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In Reply to: We are all to blame posted by Aram on April 03, 2003 at 05:58:37:
Starting off, I believe that any leader using chemical weapons on his own people should be removed, by force of war if necessary. I'm not anti-American, or anti-anything, but I'm a thinker. After being in a cult where I was asked to shit down my thinking, I now promote thinking and questioning freely. I think questions are good for us. All rhetoric, pro or anti-war, should be scrutinized.
I often read about "the mistake of pulling up
short in the Gulf War". I ask:
Do current day needs to remove Saddam come from earlier mistakes not to remove him?
Why did the Iraq invade Kuwait in the first place? Wasn't it because he got the wrong signals from U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie? Didn't Saddam ask her specifically how the US would respond to his marching into Kuwait? Wasn't her response downright encouragement to Saddam? Wasn't her mistake due to believing that since Saddam had been considered an ally of sorts, having been US sponsored to counter Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini and all, that the US would remain supportive of him no matter what? Didn't it have something to do with her idea Iraq should be rewarded for fighting a long war and holding fundamentalist extremist Iran back? Didn't the US consider Iraq a moderate state with secular politics?
When the coalition forces went into Iraq in 1991, why did the they (at the leadership of the US) pull out? Was it really due to the curtrent rhetoric that the US was responding to public outcry? If I remember corectly, the press was tightly controled and Peter Arnett did not get his stories of Iraqi suffering out until well into 1992/1993. Wasn't it because Bush senior didn't want Iran Turkey and Syria to start dismantling the country? Wasn't it because as G. Bush senior explained "Our objective was never to remove Saddam. We need Iraq to stay as Iraq, and unfortunately there is no one to run that country if Saddam is removed"? Didn't he turn his backs on the Shiites and Kurds who rose up against Saddam like he encouraged?
When the US then opted for sanctions against Iraq to encourage the Iraqi people to remove Saddam themselves (back to removing Saddam again), why didn't the US listen to reports that the sanctions were just making life miserable for ordinary Iraqis and leaving Saddam's leadership untouched? Was hurting the ordinary Iraqi people intentional when the US flooded the Iraqi economy with fake bills to create inflation, when the leadership were the only people with access to hard currencies?
Is all the world responsible for sanctions and economic sabotage most people vehemently disagreed with?
Was any of this punishing Saddam? What was he being punished for exactly? For having weapons of mass destruction? Didn't US, European and Indian companies supply Saddam with equipment which they knew could be used for this purpose?
By why did Saddam invade Kuwait in the first place? Was it all greed for the richest oil fields in the world - the Ramala oil fields?
Didn't it have something to do with Iraq not having any access to sea lanes? Who drew the map and divided Iraq and Kuwait? How did the Ramala oil fields end up lying 90% on the Kuwaiti side of the border and only 10% under Iraqi soil?
