Re: [biofuel] Don't any of you play poker? / was Moral Dilemna
At 06:37 PM 2/22/04 -0600, you wrote: Walt, The problem that I have with you analogies is that they do not include the UN. They had involvement. They were dealing with the situation. I have no doubt that the UN would have taken decisive action, just as soon as they got around to paying their parking tickets. GW Bush said that they were irrelevant. Given their sterling record in Rwanda, perhaps he was just being polite. Walt Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [biofuel] Don't any of you play poker? / was Moral Dilemna
At 06:37 PM 2/22/04 -0600, you wrote: Walt, The problem that I have with you analogies is that they do not include the UN. They had involvement. They were dealing with the situation. I have no doubt that the UN would have taken decisive action, just as soon as they got around to paying their parking tickets. GW Bush said that they were irrelevant. Given their sterling record in Rwanda, perhaps he was just being polite. Walt Follows some stuff out of the grab bag of the last few days. Nothing special - close your eyes and chuck a dart, you can hardly miss. - Keith http://harpers.org/RevisionThing.html Revision Thing A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies Posted on Saturday, September 20, 2003. All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity. Originally from Harper's Magazine, September 2003. By Sam Smith. Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had never seen before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war against them. It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil. It was absolutely clear that the number-one threat facing America was from Saddam Hussein. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts that went back a decade. We learned that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and deadly gases. The regime had long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations. Iraq and Al Qaeda had discussed safe-haven opportunities in Iraq. Iraqi officials denied accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials simply were not credible. You couldn't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talked about the war on terror. The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer was, absolutely. His regime had large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons--including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas, anthrax, botulism, and possibly smallpox. Our conservative estimate was that Iraq then had a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That was enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. We had sources that told us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons--the very weapons the dictator told the world he did not have. And according to the British government, the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the orders were given. There could be no doubt that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. Iraq possessed ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles--far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations. We also discovered through intelligence that Iraq had a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We were concerned that Iraq was exploring ways of using UAVs for missions targeting the United States. * * * Saddam Hussein was determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. We knew he'd been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believed he had, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. The British government learned that Saddam Hussein had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources told us that he had attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear-weapons production. When the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied-finally denied access, a report came out of the [International Atomic Energy Agency] that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I didn't know what more evidence we needed. Facing clear evidence of peril, we could not wait for the final proof that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. The Iraqi dictator could not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons. Inspections would not work. We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. The burden was on those people who thought he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they were. We waged a war to save civilization itself. We did not seek it, but we fought it, and we prevailed. We fought them and imposed our will on them and we captured or, if necessary, killed them until we had imposed law and order. The Iraqi people were well on their way to freedom. The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam
Re: [biofuel] Don't any of you play poker? / was Moral Dilemna
x-charset ISO-8859-1At 06:37 PM 2/22/04 -0600, you wrote: Walt, The problem that I have with you analogies is that they do not include the UN. They had involvement. They were dealing with the situation. I have no doubt that the UN would have taken decisive action, just as soon as they got around to paying their parking tickets. GW Bush said that they were irrelevant. Given their sterling record in Rwanda, perhaps he was just being polite. Walt http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0221-01.htm Published on Saturday, February 21, 2004 by the Inter Press Service Chalabi, Garner Provide New Clues to War by Jim Lobe WASHINGTON - For those still puzzling over the whys and wherefores of Washington's invasion of Iraq 11 months ago, major new, but curiously unnoticed, clues were offered this week by two central players in the events leading up to the war. Both clues tend to confirm growing suspicions that the Bush administration's drive to war in Iraq had very little, if anything, to do with the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or his alleged ties to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda -- the two main reasons the U.S. Congress and public were given for the invasion. Separate statements by Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and U.S. retired Gen Jay Garner, who was in charge of planning and administering post-war reconstruction from January through May 2002, suggest that other, less public motives were behind the war, none of which concerned self-defense, pre-emptive or otherwise. The statement by Chalabi, on whom the neo-conservative and right-wing hawks in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office are still resting their hopes for a transition that will protect Washington's many interests in Iraq, will certainly interest congressional committees investigating why the intelligence on WMD before the war was so far off the mark. In a remarkably frank interview with the London 'Daily Telegraph', Chalabi said he was willing to take full responsibility for the INC's role in providing misleading intelligence and defectors to President George W. Bush, Congress and the U.S. public to persuade them that Hussein posed a serious threat to the United States that had to be dealt with urgently. The Telegraph reported that Chalabi merely shrugged off accusations his group had deliberately misled the administration. ''We are heroes in error'', he said. ''As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful'', he told the newspaper. ''That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants''. It was an amazing admission, and certain to fuel growing suspicions on Capitol Hill that Chalabi, whose INC received millions of dollars in taxpayer money over the past decade, effectively conspired with his supporters in and around the administration to take the United States to war on pretenses they knew, or had reason to know, were false. Indeed, it now appears increasingly that defectors handled by the INC were sources for the most spectacular and detailed -- if completely unfounded -- information about Hussein's alleged WMD programs, not only to U.S. intelligence agencies, but also to U.S. mainstream media, especially the 'New York Times', according to a recent report in the New York 'Review of Books'. Within the administration, Chalabi worked most closely with those who had championed his cause for a decade, particularly neo-conservatives around Cheney and Rumsfeld -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby. Feith's office was home to the office of special plans (OSP) whose two staff members and dozens of consultants were tasked with reviewing raw intelligence to develop the strongest possible case that Hussein represented a compelling threat to the United States. OSP also worked with the defense policy board (DPB), a hand-picked group of mostly neo-conservative hawks chaired until just before the war by Richard Perle, a long-time Chalabi friend. DPB members, particularly Perle, former CIA director James Woolsey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, played prominent roles in publicizing through the media reports by INC defectors and other alleged evidence developed by OSP that made Hussein appear as scary as possible. Chalabi even participated in a secret DPB meeting just a few days after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon in which the main topic of discussion, according to the 'Wall Street Journal', was how 9/11 could be used as a pretext for attacking Iraq. The OSP and a parallel group under Feith, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, have become central targets of congressional investigators, according
Re: [biofuel] Don't any of you play poker? / was Moral Dilemna
At 06:37 PM 2/22/04 -0600, you wrote: Walt, The problem that I have with you analogies is that they do not include the UN. They had involvement. They were dealing with the situation. I have no doubt that the UN would have taken decisive action, just as soon as they got around to paying their parking tickets. GW Bush said that they were irrelevant. Given their sterling record in Rwanda, perhaps he was just being polite. Walt http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$5RM3YWKKUZDFXQFI QMGSFFOAVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2004/02/19/wirq19.xmlsSheet=/news/2004/02/ 19/ixworld.html Telegraph | News | Chalabi stands by faulty intelligence that toppled Saddam's regime By Jack Fairweather in Baghdad and Anton La Guardia (Filed: 19/02/2004) An Iraqi leader accused of feeding faulty pre-war intelligence to Washington said yesterday his information about Saddam Hussein's weapons, even if discredited, had achieved the aim of persuading America to topple the dictator. Ahmad Chalabi and his London-based exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, for years provided a conduit for Iraqi defectors who were debriefed by US intelligence agents. But many American officials now blame Mr Chalabi for providing intelligence that turned out to be false or wild exaggerations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Ahmad Chalabi: 'we've been entirely successful' Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. We are heroes in error, he told the Telegraph in Baghdad. As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants. His comments are likely to inflame the debate on both sides of the Atlantic over the quality of pre-war intelligence, and the spin put on it by President George W Bush and Tony Blair as they argued for military action. US officials said last week that one of the most celebrated pieces of false intelligence, the claim that Saddam Hussein had mobile biological weapons laboratories, had come from a major in the Iraqi intelligence service made available by the INC. US officials at first found the information credible and the defector passed a lie-detector test. But in later interviews it became apparent that he was stretching the truth and had been coached by the INC. He failed a second polygraph test and in May 2002, intelligence agencies were warned that the information was unreliable. But analysts missed the warning, and the mobile laboratory story remained firmly established in the catalogue of alleged Iraqi violations until months after the overthrow of Saddam. America claimed to have found two mobile laboratories, but the lorries in fact held equipment to make hydrogen for weather balloons. Last week, US State Department officials admitted that much of the first-hand testimony they had received was shaky. What the INC told us formed one part of the intelligence picture, a senior official in Baghdad said. But what Chalabi told us we accepted in good faith. Now there is going to be a lot of question marks over his motives. Mr Chalabi is now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, but his star in Washington has waned. Yahoo! Groups Sponsor -~-- Buy Ink Cartridges or Refill Kits for your HP, Epson, Canon or Lexmark Printer at MyInks.com. Free s/h on orders $50 or more to the US Canada. http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5511 http://us.click.yahoo.com/mOAaAA/3exGAA/qnsNAA/FGYolB/TM -~- Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [biofuel] Don't any of you play poker? / was Moral Dilemna
x-charset ISO-8859-1At 06:37 PM 2/22/04 -0600, you wrote: Walt, The problem that I have with you analogies is that they do not include the UN. They had involvement. They were dealing with the situation. I have no doubt that the UN would have taken decisive action, just as soon as they got around to paying their parking tickets. GW Bush said that they were irrelevant. Given their sterling record in Rwanda, perhaps he was just being polite. Walt http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0222-04.htm Published on Sunday, February 22, 2004 by Knight-Ridder Officials: US Still Paying Millions to Group that Provided False Iraqi Intelligence by Jonathan S. Landay, Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott WASHINGTON - The Department of Defense is continuing to pay millions of dollars for information from the former Iraqi opposition group that produced some of the exaggerated and fabricated intelligence President Bush used to argue his case for war. The Pentagon has set aside between $3 million and $4 million this year for the Information Collection Program of the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, led by Ahmed Chalabi, said two senior U.S. officials and a U.S. defense official. They spoke on condition of anonymity because intelligence programs are classified. The continuing support for the INC comes amid seven separate investigations into pre-war intelligence that Iraq was hiding illicit weapons and had links to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. A probe by the Senate Intelligence Committee is now examining the INC's role. The decision not to shut off funding for the INC's information gathering effort could become another liability for Bush as the presidential campaign heats up and, furthermore suggests that some within the administration are intent on securing a key role for Chalabi in Iraq's political future. Chalabi, who built close ties to officials in Vice President Cheney's office and among top Pentagon officials, is on the Iraqi Governing Council, a body of 25 Iraqis installed by the United States to help administer the country following the ouster of Saddam Hussein last April. The former businessman, who lobbied for years for a U.S.-backed military effort to topple Saddam, is publicly committed to making peace with Israel and providing bases in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East for use by U.S. forces fighting the war on terrorism. The INC's Information Collection Program started in 2001 and was designed to collect, analyze and disseminate information from inside Iraq, according to a letter the group sent in June 2002 to the staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Some of the INC's information alleged that Saddam was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program, which was destroyed by U.N. inspectors after the 1991 Gulf War, and was stockpiling banned chemical and biological weapons, according to the letter. The letter, a copy of which was obtained by Knight Ridder, said the information went directly to U.S. government recipients who included William Luti, a senior official in Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's office, and John Hannah, a top national security aide to Cheney. The letter appeared to contradict denials made last year by top Pentagon officials that they were receiving intelligence on Iraq that bypassed established channels and vetting procedures. The INC also supplied information from its collection program to leading news organizations in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, according to the letter to the Senate committee staff. The State Department and the CIA, which soured on Chalabi in the 1990s, viewed the INC's information as highly unreliable because it was coming from a source with a strong self-interest in convincing the United States to topple Saddam. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has concluded since the invasion that defectors turned over by the INC provided little worthwhile information, and that at least one of them, the source of an allegation that Saddam had mobile biological warfare laboratories, was a fabricator. A defense official said the INC did provide some valuable material on Saddam's military and security apparatus. Even so, dubious INC-supplied information found its way into the Bush administration's arguments for war, which included charges that Saddam was concealing illicit arms stockpiles and was supporting al-Qaida. No illicit weapons have yet been found, and senior U.S. officials say there is no compelling evidence that Saddam cooperated with al-Qaida to attack Americans. The Information Collection Program is now overseen by the DIA, the Pentagon's main intelligence arm, which took over when the State Department decided to give it up in late 2002. The defense official defended the current support of the INC effort, saying that it has been of some help to the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, a team that is trying to determine what happened to
Re: [biofuel] Don't any of you play poker? / was Moral Dilemna
x-charset ISO-8859-1At 06:37 PM 2/22/04 -0600, you wrote: Walt, The problem that I have with you analogies is that they do not include the UN. They had involvement. They were dealing with the situation. I have no doubt that the UN would have taken decisive action, just as soon as they got around to paying their parking tickets. GW Bush said that they were irrelevant. Given their sterling record in Rwanda, perhaps he was just being polite. Walt http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0220-10.htm Published on Friday, February 20, 2004 by TomDispatch.com History Lesions by Renato Redentor Constantino And so here we are, at the crossroads of another day, speechless and troubled by what is before us, so anxious to engage in a conversation with what ought to be, and yet so unaware of or indifferent to a past waiting to explain itself, to be heard, to be remembered. You have to understand the Arab mind, said Capt. Todd Brown, a U.S. company commander with the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq, who had led his troops in encasing Abu Hishma in a razor-wire fence to contain the resistance suspected to be coming from the village. The only thing they understand is force. Over a century ago, during a period of history that few Americans today can recall, another U.S. general uttered similar words. It would take at least ten years of bayonet treatment to make Filipinos accept American rule, said Gen. Arthur MacArthur, even as, to deprive the enemy of popular support, U.S. troops herded whole Filipino villages into concentration camps -- precursors of the strategic hamlets used by the United States during the Vietnam War and the razor-wire fences now employed by the troops commanded by Capt. Brown to enclose defiant Iraqi villages. History. How much better off we would all be today if only we remembered more -- beginning with the origins of the relationship between the Philippines and the United States, a chapter which in our history is called the Philippine-American War; a chapter that began on February 4, 1899 and lasted an endless decade, which largely defined not only the pathways Filipinos were forced to take over the next century but the imperial directions that have framed recent U.S. history as well. By returning to this vast and incredibly brutal conflict, Americans (and Filipinos) today may yet find what they have lost: the key to understanding the depravities of the present and, perhaps, their collective deliverance. The triggers for war For an empire perennially weighed down by the necessity of justifying aggression, triggers for war are providentially everywhere, to be pulled expediently whether real or not. In the spring of 2003, it was weapons of mass destruction in Never-Never Land or al-Qaeda connections. In 1964 in Vietnam, it was an attack by North Vietnamese gunboats. In 1899, it was savages attacking our boys. Anything will do. When Lyndon Johnson's administration launched its long-planned full-scale bombing campaign in Vietnam, it did so using the authority granted by Congress under the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, named after the site where North Vietnamese torpedo boats allegedly attacked U.S. destroyers on August 2 and 4, 1964. With domestic concern growing over an escalating U.S. military intervention, the Tonkin Gulf incidents gave the Johnson government the leverage it needed to pressure Congress to authorize an open assault on Vietnam. Reports of the alleged attacks caused such a rumpus that, by August 7, 1964, within three days of the second incident, Congress had passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution by a vote of 416 to 0 in the House of Representatives and with just two dissenting votes in the Senate. Only later was it revealed that a draft version of the resolution had been prepared prior to the alleged attacks; that the provocation on August 2 actually came from the U.S. side -- an American destroyer deliberately entered North Vietnam's territorial waters escorting South Vietnamese boats -- and that the August 4 attack did not take place at all. By the time the Johnson administration's manipulation of the incidents was exposed, however, the US was already deeply committed to a full-scale American-led war in Vietnam. As we cycle backwards in history, we find a similar and no less bloody tale of cold-blooded imperial calculation and script-writing. To kill a republic The last decade of 1890 was an invigorating time for Filipino revolutionaries. After four centuries of largely inchoate revolts, Filipinos had united in 1892 under the banner of an organization whose goal was to overthrow Spanish colonial rule and create a democratic Filipino republic. By 1896, born out of well-articulated aspirations for national economic and political independence, open revolutionary war had commenced. By the first few days of 1899, the revolutionary movement had not only defeated Spain, but assembled a government ready
Re: [biofuel] Don't any of you play poker? / was Moral Dilemna
At 06:37 PM 2/22/04 -0600, you wrote: Walt, The problem that I have with you analogies is that they do not include the UN. They had involvement. They were dealing with the situation. I have no doubt that the UN would have taken decisive action, just as soon as they got around to paying their parking tickets. GW Bush said that they were irrelevant. Given their sterling record in Rwanda, perhaps he was just being polite. Walt http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0218-05.htm Published on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 by CommonDreams.org Iraqis say, Same Donkey, Different Blanket by Susan Galleymore After serving nine months in Afghanistan, my son was deployed to the Sunni Triangle on January 9, 2004. I sought support from military moms then realized that none amongst us knew what was really going on there. Three weeks ago, I packed my bag, traveled to Baghdad and talked to GIs, Iraqi professionals, and Iraqi mothers affected by the occupation. I learned about: * Random shootings: jittery GIs shoot Iraqi civilians in the streets. Anwar Jeward lost her husband, 18 year old son, and 14 and 8 year old daughters this way. Her 10 year old daughter, Abir, was left for dead in the street after a female GI stole the gold earrings from the child's ears. * Mid-night house arrests: GIs smash down doors of Iraqi residences, order mothers and children outside in their nightclothes, and question fathers whose faces are ground into the dirt by a heavy military boot on their neck. Iraqis agree, Not even Saddam treated us like this. * Pediatric oncology hospital wards: understaffed, underfunded, poor in resouces and medicine but rich in young patients. While children suffer from a range of cancers, many environmental, their parents sell cars, houses, and worldly belongings to afford 8-days sessions of chemotherapy. Frequently, three years of such 8-day sessions are required. * Fresh out of boot-camp GIs: killed, wounded, or damaged; one 18 year old reportedly crumbled psychologically after his first kill. He said, it was nothing like video games. He was lucky his PTSD qualified him for a return to the States; too many GIs are killed by IEDs tossed into their vehicles or left on the roads, or by friendly fire. * Three women on the Iraqi Governing Council: they represent Womens' Issues and all Iraqi women depend on IGC for the review of equitable secular law but Womens' Issues has no budget. * Farming villages like Abu Hishma: houses of suspected insurgents bombed; villages surrounded by razor-wire; villagers placed under curfew 15 out of 24 hours a day; entrance and egress controlled by English languge ID cards; farmers unable to tend crops or livestock. * Battalion commander Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman: of the Sunni Triangle, he believes, With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them. Military leadership never responded to my requests for information on visiting my son but - after a week of searching -- I hired a driver/translator to take me to the military base where I suspected he might be. Serendipitiously, I found him and met his colleagues. That base, using up 22 square miles of farming land, is growing by leaps and bounds as contractors from Kellog, Root, and Brown, subsidiary of Halliburton, supply building materials, food, American supermarket items, laundry services, internet cafes, telephones, everything but combat personnel. For that pleasure, our sons and daughters are paid minimal wage for maximum danger. My trip to visit my son was relatively trouble free: only one incident with bombs blocking the highway on our return. I'm back home and now I know what is going on in Iraq: our leadership is destroying the spirits of GIs and Iraqi civilians in an unnecessary, money-grubbing free-for-all under the guise of necessary war and occupation. Iraqis, too, know what is going on; they describe the situation as, Same donkey, different blanket. Susan is an interactive producer, writer, and mother who travelled to Baghdad between January 24 and February 4, 2004. You can contact her at [EMAIL PROTECTED] and view the web site, www.motherspeak.org Yahoo! Groups Sponsor -~-- Buy Ink Cartridges or Refill Kits for your HP, Epson, Canon or Lexmark Printer at MyInks.com. Free s/h on orders $50 or more to the US Canada. http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5511 http://us.click.yahoo.com/mOAaAA/3exGAA/qnsNAA/FGYolB/TM -~- Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to:
Re: [biofuel] Don't any of you play poker? / was Moral Dilemna
x-charset ISO-8859-1At 06:37 PM 2/22/04 -0600, you wrote: Walt, The problem that I have with you analogies is that they do not include the UN. They had involvement. They were dealing with the situation. I have no doubt that the UN would have taken decisive action, just as soon as they got around to paying their parking tickets. GW Bush said that they were irrelevant. Given their sterling record in Rwanda, perhaps he was just being polite. Walt http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16911 The New York Review of Books Volume 51, Number 3 ?February 26, 2004 Review The Wars of the Texas Succession By Paul Krugman American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush by Kevin Phillips Viking, 397 pp., $25.95 The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill by Ron Suskind Simon and Schuster, 348 pp., $26.00 1. Here's a true story that came too late to make it into Kevin Phillips's American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, but it fits perfectly with its thesis. As all the world knows, Halliburton, the company that made Dick Cheney rich, has been given multibillion-dollar contracts, without competitive bidding, in occupied Iraq. Suspicions of profiteering are widespread; critics think they have found a smoking gun in the case of gasoline imports. For Halliburton has been charging the US authorities in Iraq remarkably high prices for fuel-far above local spot prices. The company denies wrongdoing, saying that its prices in Baghdad reflect the prices it has to pay its Kuwaiti supplier. That's not quite true; Halliburton's reported expenses for transporting gasoline are, for some reason, much higher than anyone else's. But the real question is why Halliburton chose that particular supplier-a company with little experience in the oil business, mysteriously selected as the sole source of gasoline after what appears to have been a highly improper bidding procedure. Why did it get the job? We don't know. But it's interesting to note that the company appears to be closely connected with the al-Sabahs, Kuwait's royal family. And the al-Sabahs, in turn, have in the past had close business ties with the Bush family, in particular the President's brother Marvin. In any previous administration-at least any administration of the past seventy years-this sort of incestuous relationship among foreign governments, private businesses, and the personal fortunes of people in or close to the US government would have been considered unusual and prima facie scandalous. What we learn from Kevin Phillips's new book, however, is that this kind of intertwining of public policy and personal self-interest has been standard operating procedure not just for George W. Bush, but for his entire family. American Dynasty and Ron Suskind's new book, The Price of Loyalty, can be seen as a second wave of Bush critiques. The first wave, exemplified by Molly Ivins's Bushwhacked, Joe Conason's Big Lies, and David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush, described what Bush has been doing these past three years. But they offered only scant explanations of how and why the Bush administration does what it does. (I made a brief stab at an explanation in the introduction to my own The Great Unraveling, but it was no more than a sketch.) The new books go deeper into the agonizing question of what is happening to our country. Ron Suskind-an investigative reporter with a knack for getting insiders to tell what they know -offers a detailed, deeply disturbing look at how the Bush administration makes policy. Kevin Phillips-a former Republican strategist who feels that his party has betrayed the principles he supported-investigates the history of the Bush clan, and argues that this family history provides the key to understanding George W.'s motives and even his technique of governing. Phillips is well aware that some will dismiss his work as conspiracy theory. But as he says, such taunts shouldn't prevent us from looking at the family history of the people who now rule us: Worries about conspiracy thinking should not inhibit inquiries in a way that blocks sober examination, which often more properly identifies some kind of elite behavior familiar to sociologists and political scientists alike. To that end, Phillips offers an unusual and unflattering portrait of a great family (great in power, not morality) that has built a base over the course of the twentieth century in the back corridors of the new military-industrial complex and in close association with the growing intelligence and national security establishments. And George W. Bush, as the scion of this dynasty, is the first president to, in effect, inherit the office. For four generations the Bush family has thrived by exploiting its political connections, especially in the secret world of
[biofuel] Don't any of you play poker? / was Moral Dilemna
International diplomacy is a game of high stakes poker played with billion dollar chips and stacks of human lives. Saddam really enjoyed the prestige that came with playing in the high stakes game, and did everything he could to make the world think that he still had WMD, in part because that kept him at the table, and in part because of the prestige that gave him in that part of the world. It was a bluff because apparently he spent the money not on actual weapons programs, but on himself and his cronies, and when it came time to show his cards, all he held was a busted flush. What Saddam did was akin to the punk who pulls a fake gun on a cop. The punk will definitely succeed at getting the cop's attention, but no matter how convincing the fake gun looks, the outcome is not in doubt, and I for one can't blame the cop for blowing the fool away. Walt Yahoo! Groups Sponsor -~-- Buy Ink Cartridges or Refill Kits for your HP, Epson, Canon or Lexmark Printer at MyInks.com. Free s/h on orders $50 or more to the US Canada. http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5511 http://us.click.yahoo.com/mOAaAA/3exGAA/qnsNAA/FGYolB/TM -~- Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [biofuel] Don't any of you play poker? / was Moral Dilemna
Hey Walt, Your analogy was only partially correct. He held a fake gun and the judge said that the cop would shoot unless he proved it was a fake gun. He began to show that he had no bullets and the cop shot him anyway. Don't forget that there were inspectors allowed back into Iraq before the US went on it's little war. fred At 09:51 AM 2/22/2004 -0800, you wrote: International diplomacy is a game of high stakes poker played with billion dollar chips and stacks of human lives. Saddam really enjoyed the prestige that came with playing in the high stakes game, and did everything he could to make the world think that he still had WMD, in part because that kept him at the table, and in part because of the prestige that gave him in that part of the world. It was a bluff because apparently he spent the money not on actual weapons programs, but on himself and his cronies, and when it came time to show his cards, all he held was a busted flush. What Saddam did was akin to the punk who pulls a fake gun on a cop. The punk will definitely succeed at getting the cop's attention, but no matter how convincing the fake gun looks, the outcome is not in doubt, and I for one can't blame the cop for blowing the fool away. Walt Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Re: [biofuel] Don't any of you play poker? / was Moral Dilemna
At 12:24 PM 2/22/04 -0600, fred wrote: Hey Walt, Your analogy was only partially correct. He held a fake gun and the judge said that the cop would shoot unless he proved it was a fake gun. He began to show that he had no bullets and the cop shot him anyway. Not true. The cop knew that he had lots of bullets since (1) his father sold them to him, and (2) he'd already used them to kill lots of his neighbors. There wasn't any question that Saddam had WMD, the only question was what he'd done with them. Don't forget that there were inspectors allowed back into Iraq before the US went on it's little war. Time and time again. That's why Clinton, Gore, Kerry and company concluded that Saddam was noncompliant to a degree which justified the use of military force to resolve the issue. Perhaps another analogy will help. Two drunks are in a bar calling each other vile names. Drunk A pulls out a gun and shoots Drunk B. However improper it was for Drunk A to shoot Drunk B, it's quite clear that Drunk B was a fool to get into a heated argument with an armed drunk. Natural law tends to go hard on such fools. Walt Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
