In response to Robert....
Yeah, uh, that was more rant-like than normal, I should elaborate.
I recall the Ritter interview where the inspectors concluded Iraq was free of WMDs (95% free?) I'm having trouble finding it. And I remember well the typical Z analysis: Iraq was devastated by years of harsh economic sanctions and could not afford to build weapons, also under tight scrutiny; the building of weapons claimed impossible. Of course, I don't know if I've seen a truly objective analysis of the war. Everyone seems to have their own agenda. I should probably take the Zinn/Chomsky/Solomon, etc articles on Znet with as much salt as I would an article from Fox News or something.
The point I was trying to get across was that there is a noticeable pattern in the media. The anti-war movement will denounce the claims of the administration responsible for the war and the mainstream media or whatever will denounce them as cooks. Then, something from the corporate media will come out and is now more "credible," but no one seems to care about it because they're all caught up in some new illusion proffered by an actor of another agenda. Indeed, it would be interesting to look at the evidence that led these people to this conclusion. And who knows what would have happened if the invastion didn't take place? You said that the 500 tons of yellow-cake was a "known quantity" and that efforts to process them into weapons of destruction "would have raised alarm bells". I'd have to agree. Any processing of that material would have been detected promptly and I'd bet money that there would have been more international cooperation in preventing something bad from happening.
Anyways, I think the more important thing is the logic that went into the conclusion. I believe in justice, so I believe in the whole "innocent until proven guilty" ordeal that seems to be losing popularity in our justice system. Most of the anti-war movement follows this logic. We were not offered credible evidence that there were WMDs and I think they're still having trouble finding it. In fact, I don't think the US has come through on any of the reasons that were given to legitimize the war. The WMD thing didn't go through. Democracy is pretty false. The first thing the appointed interim government did was declare marshall law and soon after, they reinstated capital punishment. The election likely won't take place until well after the latest date the UN requested. I believe the new rhetoric offered is political stability. Who knows where that's going? It's pure speculation from where I'm sitting in suburban Texas thousands of miles away from what's happening. As far as I can tell reading the news, the interim government is incapable of representing most of the population of Iraq with intense relations between different ethnic groups and will be incapable of resolving the turmoil right now. As long as so many distressed people are irritated by military occupation, government corruption, and are not understood by anyone in the West, I don't think any of the problems will go away. Hell, I'm so ignorant that I can barely tell what the problem is.
I'm not sure what you were trying to say in your response, but I'm pretty damn confused and angry, too. I wanna see what's going on, what really happened. Sorry about the lazy journalism, my resources are limited, I'm tired, confused, and I've got homework to do. In the meantime, I'd like to hear more from you. Thanks.
I recall the Ritter interview where the inspectors concluded Iraq was free of WMDs (95% free?) I'm having trouble finding it. And I remember well the typical Z analysis: Iraq was devastated by years of harsh economic sanctions and could not afford to build weapons, also under tight scrutiny; the building of weapons claimed impossible. Of course, I don't know if I've seen a truly objective analysis of the war. Everyone seems to have their own agenda. I should probably take the Zinn/Chomsky/Solomon, etc articles on Znet with as much salt as I would an article from Fox News or something.
The point I was trying to get across was that there is a noticeable pattern in the media. The anti-war movement will denounce the claims of the administration responsible for the war and the mainstream media or whatever will denounce them as cooks. Then, something from the corporate media will come out and is now more "credible," but no one seems to care about it because they're all caught up in some new illusion proffered by an actor of another agenda. Indeed, it would be interesting to look at the evidence that led these people to this conclusion. And who knows what would have happened if the invastion didn't take place? You said that the 500 tons of yellow-cake was a "known quantity" and that efforts to process them into weapons of destruction "would have raised alarm bells". I'd have to agree. Any processing of that material would have been detected promptly and I'd bet money that there would have been more international cooperation in preventing something bad from happening.
Anyways, I think the more important thing is the logic that went into the conclusion. I believe in justice, so I believe in the whole "innocent until proven guilty" ordeal that seems to be losing popularity in our justice system. Most of the anti-war movement follows this logic. We were not offered credible evidence that there were WMDs and I think they're still having trouble finding it. In fact, I don't think the US has come through on any of the reasons that were given to legitimize the war. The WMD thing didn't go through. Democracy is pretty false. The first thing the appointed interim government did was declare marshall law and soon after, they reinstated capital punishment. The election likely won't take place until well after the latest date the UN requested. I believe the new rhetoric offered is political stability. Who knows where that's going? It's pure speculation from where I'm sitting in suburban Texas thousands of miles away from what's happening. As far as I can tell reading the news, the interim government is incapable of representing most of the population of Iraq with intense relations between different ethnic groups and will be incapable of resolving the turmoil right now. As long as so many distressed people are irritated by military occupation, government corruption, and are not understood by anyone in the West, I don't think any of the problems will go away. Hell, I'm so ignorant that I can barely tell what the problem is.
I'm not sure what you were trying to say in your response, but I'm pretty damn confused and angry, too. I wanna see what's going on, what really happened. Sorry about the lazy journalism, my resources are limited, I'm tired, confused, and I've got homework to do. In the meantime, I'd like to hear more from you. Thanks.
posted by sdskyle at 7:17 PM
1 Comments:
Hussein was quite adept at dodging sanctions; he and his cronies made hundreds of millions of dollars from the "oil for food" program. How else was he able to build all those palaces? Hussein's palaces, by the way, were declared "off limits" to inspectors. Recall too that for a number of years, there were no inspectors in Iraq.
Like you suggest, one has to take the media with a grain of salt. It's good to read from a number of sources to get a fuller picture of what's going on.
I brought up the 500 tons of yellow-cake in response to Mr. Jafar's (the guy in the BBC article) claim that Iraq wouldn't need to buy uranium from Niger since it already has 500 tons of it. But as I mentioned, that's not really a reason for not acquiring by secret means more of it. If Iraq had plans for a nuclear weapons program, it would obviously seek to acquire uranium surreptitiously--not use the stuff it already had because it (the 500 tons of yellow-cake) was catalogued and monitored. Many intelligence agencies reported that Iraqis were in Niger, a country w
The "innocent until proven guilty" was not a standard the U.N. chose to impose on Iraq. Recall that it was Iraq's responsibility to prove that it did not have any WMD since in the past it did. Iraq claimed it disposed of its WMDs, but offered insufficient proof and failed to cooperate with weapons inspectors. Still, the chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, felt he could get to the bottom of the question if given sufficient time. War supporters did not think giving weapons inspectors more time would achieve anything. In retrospect, they were wrong.
Iraq is a huge mess right now. Still, I hope that a stable democracy can eventually grow there. The benefits for the region and the world would be immense. I'm not holding my breath, however.
p.s. Perhaps you could write a post about what anarchism means to you. Nominally, it means "the absence of political authority."
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