First WikiLeaks Revolution?

[hippiewannabe]

Good point. All my liberal friends would seem to disagree. They believe in U.S. non-intervention and letting "legitimate" regimes without U.S. involvement taking hold. Like the one in Iran.

I don't know if liberal versus conservative is relevant to international relations.
We are a nation, our actions are singular. We have propped up amazing assholes to keep the dollars coming in to our fatcat military/industrial corporations. That is what compromises any action on our part to affect the outcome now. How many Americans are truly informed of our actual behavior overseas?

Had we not propped up the hated Shah of Iran, had we helped the people of Iran, do you think the outcome would have been different? Had we not then propped up the hated Saddam Hussein, do you think Iraq would be in shambles now? Had we not propped up Allende in Argentina, the contras in Nicaragua, the Taliban in Afghanistan . . . . . geeze.
Colin

Other countries often refuse to line up in clear black and white categories, so international relations is filled with shades of gray. We just held a state dinner with full honors for the illegitimate dictator of China, for Chrisakes. And hindsight is always 20-20. The Taliban vs. the tyrannical Soviet invaders seemed pretty easy, and it may have remained that way if Bin Laden hadn't set up shop there to run his war. We hardly "propped up" Saddam, we fed him a little intelligence to help keep Iran at bay. Those Cold War era authoritarians may have been distasteful, but they helped defeat the Soviet murder machine. And now Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Panama, Peru, etc., etc., etc. have become free and democratic, which wouldn't be the case if we had abandoned them to the foreign-supported revolutionaries that used violence to try to take over.

Those that like to nit-pick the behavior of the U.S. are dangerously naive about the larger picture. There is real evil in the world, and it is the United States and her powerful military that has defeated it in the past and keeps it in check now.

[ruckman101]

Rah rah. Wave that flag.

If our leaders hadn't already fumbled, Egypt wouldn't be in a state of revolution. This is a consequence of $ first, people be damned. Yemen, Tunisia, Egypt, our allies. Yet the citizens have had enough. We've winked winked at the lack of democracy, freedom, human rights to keep the fat cats fatter. Note also that these uprisings are populist in nature, not theologically driven.

Shall we resolve the issue in Egypt by marching our military in? I certainly hope not. That would be same ol' same ol', which got us where we are on so many levels. Ask the family members of the citizen's dead that we find acceptable "collateral damage" how they feel about being liberated from oppression. That's the crux of the biscuit.

Imperialism is a long stretch from freedom and democracy. We reap what we sow. Live by the gun, die by the gun.


neal

[hippiewannabe]

Again with the nit-picking hindsight. Sadat was the man, a peacemaker and visionary who was committed to leading his nation, the birthplace of global Jihad-ism, to peace, modernity and democracy. So the radical Muslims killed him. And the successor he had chosen drifted towards authoritarianism. We complained about it, but fear of the alternatives stopped us from interfering in their internal affairs and trying to oust him.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 03144.html
Seemed like the least-bad choice at the time, and it's still not clear anything better could have been accomplished, but perhaps we should have taken the risk. Shades of gray.

[turk]

Good article. Thanks for posting.

[Amskeptic]

Other countries often refuse to line up in clear black and white categories, so international relations is filled with shades of gray. We just held a state dinner with full honors for the illegitimate dictator of China, for Chrisakes. And hindsight is always 20-20. The Taliban vs. the tyrannical Soviet invaders seemed pretty easy, and it may have remained that way if Bin Laden hadn't set up shop there to run his war. We hardly "propped up" Saddam, we fed him a little intelligence to help keep Iran at bay. Those Cold War era authoritarians may have been distasteful, but they helped defeat the Soviet murder machine. And now Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Panama, Peru, etc., etc., etc. have become free and democratic, which wouldn't be the case if we had abandoned them to the foreign-supported revolutionaries that used violence to try to take over.

Those that like to nit-pick the behavior of the U.S. are dangerously naive about the larger picture. There is real evil in the world, and it is the United States and her powerful military that has defeated it in the past and keeps it in check now.

Nit-picking naivete:

Huffington Post 08/2007
So what was Washington trying to hide? Donald Rumsfeld, as special envoy to President Reagan, visited Baghdad twice, in 1983 and in 1984, and met with Saddam Hussein ostensibly to reaffirm American support for Iraq against the Iranians during their eight-year war. According to a March 2005 article by Ari Berman in The Nation, Washington supplied Baghdad with landmines while "American companies, with the government's approval, sold the chemical agents used against Iranian troops and Iraq's own Kurdish population." Or as Hiltermann puts it, "Rumsfeld reassured the Iraqi leadership that it had broad latitude in prosecuting the war against Iran, including by using poison gas. Along with the Reagan administration, he thereby helped build up a state that terrorized its own citizens and turned a tinpot dictator into a tyrant threatening the region."

Hiltermann details how the State Department, fearing that embarrassing information might come to light, tried in the late-1990s to erase America's footprints in Iraq. Washington, he told Harper's, "was extremely worried that past American support of the Saddam regime would not only be exposed, but also be used to undermine a case against the regime as part of a future U.S.-supported tribunal. Therefore, it ordered its lawyers to conduct a document review to determine whether its Iraq policy, especially regarding chemical weapons use, would disqualify the U.S. from participating in efforts to bring the regime to justice."

Take off those rosy colored hero glasses. Sometimes evil is perpetrated in the name of "good" and it becomes almost worse than the ostensible evil, particularly the flag-waving self-annointed heros.

Then the larger picture, which the hero mythologies claim only they can see, is contaminated by the rage of innocents.

Your comments regarding South America are Reaganesque suppositions that the PEOPLE of those countries would not have evolved without outside heroic intervention. In fact, most countries evolving towards democracy have to fight under and through our filthy linkages with despots who are smart enough to link up with our political-military-industrial machine. Ask Egyptians. Talk about naive.
Colin

[turk]

I suppose you would call Iran a democracy then?

[hippiewannabe]

[
Nit-picking naivete:

Huffington Post 08/2007
So what was Washington trying to hide? Donald Rumsfeld, as special envoy to President Reagan, visited Baghdad twice, in 1983 and in 1984, and met with Saddam Hussein ostensibly to reaffirm American support for Iraq against the Iranians during their eight-year war. According to a March 2005 article by Ari Berman in The Nation, Washington supplied Baghdad with landmines while "American companies, with the government's approval, sold the chemical agents used against Iranian troops and Iraq's own Kurdish population." Or as Hiltermann puts it, "Rumsfeld reassured the Iraqi leadership that it had broad latitude in prosecuting the war against Iran, including by using poison gas. Along with the Reagan administration, he thereby helped build up a state that terrorized its own citizens and turned a tinpot dictator into a tyrant threatening the region."

Hiltermann details how the State Department, fearing that embarrassing information might come to light, tried in the late-1990s to erase America's footprints in Iraq. Washington, he told Harper's, "was extremely worried that past American support of the Saddam regime would not only be exposed, but also be used to undermine a case against the regime as part of a future U.S.-supported tribunal. Therefore, it ordered its lawyers to conduct a document review to determine whether its Iraq policy, especially regarding chemical weapons use, would disqualify the U.S. from participating in efforts to bring the regime to justice."

Take off those rosy colored hero glasses. Sometimes evil is perpetrated in the name of "good" and it becomes almost worse than the ostensible evil, particularly the flag-waving self-annointed heros.

Then the larger picture, which the hero mythologies claim only they can see, is contaminated by the rage of innocents.

Your comments regarding South America are Reaganesque suppositions that the PEOPLE of those countries would not have evolved without outside heroic intervention. In fact, most countries evolving towards democracy have to fight under and through our filthy linkages with despots who are smart enough to link up with our political-military-industrial machine. Ask Egyptians. Talk about naive.
Colin

This "chemical agents" crap is semantic propaganda that has rattled around the liberal echo chamber to great effect. Some common industrial chemicals did get sold, which Saddam's intensive Weapons of Mass Destruction Program converted to chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction that he used against both the Iranians and his own ethnic minorities. The U.S. never sold him chemical weapons, period. Land mines, I don't know, but his main weapons suppliers were the Soviets and the French, with us coming in somewhere below the Germans.

I don't know what color glasses you are looking at history through, but you are drawing the wrong conclusions. Reaganesque, yes. True, absolutely. Compare South Korea to North Korea. Same people, one allied to America with a formerly autocratic leader, one not. Taiwan and China. Taiwan used to be a virtual dictatorship, and they evolved. People of Central Africa have no involvement with our political-military-industrial machine, and they aren't evolving very well. 900,000 Tutsis could have been saved from genocide-by-machete with a few of our filthy linkages. Sadly for them, none were forthcoming.

The point is peace and freedom are not the normal state of man throughout history, and even across the world today. Virtually everyone who enjoys freedom today owes it to the USA. If you obsess about the ragged edges, you miss the larger truth. Without us much more of the world would look like North Korea and Rwanda, and less like Europe or the U.S.

[ruckman101]

And now Jordan. Folks really seem to be thrilled with the "help" we give them.


neal

[Amskeptic]

I suppose you would call Iran a democracy then?

Who are you talking to, turk? If me, you suppose wrong . . . . again. You pick out some bizarre non-sequitur to blow up the discussion with irrelevant "you" suppositions.

Perhaps you do not remember how Reagan consorted with the Ayatollahs baked them cakes, sold arms illegally with contra cash, do you think the highly educated Iranian people did not trust us? You bet they didn't.
Colin

[Amskeptic]

This "chemical agents" crap is semantic propaganda that has rattled around the liberal echo chamber to great effect. Some common industrial chemicals did get sold, which Saddam's intensive Weapons of Mass Destruction Program converted to chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction that he used against both the Iranians and his own ethnic minorities.

Please don't try to tell me that we sold the below to help them clean the bathrooms and get rid of mosquitos at the Great Palace. Come on. From that liberal echo chamber CBS News INC:

Congressional investigations after the Gulf War revealed that the Commerce Department had licensed sales of biological agents, including anthrax, and insecticides, which could be used in chemical weapons, to Iraq.

When Iraq used chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1987, there was anger in Congress but a memo in 1988 from Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy stated that "The U.S.-Iraqi relationship is … important to our long-term political and economic objectives."

We cannot in good conscience, hippiewannabe, dismiss this as "liberal semantic propaganda". It is the United States of America and the decisions of those idiots in the Bush I and Bush II Administrations (common denominator, Donald Rumsfeld) have great great bearing on our standing in the world, on the lives of innocents abroad and at home.

The U.S. never sold him chemical weapons, period. Land mines, I don't know, but his main weapons suppliers were the Soviets and the French, with us coming in somewhere below the Germans.

The United States CDC (Center for Disease Control) provided Iraq with biological samples up until 1989 for "Medical research and other purposes". The US supplied anthrax, West Nile virus, botulism, and Brucella melitensis to Iraq for little or no charge. ( that was nice of us, huh?)
The Washington Post reported that in 1984 the CIA secretly started providing intelligence to the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq War including information to target chemical weapons strikes.

I don't know what color glasses you are looking at history through, but you are drawing the wrong conclusions. Virtually everyone who enjoys freedom today owes it to the USA. If you obsess about the ragged edges, you miss the larger truth.

"Obsess"? My goodness how subtle the marginalization of my moral outrage. We can do so much better. So much better. So totally much better. You wave your flag that we saved the world ("you owe us!"), yet we are standing in the way of freedom and democracy at the same time we have exploited people with long memories. You cannot just dismiss or turn away from those moments where we missed our highest priniciples by a country mile. I am the sort of American who strives for a more perfect execution of our exceptionalism.
Colin

[hippiewannabe]

There is no evidence Saddam ever used anthrax, and it is very easy to obtain from a variety of sources, but yeah, we shouldn't have sold him any. Definitely with the insecticide, that's what he made his nerve gas from, but it is a common and freely traded commodity. Again, we were a very minor supplier, he got everything he needed from the Soviets, the French, the Germans, and all the Sunni Arab states.

The main point is to refute the notion stated here that he was some kind of U.S. client, or that we helped him stay in power. Our real friend and client was the monarchy, and the Baath Party overthrew it. There was a realpolitik calculation that engagement could help moderate his behavior, and use him as a bulwark against Iran. His invasion of Kuwait, support of suicide bombers against Israel, and gassing of innocent civilians finally disabused us of that notion. Turns out he emulated Hitler and Stalin not just in methods of seizing and maintaining power, but in paranoid psychosis as well. We didn't help him gain power, nothing we did prolonged his regime, and he would would still be murdering his own people if we hadn't removed him. It's not a pretty chapter, but it does nothing to change the fact that the U.S. is the last, best hope for freedom in the world, and there would be a lot less of it if not for our engagement and sacrifice.

[ruckman101]

Bullshit. Saddam let us know about his plans to invade Kuwait. We didn't bat an eye so Saddam took it as a wink of approval. I guess that's when we let him know we were cutting him loose. Plus we had all that new war technology to test in the field. I guess the Bush thought that was enough. Oops. 'Salright, the shrub picked it up. Sigh. How long has it been since the shrub declared victory in the Iraq war while standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in his top gun costume?


neal

[turk]

I suppose you would call Iran a democracy then?

Who are you talking to, turk? If me, you suppose wrong . . . . again. You pick out some bizarre non-sequitur to blow up the discussion with irrelevant "you" suppositions.

Perhaps you do not remember how Reagan consorted with the Ayatollahs baked them cakes, sold arms illegally with contra cash, do you think the highly educated Iranian people did not trust us? You bet they didn't.
Colin

Oh really? You think Reagan wanted to support the Islamic Republic of Iran then? That's brilliant. I honestly don't know what the hell you mean. But since you mentioned the "highly educated Iranian people", why don't you quote them? Maybe then you'd have a good case against American imperialist intervention there. The Soviet Union might have something to do with that.

[ruckman101]

I suppose you would call Iran a democracy then?

Who are you talking to, turk? If me, you suppose wrong . . . . again. You pick out some bizarre non-sequitur to blow up the discussion with irrelevant "you" suppositions.

Perhaps you do not remember how Reagan consorted with the Ayatollahs baked them cakes, sold arms illegally with contra cash, do you think the highly educated Iranian people did not trust us? You bet they didn't.
Colin

Oh really? You think Reagan wanted to support the Islamic Republic of Iran then? That's brilliant. I honestly don't know what the hell you mean. But since you mentioned the "highly educated Iranian people", why don't you quote them? Maybe then you'd have a good case against American imperialist intervention there. The Soviet Union might have something to do with that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnzHtm1jhL4


Is it the chicago air? Unfair. Everyone else i've met from the area seems sane.


neal

[turk]

No, apparently it's the Portland air. Ya got any other questions ask yer father. What were you born yesterday or something. The world is always in revolution. Peace isn't the status quo in the world. You hear about that?