U.S. Air Strike Kills 40 In Iraqi Mosque (Read On For The Full-On War Crimes Debate)

[SM BHAFC]

Dandyman I agree with so much of what you say but particularly on the Legal reasons for war, personally I did not need Blair to use the WMD thing I believed we should have gone in and finished SH on humanitarian grounds and there are plenty of other places that need sorting as well.

However as i said at the time of the war obviousely there is oil in them hills so to speak and yes we were also looking after our own interest, again I had no probelm with that, people have gone to war for much less.

I want our PM whichever party he is from looking after UK interest so the claims that is was a war for oil from peace protesters never bothered me. i know it was not all about that and was not bothered it was partly about that.

Afgahnistan neded to be done and it aint perfect but it is a whole lot better than having a country full of people training to kill us.

 

[SM BHAFC]

Simster I dont think Iraq had anything to do with Bin laden that is not something I have said but Saddam did not take on board the change of the western world after 11 sept and paid the price I am glad he is gone. As for Tony and all his bullshit maybe he will pay at the ballot box we are a democracy but I find myself in the odd position of agreeing with his actions but not his reasons for his actions.

 

[Lady Bracknell]

Not prepared to be grateful to their "liberators"? Well there's a surprise!

Who has given the Iraqis anything to be grateful for in terms of rolling out red carpets and showers of rose petals? Certainly not Buffalo Bush whose war games have now systematically destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and left the country dangerously unstable. This is surely the sort of liberation that owes most to a plot long lost than it does any sort of strategic understanding of either Iraq or, indeed, cause and effect.

I doubt there's anyone who disputes the nastiness of Saddam Hussein's regime (and that old chestnut about "appeasement" is the laziest way of all to avoid answering the difficult questions) but there are many quick and quiet ways to dispose of despotic leaders. If, of course, some of those very people so quick to send the troops into Iraq last year hadn't previously found it a deal more "convenient" to leave Saddam Hussein in charge.

And just as the appeasement argument doesn't wash as a defence of the war in Iraq, neither does dragging in the 9/11 factor. There's no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved and the implied suggestion that he was has done nothing to bring the perpetrators to justice. Quite the opposite, in fact since Al-Queda has many, many more axes to grind now that Bush has inflamed the Middle East and blundered along creating ever greater divisions both in and outside the Islamic world. That our Government is happy to go along with all this is shameful.

As for his "War on Terror" - terrorism, in the Gospel according to Dubya, was an unknown element in the world until September 2001 - the "results", from this particular campaign must be very satisfying to Bin Laden & Co. Why leave their caves to whip up insurgency when Bush can do it for you?

 

[Dave the OAP]

I personally think that the Americans were looking for an excuse to have a go at Iraq following Saddam's obstructiveness with regards to weapons investigators.

If you recall there were many times that the Inspectors were refused access to places, Iraqi sciantists could only be interviewed with Iraqui feda een present, war planes targetted by missiles from iraqui batteries...etc etc, so the excuse Bush was waiting for was given to him by saddam on a plate. Saddam probably had to show a hard line to keep his warring population under control and the UN are a very weak ill led group that has/had no bite at all. Everytime the UN soldier raises his gun, they have to report back to the SC before they can do anything...look at Rwanda /Bosnia/serbia/Croatia etc etc

I am not saying that the US were right in going in, I am just saying they had every provocation...and Americans are very twichy especially afetr 9/11 so Saddam must have known what he was at.

My concern in all of this is how we defeat Al Qieda. I actually believe we will not and we will end up with a situation where it is intelligence and luck foiling bomb plots, as we are seeing, but I think we will get more "Madrids" and "Istanbuls" It is just something we will have to get used to.

It is quite enlightening to see you have such verhment anti's and pro's on a message board.....we are a perfect example of why this will never go away.

my main concern is that this is all being blamed on the Americans. It was Saudi's who flew the planes into the twin towers ( not Jumbo jets Gareth BTW) Osama is a Saudi.

For a start I would get all American/ Allied bases out of saudi...that will go some way to appease these people

 

[Dandyman]

Interesting point about the Saudi's.

The Amnesty International website has this to say about that delightful country...

www.amnesty.org/ailib/intcam/saudi/report.html

IMHO if we really want to defeat terrorism and its causes then ending "our" support for repressive and anti-democratic regimes has to be the first step.

 

[blue-shifted]

Sadly I agree that there will now always be Madrids, Bali's and Instanbul. I believe this would have occurred, whether or not we went to war with Iraq, though the war gives a perfect excuse to people who don't need an excuse and the threat is now increased.

I also believe that al queda etc will kill as many (Americans westerners, whites, Christians, I don't know their real motivation is ) people as it is in there ability to do. This i believe is also irrespective of action in Iraq.

I can only see 2 ways to prevent this

negotiation/not winding them up any more. ( i don't think this would work, Bali hadn't been very provocative, and France have been on terrorist alert for the proposed headscarf laws despite opposing the war)

Or to limit the amount of people they have the ability to kill.

How to go about this is though

Well, it seems sensible to me to prevent the proliferation of technology which would allow al queda etc to kill millions rather than thousands. One way to achieve this is stop states, on whom you have reliable intelligence that they have WMD's and the intention to pass the these on to terrorist organisations, from doing so.

Whether or not UK and USA had this intelligence, I don't know. If they did then I completely agree with the war and would back them to do the same if a similar situation arose. The fact that nothing has been found makes Bush and Blair look very bad, though it's puzzling that Saddam gave the weapons inspectors such a run around if he had nothing like this.

I've included a link to the gas massacre at Halabji, which is sobering reading for those on both sides of he argument.

http://www.gendercide.org/case_anfal.html

 

[Brighton Breezy]

don't these Iraqi people know we are doing them a favour by getting rid of an evil dictator who presecuted and killed Iraqi curds? Not only this but they are getting a democracy as well. Some people...

 

[alan partridge]

don't these Iraqi people know we are doing them a favour by getting rid of an evil dictator who presecuted and killed Iraqi curds? Not only this but they are getting a democracy as well. Some people...

yeah, bloody lemon idiots

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

After Sept 11th it was a different world we went into Iraq and may go into other places beacuse as a country Iraq had continually pissed everyone about threatening to use weapons that we know they had.

Some good sincere opinions on this thread. Respect for that.

But...

Iraq patently DIDN'T have these weapons, and they had BUGGER ALL to do with 9/11. Which means the illegal and immoral invasion of a sovereign state against the wishes of the majority of the UK population, the consensus of the United Nations and the heartfelt opinion of every leader of religion who expressed a preference was just plain WRONG. No matter how much Saddam may be a loathsome figure. Plenty of those about. Mugabe for starters. Nah, this was all about oil and settling old scores, and it sure as f*** ain't why any of us voted in a Labour government. Nor will again til they get shot of Tony B.Liar

 

[blue-shifted]

Tom Hark, I put the Halabji link in my last post as a round about way of saying that US/UK would have had good grounds for believing that Saddam did have those weapons. (That and the way he was acting at the time).

I believe that, if there is reliable intelligence that a state is creating WMD's with the intention, or even the liklihood of intent to supply to terrorist organistaions, that is a grave enough possibility to justify war and we should do it again if necessary.

Whether that is the case here, I don't think any of us can know

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

Tom Hark, I put the Halabji link in my last post as a round about way of saying that US/UK would have had good grounds for believing that Saddam did have those weapons. (That and the way he was acting at the time).

I believe that, if there is reliable intelligence that a state is creating WMD's with the intention, or even the liklihood of intent to supply to terrorist organistaions, that is a grave enough possibility to justify war and we should do it again if necessary.

Whether that is the case here, I don't think any of us can know

Well there was all these UN weapons inspectors running around Iraq at the time - & THEY couldn't find any. And the 'reliable intelligence' is being discredited by the day - watch how Bush & B.Liar's language is gradually changing to shift the blame onto dodgy intelligence, when truth is the spooks were under EXTREME pressure from both governments to whip up a half-credible case for invasion. Hence the dodgy dossier.

 

[London Irish]

Tom Hark, I put the Halabji link in my last post as a round about way of saying that US/UK would have had good grounds for believing that Saddam did have those weapons. (That and the way he was acting at the time).

I believe that, if there is reliable intelligence that a state is creating WMD's with the intention, or even the liklihood of intent to supply to terrorist organistaions, that is a grave enough possibility to justify war and we should do it again if necessary.

Whether that is the case here, I don't think any of us can know

Get your facts right about Halabji, Blue-shifted.

The gassing of the Kurds in 1988 occurred when Iraq was an ALLY of the United States. Cast your mind back to 1988. Everyone knew that a terrible atrocity had happened, the Kurds got the message out to the world pretty quickly.

Did that terrible genocide make any headlines in the USA or this country - like f*** it did! Saddam Hussain was our boy back then and the response of Bush Snr and Thatcher? You could hear a pin drop.

In 1988, Saddam has just spent the last eight years since the Iranian revolution acting as a sub-contractor for the west in crushing Isalamic fundamentalism. Half a million lives were lost in the Iran-Iraq war, a war in which we gave political, logistical and tactical support to Saddam Hussain in his war against the Iranian clerics, the "Islamo-fascist" bogeymen before Al-Quada. (It was also in this period we were arming the Afghan mujahideen, who would mutate into the Taliban, because in this particular theatre of conflict the "Islamo-facists" were designated "our friends" against the Soviets - that's "principled" western foreign policy for you, doncha love it?).

Saddam wanted a little payback for all that hard work in behalf of the oil companies. So he set out to neutralise the northern Kurdish opposition with WMDs. That the west did nothing about that both before and after that terrible event emboldened Saddam to proceed with his plans to invade Kuwait. It was only then that the West decided their little puppet was developing too much of a mind of his own and a little too much control of western oil supplies and had to be taken down. Then the west "discovered" Saddam's human rights abuses! Marvellous!

The delivery systems that Saddam used to gas the Kurds in 1988 were supplied by the USA. How any Bush-supporting idiot can use this as an argument of Saddam's "evil", well such hypocrisy defies belief.

Saddam still had his WMD stockpiles after the first Gulf War. It was then that the UN introduced the programme of weapons inspectors to ensure that Saddam complied with UN resolutions. Guess what? THE UN DID f***ing DISARM SADDAM. All you Bush-supporting idiots can't get your head around that fact, can you?

The weapons inspectors did their job, Saddam did destroy his WMDs for fear of being caught. It was not the so-called weak UN who f***ed up, they did their job in making the world a safer place. It is Bush's war that has turned Iraq into an ungovernable playground for the training of terrorists. The Shia currently being radicalised in Iraq will be the next generation of al-Quada bombers heading our way in 5-10 years' time.

One final thing. Around 20 years ago I was organising meetings in Brighton with Iraqi oppositionists to try and publicise Thatcher's silence on Saddam's atrocities. Saddam's thugs were everywhere on the Unversity of Sussex campus, it was a nice little earner accepting their blood money. I don't need to be lectured on "Saddam's evil" by any Bush-supporting idiots on here who had never heard of Saddam until pappy Bush decided that he had outlived his usefullness as an ally against Islamic fundamentalism.

 

[DTES]

don't these Iraqi people know we are doing them a favour by getting rid of an evil dictator who presecuted and killed Iraqi curds? Not only this but they are getting a democracy as well. Some people...

I think you should put a smilie after your posts, so can be sure they're jokes. I mean, I'm pretty sure that is. By that I mean I really, really, hope it is.

I think you'll find there are many, many innocent Iraqi's who are even more unhappy now than they were under Saddam. And what price have they paid to get this "better life"? Well, many of them have lost loved ones, or entire families. Yes RM, you're right - we did them a massive favour.

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

Get your facts right about Halabji, Blue-shifted.

The gassing of the Kurds in 1988 occurred when Iraq was an ALLY of the United States. Cast your mind back to 1988. Everyone knew that a terrible atrocity had happened, the Kurds got the message out to the world pretty quickly.

Did that terrible genocide make any headlines in the USA or this country - like f*** it did! Saddam Hussain was our boy back then and the response of Bush Snr and Thatcher? You could hear a pin drop.

In 1988, Saddam has just spent the last eight years since the Iranian revolution acting as a sub-contractor for the west in crushing Isalamic fundamentalism. Half a million lives were lost in the Iran-Iraq war, a war in which we gave political, logistical and tactical support to Saddam Hussain in his war against the Iranian clerics, the "Islamo-fascist" bogeymen before Al-Quada. (It was also in this period we were arming the Afghan mujahideen, who would mutate into the Taliban, because in this particular theatre of conflict the "Islamo-facists" were designated "our friends" against the Soviets - that's "principled" western foreign policy for you, doncha love it?).

Saddam wanted a little payback for all that hard work in behalf of the oil companies. So he set out to neutralise the northern Kurdish opposition with WMDs. That the west did nothing about that both before and after that terrible event emboldened Saddam to proceed with his plans to invade Kuwait. It was only then that the West decided their little puppet was developing too much of a mind of his own and a little too much control of western oil supplies and had to be taken down. Then the west "discovered" Saddam's human rights abuses! Marvellous!

The delivery systems that Saddam used to gas the Kurds in 1988 were supplied by the USA. How any Bush-supporting idiot can use this as an argument of Saddam's "evil", well such hypocrisy defies belief.

Saddam still had his WMD stockpiles after the first Gulf War. It was then that the UN introduced the programme of weapons inspectors to ensure that Saddam complied with UN resolutions. Guess what? THE UN DID f***ing DISARM SADDAM. All you Bush-supporting idiots can't get your head around that fact, can you?

The weapons inspectors did their job, Saddam did destroy his WMDs for fear of being caught. It was not the so-called weak UN who f***ed up, they did their job in making the world a safer place. It is Bush's war that has turned Iraq into an ungovernable playground for the training of terrorists. The Shia currently being radicalised in Iraq will be the next generation of al-Quada bombers heading our way in 5-10 years' time.

One final thing. Around 20 years ago I was organising meetings in Brighton with Iraqi oppositionists to try and publicise Thatcher's silence on Saddam's atrocities. Saddam's thugs were everywhere on the Unversity of Sussex campus, it was a nice little earner accepting their blood money. I don't need to be lectured on "Saddam's evil" by any Bush-supporting idiots on here who had never heard of Saddam until pappy Bush decided that he had outlived his usefullness as an ally against Islamic fundamentalism.

Post Of The Day

 

[Zeitgeist]

Post Of The Day

Seconded

 

[Brighton Breezy]

If you look at the numbers involved in the fighting, there are lots who are not. There are also those supporting the coalition, should we just abandon them? No. THAT would be the irresponsible thing.
Iraq is now a mess and we must shoulder some of the blame for that but we should no just cut our losses and leave it in that mess.
Man Iraqis DO support out troopes and ARE glad they are there.
Nobody can doubt that Iraq is better off without Saddam.
I admit that things have gone slightly pear shaped but it is no reason to quit, just as mistakes made by US and British governments years ago are not reasons to not put them right now.
We MUST help deliver democracy to Iraq.

 

[JAMC]

I've got a mate in Iraq at the moment. He quit the army not so long ago for a job out there doing body guard duties to the UN and local government officials. A lot of his duties are riding as armed guard for them when they have to go out of the compound or safe areas etc.
I wonder what he must be thinking right now??
The pay is about £10,000 a month, plus a good sun tan.
Would you do it for that amount of money??

On the whole it's not looking good but is a lot of it being blown up (no pun intended) by the media for a good news story??

 

[NMH]

The way I see it, the world is not a safer place since the CIA manipulated foreign affairs to suit USA - however, there's always the concept and fear in America that a united Muslim world could grind the rest of the world to an effective halt by hiking or stopping oil sales.

The fallacy with that point, is underlined in Brazil - where about half the transportis powered by alcohol....made from sugarcane.
There's also 'alternative' power provided for 'hybrid' vehicles that use batteries for propulsion, and we should be getting on with making alternatives work. Oil money runs our world though, and Bush is from an oil family that need to help all their oil business associates as well - not provide for the alternative.

About Iraq - the convenient balance of power in that region was manipulated by Washington to keep Iran's Ayatolla regime and ideals from swamping the area. A balance is kept carefully by playing one country against another..... and distracting from Israel of course. We too live in culture that is mostly on a Judaism-related basis. Christianity is the teaching that is based on Judaism, as is Catholicism. The Koran and the Torah both inherently present an amount of perceivable and available violence, and humanity can't seem to see beyond the concept of 'right vs wrong' to a harmonious tolerance of other's beliefs.

Bottom lines might include that we as a species have ALWAYS fought and warred, killed and subjugated, hated and oppressed.
It doesn't seem to be ending, and whatever reasons are concocted for intolerance, they seem good enough reasons.... to the people who are blind to reason. Then someone kills one of yours and you are part of the hatred as well. There are many who say "kill all infidels" or "kill all Arabs", and we won't kill all of them either!

Is there a peaceful alternative out there? Look at the globe, and the World map does have a few lands, like much of South America, which appears to be both religiously tolerant and relatively peaceful. Rancid with poverty, almost singular in mass religion, but tolerant.

So, there's no solution or place to hide from the powers-that-be, and we walk a tightrope between complete world mayhem and peaceful harmony - one power staving off another, manipulations continuing fragile stalemates yet keep the games and contentiousnesses going .

No solution or heavy opinions here, just a helpless feeling that pervades me, that we'll never see the end of wars, power-struggles or 'good reasons for bad actions'. Mad innit?

 

[JAMC]

The problem here is!
We are entering into another world war.
This time, it's not in Europe (as we call it) but in Iraq and associaceted countries.

 

[blue-shifted]

London Irish. I agree with parts of your last post, though you misinterpreted what I was saying.

In particular, I had a specific reason for mentioning Saddam used chemical weapons in the 80's. This is that....

a) he has had the ability to make chemical weapons. (your assertion that it was set in stone that prior to the second gulf war Saddam certainly didn't have WMD's, though with hindsight seems to be true, didn't match what was widely believed at the time).

b) he has a track record of recklessness to their use. (from that I think its safe to infer he wouldn't refuse to supply this material to terrorist organisations on moral grounds, should the link be shown, this is a controversial point, as the links are questionable, but again is down to the intelligence)

I wasn't mentioning the history of Saddam's record on genocide to make any points about world affairs in the late 80's. To be honest the history I don't think is relevant to the here and now.

Though, as an aside London Irish, in that 1st paragraph you say that the USA was an ally of Iraq during the gassing of the Kurds. This is true to the point that they supported Saddam in the Iran/Iraq war, but it's surely misleading to suggest that UK or US in any way sanctioned or condoned the genocide. This seems to be a popular argument to against the war, I don't see how it's relevant to now, obviously allies and enemies are going to change over time in world politics. In this instance the US took a a pragmatic approach in the late 80's that Saddam wasn't as much of a danger as the Ayatollah. yup your right, with hindsight this looks not a great call, this hindsight's bloody brilliant.

I repeat, that debating history isn't helpful to now, but you state that the gassing was hardly reported at the time. Was that true? can't see how that would be the fault of Us/UK govt's rather than news agencies.

Also LI, you organising meetings in the 80's doesn't in itself make you right and doesn't mean I don't have the right to disagree.

I'd like to restate my central point to you which is, if we have reliable intelligence that a state seeks to create, chem/bio/nuke weapons and it's reasonable to assume they intend to pass these weapons to al queda etc, then I believe we should go to war if that's what is necessary to prevent that happening. Whether the facts fit that statement is something noone on nsc knows for sure.