Why did Bush deliberately attack the wrong country?

OST* of Iraq's dissendents have been
protected by the Iranian government "at some time or another". We're not
talking about a weekend visit here, al Sadr was living under protected status
in Iran for 4 years and was returned to Iraq *by the Iranian government*!

Interesting I wonder why Ayatollah Sistani went to UK for the negotations,oops
I meant for the treatment,and not to US or Iran ?
US lost the Irak when Ayatollah Sistani in fall of 2003 declared a terrorist
bomb attack that claimed the lives of hundreds of worshippers as a "provocation
of US".
The wise Ayatollah was right it was a provocation but not a "provocation of
US".

Only if he stays there for 4 years as a guest of the goverment then re-enters
the country with the assistance of the Iranian government.

Where and when did Sistani go for the "treatment" and how he returned to Iraq?.
Similarities with Ayatollah Humeyni's return to Iran from France are of course
only coincidental.

Both Britain and France are of course very experienced the Great Game players.

Emmanuel Gustin wrote:

The term "neo-con" has the advantage that it is close, if
not in etymology then at least in sound and appearance,
to "con-men".

Ohh, so we're talking about how a word sounds, not what it means? How very
European of you. Now do a google on "Neocon" and tell me who it applies to on
Bush's cabnit. There are people working in positions in the administration that
could be catagorized as "neo conservatives" (what Neocon stands for), but they
don't occupy any cabnit positions and they are certainly the minority. The Bush
administration is simply conservative.


BUFDRVR

"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"

Paul J. Adam wrote:

Harboured a few, but then so does the US according to us.

Which member of the IRA was harbored by the U.S. ever, but particularly after
9/11?

Life isn't simple or obvious.

I guess because it happened here and not in Europe September 11th has left
(after nearly 3 years) two starkly different impressions on Europe and the U.S.
As far as terrorism is concerned, life is simple and very obvious.

But much worse has been tolerated in the past

"The past" being the key term. 9/11 changed everything.

and it remains a question worth asking: given the
cost in troops tied up, what made Iraq such a pressing threat?

The potential of Hussain.


BUFDRVR

"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"

Zarqawi was AQ...Al Zarqawi was wounded by coalition forces in Afghanistan
and fled....Al Zarqawi was allowed into Iraq by Hussein...Al Zarqawi was
given medical treatment in Baghdad...Al Zarqawi ended up working with Anser
Al Islam, which group had

Interesting Al Zarqawi ,who speaks Arabic with Jordanian accent but never uses
his Jordanian accent during his televised execution orgies,and and whole AQ now
seems to target every country that oppose the occupation of Iraq by Anglos.
(France,Russia etc)

The dreaded AQ is only a proxy of US,after it has been used for the realization
of US policy goals on 9/11 (as suggested by Brzezinski in his book) now its
used to bring the countries that oppose US policies in the line with US policy.

"BUFDRVR" wrote
Emmanuel Gustin wrote:

The term "neo-con" has the advantage that it is close, if
not in etymology then at least in sound and appearance,
to "con-men".

Ohh, so we're talking about how a word sounds, not what it means? How very
European of you. Now do a google on "Neocon" and tell me who it applies to on
Bush's cabnit. There are people working in positions in the administration that
could be catagorized as "neo conservatives" (what Neocon stands for), but they
don't occupy any cabnit positions and they are certainly the minority. The Bush
administration is simply conservative.

I don't go to a lot of political sites. I'm basically a Republican because the
Democrats have yet to field a team I respect (Since 1970 when I started voting).
I asked Kramer two times what a neocon was, and he didn't reply. I don't think
he knows what it means. About the only thing I found, where the acronym was
used in every paragraph, was some loony juvenile web site (with some pretty old
people running it).

My politics pretty much side with a more liberal agenda than this administration is
putting forward. For example, I am willing to give up 98% of our nuclear weapons,
as we no longer have the stomach to use them, and they cost the same as an F-15E
to keep on alert (1300 of them I believe). I am willing to give up Forces in Korea,
Europe, and the Sinai. With those troops cannibalized into Iraq. I believe we should
move all the forces out of Korea and Europe, and move them to Iraq. The next big
war is either Syria, or Iran, and we will need the armor and airbases. My feelings
about Chechnya and North Korea, are that we (Russians in the first, Americans in
the second) should pull out, wait 9 months, and then use Neutron weapons to
wipe them out, as they cheer in the streets about their victory.

Drugs? Legalize them all, tax them and use the taxes for health care. Having fought
the war on drugs for 10 years (actively), I can say without reservation, it's a war that
cannot be won, and the battles are merely getting more costly every month. If people
want drugs, then I think they should get it at low cost, and safer products to reduce the
overload on city morgues. When we have a squadron of 250 million dollar airplanes
orbiting Central and South America, with almost 30,000 troops in the war, and the
quantity of cocaine is increasing on the streets, then that's the definition of a failed
policy.

Alas, so far neither Bush, nor Kerry have even mentioned nuclear weapons, and the
war on drugs. Every month that Los Alamos stays in operation, is another month of
exporting nuclear technology to China. The troops in the Sinai are invisible, and
people don't even know we are spending billions on them (as a trip-wire).

rom:

You seem to forget the most important name of whole neo con story.
Neocons are also known as "The Straussians", .Leo Strauss was the spritual
leader and chief ideologist of neo con movement.

Many of the neo cons you mentioned above were actually the students of
Strauss.

Leo Strauss, yes, another one of Columbia University's Germans. Certainly an
important ivory tower conservative philosopher.
What I was mentioning was the relationship of the so-called neo-cons to Sen.
Jackson. All those I mentioned were protoges of his, many working for him in
their youth.
They were more directly influence by Jackson's views, which were evolved from
personal experience, both his and his confreres such as Paul Nitze, Walt
Rostow, George Meany and others.
The bipartisan Committe on the Present Danger, officially debuted in Nov.,
1976, is a better place than Strauss to look for "neo-con" origins. Among
founding members were Charles E. Walker, Richard V. Allen, Lane Kirland, Jay
Lovestone, Henry H. Fowler, Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt, James Schlesinger, Max
Kampelman, David Pakard, Charles Burton Marshall, Edmund A. Gullion and Charles
Tyroler II.
Students of American political science will spot in this list men from the
Truman, Johnson and Nixon administrations, not to mention the Fletcher School
of Diplomacy and the AFL-CIO. Such a group of brilliant minds led to some very
lively discussions at the Metropolitan Club in D.C.
Labor leader George Meany's straightforward brand of political philosophy was
more their style than Leo Strauss. Here's what Meany said about what the CPD
was all about: "In my book, you have to be anti-communist. You have to be
anti-dictatorship. You have to be anti-Allende, you have to be anti-Franco,
anti-Hitler, anti-Stalin, anti-South Africa. The people who consider
themselves liberal become very selective. They can be very anti-South
Africa--strongly against this apartheid policy--and shrug their shoulders about
Czechoslovakia and Poland and the Soviet Union. We hold them all even."
You've also got the Georgetown University anti-communist branch, where Jean
Kirkpatrick was, along with Ernest Lefever, Valerie Earle, William V. O'Brian,
Estelle R. Ramey and Peter Krogh. Their Center for Strategic and International
Studies, affiliated with the AEI, was chaired by CPD member Ray Cline, who, as
you know, was former deputy director of the CIA. It published a journal,
Washington Quarterly, that dueled with the pro-detente Foreign Affairs.
Other important names in these formative days were the amazing Bertram Wolfe,
who went from being a card-carrying communist to a member of the Hoover
Institution, Richard Pipes, also a very interesting fellow, Richard J. Whalen
and James T. Farrell (author of the Studs Lonigen trilogy, for fans of the
American novel), not to mention Clare Boothe Luce, Dean Rusk, Peter Grace
(Grace Corp.), William F. Casey, and Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Gen. Matthew
Ridgway. Again note the bipartisanship.
The Jewish element was well represented in the CPD, prominent among them Saul
Bellow (the Nobel-prize winning novelist), Nathan Glazer, Oscar Handlin,
Seymour Martin Lipset, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Dector (Podhoretz' wife).
Back in the seventies, this nascent "neo-con" movement was described by Sidney
Bloomenthal (who defined neo-conservatism as "the counter-establishment" which
I think is a very accurate way to describe what it was--against detente and
accomodation, the premier policies of Nixon and Carter) as "the final stage [so
he thought then] of the Old Left.... The conservatives believe that the
Liberal Establishment has been ruining the country. The neo-conservatives (who
aren't conservative in the traditional sense at all) add to this general notion
the belief that liberals are either a species of Stalinist fellow traveler or
operate 'objectively'--whether they know it or not--in the broad interest of
the Soviet Union. Conservatives would like to believe this, too, but deep down
don't. But the neo-conservatives, many with the benefit of Trotskyist
background, offer an unmatchable authenticity and intensity on the subject."
The CPD people bitterly opposed the New Left, which they clearly saw had a
dangerous fascination with populist totalitarianism. As Podhoretz recalled,
"To be pro-American in the 1970s was like being anti-Soviet in the 1930s. But
just as radicalism then had been tied to suport of the Soviet Union as the
center of socialist hope, so radicalism in the '70s increasingly defined itself
in opposition to the United States as the major obstacle to the birth of a
better world." This view the CPD and like-minded thinkers vowed to fight and
defeat.
You could see all of this played out during the GOP convention this week, with
the populist totalitarian loons raving in the streets while Democrats Ed Koch
and Zell Miller joined forces with like-minded Republicans to face real, deadly
threats to freedom and democracy whatever the current incarnation, nazis,
commies, islamic terrorists...whoever, while the Liberal Establishment, now
almost all in the current incarnation of the Democratic Party, looked on with
raised eyebrows at all this unnecessary alarmism.



Chris Mark

Leo Strauss, yes, another one of Columbia University's Germans. Certainly an
important ivory tower conservative philosopher.

Looks are always deceiving,for example did you know that both Karl Marx and
Engels were members of "The League of Just" which was the islamic wing of "The
Illuminati"?

John Mullen wrote:

I've noticed this before; for such a swaggering, gung-ho country, many
Americans seem very thin-skinned.

You're kidding right? With the exception of the Brits, I've found most
Europeans so sensative about *everything* that you can't even joke around with
them.


BUFDRVR

"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"

(BUFDRVR) wrote in message ...
Paul J. Adam wrote:
and it remains a question worth asking: given the
cost in troops tied up, what made Iraq such a pressing threat?

The potential of Hussain.


BUFDRVR

"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"

The Bush administration has been spending enormous sums of money on
"potential" threats that Iraq supposedly posed while ignoring real
threats like those posed by North Korea. Plus, with ten times as many
troops in Iraq as in Afghanistan, the true "war on terror" is being
starved of resources.

I would have preferred that Hussein had remained in power; he was a
secular dictator who kept those Islamic fundamentalists in his country
from achieving the influence that they clearly now have for the first
time. Few people outside of Iraq had heard of Ayatollah al-Sistani
before but now he's the most powerful person there.

The US is much worse off by the invasion of Iraq, which has allowed
Islamic fundamentalism to take hold in there, while diverting
resources away from combating Islamic fundamentalism elsewhere in the
world.

Regards,

Abhijit

Abhijit Bhattacharya wrote:

The Bush administration has been spending enormous sums of money on
"potential" threats that Iraq supposedly posed while ignoring real
threats like those posed by North Korea.

North Korea is not being ignored, but it does represent a much tougher nut to
crack. I think the problems we're encountering with North Korea (possible
nuclear weapons being the the biggest problem) were the main reason we decided
to go into Iraq as soon as we did.

Plus, with ten times as many
troops in Iraq as in Afghanistan, the true "war on terror" is being
starved of resources.

The "true" war on terror exists outside of Afghanistan. You could increase U.S.
force numbers in Afghanistan by twenty and still be getting the same results,
albeit with more U.S. casulties.

I would have preferred that Hussein had remained in power

You and most of the democratic party in the U.S.

he was a
secular dictator who kept those Islamic fundamentalists in his country
from achieving the influence that they clearly now have for the first
time.

However, while he clamped down on Islamic Fundamentalists inside Iraq, he
supported both Hamas and Hezbullah by giving money to the families of suicide
bombers in Isreal and was actively helping Al Queada personnel fighting the
U.S. in Afghanistan. We know al Zarquawi received medical treatment in Baghdad
for wounds from fighting in Afghanistan, but how many more were helped that we
*don't* know about?

The US is much worse off by the invasion of Iraq, which has allowed
Islamic fundamentalism to take hold in there

There hold is tenuous and much less capable of being exported beyond its
borders than it would have been had Hussain remained in charge.


BUFDRVR

"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"