Hard News: The Solipsistic Left
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Neil, two words: Kuwait, Turkey
Ridley,
There you go, the liberal left, so full of hatred for bland starchy meals that you are willing to defend perpetrators of nose-searing artificially green food over freedom, human rights and Decency. Shame on you.
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Terence, 80 words, I'm not an expert on how the US military logistics in the Gulf works and what is and what is not possible, but given the fact that the US troops were out of Saudi Arabia the minute Saddam was gone suggests to me that they didn't have many alternatives and getting those troops out was very high on their list of priorities.
The BBC article is a good account. The account of Clinton and his officials in the PBS article is also I think an accurate indication t of US thinking on this.
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The cous cous made me do it, that and a deep seated hatred of Freedom Fries.
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Neil,
Saudi Arabia was not necessary to conduct the no fly zones (which in themselves were voluntary on the part of the US & UK and did the southern Iraqis little good in 91-92, or thereafter, as we know) modern aircraft being what they are. Much of the southern no fly was conducted from elsewhere, including carriers and other gulf states, although clearly the SA bases were extensively utilised (and indeed Southern Watch was for a while headquartered there). Some of it was conducted from as far away as Diego Garcia. Whatever you think of the NFZs, proximity was not a requirement.As to the Iraqi threat, the evidence, independently verified, simply says otherwise.
Also, Norman Schwarzkopf::
recalls the prevailing mood in his autobiography, It Doesn't Take a Hero. He quotes General Colin Powell's remark to him: "I think we could go to war if they invaded Saudi Arabia. I doubt if we would go to war over Kuwait."
http://foi.missouri.edu/polinfoprop/nocasusbelli.html
The US presence in SA actually caused the country a bit of grief rather than the other way around. The Scuds fired into that country were, almost without exception, aimed at coalition targets and the Patriot batteries were afterwards largely deemed a failure in intercepting these.
http://www.cdi.org/issues/bmd/Patriot.htmlI don't deny that the US forces were there over the next decade to keep the pressure on Iraq but the notion that they were there to defend Saudi Arabia is unsupportable.
I would look more at the Bandar relationship with the US administrations, and at the arrogance of the Saudi ruling elite towards it's people as to whether they were concerned with the public popularity of the stationing.
As we now know, that arrogance bit back.
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I'm not an expert on how the US military logistics in the Gulf works and what is and what is not possible, but given the fact that the US troops were out of Saudi Arabia the minute Saddam was gone suggests to me that they didn't have many alternatives and getting those troops out was very high on their list of priorities.
Two things...18 Saudi hijackers on 9/11.
And post 3/03 the US had the option to build vastly bigger permanent bases with no oversight and no host to answer to... -
I don't deny that the US forces were there over the next decade to keep the pressure on Iraq
I can accept that, but maybe you changed your mind in the later post.
My initial point was that there were difficulties with the US and British containment of Saddam. One major one, a major source of propaganda for bin Laden, were the US troops in Saudi Arabia necessary to keep the pressure on Saddam.
The PBS account from 1996, during the Clinton years, as well as most things I've read, indicate that while Saddam was still around the US had little option other than to have troops in Saudi Arabia. That was one of the prices that was being paid for Saddam's containment.
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there is nothing more cruel nor inhumane than meat and 3 veg. britain's vicious legacy to the civilized world
and one dish to rule them........
why have 3 veg when you can have them all!
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you can have them all
well that would run the risk of creating something palatable.
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Pressure cookers usually solve that problem
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Neil
My initial point was that there were difficulties with the US and British containment of Saddam.
No, I disgree completely. Quite the opposite. Any military analyst (of which I'm little more than an interested amateur) would tell you that Saddam was absolutely contained by the end of 1991. He had no viable military force, no way to acquire one, and was no reasonable threat to anyone beyond his borders, and there was no evidence he was about to become one. Defectors in 95 indicated repeatedly, and independently of each other, that he had no weapons programs, and these was little to indicate after that that he had begun any. This was still true in 2003.
The no fly zone missions were largely bombing dirt, and the people on that dirt, over and over again after 1991. The pressure I mentioned had nothing to do with any imminent threat, it was more strategic than that, and had to do with bases on the mainland of the gulf region and power projection.. Once Saddam was gone they could be expanded and moved.
The PBS post is interesting in that it talks to that grander strategic design, but little else..the threat, so often referred to over the years, lacks, as always, any real detail and doesn't bear much scrutiny. Certainly there is nothing in that piece.
The concept that the US & The UK invaded Iraq because they were essentially bored with containing Saddam is a new one to me, but you will recall that in February 2003 the Iraqis offered the UN full unfettered and unsupervised access to the whole of Iraq without limit, including Saddam's palaces, but this was dismissed out of hand by the UK & the US. That to me speaks more to the intent of the coalition than the the idea that they had nowhere else to go beyond invasion.
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Simon,
I read once that the only part of fundamental that Indonesian Muslims want is the first 3 letters, fun. They are not very receptive to the fundamentalist message, which is something for which to be thankful, I hope this approach to Islam would somehow spread to the Middle East.I wonder if you and your wife would feel so safe and secure in Afghanistan when the Taliban ran the show? How would your wife feel about being beaten with a stick if she had an ankle showing? How about Saudi Arabia, would you wife like having to be covered and accompanied by a male relative whenever she stepped out of the house and not being able to drive a car because she was a woman? Would she like Kashmir where Islamists have thrown battery acid into the faces of women who are in public without being “covered”? What about the stoning to death of women who have been convicted of “adultery”, which is frequently rape? However, as a woman‘s word automatically counts for less than a man’s in Islam and Sharia law, the man’s version of events is assumed to be correct, by law.
What did you think of the Australian cleric who recently said that women who are in public without being covered are like a piece of meat left in the street? Implying that of course a cat or dog is going to eat the meat if it is left in the street, i.e. that women who don’t wear a veil are asking to be raped.
What about the death threats and what have you over a few harmless cartoons?
What about Theo Van Gough who was murdered because he made a movie about the miserable plight of women in Islam?
I could go on and on, I haven’t covered honor killings, homicide bombers and Palestinian mother’s exhorting their children to become homicide bombers and other fun stuff yet, but I think you should get the point.
What is the common factor running through all of these horrendous and barbaric situations? Islam. To say that there isn’t some kind of issue within Islam and parts of the Islamic world that needs to change somehow, is to deny what is starring all of us right in the face. How many Hindu, Buddhist or Christian suicide bombers have there been over time? Not too many.
Unfortunately in this politically correct world we live in today, to be frank and honest is to risk being called a racist or bigot or whatever other pejorative is the favorite of the day, which greatly hinders progress. How can you do anything about a problem, if political correctness prevents you from being able to speak about it?
Of course it is very cool and chic to insult Christians, the most “clever and sophisticated” do it all day long, but then they won’t threaten to cut your heads off, will they? And of course Christians are just as bad as Islamists; I mean to say, you just can’t tell the difference can you!!
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How many Hindu, Buddhist or Christian suicide bombers have there been over time? Not too many
heard of the tamil tigers?
what about the kamikaze?
now, the IRA weren't suicide bombers, but they terrorised britain for decades.
james, if you are ever called a bigot, it is because your language encourages people to do so.
otherwise, all the bits of information you've strung together in the pretence of an argument are just that, "bits of information". it is neither a compelling narrative of islamic extremism, or a realistic one. you are cherry picking googled information to justify your neocon distaste for islam.
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James:
http://www.godhatesamerica.com/index.html
Fifteen minutes looking thru a history of Christendom might help you too.
Che says the rest rather well, although he forgot Christian militias running murderously through Palestinian camps at the instigation of a Jewish military.
Now that the British government has accepted the methology of the Johns Hopkins research, and by extension thus, its result...remind me how many hundreds of thousands of Muslim souls were taken by the forces of a nation, whose money includes the phrase "In God We Trust", pursuant to that research
The United States has, statistically, some of the worst person on person violence in the world, west, east, third or first, although I believe largely Christian South Africa leads in violence towards woman, and murder, in which Catholic Brazil follows.
Hypocrisy, James...
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I'll also let you read through these without comment James:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/07/women_in_military/
http://www.alternet.org/story/38942/
http://hometown.aol.com/milesfdn/myhomepage/
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/08/1443232#transcript -
James, I recall you mentioning no one being hurt in Abu Ghraib. Did you ever address the criticism of that statement? Or doesn't it suit your 'frank and honest' stance? Would it make any difference if the perpetrators were Muslim?
You're flat wrong, and failure to acknowledge that begins to make it seem deliberate. Deliberate falsehood?
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3410,
Unfortunately in this politically correct world we live in today, to be frank and honest is to risk being called a racist or bigot or whatever other pejorative is the favorite of the day, which greatly hinders progress. How can you do anything about a problem, if political correctness prevents you from being able to speak about it?
James, you've been banging on about Islam on this thread for days, yet who's preventing you from speaking?
Free speech means that you can say that my opinions seem to be prejudiced and not-very-well-informed rhetoric displaying a tenuous grasp on logic, and that I can say the same about yours, which I do.
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big ups 3410. i guess it's not free speech if nasty politically correct lefties question your assertions?
this politically correct world we live in today
i love that one, that's the world where good old boys can't even honestly call a human being a nigger or faggot or chink or retard. by politically correct, are you sure you don't mean 'world where people are expected to accord at least some courtesey and respect to one another'?
oh of course you don't! you mean 'a world where that nasty nanny state keeps interfering with our lives', a world like the one being cast by George W's neocons - where his wonderful libertarian non-interfering state just sends its underclass off to kill and be killed in wars to make rich people richer. oh, and passes the most draconian laws to spy on and detain its own people that modern world has ever seen. now that's politically incorrect.
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that's the world where good old boys can't even honestly call a human being a nigger or faggot or chink or retard.
That'd be the politically correct, hairy-armpitted world we live in today.
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otherwise, all the bits of information you've strung together in the pretence of an argument are just that, "bits of information". it is neither a compelling narrative of islamic extremism, or a realistic one. you are cherry picking googled information to justify your neocon distaste for islam.
I gotta say I'm with James for once. It seems obvious to anyone who's paying attention that there's something horribly wrong with Islam - even more so that there is with Christianity. Adherants to other faiths do commit crazy, evil acts but not with the sickening regularity that Islamic fundamentalists do. Che's argument that the recent history of Islamic terrorism is 'just bits of information'' is pretty banal sophistry. If someone tried to prove John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer by listing his victims would you dismiss the argument by pointing out that the names of the dead were 'just bits of information'?
Russell's original thesis for this thread was that 'the left' are not apologists for Islamic fundamentalism. It seems to me that many of the posters here have gone some way towards disproving that.
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Yes, there's that Cohen chap too who was sort of saying the same about the left.
I don't necessarily buy that neocons and their ilk have a distaste for Islam as such either. Why would they? Islam is illiberal and misogynist to the core. If it kept to itself without threatening various empire building efforts around the globe, said neocons wouldn't have anything bad to say about it.
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danyl, i'm sticking to my guns on this one. what james has listed is a bunch of things he thinks indicate that islam is the problem. i'm stating that he hasn't considered the issue, he's heard some neocon talking points, and is verifying them with media reports.
so. let's ask a critical question. when did we start talking about "islamic terrorism" and "the fundamental issue with islam" as the issue in world politics?
it was after 2001.
some variants of islam are illiberal and are aggressive. but to tar and entire world religion as some kind of fundamental threat to humanity is simply insane.
i'm not apologising for any terrorists or extremists. i'm just not buying any propaganda posed by hawks actively shifting blame from their own stupidity.
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WH,
There is a middle ground here. You don't have to be an apologist for either Islamic fundamentalism or Western injustice - unless you choose to be. In opposing one, we need not accept the other.
He said she also underwent stringent psychological evaluations, a step not usually required during the investigations.
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"but to tar an entire world religion as some kind of fundamental threat to humanity is simply insane."
Couple of things here: why is it insane to tar an "entire world religion" as a threat to humanity? I don't think anyone's said Islam is a threat to all of humanity but it's arguably a threat to parts of it though - like Jews, gays, atheists, what few pagans there are left, women and each other. Oh, and the dhimmi as well.
Second, if the illiberal and aggressive "variants" of Islam are Sunni and Shi'a, as witnessed by recent monstrosities around the world, which ones are the liberal and peaceful ones? The Ibadiyah or the Kharijtes?
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"if the illiberal and aggressive "variants" of Islam are Sunni and Shi'a,"
They aren't. That's kind of like saying that the illiberal and aggressive variants of Christianity are Catholicism and Protestantism. ObWikiLink
My fundamental issue is that by charging all these evils to Islam the world religion, rather than the minorities within Islam who actually deserve it, you turn every Muslim into your potential enemy. This is neither just nor smart. And paradoxically, it is just what people like Osama Ben Laden would like you to do. I think that is the insanity Che is referring to.
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you turn every Muslim into your potential enemy. This is neither just nor smart. And paradoxically, it is just what people like Osama Ben Laden would like you to do. I think that is the insanity Che is referring to.
that's exactly it. islam has a lot of flaws, none of which are exclusive to islam. so while a clear thinker like juha might be able to distinguish between the big fuzzy concept of 'da muzlims' and violent activitists within the culture, there's plenty of ordinary people who can't.
msm commentators who conflate the two are doing a grave disservice to all of us, because they are fueling a civilisational conflict and playing into the hands of the extremists.
thus far, "the osama's wish list".
1. usa out of saudi? check.
2. secular regime in iraq overturned? check.
3. usa bogged down and bankrupting self in war in afghanistan? iraq you say? close enough... check.
4. civilisational conflict that will galvanise the ummah islam? soon, very soon.
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