Iraq? Why not now?

1) Why is the Bush administration so angry and surprised over the intractability of the United Nations – especially when Vice President Cheney last summer warned that inspections were a total "sham"? Why are they upset over the very 'slow as molasses' process they agreed to?

2) Why is using the U.N. and the art of 'diplomacy' acceptable when it comes to North Korea's nuclear program and intercontinental missiles but unacceptable for dealing with Iraq?

3) Why does G.W. Bush believe Russian President Vladimir Putin – now on the record calling for more inspections in Iraq – has a 'soul' and is still a friend of the U.S. yet bitterly condemns German Chancellor Schroeder and French President Chirac, who echo the same position on more inspections?

4) Why – after 9/11 and the unanimous world opinion in favor of American retaliation – did we not go after Iraq then?

5) Why is Iraq more of a threat today than 17 months ago? What has changed to suddenly make Iraq more of a threat than it was right after the 9/11 attacks?

6) Why do we not use 'surgical strikes' – now – with our satellite-guided bombs to neutralize each and every Iraqi military site, warehouse suspected of holding weapons of mass destruction (WMD), weapons factories and underground bunkers? If the threat to us is so grave, why not neutralize that threat right away?

7) Why not 'take out' the al-Qaeda training site – now – in northeast Iraq as we did all the training camps inside Afghanistan?

8) Why – 12 years ago – did then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell immediately declare downed Navy pilot Michael Scott Speicher dead – even before any investigation had been done?

9) Why – in the ramp-up to this Iraqi conflict – did the Bush-Cheney-Powell team suddenly re-classify Speicher as a potential POW?

10)Why do we dangle 'safe exile' to Saddam and his henchmen – including keeping their ill-gotten plunder of Iraqi oil funds – when we have accused them of 'crimes against humanity' punishable by the World Court in The Hague?

11) Why is Saddam any different from Slobodan Milosevic or the other butchers now on trial for their lives there?

O.k., I've done that; I've read your home page. Now what am I supposed to do with all that? Is that supposed to convince me of the moral and ethical basis to attack Iraq? There's no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein is a monster. I knew that before becoming privvy to the succulent details you promote there. There's no doubt in my mind that something needs to be done about him now and not later and certainly not in the vein of Neveille Chamberlain. But I always knew that, that's not my point.

Saddam being the monster he is, is only because of the complicity of the U.S. government and those that supplied aid, knowledge, technology and the werewithall to make him into a monster. Why do you really think France is so strongly opposed to a regime change in Iraq? Because Iraq owes France lots of money. LOTS of money. Moreover, the U.S. propped the clown up and ensured he'd consolidate his stranglehold onto his countrymen. Now its conveniant for the U.S. to knock him down. Just as it was conveniant for the U.S. to knock down Afghanistan when the time came. How many times has the United States propped up tin-pot dictators when convienent, only to tear them down again when convienient. What's amazing is how they are lauded when we are building them up, but so demonized when it suits to tear them down. Same guys, diffent pictures.

Why did we support Saddam Hussein? Because he was engaged in a war with Iran. Well, why were we interested in that? Well, because the Shah of Iran, about as good a guy as Saddam Hussein, had died and control of the country was taken by those the Shah had oppressed. When in the history of the world have the oppressors remained meek when their oppressor become weak?

My issue isn't with Saddam being a monster, although I'll now concede that its pretty much a foregone conclusion. So am I supposed to bleat with the rest of the sheep LET'S GO GET THE ROTTEN BASTARDS THAT WOULD PRESUME TO "GAS THEIR OWN PEOPLE"!!!! When will the bombing of Ft. Dietrick and Dugway begin? Don't you have any sense of the ironic?

So once again the U.S. military is called upon to do a job. Is it the job that is Constitutionally mandated? Perhaps it can be argued that Saddam poses a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. Just one question: when we attack Iraq, can you guarantee me that anthrax, VX and radiological dirty bombs don't start blowing off here in the U.S.? Who do we bomb when that starts happening? And when we are bombing those people, what do we do when North Korea takes adavantage of the situation and launches a full scale invasion of the south? And then China, not willing to stand idley by, assualts Formosa? What do we do then? Think it can't happen? Think again. You promote yourself so astute in these matters.

The defense of the United States and its citizens is the purpose of the United States armed forces. Quite frankly I find it hard to find where a standing army is authorized in the Constitution to begin with. Nevertheless, it is Congress, and not the President, that has the Constitutional authority delegated by the People to make the decision for the implementation of these armed forces and as such requires a declaration of war. It is the President's mandate by the Constitution to be Commander in Chief of the army when it is called up. The fact that no nation has declared war in the last half century is immaterial if not irrelevent.

The joint resolution of Congress authorizes the President to use force "as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to...enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq." Simply put, the resolution amounts to carte blanche for the President to enforce UN dictates.

So if all you are saying about Saddam Hussein is true, and I have every reason to believe that he is indeed the monster that he's portrayed as being, where is the argument being made that the U.S. has to protect itself and its people? Where is the argument being made to the people and in front of its duly elected representatives so as for them to excercise their Constitutionally mandated authority? You know what I see? I see appeals to the U.N.

To be fair, the President has repeatedly expressed displeasure with the UN for not adopting a new resolution authorizing enforcement of the old UN resolutions. If the President's lament was based on the UN becoming too powerful, then his rhetoric, at least would be noteworthy, if not praiseworthy even. Unfortunately the president is only complaining that the UN is not exercising the power it has and as it should. Consider the President's words:

"We created the United Nations Security Council, so that, unlike the League of Nations, our deliberations would be more than talk, our resolutions would be more than wishes...

The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are the Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?...

We want the resolutions of the worlds most important multilateral body to be enforced."

On what basis is President Bush arguing for war and to whom is making that pitch? He's not pitching it to me, that's for sure.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has stated that global interest should be national interest. While the President may sound like he's lauding our national interests, in reality he's supporting the same objective as that of Kofi Annan - empowerment of the United Nations. If that were not the case, then he'd be hoping that the UN indeed become irrelevant instead of fulfilling the purpose of its founding. If the UN can disarm Iraq, then so can it disarm any other nation, including America and it would be well on its way to becoming the global police force its founders had envisioned.

Freedom From War
The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament
in a Peaceful World
DEPARTMENT OF STATE PUBLICATION 7277
Disarmament Series 5
Released September 1961
(http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/arms/freedom_war.html)

says as much and is something that the State Department has never disavowed even so they refuse to comment on it.

Mr. Bush actually makes the UN more relevant than to the contrary and more politically attainable than less so. By taking the position he has, he is making it easier for the U.S. to support whatever "compromise" resolutions the UN does adopt without provoking too much backlash from patriotic Americans.

If Mr. Bush truly wants to put "the UN where it belongs" - the ash-bin of history - he should use his bully pulpit to try to get the U.S. out of the UN and the UN out of the U.S.

Saddam is, however, just one of many dictators throughout the world that hate the United States. To oppose a pre-emptive strike against Butcher of Baghdad Saddam doesn't make me any more pro-Saddam than opposing a pre-emptive war against China is being pro-Butcher's of Tienamin Square Jiang. But our previous administration has aided and abetted just those same butchers of Beijing, as previous administrations did the beast of Baghdad. Can you tell me how many military interventions there were by U.S. forces in Nicaragua last century? The number would shock you. And what did all that accomplish for us?

Here are some pertainent cliches to consider:

Elections are a means of peacefull political change.
War is the result of the failure of diplomacy.
War is political change through violent means.
Peace flows from the end of a gun barrel.

Does one go to to war because of what one knows, or does one go to war because of what one does not know?

Is what we know about Iraq sufficient to justify war? Is what we don't know about Iraq enough to justify war? Is everything on your home page sufficient to justify a war with Iraq? Frankly I doubt it. Because if there was real hard solid evidence that Saddam was a threat, the Israeli's would've already taken action like they did with the Osirak nuclear plant.

When one looks to the Cuban missile crises for clues, what one finds there is quite alarming. It was thought that the U.S. knew enough to go to war. What the Soviet archives reveal however, is that the CIA's failure to spot the tactical nukes present at the time, led to a potentially catastrophic underestimation of the threat that Cuba posed as President Kennedy was considering invading the island to knock out the strategic missiles. A Pentagon estimate issued in midcrisis that a U.S. invasion would suffer 18,500 dead and wounded did not include the possibility that Cuba had tactical nukes. Two recent books -- One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964 by Timothy Naftali, a Cold War historian at Yale University, and Russian historian Aleksandr Fursenko, and Gribkov's Operation Anadyr -- put the number of tactical warheads deployed in Cuba at between 98 and 104, and these were under direct authority of Cuban President Fidel Castro. He wanted to keep the tactical weapons -- short-range rockets and airplane bombs -- even after the crisis, and Moscow's defense minister had initially ordered his troops to train Cubans in their use. We were so self-assured about what we thought we knew for thirty years, that the truth was indeed quite chilling.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, horrified upon Castro's urging to launch strategic nuclear missiles against the United States - in a first strike - at the height of the crisis, ordered that all the tactical weapons be swiftly removed.

The information that recently has been uncovered is that Castro fully intended to use the weapons at his disposal in response to a U.S. invasion force. This would've eliminated many times the original estimate of casualties forecast by the CIA, in addition to the loss of dozens of U.S. Navy fleet surface ships. What options would the U.S. have had in response? Keep in mind that by 23 Oct 1962, there were 41,902 Soviet military personell, including 10,000 combat troops on the island. And they definitely would've been collateral damage in that exchange.

Khrushchev's son was asked what his father's response would've been to what would've been no doubt America's only response to Cuba's use of the tactical nuclear weapons at its disposal. He answered, that his father would've had two choices. One would've been to resign. That was a death sentence, because he'd have been killed. The other choice was to launch a full scale assault on Europe.

At the height of the missile crisis, on Oct. 27, when the world seemed poised on the edge of nuclear holocaust, Castro had appeared to urge Moscow to launch a first-strike nuclear attack on America.

``If the imperialists invade Cuba,'' Castro wrote in a letter to Khrushchev, ``the danger that that aggressive policy poses for humanity is so great that following that event, the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike.

``If they actually carry out the brutal act of invading Cuba . . . that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of legitimate self-defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be.''

When the stunned Soviet ambassador in Havana, Aleksander Alekseev, asked Castro if he was really advocating that Moscow be the first to launch its nukes, Castro demurred.

``No,'' he answered, according to Alekseev's report to Moscow. ``I don't want to say that directly, but under certain circumstances we must not wait to experience the perfidy of the imperialists, letting them initiate the first strike.''

Before his death, Dr. Ernesto "Che" Guevera was asked if he was happy about the outcome of the Cuban Missile crises, seeing how close it came to nuclear holocaust. Guevera quipped that he actually was quite dissapointed. How could he be dissapointed that Cuba, and his cause was not obliterated by the most likely of U.S. responses. His answer: "We and Cuba's cause might be dead. But the United States would be destroyed."

That was then. This is now. Question is, are there any even more wacked-out people than Guevera running about now? Would it matter if there are wack jobs running around with towels wrapped on too tightly about their heads, cutting off oxygen to their brains? The question is, is Saddam a wack job like Guevera? Or does he know somebody who is just such a wack job and has been supplied by him (as Castro was by Khrushchev)? Is it plausible to believe that wack jobs can exist that have no sense of self preservation and would sacrifice not only themselves, but their nation and people, satisfied with the knowledge that the United States would be dealt a fatal blow? Is it possible that people exist that hate the United States in the full meaning of the word, and would do - at all costs - whatever necessary so as to accomplish the destruction of their nemesis? Do we know enough to justify the possible ramifications to our actions based on what we don't know? Or vice versa? That is indeed the question.

For some unknown reason everybody wants to keep overlooking the nuke sub pens in Cuba that serviced Soviet "boomers". For one thing, this proves beyond all doubt that the press was heavily pro-Kennedy. He is given credit for removing all nukes from Cuba, yet no mention is ever made of the sub pens that remained in use. It is highly unlikely the USSR would have been in a very forgiving mood if we had destroyed a couple of their nuke subs. And you can bet the US Navy was watching and tracking them at the time, and that we would have had no other choice once the shooting started.

The truth is that the monster known as Khruschev probably deserves more credit for avoiding war in Cuba than that idiot Kennedy did.

Ah, but I digress and what about all your evidence on your home page concerning anthrax and my statement about the Israeli's? They didn't attack Iraq yet did they? Nope. They didn't attack Iraq during the Gulf War either. That just means that the masters leash is stronger than the pit bull. Or at the very least, the Israelis are complicit somehow in the monster of Saddam as well, or that the Israeli government is comprised of individuals who have similiar philosophy and ideology as those on this side of the pond.

I'm getting sick of these manufactured crises orchestrated by the powers that be. The solutions have lead to nothing but incremental erosion of liberty. Homeland Security was a bill sitting on President Bush's desk the day he was innaugurated. Why did he sit on it until 12 Sep 2001? Well, that was a shoo-in then. WHY DID THEY HAVE TO WAIT? Was it perhaps of the Orwellian and frightfull police-state programs it proposed? I guess we escaped the bullet with the scuttling of the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but what about TIA? No longer do we have to fear legions upon legions of citizen spies, but now we are faced with a vast and omnipresent, omniscient hi-tech program being developed by the Defense Department to keep an eye on its own people. Now we just have to tolerate government scrutiny of all electronic transactions, communications, credit card purchases, video rentals, ATM activity, magazine subscriptions, prescriptions, car rentals, telephone conversations, eMail, etc. They even have this thing called Human Identification at at Distance (HID) with advanced facial recognition using biometrics. They're even working on human gait characteristics for identification. Who's running this show? Nobody other than Rear Admiral John Poindexter. Where've you heard that name before? That's right, Reagan's national security advisor and manager of the arms-for-hostage fiasco known as Iran-Contra. Gee, I feel safer already.

During a telecast of Charlie Rose...2 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) members went head to head on Iraq and mid-east. I thought..."What is this?!? Both ripping into each other like that" Then I mused "Ah, yes an arranged debate...to make the CFR look mainstream thinktank..with divergent views allowed."

The CFR 's web site has had the implementation schedule and phase protocols for Iraqi gov transition up for weeks now....like its been certain beyond any other outcome.

A senior Russian foreign minister recently commented openly in the media:

"Moscow see's a rift..a division within the Council on Foreign Relations and U.S. State department. One group forwards America as Zenith in manifest authority....America will remain Imperial..and independent. The other group see's America as an associate with World Government...She will be assigned ..Her wealth,military and politcal power used for a desired outcome...then she will step back from the spotlight..her mission completed..while the World Government remains the prime focus."

For these guys to say something like that publicly indicates that the Establishment insider clique is getting brazen, that's all. Or Professor Quigly's (Xlinton's mentor and author of "Tragedy and Hope" documenting the CFR's machinations towards global governemnt) desire is becoming fashionable.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear here: Saddam Hussein is a heinous and despicable dictator. However, my criticism of U.S. policy is that the United States aided and abetted Saddam's regime prior to the Gulf War. If the U.S. hadn't helped him consolidate power, then we wouldn't be threated today.

The Russian foreign minister who sneered at the CFR and U.S. State Dept made a cutty comment about Zbigniew Brzenzski (hinting at Z.B's pre-emminet CFR work "The Grand Chessboard...Americas Primacy and geostrategic imperative" published in 1972 Foreign Affairs - the CFR mouthpiece) and then a few gutsy comments from Nato leadership on CFR protocols...

Several have forwarded linkage concerning the CFR and Israeli real-politic.

Conrad Black (owner of Jerusalem Post) is a CFR member.
Henry Kissinger..sits on the board of the Jerusalem Post.
Ariel Sharon was groomed by the CFR after his rise to fame post Yom Kippur war (Arik having a portfolio in every cabinet since that time) His handler.....Henry Kissinger.
Raanam Gissen...Ariks personally secretary and spokesman..was confronted in the U.S. in an interview concerning Arik and the CFR. Raanam did not deny Ariks connection historically with the CFR....conveying that no comment would come at this time as per this info..that Ariel Sharon would reveal his relationship with the CFR in his memours.

Other Israeli leaders molded by the CFR.....Yitzkak Rabin,Ehud Barak...Binyamin Netanyahu.

In 2001 I watched an interview with [Gravel tone]..Henry Kissinger. During the interview on the mid-east crisis they went to interview segments years further back with Henry. Kissinger went on ..waxing eloquent about 5 and 7 year time windows to impliment regional change. No real suprise from the individual for putting the term "decent interval" into the diplomatic lexicon.

What really shook me was this statement, "There needs to be some drama by which the parties involved will be well motivated to come together to ennact change".

"Drama"??...has Henry wispered the game plan for the region. are we seeing the Drama now? Or is this just the musical part before the main show?

Let me ask you something. Who did SecDef Wolfowitz address? Who did SedDef Wolfowitz send an essay to? Who did Colin Powell address? When they finally got around to talking to the people of the United States? What did they talk about when they finally did that? What are the U.S. citizens, chopped liver? And then they didn't talk about the United States. They didn't talk about the Constitution, they didn't talk about clear and present danger to the U.S. and declaring war. They talked about strengthening the U.N. and enforcing U.N. resolutions.

This whole thing absolutely revolts me to no end, it is disgusting and abhorous. Nevertheless, I suppose we have to go bomb Saddam Hussein now. Who are we going to bomb next?

"People who are anxious to bring on war don't know what they are bargaining for; they don't see all the horrors that must accompany such an event." - Stonewall Jackson

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