)

Blaming the US for gassing the people is like blaming Chevy for DUI accidents.


----------



## Makalakumu (May 15, 2013)

billc said:


> Yes, getting rid of an entrenched monster is not easy or painless, that is why it is done so rarely.  Keeping that monster in power, as Ballen points out isn't a great choice either.  His time was up, and he is gone.  the Iraqi people have a chance to change their lives, and it is now up to them to use that opportunity created at great loss to the American people.



Some Americans made lots of money.  Darth Cheney for example...

http://firedoglake.com/2013/04/07/sunday-late-night-hell-bound-dick-cheney/



> Who made the most money of all the contractors during the War On Iraq?
> Houston-based energy-focused engineering and construction firm KBR, Inc. (NYSE:KBR), which was spun off from its parent, oilfield services provider Halliburton Co. (NYSE:HAL), in 2007.
> The company was given $39.5 billion in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade, with many of the deals given without any bidding from competing firms, such as a $568-million contract renewal in 2010 to provide housing, meals, water and bathroom services to soldiers, a deal that led to a Justice Department lawsuit over alleged kickbacks, as reported by Bloomberg.
> ​And how did it come to pass that private contractors developed a profit opportunity in American war-making?
> ...


----------



## Makalakumu (May 15, 2013)

ballen0351 said:


> Blaming the US for gassing the people is like blaming Chevy for DUI accidents.



If you sell a psychopath weapons that can kill thousands, knowing that he will use them, that is not like blaming a chevy for a DUI.


----------



## ballen0351 (May 15, 2013)

Makalakumu said:


> If you sell a psychopath weapons that can kill thousands, knowing that he will use them, that is not like blaming a chevy for a DUI.


We sell thousands of cars to alcoholics every month.  

Either way you can't condemned the US for selling a product (you know free market isn't that want you libertarian guys are all about) and give the guy pulling the trigger a pass on his behavior.


----------



## ballen0351 (May 15, 2013)

Makalakumu said:


> Some Americans made lots of money.  Darth Cheney for example...
> 
> http://firedoglake.com/2013/04/07/sunday-late-night-hell-bound-dick-cheney/


What's wrong with making money?


----------



## Makalakumu (May 15, 2013)

billc said:


> and if we hadn't gone in, that whole family may have been " disappeared" by the monster or his monster offspring.
> 
> People have already forgotten that because of Colin Powell, we stopped before deposing the monster in the first gulf war...when there would have been a strong Bush lead coalition to put the country back together after that war.  we allowed him to sign the ceasefire to end combat, and then he broke every element of that agreement.  The Euoropean diplomats in the u.n. we're making a fortune off of the monster by looking the other way as he starved his people and every few months we had to redeploy troops to Kuwait because he moved his troops in a threatening way.  He blocked inspectors and at the time we invaded, the inspections, as laughable as they were, were about to fall apart.  He constantly attacked allied aircraft, again in violation of the ceasefire, and yet no one remembers these things.
> 
> The cowardly Europeans wouldn't do anything about him, Clinton didn't, do anything about him...and then 9/11 happened...remember?  he time for codling monsters had come to a brief end...and he was hung and his monster children were killed as well.  If the Iraqis fail to make something better out of their country...that is on them...they were given a chance...at a horrible cost to our people.



This is the new Right Wing talking point.  If Iraq sucks after the US put in Saddam, armed him to the teeth, let him go wild, and then the US bombed the country to the stone age, blockaded it for a decade, invaded, caused a civil war, and installed another corrupt government...it's the Iraqi people's fault.  Boy, you certainly had a good chance there.  

And Republicans wonder why Democrats win on foreign policy.  Even though the Democrats are just as propagandized as Republicans, that line is so far fetched that no one with two brain cells left should buy it.

And I'm not defending the Lefts foreign policy either.  Obomba and the Clinmegatons are warmongers too.


----------



## Makalakumu (May 15, 2013)

ballen0351 said:


> We sell thousands of cars to alcoholics every month.
> 
> Either way you can't condemned the US for selling a product (you know free market isn't that want you libertarian guys are all about) and give the guy pulling the trigger a pass on his behavior.



I think you missed the part where the US and the UK shipped him weapons after he gassed his own people.


----------



## Makalakumu (May 15, 2013)

ballen0351 said:


> What's wrong with making money?



Nothing, as long as you don't kill anyone.  War profiteering is evil.


----------



## elder999 (May 15, 2013)

billc said:


> Yes, getting rid of an entrenched monster is not easy or painless, that is why it is done so rarely.  Keeping that monster in power, as Ballen points out isn't a great choice either.  His time was up, and he is gone.  the Iraqi people have a chance to change their lives, and it is now up to them to use that opportunity created at great loss to the American people.






billc said:


> Yes, getting rid of an entrenched monster is not easy or painless, that is why it is done so rarely.  Keeping that monster in power, as Ballen points out isn't a great choice either.  His time was up, and he is gone.  the Iraqi people have a chance to change their lives, and it is now up to them to use that opportunity created at great loss to the American people.



_Somoza may be a son of a *****, but he's *our* son of a *****._-Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1939.

The U.S. has had "pet dictators" for more than a century. We still do.See: King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia,President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al-Said of Oman, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan, and, of course, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. 

A more savvy president than G.W.  might have approached Saddam Hussein and enlisted his aid against al Qaeda and the Taliban, in return for lifting of some economic sanctions, economic guarantees, and the use of his country as a base of operations. No shots fired, no lives lost, a feeble move in a gambit for empire replaced with a truly shrewd strategy,  and we could always have given him and his sons "cancer," at a more convenient later date, removing those pawns from the board and replacing them with more suitable pieces. It's what his dad would have done, but, as he pointed out, _This is the guy who tried to kill my dad._

You remember George Hubert Walker Bush, dontcha? CIA man, President and all around wonderful guy who will take  buckets of evil secrets to the grave with him? The man who invaded a country to keep some of those secrets, toppling former pet dictator Noriega of Panama, and arresting him? Never mind that the guy was *his* son of a *****?

View attachment $bush_noriega.jpg

Of course the family has been friends with the Arabs for decades..




And, once, Saddam was *our* son of a *****, and those WMDs? Of course he had them-we sold them to him....
View attachment $saddamandrumsfeld.jpg

By the time 2003 rolled around, and we were perched to invade Iraq, Saddam would have been more than happy to be our son of a ***** again. A savvy man-a shrewd and capable man-would have coopted Saddam at that time, instead of wasting billions of dollars, nearly a decade, and countless lives to take a country that really doesn't want us, and is no better for our being there, save for his removal. 

You go ahead, though, wave the flag with your face some more. We threw out a "monster," and squandered the entire world's goodwill towards us to become monsters ourselves, but you go right on ahead and wave that flag for all it's worth....


----------



## ballen0351 (May 15, 2013)

Makalakumu said:


> I think you missed the part where the US and the UK shipped him weapons after he gassed his own people.



But just a bit ago you said he didn't have any weapons of mass destruction you said we went to war on a lie.  But he did have them and did use them and killed over a million of his own people.  I personally think we should have took him out in the 80s but we didn't.  Better late then never.  I still don't understand why he gets a pass in your eyes for what he did and its all our fault.


----------



## K-man (May 15, 2013)

billc said:


> and if we hadn't gone in, that whole family may have been " disappeared" by the monster or his monster offspring.
> 
> People have already forgotten that because of Colin Powell, we stopped before deposing the monster in the first gulf war...when there would have been a strong Bush lead coalition to put the country back together after that war.  we allowed him to sign the ceasefire to end combat, and then he broke every element of that agreement.  The Euoropean diplomats in the u.n. we're making a fortune off of the monster by looking the other way as he starved his people and every few months we had to redeploy troops to Kuwait because he moved his troops in a threatening way.  He blocked inspectors and at the time we invaded, the inspections, as laughable as they were, were about to fall apart.  He constantly attacked allied aircraft, again in violation of the ceasefire, and yet no one remembers these things.
> 
> The cowardly Europeans wouldn't do anything about him, Clinton didn't, do anything about him...and then 9/11 happened...remember?  he time for codling monsters had come to a brief end...and he was hung and his monster children were killed as well.  If the Iraqis fail to make something better out of their country...that is on them...they were given a chance...at a horrible cost to our people.


George Bush senior had enough knowledgable people around him to realise that deposing Sadam Hussain would totally destabilise the region. Leaving him in power was the best of bad options. Clinton had the same information. George junior was influenced by those who had most to gain (arms dealers and oil tycoons) and made the terrible mistake of invading Iraq. Unfortunately he dragged those 'cowardly European's and others into the mire with him.

I'm not sure what 9/11 had to do with Iraq. I suppose it was carried out by Arabs and Arabs live in Iraq. Al-Queda was in Afghanistan and that is why you invaded there if you remember. 

But this is priceless ...

*"If the Iraqis fail to make something better out of their country...that is on them...they were given a chance...at a horrible cost to our people."
*
The cost to America and ordinary Americans was one thing although there were many Americans, not so ordinary, who increased their fortunes as a result. The cost to Iraq was a thousandfold worse. You destroyed the only person who could control the country. You destroyed most of the infrastructure.  You killed and maimed thousands and you caused the displacement of millions of people. You destabilised the entire region.

Then you walk away and say "*if they fail to make something better out of their country ... that is on them!" * Priceless!!!

What do you expect them to do now? Hold free and fair elections? Adopt a democratic system of government? All you can show for the horrendous loss of life and waste of money is one great mess ... and you wonder why the people of the Middle East don't like Americans.

You've handed the country back to the warlords just like Afghanistan and they will bicker for the next 1000 years as they have done for the past 1000 years, and their people will suffer greatly for generations as a result. 

Looks like I'm on *Maka*'s side on this one! (And Maka, it *was* meant to be an understatement.  ) 

   :asian:


----------



## ballen0351 (May 15, 2013)

elder999 said:


> _Somoza may be a son of a *****, but he's *our* son of a *****._-Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1939.
> 
> The U.S. has had "pet dictators" for more than a century. We still do.See: King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia,President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al-Said of Oman, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan, and, of course, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.
> 
> ...


I'll wave the flag I'll wave it proud.  We are the best county there is I don't care who it offends.  I'm tired of being the biggest kid in class and being embarrassed by it because were bigger stronger faster then the next guy.  We are an easy target until the next tsunami or major earthquake then its come on America we love you help us that's not enough we need more.  We bend over backwards for people and then when a nut job attacks us you here the "see you deserve that". Or your chickens have come home.  Blah blah blah.   You got a president that was supposed to "Fix our image" around the world hell he got a piece prize and everything. Lot of good he's done our embassy get over run and he does nothing.  
The rest of the world wants us to but out then don't call us*for help when crap hits the fan.  Earthquake crushes Haiti oh well we would live to help but.... Tsunami flattens the south pacific we would love to help but..........   See how vilified we become then.  
Sad am should have been killed 30 years ago and we didn't do it.  Well he is now and good riddance.  You want to pull our troops out let's do it pull them all home they won't mind I'm sure.  Then what?  The entire world is a corrupt dangerous place how done protect ourselves?  Lock down the boarders can't do that its inhumane to the undocumented immigrants.  Air port scanners can't do that someone might touch your butt ah the horror,  more police no way we don't want to live in a police state.  So what do we do?  Give out more free crap and hope they like us?  Man has been fighting since we got on this planet its in our nature.  So what's the solution?


----------



## K-man (May 15, 2013)

ballen0351 said:


> I'll wave the flag I'll wave it proud.  We are the best county there is I don't care who it offends.  I'm tired of being the biggest kid in class and being embarrassed by it because were bigger stronger faster then the next guy.


It's one thing to be proud of your country. That doesn't offend anyone. Most of us can be proud of our countries. It is your opinion that you are the 'best' country. Personally, if I couldn't live in Australia there would be at least twenty other countries I would prefer to go before I would consider the US, and that is my opinion.

But, you hit it on the head when you said you are tired of being the biggest kid in the class and being embarrassed by it. At this time for a number of reasons the US is the richest and most powerful nation on Earth and although it considers itself the world's policeman and benefactor, in reality it is the world's biggest bully, and one day that power balance will change. That is why I have always said, I like Americans but I don't like America. Over the years, America has shafted most of its allies one way or another and that includes the UK and Australia.  :asian:


----------



## Big Don (May 15, 2013)

K-man said:


> It's one thing to be proud of your country. That doesn't offend anyone. Most of us can be proud of our countries. It is your opinion that you are the 'best' country. Personally, if I couldn't live in Australia there would be at least twenty other countries I would prefer to go before I would consider the US, and that is my opinion.
> 
> But, you hit it on the head when you said you are tired of being the biggest kid in the class and being embarrassed by it. At this time for a number of reasons the US is the richest and most powerful nation on Earth and although it considers itself the world's policeman and benefactor, in reality it is the world's biggest bully, and one day that power balance will change. That is why I have always said, I like Americans but I don't like America. Over the years, America has shafted most of its allies one way or another and that includes the UK and Australia.  :asian:


You have nuclear ****ing weapons Aussie? Yosemite? Yellowstone? The Grand Canyon? The Great Lakes? Carrier Battle Groups? Airborne DIVISIONS? CA beaches, Florida beaches? Rocky Mountains? Are people so desperate to be Aussies they sneak in by the hundreds of thousands EVERY year?
No. Just a few reasons we are the best.


----------



## billc (May 15, 2013)

An alternative look at the Iran/Iraq war and the use of chemical weapons...and their suppliers...

http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/chemical_warfare_iran_iraq_war.php



> *Indigenous or external sources of supply?*
> With the exceptions, maybe, of the last two of these different categories of putative Iraqi agent, sources of supply might as well be indigenous as external to Iraq, given the technology implied. Involvement of the last three categories would, in some circles, implicate the USSR as supplier, for the reason that the USSR is said, on evidence that has yet to be solidly substantiated but which has nonetheless attracted some firm believers, to have weaponized all three of them in recent years. For its part, the USSR has expressly denied supplying Iraq with toxic weapons. Reports of Soviet supply attributed to US and other intelligence sources have nonetheless recurred. The earliest predate reports of Iraqi use of chemical weapons in the Gulf War.
> 
> Official Iranian commentaries, too, have pointed to the USSR as a supplier of the Iraqi weapons. These sources have also accused Brazil, France and, most conspicuously, Britain of supplying the weapons. No basis for any of these Iranian accusations has been disclosed. France, alongside Czechoslovakia and both Germanies, is reportedly also rumoured, among "foreign military and diplomatic sources" in Baghdad, to have supplied Iraq with chemical precursors needed for an indigenous production effort. Unofficial published sources have cited Egypt as a possible supplier of actual chemical weapons. In the mid-1960s, when Iraq was alleged to be using chemical weapons against insurgent Kurdish forces, Swiss and German sources of supply were reported in the Western press.





> *ORIGIN OF THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS*
> 
> The UN report provides only negative evidence of the origin of the mustard gas sample. The absence in the sample analysed in Sweden and Switzerland of polysulphides and of more than a trace of sulphur indicates that it is not of past US-government manufacture, for all US mustard was made by the Levinstein process from ethylene and mixed sulphur chlorides. That process is also said to have been the one used by the USSR. From similar reasoning, British-made mustard, too, can probably be ruled out, even though substantial stocks were once held at British depots in the Middle East. For more positive evidence other sources of information must be used.
> 
> ...


----------



## billc (May 15, 2013)

Yes, and stalin, one of the biggest, socialist mass murderers in history was our ally against the other socialist mass murderers, the Germans under hitler.  The world is a big nasty place, and you can't pick and choose only the nicest and best people to help fight the other monsters in power around the globe.  I enjoy how the nations that benefit from the U.S. military, and then spend all their money on social welfare programs, complain about the U.S.  Well, we are tapped out and the liberals are going to hollow out our military...enjoy defending yourselves, you may have to give up that free medical care so you can by some tanks, planes and ships...self defense is expensive.


----------



## elder999 (May 15, 2013)

billc said:


> An alternative look at the Iran/Iraq war and the use of chemical weapons...and their suppliers...
> 
> http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/chemical_warfare_iran_iraq_war.php


 No, Bill. That's not "alternative." It's B.S.:BSmeter: :lfao: Actually, testimony entered into the Senate record in 1994 conclusively demonstrates that U.S. corporations sold dual use precursors to Iraq more than 500 times between 1985 and 1989. No less than the CDC shipped biological precursors to Iraq-at least 10 times during the same period. While Iraq doubtlessly obtained weapons from the U.S.S.R., and had their own program to develop chemical and biological weapons, the materials needed for those programs were clearly obtained from the U.S.-Saddam may not have kept the receipts, but the companies involved kept invoices, and the U.S. Commerce Department authorized every last shipment made.....


----------



## Scott T (May 15, 2013)

Big Don said:


> You have nuclear ****ing weapons Aussie? Yosemite? Yellowstone? The Grand Canyon? The Great Lakes? Carrier Battle Groups? Airborne DIVISIONS? CA beaches, Florida beaches? Rocky Mountains? Are people so desperate to be Aussies they sneak in by the hundreds of thousands EVERY year?
> No. Just a few reasons we are the best.


A rather self-centered post. Nuclear weapons? only a warmongering fool would consider WMD's (or any machine built for the sole purpose of causing the deaths of others) as a point of pride. As for natural landmarks and immigration: Don, you really don't know much about Australia, do you? Yet another way you made yourself look like a fool with this post. It's sad, really.


----------



## Makalakumu (May 15, 2013)

ballen0351 said:


> But just a bit ago you said he didn't have any weapons of mass destruction you said we went to war on a lie.  But he did have them and did use them and killed over a million of his own people.  I personally think we should have took him out in the 80s but we didn't.  Better late then never.  I still don't understand why he gets a pass in your eyes for what he did and its all our fault.



Saddam was an evil little imp perched on demon Bush's shoulders.  When he got in the way, that crew smashed him with the Hammer of Morgoth.  The little people in the way were literally called bugsplat.

I don't think the US should be spending my tax money before I was even old enough to earn any to put people like Saddam in power in the first place.  The whole foreign policy is rotten.  Yeah, I've heard the whole "fix a mistake" bit too, but that doesn't hold any water when you consider all of the other monsters the Imperial government has on leashes all over the globe.  

The foreign policy is the problem.


----------



## billc (May 15, 2013)

Dual use...

And this...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction



> In the early 1970s, Saddam Hussein ordered the creation of a clandestine nuclear weaponsprogram.[SUP][24][/SUP] Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs were assisted by a wide variety of firms and governments in the 1970s and 1980s.[SUP][25][/SUP][SUP][26][/SUP][SUP][27][/SUP][SUP][28][/SUP][SUP][29][/SUP] As part of Project 922, German firms such as Karl Kobe helped build Iraqi chemical weapons facilities such as laboratories, bunkers, an administrative building, and first production buildings in the early 1980s under the cover of a pesticide plant. Other German firms sent 1,027 tons of precursors of mustard gas, sarin, tabun, and tear gassesin all. This work allowed Iraq to produce 150 tons of mustard agent and 60 tons of Tabun in 1983 and 1984 respectively, continuing throughout the decade. Five other German firms supplied equipment to manufacture botulin toxin and mycotoxin for germ warfare. In 1988, German engineers presentedcentrifuge data that helped Iraq expand its nuclear weapons program. Laboratory equipment and other information was provided, involving many German engineers. All told, 52% of Iraq's international chemical weapon equipment was of German origin. The State Establishment for Pesticide Production (SEPP) ordered culture media and incubators from Germany's Water Engineering Trading.[SUP][30][/SUP]





> > Italy gave Iraq plutonium extraction facilities that advanced Iraq&#8217;s nuclear weapon program along with 75,000 shells and rockets designed for chemical weapons.
> 
> 
> Between 1979 and 1982 Italy gave depleted, natural, and low-enriched uranium. Swiss companies aided in Iraq&#8217;s nuclear weapons development in the form of specialized presses, milling machines, grinding machines, electrical discharge machines, and equipment for processing uranium to nuclear weapon grade. Brazil secretly aided the Iraqi nuclear weapon program by supplying naturaluranium dioxide between 1981 and 1982 without notifying the IAEA.
> ...






> > France also provided glass-lined reactors, tanks, vessels, and columns used for the production of chemical weapons. Around 21% of Iraq&#8217;s international chemical weapon equipment was of French origin. Strains of dual-use biological material also helped advance Iraq&#8217;s biological warfare program.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


----------



## billc (May 15, 2013)

Ah yes...and the rest of the story...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_biological_weapons_program



> *Startup and foreign suppliers*
> 
> In the early 1980s, five German firms supplied equipment to manufacture botulin toxin and mycotoxin to Iraq. Iraq's State Establishment for Pesticide Production (SEPP) also ordered culture media and incubators from Germany's Water Engineering Trading.[SUP][1][/SUP] Strains of dual-use biological material from France also helped advance Iraq&#8217;s biological warfare program. From the United States, the non-profit American Type Culture Collection and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control sold or sent biological samples to Iraq up until 1989, which Iraq claimed to need for medical research. These materials included anthrax, West Nile virus and botulism, as well as _Brucella melitensis_, and _Clostridium perfringens_. Some of these materials were used for Iraq's biological weapons research program, while others were used for vaccine development.[SUP][2][/SUP] In delivering these materials "The CDC was abiding by World Health Organization guidelines that encouraged the free exchange of biological samples among medical researchers..." according to Thomas Monath, CDC lab director. It was a request "which we were obligated to fulfill," as described in WHO and UN treaties.[SUP][3][/SUP]





> "The CDC was abiding by World Health Organization guidelines that encouraged the free exchange of biological samples among medical researchers..." according to Thomas Monath, CDC lab director. It was a request "which we were obligated to fulfill," as described in WHO and UN treaties.[SUP][3][/SUP]


*[edit]

*The simple answer...never trust the U.N.


----------



## K-man (May 15, 2013)

Big Don said:


> You have nuclear ****ing weapons Aussie? Yosemite? Yellowstone? The Grand Canyon? The Great Lakes? Carrier Battle Groups? Airborne DIVISIONS? CA beaches, Florida beaches? Rocky Mountains? Are people so desperate to be Aussies they sneak in by the hundreds of thousands EVERY year?
> No. Just a few reasons we are the best.


Unfortunately, yes we have thousands of people disparate to be Aussies trying to sneak in. If I could I would tell them how great America is and redirect the boats across the Pacific.  

Yosemite? Yellowstone? The Grand Canyon? The Great Lakes?  CA beaches, Florida beaches? Rocky Mountains? Breathtakingly beautiful. Would love to go to Yellowstone one day, Florida I think I could do without and the rest I have visited.  America is a beautiful country, no doubt. We can challenge anything you care to throw with The Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, Kakadu, Flinders Ranges, the Red Centre, Cradle Mountain, beautiful beaches, etc. 

nuclear ****ing weapons Aussie?  Carrier Battle Groups? Airborne DIVISIONS?   
Yeah, we'll that's sort of what I was referring to in my post.  It's not the fact that you have those things, just how you use them. That's what can make The US a bully. France has nuclear weapons, Britain has nuclear weapons but I haven't seen them running round threatening other nations with them.

But these things do not make you the best. How you behave as a Nation makes you the best. You have a dysfunctional political system that polarises the country and paralyses your government. Because you have military power you can pick and choose who you will invade next to keep your armament industry making a fortune for your politicians. You subsidise your farmers to overproduce then dump that produce in the overseas countries that your allies are trying to sell unsubsidised produce to. You have an outdated constitution that you think is the envy of the Western world. You like to run round with guns, shooting at anyone you consider a threat, causing the deaths of thousands of your citizens each year. You don't want to provide the umbrella of health care that every other first world country takes for granted.  

America is a beautiful country, almost every American I have met is a warm and generous person. I love to visit the US but I would not choose to live there.   :asian:


----------



## billc (May 15, 2013)

And who gave the sample to Iraq...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Type_Culture_Collection



> The *American Type Culture Collection* (ATCC) is a private, not-for-profit biological resource center whose mission focuses on the acquisition, authentication, production, preservation, development and distribution of standard reference microorganisms, cell lines and other materials for research in the life sciences. Established in 1914 and originally incorporated by scientists in 1925[SUP][_not verified in body_][/SUP] to serve as a worldwide repository and distribution center for cultures of microorganisms, the ATCC has developed into the global leader[SUP][_citation needed_][/SUP] in research and development expertise for identifying, characterizing, preserving and distributing a wide range of cell lines and microbes. Aside from maintaining the biorepository, an R&D program and a product development team, the ATCC also competes for federal grants and contracts and engages in partnerships and collaborations with academic institutions and private companies.





> *Supply to Iraqi weapons program [edit]*
> 
> ATCC supplied Iraqi organisations, including Baghdad University, with several pathogens between 1985 and 1989. These include _Bacillus anthracis_ (the causative agent of anthrax), _Aspergillus_ fungal cultures producing the mycotoxin aflatoxin), _Brucella melitensis_ (causing brucellosis),_Clostridium botulinum_, _Clostridium perfringens_, _E. coli_ and _Salmonella cholerae-suis._ [1].
> This frequently cited list, however, includes both difficult-to-obtain, highly dangerous organisms like anthrax and common, easily identified organisms found in most or all households worldwide, such as the principal aflatoxin producer _Aspergillus flavus_, a species especially ubiquitous on peanuts or in maize corn fields, and _E. coli_, found in all animal guts and most natural waterways. [SUP][1[/SUP]


----------



## jks9199 (May 15, 2013)

Folks, I don't think the topic here is who's nation is best.  We could argue that all day, until Chiun stepped in and informed us it was Korea.  Let's get back to the original topic, and avoid nationalistic jabs.


----------



## billc (May 15, 2013)

What was that about Australia...

http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/98



> Survival today condemned Australia's treatment of Aborigines as 'appalling'. Survival's Director General Stephen Corry said, *'The Australian government seems hell-bent on doing everything it can to deny Aborigines their internationally-recognised rights, especially their land rights. Its stance can only be described as racist, and seems like a throwback to attitudes 30 years ago. Recent government legislation will make it very difficult for many Aborigines to reclaim land now occupied by huge ranches.'*



Oh...I guess I should stop...and now back to the thread...


----------



## K-man (May 16, 2013)

billc said:


> What was that about Australia...
> 
> http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/98
> 
> Oh...I guess I should stop...and now back to the thread...


WTF this has to do with Iraq!  

But, I'm not averse to rolling in the gutter with you. 

Australians have a dark history when it comes to the treatment of our indigenous people. We deprived them of their land, their rights and their identity. Fortunately in the past 40 odd years we have been trying to redress the situation.  Currently the Aboriginal people have land rights over 11% of Australia including much of the area rich in oil and minerals. We have about 550,000 people who claim to be 'Aboriginal'.  Out of a population of 23,000,000 that makes them 2.4% of the population with 11% of the land and another 500 claims in the pipeline. That is 854,000 sq kilometres in area or 211 million acres.

Health and education are other difficult areas because most of these people live in remote communities. As a result life expectancy and infant mortality are much worse than the general population. But, a lot of taxpayer funds are directed at improving it.

Now, how does that compare with your treatment of indigenous Americans?  

Oh! I'm not sure about the author of the article but we don't have 'ranches' in Australia.  :asian:


----------



## ballen0351 (May 16, 2013)

K-man said:


> It's one thing to be proud of your country. That doesn't offend anyone. Most of us can be proud of our countries. It is your opinion that you are the 'best' country. Personally, if I couldn't live in Australia there would be at least twenty other countries I would prefer to go before I would consider the US, and that is my opinion.
> 
> But, you hit it on the head when you said you are tired of being the biggest kid in the class and being embarrassed by it. At this time for a number of reasons the US is the richest and most powerful nation on Earth and although it considers itself the world's policeman and benefactor, in reality it is the world's biggest bully, and one day tha t power balance will change. That is why I have always said, I like Americans but I don't like America. Over the years, America has shafted most of its allies one way or another and that includes the UK and Australia.  :asian:



Like I said its easy to call us bullies until you want something.  We are bullies until the next natural disaster strikes and then not just the US Govt but we as a people  start donating millions of dollars to help out other nations.  The next super volcano eruption and there will be campaigns to text " fire" to donate 10 bucks to help the poor people in some place over never heard of.  
I agree out govt has screwed over people name one that hasn't.  But I asked what should be done and nobody has answered that.  Should we have gone into Iraq because of 9-11?  No I don't think it was related.  Should we have taken out sadam yes I'm not sorry he's gone.


----------



## K-man (May 16, 2013)

ballen0351 said:


> Like I said its easy to call us bullies until you want something.  We are bullies until the next natural disaster strikes and then not just the US Govt but *we as a people  start donating millions of dollars to help out other nations.  The next super volcano eruption and there will be campaigns to text " fire" to donate 10 bucks to help the poor people in some place over never heard of.  *
> I agree out govt has screwed over people name one that hasn't.  But I asked what should be done and nobody has answered that.  Should we have gone into Iraq because of 9-11?  No I don't think it was related.  Should we have taken out sadam yes I'm not sorry he's gone.


And isn't that just what I'm saying? That Americans individually are warm and generous. The problems arise at the corporate level and flow through to government.  Once an organisation like the CIA becomes involved who knows what is really happening and who is pulling the strings?  :asian:


----------



## ballen0351 (May 16, 2013)

K-man said:


> And isn't that just what I'm saying? That Americans individually are warm and generous. The problems arise at the corporate level and flow through to government.  Once an organisation like the CIA becomes involved who knows what is really happening and who is pulling the strings?  :asian:


Same can be said for almost all countries.  What's the alternative?  Sometimes we need to make deals with the devil for the greater good.   
On a local level say I'm trying to work a homicide case I may overlook that my witness is a drug dealer or wife beater ect for the greater good.  Now later I may then lock him up once I'm done using him.  Its the nature of the beast.


----------



## Sukerkin (May 16, 2013)

I hold much the same opinion as K-Man when it comes to a perception of America (TM).  Beautiful geography, mostly nice people (like anywhere really I suppose) and an absolutely awful corporate government that has made some terrible international political decisions now and again (not that the American government is alone in such failings).

So, that said, it might be wise to return to the topic of the thread rather than trying to determine by 'Degree of Web-Warriorness' whose home country is the best - after all it is clearly England, so it's a pointless argument .


----------



## K-man (May 16, 2013)

Sukerkin said:


> So, that said, it might be wise to return to the topic of the thread rather than trying to determine by 'Degree of Web-Warriorness' whose home country is the best - after all it is clearly England, so it's a pointless argument .


If it wasn't for your fer, fer, fereezin weather!  :s484:


----------



## ballen0351 (May 16, 2013)

Sukerkin said:


> I hold much the same opinion as K-Man when it comes to a perception of America (TM).  Beautiful geography, mostly nice people (like anywhere really I suppose) and an absolutely awful corporate government that has made some terrible international political decisions now and again (not that the American government is alone in such failings).
> 
> So, that said, it might be wise to return to the topic of the thread rather than trying to determine by 'Degree of Web-Warriorness' whose home country is the best - after all it is clearly England, so it's a pointless argument .



I wasn't trying to compare the US to other countries at least that wasn't the point I was trying to make.  It was the poster that put the blame for killing Iraqi civilians on the shoulder of the  US yet seem to give sadam a pass when he killed far more people.  To say under sadam rule your wife and baby had a better chance to survive is false it would depend on your background and political beliefs.  Sadam was a bad dude was he our bad dude sure he was for a while he out lived his use fullness and was removed. We went to war because he had WMDs which was true to say he didn't is just wrong we know he had them because as already pointed out we sold them to him.  
Then to say we as a nation are bullies well that may be true and it may not be depends on your prespective but same is said about most of the super power nations.  I just don't think we should be ashamed or feel bad about it.  As "bad" as we are we do plenty of good as well.  
The Iraq war didn't need to take as long as it did but its because we tried not to kill innocent that we took the harder longer road.


----------



## Makalakumu (May 16, 2013)

I think the bigger lesson is that America's foreign policy is the real problem. We can't support monsters, take them out when convenient, and support more monsters without expecting blowback. The foreign policy is madness and it really hasn't changed. Look at Syria. Look at Libya. There will be more Iraq Wars. More lies. More destruction and more hatred. America will eventually bankrupt itself like this.

The military industrial complex is eating this country like a snake eating it's own tail.


----------



## ballen0351 (May 16, 2013)

Makalakumu said:


> I think the bigger lesson is that America's foreign policy is the real problem. We can't support monsters, take them out when convenient, and support more monsters without expecting blowback. The foreign policy is madness and it really hasn't changed. Look at Syria. Look at Libya. There will be more Iraq Wars. More lies. More destruction and more hatred. America will eventually bankrupt itself like this.
> 
> The military industrial complex is eating this country like a snake eating it's own tail.


So I ask again what's the better option?  The world is a dangerous place people in general are dangerous.  Look no further then putting 2 three year olds in a room with 1 toy and watch how long it takes to turn violent.  Its in our nature to resort to violence.  When a country decides it wants nukes and also says its goal is to wipe another country off the face of the earth like Iran and Israel then what should be done?  As a nation should we just sit back and watch?


----------



## Makalakumu (May 16, 2013)

ballen0351 said:


> So I ask again what's the better option?  The world is a dangerous place people in general are dangerous.



Some people can be dangerous, but from my experience, when people are unprovoked, they remain peaceful and generous.  

The problem with our foreign policy is that it is wholly shaped by corporate interests.  Take Libya for example.  30,000 Chinese oil workers were in the country working on contracts with Gaddafi.  Those contracts disappeared when he was deposed by the US backed violence and new contracts were drawn up with western firms as soon as the new guys got in power.  

The whole production is a lie.  In a way it's worse than Iraq, because at least Saddam's hell hound reputation gave the war an illusion of legitimacy.  And now look who is in power in Libya...Al Qaeda types.  This isn't about keeping America safe from danger.

Look at these pictures.












How do you think the people living here view America now?  How open would their ears be to people preached that we were the Great Satan?  

We haven't seen the end of trouble here...and basically this is just an extension of the same policy that created the problems in Iraq in the first place.

This foreign policy isn't about keeping you safe or protecting your interests.  It's about the Great Game of domination between countries.  Corporations are using the military (government) to alter the market for their benefit.  

So, the solution, IMHO, is to take this tool away from them.  The US needs to pull back it's military bases and cut "defense" spending by at least 80%.  We could have a real defensive force on a fraction of this budget and create a lot fewer enemies by doing this.  Over time, I think people will forgive America and things will eventually change for the good. Getting our people out of there and stopping the "bugsplat" would be a good first step.


----------



## Makalakumu (May 16, 2013)

ballen0351 said:


> I'll wave the flag I'll wave it proud.  We are the best county there is I don't care who it offends.



I wonder about this sentiment.  People are people no matter which plot of land upon which they exit the birth canal or whatever religion is inflicted on them from childhood.  This whole idea that you are part of America, that you are Christian, that you are Muslim is an illusion.  You are claimed by these ideologies and indoctrinated, sometimes horrifically, into a particular way of thinking.  

If you were born somewhere else, maybe you'd be waving a different flag, a different cross, a Koran.  Maybe you'd be trying to ignore all of the evil that is being done in the name of that other symbol because that is your team now.  These are all just illusions, though.  

Illusions that hide bloody hands.


----------



## ballen0351 (May 16, 2013)

Makalakumu said:


> I wonder about this sentiment.  People are people no matter which plot of land upon which they exit the birth canal or whatever religion is inflicted on them from childhood.  This whole idea that you are part of America, that you are Christian, that you are Muslim is an illusion.  You are claimed by these ideologies and indoctrinated, sometimes horrifically, into a particular way of thinking.
> 
> If you were born somewhere else, maybe you'd be waving a different flag, a different cross, a Koran.  Maybe you'd be trying to ignore all of the evil that is being done in the name of that other symbol because that is your team now.  These are all just illusions, though.
> 
> Illusions that hide bloody hands.


So we should abandon all borders and religion and anything else that makes us different then the next guy if we all assimilate to each other maybe then we can all be friends right.  The whole new world order thing.  

I've done a lot of things in my life and the one thing besides being a father that I'm most proud of is the day Senior Drill Instructor SSgt Wilson handed me my Eagle Globe and Anchor and said "Your a Marine now and nobody can ever take that away from you". So yeah I love MY country I'm Proud of my country. Had I been born in another land I like to think I'd be just as proud of that country as this one but I don't know I was born here.  

 Your so quick to blame the worlds problems on our foreign policy yet your answer is let's just retreat and leave the world alone and hope they forgive us.  Screw them I don't want their forgiveness.  If they want our money and our food and supplies then play by our rules or don't ask for or accept our assistance.  


I have no issue pulling all our troops home but then what?  When Iran decides to buy or build a nuke to flatten Israel what do we do then?  Or N Korea decides it wants to own S Korea again what do we do then?


----------



## ballen0351 (May 16, 2013)

Makalakumu said:


> Some people can be dangerous, but from my experience, when people are unprovoked, they remain peaceful and generous.


So who did the people in the World Trade Center Provoke?



> The problem with our foreign policy is that it is wholly shaped by corporate interests.  Take Libya for example.  30,000 Chinese oil workers were in the country working on contracts with Gaddafi.  Those contracts disappeared when he was deposed by the US backed violence and new contracts were drawn up with western firms as soon as the new guys got in power.
> 
> The whole production is a lie.  In a way it's worse than Iraq, because at least Saddam's hell hound reputation gave the war an illusion of legitimacy.  And now look who is in power in Libya...Al Qaeda types.  This isn't about keeping America safe from danger.
> 
> ...


So what do we do in the mean time before everyone "forgives" us?  What do we do if one of our allies asks for help?  Sorry we would love to help but people won't like it.  I'll say again I could care less what others think of us.  Our problem is when we do intervien we only go half way.  We try to fight a war poliety we court marshal our people because they humiliated prisoners and allow them to decapite our POWs. If we are going to fight a war then fight it full on full power full might end it fast and complete.  Not 13 years of small conflicts.  That's what causes more people to grow to hate us.  We could have wiped out all the Taliban in 60 days destroyed them and been out in a year but we ***** footed around.  Same on Iraq.  We were more worried about winning the hearts and minds vs winning the war.
Then part of our govt problem is using foreign policy as a smoke screen  so we don't pay attention to them wiretapping reporters and the IRS targeting political enemies of the current president.


----------



## Makalakumu (May 16, 2013)

ballen0351 said:


> So who did the people in the World Trade Center Provoke?



At the very least, 9/11 was blowback from past foreign policy.  We can expect more of it.  

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/05/1...ar-tsarnaev-reportedly-left-note-inside-boat/



> Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev reportedly wrote a note taking responsibility for the attack, claiming it was retribution for Muslims in response to U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.





ballen0351 said:


> Then part of our govt problem is using foreign policy as a smoke screen  so we don't pay attention to them wiretapping reporters and the IRS targeting political enemies of the current president.



This is very interesting, even people who are staunchly patriotic have this worm of suspicion creeping in about their government.  I think most of what we've been told about the wars is a smokescreen for something else.  The foreign policy is a tool of the corporations.  It doesn't make us safer.  It makes the world more dangerous.  It causes more trouble.  It creates more reasons to intervene...creating more problems...and more reasons.  

I think we need to break the cycle.  We need to dispel the illusion that this has anything to do with keeping America safe.  Drastically changing our foreign policy will actually keep America safer in the short term and in the long term.


----------



## Makalakumu (May 16, 2013)

ballen0351 said:


> So we should abandon all borders and religion and anything else that makes us different then the next guy if we all assimilate to each other maybe then we can all be friends right.



If nationalism and religion could exit this world, it would be a much safer and peaceful place.

BTW - Israel and S. Korea are perfectly capable handling their enemies.  Especially S. Korea.


----------



## ballen0351 (May 16, 2013)

Makalakumu said:


> If nationalism and religion could exit this world, it would be a much safer and peaceful place.
> 
> BTW - Israel and S. Korea are perfectly capable handling their enemies.  Especially S. Korea.



So we should give up our national identity because it offends others?

And why should s Korea and Israel have to do it alone we are allies


----------



## Big Don (May 16, 2013)

Khomeini, at the time was the far greater threat and using Saddam against him made sense. If you can't grasp that, I pity you even more.


----------



## elder999 (May 16, 2013)

Big Don said:


> Khomeini, at the time was the far greater threat and using Saddam against him made sense. If you can't grasp that, I pity you even more.


 Substitute "al Qaeda" for "Khomeini," and you have a much better strategy for Saddam than invading his country has proven to be........


----------



## K-man (May 16, 2013)

I think what is coming out here is that there are two extremes and each is as bad as the other.  One is; 'there is something evil out there and it might make things worse for us so we'll take the bastards out' and the other; ' there is something evil out there so we'll pull our heads in and it might go away'. At the moment the US is closer to the first. The middle course is much more difficult to follow.  The UN was set up after the war to try to prevent future conflict. Unfortunately the major powers were given a right of veto that has more or less emasculated the UN. If its not the US vetoing something, it is Russia or China. But, realistically, that is the only way the world can react against an evil regime without generating the hatred being aimed primarily at the US. Even to use NATO, which is US dominated, will not be recognised by Middle East nations.  :asian:


----------



## billc (May 16, 2013)

The U.N. is corrupt all by itself...the "Oil for Food" scandal, the rapes and human trafficking by U.N. soldiers...

Remember, we only helped out in Libya when the Europeans asked us to help...they ran out of munitions, and some refused to participate.  I love that the nice picture of Libya in 2007 is put up as to why now is so much worse.  That picture hid the monsters acts against his own people.  Personally, I don't think we should have toppled qadafi...he wasn't hurting anyone but his own people and the people obama supported are going to be much worse, spreading the "islamist supremacy," whereever they can.


----------



## K-man (May 16, 2013)

billc said:


> The U.N. is corrupt all by itself...the "Oil for Food" scandal, the rapes and human trafficking by U.N. soldiers...


I agree with you. But what I am suggesting is that a body representing most, if not all countries is essential if we are to avoid major conflict and control absolute tyranny when it appears. :asian:


----------



## Makalakumu (May 17, 2013)

How many starships could the US have built for the price of one Iraq war?

http://now.msn.com/star-treks-enterprise-would-cost-dollar480-billion?gt1-50501



> Why is NASA wasting its time with Mars rovers and space telescopes when it could be building the Starship Enterprise? All we need is $480 billion. That's all it would take to get the raw materials and assemble it in orbit, according to the folks at Gizmodo. Oddly enough, not only does the cool tech inside the ship already exist (mostly), it's the least expensive part. The replicator and holodeck only cost $300,000 and $6 million respectively. The only thing we're missing is the dilythium crystal engine, but hey, while we wait for that to be invented, we'll have a weaponized Starship Enterprise space station. Pretty good deal for $480 billion. [Source]


----------

