[extropy-chat] Who thinks the Bush admin lied over Iraq? Onwhatbasis?

Robert Lindauer robgobblin at aol.com
Thu Jul 14 19:20:02 UTC 2005


Terry W. Colvin wrote:

> Ah, that explains certain words.  I myself have a love of English 
> literature which often confuses my use of "s" and "z" in
> words Americans changed early in our history.  My ancestors come from 
> Scotland.  I too like mushrooms and tomatoes
> but rarely for breakfast.


Well, you've got to try them!  Cut in half fried in butter.  Mmmmm.

>   Queen's greatest hits?  Leg-pull?


We were all young once.

>   I'm curious to trace ancestry through the National Geographic
> project but $125 to process a mouth swab is a bit exorbitant.


Thankfully my ancestors have been pretty careful to leave written 
records.  On the korean side I've got records going back around 3000 
years from when the Mongolians invaded china and were given Korea as 
appeasement (see, the Chinese know that appeasement works sometimes - 
after giving Korea to the Mongolians, the Koreans never again invaded 
china).  On the European sides I can get back to the middle ages, 
suprising as that is.  For the Irish I was lucky enough to find some 
catholic birth records and for the Hungarians they had a land grant and 
tobacco concession from a local duke which made them pretty easy to 
trace and when their family married with the Austrians they incorporated 
their records AND when the German (beck) showed up to marry the eldest 
daughter of my great-great-great-great (or so) grandfather because he 
had no daughters.  Not much is known about him except that he wasn't 
well-liked as a german in hungary.

>   My wife is Thai-Chinese.  Ruk-Long (Infatuation) and I have
> been married 32 years.  We have five adult children and six 
> grandchildren.  Amy (age 30) and Jeremy (age 28) tend to look
> either Arabic or Spanish in my opinion.  Amy married a fellow of 
> German ancestry.  Their sons/our grandsons, Nicholas
> (age 7.5) and Jacob (age 4.5) are 25% Thai-Chinese but the phenotypes 
> common to Asians are not expressed.  It is
> fascinating to watch genetics at work.


It's AMAZING sometimes.  My two daughters are dark-skinned (like me), 
but my son is whiter than my Austrian Grandmother (green eyes, red hair, 
allergic to the sun, etc.) and looks most like my Grandfather 
(german-irish) and my wife's father (Flemish).

>
>>>
>>> Second, if war is the last resort then would you have pursued 
>>> Islamic extremists in Afghanistan in a different way?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I don't have enough information about Al quaeda and thier involvement 
>> in the 9/11 attacks to say what I would have done.
>>
>> How can we extract ourselves from these messes in Iraq and 
>> Afganistan?  Now that's a question worth asking.
>>
>> 1)  Impeach our president, admit we were wrong.
>
>
> IMO, no evidence to impeach.


Obviously it's not an opinion I can respect but I won't chide you about 
it because you've been so polite.  What we have are some definitive 
statements by Bush that there were Chemical, Biological and Nuclear 
weapons and/or programs (various statements) in Iraq and on the other 
side no evidence whatever of them.  This establishes a reason for 
suspicion.  You say later that you're suspcious of politicians, well...  
An impeachment is, in some ways, like a trial.  Once the impeachment 
proceeding is begun the President has the right and ability to defend 
himself during the discovery process (congress has broader discovery 
powers than a court, I think). 

>> 2)  Reach out to the UN for assistance in rebuilding Iraq on THEIR 
>> terms - give it to them!
>
>
> The UN make good peacekeepers, not peacemakers.  Diplomacy and 
> economic sanctions sometimes aren't enough.

But you have to try and not half-assed baloney.

> Two prime examples are Somalia in 1993 and Bosnia/Kosovo before 1995.  
> Somalia was a disaster where the U.S.
> allowed UN bureaucrats to make military decisions.  We left.  Somalia 
> continues to be a non-functional country.  The
> UN couldn't talk the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims into being good guys.  
> After the Srebenica massacre (10 years ago
> as of 11 July) the UN handed control over to NATO.  This worked.  NATO 
> (mostly American forces) put out the word
> that any attacks on NATO would bring full military force on their 
> heads.  The UN was run out of Iraq last year.


They were run out of Iraq BY THE US "better get your guys outta there 
because we're gonna start bombing."

>> 3)  Extract our troops as quickly as is reasonably possible.
>
>
> Yes, and the horns of a dilemma.  Too soon and the area reverts to 
> tribal/religious warfare with another strongman
> emerging.  Too lengthy and we do risk a long-term 
> Baathist/Sunni/foreign extremist nightmare.

I suspect with a reasonable coalition of local arab nations alongside 
religious sunnis, shiites and kurds a government could be formed 
(assuming that's a good thing for the time being, sometimes the pain of 
revolution is a good thing) if it weren't seen as coming from the United 
States.

>> 4)  Reach out to the current "insurgency" and let them know that 
>> they'll be getting their country back reasonably and peacefully as 
>> quickly as possible and that they're invited to join in the formation 
>> of the new government -and mean it-.  Perhaps offer to make Iraq a 
>> shining example of a Libertarian utopia :)
>
>
> I'm hearing that U.S. commanders and GOI (government of Iraq) 
> officials are meeting with some insurgent groups.  The Shias
> allied with Muqtada-al-Sadr have ceased military action and seek 
> political assimilation.  The Kurdish region is relatively stable.
> The Shia south is relatively stable.  Yes, I see your smiley face.  
> IMO, utopias only work in literature.


I agree, utopias don't even work in litterature, really.  For every 
literary utopia there is a corresponding dystopia. But I still think 
with the US presence there in the formation of a government it will fail 
to have legitimacy in the eyes of the common people and consequently 
will be regarded as an imposed puppet government likely to continue to 
receive attacks by the poor and engender the hatred of all things American.

> (as long as I'm at it...)
>
>>
>> 5)  Rebuild our economy by financing a massive alternative energy 
>> conversion on the same debt we were going to use to pay for the rest 
>> of the war obviating the percieved need for more exploratory missions 
>> to the middle east.
>
>
> The economy remains strong; however, the housing market bubble worries me.


Check the following statistcis - corporate and personal bankruptcy 
rates, "no longer looking for work" rates at the unemployment office.  
Also compare average household salaries from 5 years ago to today.

Also, the housing market appears to have been a bubble caused by 
artificially low interest rates proceeding from the FED. 

>   Unlike the dotcom bubble, pure speculation,
> housing are physical assets, although prices may level out or depreciate.

The dot-com bubble wasn't pure speculation, it remains that the Internet 
has significantly replaced radio, television and newspaper in some media 
consumption segments.  Control of this media remains the most important 
project for major media players. 

The housing market has plenty of speculation.  I sincerely believe that 
we're due for a Freddie/Fannie/Ginne-Mac/Mae fiasco on the level of the 
Savings and Loan Scandal of the first Bush era.  The devestation of the 
job market caused primarily by the off-shoring of technical jobs (it's 
offensive to call programmers "resources" as though they're a variety of 
structural wood or something) resulted in a major vaccuum probably 
intended to coerce the current generation of recent grads into signing 
up for the air-force, marines, army and navy since we're obviously going 
to be needing bodies to fill all those bags "we're" planning on having.

>> (and now to the soapbox version of attempting to answer your 
>> question, I'm sure you were looking forward to it)
>>
>> Hopefully I'd have been a better diplomat (yeah right!, me a 
>> diplomat... I still piss off my wife's cat for fun) BEFORE 9/11 and 
>> avoided the whole confounded incident.  But in the unimaginably 
>> unlikely possible world where I found myself president on 9/12 
>> looking for something to do I'd probably have listened to my CIA/FBI 
>> advisors and gone in with the toothpick before using a hammer.  If I 
>> was interested in saving my political career (which would probably be 
>> the main reason such a world was so completely absurd) I would 
>> attempt to have a head or two rolling down the table within a few 
>> weeks and then some kind of back-office deal to appease the attackers 
>> and once again restore peace?  Hopefully the head will have been dead 
>> for years so nobody new would have had to die...  Maybe...
>
>
> We did use a toothpick in Afghanistan.  Special operations and using 
> "friendly" tribal forces to disrupt Taliban forces.


Then why is bin Laden still alive?  We must have the most bungling 
dipshit assasins in the whole world.  I wasn't thinking green berets, 
though.  I'm talking James Bond shit, here.  Super-spy teams with 
license to kill and kool ray-guns that shoot out of their bionic eyes!  
I mean, if you're going to have "special forces" you may as well make 
them REALLY special.  Which leads me to the whole preparedness thing.  
This "war against terror" can't be won with tanks and machine guns.  Our 
enemy isn't of that kind (and there's plenty of analysis on this so I 
won't rehash it...).  Which means that the nature of current military 
spending is at best misguided for facing the threat posed.  Instead of 
building bombers and bombs and smart bombs and stuff, we need to be 
thinking small and smart.  Enhanced people.  Well, that is, if we like 
the idea of enhanced people.  I'm ambivalent about it.  I kind of like 
the idea of having a high powered lazer embedded in my eyes and a small 
net-connected super-computer in my brain.  BUT I don't really like the 
idea of everyone else having a high-powered lazer embedded in their eyes 
and a small net-connected super-computer in their brains....

My mother says "If everyone owned a nuclear weapon people'd be a lot 
more polite."  I dunno.  There are sadistic sycophants in the world, 
they might not like the idea that just any old little old lady could 
take them out by blinking their eyes the wrong way at them.  But, maybe, 
if humans were super-humans we'd "evolve".  But that's a giant, huge, 
tremendously irrationally optimistic MAYBE.

All of this, of course, is based on the premise that force is the best 
way to fight this battle, but this remains to be proved.  I don't agree 
with you that you can't appease or placate the other side in any given 
conflict and as soon as you see the enemy rationally as combatants, then 
you can start dealing with them rationally as enemies with specific 
goals that, not suprisingly, aren't all that unlike one's own goals but 
in reverse (prosperity, security, peace, etc.)  It's when we dehumanize 
enemies that they become implacable fanatics bent on death and 
destruction.  This isn't a rational outlook.

>   Fanatics
> can neither be appeased nor vetted.


What makes you think Bin Laden is a "fanatic".  As I see it, he's a 
tribal leader of some sort protecting his values as best he can.  He's 
unable to raise a real army and so is using the means that are available 
to him.  He dislikes US intervention in the middle east and sees it as 
imperialism.  In this I agree with him and so should anyone with two 
open eyes.  I consider the case parallel to the IRA.  The Irish were 
unjustly invaded and oppressed by the English and the poor and 
disenfranchised Irish resorted to whatever means were available to 
express their pain.  People don't become terrorists because they're 
happily married with two kids a nice house and prospects for a 
prosperous future.  If you're thinking about strapping a bomb to your 
chest and walking into a library, you're probably not extremely hopeful 
about your life-prospects anyway.  Such circumstances for city-folk 
often includes desperate boredom.  That is, the roots of "fanaticism" or 
"revolutionary" or "radical" or "terroristic" behavior are not 
necessarily the same as the sadistic impulse in people.  Sometimes 
they're the result of the rational facility in people to evaluate their 
circumstances and options.  I don't think Bin Laden and the junior Bin 
Laden's of the word is/are Hitlerian in that I don't think he has a sick 
agenda of trying to wipe out a particular race and taking over the 
world.  Nor do I think he just enjoys killing people  (although I 
suppose that qua warrior he may in the same way that many American 
soldiers enjoy the fight, it may be a psychological pre-requisite for 
warriors that they enjoy it on some level). My guess, not having met the 
man, is that he's a rational warrior in a rational battle.  One must 
remember that the CIA in a sense created Bin Laden and the Taliban to 
combat the Russians in Afghanistan during the cold war.  Understanding 
him that way is a first step to trying to end the conflict with Al Quaeda.

>   My geography professor, a retired military intelligence colonel, 
> predicted the rise of
> extremist Islamic forces in 1995.

Wow, a real visionary!  I take a longer view of the matter.  I don't 
regard 'the rise of extremist islamic forces' as something that 
'started' in the modern era at all nor do I see the current conflict 
between Wetern Civilization and THEM (remembering that the North Koreans 
are NOT Islamic and neither are the Chinese both of whom are equally 
enemies in the global struggle for world-domination...) as simply 
economic or technological or tribale or...  The difference between US 
and THEM is that they are THEM and we are US.  The WE hate the THEM, 
that's how the psychology of war works, that's how governments justify 
their oppression of their own people.  I assume you've read 1984, right 
(sadly, I've met people who haven't!)  For a -real- visionary, check out 
Malachi.

>   The best defense is a good offense.

Sometimes.  The best defense is the ability to adapt to circumstances ad 
hoc and react rationally under pressure while simultaneously keeping as 
many of one's options open as possible.

>> No doubt the Taliban were upset by Unocal's insistence on pushing 
>> through the afgan line -on their terms- and no doubt they could have 
>> been sated had -someone- told Unocal just to play nice with the 
>> natives.  But I don't know enough about Al Quaeda's involvement with 
>> the Taliban and the Saudi government to really have an understanding 
>> of who to talk to and how to talk with them.  I'd LOVE to know, 
>> though.  I've read Osama Bin Laden's statement but frankly without 
>> knowing in more detail how Al Quaeda is organized and what their 
>> relationship is with their various supporting organizations, I don't 
>> have enough information to make an informed decision even in 
>> retrospect.  It's possible that the taliban was so closely aligned 
>> with Al Quaeda that 9/11 was essentially a first-shot act of war.  If 
>> that was the case, I don't know what I'd have done, but it probably 
>> wouldn't have been greeted with glee by true pacifists - would have 
>> had to keep it hush-hush no doubt.  It's equally possible, from my 
>> point of view, that Bin Laden was hired by Bush's people to stir 
>> things up and save his flailing presidency.  In which case, because 
>> I'd be such a good president there'd be no need to hire terrorists to 
>> give me something to do and so the whole event would have been 
>> avoided.  But this possible-world day-dreaming is always so 
>> ridiculous after the fact.  The possibilities to explore are the ones 
>> moving forward.
>
>
> The Taliban were manipulated by Osama Bin Laden.  Al Quaeda is no 
> longer the primary force.  There is a movement of
> like-minded fanatics, as individuals, cells, and organizations 
> spreading as a virus throughout the world.  Bush's presidency
> was less than a year old when 9/11 happened.


If your child died in its first year because you left it in a grocery 
store, would you excuse yourself because you'd only had the child for a 
year.

>   I don't blame Clinton entirely; however, he helped along the 
> abetting and
> ignoring that seemed to take hold after Watergate.  


What the heck are you talking about?  Slick willie wasn't good at hiding 
his dick but he was prettty good at providing a relatively secure 
environment for domestic growth.

> The CIA was eviscerated by Congress, rightly or wrongly/probably a mix,
> and the FBI continued to muddle along.

It appears from the record that the FBI and CIA were on top of it.  The 
FBI had reported correctly to the white house that Bin Laden was 
planning on using planes to attack targets in the US and had identified 
trainees in flight schools in the us who later turned out (assuming you 
believe even this stuff) to be the perps.  They had, correctly, asked 
the President's Office for the CIA intelligence on the matter when the 
CIA, correctly, refused to give it to them themselves.  The President's 
office denied their request for information for some unknown reason.  
THEY, the intelligence community, were doing their jobs.  The official 
report is that it was the white house that shrugged its collective 
shoulder at the reports and consequently denied the FBI's request for 
information.

It should be noted that the same kinds of threats have been happening 
for years and that the reaction of rational white-house officials has 
been to step up funding and resources and to promote cooperation between 
the agencies on genuine threats in order to avoid major incidents like 
these when the warning flag is raised.  Bush's incorrect action here or 
maybe prevention of action here has to be regarded as among the 
strangest events in this history of his presidency and if he did it with 
malice, it's certainly treason.  If he did it simply out of laziness and 
stupidity it's really, really, really scary.

>   This is more a systemic problem and inherent in any democracy.  

Actually, with people in general.the problems are greed, faithlessness, 
foolishness, sadism, bloodthirst, (not in any particular order) etc.    
Democracy is only a violent byproduct of our generalized inability to 
"just get along".

>  Term limits and amateur status as our forefathers intended those 
> serving to return to
> their farms and businesses after a few years, unlike the professional 
> politicans we have today.


I wish they'd just stayed at home.  I for one certainly don't trust 
politicians, and certainly not professional politicians.  But it's a 
natural extension of a specialization economy.  If you have the time and 
resources to practice being a good politician (which means winning 
elections, not doing good things), you're likely to be better at it than 
any amateur.  Elections are like todo va fights, you'd better be good.

>> I know that the Taliban had terrible treatment of women and that 
>> might be grounds for war all by itself, but then the Taliban wouldn't 
>> be the first target if we were starting a war on sexism.  Perhaps to 
>> solve that problem I'd try something definitively diplomatic (lap 
>> dances all around?  - just a joke, lighten up people!)  Anyway, for 
>> that we'd probably have to start in India or Pakistan, "our allies".  
>> So, unfortunately, the sex issue gets swept under the floor as it has 
>> been for the last 5000 years
>>
>
> Sexism works both ways.  Some feminists and Hollywood went overboard 
> portraying "ALL" males as contemptible.
> One theory is that sexism began with agriculture.  Women were 
> relegated to inferior roles.  The hunter-gatherers were
> much more egalitarian.  Women often provided more sustenance from 
> insect protein, roots, berries, etc. than those
> engaged in hunting animals.


The point here being that the "long list of reasons to hate the Taliban 
and Bin Laden and all of THEM" that was fabricated immediately after the 
9/11 incident to justify the toppling of that government (despite the 
fact that diplomatic resources had not be exhausted in that case either) 
included the sexism of the Taliban.  Well, let them without sin cast the 
first stone.  It's just funny to watch the propaganda machine at work.  
It's so sad to watch the public-school-brain-washed residents of 
dumbfuckistan be hand-fed their own children on sticks with smiles on 
their faces.  Soilent green - it's people!

Robbie Lindauer



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