> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Warren Ockrassa > Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 3:07 AM > To: Killer Bs Discussion > Subject: Re: Barack Obama > > Please use quotes when replying. > > On Aug 2, 2007, at 12:30 AM, jon louis mann wrote: > > > gore would be my choice for a dark horse, if he decides to run, but > > that may only happens if hillary stunbles. > > It's a longshot. A very long shot. I don't see him running at all, but > I sure as hell hope I'm wrong. > > > the american people want to see osama held accountable, far more than > > saddam, who was a straw man. he ordered 9/11 and for that there must > > be closure. > > Saddam Hussein was a friend to the US until we decided he wasn't. There > are photos of him shaking hands with and smiling at Donald Rumsfeld.
There are also photos of Reagan and Brezhnev smiling and shaking hands too...and Reagan considered the USSR an evil empire. We chose to deal with Iraq, just as we chose to deal with Syria, Communist China, the Taliban for a while, etc. I'm not really sure what you think we should have done. Just bought oil from these countries but not have any contact? > OBL was trained by the US when Communist Russia existed; we taught him > how to be an insurgent against a larger force ... and then our > war-by-proxy with the USSR ended, more or less; what was OBL to do with > his training then? There is no real data that supports OBL being trained by the US. Almost exclusively, the US involvement was with Afghan resistance units. Members of these units included those who became the "Northern Alliance" and the Taliban. The US tilted towards the Northern Alliance, but wasn't much involved after the Soviets left Afghanistan. The training of foreign resistance fighters was very minimal. They probably benefited, indirectly, from the US supply of arms to the Afghanistan resistance movement, but there was no interest in training fighters from Saudi Arabia who were even more fundamentalist than the ruling family. > We made both of these "monsters". That is a fact. How? Did the US found the Bath party, for example? > But that is not how it would be SEEN by the rest of the world. Surely > you understand that and the implications. > > > if we pull out of iraq it will be holy war between shiite and sunni. > > It ALREADY IS a war between shi'ite and sunni. Not really....the death toll has fallen by more than a factor of two in the last 6 months. The projections after a full pullout are on the order of half a million to a million deaths in a year or so. In hindsight, the best thing to do with Iraq is let Hussein stay in power, keep the low level war going to minimize the torture and killing (to an estimated 30k deaths/year, and try to keep the sanctions for as long as possible. After 9-11, they probably could have lasted a few more years, before the pressure from the French (who's ambassador admitted to working for Hussein) and Russians to end the sanctions so they could make money on Iraq's oil. At that point, Hussein had planned to restart his MWD programs...according to the same documentation that explained why he hid the fact that he had little in the way of WMD. That's still not a good thing. The US has had and still has fairly limited options. It appears to me that you view the US as much more influential than I do. I see us as having difficult and limited options during the Iraq-Iran war. You see us as creating Hussein and strongly supporting him. If that were true, why did he have so little in the way of US arms in 1991? You also see a relatively minor connection between the US and AQ as critical. I see the Middle East as being complicated and the development of AQ as multi-causal. The main influence of the US on this has been, as AQ has stated, the strong cultural influence (poisoning in AQ's view) of Western Culture on the Middle East. Horrible things like the tolerance of atheism, letting women outside of the home, and letting homosexuals live. Do I understand your viewpoint correctly? If not, how does it vary from my interpretation? Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
