The President lied to start war

Just giving you a taste of your own medicine PB. And no Im no member of any society, I leave that to you and your neocon adherence to long revealed Washington lies over "the totalitarian Communist Ho Chi min". That was merely another of a long roster of lies to advance the paranoid Domino Theory.

http://www.kimsoft.com/1997/uncleho.htm

That this very theory remained the driving force in the villification of all such populist leaders who attempted to institute popular and egalitarian reforms for the betterment of their people - over US and foreign corporate backed interests that stood to lose their oligarchical control and holdings as a result -is something any legitimate foreign policy researcher (which you certainly have demonstrated yourself as NOT being) well knows. From Mossedegh (Iran) to Allende (Chile) to our covert proxy war against the Sandinistas (Nicaragua), the official and oft regurgitated US bandwagon line has been that we overthrew dangerous "communist" boogeymen, when in reality they were the choice of their people and indeed examples of true democratic expression. They, however, did not align to our big money interests and thus were refashioned into monsters and sold as such to the otherwise worldly ignorant US public to justify action by our MIC to remove them, covertly through support of right wing insurgencies where possible, by outright military intervention elsewhere.

With a host of unquestioning minds such as you clearly evince to swallow it and repeat the revisionist line ad infinitum.

Time you came to grips with the fact that it is our foreign policy doctrine, much the same to the present day, which has generated the problems, not the boogey men nor the inflated figures they invent.

 

Oh really, it wasn't Iraq? Why not? What aspect of "totalitarian communist one part state" do you not understand? What do you think happened to all the non-communist opposition movements in North Vietnam? They suddenly decided that everyone agrees with communism and disbanded? Do you think that everyone just "decided" to shut down their newspapers? People who disagreed were imprisoned or murdered. Can you imagine that oppression can exist without the US being to blame?

And so what? You believe your teachers? Of course not - except when they tell you what you want to hear. Look at Vietnam now, where's the democracy? 30 years and no free press, no opposition parties, no democracy, no rights. That's the proof. Do you think that Mui the expert knows better than the hundreds of thousands of people that got the fuck out of Vietnam when the communist took over, first in 1954 and again in 1975? That was their vote. You say DEMOCRATICALLY, as if capital letters somehow makes it true. Who, in the history of Vietnam, voted for Ho Chi Minh? Are you so naive, so ignorant as to believe that North Vietnam was a democratic and free society? It never ceases to astound me how people that think the Patriot Act and Fox news make the US a fascist country can look at a one party totalitarian police state like North Vietnam and see democracy. Its simple really, if North Vietnam was against the US then therefore they must be good, no thought required.

Thank you for speaking up for North Korean neo stalinists LickHERish, they really get a unfair treatment by "the media", don't they? Good thing you and the flat earth society are here to stand up against that kind of groupthink.

But who's surprised. Communist Boogeymen indeed. First they say Stalin was a bigger "murderer" then Hitler, then they complain about Mao's cultural revolution just because a few tens of million of people "died", next thing you know people are getting sceptical that communism is going to bring them freedom! And they are "witchhunting" those poor communists that only wanted to kill off undesirables and impose a one party totalitarian state. Can you believe it? Imagine if South Vietnam had been allowed to develop like South Korea. The horror! THE HORROR!

 

Point I’m sorry to see that you seem to be arguing more with your emotions and rather less with your head.

Take for instance saying you found the claim that some people were bribed to go to South Vietnam ‘insulting’, well to you it may be but that doesn’t necessarily make it untrue. You say my history is absurd well you may think so but it comes from mainstream accounts and histories and is based on what I’ve read of these. Remember there were people that thought the idea that the world was round was absurd.

You make a big thing out of the thousands killed, but the problem is US foreign policy has supported governments who have also killed thousands. Are you saying that only ‘communist’ dictators have run authoritarian regimes that have tortured and murdered their opponents? Are you saying that the only murders and torture worth mentioning are those committed by people the US doesn’t like? I hope that you are not saying like some have argued on these very forums that Saddams murders and tortures were ok when he was fighting the US’s enemy Iran but then ‘became’ bad when he became the US’s enemy?

Your argument also seem all over the place, you compare Vietnam to Taiwan, China plus North and South Korea but do not give any explanation as to why? Their histories are very different. Some aspect may be similar or contrasts can be made but to just say X is like Y doesn’t make sense.

I pointed out the US led land reform program in South Korea to show that such reforms could be acceptable to the US and that they were seen as a way of gaining popularity for a regime. This was also copying a communist idea.

The US advisers convinced the Rhee regime of the need for a thorough land reform program. They were very much aware of events in China, where the nationalist Kuomintang had been defeated by the communists who promised rural peoples «land to the tiller». The US scheme in South Korea allowed for compensation, and land redistribution limited to three hectares per person; former Japanese-owned land was also redistributed. Many of the previous land-owners moved to the cities.

http://gbgm-umc.org/country_profiles/country_history.cfm?Id=151

But to blankly and seemingly blindly to compare one place with another seems silly.

**

So you have given me very little to work with here.

Your points seem to be that -

The Southern Government and US involvement was popular in the south.

If the Hanoi government had been allowed to take control it would have been worse than what did happen.

Well I’ve yet to see the evidence for the first, even if you take the number of 900,000 refugees going south (125,000 going north Logill) at face value that still doesn’t mean the majority of those in the south didn’t want an independent Vietnam. If is was true why was it that the US backed Diem didn’t at least negotiate, or have a South only referendum?

The second is unknowable. We just do not know what would have happened if Ho’s declaration of Vietnamese independence in 1945 had been accepted and the US had not backed the French take-over then interfered themselves. But we do know what did happen.

I think (and it can only be supposition) is that it could have been better if the international community had worked to bring it about.

 

Didn't the USSR create the conditions by invading Afghanistan?

?…how about the British Empire and Tsarist Russia.. or anyone think Alexander the Great had a lot to answer for….?

As one of my lecturers used to say if you begin looking at cause and effect you can quickly end up at the primeval soup.

In this case the Soviets were a spent force by 87, and they left in 89 the taliban got to power in 96 so there is some 7-9 years in which the US could have done something. Instead it virtually washed its hands of the country, it’s policy was to counter another great power Russia, once that seemed to have been achieved it wasn’t much interested in helping the desperate people of Afghanistan.

In the time when it had been active there it had helped both the Saudis and the Pakistanis to recruit train and equip fighters and it knew just what kind of fighters that were being produced.

The US knew that the Saudis support and export an extreme form of Islamic teaching (Wahabism). Pakistan is also that has a very high number of people with very conservative views of Islam.

It also knew what kind of people the warlords were they knew they made money from opium and they knew they where brutal and misogiynist. Also they gave money to anyone so there was quiet a few warlords that at the end spent as much more time fighting each other as they did the soviets. The ‘country’ that came out was a mess and the warlord then caused more damage than had happened in the whole war. The US policy was short sighted and self-serving it was to hurt the soviets and had little to do with ‘saving’ Afghanistan or the Afghans. I believe that if they had had the people in mind they would have done things diffrently. The sad thing is that US policy today is not much different it still seems short sighted, self-serving and seems to have little to do with ‘saving’ Afghanistan or the Afghans.

"Similarly, 99% of Iraq's arms came from countries other than the US. That's tens of billions of dollars of arms. You don't want to talk about the 99%, because you don't want the debate to be "who armed Iraq", you want it to be "in what ways is the US to blame for Iraq getting armed", which is the only way to frame the debate to keep it focussed on US guilt"

Does the US allow tens of billions of dollars of arms to be sold to Cuba? You have to remember how powerful the US is. Places like Egypt are not free agents when it comes to who they can sell areas related products to. It also gave assiatance to Iraq in other ways.

Although official U.S. policy still barred the export of U.S. military equipment to Iraq, some was evidently provided on a "don't ask - don't tell" basis. In April 1984, the Baghdad interests section asked to be kept apprised of Bell Helicopter Textron's negotiations to sell helicopters to Iraq, which were not to be "in any way configured for military use" [Document 55]. The purchaser was the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. In December 1982, Bell Textron's Italian subsidiary had informed the U.S. embassy in Rome that it turned down a request from Iraq to militarize recently purchased Hughes helicopters. An allied government, South Korea, informed the State Department that it had received a similar request in June 1983 (when a congressional aide asked in March 1983 whether heavy trucks recently sold to Iraq were intended for military purposes, a State Department official replied "we presumed that this was Iraq's intention, and had not asked.") [Document 44]

During the spring of 1984 the U.S. reconsidered policy for the sale of dual-use equipment to Iraq's nuclear program, and its "preliminary results favor[ed] expanding such trade to include Iraqi nuclear entities" [Document 57]. Several months later, a Defense Intelligence Agency analysis said that even after the war ended, Iraq was likely to "continue to develop its formidable conventional and chemical capability, and probably pursue nuclear weapons" [Document 58]. (Iraq is situated in a dangerous neighborhood, and Israel had stockpiled a large nuclear weapons arsenal without international censure. Nuclear nonproliferation was not a high priority of the Reagan administration - throughout the 1980s it downplayed Pakistan's nuclear program, though its intelligence indicated that a weapons capability was being pursued, in order to avert congressionally mandated sanctions. Sanctions would have impeded the administration's massive military assistance to Pakistan provided in return for its support of the mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

 

I blame Russia, and then you reply that

and then immediately return to blaming America. No soup for you?

You didn't pick the best example there Balbus. How did Cuba acquire its air force? Do they build their own MiGs? In fact Cuba got over $11 billion in military gifts from the USSR. http://www.fas.org/asmp/library/scourge/scourge-ch3.pdf I guess the US must have conspired to get Cuba armed.

And you have continued your efforts to steer debate away from "who armed Iraq" to "in what ways can we blame the US for Iraq getting armed", or at least "rather than talking about the tens of billions of actual military equipment sold to Iraq, lets only talk about US "dual use" sales. As two examples, you give civilian helicopters and, surprisingly, trucks. So lets not talk about sales of military helicopters. No, not the Mi-24 Hind, one of the most powerful attack helicopters ever built, or the Gazelles and other military helicopters sold by the French. No, let's talk about civilian helicopters sold by the US! And lets not talk about the four and a half thousand tanks, and where they came from. Lets talk about trucks! Despite the fact that significant misconceptions about who armed Iraq persist in the forum, and the overwhelming opposition to US policy in Iraq here, you continue your mission to ensure that all debate is focussed solely on US guilt, and pretend that is somehow a helpful contribution.

 

Just as you will spin off onto any set of diversionary examples (regurgitated from your clear adherence to mainstream media as your only real effort at substantive research) to dismiss any US culpability or the fact that WE not Russia nor China, nor any other nation you would much rather point a finger at, are militarily stationed in more nations and regularly dictating policy to serve OUR hegemonic interests than any empire so far in the history of man.

You live for excuses, dismissals and outright denial PB, and have only the further gall to call others pompous. Neocon hack!

 

Pointbreak,

I don't often agree with Balbus, but I think he's right on about Vietnam. The US killed far more Vietnamese than the VC or NVA ever did. (The commonly accepted figure ranges from 1-2 million, with roughly 45% civilians.) It is patently obvious that the puppet South Vietnamese regime had little or no popular support. We even assassinated our vassal Diem because he was so widely hated by his own people. Unfortunately, we made the communists seem like the only credible alternative, by liquidating vitually all political opposition to our occupation (e.g. "strategic hamlets," Tiger Force, Operation Phoenix, etc.) Even some of our military advisors recognized this, but they were largely ignored in Washington. (Read A Bright Shining Lie by Neal Sheehan.)

I realize that communist Vietnam is no utopia, but nor is it remotely comparable to Stalinist North Korea. (Remember that it was the Vietnamese communists who finally deposed the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.) Our intervention in Vietnam accomplished nothing except to kill lots of people and devastate the country.

MLK gave a very poignant speech on the topic not long before his death:

http://www.illuminingtalks.org/humanitarian/martin_luther_king/beyond_vietnam/document_view

 

Ho Chi Minh was also much more of a nationalist than he ever was a communist, his main objective was always simply to get the foreign powers out of Vietnam. That's why he was so popular. Minh had even appealed to the US for aid against the French, but was turned down, and so then he went to the Soviets.

 

I'd debate the content of that, but your content = ZERO. And your post doesn't even make grammatical sense. You also have a real problem with run-on sentences, a problem which needs to be addressed urgently.

Finally, the Federation of American Scientists is not "mainstream media", and if you'd like to debate Soviet aid to Cuba with non-mainstream media such as www.whatreallyreallyreallyhappenedIsweardude.com/tinfoilhat.html go ahead, but you probably don't dispute the figures I gave and are simply dumping boilerplate attacks into your boilerplate post.

Having dealt with the troll, I now return to the debate.

HuckFinn, one point that I have tried to make with Balbus is that saying that South Vietnam's (SV) government had no popularity is a bit of a joke. Was East Germany's government more popular than West Germany's? After all on many occasions people protested the West German government and voted out its leaders, whereas this never happened in East Germany. So which government was more popular?

And I totally reject the idea that this unpopularity made the communists "the only viable alternative". Lack of support for the SV government does not equate to support for the communists. If no UN intervention had kept South Korea free, would we now be concluding that South Korea fell because its government didn't have enough popular support? Popular support and just government do not produce military victories. North Korea was not defeated because the UN represented truth and justice, it was defeated because the UN defeated North Korean military forces on the battlefield.

And what is the difference? Although it took many years, in the end what happened was that SV was invaded by North Vietnam. Saigon was not capured by viet cong guerillas with sharpened bamboo stakes, it was overrun by North Vietnamese divisions complete with hundreds of tanks.

The communists did what they could to extinguish all opposition. As early at 1957 they were assassinating South Vietnamese officials by the hundreds. This goes unmentioned in most histories of the conflict.

No they weren't North Korea, but they still had gulags and mass killings, and brought economic ruin to their country. By any measure it was a tyrannical regime in North Korea and a tyrannical regime for the rest of the country after 1975.

After supporting the khmer rouge in their rise to power, they decided to take them out only because khmer rouge forces were attacking them, and their occupation of cambodia was at times brutal. the democide in cambodia was not a factor in their invasion.

Yes, our involvement in Vietnam accomplished nothing except killing and desctruction. The same could have been said for Korea had we packed up and left after China entered. Any lost war is obviously a pointless waste.

Well it sure seems like he made a pretty good communist to me. He exterminated all non-communist opposition in North Vietnam, set up a one party communist state, collectivised agriculture, and then followers inspired by his vision imposed the same in South Vietnam. He was so popular that he was never elected, nor has any of the 'nationalists' who followed him.

 

Sorry have to pipe in here on this...seeing as that I recently waged a battle with grammar-nazis. So sorry for the off-trackness of this.

There are no academic rules about how forum/message board posts are supposed to be written. They dont even have to legible. Lickerish's post was legible and I understood it perfectly, run-on sentences and all. You most likely did too, seeing your response to her comment.

While during your debate with Likerish..I have been agreeing more with you, a word of advice...

It is common knowledge that pointing out grammar mistakes as a way to gain ground in a debate, is not the most intelligent manuever. It just makes you look silly. It also proves(unfortunately)that you cannot sharply come back to her flaming or as most ought to..ignore it altogether...therefore your only tactic is to criticize her grammatical errors on a message board post. You could have just told Lickerish to "bite you" and moved on to derail the rest of her argument.

Sorry, a large petpeeve of mine, are people on forums who sit around and pick on other people's grammar. Especially, when their own grammar is not something to brag about.

The only time that I pick on people about grammar is; when they pick on others' grammar and spell the word "grammar" as "grammer". Those people really deserve to be Otter-smacked.LOL.

Oh and her quote could have been worse, it could have been this.

"OMG!!!1!!!!1 U R sutch and asshile!!!1111!!!1"


Ok Pointbreak you may resume your flogging.

 

The East German government was externally imposed by the Soviets; not so with North Vietnam.

Military victory was possible in Korea because there was no substantial insurgency in the South allied with the North.

Unlike Korea, the Vietnamese conflict predated the artificial North-South division. I've never known any credible historian to dispute that Ho Chi Minh would have won in a landslide, had we allowed the 1956 election to be held.

Were the Viet Minh allowed to work as an opposition party through political means?

Again, we far outdid them in the mass murder department, and Vietnam is a much more open and prosperous country than North Korea. The insanity that followed the fall of Saigon might have been averted if we'd stayed out.

The Khmer Rouge filled a political vacuum created by our destabilization of Cambodia.

We could've only "won" by waging an even more indiscrimately murderous war than we did, and we'd likely still entrenched there if we hadn't finally wised up and gotten out. Again, the historical roots of the Vietnamese and Korean conflicts were very different.

Here's a quote from the military advisor profiled in the book I recommended previously:

"If I were a lad of eighteen faced with the same choice -- whether to support the [Saigon government] or the NLF -- and a member of a rural community, I would surely choose the NLF."

- http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/Sheehan/sheehan-con3.html

(See also the MLK speech I cited earlier.)

 

Otter I agree with you 100%. As a rule I never critisize grammar or spelling, not least because my own standard is not especially high. I would definitely never critisize somebody whose first language is not english or who obviously just makes a lot of honest mistakes.

The thing about LHI is that her style deliberately stuffs so much pompous, turgid writing into run on sentences which condemn people for incorrect thinking or demand that they "get educated". If someone insists on using language this way, I think that makes them fair game.

And if I am going to do her the favor of actually wading through a post even though it is nothing more than a dreary, long winded tirade, the least she can do is write something that makes sense.

Having said all that, I'll try to resist the temptation from now on.

 

Clearly you read nothing, otherwise I would not need remind you for the upteenth time that I am not a "she".

As for pompous, I couldn't hold a candle to your routine demonstrations of self absorbed dismissal, denial of documented reality (going so far as to show your laughable ignorance by denying the well documented facts of our historic duplicites in Veitnam in response to Balbus's quite substantiated presentations) and repeated flaming.

You get only as good as you give PB, and its become clear that substantive effort is wasted on your self woven cocoon of Murdoch fed spin.

 

Point are ok? I usually think of you as clear headed and perceptive but here you seem to be rather obtuse. You didn’t get the meaning of the lecturer’s saying or that the arming of Cuba virtually only by USSR was the actual point I was making.

You are making a big think about me criticising the US but I have already given my reasons. I said that the political forums on Hipforums are nearly exclusively filled with Americans, and for that reason the subjects and issues discussed here are more often as not going to have an American perspective or slant. You accuse me of being anti-American but I judge things as I see them and we all tailor our conversations to where we are or the company we are in. When I lived in France I argued with a slant toward French politics here in Britain it has a British slant (I’m also a member of the Green Party). It should also be remembered that I have written things for the forums that reflected my views and criticisms on European issues and history, but frankly it doesn’t get much of a response. As I have commented many Americans that I have argued with here seem loath to learn or understand American history so trying to discuss that of Britain or European is sometimes near impossible, although some do and it can be wonderful.

However as fun as it would be to discuss European issues and history I have to say that the main reason I’m here (as I’ve said many times) is to try and understand the American viewpoint and perspective on politics especially the US’s right wing perspective.

One thing I have learnt is that there seems to be a certain desire to simplify things to ‘yes or no’, good or bad, with us or against us in American thought. This I believe has led to a viewpoint amongst many Americans that the US ultimately cannot be criticised.

Think about it if someone only has two choices ‘good’ or ‘bad’ then when such people think of the US it is most likely they will think ‘good’. Incidentally this is why I think so many on the right use the ‘love it or leave it’ argument. If a person criticises America they must hate it this being either/or and so cannot be ‘truly’ American so they should leave. If I demonstrated against a British government, institution or establishment or if I criticised the brutal imperialism of Britain’s past (and present) those opposed to my view don’t see this as an attack on ‘Britishness’, but as an attack on government policies.

This belief in American ‘goodness’ means that even when a US policy does things that look ‘wrong’ it can only mean that it did it for a higher purpose. From the treatment of the native Americans to the Iraqi Occupation, there is a belief in some quarters of the American public that see such actions as ultimately leading to good since otherwise the US wouldn’t have done them. It isn’t logical but belief systems usually aren’t, but it is comforting which belief systems usually are.



The US government and elite even gives the American people ‘good intentions’ to believe in. They give them ‘good’ goals and the slogans to go with them. These aims also portray the American people as the guardians of the light and the champion of civilisation. So there was the destruction of the ‘evil empire’ and the scourge of ‘communism’, as one American I talked to commented a lot of ‘bad shit’ might have happened in the Cold War but the objective was still righteous. Then there was the ‘War on Drugs’ which kept the torturers and right wing paramilitaries trained in the cold war in a job. Now there is the ‘War on Terror’ and as another American right winger argued Iraq might not have had anything to do with 9/11 but it was still part of the scheme to end Islamic terrorism.

To me the US is just another country like any other in history it and its people are not chosen by god and it has no ‘manifest destiny’. To me policies and decisions are to be looked at on their merits and those merits can be argued over.

**

So we come back to Vietnam, I find that some people try to place it under the umbrella of the ‘Cold War’. As if to say that while things may have been done wrong it should be seen as having as its ultimate goal a ‘goodness’ and so therefore what seemed wrong was not wrong.

I think that every episode should be seen on its merits not as part of an arc, because otherwise lines can become blurred. For example in many Americans minds there was no distinction between left wing thought, it was all seen as ‘communist’ and so social and economic reformers could be portrayed by their enemies as ‘communists’, trade unionist became ‘communists’, hippies and anti-war demonstrators became ‘communists’. And every ‘communist’ leader was or would be as bad and evil as Stalin. It is again that yes / no outlook ‘communist’ / ‘not communist’ it was then a short step to communist bad, anti-Communist good. So it was then easy to accept brutal and corrupt regimes like those of Pinochet, the Shah or Diem purely because they were anti-Communist.

US policy toward Indochina was based on anti-Communism, which meant that while it believed it had the interests of the people at heart, their views and opinions would always be secondary (if thought about at all) and only would be canvassed if the outcome would be what was wanted. Remember the US is ‘good’ what it believes in is therefore ‘good’ and so its actions will therefore be ‘good’. It therefore would follow that wherever the US goes the native population there will understand that Americans are doing what is best for them. Even if the native populations don’t seem to want the same things as the Americans want it doesn’t matter the US will still believe that what they believe is best. This is expressed in a quote attributed to Henry Kissinger

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." Many of those that went to Vietnam believed they were there to save the people. What they found was that many Vietnamese didn’t like them and didn’t want them there. You can see the same incomprehension at this situation from soldiers today in Iraq.

The Vietnamese wanted independence, Ho and the Hanoi government claimed (and were believed) to be fighting for Vietnamese independence. The communist insurgents the British fought in Malaya also claimed (and were believed) to be fighting for independence. The UK government policy was to give Malaya a timetable for independence this reduced the support given to the insurgents. The US anti-Communist policy couldn’t promise independence since it claimed that the South Vietnamese government was independent and they had been invited to be there. The problem was many of the Southern Vietnamese didn’t much believe it at first and as US military presence became larger it looked like an out and out lie. Also the way the US fought the war did not help in winning hearts and minds there was a lot of talk but I think in the end they just thought that being anti-Communist was enough (just as I think some thought just being anti-Saddam would be enough in Iraq).

Point your argument seems to be based on a similar single-minded, and simplistic ‘yes/no outlook since Ho and the Hanoi government were ‘evil communists’ then any other government was better even if it was brutal or corrupt. That since Ho and Hanoi were ‘evil communists’ they couldn’t have been popular.

 

Huck thank you, this just show that however far apart people may seem to be there is usually some common ground for them somewhere.

Cheers Balbus

 

Your continued efforts are laudable Balbus, but sooner or later i suspect you will be forced to conclude that such lengthy posts are wasted on the HITS crowd. The lies and ideology-grasping denials of historic reality are much more preferrable to such types than is confronting the evils which have been perpetrated in our name for decades, however extensively such evils have been revealed.

The "great Communist menace" (and all such external "evils") makes for a wonderfully convenient filter through which Washington's equally expeditionary, militant and expansionistic policies can be distilled down to only the purest of intents with which such simplistic minds might console themselves.

Bravo for the effort nonetheless.

 

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0208/S00158.htm

Yeah, the us never SOLD any Chemical Weapons to Iraq or Saddam, but they sure did help him develop them!

"not only did Washington turn a blind-eye to the Hussein regime's repeated use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Iraq's Kurdish minority, but the US helped Iraq develop its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs."

And when things looked bad for The US's Ally In The Iran/Iraq War, they sent them LOADS of Weapons and Military Supplies To Win (All Sent from other countries to hide the evidence).

"Using its allies in the Middle East, Washington funnelled huge supplies of arms to Iraq. Classified State Department cables uncovered by Frantz and Waas described covert transfers of howitzers, helicopters, bombs and other weapons to Baghdad in 1982-83 from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait."

"Howard Teicher, who monitored Middle East policy at the US National Security Council during the Reagan administration, told the February 23, 1992, LA Times: ``There was a conscious effort to encourage third countries to ship US arms or acquiesce in shipments after the fact. It was a policy of nods and winks.''

If that isn't enough for you, here is some more Associated Reading For You:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/31/world/main534798.shtml
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A52241-2002Dec29&notFound=true
http://www.prisonplanet.com/news_alert_090802_enemies.html

As For This, The Money was sent to Humanitarian Organizations, but was most likely intercepted by the Taliban, maybe the US government knew this to begin with, and was a secret way to fund them, maybe not, who REALLY knows. But all I am saying is the Money sent to Humanitarian Organizations was probably ALL (unfortunetly) taken By The Taliban.

Peace and Love,
Dan

 

PB, the reason the majority of people in these forums critique the US government's role in Wars and Conflicts, and not other countries roles is because we LIVE in the US, and we want to look at things from a US perspective. We are ALL good and aware that every other countries government does horrible things as well, but, I am Usually found questioning the US role in things because 1. I hold the US government to a Higher standard than every other country, the US is supposed to be RUN by the people, for the people, and whenever i see the least bit of that rule being broken, I will always stand up against it, and 2. Because I LIVE in the US, I do look at other countries Roles in things, but not to the extent of US involvement.

Peace and Love,
Dan

 

LickHERish, OMG!!!1!!!!1 U R sutch and asshile!!!1111!!!1 Your posts, again, say nothing! And why the hell does your name say HER if your aren't a she?

This should be split into about three threads by now, but...

Balbus, you are the one saying that a million North Vietnamese fled south because they were offered free cows. Presumably the one million boat people left because they were offered free fish then. And you are asking me if am OK? Don't give me your condescending bullshit.

Here's a quote from a "greenleft" paper:

Wow! The only reason people fled was because of stuff that can be blamed on the USA! Amazing.

That's the kind of attitude I am getting a little bored with here. Rationalising and apologising for communism. You could almost get the impression here that there was nothing actually wrong with communism and it was all a big scare dreamed up in the Pentagon.

Right, and you go to Freerepublic to hear from the left then.

Here's what I think is a typical Balbus post - after numerous posts pointing out bad economic data coming out of the US, I point out some good economic data. Only at that point do you decide to step in and remind everyone that economic data can't be trusted, and it may be misleading. Funny how you don't need to point that out when the data is bad, ain't it? You seem to feel that in a forum which overwhelmingly slants towards disapproval of the US, you have an important role to play by stepping in and challenging anything which could remotely be considered favorable to the US. I don't think that's a new perspective.

Sure, your attempts to steer debate towards European topics or perspectives may fall flat. So do mine, obviously, how many people care about the 99% of Iraq's weapons that were purchased from countries other than the US? As far as I can tell nobody, but I'm going to keep pointing it out because I think it is more useful than telling people who already overwhelmingly believe that the US was primarily responsible for arming Iraq all about exciting truck purchases.

Also I have made the point repeatedly that Taiwan and South Korea had generally odious regimes. Applying the standards you have to South Vietnam, we would find that they were bad countries which should have been allowed to fall to the communists (who were, of course, "popular"). The same can be said for Chile. Although Chile will always live in the left wing hatred hall of fame, what did Pinochet do compared to what the Vietnamese communists did? His brutality, a mere fraction of what Vietnam managed, eventually produced a democratic and relatively prosperous country. What did Vietnam produce? A totalitarian state mired in poverty. Nonetheless, for the left Vietnam was a victory for justice and Chile is simply another example of American evil.

Hipster, you have now conceded two of my points already - #1, the US did not sell chemical weapons to Iraq, #2, the vast majority of Saddam's arsenal was purchased from countries other than the US. That leaves one point.

It's pretty hard to refute this - if you simply make a convenient theory up off the top of your head and provide no evidence whatsoever, how can I disprove it? Essentially the premise seems to be that in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, knowing that the US is universally evil, we shall simply assume a crime has been committed and covered up so well that no trace exists.

You know what? I'm going to go ahead and award point #3 in my favor anyway. So I named three myths and proved them.

 

I'm really enjoying this thread and because I have nothing remotely intelligent to add to it...I will simply say this.


OMG...U guyz so Rock!!!!11!!!!1! This Thred is teh kewl!!!!111111!!!!!!!


oh and Lickherish...did anyone tell you..you sound like a chick when you write? which is funny because people often refer to me as a "he" or "dude". So I guess I sound like a guy when I write.LOL. Sorry for the mixup...I don't recall you ever telling me you were a "he"..if you did, I missed it.oops.

ok all...you may now ignore me and continue the manly show of aggressive intellect..it's quite sexy.