06/19/03:
DER LONG-PROMISED RANT AUF KLAUS. My response
to an antiwar diatribe addressed to us some time ago by an acquaintance. Did
you know, for example, that George W. Bush is a... a mean man?
Read on.
**********
BBC
NEWS June 16, 2003:
I was at home
when I heard the noises. Outside, people were running everywhere, and were
trying to hide somewhere, I could hear the guns, and although we are living 3
streets away from the place, we could hardly open our eyes and breathe because
of the tear gas. I could see about 20 motorcycles riding here and there
shouting and trying to catch people in the street. Mothers were crying and
trying to find their sons, cars in traffic were pushing their horns to show
their partnership in the protest, but motorcyclists tried to stop them by
threatening them.....
Name withheld,
We are not risking our lives here for reforming this murderous system. We want
a complete overthrow of the Islamic republic and establishing a proper
democracy like the one in
Farhad, Iran
We are going to have democracy in Iran, if this demonstration keep going, as
the nations in Europe couldn't get freedom without the help of USA in 2nd world
war, the nations can not afford to became free from dictatorship in the developing
countries without the help of Americans and all freedom fighters in Europe.
The Iranian people have shown their urgent tendency for freedom. Now the
The fall of the Ayatollahs is coming. The majority of the Iranians have been
silently opposing the dictatorship of the "religious" elite. The
protests will only increase in the near future and an internal revolution seems
imminent. As expected, the coalition forces presence in
Europeans with their so-called human rights concerns are the most pathetic
players in the Iranian current affairs. The reformist that you name such as
Hajarian and Karubi are the murderers of the early years of revolution. I
guess, for the great defenders of human rights in
Withheld,
PRESIDENT BUSH PLEASE HELP
Ali M.,
Why are the Iranians suddenly emboldened so as to go into the streets demanding
democracy and an end to their own Stalinist theofascist nightmare? Could it be
because they find themselves now flanked to the east and west by liberated,
free nations? This is what many Iranians are saying. Who do they have to thank
for this? George W. Bush. Think about it.
"A burly
39-year-old man named Qifa, assigned by Mr. Hussein's Information Ministry to
keep watch on an American reporter, paused at midmorning, outside the inferno
that had been the headquarters of
Part 1
1:
Original
text of letter in aqua; Klaus' fisking in our usual earth tones.
I
don't dispute any of the facts you cite about the Iraqi government. But I
question why *our* government has chosen that one to single out -- what about
the many other non-democratically-chosen regimes that the
This is
“*our*” government, like it or not. I thought
By your rationale, force would NEVER be used to
address any threat because there exist OTHER threats. Now THERE’S a good reason
to do nothing.
Name another nation which fulfills the
following criteria:
1) has hostile intent toward the United
States
2) has extensive revenues controlled by a megalomaniacal dictator
3) was actively developing and producing chem- and bio-weapons (yeah, I know
they haven’t been located yet – our forces are still being SHOT) (see Iraqwatch)
4) was avidly pursuing a nuclear weapons capability
5) was actively sponsoring terrorist organizations
6) had completely ignored demands by the international community to disarm from
WMD
7) had attempted to assassinate a US President
8) has murdered ~1,500,000 of its own countrymen, many of them with chemical
weapons
One must separate the NATION of Iraq from its
ruling REGIME.
We cannot wait until someone throws the first
punch when that first punch could incinerate a large city.
These decisions are not made at the whim of a
President. Three words: EVIDENCE, INTELLIGENCE, FACTS.
If the forceful deposition of the Hussein
regime from power was not the “best” course of action, what was? And this
disagreement is based on what information? The infinite hubris of the antiwar,
anti-administration left is no less than startling. They have no access to the
daily, tsunamic intelligence briefings from the FBI, NSA and CIA. They cannot
see the massive amounts of intelligence flowing in continuously 24/7 from our extensive
intelligence assets in the field. These decisions are not made by a small cadre
of individuals in isolation; they are made in consultation with the top brass
of the aforementioned agencies, all branches of the armed services and the
National Security Council.
The antiwar left is peddling a fraud and the
simple fact is that they were dead wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Tell me, if the
holocaust against the Iraqi civilians perpetrated by the Hussein regime in
which some 1-2 MILLION innocent men, women and children were murdered is not
sufficient call to arms, WHAT IS?! You tell me. Tell the families of those
murdered that this is the wrong war at the wrong time. Tell the millions of
Iraqis deliriously dancing in the street celebrating the end of their Stalinist
23 year long nightmare. Tell the Iraqis who prayed to Allah that the American
bombing would start and the Iraqis that pledged to take their own lives if the
Americans did NOT come. The antiwar crowd conveniently dismisses these people.
The same clueless morons with “CELEBRATE
DIVERSITY” bumper stickers marched in the streets to keep the Iraqi people
oppressed under as brutal a totalitarian regime as this world has ever known.
Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a “war on
2:
While
Bush was beating the macho war drums to go to war against Iraq what about the
*real* Islam-fascists that are living inside Pakistan and Afghanistan that you
talk about who are still alive and still planning real plots to kill Americans?
These
“*real*” Islamists continue to be hunted down by coalition forces. This
operation will not be abandon as a result of dealing with the threat posed by
3:
I was
about 300 yards from the northeast corner of the White House on 9/11 and the
passengers who bravely brought down the jet in
Everyone
has their own story to tell about their experience on 9/11. I appreciate the
horror, fear and loss that anyone experienced on that day. I tuned in just in
time to see, on live TV, the second tower crumbling with the full belief that
my sister, who used to work at the WTC, was being murdered before my eyes.
Fortunately, she was not in her office at that time. Had it been Monday or
Wednesday, she would have been.
4:
I
know that the hatred some people feel for the
Hitler’s
hatred of Jews was very, very real, albeit very, very unjustified.
4.1
And I
don’t see what the hell Saddam had to do with that.
The
deposition of the Hussein regime is not in retaliation for 9/11. Rather it is
the neutralization of a clear threat to the national security of the United
States and our Allies (whether or not those Allies choose to face reality or to
continue deluding themselves, just as France chose to do right up to May 12,
1940) and the entire Mideast region.
4.2
He
was (I am assuming he is dead by now) an awful, butchering person –
4.3
but
the whole rest of the world,
See
Section 13 below.
4.4
including
the great majority of citizens in the
Did you
notice how the polls in the
4.5
questions
why we singled out that country, how we could justify going to bomb them
*before* they did anything aggressive toward us.
Yeah,
there are millions of people in the world that hate the
Bush and Blair have exhibited something we
have seen too infrequently in our elected officials – LEADERSHIP. They risked
it all politically to do the right thing. Remember, Blair is a LIBERAL
DEMOCRAT! (Labour Party). But HE recognizes the clear and present danger posed
by the Hussein regime. In short, Blair gets it, but I guess it is just
too arcane for the left to comprehend.
Further, is not the intra-Iraqi
holocaust sufficient causus belli ? It’s acceptable to the Left if he’s
attacking and murdering his own population so long as he leaves us alone? Where
are your “Liberal values?”
5:
I
believe it was for psychological and not geopolitical let alone moral reasons
that Bush chose
Yeah,
and a lot of people used to believe that the Earth was flat.
Do you also believe that 2/3 of Congress
would approve the use of force against the Hussein regime if they had suspected
that this was all for a psychological fix for the President? Remember, that
vote was held long before midterm elections. This is an example of the insular
world of fictions, factoids and paranoid conspiracy theories typical of the
left, (Wellstone was murdered!) few of whom were trained in any rigorous
discipline requiring an objective, sober interpretation of empirical EVIDENCE.
6:
Bush
is known as a vindictive person who is quick to anger and holds grudges for a
long time.
7:
His
regime in
As
for his record as Governor of
Mario Marquez 1/31/1995 #87
Spencer Goodman 1/18/2000 #201
According to the Texas Department of Criminal
Justice records, the first death row inmate to be executed under the
governorship of George Bush was Mario Marquez who was executed on January 31,
1995. He the 87th executee on records starting December 7,1982. The last
executee (the 201st) under Bush’s governorship was Spencer Goodman executed on
January 18, 2000. That makes a total of 114 executions while Bush was Governor.
He was Governor for 1,826 days (1/19/95 – 1/19/2000). Therefore, the rate of
executions while George Bush was Governor of Texas was 1 execution per 16 days,
not an average of more than one person per day.
Certainly the left must not allow FACTS to
get in the way of their anti-Republican, anti-American, anti-Bush agenda. More
leftist fiction.
8:
He
let be killed one prisoner whom DNA tests showed could not have done the crime
but because that evidence came in after the formal appeals process had run its
course let him die anyway.
Not to
mention that these defendants were convicted in a court of law by juries of
their peers and, presumably, beyond all reasonable doubt with the evidence
available at the time of their trials. Who am I or who are you to critique the
proceedings and conclusions of those trials? Again, what are the FACTS?
9:
He is
a mean person, Klaus.
So,
I am supposed to reject an administration’s foreign policy because someone
believes that the President is a “mean man?” According to whom? Do you know
George Bush personally? Show me the data, and I don’t mean the rantings and
ravings from an Alexander Cockburn type. I mean facts.
10:
And
Ashcroft, his attorney general, with Patriot Acts I and 2 wants to strip *us*
of many of our civil rights -- including the right for this email message to
remain private.
Which
“many” of our civil rights, for how long and for what Machiavellian purpose?
I have not read the some 342 pages of the
Patriot Act. Have you? If so, What is the EVIDENCE that John Ashcroft WANTS to
strip us of civil rights? If, via the Patriot Act, the email of non-citizen
foreigners is monitored, how does that infringe upon the civil rights of
citizens? The United States is under no obligation to extend to any and all
foreigners the same rights extended to American citizens. This is one of the
many benefits of being an American. The opportunity, privilege, security and
prosperity enjoyed by Americans was won by the blood, sweat and tears of our
forbearers and by the projection of American economic, political, military and
moral power in the world. You cannot divorce your own good fortunes from the
fertile environment within which you have developed them, and that environment
is YOUR COUNTRY, the country which your own father defended at the risk of his
life and which you focus upon deriding. Are you enjoying your new house?
11:
This
is an intolerant regime that ridicules dissent as unpatriotic. How ironic and
frightening that a regime that purports to defend democracy condemns dissent,
which is perhaps the core principle of a democratic society.
Dissent per
se was never condemned; the POSITION of the dissenters was (and is).
You cannot expect to take an unpopular position on an extremely controversial
issue and expect that no one will disagree with you.
12:
We
are losing important aspects of the democracy that Bush purports to be
protecting.
What
aspects? Name them. How are we losing them?
13:
I am
one of those who is singing kumbaya, if that's a fair characterization of those
who are appalled by this eagerness to tell the rest of the world *not* to help
us after 9-11,
The
following is a list of Coalition countries as of 4/3/2003:
Afghanistan
Albania
Angola
Australia
Azerbaijan
Bulgaria
Colombia
Costa Rica
Czech Republic
Denmark
Dominican Republic
El Salvador
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Georgia
Honduras
Hungary
Iceland
Italy
Japan
Kuwait
Latvia
Lithuania
Macedonia
Marshall Islands
Micronesia
Mongolia
Netherlands
Nicaragua
Palau
Panama
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Rwanda
Singapore
Slovakia
Solomon Islands
South Korea
Spain
Tonga
Turkey
Uganda Ukraine
United Kingdom
United States
Uzbekistan
14:
who
wish that Nader had not run so that Al Gore would be leading us since 9-11 and
not George Bush because Gore, while stiff and wooden, would not have arrogantly
told the UN and "old Europe" that they were irrelevant -- someday we
may need these people as allies.
The
Germans will never forgive us for kicking their asses and the French will never
forgive us for SAVING their asses. We can always count on the French to be
there when THEY need US. With an “ally” like France, who needs enemies?
Besides, Poland will be a far more reliable ally and the Poles really KNOW THE
FACE OF FACISM, unlike the American and EU left to whom this is all just an
academic abstraction.
As evidenced by the policies of the
Clinton/Gore administration, Gore would have fired off a couple of cruise
missiles at tents in the Afghan desert to be followed up with a quagmire of
feckless UN sanctions. Al qaeda would still be metastasizing in Afghanistan;
Hussein would still be murdering an average of 250 citizens per day and closing
in on his first atomic weapons. But we’d have multilateral UN resolutions and
UN condemnations and UN sanctions coming out of our ears, agreements which
would prove to be as effective as the Clinton/Albright “Agreed Framework” with
Kim Yong Il. Yeah, THAT”LL work!
15:
Bush
has offended our traditional allies,
As
in the Allies who have thanklessly prospered under the American Security
Umbrella for 50 years?
Rather, the traditional allies have offended
the United States, Great Britain and the above list of 49 Coalition Partners
and, likely, many of the now liberated Iraqis who are grateful to the coalition
forces.
16:
and
has offended nearly the entire Muslim religion worldwide who all believe the
Iraq war *is* about oil.
Rather,
it is the distorted portrayal of George Bush and the United States, promulgated
and broadcast by al jezeera, madrassa-of-the-air, which has offended the hoards
of gullible, uneducated, and misguided Muslims and has tried to convince them
that the so-called war-on-Iraq was about oil. Al-jazeera has also
succeeded in convincing gullible, uninformed and misguided members of the left
that this war is about oil and some grand American-Israeli conspiracy to
enslave the Arab world.
It’s Not About the Oil, Already!
17:
We
can say smugly that the rest of the world is wrong and we are right and nobody
likes us because we are so much better ethically and materially, but it is our
cultural arrogance that offends so many in other lands, not that we have more
toasters and cars than they do.
I’m
confident that I am not alone in not caring if the United States has offended
people in other lands. There is no cultural equivalence between American
western culture and the anachronistic, medieval, oppressive, nihilistic
monoculture of Islamic fundamentalism. That culture SUCKS and our culture is so
profoundly superior that they can scarcely be compared and contrasted. The
United States has been the greatest benefactor the world has ever known. Heaven
forbid that something as banal as NATIONAL DEFENSE should upset the cocoon of
serenity of the deluded left.
Arabs stupid? No. Ignorant, uninformed,
misguided and uneducated? Yes. It is a serious deficiency of Islam that it
never experienced an Enlightenment or Reformation. It has been petrified in a
form of medieval nihilism which the Islamists desire to inflict upon the entire
globe. The Mideast oil resources were discovered and developed predominantly by
US companies. The United States has been the preeminent global economic engine
which promoted the development of the huge global demand for the products of
those resources and provided livelihoods for billions of people throughout the
world who otherwise might have none. Without the US, the entire Arab world
would likely still be “sitting in the sand chanting a whole bunch of shit.”
(Dan Jenkins)
18:
And I
don't see why going to *war*, for God's sake, is better than UN inspections.
Because
they weren’t working for starters – even Hans BLIX admitted that.
“Whatever one's stance on how best to handle
Saddam Hussein, it is crucial to understand one thing: United Nations
inspections, as they are currently constituted, will never work.
“For inspectors to do their job, they have to
have the truth, which can only come from the Iraqis. As President Bush told the
United Nations last week, the world needs an Iraqi government that will stop
lying and surrender the weapons programs. That is not likely to happen as long
as Saddam Hussein remains in power.”
--Gary Milhollin & Kelly Motz , The
New York Times, September 16, 2002, p. A21
Gary Milhollin is director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.
Kelly Motz is the editor of IraqWatch.org.
Iraqwatch:
Why Iraq Will Defeat Arms Inspectors
Iraqwatch:
Nuclear, Chemical, Biological, and Missile Programs of Iraq
THE IRAQI BOMB
Because the International Atomic Energy Agency is ineffectual,
Saddam Hussein will continue to outwit U.N. inspectors.
by Gary Milhollin
The New Yorker
February 1, 1993, p. 47.
(link to
article)
19:
Saddam
had stopped gassing his people,
Oh,
I see. We’ve just GOT to draw the line at gassing people. It’s acceptable if
he’s otherwise murdering them with summary executions, torturing them to death,
throwing people into plastic shredders, summarily cutting out tongues,
imprisoning children, raping children in front of their parents. That’s ok;
just no gassing.
I just LOVE the absolute hypocrisy of the
left, the self described champions of human rights and civil liberties marching
in support of keeping a regime like this in power while they worry that someone
might peek at their email because they just happened to check out the title How
to Make an Atomic Bomb in Your Spare Time from the public library.
Is any of this getting through?
20:
wasn't
massing troops on any border to attack anyone else
In
an age of suitcase mass terror technology, major attacks do not require the
massing of troops. THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT!
21:
and
yes, while terrorizing his own people
And
“terrorizing his own people” is INSUFFICIENT cause to take him out???!!!
22:
--
and there are African and Asian dictators doing that now and why aren't we
going to bomb them?
Military
action against North Korea may yet be required. Which African dictators are you
referring to who has active WMD programs?
We cannot allow weapons of mass destruction
to be handed off to terrorist groups to be brought into the United States. This
is an ACTUAL, EMPIRICAL, REAL threat.
This is not theoretical. Unfortunately, the
delays encountered in the UN, thanks to our “allies,” may have afforded Hussein
the opportunity to provide these very weapons to terrorist groups.
23:
-- he
was not aggressing against other countries and hadn't been since he went into
Kuwait in 1991
Please
explain to me the moral difference between aggressing against another country
versus aggressing against the population of one’s own country. Are you singing
Kumbaya for the Iraqi population too, or don’t they matter for some reason that
is just beyond the logical capacity of someone outside of the academic
meritocracy?
Celebrate Diversity!
24:
If we
went to war because he is evil, there is a long list of others we should be
bombing right now too.
A journey
of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Hussein’s “evil”
nature per se was not the causus belli. We have many tools in our
toolbox of which military force is but one.
25:
If we
use 9-11 as a reason to say someone could do this again and let's kill anyone
who might do this again, we are going to *create* whole generations of orphans
and dispossessed with the motivation to want to do this again.
It
should be clear by now that the United States, with a coalition of the willing,
is able to depose tyrannical regimes without causing the collateral damage
which leads to the creation of generations of orphans and dispossessed.
This is not accidental. The Defense Department has already figured this out as
evidenced by the stunning success and precision of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Continued Tomorrow
posted by Klaus (mit mein vicious Hund, Helmut) 06/19/03