The President's Prime Time Oval Office Address on Iraq 8/21/2010 - Page 2

I don't have a problem with Utilitarian philosophy (the Greatest Good For The Greatest Number) per se, but it's difficult to see Bush and Obama's actions in Iraq as anything other than a perversion of such. I'd say The Greatest Good For The Most Wealthy And a Terrorist's Paradise For Everyone Else is closer to the mark.

And Mussolini taking the credit for the work of others doesn't mean HE made the trains run on time.

After? I was under the impression that Iraq (and, arguably, Afghanistan) is ALREADY in a state of civil war. On November 27, 2006, NBC announced it would "henceforth label the violence in Iraq a civil war". Can't get more definitive than that.

The whole notion that the US has the best interests of the Iraqi people at heart is not just broken - it's obliterated.

If it did care for the Iraqi people it wouldn't have:

a) Put Saddam into power.
b) Sent half a million Iraqis to their deaths in a senseless war against Iran.
c) Provided mustard and nerve gas for the extermination of nationalist elements in Iraq (they died in agony drowning in their own lung fluids).
d) Dropped more ordinance on Iraq in GWI than on Germany & Japan COMBINED.
e) Allowed Saddam to maintain power post GWI.
f) Encouraged Iraqi rebels post GWI in the southern marshes to rise up against Saddam (promising them military support) and then sold them down the river to be butchered.
g) Strong-armed the UN into disgusting sanctions which some estimates claim resulted in the premature deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.
g) Concocted a dubious pretext (WMD) to invade Iraq.
h) Bombed the major public utilities (water, sewage, electricity, bridges etc.) to dust.
i) Dismantled Iraq's civic infrastructure (lawyers, doctors, midwives, police, fire department etc.)

etc. etc.

Show me the compassion!

As for what Afghanistan and Iraq would do if the US pulled out - this reminds me of an appallingly racist discussion with two Iraqi intellectuals I watched on CNN a few years ago in which the host said something along the lines of "So what's with Arabs and violence?"

I see this kind of crap time and time again in the media. The notion that Arabs are predisposed to violence is taken as axiomatic without so much as a hint of uncertainty.

They are NOT. Prior to the imperialistic meddling of Europe and the US both Afghanistan and Iraq functioned just fine. And there's no reason to suggest they can't do so again in a future minus foreign parasites.

The US has killed what? 2 - 3 million (probably more) people between Afghanistan and Iraq? Some would say that makes the US the biggest terrorist nation.

And as Geoff pointed out the US sold wmds to Saddam. And the US CONTINUED to sell WMDS to Saddam AFTER he used it to kill hundreds of thousands of his own people. Yes thats right, the US continued to sell the wmds to Sadaam as he was using them on his own people. So lets not pretend the US ever cared about the Iraqi people when the US encouraged Sadam to massacre his own people. Despite all this, what the US did was far far worse.

Anyone arguing for the justification for the Iraq war by pointing to Sadam is, well lets not use any rude words. The US obliterated a nation, killed over a million people, unleashed private security firms that they allowed to rape and kill at will, destroyed every element of infrastructure and simply refused to rebuild it. Its absolutely insane and offensive that people are arguing the war was an act of kindness towards the Iraqi people. But I guess people have to cling to some reason not to believe their country is evil, not to believe their country is in the business of profiting from warfare and mass murder.

I recently listened to an emotional talk by Robert Fisk which was recorded a few years ago in London. It sums up the US and Britain's relationship with Saddam completely:

"I recall one early day in the eighties when I was travelling near the Iran-Iraq war front back to Tehran on an Iranian military hospital train. All the soldiers aboard had been gassed. Those Iranians were all victims of Saddam, coughing and choking up blood and mucous into towels. Back in London, I was working for the London Times at the time, my paper front paged the story of the Death Train and spoke of war crimes by the Iraqis. And later that week, a British foreign office official told my then editor over lunch that "Robert Fisk's story has not been very helpful", because, of course, Britain was supporting Iraq against the Iranians. In America, the United States was supporting Iraq against the Iranians. And that same week that I was on the hospital train the US sent a special delegate to meet Saddam in Baghdad to re-open the American embassy and, as we all know, his name was Donald Rumsfeld."

Fisk later quit the London Times when Murdoch bought it up and wanted to exercise editorial control over his reports.

I understand what you're saying here Nabster, but I think we must be very careful with language. I'm sure you don't believe that "America" (or any other country for that matter) is "evil". I certainly don't. Take any independent poll (not the ones run by FOX news which are either made up or biased against millions of people who can't afford a phone, computer, or cannot access them at all because they are sick, incarcerated etc.) and time and time again you find that Americans want to bring the troops home from Iraq, Afghanistan etc., despise torture, favour a peaceful solution to the Iran issue, are opposed to the US being the "Global Policeman" and would like to see the UN play a greater role in international affairs etc.

Of course, you'll never see THESE polls on FOX. That would totally undermine the US administration's policies.

Another point worth making is that for all the horrors we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US is - in many ways - far more democratic than it was, say, in the sixties.

Take the anti-war protests for example. Even before the war started there were millions of people on the streets venting their anger. Recall that the Vietnam war had been under way for years before any serious peace movement emerged. Because of this the ruling elites simply couldn't employ the tactics they used against Vietnam and Cambodia. There would have been outrage! So, no saturation bombing of towns and cities. No chemical warfare (ok, I accept there's an argument regarding depleted uranium - but you can't compare it to the Monsanto-devised Agent Orange devastation).

The US was forced to back down from some of its war aims. Bush fought tooth and nail to prevent elections. The idea was to have some kind of pro-consul. I'm certain that they would have loved to implement a draft (which sweeps up the lower incomes, criminals, mentally ill etc. whilst the elites find ways of circumventing it), but the US discovered in Vietnam that you simply cannot use a civilian army to carry out a brutal colonial war. Britain and France learned the same lesson years earlier hence the use of the Gurkhas and French Foreign Legion respectively.

So things are improving - very slowly - but we're still a long, long way short of embracing absolute democracy and peaceful co-existence. I personally believe many of these problems are an emergent function of the capitalist system and until we abandon it for good we'll always be in the mire. But that's from someone who's close to tipping off the edge of the Left and I'm sure others will disagree.

No you're right I don't think the US is evil. Like other countries, their governments do good and bad things. I used to live there and I still go there all the time, since my family lives there. Its just frustrating sometimes when you hear peoples justification for the wars, as the arguments some people made here, only thing I can point to is ignorance or racism. It sounds like they take all their info from fox news. If it wasn't reported on Fox News or CNN its like it never happened.

You mentioned Vietnam War and how things are getting better, but I actually disagree, because they learned so much from their previous wars. They understand the value in making sure the installed leaders are not precieved to be puppets, so they allow rigged elections to happen ala Karzai, but at the end of the day its a US puppet.

The media. Embedded journalism is propaganda. The US researches and reviews journalists, and they grade them on how friendly and patriotic they are. And obviously they only award these embeds to pro American journalists. This also allows them to control the setting and message of the journalist. You write anything the military doesn't like and your embed is revoked. What about the vacancy of the images of war in the media? Vietnam alteast people saw what was happening to some extent, and this is what roused them to action. But now they've become so good at quelling these sentiments. The US understands, no one reports it, it didn't happen, thus no civilian death count. There could be 2 million dead iraqis due to the war, and its impossible to know.

I take your point about embedded journalism. You're absolutely right that Vietnam taught governments that you have to control the flow of information.

But remember, during the early years of the Vietnam war (when some of the worst atrocities took place) there were very few restrictions on information flow. And yet it took years before the peace movement really kicked into gear.

The very fact that they are compelled to control the media (during the first weeks of the war and after endless videos of missile sites, bunkers, buildings, barns and warehouses being hit you could be forgiven for thinking there are no people in Iraq!) confirms that society is changing for the better. Had we witnessed the kind of horrific newsfeeds that came back from Vietnam in the opening years there would have been uproar and Bush would have been out on his ear.

And you just can't compare the level damage inflicted on Iraq with what was unleashed on Vietnam and Cambodia (especially). The latter was quite literally bombed back into the Stone Age where Pol Pot was waiting with open arms.