> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > On Behalf Of jon louis mann > Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 4:09 PM > To: Killer Bs Discussion > Subject: not so secret reasons for u.s.intervention > > not only that. you might want to order, "the iran/contra affair" from > netflix. a dear friend of mine, barbara trent, was nominated for > best documentary academy award.
Well, you know I like dense instead of sparse information. Documentaries are fine for getting the feeling of an era (Ken Burn's work comes to mind here), but I don't see them as a primary source (well except for understanding the era that produced the documentary as with "Triumph Of The Will "). So, let me ask you, what information is in that documentary that wasn't available to Walsh and published by Walsh? I'm sure two hours of watching Trent's work would be more interesting than reading the Iran-Contra report for two hours, but I think the focus of this debate is not enjoyment. > there are many ways nations assist allies, or the enemy of their enemy. There are. But, you talked about something a stronger: "actually the us has been supplying the saudis with high tech weapons for decades, saddam also." We supplied Hussein with mid-tech weapons for several years, in the '80s, is a better description. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_sales_to_Iraq Hussein was an enemy of a secondary enemy of ours then. He was a client of our biggest enemy. Before the '80s, he was a client of our enemy and an enemy of our client. That's not the kind of government one gives high tech to. So, the above the board sales to him seem about right. They filled a hole: medium and light helicopters. Additional, unseen small sales cannot be ruled out, but they would mean little to a man with an army his size. And, you have offered no evidence for billions of dollars of weapons sales from the US. You have also not offered evidence that the US competed with the USSR in supplying the USSR's client state. My view is that the Saudies did and do have tens of billions of high tech defensive weapons from us. Hussein had tens of billions of high tech offensive and defensive weapons from the Russians, French, and Chinese, sold to him over decades. He had a couple of hundred of millions of dollars of mid tech weapons from us, mostly sold over a two year period. Further, we can set an upper limit on covert sales from the US to Hussein that within the noise when one considers ~40 billion worth of weapons purchases. > not only with intel, but other ways to acquire weapons systems, > covert and overt. That exists, but at a level that's very small compared to Hussein's arsenal. Further, why arm your enemy's proxy and your proxy's enemy? > why do you think israel has survived this long? 1) The Arabs were hopelessly incompetent fighters in 1948. If it were a football game, Israel would have been the Aggies going against New England. Yet they won. 2) The French helped Israel through the end of the '50s...mostly for good money. This was above board. 3) The Arabs were quite incompetent in the six days war. 4) Nixon wasn't going the let Israel be overrun in 1973. Perhaps he didn't want the USSR to dominate in the region, perhaps he didn't want Israel to use their nukes to bring the Arabs down with them as they were being destroyed. 5) Their technological superiority has been overwhelming since the Yom Kipper war. It was during this time that there has been extensive cooperation between the US and Israel on military technology. >what do you think north korea is up to in syria? Generating hard cash by selling what they can. > > the us is arming the insurgency right now in iraq, indirectly, but > they are not the only source. we did the same thing in afghanistan, > it's called blowback. Weapons we give to allies can go to the black market, I don't doubt that. There is no argument that, after the war in question, they can enter circulation and be used against American interests. But, at the same time, the world has three weapons suppliers (Russia, China & France) that have few worries about where their weapons are being used. So, I don't see the existence of black market US weapons as a critical, deciding factor. > the old days when the cia got away with assassination attempts, etc., > are over, but there are still operations that have not been exposed. My argument doesn't require that. It just requires that the magnitude of such uncovered operations be small compared to the magnitude of other forces (e.g. weapon sales from Russia, French interest in Iraqi oil, Arab shame at being weaker than Christians and Jews.) > I will cite one example; i > was in Chad in 1979. the us and the soviet union both worked through > surrogates in the civil war there. france was helping out the > president and libya was helping out the defense minister. the whole > deal there was over uranium deposits in the north. The fact that, for the most part, the Cold War was a surrogate war is not disputed. The actions in Chad do not surprise me. But, the magnitude of the action doesn't seem particularly large. If, for example, there is a genocide in Chad next year, it would be foolish to point to this proxy war as the cause. > it is not just the u.s. iran is supplying i.e.ds. but we can't prove > it. france and germany didn't want us to invade iraq for a lot of > reasons, including oil. I agree for the reason with France because there is empirical evidence for it. First, there are lucrative agreements that have been documented and quantified concerning the development of Iraqi oil which become practical only after the sanctions are lifted. If need be, I can list a number of websites but let me give just one: http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/1999/msg00786.html <quote> Iraq's leading official daily warned France on Sunday of a high price to pay if it sides with the United States in a UN Security Council vote linking a suspension of sanctions to a new disarmament regime. Such a vote would be "the last straw for Iraqi-French relations," said a commentary in Babel written by Abdel Razzak al-Hashemi, who was Iraq's ambassador to Paris when Baghdad broke diplomatic ties during the 1991 Gulf War. As a result it would be "only logical for the French (oil) companies Elf and Total to close their offices in Baghdad and lose the immense concessions which they have won but not yet exploited." <end quote> Second, I read in several reputable news outlets quotes from the French ambassador to the UN explaining why his consulting contract with Hussein wasn't a bribe, but legitimate work. I can provide more data supporting this point, which we agreed to. Official >saddam was preparing to convert to euros instead of dollars. > http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Iraq/Iraq_dollar_vs_euro.html Huh? The cash Hussein had on hand was pocket change compared to the trillions of dollars and Euros in existence. I'd like to see hard evidence that this was a factor in the war. > there are so many reasons why nations (and corporations) interfere in > other nations' internal affairs. one of the reasons ghwb started the > gulf war was because of the s&l scandal. > http://www.users.qwest.net/~mbenjamin4/mypages/thoughts/gulfwar2.html I read that website and saw one glaring point: no data to back up claims. It appears to me that you are ready to accept conspiracy theories, and malignant causes for things without requiring hard data. Now, it's true that one cannot prove a conspiracy doesn't exist. That goes for any conspiracy, including the "IKE and JFK are Communist" conspiracies of the John Birch Society. So, if one insists on hard data to support arguments, then one could not accept a true statement. But, on the whole, I think we can establish that looking for data to support empirical claims is, in general, a good practice. As an aside, I'm still working on my discussion of the engineering step in developing empirical knowledge...but its long and fairly slow work. > nixon lied about war before and during watergate, but the military > would not go along when he tried to escalate tension with the soviet > union. > http://www.thefreelibrary.com/From+Watergate+to+downing+street%3a+lyin > g+for+war-a0133755141 Again, a person wrote a book claiming something that is counter to the general historical understanding of Nixon's actions. He may have data to support his claims, but the claims by themselves are not evidence. In addition, IIRC, there is substantial documentation at the Nixon library supporting the majority understanding: that Nixon wanted to end the Viet Nam war in a way that would allow him to split China and Russia as allies. > btw, what do you think about hired guns like blackwater? Several things came to mind on that. First, this is yet another example of the stupidity of the Bush regime. Second, at best, it was an accident waiting to happen. Third was what I told Gautam: isn't this an area where even conservatives favor socialism: government ownership of the means of war? I think the use can be explained by Rumsfeld's view of the role of the US military (a high tech, relatively small shock and awe force), the blind faith in the power of the market, and the inability of the Bush government to think their way out of a paper bag. > we were more involved in the iran/iraq war than you think. we worked > through our arab allies that didn't want a shiite crescent. OK, for the last half of the war that has some value. When it looked like Hussein was going to prevail, we were more interested in re-establishing relationships with Iran. >we supplied intel as well, like we did for the british and many other >"police" interventionist actions. At the point that Basra might fall, that's been established, yes. > kuwait was giving saddam assistance > and then wanted him to pay for it, so they slant drilled into iraq. I'd like to see the well logs that showed this. Do you have a reference that gives the logs that show this (if it was done, they exist), or are you just taking Hussein's word. For years he claimed that Kowait was a province of Iraq. For years he talked about the need for a pan-Arab super power (which is very much in line with Bathe objectives)...and how he saw himself as the head of that. So, I see no reason to take his word on this as > american ambassador april glaspie gave saddam a green light. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_war Did you read the quote there? How can you claim it's a green light? It is: "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late '60s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via [Chadli] Klibi [then Arab League General Secretary] or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly. With regard to all of this, can I ask you to see how the issue appears to us? "My assessment after 25 years' service in this area is that your objective must have strong backing from your Arab brothers. I now speak of oil. But you, Mr. President, have fought through a horrific and painful war. Frankly, we can see only that you have deployed massive troops in the south. Normally that would not be any of our business. But when this happens in the context of what you said on your national day, then when we read the details in the two letters of the Foreign Minister, then when we see the Iraqi point of view that the measures taken by the U.A.E. and Kuwait is, in the final analysis, parallel to military aggression against Iraq, then it would be reasonable for me to be concerned. And for this reason, I received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship -- not in the spirit of confrontation -- regarding your intentions. "I simply describe the position of my Government. And I do not mean that the situation is a simple situation. But our concern is a simple one." The meaning of this is absolutely clear to me: "We want you to resolve this peacefully. Normally, we don't get involved in border disputes. However, seeing your statements about war like actions by the UAE and Kuwait, and the massing of your troops, we are concerned. Please see our point of view." Now, it might be that Hussein took this as a green light...misinterpreting diplomatic speak. Heck, it might have been translated for him in a way that would change the meaning. But, this is clearly not a green light. It is a yellow light, that's about to change to red. > these are not super secret reasons and i do not rule out the obvious > ones. But, the ones I objected to have virtually no data to support them. My understanding, talking to people, is that "it sounds about right for this lousy government" is the reason for believing these claims without supporting data. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
