[B5JMS] Attn JMS: What about now?

[b5jms-admin at cs.columbia.edu]

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From: warlock at es.co.nz (Matthew Vincent)
Date: 17 Dec 2002 03:15:23 -0800
Lines: 23

"Laura Appelbaum" <l-appelbaum at mindspring.com> wrote: 

>The conditions of life for the average person in Iraq are *entirely* 
>the fault of their dictator.  It was he who chose to invade Kuwait, 
>and whether or not you think the US should have intervened, the 
>fact remains that it was Hussein who thus began the Gulf War.  If 
>he hadn't tried to expand the borders of his personal power, there 
>wouldn't have been any bombing of Iraq, be it civilian or military 
>targets, nor would there be any sanctions. 

You're making a fallacy here, by ignoring other sources of causality.
The US and allies also had choices, and these choices had consequences
for the lives of the Iraqi people.

>The only way in which any of this is "our" fault is insofar 
>as once the decision was made to attack Iraq, we should 
>never have left without eliminating him.

The latter is quite possibly true. Starvation seems to cause more
deaths than surgical military strikes do.

Matthew


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From: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)
Date: 18 Dec 2002 07:35:42 GMT
Lines: 47

Okay, I'm probably going to get cyber-mugged for this, but let me put in my two
cents on the Iraq situation, and the reasons behind it.

It is really nothing more or less than an attempt to re-draw the map of the
Middle East.

By their actions and their statements, Bush and Co. seem to believe that they
have a manifest destiny, and that they must act to seize the moment while they
can, hence their haste to get things popping.

If you take down Iraq and replace it with either a puppet government or one
friendly to the US, suddenly you can bring down the price of Iraqi oil
considerably.  If the other nations in the region don't go along, they get
frozen out.  So suddenly the prices go down, profits go up, and (while fossil
fuels last) everybody profits economically.

Politically, if you take out Iraq, you remove a linchpin from the Mideast
structure.  You have a friendly base of operations from which to launch
military endeavors; you can aid your friends and loom over your enemies; it
puts the US in a position to destabalize other countries in the area or bring
them to the side of the US.

That, I believe, is their plan.  The only thing wrong with it is that it can't
work; the region is too interlinked and impossible to govern from afar, and
they haven't fully thought out the doctrine of unintended consequences.

Within an hour or so of 9/11, Rumsfeld -- according to the NY Times -- was
asking people, "Can we pin this on Saddam, take 'em all down at the same time?"
 They've clearly been looking for an excuse to go in on this for a long time. 
If it wasn't 9/11, it'd be something else.  

If you say it's about oil, that's only part of the picture; if you say it's
about weapons and terror, that's also only a part of the picture.  You have to
stand well back from the tapestry and get a good look at the whole of it to
recognize the thing for what it is: an attempt to redraw the map of the Middle
East in its entirety.

 jms

(jmsatb5 at aol.com)
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