How to destroy a Country

[buffycat]

Very well written oped dealing with the lies and agenda soaked media blitz which kicked off the illegal and tragic war in Iraq.

Instead of wishing this poor country a happy anniversary, usually a celebration of something GOOD, as one of you more prolific posters here has done, I post this for those who don't relish in the disaster the West has caused in Iraq, for those with a heart and soul and a place in their conscious for the suffering of other human beings:

How to Destroy and Country and Get off Scot free

excerpt:

First, they cleverly used the politics of fear to sway public opinion. As noted in the Project for the New American Century's document "Rebuilding America's Defenses", the warmonger signatories - who later became senior members of the Bush administration - needed "a new Pearl Harbor". On Sept. 1l 2001 they got it. Americans and their allies were in shock. Almost every country in the world was sympathetic and willing to do anything to help. And, boy, did they capitalize on that empathy even managing to persuade Russia to stay silent as they made deals with Caspian states to allow US bases.

Step one was a country where a giant bogeyman was supposed to be hiding out in a cave presumably equipped with a dialysis machine and a production studio and whose black-turbaned government forced women to wear a burqa and disallowed nail polish. But then Defense Minister Donald Rumsfeld was disappointed because there weren't enough targets for his bombs. It was no fun bombing a country into the Stone Age when it was already there.

Step two was the insidious demonizing of Muslims, thousands of whom were arrested and held for months without charge or access to lawyers. In that climate of fear, it was relatively simple to persuade the American people that Saddam Hussein was conniving with the people who brought down the World Trade Center. US officials warned of mushroom clouds; Prime Minister Tony Blair said British interests could be attacked within 45 minutes of Saddam giving the order. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell allowed himself to be used as their fall guy. He spouted the most unbelievable scripted codswallop the UN had ever heard...yet, bullied and bribed nation after nation pretended to believe him as IAEA chief Mohammed El-Baradei and UN weapons inspector Hans Blix did little to discredit the hoax.

Step three entailed replacing Osama in people's minds with Saddam, who overnight morphed into a hydra-headed monster whose idea of a pleasant weekend was gassing and torturing his own people.

Step four was 'Shock and Awe' which illuminated the Baghdad skyline on March 19, 2003. As their bombs and missiles rained down on crowded market places scattering limbs, they told us those bombs and missiles were Saddam's even though the Independent's Middle East correspondent inconveniently dug up their Made in the USA shards.

As the months went on, we began to wonder what happened to the WMD. They told us it was only a matter of time before it would be unearthed from under the sands or discovered in a tunnel under one of Saddam's palaces. They even suggested it may have been shipped off to a neighboring country for safekeeping!!

Step five was an orchestrated administration campaign to inject us with mass amnesia. Never mind about the weapons, they said. We are here to liberate the poor Iraqi people from their evil dictator and deliver freedom and democracy. Look, look, they said. The Iraqis have purple fingers! With up to one million dead, Iraqis are lucky they have any fingers at all.

To be fair, they couldn't have done it without the aid of a compliant, supine media, which embedded its reporters with US battalions and agreed not to show captured US soldiers, flag-draped coffins, military funerals or scenes of blood-soaked Iraqi civilians. Independent reporters who neglected to abide by the script were discredited, refused access to information and even shelled.

And these same idiots who applauded this illegal war and now beating the same drum for attacking Iran!!

Way to go, boys! Kill Kill Kill!! That's where the fun is eh???

[Leafless]

TRAITOR!

[buffycat]

Ahhh, thanks Leafless - for making such an informed and useful comment - just what I have come to expect from the high quality (gag.. cough... spit) posters on this inane board!!

Well done!!

Go kill a few kids - you will obviously feel better - just make sure they are Arab - or at the least Muslim!!

Whooopeeee!!

(Garbage in garbage out eh???)

What a joke!

[Borg]

Ahhh, thanks Leafless - for making such an informed and useful comment - just what I have come to expect from the high quality (gag.. cough... spit) posters on this inane board!!

Well done!!

Go kill a few kids - you will obviously feel better - just make sure they are Arab - or at the least Muslim!!

Whooopeeee!!

(Garbage in garbage out eh???)

What a joke!

Yet you keep coming back

Borg

[buffycat]

I take it from the above two responses that y'all agree it's just fine what the US and her 'allies' have done to the Iraqi people?

Now, please stay on topeic - I know for some here that is really difficult.

The topic is: the destruction of Iraq, and the media complicity thereof.

Now, see that's not too hard is it?

(Well for some here it certainly is... BTW Borg - your posts aren't usually very enlightening to say the least! Carry on... blah blah blah)

[Borg]

I take it from the above two responses that y'all agree it's just fine what the US and her 'allies' have done to the Iraqi people?

Now, please stay on topeic - I know for some here that is really difficult.

The topic is: the destruction of Iraq, and the media complicity thereof.

Now, see that's not too hard is it?

(Well for some here it certainly is... BTW Borg - your posts aren't usually very enlightening to say the least! Carry on... blah blah blah)

From you that IS a compliment.

To answer your question - Yes.

BTAIM - Iraq is Iraq and you can bitch all you want - go there and see for yourself.

A country racially and religiously divided - held together in the past by torture, kidnap, murder, extorsion and chemical gas killers - and a ruler who used to shred people in a giant commercial shredder for amusement - things will change and things may or may not get better - such is life.

Should be divided into three countries.

I have walked the ground there and had people thank me for being there. As for the media - believing everything you read is like eating everything you see. Ran into a ferllow Canuck there serving with the USAF on exchange - he was quite proud of what he was doing.

You should be too.

Have a good one my dear.

Borg

Edited March 18, 2008 by Borg

[bush_cheney2004]

I take it from the above two responses that y'all agree it's just fine what the US and her 'allies' have done to the Iraqi people?

Ya think? Either way, what the hell does the "legality" of the war have to do with it if the passion is really about dead and maimed Iraqis? And where was the "passion" before the invasion? Your own Liberal government helped to strangle the Iraqis before Bush was ever elected.

Are you still stuck with the obsolete talking points of 2003?

Edited March 19, 2008 by bush_cheney2004

[Regulus de Leo]

Saddam destroyed Iraq and set the stage for civil strife once his regime self-destructed. The blame is almost entirely with Saddam, the Ba'ath Party and the Sunnis.

[margrace]

Of Course it is but we all know that Saddam was put there by the American government. You people seem to forget that little fact. I remember talking to a lady on a plane who was returning to Iran. This was when the two countries were involved in a war. She told about the horror of Iraq sending in Children, boys of 12 years of age, as their soldiers.

[August1991]

This article is published by a woman born in Wales but who says:

“When I hear the hauntingly beautiful call of the muezzin, I know I’m home,” she is known to say.

Link

She writes for a Saudi newspaper but curiously she lives in Cairo. She's also a garden-variety anti-American.

She would also like to see a multi-polar world instead of one where a hyper-power is able to ride roughshod, unchallenged.

She no doubt enjoys her freedom to travel and to express her opinions. As John Howard used to say, be careful what you wish for because you may just get it. A world in which the US is disengaged or in which it faces undemocratic opponents would not be a better world. It would be a world less free.

[M.Dancer]

Of Course it is but we all know that Saddam was put there by the American government.

Lets see if you can back up that statement with some credible reference. Remember just because yuouheard your taoster say it doesn't make it true.

[jazzer]

Saddam destroyed Iraq and set the stage for civil strife once his regime self-destructed. The blame is almost entirely with Saddam, the Ba'ath Party and the Sunnis.

And sent the planes into the towers right?

[DogOnPorch]

Of Course it is but we all know that Saddam was put there by the American government. You people seem to forget that little fact. I remember talking to a lady on a plane who was returning to Iran. This was when the two countries were involved in a war. She told about the horror of Iraq sending in Children, boys of 12 years of age, as their soldiers.

Both Iran and Iraq used child soldiers during their war.

Here's an Iranian 14 yr old at the front...

...and a 13 yr old... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-PGWe0E6S0

Saddam was also using his US contacts just as much as they were using him. The US initially supported Saddam back in the Cold War as he was viewed to be staunchly anti-Communist. This, of course, changed dramatically once Saddam was actually in power.

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I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts...

---Fred Heatherton & Danny Kaye

[Topaz]

Both Iran and Iraq used child soldiers during their war.

Here's an Iranian 14 yr old at the front...

...and a 13 yr old... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-PGWe0E6S0

Saddam was also using his US contacts just as much as they were using him. The US initially supported Saddam back in the Cold War as he was viewed to be staunchly anti-Communist. This, of course, changed dramatically once Saddam was actually in power.

------------------------------------------

I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts...

---Fred Heatherton & Danny Kaye

The US has always put its nose in every countries business since WW2. The CIA can be found sooner or later mixed up with interferring with other countries business and at times starting wars for US. Iraq is so broken, its going to take at least trillions of dolllars to put it back and whi will benefit from the world and the reconstruction... the US and the Bush and Cheney families.

[DogOnPorch]

The US has always put its nose in every countries business since WW2.

Just the USA?

-------------------------------------

Is this your pen?

---Sam 'Ace' Rothstein: Casino

[Regulus de Leo]

Just the USA?

-------------------------------------

Is this your pen?

---Sam 'Ace' Rothstein: Casino

Everyone else get a free pass.

[Regulus de Leo]

And sent the planes into the towers right?

No but he was rather happy about it.

[DogOnPorch]

Everyone else get a free pass.

Something the anti-USA crowd ignores:

United States Is Largest Donor of Foreign Aid, Report Says

Americans favor private giving, people-to-people contacts

Washington — The United States is the single largest donor of foreign economic aid, but, unlike many other developed nations, Americans prefer to donate their money through the private sector, according to a new report published by a Washington research organization.

Of the $122.8 billion of foreign aid provided by Americans in 2005...

http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english...a0.2997553.html

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Where were you in '62?

---American Graffiti

[Argus]

Of Course it is but we all know that Saddam was put there by the American government. You people seem to forget that little fact.

It's easy to forget things when they never happened.

[jazzer]

It's easy to forget things when they never happened.

Like a handshake with Dumsfelt, like the gassing of the Kurds with Reagan watching.

[bush_cheney2004]

The US has always put its nose in every countries business since WW2.....

Way before that....and often at the behest / in partnership with your falling empire.

Somebody had to pick up the slack

[Regulus de Leo]

Like a handshake with Dumsfelt, like the gassing of the Kurds with Reagan watching.

Actually if you cared to get your facts right one of the problems with aid to Iraq (in preventing his regime from losing a war to Iran and making it a superpower) was the use of chemical weapons. The ingredients for those weapons and know-how were primarily obtained from Asian and European countries.

[margrace]

Lets see if you can back up that statement with some credible reference. Remember just because yuouheard your taoster say it doesn't make it true.

Watch the lies that led to war on CBC

[margrace]

Actually if you cared to get your facts right one of the problems with aid to Iraq (in preventing his regime from losing a war to Iran and making it a superpower) was the use of chemical weapons. The ingredients for those weapons and know-how were primarily obtained from Asian and European countries.

Oh no they weren't watch ' The lies that led to war" The US sold those chemicals and never admitted that they had been used against the Kurds.

[jazzer]

The ingredients for those weapons and know-how were primarily obtained from Asian and European countries.

And possibly the good old U.S. of A.:

Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs -- which oversees American exports policy -- reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.

link

Edited March 20, 2008 by jazzer