>>All these claims of shameless hypocrisy ring rather hollow.<<
It's exactly what Malik says it is - shameless hypocrisy. Manifestly all governments act in their own self-interests; but which other government have you seen whose own self-interests run so counter to international laws? Besides the US, no other govt's. implementation of its selfish policies adversely affects more innocent people. No other country trumpets as loudly about "justice, freedom and liberty for all" ideals. THIS is why those in the so-called "Arab street" and Muslim world are furious - not because we envy the US, not because we envy McDonald's. No. We fume at the lack of thought that goes behind implementing policies that have such adverse effects upon millions, millions, of innocents around the globe. We fume because the very same country that implements these policies, then dictates adhering to the "rule of law" to other countries. Give it a break - this is not the colonial era.
Nadia: It's called critical mass. When you are the size of the US, wield the economic and military power of the US. your actions will have an impact on a larger section of the world than say pakistan. National interest is supreme and is real. Everything else is rhetoric.
This may not be the colonial era, but it is not the communist era either, where all countries have equal powers. Democracy, capitalism, secularism and freedom have put the US in the position it is today. Chaltahai is right, when the US has a drink, the world gets drunk. It is because of how large the US is compared to all other nations. Is it the fault of the US that they have become so powerful, or the faults of other societies which have prevented them from also becoming powerful?
This has been asked a million times, but what country would do a better job if they were the world leader? Do you really think any other government would be less "evil" than the US? Or do you think the US should squander all its wealth and power so societies that haven't promoted democracy, capitalism, secularism and freedom can have equal footing?
And may one ask all the alligator teared pious souls which country can they cite which is not indulging in hypocrisy by their standards? It is amazing to see so much hand wringing!
Seminole, i am not complaining over whose fault it is that the US is so powerful nor am i even complaining that the US IS powerful. You are missing the whole point my good friend. i am complaining of the lack of responsibility that accompanies power.
>>This has been asked a million times, but what country would do a better job if they were the world leader?<<
Hypothetically, let's say that you are the Prime Minister of Canada. Do you fudge around with domestic and international policies, select only close acquaintances for Cabinet positions, refuse to subsidize farmers, stop federal payouts to less affluent provinces - in general, make a mess of the Canadian economy, all because you believe that someone else in your position would do more evil? Just because another country in the US's position might do more evil, does not allow the US government to shirk its own responsibilities! First do no harm yourself, basic principle.
>>Or do you think the US should squander all its wealth and power so societies that haven't promoted democracy, capitalism, secularism and freedom can have equal footing?<<
No, please don't put words in my mouth. i am not suggesting this. With great power, comes even greater responsibilities as the cliche goes. By all means, be the most wealthiest hyperpower in the world - just don't assume that you can go around trampling all the rights of peasants, farmers, and shepherds around the world, and expect the rest of us to applaud every move and cheer the US govt. on.
>>Alligator teared pious souls<<.
Rather rich, Old Lahori. i always think the same thing when i hear someone complaining in 2002 of how "evil" Saddam is for gassing the Kurds, when no one uttered a word of condemnation in 1988.
Answer me this...what were our relations vis-a-vis Iran to Iraq? Even if we knew, the US government never condoned it. Is there any speech by rummy or reagan saying good for you Saddam? Looking at singular points and trying to depict it as US policy is the mantra of US bashers. This is nothing new. The fact that the Soviet union was the greater evil of the time and the bi-polar world as the reality. Did Zia ever shake hands with Saddam? Did he know?
Nadia: How do you know no one uttered a word? Unlike the Iraqis and the plaestinians after 9/11, I didn't see celebrations in the streets of New York in 1988.
Malik, you’ll be interested to read Fisk’s latest piece:
Most important of all, we absolutely must forget that President Ronald Reagan dispatched a special envoy to meet Saddam Hussein in December 1983. It’s essential to forget this for three reasons. Firstly, because the awful Saddam was already using gas against the Iranians – which is one of the reasons we are now supposed to go to war with him.
Secondly, because the envoy was sent to Iraq to arrange the re-opening of the US embassy – in order to secure better trade and economic relations with the Butcher of Baghdad. Thirdly, because the envoy was – wait for it – Donald Rumsfeld. Now you might think it strange that Mr Rumsfeld, in the course of one of his folksy press conferences, hasn’t chatted to us about this interesting tit-bit. You might think he would have wished to enlighten us about the evil nature of the criminal with whom he so warmly shook hands. But no.
Strangely, Mr Rumsfeld is silent about this. As he is about his subsequent and equally friendly meeting with Tariq Aziz – which just happened to take place on the day in March, 1984, that the UN released its damning report on Saddam’s use of poison gas against Iran. The American media are silent about this too, of course. Because we must forget.
We must forget, too, that in 1988, as Saddam destroyed the people of Halabja with gas, along with tens of thousands of other Kurds – when he “used gas against his own people” in the words of Messrs Bush/Cheney/Blair/Cook/Straw et al –President Bush senior provided him with $500m in US government subsidies to buy American farm products. We must forget that in the following year, after Saddam’s genocide was complete, President Bush senior doubled this subsidy to $1bn, along with germ seed for anthrax, helicopters, and the notorious “dual-use” material that could be used for chemical and biological weapons.
Yes, and Rumsfeld was surely aware of that, because he admits in the CNN transcript I posted above that In that visit, I cautioned him about the use of chemical weapons, as a matter or fact, and discussed a host of other things..
Many leading American propenents of war, are having serious lapses of memory when it comes to the Iraqi situation. these days. First it was President Bush himself, who touted Winston Chrurchill as a model in his tirade against Saddam the gasser, but did not mention that his hero Churchill was a great exponent of gassing the same people that Saddam gassed.
Now we have Rumsfeld who also decries about Saddam the gasser, but failed to mention his quite cosy meetings with Saddam nearly 20 years ago, which he attended with full knowledge of Saddam using chemical weapons.
Indeed. In his second meeting with Saddam our belated man of principle, Rumsfeld was well aware of Saddam using chemical weapons against Iran (at least). The article I posted above states exactly what Fisk writes, namely that In March of 1984, with the Iran-Iraq war growing more brutal by the day, Rumsfeld was back in Baghdad for meetings with then-Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. On the day of his visit, March 24th, UPI reported from the United Nations: “Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers…
Not only did the likes of Bush Snr and Rumsfelf know that Saddam had gassed the Kurds at Halabja in 1988, they actively covered this fact up to carry on their business and military links with him. The article in the other thread states:-
***The Reagan Administration even sought to prevent congressional reaction to the the gassing of the Kurds, including the (failed) plea of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell that “we cannot be silent to genocide again” as the world was when Hitler exterminated Europe’s Jews.
So extreme was Reaganite support for their friend that when ABC TV correspondent Charles Glass revealed the site of one of Saddam’s biological warfare programs a few months after Halabja, Washington denied the facts, and the story died; the State Department “now issues briefings on the same site,” Glass writes (in England). There were no passionate calls for a military strike against this brutal killer and torturer. Quite the contrary: much of what was known, including US support, was downplayed or not reported.***
>>The Reagan Administration even sought to prevent congressional reaction to the the gassing of the Kurds, including the (failed) plea of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell that “we cannot be silent to genocide again” as the world was when Hitler exterminated Europe’s Jews.<<
And yet, ultimately, silence prevailed - how we alter history in our own minds. Many of us today sanctimoniously decry the “evilness” that lies in S. Hussein while simultaneously mentally erasing the fact that Rumsfeld enjoyed not one, but two, personal visits to the Butcher of Baghdad - the latter visit was paid by Rummy on the very day (as you noted) that media reported Iranian troops were exposed to mustard gas.
The odd report here and there managed to be published in the country with the world’s most free press, but nothing even remotely in comparison to 1991’s 24/7 coverage given to demonizing Iraq and Sad-damn Hussein, the ever-lingering skeleton in Rummy’s closet.
Rummy meeting Hussein, Cheney’s Haliburton doing business in Iraq, Bush’s mentor, Churchill, gladly using Iraqi Kurds as chemical guinea pigs, US exporting biological and chemical weapons to Iraq — is there never any end in sight to the hypocrisies?
Nothing too new here, i admit. Am posting this info again for the benefit of a few who still insist that, during the 1980s, the US was well and truly in the dark regarding Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. The Washington Post again. As article is long, just posting my selected excerpts.
…] Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an “almost daily” basis in defiance of international conventions.
The story of U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait - which included large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq’s acquisition of chemical and biological precursors - is a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy. It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators, all on the principle that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
…] on Nov. 1, 1983, a senior State Department official, Jonathan T. Howe, told Secretary of State George P. Shultz that intelligence reports showed that Iraqi troops were resorting to “almost daily use of CW” against the Iranians. But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating in several visits by the president’s recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East, Donald H. Rumsfeld.
…] As part of its opening to Baghdad, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department terrorism list in February 1982, despite heated objections from Congress. Without such a move, Teicher says, it would have been “impossible to take even the modest steps we were contemplating” to channel assistance to Baghdad. Iraq - along with Syria, Libya and South Yemen - was one of four original countries on the list, which was first drawn up in 1979.
**
Ronald Reagan signed a secret order instructing the administration to do “whatever was necessary and legal” to prevent Iraq losing the war.
In December Mr Rumsfeld, hired by President Reagan to serve as a Middle East troubleshooter, met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and passed on the US willingness to help his regime and restore full diplomatic relations.
Mr Rumsfeld has said that he “cautioned” the Iraqi leader against using banned weapons. But there was no mention of such a warning in state department notes of the meeting.
Howard Teicher, an Iraq specialist in the Reagan White House, testified in a 1995 affidavit that the then CIA director, William Casey, used a Chilean firm, Cardoen, to send cluster bombs to use against Iran’s “human wave” attacks.
A 1994 congressional inquiry also found that dozens of biological agents, including various strains of anthrax, had been shipped to Iraq by US companies, under licence from the commerce department.
Furthermore, in 1988, the Dow Chemical company sold $1.5m-worth (£930,000) of pesticides to Iraq despite suspicions they would be used for chemical warfare.
The only occasion that Iraq’s use of banned weapons seems to have worried the Reagan administration came in 1988, after Lt Col Francona toured the battlefield on the al-Faw peninsula in southern Iraq and reported signs of sarin gas. **
Whoa! I thought this stuff was supposed to stay classified
Although, it doesnt mention above but one can put 2 and 2 together and figure out that US govt or companies had a direct or indirect hand in Iraq alleggedly using the nerve gas - sarin.
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, scheerleaders for so-called preemptive action, are obviously disappointed that the Iraq inspections have turned up nothing more then the rusting remnants of a deadly weapons programs originated and used with the full knowledge of the U.S. government to punish fundamentalist Iran.
Rumsfelds links to his old freind Saddam have now been officially exposed in the US, suggesting that the US Adminstration knew about the chemical weapons in Iraq and continued to support the Saddam regime during and after their use against Iran.
**Documents newly released under the freedom of information act place Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad in 1984, personally assuring Saddam Hussein that the dictator’s use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, did not threaten U.S.-Iraqi ties. Rumsfeld was then President Reagan’s special Middle East envoy. **
The documents were obtained by the non-profit National Security Archive, and more documents may follow about the degree of U.S. concern over Iraq’s use of weapons of mass destruction when the weapons were used against Iran.
Guys whay are we even disucssing this? It does not make a difference if US was there to help him drop chemcial weapons on his own people. fact is Saddam choose a path of murder, tortue and destruction on his own. He is responsible for his actions and needs to be punished. Yes, US aided him, kept him in power against Iran war, but we need to realize that he could have taken different actions after the war and not drag his country and fellow men to destruction. Just my 2 cents.
Theres no doubt that Sadam is an evil tyrant and must be punished for his deeds, but what people must realise is that his actions at the time had the backing of the US Adminstration including the current secretary of state Rumsfeld.
Simply put, it is far more important for the anti-American/anti-Bushies to think they've won another round of "Gotcha America" than to hold a murderous torturer of men women and children to account or seeing the slightest bit of good in the fact that he's gone. Giving America a black eye has always been more important.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by storch: *
Simply put, it is far more important for the anti-American/anti-Bushies to think they've won another round of "Gotcha America" than to hold a murderous torturer of men women and children to account or seeing the slightest bit of good in the fact that he's gone. Giving America a black eye has always been more important.
[/QUOTE]
Yes Sadam was a murderous torturer who needs to be made accountable, but justice must be applied universally.. this should include anyone who supported or turned a blind eye to the gassing of the kurds and Iranians !!
