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Originally posted by Webby
Ah... sorry.. I never realised these were all mistakes! Gimme a break! Was US foreign policy just a series of mistakes next?
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Nice try at putting words in my mouth. I never said US foreign policy was just a series of mistakes. YOU implied that the US had made mistakes in the region. Its interesting that you evade the question and attempt to put the worst possible spin on it.
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Originally posted by Webby The US has NO credibility to act in any capacity with honor regarding Iraq (or many other places!) - tis a fucking disgrace and blot on the landscape on this planet.
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Lets here some reasons for this. In your own words. Don't go copy and pasting other people's opinions. Lets see if you can formulate a logical reasonable argument. So far all I've seen from you are non-sensical insults and copy-paste jobs.
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Originally posted by Webby
Quick summary if ya got a retention span to absorb....
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Nice jab, pity you feel threatened enough to have to resort to that. I read the original article when it was posted earlier. Did you?
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Originally posted by Webby
"In Iraq, the US record speaks for itself:
it backed Saddam's party, the Ba'ath, to capture power in 1963, murdering thousands of socialists, communists and democrats of all shades.
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What was the alternative? Sure it sounds horrendous now, but is that statement the whole story of Iraq in 1963? Of course not. How did the US back Saddam? Any evidence of this? I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I'm not aware that it did.
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Originally posted by Webby
It backed the Ba'ath party in 1968 when Saddam was installed as vice-president.
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The US supported Stalin too. I suppose Roosevelt is to blame for the Gulag. What form did this support for the Ba'ath party take?
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Originally posted by Webby
It helped him and the Shah of Iran in 1975 to crush the Kurdish nationalist movement.
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Stability is generally preferrable to turmoil. Any emerging Kurdish state would have had designs on part of Turkey as well. With Turkey being a member of NATO, things could have gotten very bloody had they been allowed to progress.
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Originally posted by Webby It increased its support for Saddam in 1979, the year he elevated himself to president, helping him launch his war of aggression against Iran in 1980. it backed him throughout the horrific eight years of war (1980 to 1988), in which a million Iranians and Iraqis were slaughtered, in the full knowledge that he was using chemical weapons and gassing Kurds and Marsh Arabs
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The enemy of our enemy is our friend. You seem to forget that during the Iran was a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism. This was the era of jihad's, islamic terrorism (sponsored by Iran). Iraq's use of chemical weapons was hardly sanctioned. It was widely condemned at the time.
Also, I wish you anti-war people would get your arguments straight on the chemical weapons situation. Was it Saddam who gassed the Kurds or was it Iran? You can't have it both ways.
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Originally posted by Webby it encouraged him in 1990 to invade Kuwait when the Arabic-speaking US ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, told him on July 25 1990 that the US had "no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts" when she knew that Saddam's forces were only one week away from invading
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A very misleading statement. The "no opinion" was in relation to Iraq's border dispute with Kuwait not on the invasion, occupation and plundering of Kuwait.
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Originally posted by Webby it backed him in 1991 when Bush suddenly stopped the war, exactly 24 hours after the start of the great March uprising that engulfed the south and Iraqi Kurdistan (US aircraft were flying over the scenes of mass killing as Iraqi helicopter gunships were aiding Saddam's forces crush the uprising)
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The war stopped after Iraq was expelled from Kuwait and it agreed to disarm. The US bowed to world opinion NOT to take out Saddam. I will agree with professor Ramadani, here in that it is regrettable that the uprisings in the north and south were not supported.
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Originally posted by Webby and it backed him as the "lesser evil" from March 1991 to September 11 2001 under the umbrella of murderous sanctions and the policy of "containment". - Sami Ramadani is an Iraqi political exile and a senior lecturer in sociology at London Metropolitan University.
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I don't follow how sanctions and containment can be perverted into "backing"? Seems a bit like the author is trying to pin the blame for everything wrong with Iraq on the US, which coincidentally seems to be what you, Webby, are doing.