Tim's Favorite Blogs
Media Matters
Blog Directories
Wednesday, January 3. 2007
The Saddam Hypocrisy
Welcome to 2007!
Saddam is dead, gone in one last moment of defiance. The death penalty is an abomination, solves nothing and really just illustrates how those performing the execution are barbarians. Tragically, most Americans like being barbarians. But that’s another topic.
Saddam’s death will solve nothing of course. Violence won’t magically cease in Iraq, it will probably escalate. Over 3,000 American service men and women have died since Bush started his war in March of 2003. That’s almost four years ago –
Remember when Don Rumsfeld, then the Secretary of Defense, said this war wouldn’t last more than five months?
“I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won’t last any longer than that.” From an interview on Infinity Broadcasting in November, 2002.
Saddam Hussein, put to death by Shiites who mocked him as he walked to the gallows, hangmen who shouted the name “Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!” after Hussein offered up a prayer to Allah. That’s when Hussein got defiant once again. “Down with the traitors, the Americans, the spies and the Persians.”
Once again Saddam Hussein won out over his foes — including the United States — by being the more dignified, the more statesman-like figure in that public lynching. We have — President Bush has — allied the U.S. to the Shia-controlled government that made this happen, an act which every civilized culture has called deplorable, including our one ally in Bush’s war in Iraq, Britain.
Some of my fellow Americans will applaud, not just Hussein’s hanging, but the humiliation that preceded it, as if there’s some sort of justice in mocking someone you are about to kill. Sick … truly sick.
If you read the reader response pages of all the major Internet sites — New York Times, Washington Post, etc — close to 75% refer to Saddam’s execution as an American act, despite the news of how Hussein was tried in an Iraqi court by Iraqis and sentenced by an Iraqi judicial panel. That’s pretty significant, but it’s been no secret the U.S. government was looking for a conviction and a sentence of death, so much so that people have the impression everything about the Hussein trial and sentence was orchestrated by the United States. And there is a certain amount of truth to that belief.
We didn’t get the clean water running, couldn’t repair the electrical grid or any other part of the Iraqi infrastructure, but we made sure Iraq had a judicial system — long before the Iraqis voted on a government — so “they” could try Hussein and then execute him. The Bush administration went so far as to call the killing of Hussein a “milestone,” one President Bush will no doubt use when he trots out his “new strategery” for Iraq: More troops.
Not more troops for training the Iraqis — we’ve been training the Iraqis for two years now and it’s quite evident they won’t stand up. No, more troops for the security of Baghdad, despite the fact that when we put more troops into securing that city last summer, the violence just escalated.
Everyone — including the generals on the ground — have said in Congressional committee hearings and elsewhere, adding more troops to Iraq was not only not the right answer, it would exacerbate the situation and would only increase the number of American troops killed in action.
And of course General Casey, the HMFiC in Iraq, will be the scapegoat for the failures in Iraq because, unlike several of his colleagues, General Casey refused to reverse his opinion on adding troops to Iraq when it became clear adding troops would be the “new” Bush doctrine.
But before I go rambling off about the president’s war and his stupid — no, arrogant — “new” direction –
Key White House advisors have admitted the president’s “new” strategy is for political reasons: he doesn’t want to go down in history as a president who lost a war –
There’s something that really bothers me about this debacle with Saddam Hussein. Pundits and politicians who have been behind this war, Democrats and Republicans alike, have consistently used the phrase “he attacked his neighbors” as one of the reasons for taking Hussein out. One of those neighbors was Iran, which Hussein attacked in 1980, right after the Shah was deposed and replaced by the fanatical religious regime that now controls Iran.
The crime for which Hussein was executed took place in 1982, the same year our government, headed by President Ronald Reagan, began negotiations to ally the U.S. with Hussein’s Iraq. Hussein’s brutality wasn’t unknown to anyone. In 1979, when Hussein rose to power, he recorded for prosperity, one of his first acts as Iraq’s new dictator; he video-taped the executions of his political foes, hundreds of them, real or imagined.
The United Nations and several NGO’s warned the Reagan Administration about Hussein before he became our ally, but on December 20, 1983, Donald Rumsfeld was in Baghdad shaking hands with the Iraqi dictator.
What does that say about the United States? “We” knowingly allied ourselves with a brutal tyrant for the only reason that he started a war against one of our enemies, Iran, an act for which he is now roundly condemned in this country. “We” gave him the American flag, for Christ’s sake, to fly on his oil tankers as cover so that we could justify attacking Iran if that country fired on a ship under our flag.
We did enter that war, on the side of Hussein, firing 16-inch shells from our war ships into Iranian shore installations. That our special envoy to Hussein was none other than Donald Rumsfeld, the man who would one day help design a war to topple Saddam Hussein and throw Iraq into civil war is the ultimate in hypocrisy.
While we were happy allies of Saddam Hussein, he used chemical weapons against the Iranians as well as his fellow Iraqis, Kurds and Shia. We gave him more than tacit approval, we participated in his crimes because as allies, we gave him overt approval.
When the news broke about the use of chemical weapons, did our nation’s leaders — Ronald Reagan and his administration, which included then Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush — break our ties to Hussein? Did they even publicly condemn Saddam Hussein? The answer is no, President Reagan was strangely silent.
It’s too bad Reagan isn’t alive to stand trial, as Saddam Hussein did, for his crimes in relation to the atrocities committed by Hussein and his agents. When his state funeral took place, all the pundits were out in force, praising Ronnie for everything from a great economy — his policies ran up the largest U.S. budget deficit in our nation’s history to that point — to “winning” the Cold War, as if the previous seven presidents sat on their hands doing nothing for the 36 years before Reagan was sworn in as president.
Reagan’s term can be best described as one that made the United States a bellicose bully that started a protracted assault on this nation’s middle class. Labor was spit on in favor of higher corporate profits and upper management salaries; jobs were made easier to export over seas, or in Reagan’s case, to Mexico’s Maquiladoras, all in the name of larger CEO paycheques.
In response to the cheap — almost slave — labor our nation’s workers face as competition, Reagan and his followers tell U.S. workers they will have to work for less, live on less, lower their standard of living.
But that’s a different topic altogether. This is about the Saddam Hypocrisy.
When will those from Reagan’s foreign policy team, who are still alive, stand trial for their complicity in the acts of barbarism perpetrated by Saddam Hussein? Sadly, that will never happen. In this country we collectively choose to remain ignorant when our own leaders are guilty of war crimes. Instead, we hold them up as “heroes” for acts they never performed, like winning the Cold War (The Soviet system collapsed under its own ponderous weight, a victim of its own excesses).
To say U.S. foreign policy is built on hypocrisy would be understating the condition. This current war, which has now cost the U.S. 3003 U.S. service men and women, was started on two lies: a supposed connection to the terrorists responsible for that attacks of 9/11 and the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
This current president lied to get it started, to remove from power a former ally, and in the process used as fodder for his condemnation of Saddam Hussein, the act of invading his neighbor, Iran, an act for which we made Hussein our ally. I can’t be the only one who sees the hypocrisy and the lie, the conscious falsehood, of this president, and his father, Bush 41 and yes, President Clinton who failed to correct the record during his administration.
To his credit, Clinton didn’t start this obscene war when strongly urged by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Kristol and the rest of the PNAC crowd in 1998. But Clinton failed to atone for the hypocrisy of a previous (and the current) administration which used as ammunition for public repudiation, the very acts for which we, represented by President Reagan, made Saddam Hussein an ally.
What lessons do other Third World nations take from this spectacle? Don’t ally yourself with the United States. You could end up like Saddam, publicly humiliated and hanging from a gallows pole.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/11/14/rumsfeld.iraq/
Saddam Hussein moments before “we” killed him.
Saddam’s death will solve nothing of course. Violence won’t magically cease in Iraq, it will probably escalate. Over 3,000 American service men and women have died since Bush started his war in March of 2003. That’s almost four years ago –
Remember when Don Rumsfeld, then the Secretary of Defense, said this war wouldn’t last more than five months?
“I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won’t last any longer than that.” From an interview on Infinity Broadcasting in November, 2002.
Saddam Hussein, put to death by Shiites who mocked him as he walked to the gallows, hangmen who shouted the name “Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!” after Hussein offered up a prayer to Allah. That’s when Hussein got defiant once again. “Down with the traitors, the Americans, the spies and the Persians.”
Once again Saddam Hussein won out over his foes — including the United States — by being the more dignified, the more statesman-like figure in that public lynching. We have — President Bush has — allied the U.S. to the Shia-controlled government that made this happen, an act which every civilized culture has called deplorable, including our one ally in Bush’s war in Iraq, Britain.
Some of my fellow Americans will applaud, not just Hussein’s hanging, but the humiliation that preceded it, as if there’s some sort of justice in mocking someone you are about to kill. Sick … truly sick.
If you read the reader response pages of all the major Internet sites — New York Times, Washington Post, etc — close to 75% refer to Saddam’s execution as an American act, despite the news of how Hussein was tried in an Iraqi court by Iraqis and sentenced by an Iraqi judicial panel. That’s pretty significant, but it’s been no secret the U.S. government was looking for a conviction and a sentence of death, so much so that people have the impression everything about the Hussein trial and sentence was orchestrated by the United States. And there is a certain amount of truth to that belief.
We didn’t get the clean water running, couldn’t repair the electrical grid or any other part of the Iraqi infrastructure, but we made sure Iraq had a judicial system — long before the Iraqis voted on a government — so “they” could try Hussein and then execute him. The Bush administration went so far as to call the killing of Hussein a “milestone,” one President Bush will no doubt use when he trots out his “new strategery” for Iraq: More troops.
Not more troops for training the Iraqis — we’ve been training the Iraqis for two years now and it’s quite evident they won’t stand up. No, more troops for the security of Baghdad, despite the fact that when we put more troops into securing that city last summer, the violence just escalated.
Everyone — including the generals on the ground — have said in Congressional committee hearings and elsewhere, adding more troops to Iraq was not only not the right answer, it would exacerbate the situation and would only increase the number of American troops killed in action.
And of course General Casey, the HMFiC in Iraq, will be the scapegoat for the failures in Iraq because, unlike several of his colleagues, General Casey refused to reverse his opinion on adding troops to Iraq when it became clear adding troops would be the “new” Bush doctrine.
But before I go rambling off about the president’s war and his stupid — no, arrogant — “new” direction –
Key White House advisors have admitted the president’s “new” strategy is for political reasons: he doesn’t want to go down in history as a president who lost a war –
There’s something that really bothers me about this debacle with Saddam Hussein. Pundits and politicians who have been behind this war, Democrats and Republicans alike, have consistently used the phrase “he attacked his neighbors” as one of the reasons for taking Hussein out. One of those neighbors was Iran, which Hussein attacked in 1980, right after the Shah was deposed and replaced by the fanatical religious regime that now controls Iran.
Special Envoy Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands
with Saddam Hussein. The picture of hypocrisy.
with Saddam Hussein. The picture of hypocrisy.
The United Nations and several NGO’s warned the Reagan Administration about Hussein before he became our ally, but on December 20, 1983, Donald Rumsfeld was in Baghdad shaking hands with the Iraqi dictator.
What does that say about the United States? “We” knowingly allied ourselves with a brutal tyrant for the only reason that he started a war against one of our enemies, Iran, an act for which he is now roundly condemned in this country. “We” gave him the American flag, for Christ’s sake, to fly on his oil tankers as cover so that we could justify attacking Iran if that country fired on a ship under our flag.
We did enter that war, on the side of Hussein, firing 16-inch shells from our war ships into Iranian shore installations. That our special envoy to Hussein was none other than Donald Rumsfeld, the man who would one day help design a war to topple Saddam Hussein and throw Iraq into civil war is the ultimate in hypocrisy.
While we were happy allies of Saddam Hussein, he used chemical weapons against the Iranians as well as his fellow Iraqis, Kurds and Shia. We gave him more than tacit approval, we participated in his crimes because as allies, we gave him overt approval.
When the news broke about the use of chemical weapons, did our nation’s leaders — Ronald Reagan and his administration, which included then Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush — break our ties to Hussein? Did they even publicly condemn Saddam Hussein? The answer is no, President Reagan was strangely silent.
Presidents Reagan and Bush. War criminals?
Reagan’s term can be best described as one that made the United States a bellicose bully that started a protracted assault on this nation’s middle class. Labor was spit on in favor of higher corporate profits and upper management salaries; jobs were made easier to export over seas, or in Reagan’s case, to Mexico’s Maquiladoras, all in the name of larger CEO paycheques.
In response to the cheap — almost slave — labor our nation’s workers face as competition, Reagan and his followers tell U.S. workers they will have to work for less, live on less, lower their standard of living.
But that’s a different topic altogether. This is about the Saddam Hypocrisy.
When will those from Reagan’s foreign policy team, who are still alive, stand trial for their complicity in the acts of barbarism perpetrated by Saddam Hussein? Sadly, that will never happen. In this country we collectively choose to remain ignorant when our own leaders are guilty of war crimes. Instead, we hold them up as “heroes” for acts they never performed, like winning the Cold War (The Soviet system collapsed under its own ponderous weight, a victim of its own excesses).
To say U.S. foreign policy is built on hypocrisy would be understating the condition. This current war, which has now cost the U.S. 3003 U.S. service men and women, was started on two lies: a supposed connection to the terrorists responsible for that attacks of 9/11 and the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
This current president lied to get it started, to remove from power a former ally, and in the process used as fodder for his condemnation of Saddam Hussein, the act of invading his neighbor, Iran, an act for which we made Hussein our ally. I can’t be the only one who sees the hypocrisy and the lie, the conscious falsehood, of this president, and his father, Bush 41 and yes, President Clinton who failed to correct the record during his administration.
To his credit, Clinton didn’t start this obscene war when strongly urged by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Kristol and the rest of the PNAC crowd in 1998. But Clinton failed to atone for the hypocrisy of a previous (and the current) administration which used as ammunition for public repudiation, the very acts for which we, represented by President Reagan, made Saddam Hussein an ally.
What lessons do other Third World nations take from this spectacle? Don’t ally yourself with the United States. You could end up like Saddam, publicly humiliated and hanging from a gallows pole.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/11/14/rumsfeld.iraq/
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Calendar
|
February '12 |
|
||||
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | ||||
Quicksearch
Categories
AD Links
Referrals
Syndicate This Blog
Blog Administration
Powered by
TheForkesReport