Why wouldn't our "allies" support war in Iraq

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

..........lack of morals

 

 

 

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,134256,00.html

 

 

 

Seems our "allies" were too busy making billions of dollars off "oil for food" a program which seems to have done just about everything except serve the purpose to which it was intended.

 

This oil for food scandal is getting bigger every day and its looking more and more that all of our "allies" who wouldnt back the war had their hands in the cookie jar and opposed the war so we wouldn't kill their "golden goose". Additionally this goes to the very top circles of the U.N. without whose cooperation such a scam couldn't have gone on.

 

When I was in Baghdad I saw what Saddam did with his "oil for food" money. He built himself a bunch of palaces that were literally made of gold, stashed over a billion in cash in one neighborhood in Baghdad with more elsewhere while his people were starving and do-gooders in the U.S. and elsewhere were whining about all the damage the sanctions were doing to the Iraqi people. Lets also not forget all the military hardware that my unit and others found in the city. I'm talking brand new Night vision equipment, rifles, artillery shells, you name it. Baghdad was a massive arms bazzarr and it was stamped "Made in Russia" and "Made in France".

[LowerCaseRepublican]

So wait...it's bad for other countries to sell weapons to dictators that kill civilians...yet we do the exact same thing in Turkey?

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

So wait...it's bad for other countries to sell weapons to dictators that kill civilians...yet we do the exact same thing in Turkey?

Turkey.......a trusted ally in the Cold War and clean as a baby's ass when stacked up against their neighbor to the Southeast. Nice try.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

Turkey.......a trusted ally in the Cold War and clean as a baby's ass when stacked up against their neighbor to the Southeast.  Nice try.

Perhaps you haven't seen their slaughter of the Kurds (aka the destruction of 3000+ villages known as Kurdistan using the US sold weapons) and the only way they would assist in condemning Hussein for his Kurd murdering was getting a guarantee that the US wouldn't go after them for murdering mass amounts of Kurds. But nice try.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Perhaps you haven't seen their slaughter of the Kurds (aka the destruction of 3000+ villages known as Kurdistan using the US sold weapons) and the only way they would assist in condemning Hussein for his Kurd murdering was getting a guarantee that the US wouldn't go after them for murdering mass amounts of Kurds.  But nice try.

Rediculous. No evidence = baseless charge.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

Rediculous. No evidence  = baseless charge.

If you put Kurdistan slaughter into Google, there are plenty of links discussing trials where this was brought up as evidence. It's not a baseless charge, it's common knowledge.

[Rex Kickass]

Don't forget about our ally Pakistan, who pardoned A.Q. Khan, you know the guy who was disseminating nuclear technology to the highest bidder.

[Rex Kickass]

"[T]he question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq. Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? Now what kind of government are you going to establish? Is it going to be a Kurdish government, or a Shi'ia government, or a Sunni government, or maybe a government based on the old Baathist Party, or some mixture thereof? You will have, I think by that time, lost the support of the Arab coalition that was so crucial to our operations over there."

 

Dick Cheney, 1992.

[mmmmmbeeer]

So wait...it's bad for other countries to sell weapons to dictators that kill civilians...yet we do the exact same thing in Turkey?

So what are your feelings about the Oil for Food scandal reaching the upper echilons of the UN and high ranking officials from those countries opposed to the war? I mean I hear ya about the weapons, but I don't think that was the main point of his post.

[Rex Kickass]

Oh yeah, wasn't this the same Oil for Food program that Halliburton participated in through a France based subsidiary of the company, while Cheney was CEO? Just asking...

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Oh yeah, wasn't this the same Oil for Food program that Halliburton participated in through a France based subsidiary of the company, while Cheney was CEO? Just asking...

Irrelevant. Extracting the oil has nothing to do with this scam at all.

 

 

Fact is that the governments of France and Russia made billions in kickbacks on this scam and god knows how much more selling weapons to Hussein in blatant violation of U.N. sanctions while Kofi Annan and his cronies sat there and let it happen either because they were incompetent or complicit.

 

Chirac, Putin and Annan have brass balls trying to accuse Bush of waging an "illegal" war against Iraq when they have been breaking international law themselves and making billions off the suffering of the Iraqi people. These people are total hypocrites.

 

Where is all the venom from the left on this issue?

 

Where are all the do-gooders who blame America for Iraqi suffering in the '90's because of sanctions? Maybe they have nothing to say anymore because it is France, Russia and Kofi Annan's U.N. who are truly to blame.

[Rex Kickass]

How is the current Vice President, a chief advocate of isolation and invasion of Iraq, running an American company, just four years earlier, which used back channel subsidiaries to do business in a market it should have not accessed irrelevant?

 

If Halliburton was doing business in Iraq, it was part of the Oil for Food program. Or else Cheney's company was just there illegally

 

You sit here and argue that Third World corruption isn't common. Like it never happens in the developing world. What happened in Iraq with the Oil for Food program was bad, there's no denying it... but to sit there and say that Russia had no economic interest in a liberated Iraq is ridiculous. Agreeing to give verbal support to the Bush plan would have guaranteed that Russia could have kept its oil contracts with Iraq. Russia could have gotten a sweet deal with the U.S. Much better then the few billions they could have hoped for with another couple years of a Saddam Hussein regime.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

How is the current Vice President, a chief advocate of isolation and invasion of Iraq, running an American company, just four years earlier, which used back channel subsidiaries to do business in a market it should have not accessed irrelevant?

 

If Halliburton was doing business in Iraq, it was part of the Oil for Food program. Or else Cheney's company was just there illegally

 

You sit here and argue that Third World corruption isn't common. Like it never happens in the developing world. What happened in Iraq with the Oil for Food program was bad, there's no denying it... but to sit there and say that Russia had no economic interest in a liberated Iraq is ridiculous. Agreeing to give verbal support to the Bush plan would have guaranteed that Russia could have kept its oil contracts with Iraq. Russia could have gotten a sweet deal with the U.S. Much better then the few billions they could have hoped for with another couple years of a Saddam Hussein regime.

Pumping oil under the program was not the illegal part. Saddam taking money for himself and using it to subsidize his military and his grandiose lifestyle is the issue. Saddam giving billions in illegal kickbacks to France and Russia and paying off high ranking U.N. officials is the issue.

[Texsox]

A lot of my objections to Iraq comes down to a simple equation

 

How many US deaths is acceptable to safe one foreign life?

 

Shall Nuke die to save 1 Iraqi? Shall Nuke die to save 10 Iraqis? Worse yet, should Nuke and 20 of his buddies die to save 1 Iraqi? And please feel free to substitute Somalia, Sudan, Grenada, Canada, England, etc. in that equation.

 

Why is it our moral duty to die to save anyone else? Why is it our moral duty to inflict our brand of morals on the world?

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

A lot of my objections to Iraq comes down to a simple equation

 

How many US deaths is acceptable to safe one foreign life?

 

Shall Nuke die to save 1 Iraqi? Shall Nuke die to save 10 Iraqis? Worse yet, should Nuke and 20 of his buddies die to save 1 Iraqi? And please feel free to substitute Somalia, Sudan, Grenada, Canada, England, etc. in that equation.

 

Why is it our moral duty to die to save anyone else? Why is it our moral duty to inflict our brand of morals on the world?

We dont pay and train a military to save foregin lives we do it to protect our national interests. As long as Saddam Hussein was in power he was a threat to us and our interests in the region. We had intelligence that he was building up stockpiles of WMD and was cooperating with Al Queda and we acted on it. This has nothing to do with imposing our morals on anyone and neither does pointing out the self serving and harmful hypocrasies of our "allies".

[DBAHO]

We had intelligence that he was building up stockpiles of WMD and was cooperating with Al Queda and we acted on it.

And yet the UN weapon inspectors couldn't find any WMD in Iraq and to this day I haven't seen any WMD in Iraq either, almost a year and a half after you guys entered Iraq. Now North Korea and Iran, that's another story.

 

We have a federal election down here next week, and a LOT of people down here are still upset that we entered Iraq, and I think it's going to show in the polls next week.

[Texsox]

We dont pay and train a military to save foregin lives we do it to protect our national interests. As long as Saddam Hussein was in power he was a threat to us and our interests in the region.  We had intelligence that he was building up stockpiles of WMD and was cooperating with Al Queda and we acted on it.  This has nothing to do with imposing our morals on anyone and neither does pointing out the self serving and harmful hypocrasies of our "allies".

We had faulty intelligence that the CIA warned was faulty.

 

Tell me again what our self interest was in Somalia? East Timor? Sierra Leon? Haiti? Angola? Cyprus? Georgia? Western Sahara? All of these and more have seen US servicemen and women on "peacekeeping" missions. All of these and more basically involved sending US servicemen and women in harms way, to have them standing between two sides that dislike each other and if history repeats itself, will end up hating us.

 

We've been inflicting our morality around the globe for decades. Either through financial or force. If we do not agree how a country should govern itself we send in the CIA to destabilize the regime. We've tried to assasinate foreign leaders. We cut off aid. We don't give them weapons. We don't allow them to have McDonalds and Coke.

 

Should we attack all countries that are a threat? Whoopie let's attack North Korea, Pakistan, China, Russia, Syria. Let's be the paranoid superpower hell bent on world domination.

[DBAHO]

And you still get messages from Al Qaeda and their deputy leader like this.

 

"Let us start resisting now," said the tape, which was aired by al-Jazeera television.

 

"The interests of America, Britain, Australia, France, Poland, Norway, South Korea and Japan are spread everywhere.

 

"They all took part in the invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq or Chechnya or enabled Israel to survive."

 

The voice on the tape said Muslims could not wait to eaten up country by county.

 

"We should not wait until US, British, French, Jewish, South Korean, Hungarian or Polish forces enter Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen and Algeria before we resist," it said.

 

"People of knowledge and experience should organise their efforts and form a leadership for the resistance to combat the crusaders."

[southsider2k5]

I have got a laugh out of the replies in this thread. It is OK to presume that Bush started a war for oil, but when France Germany and Russia didn't want a war because they lost their same presumed profit opportunities, excuses are made for them. I would have thought greed was greed, guess not.

 

It is pretty well know that some pretty big companies in FR, GER, and RUS, were owed some pretty big money by Saddam and Co in Iraq, and those companies have been laying big pressure on their governements to insure that that money isn't lost. That is the big reason when Bush went to these countries to excuse lots of their forgein debts, they hit a brick wall.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

I have got a laugh out of the replies in this thread.  It is OK to presume that Bush started a war for oil, but when France Germany and Russia didn't want a war because they lost their same presumed profit opportunities, excuses are made for them.  I would have thought greed was greed, guess not.

 

It is pretty well know that some pretty big companies in FR, GER, and RUS, were owed some pretty big money by Saddam and Co in Iraq, and those companies have been laying big pressure on their governements to insure that that money isn't lost.  That is the big reason when Bush went to these countries to excuse lots of their forgein debts, they hit a brick wall.

Why should any of that matter when these guys can sit around and talk about how horrible America is?

 

[Rex Kickass]

Nuke, you didn't answer the question - how is it to Russia or France's advantage to not go along with an inevitable war to save billions of dollars in oil contracts with Iraq, which they could have saved had they gone along with the war? First it was economic advantage to argue why they didn't go along with the war, now its just simple braggadocio?

 

And you also haven't answered the question of why it is acceptable for someone in an American company to do business with Iraq when they are not allowed to by US law?

[Texsox]

Why should any of that matter when these guys can sit around and talk about how horrible America is? 

 

Nuke,

 

America isn't perfect, but the pursuit of perfect is what has made this country great.

 

Notice that the countries, like Iraq, Russia, China, that cannot have a free and open discussion about what can be made better, don't do so well. The choice is yours.

 

You seem to find it ok to criticize Clinton's budget cuts in defense and intelligence, his handling or lack there of with Osama, and that is somehow ok? So with all due respect, kiss my ass.

 

I'll see your and raise you a

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Nuke,

 

America isn't perfect, but the pursuit of perfect is what has made this country great.

 

Notice that the countries, like Iraq, Russia, China, that cannot have a free and open discussion about what can be made better, don't do so well. The choice is yours.

 

You seem to find it ok to criticize Clinton's budget cuts in defense and intelligence, his handling or lack there of with Osama, and that is somehow ok? So with all due respect, kiss my ass.

 

I'll see your  and raise you a

I've rightly criticized the Clinton administration for materially weakening our defenses. There is a big difference between that and left wing bomb throwers who throw dirt on America every chance they get no matter how insane their petty carping is.

 

 

I see your and raise you a :fyou

[Rex Kickass]

Nuke, you didn't answer the question - how is it to Russia or France's advantage to not go along with an inevitable war to save billions of dollars in oil contracts with Iraq, which they could have saved had they gone along with the war? First it was economic advantage to argue why they didn't go along with the war, now its just simple braggadocio?

 

And you also haven't answered the question of why it is acceptable for someone in an American company to do business with Iraq when they are not allowed to by US law?

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Nuke, you didn't answer the question - how is it to Russia or France's advantage to not go along with an inevitable war to save billions of dollars in oil contracts with Iraq, which they could have saved had they gone along with the war? First it was economic advantage to argue why they didn't go along with the war, now its just simple braggadocio?

 

And you also haven't answered the question of why it is acceptable for someone in an American company to do business with Iraq when they are not allowed to by US law?

Its to their advantage to oppose the war when they are making big money illegally and violating U.N. sanctions by selling Iraq weapons since almost right after the guns fell silent in Gulf War 1. This is completely seperate from what you're talking about and is the heart of my issue.

 

 

The people doing the drilling had nothing to do with the scam at all. It was not illegal to drill for oil there. The big issue is that Saddam was taking the proceeds from his oil sales that were supposed to be used for buying food and medicine for his people and buying military hardware from France and Russia and building his own personal fortune and lavish lifestyle. The U.N. was either totally asleep at the switch or complicit. This is the issue this post is about.

 

Kofi Annan has some cojones trying to lecture George Bush about waging an illegal war when he was violating his own sanctions for years by engaging in a multi billion dollar kickback scheme which deprived innocent Iraqi's of food and medicine. He should be removed from his job and imprisoned for his complicity in this matter.