Saddam Hussein is caught!

Chris OConnor · Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2003 12:03 pm Post subject: Saddam Hussein is caught!

How do you all feel about the fact that Saddam Hussein is now in US custody? What do you think should happen to him? What do you think will happen to him?

Chris

"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward,for there you have been, and there you will always want to be." -- Leonardo da Vinci

ZachSylvanus · Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2003 11:39 pm Post subject: Re: Saddam Hussein is caught!

I think he should be turned over to the Iraqi government, held under US watch, and tried and committed by the people he oppressed for so long.

I suspect he's probably going to die.

Chris OConnor · Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2003 3:53 am Post subject: Re: Saddam Hussein is caught!

I don't want to change the subject but a comedian just asked a great question:

Quote:
How do blind people know when they're done wiping their asses?

Anyway...back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Chris

"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward,for there you have been, and there you will always want to be." -- Leonardo da Vinci

Dissident Heart · Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2003 1:00 pm Post subject: Re: Saddam Hussein is caught!

We Finally Got Our Frankenstein
and He Was In a Spider Hole!
by Michael Moore
December 15, 2003

Thank God Saddam is finally back in American hands! He must have really missed us. Man, he sure looked bad! But, at least he got a free dental exam today. That's something most Americans can't get.
America used to like Saddam. We LOVED Saddam. We funded him. We armed him. We helped him gas Iranian troops.

But then he screwed up. He invaded the dictatorship of Kuwait and, in doing so, did the worst thing imaginable -- he threatened an even BETTER friend of ours: the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, and its vast oil reserves. The Bushes and the Saudi royal family were and are close business partners, and Saddam, back in 1990, committed a royal blunder by getting a little too close to their wealthy holdings. Things went downhill for Saddam from there.

But it wasn't always that way. Saddam was our good friend and ally. We supported his regime. It wasn’t the first time we had helped a murderer. We liked playing Dr. Frankenstein. We created a lot of monsters -- the Shah of Iran, Somoza of Nicaragua, Pinochet of Chile -- and then we expressed ignorance or shock when they ran amok and massacred people. We liked Saddam because he was willing to fight the Ayatollah. So we made sure that he got billions of dollars to purchase weapons. Weapons of mass destruction. That's right, he had them. We should know -- we gave them to him!

We allowed and encouraged American corporations to do business with Saddam in the 1980s. That's how he got chemical and biological agents so he could use them in chemical and biological weapons. Here's the list of some of the stuff we sent him (according to a 1994 U.S. Senate report): * Bacillus Anthracis, cause of anthrax. * Clostridium Botulinum, a source of botulinum toxin. * Histoplasma Capsulatam, cause of a disease attacking lungs, brain, spinal cord, and heart. * Brucella Melitensis, a bacteria that can damage major organs. * Clostridium Perfringens, a highly toxic bacteria causing systemic illness. * Clostridium tetani, a highly toxigenic substance.

And here are some of the American corporations who helped to prop Saddam up by doing business with him: AT&T, Bechtel, Caterpillar, Dow Chemical, Dupont, Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM (for a full list of companies and descriptions of how they helped Saddam, go here).

We were so cozy with dear old Saddam that we decided to feed him satellite images so he could locate where the Iranian troops were. We pretty much knew how he would use the information, and sure enough, as soon as we sent him the spy photos, he gassed those troops. And we kept quiet. Because he was our friend and the Iranians were the "enemy." A year after he first gassed the Iranians, we reestablished full diplomatic relations with him!

Later he gassed his own people, the Kurds. You would think that would force us to disassociate ourselves from him. Congress tried to impose economic sanctions on Saddam, but the Reagan White House quickly rejected that idea -- they wouldn’t let anything derail their good buddy Saddam. We had a virtual love fest with this Frankenstein whom we (in part) created.

And, just like the mythical Frankenstein, Saddam eventually spun out of control. He would no longer do what he was told by his master. Saddam had to be caught. And now that he has been brought back from the wilderness, perhaps he will have something to say about his creators. Maybe we can learn something... interesting. Maybe Don Rumsfeld could smile and shake Saddam's hand again. Just like he did when he went to see him in 1983 (see the photo here).

Maybe we never would have been in the situation we're in if Rumsfeld, Bush, Sr., and company hadn't been so excited back in the 80s about their friendly monster in the desert.

Meanwhile, anybody know where the guy is who killed 3,000 people on 9/11? Our other Frankenstein?? Maybe he's in a mouse hole.

So many of our little monsters, so little time before the next election.

Stay strong, Democratic candidates. Quit sounding like a bunch of wusses. These bastards sent us to war on a lie, the killing will not stop, the Arab world hates us with a passion, and we will pay for this out of our pockets for years to come. Nothing that happened today (or in the past 9 months) has made us ONE BIT safer in our post-9/11 world. Saddam was never a threat to our national security.

Only our desire to play Dr. Frankenstein dooms us all.

Yours,

Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com

sandor at the zoo · Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 10:56 am Post subject: Re: Saddam Hussein is caught!

Zach says:

Quote:
I think he should be turned over to the Iraqi government, held under US watch, and tried and committed by the people he oppressed for so long.

I agree, but would add that we have to make sure it's as fair a trial as we can possibly make it. Many Iraqis want him turned over quickly, thrown before a kangaroo court, and hung high where everyone can watch him twist. I empathize with their desire for revenge, but Iraqis must be shown that "mob justice" - which is no better than Saddam's own "thug justice" - will not be tolerated.

Iraq is going to become the middle east's first stable, secular democracy (that's the entire reason for the war) and it's going to take a generation or two before that fully blossoms. But the lessons have to start coming now, and one of the first is "everyone deserves to be judged equally and fairly before the law". Even slimy tyrants who've murdered 400,000 people.

S

Dissident Heart · Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 1:02 pm Post subject: One Consideration

Quote:
Iraq is going to become the middle east's first stable, secular democracy (that's the entire reason for the war)

"Iraq's one of the major oil producers in the world. It has the second largest reserves and it's right in the heart of the Gulf's oil producing region, which US intelligence predicts is going to be two-thirds of world resources in coming years.

The invasion of Iraq had a number of motives, and one was to illustrate the new National Security Strategy, which declares that the United States will control the world permanently, by force if necessary, and will eliminate any potential challenge to that domination.

It is called "preemptive war." It is not a new policy, it's just never been announced so brazenly, which is why it caused such uproar, including among the foreign policy elite in the United States. They're appalled by it. But, having announced the doctrine, it needed an "exemplary action," to show that the United States really meant it.

But if the United States is going to attack somebody, the action has to meet several criteria. The first and crucial criterion is that they must be completely defenseless. It's stupid to attack anyone who can shoot back. Anyone knows this. They understood perfectly well that Iraq was completely defenseless, the weakest country in the region. Its military expenditure was about a third of Kuwait, devastated by sanction, held together by Scotch tape, mostly disarmed, under complete surveillance. So Iraq met that condition.

Second criteria is that the place attacked has to be important enough to matter. There's no point taking over Eastern Congo, which is also defenseless -- but Iraq matters. That's where the issue of oil comes up, since the United States will end up with military bases right in the heart of the oil producing region.

The third criteria is you have to somehow pretend it's a threat to your existence. While the people of Kuwait and Iran might be delighted to tear Saddam Hussein limb from limb, they still did not regard him as a threat. No one thought he was a threat. But in the United States the propaganda did succeed in moving the American population, and Congress passed a resolution authorizing the use of force to defend the US against the continuing threat posed by Iraq. No matter what you think, that's just laughable."

Recent Interview with Noam Chomsky monkeyfist.com/ChomskyArc...iness_html

sandor at the zoo · Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 1:50 pm Post subject: Re: One Consideration

I agree. If our real goal was oil, the most expedient method of obtaining it would have been to simply take Kuwait away from Saddam (under the guise of "liberating" her, of course) and then administer the country as a protectorate while looting what we wanted. The fact that we did not goes far in proving that securing an oil supply is not our goal in the middle east.

However, my argument in the previous post was only offered as a counterpoint to Chomsky's claim that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was about oil and that we attacked Saddam because he was weak. Most of the nations in that area have oil, and compared to the US military they're all weak. If what we wanted was oil - or land or olive trees or beautiful Arab women in long, flowing dresses - we could take it at will, and for a lot less than the $166 billion and hundreds of lives we've already paid. That we haven't done so, but are instead working hard and paying a lot to bring democracy and law to Iraq, shows that our goals are mostly noble. Are they completely noble? No, of course not. But because we have some selfish goals (about security, mostly) that doesn't mean that Chomsky's "American hegemony" conspiracy theories are anything close to correct.

S

Edited by: sandor at the zoo at: 12/16/03 2:24 pm

sandor at the zoo · Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 2:08 pm Post subject: Re: One Consideration

Dissident, your post proves nothing other than the fact that Chomsky disagrees with President Bush's foreign policy. Is this anything new? I suspect that if Bush came out in favor of red stop lights, Chomsy would produce a litany of statistics and convoluted reasoning to prove that blue was actually a better color.

If his theory were true - that our only intention in invading Iraq is to secure an oil supply at the expense of a "weak" nation - then why did we risk even one American life? We could have carpet bombed every population center within 500 miles of the oil fields into gravel, nuked Baghdad, and moved our troops in unopposed. It would have accomplished what Chomsky says is our goal without a single GI coming home in a flag-draped coffin. And as for Saddam being "defenseless", I propose that you and Noam go around to the families of the 400,000 Iraqis who ended up in mass graves and ask them just how "mostly disarmed" he was.

On a side note, wasn't an earlier point of Chomsky's that militarily strong nations are bad, while weaker ones are good? If so - and if Saddam was indeed so weak - why was his regime such an obviously brutal and corrupt one? As "the weakest country in the region", shouldn't Saddam's Iraq also have been the most just and moral? Or at least just and moral enough to not be shooting dissenters and tossing their corpses into unmarked mass graves?

Or perhaps it's possible that militarily strong nations - when tempered by a secular democratic form of government - do in fact produce the most just nations on Earth (imperfect though they are). It might also be true that such nations produce so much wealth and remain so stable that they develop and support a caste of elite political theorists who, having never known even the slightest deprivation, now insist that the only standard is perfection and anything short of it denotes complete failure.

S

Chris OConnor · Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 2:26 pm Post subject: Re: One Consideration

Sandor

Quote:
If his theory were true - that our only intention in invading Iraq is to secure an oil supply at the expense of a "weak" nation - then why did we risk even one American life? We could have carpet bombed every population center within 500 miles of the oil fields into gravel, nuked Baghdad, and moved our troops in unopposed. It would have accomplished what Chomsky says is our goal without a single GI coming home in a flag-draped coffin.

Even if securing an oil supply was our goal, we surely wouldn't do it by carpet bombing. Yes, this would avoid US casualties, but there would be even more extreme and long-term effects to such an action. So I'm not sure this was the best way of showing that the oil wasn't our true objective.

Here is how I see it. If securing oil was our real objective why didn't we take Kuwaits oil once we liberated her?

Chris

"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward,for there you have been, and there you will always want to be." -- Leonardo da Vinci

sandor at the zoo · Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 4:29 pm Post subject: Re: Saddam Hussein is caught!

I very, very rarely post quotations or links; I prefer to speak in my own words even though it'd often be easier to use something that a far smarter person (and better writer) has already said.

However, I reserve the right to occasionally post something from the blogosphere that I think deserves more attention. Below is a short entry from Steven den Beste's blog. It's an excellent counterpoint to Michael Moore's article that Dissident posted earlier in this thread. I have always precisely agreed with den Beste's line of thinking in this matter.

From Steven den Beste's blog on 16December03:

Quote:
One of the anti-war arguments that had kind of faded out is now back in its full glory with the capture of Saddam: "America is responsible for Saddam."

Scott Burchill writes about that in a column in SMH. As an Australian, he is writing about Australia, but one could take his column and perform a few minor search-and-replace operations ("President Bush" for "Prime Minister Howard", "America" for "Australia", "Washington" for "Canberra" ) and you could transplant it to an American leftist publication just fine, where it would make just as much sense as most of the rest of what you'd find there. (Which is to say, "not much".)

Most of those claims are exaggerated and have been refuted long since, but assume they were true. The response to that is pretty clear: If we are responsible for Saddam being in power, we have an obligation to make up for the sins of our past by removing him. If we made a mistake in the past, should we not correct it now?

The anti-war logic on this has never been clear. Why were claims of past support for Saddam an argument that we should not oppose him now? Were they contending that we were required to keep supporting Saddam because we had done so in the past, compounding the very sins they accuse us of?

Actually, what they wanted, what they've always wanted, was for us to be convulsed and paralyzed by self-doubt and shame. They didn't want us to support Saddam, nor did they want us to oppose him. What they wanted was for us to oppose ourselves, to hate ourselves as Americans (and Australians), to hate the entire notion of "Americans" ("Australians" ), to reject our membership in the group "Americans" ("Australians" ) and to start thinking of ourselves as post-modern citizens-of-the-world.

"Ask yourself why they hate you." It's the essence of that question. And it's always been a stupid question, because what they were really asking was this: "If they hate you, should you not also hate yourselves?"

And of course all of this ignores the fact that America was only peripherally responsible for Saddam; both France and Russia gave him far more in money, material, and intelligence that the US ever did (most of his military was equipped with Soviet-based technology, for example). Why is it, do you think, that both nations were so rabidly opposed to the war? Because they cared so deeply for the poor Iraqi people, or because the billions of dollars Saddam owed them would never be repaid after his ouster?

S

Chris OConnor · Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2003 6:23 pm Post subject: Re: Saddam Hussein is caught!

I had always heard that Germany was the primary supplier of Iraqs military weaponry, but I don't know this for sure.

Chris

"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward,for there you have been, and there you will always want to be." -- Leonardo da Vinci

sandor at the zoo · Posted: Thu Dec 18, 2003 11:49 am Post subject: Re: There are real tyrants!

Niall says:

Quote:
Why is it that Brutus considers bribery to be bellow him, when he is willing to use the profits of bribery to form an army? What difference is there between taking bribes and taking the money made from bribes? Is Brutus not as guilty of bribery as Cassius?

The answers are:

1) I have no idea why Brutus thinks what he does.

2) Very little or none.

3) Yes, he is.

In what way does this pertain to the discussion above? Is it a (very) roundabout way of saying "we all bear responsibility for the actions that our leaders undertake in our name"? If so I agree - up to a point.

All of us who support the war in Iraq share responsibility for dead Iraqi civilians, dead American soldiers, and billions of taxpayer dollars spent to liberate and rebuild the country. We will also share responsibility for the free and prosperous Iraq that will emerge in 20 years. This is similar to the way in which those who supported FDR during World War II shared in both the blame for 200,000 incinerated Japanese civilians but also in the post-war success of both Japan and Germany. Only a fool believes that great achievement comes without great cost ... yet that is exactly what most far-left liberals seem to be demanding (get Saddam but don't invade Iraq, sign the Kyoto accord but don't hurt the economy, protect us from terrorists but don't take a single innocent life in the process).

The other side of this coin is that we are not responsible for every past depredation an American leader has made. I feel no responsibility for slavery; I despise the fact that it happened, but my ancestors were Lithuanian coal miners during that era. I've never received a single penny of "slave money" or had one ounce of work lifted off my back by an oppressed black man. I therefore feel no need to give reparations to black folks living in America today.

Which collective sins we are responsible for and which we are not must be taken on a case-by-case basis; there is no all-inclusive rule that tells us when some of the blame rightly falls upon our shoulders. Not even Brutus and Cassius can give us such absolutisms.

S

Niall001 · Posted: Thu Dec 18, 2003 1:09 pm Post subject: Why talk straight?

well it really was a round about way of asking a question but not the one you thought it was.

The US used Saddam. The knew what he was. They knew what he did. They did not care. So are Rumsfield, Regan and Wolfowitz responsible for his actions?

Thats what I was wondering. Like Brutus, none of them would have commited the atrocities that Saddam commited but nonetheless they used the murdering tyrant.

So sandor, do you believe that those who supported Saddam were guilty of murder?

sandor at the zoo · Posted: Thu Dec 18, 2003 2:30 pm Post subject: Re: Why talk straight?

Niall asks:

Quote:
So sandor, do you believe that those who supported Saddam were guilty of murder?

No. I believe Saddam himself was guilty of both murder and attempted genocide. Many members of his regime as well.

I believe you could make a case that Rumsfeld, Regan, Wolfowitz, their counterparts in the French government, their counterparts in the German government, their counterparts in the Soviet government, every member of the Baath party (in Syria as well as Iraq), and every last Iraqi civilian that paid taxes to support Saddam were, to one degree or another, his accomplices.

If you successfully made such a case (and that'd be quite a job), I think that all of the accused should show up before the court and explain themselves. Some would have good excuses (I don't think any of us would actually hold the average Iraqi taxpayer responsible for Saddam's predations) and others none at all (Baath party officials would have lots to answer for). Men like Regan and Rumsfeld would fall somewhere in the middle: Plenty suspicious, but also quite deserving of being heard out. Their defense would amount to something like the following:

"US policy of the era was to oppose America's enemies by supporting their rivals. Iran was our enemy, so we supported their rival, Saddam. Such policy was instituted during the cold war by both the US and the Soviets, because both knew that to fall into direct conflict would lead to nuclear war. So until the fall of the Soviet Empire, the policy was simply necessary. In Iraq, the policy was mistakenly applied; Saddam pulled a fast one and revealed he was loyal to no one but himself. The 1991 Gulf War, all of the sanctions which followed it, and finally the invasion of 2003 was our attempt to clean up the mess we inadvertently helped to create".

In my opinion, this just barely squeaks by as a legitimate excuse for their actions. It smacks of the "I was just following orders" mentality - which, by the way, is not an excuse for committing war crimes in the US military - but I also understand that in war you use what has been shown to work. Iran was a scary fundamentalist theocracy that had plenty of military and technical support from the USSR. They had also held our diplomats hostage for well over a year. Simple prudence demanded we do something to oppose them. Regan applied the strategy of the times, and it blew up in our face.

I don't like the way it happened, but I'm not willing to hang anyone out to dry for it because I honestly believe the men involved were doing what they though was best. Hindsight is 20 / 20, Niall; it's easy for you, looking back on the whole thing from 20 years in the future, t


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