James A. Donald wrote:

-- On 17 Dec 2003 at 22:54, Michael Kalus wrote:

...

No, but it is very interresting that all of this didn't matter while Saddam was the "good guy" for our causes (and by that I mean the Western world general).

You are making up your own history.

Am I? The west traded heavily with him, be it the US, France, Germany, the UK. Nobody was left out. All dealt with Saddam and made a lot of money off of him.

When Saddam came to power, he seized western property and murdered westerners, especially Americans, and you lot cheered him to an echo.

Who is "you lot"? [...] So in September 1980, Hussein's troops crossed the border into Iran. At first the war went well for Iraq, but eventually Iranian forces pushed the invaders out of their country. By spring 1982, the Iranians had gone on the offensive. And that greatly worried the Reagan White House, knowing that an Iranian victory could have a disastrous effect on America's power base in the oil-rich Middle East. Before long the Reagan administration began openly courting Saddam Hussein. In 1982, the United States removed Iraq from its list of countries that supported state-sponsored terrorism. In December 1983, President Reagan sent to Baghdad none other than Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy to the Middle East and today one of Hussein's harshest critics as U.S. secretary of defense. Rumsfeld's visit opened up America's relations with Iraq for the first time since the Arab-Israeli war in 1967. Later, Rumsfeld said that "it struck us as useful to have a relationship" and revealed that Hussein had indicated he wasn't interested in causing problems in the world. [...] http://tlc.discovery.com/convergence/iraqwar/timeline/timeline_03.html

Saddam was always an enemy of the west, he was never a good guy.

Does the " mean anything to you? He was our "good guy" as long as we though we could use him.

He was at times an ally, in the sense that Stalin and Pol Pot were at times temporary allies, yet somehow I never see you fans of slavery and mass murder criticizing the west for allying with Stalin.

I think the circumstances where a bit different at this point in time. Besides. Nobody (at least not I) said anything about "supporting" him or "cheering" for Saddam. The Question here is not if he is a bad man or a good man. It is not if he did or did not do what they accuse him of. But it is about the double morale that the west has been advocating for the past 50 years. Especially when it comes to Oil. It is astonishing that it was okay for Saddam to be as evil as be and we (as a society) turned a blind eye to it, until WE (for whatever reason) felt threatened by him and than dragged it all out again, just to proof how bad he is. Face it. If the West didn't want Saddam in Power they could have removed him a long time ago. The matter of fact is, we are as much to blame for what happened to the people in Iraq as is Saddam, if not more so.

Evil men, by their nature, find themselves in conflict with other evil men for the same reasons as good men do.

So where do your enlightened Western Politicians fit in? Good or Evil?

Thus evil men and good men will often find themselves in a temporary alliance of convenience against a common enemy, an alliance that both sides know will end in war or near war fairly soon.

I suggest you read Chomsky's new book, and if only as a reference to the sources he lists.

This however seldom leads good men to mistake evil men for 'good guys"

No, but it leads good men to become evil. If you ally with the enemy than you are giving up what makes you good. Turning away when someone is abused doesn't make the abuse stop and it makes you just as guilty as the one who commits the abuse. Ignorance might be bliss for most people, but from an ethical and moral standpoint it is not. Parading Saddam around and humiliating him just shows how low we really are, despite the fact that we don't want to acknowledge it ourselves. Michael

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The west, including the US traded and continues to trade heavily with Castro, yet somehow that does not lead you to believe they think Castro a good guy, nor does it lead you to believe they are actively supporting him.

I don't think Castro is a bad guy either. Believe it or not but not everything that is not Freetrade made in America is bad.

...

It is astonishing that it was okay for Saddam to be as evil as be and we (as a society) turned a blind eye to it

Yet you show no similar astonishment concerning the evil of Stalin.

Stalin has been dealt with. His empire has fallen. I am very well aware of the past. But my concern right now is the present and the future. Also, what you don't seem to get. This is not about Saddam, it is about how the US acts.

Every citation Chomsky gives is fraudulent.

I recently posted a paragraph by paragraph examination of one of his more notorious articles. Every single citation he gave was false in some central and crucial way.

See my very long posting: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=739htvsqv3bteggtq8p2ht5ae1fl8g3rj u@4ax.com http://tinyurl.com/yzao

I'll have a look at it. But I guess you also tell me that anything Michael Moore said in "Bowling for Columbine" is wrong too?

...

If you ally with the enemy than you are giving up what makes you good.

It merely means you are dealing with one enemy at a time, rather than all of them at once.

Ethics and morales are non negotiable. Either you have it or you don't. If you don't have them, fine, but don't pretend you act because of them. Michael -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBP+NMMWlCnxcrW2uuEQK0PACg5wJOlgUm6JQkkeTJx8tpxvalTxUAoPe6 tkln3VpG4iX/435Sdu1OlMGD =NKYl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

At 11:06 AM 12/19/2003, Michael Kalus wrote:

I'll have a look at it. But I guess you also tell me that anything Michael Moore said in "Bowling for Columbine" is wrong too?

http://www.hardylaw.net/Truth_About_Bowling.html "We are much beholden to Machiavelli and others that write what men do, not what they ought to do." -Francis Bacon

At 2:06 PM -0500 12/19/03, Michael Kalus wrote:

I don't think Castro is a bad guy either.

Ah. I feel much better now. Thank you for sparing me the rest of your drivel from now on... Plonk! Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

On 17 Dec 2003 at 22:54, Michael Kalus wrote:

...

No, but it is very interresting that all of this didn't matter while Saddam was the "good guy" for our causes (and by that I mean the Western world general).

You are making up your own history. When Saddam came to power, he seized western property and murdered westerners, especially Americans, and you lot cheered him to an echo. Saddam was always an enemy of the west, he was never a good guy. He was at times an ally, in the sense that Stalin and Pol Pot were at times temporary allies, yet somehow I never see you fans of slavery and mass murder criticizing the west for allying with Stalin.

Relevant numbers from the Times today, quoting Air Force Monthly, January 2003: from 1980 to 1990 Iraq imported 28.9 billion pounds worth of weapons. 19% by value were from France; 57% from the Soviet Union (ie Russia), East Germany, and Czechoslovakia; 8% from China. Sales from the United States were inconsequential and did not make the list. From earlier articles in other publications I believe that in fact US sales were a small fraction of 1%. It is not coincidental that the Security Council members opposed to taking any action on Iraq's repeated violations were France, Russia, Germany, and China: Iraq's weapons suppliers. These repeated claims that Saddam was somehow the US's boy in the Middle East are puzzling. The US did not supply any significant number of weapons or other military aid to Iraq. They did give limited support to Iraq in its war against Iran, a direct consequence of the Irani occupation of the US embassy in Teheran and kidnapping of its staff. If you look at the tactics and weapons used by Saddam in the invasion of Kuwait and in the resulting Gulf War, they were Soviet. Chirac's personal relations with Saddam go back to at least 1975, the year that France signed an agreement to sell two nuclear reactors to Iraq. There have been rumors for a long time that Saddam provided financial support to Chirac in various election campaigns. The evidence points to deep ties between Russia, France, and Iraq that goes back decades, plus somewhat weaker ties to China and Germany. Relations between the US and Baath-controlled Iraq were bad from the beginning; American bodies dangling from ropes in Baghdad were not the beginning of a great romance. -- Jim Dixon jdd@dixons.org tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881 http://jxcl.sourceforge.net Java unit test coverage http://xlattice.sourceforge.net p2p communications infrastructure

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, BillyGOTO wrote:

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 07:18:04PM +0000, Jim Dixon wrote:

...

Relevant numbers from the Times today, quoting Air Force Monthly, January 2003: from 1980 to 1990 Iraq imported 28.9 billion pounds worth of weapons. 19% by value were from France; 57% from the Soviet Union (ie Russia), East Germany, and Czechoslovakia; 8% from China. Sales from the United States were inconsequential and did not make the list. From earlier articles in other publications I believe that in fact US sales were a small fraction of 1%.

I smell statistical acrobatics by the USAF... Do we really measure weapons in pounds?

In the UK we measure sales in pounds sterling. One pound = $1.75 and rising.

I'd rather see a listing of weapons imports from JUST the period of the Iran-Iraq war than a listing of weapons imports from 1980-1990.

One is included in the other. From memory, total US military sales to Iraq in the decade were $3 million. As we all know, in Washington DC "a billion dollars here, a billion dollars there -- pretty soon you are talking real money". Three million dollars will buy you a few coffee pots and a monkey wrench for your AWACS aircraft. -- Jim Dixon jdd@dixons.org tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881 http://jxcl.sourceforge.net Java unit test coverage http://xlattice.sourceforge.net p2p communications infrastructure

Jim Dixon wrote:

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

...

On 17 Dec 2003 at 22:54, Michael Kalus wrote:

...

No, but it is very interresting that all of this didn't matter while Saddam was the "good guy" for our causes (and by that I mean the Western world general).

You are making up your own history. When Saddam came to power, he seized western property and murdered westerners, especially Americans, and you lot cheered him to an echo. Saddam was always an enemy of the west, he was never a good guy. He was at times an ally, in the sense that Stalin and Pol Pot were at times temporary allies, yet somehow I never see you fans of slavery and mass murder criticizing the west for allying with Stalin.

Relevant numbers from the Times today, quoting Air Force Monthly, January 2003: from 1980 to 1990 Iraq imported 28.9 billion pounds worth of weapons. 19% by value were from France; 57% from the Soviet Union (ie Russia), East Germany, and Czechoslovakia; 8% from China. Sales from the United States were inconsequential and did not make the list. From earlier articles in other publications I believe that in fact US sales were a small fraction of 1%.

From the same site I linked to before: [...] By January 1984, /The Washington Post/ was reporting that the United States had told friendly nations in the Persian Gulf that the defeat of Iraq would "be contrary to U.S. interests." That sent the message that America would not object to U.S. allies offering military aid to Iraq. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait sent howitzers, bombs and other weapons to Iraq. And later that year the U.S. government pushed through sales of helicopters to Hussein's government. But that was just the beginning of Reagan's pro-Iraq campaign. The United States sold the Iraqis military jeeps and Lockheed L-100 transports. And, according to a recent report in /The New York Times/, as many as 60 American intelligence officers provided Iraq with "critical battle planning assistance," lending detailed information on Iranian deployments, plans for airstrikes and bomb-damage assessments. The /Times/ story further reported that this intelligence assistance was offered even though American officers knew the Iraqi commanders would probably use chemical weapons against the Iranians. The military aid helped Iraq hold off the Iranians, and the war dragged on until 1988. That year the U.S. Senate passed the Prevention of Genocide Act, which would have imposed sanctions against Hussein's regime. But the Reagan White House opposed the bill, calling it premature. When it eventually passed, the White House made little effort to enforce it. [...] Just because they didn't sell the weapons directly doesn't mean they didn't sell them. It is an age old practice to sell weapons to a middle man in order to get them where they are not supposed to be. And in regards to arms sales: [...] * U.S. arms exports in 1995 amounted to $15.6 billion, three times that of the next supplier and 49 percent of the world's. Over the 1993-1995 period, U.S. exports went equally to developed and developing countries. * The six next largest suppliers, with over $0.5 billion each and together accounting for 42 percent of the world total, were: U.K. $5.2 billion Germany 1.2 Russia 3.3 Israel 0.8 France 2.2 China, Mainland 0.6 * The Middle East imported over 30 percent of the total number of major weapons in trade over the last 12 years (1984-1995). In 1993-1995, Western Europe became the main importing region with 32 percent. [...] http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/acda/factshee/conwpn/wmeatfs.htm

It is not coincidental that the Security Council members opposed to taking any action on Iraq's repeated violations were France, Russia, Germany, and China: Iraq's weapons suppliers.

http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1991/C231.html [...] *Kroft. *And other arms dealers and countries did. Brazil provided thousands of armored vehicles. China and the Soviet Union sent tanks, missiles and munitions. German companies sold Saddam poison gas technology, and France, not only approved the sale of artillery to Iraq, but [also sold] armed helicopters and antiaircraft missile systems. This Chilean arms manufacturer [shown on screen] sold Saddam deadly cluster bombs--reportedly with technical assistance from U.S. companies, and the United States allowed American computer technology to go to Iraq as well. It allowed Sarkis to sell Hughes and Bell helicopters. The U.S. government approved the sale after Iraq promised that they would only be used for civilian purposes. Sarkis told us that the helicopters were used as transportation during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. *Sarkis. *I did it with the knowledge of U.S. authorities, policy makers--and also they have delivered weapons that are equally weapons as I did. I do not have anything on my conscience. I did not sell the weapons to kill the American boys. *Kroft. *Which agencies of the U.S. government knew about Sarkis and his deals with Iraq? Well, according to Sarkis, almost all of them. And federal court documents show that Sarkis Soghanalian had a relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies for decades, and has performed work on their behalf. Not all of Sarkis's deals with Iraq involve weapons. He arranged the sale of $280 million in uniforms to the Iraqi army. And Sarkis's partners in the deal included former Vice President Spiro Agnew, a former Attorney General, Colonel Jack Brennan. The partners used their influence to get ex-President Nixon to provide them with these letters of introduction [shown on screen] to heads of state around the world. [To Sarkis] Do you think there was anything unusual about a former Vice President and a former Attorney General and a former Chief of Staff for the President of the United Stateas to want to be selling military uniforms to the Iraqis? *Sarkis. *They were not only in the uniform business. They would sell their mothers if they could, just to make the money. [...]

These repeated claims that Saddam was somehow the US's boy in the Middle East are puzzling. The US did not supply any significant number of weapons or other military aid to Iraq.

The word "directly" is missing here.

They did give limited support to Iraq in its war against Iran, a direct consequence of the Irani occupation of the US embassy in Teheran and kidnapping of its staff. If you look at the tactics and weapons used by Saddam in the invasion of Kuwait and in the resulting Gulf War, they were Soviet.

That may be, but they also had Hughes Helicopters (see quote above) as well as other weapons that clearly came from the US. The US was very well aware of what Saddam had because if they didn't sell it to him directly they at least acted as facilitator. And so did pretty much Western Europe.

Chirac's personal relations with Saddam go back to at least 1975, the year that France signed an agreement to sell two nuclear reactors to Iraq. There have been rumors for a long time that Saddam provided financial support to Chirac in various election campaigns.

From the TLC page again: [...] In December 1983, President Reagan sent to Baghdad none other than Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy to the Middle East and today one of Hussein's harshest critics as U.S. secretary of defense. Rumsfeld's visit opened up America's relations with Iraq for the first time since the Arab-Israeli war in 1967. Later, Rumsfeld said that "it struck us as useful to have a relationship" and revealed that Hussein had indicated he wasn't interested in causing problems in the world. [...] So was apparantly Rumsfeld.

The evidence points to deep ties between Russia, France, and Iraq that goes back decades, plus somewhat weaker ties to China and Germany.

And the US was just drawn into it by accident?

Relations between the US and Baath-controlled Iraq were bad from the beginning; American bodies dangling from ropes in Baghdad were not the beginning of a great romance.

No Government ever cared about the individual if greater gains could be amassed. Be it the US or any other country in the world. BTW, can you provide me with a reference for the "dangling bodies'? Because I was unable to find anything on this so far. Michael

-- On 18 Dec 2003 at 15:42, Michael Kalus wrote:

By January 1984, /The Washington Post/ was reporting that the United States had told friendly nations in the Persian Gulf that the defeat of Iraq would "be contrary to U.S. interests." That sent the message that America would not object to U.S. allies offering military aid to Iraq. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait sent howitzers, bombs and other weapons to Iraq. And later that year the U.S. government pushed through sales of helicopters to Hussein's government.

This does not resemble in the slightest sending collossal amounts of logistic aid to Stalin, or even supplying the murderous marxist Mengistu with free cattle trucks to ship the peasants to death camps in the course of imposing forced collectivisation, yet somehow I never hear the fans of terror and slavery complaining about those episodes. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 5ibjDrK757xI4qlX/NW0eJQnWdI267xZu+oMuBEO 4esmiD8ZBiOaoKK48vXdGpqBQjC43P2L5EtUa9k+i

Jim Dixon <jdd@dixons.org> [2003-12-18/19:18]:

19% by value were from France; 57% from the Soviet Union (ie Russia), East Germany, and Czechoslovakia; 8% from China. [...] It is not coincidental that the Security Council members opposed to taking any action on Iraq's repeated violations were France, Russia, Germany, and China: Iraq's weapons suppliers.

You are confusing todays Germany with the communist pre-1989 Eastern Germany, two *very* different things (I thought the British had better knowledge of the "Olde Europe" than the fellow Americans do?) As to the rest, always look at who published the "facts". It's the same sources that claimed the Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It's unfortunate that most people fall for this kind of manipulative misinformation. Cheers, Dan -- Daniel Roethlisberger <daniel@roe.ch> OpenPGP key id 0x804A06B1 (1024/4096 DSA/ElGamal) 144D 6A5E 0C88 E5D7 0775 FCFD 3974 0E98 804A 06B1 !-> [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Jim Dixon wrote: <huge snip>

The evidence points to deep ties between Russia, France, and Iraq that goes back decades, plus somewhat weaker ties to China and Germany. Relations between the US and Baath-controlled Iraq were bad from the beginning; American bodies dangling from ropes in Baghdad were not the beginning of a great romance.

And all of this is meaningless: we simply had no right to invade a foreign, *sovereign* nation.

-- Jim Dixon jdd@dixons.org tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881 http://jxcl.sourceforge.net Java unit test coverage http://xlattice.sourceforge.net p2p communications infrastructure

-- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org "Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." The Promise of World Peace http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, James A. Donald wrote:

On 18 Dec 2003 at 19:09, J.A. Terranson wrote:

...

And all of this is meaningless: we simply had no right to invade a foreign, *sovereign* nation.

Although you probably do not know it, you are invoking the rules of the peace of Westphalia.

The Soviet Union never respected the peace of Westphalia.

Which was evil.

After the election of Ronald Reagan, neither did the US,

Living proof that you can become what you hate.

and the US has never resumed respecting it, so that stuff is ancient history now.

So what you are saying is that we have become the Soviet Union?

National Sovereignty, like the divine right of kings, just is not taken seriously any more, and the only people weeping big salt tears about its passing are those who enthusiastically hailed all the Soviet violations of it as wars of national liberation.

Spare me. I was no Soviet apologist. And until Reagan I was a dyed in the wool republican. Yet, I shed and continue to shed tears for a race of people that refuses to respect the rights of men and their nations. Like the Soviets. Or [now], the Americans...

--digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG MG21u2rXbbd8Gv6a0KI33gOfB0dq3Rj0+8QLf9Zu 475GB3UNm+fRK0Tmju1skiWzb5gB5QGgnIdyidhHM

-- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org "Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate patriotism, must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a whole. Bah'u'llh's statement is: "The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." The Promise of World Peace http://www.us.bahai.org/interactive/pdaFiles/pwp.htm

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 19-Dec-03, at 2:35 PM, James A. Donald wrote:

-- On 18 Dec 2003 at 21:57, J.A. Terranson wrote:

...

Yet, I shed and continue to shed tears for a race of people that refuses to respect the rights of men and their nations. Like the Soviets. Or [now], the Americans...

Such high moral sentiments from someone who claims that Americans deserved 9/11 and have no right to whine about it.

Nations are not morally entitled to any rights. They have rights merely by habit and convention, a convention formalized in the peace of Westphalia, and now at long last fading.

Interresting note. Did they deserve 9/11? If you go by "eye for an eye" then yes. If you think that Ossama (if it was him) and his cronies are evil, then yes, they deserved it too (wasn't Jesus all about suffering for the greater good?). If you think that nobody has the right to terrorism than they didn't. But neither did the Iraqis during the sanctions, nor the countless people who died in South America because the "good guys" were waging a war. Let's not even talk about all the things that were done by the "good guys" in Vietnam. M. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBP+NspWlCnxcrW2uuEQIQRACeLIEpk760YpoNgMSsa1IZzg20ZusAoKmI IIo6dnih7/pjDBcd1sbkVB0C =kya6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

That all depends on your definition of sovereign. After all, "we" put, or at least helped, that monster into power. No different an action than we the many times before putting tyrants into control of small, but important nations under the guise of "protecting democracy." So, while he was our puppet, he was the good guy, and no matter how many he murdered, he was a benevolent leader. Once he turned on our interests, he was no longer useful and had to be removed. It just took Jr. to do it. Now, we'll put a different "democratic" government in place. Of course, it won't be as free as the USA, nor have the same kind of constitution - that would be a problem since we couldn't control it's oil. Nothing new, nothing to be surprised about. We couldn't give a fuck less if Sadam was given an anal probe on TV, or if he was put in the colliseum for donkeys to use as a sex toy, as in Roman times. As entertaining as it would be for some, it's utterly unimportant. Pax Americana will march on. We have their oil - we can throw some crumbs to some other "friendly" countries of the COW, and lesser crumbs to those who complained, but the rest is just meaningless green colored icing on the cake. The war on terror itself will go on for as long as the voters will tolerate it, or until it's true goals succeede and it becomes impossible for the voters to do anything but accept it - or be disappeared in the middle of the night... Not much different than in Stalin or Hitler's days. Perhaps a democrat will make it back in power again, but that too is meaningless, as the infrastructure for the super surveillance, terror police state is already in place and won't likely go away. It no longer makes a difference, even if a few of the teeth of the DHS are removed... people will still be disappeared in the middle of the night, warantless searches, secret shadow trails, et al. ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of /|\ \|/ :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\ <--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech. \/|\/ /|\ :Found to date: 0. Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD. \|/ + v + : The look on Sadam's face - priceless! --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------ On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, J.A. Terranson wrote:

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Jim Dixon wrote:

<huge snip>

...

The evidence points to deep ties between Russia, France, and Iraq that goes back decades, plus somewhat weaker ties to China and Germany. Relations between the US and Baath-controlled Iraq were bad from the beginning; American bodies dangling from ropes in Baghdad were not the beginning of a great romance.

And all of this is meaningless: we simply had no right to invade a foreign, *sovereign* nation.