----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
> At 3:44 PM -0800 1/8/03, Ian Murray wrote:
> >Golly, I'm learning so much today. If you lived in Kuwait, Yemen,
Saudi
> >Arabia or the UAE in 1991 I seriously doubt you would say Iraq posed
no
> >threat.
>
> I don't know why you are asking questions about the past before Iraq
> got disarmed by the war, economic sanctions, and UN weapons
> inspections.
=====================
Because Saddam and his gang of thugs were killing lots of people. Or does the historical context mean only what you determine it to mean?
> Even in 1991, though, it was not the Arabs but the US that was mainly
> gunning for the war. It's interesting that you mention Yemen among
> the nations allegedly threatened by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Yemen
> cast the lone dissenting vote in the Security Council against the
> Gulf War. A US official reportedly told Yemen's representative:
> "That's the most expensive 'no' vote you'll ever cast." Three days
> later, the US cut off its entire aid budget of about $70 million to
> Yemen.
======================
Every single one of those autocratic, authoritarian governments does not speak for their people so just because they officially kept a facade of composure does not mean their own citizens didn't abhor/fear the repercussions of Saddam's annexation of Kuwait.
>
> At 3:44 PM -0800 1/8/03, Ian Murray wrote:
> >I notice you didn't answer my question.
>
> What question? Whether or not Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was
> justified? That has nothing to do with the current US war on Iraq.
> It had nothing to do with the Gulf War either. That one country
> invaded another was never a reason enough for the US to launch a war.
> It can only be a pretext.
==================
It has everything to do with it or do you see history as some kind of Markov process? By your logic, carried to its conclusion, there can never be any reason for the inauguration of aggression by any state against any other state, because what holds for your thinking regarding US motivation for dealing with Iraq, to be consistent, holds for Iraq's dealing with Kuwait. Kuwait gave no reason to anybody to be attacked, period. So if Iraq didn't need a justification for attacking Kuwait, the US didn't need one to attack Iraq. Nor would China need a reason to take Taiwan. On and on it goes. War begins when the aggressor thinks justifications are a waste of time -even as they make public displays of them to sustain their legitimacy- and they can defeat their opponent. It is to "step outside" the bounds of ethics and reasons. The breakdown of Rumsfeld's unflappability on the NK question is a case in point.
>
> At 3:44 PM -0800 1/8/03, Ian Murray wrote:
> >There's no such thing as a political threat without military means
> >to back it up.
>
> A political threat with military means to back it up may be a bigger
> threat, but the US has acted to suppress many political threats that
> lacked military means, internally and externally. Toward bigger
> threats with military means to back them up (e.g., the USSR, China),
> the US was much more diplomatic.
======================
Golly, I'm learning so much.
>
> At 3:44 PM -0800 1/8/03, Ian Murray wrote:
> >Sweden has a lack of current military capacity, you don't see the US
> >bothering them, heh?
>
> I don't recall Sweden getting in the way of US policy either.
=======================
Humorless again, eh?
>
> At 3:44 PM -0800 1/8/03, Ian Murray wrote:
> >The Iraq crisis was manufactured to slow down, if not derail, the
> >global justice movement which had been given a big gift horse called
> >the millenium bubble and the Enron/WorldCom etc. "scandal" which
> >exposed for all the world to see that the cowboy capitalism of the
> >US is totally corrupt and in need of replacement. Now the US
> >capitalists have to use militarism/nihilism to change the subject
> >and thanks to the lapdogs in the corporate media, have largely
> >gotten away with it so far.
>
> I doubt that they consciously manufactured the so-called Iraq crisis
> in response to corporate scandals and the "global justice movement,"
> as Bushies had long been planning to do something like this, even
> before they got into power. In any case, what's your point?
> --
> Yoshie
====================
What, they did it in their sleep? Warrior-nihilists are incessently thinking about who they can beat up on the world stage, it's part of the paranoid/dominance streak in some men that has been institutionalized for thousands of years. So in that sense it ain't just the Bushies doing the planning but the larger institutional matrix of which they are one faction that is the larger issue/context. As some have noted, it was only a couple of hours after the morning of 9-11 when Rusmfeld launched his first rants/proposals to get Iraq. Don't think for one minute they aren't anxious as hell about how the rest of the world sees the millenium bubble and its aftermath.
My point is the one I'm alway making with you. If you haven't figured that out by now I can't help you.
Ian