Are the American People Insane?

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Oblate,
Thank you for a post that is well thought out. You are reasonable, state your experiences with both groups, and try to maintain some objectivity.
Truly refreshing.

 

I don't mean to offend anyone, but America hasn't made too many good decisions in the past. They all seem trigger happy, and use the military to get their own way.

 

Yes, that's why we've conquered so many nations and bent them to our will lately. Really, we've become quite rich off of wars.

No, wait. I was wrong. We haven't. We haven't gained an iota of land militarily since the Spanish-American War IIRC. We haven't used military force for trade since we opened Japan's harbors back before WW2. We gained nothing in Vietnam, Korea, or the Persian Gulf wars.

If you folks up in Canadia and elsewhere in NATO would get off your tushes and start funding your military (the U.S. spends more than twice as much on defense as the rest of NATO combined), then maybe we wouldn't have to be guarding your sorry asses all the time and we could actually cut back on the size our military (which, actually, we have been doing anyway).

It's amazing how many people operate by stereotypes instead of facts.

 

If America didn't gain anything from Vietnam, Korea, or the Persian Gulf wars then why did you do it in the first place?

 

To fight the "commies" remember??

 

any country with a regime like iraq,that starts producing NBC weapons,that has already shown its willingness to attack others should be eliminated from the world stage.and there are not 50 countries with this capability.and yes America is the youngest of nations but have we not kickedeverybody elses butt at least once.and we do it ,not with arrogance, but with national pride.we strive to be the best.maybe we dont have the traditions ya'll have but then why does everybody send their kids to school over here to get their degrees.goverments actually pay the tuition costs.as for evil in the world, theres always going to be evil,the ? you should be asking yourself is are you going to stand by or are you going to do something about it. Americans are always the first to act, to help,to give, to rebuild.as to war,nobody wants it,but our pride wont let us back down.and after we get a bloody nose,the American people will do some evil buttkicking.

 

Amen to that

 

korea: http://www.steamshovelpress.com/biowar.html

http://www.korea-np.co.jp/pk/169th_issue/2001103103.htm

http://www.ku.edu/~ibetext/korean-war-l/20000401/msg00006.html

http://www.kimsoft.com/korea/eyewit27.htm

http://www.brianwillson.com/awolrevkor.html

vietnam:http://members.aol.com/warlibrary/vwch1.htm

The next one's very good with a lot of photos.
http://www.pathfinder.com/photo/essay/mylai/mylaihp.htm

iraq: http://english.pravda.ru/diplomatic/2002/08/06/33892.html

http://www.deoxy.org/wc/warcrime.htm

Yes Shralp, that's it. War is no fun.

[ October 04, 2002, 22:15: Message edited by: Oblate ]

 

Interesting. A list of supposed war crimes (and one in which the author apparently didn't like the way Washington conducted peaceful negotiations with an ally). Some of those are debatable as war crimes (Pravda article on DU rounds, killing of Iraqi soldiers during Gulf War).

What's interesting is that several of them cite American government sources. Americans were holding trials on their own soldiers and administering justice. Not exactly a resounding condemnation of America you've presented there.

Regardless, I fail to see how a list of possible war crimes proves anything beyond the fact that soldiers often commit war crimes.

 

"If you folks up in Canadia and elsewhere in NATO would get off your tushes and start funding your military (the U.S. spends more than twice as much on defense as the rest of NATO combined), then maybe we wouldn't have to be guarding your sorry asses all the time and we could actually cut back on the size our military (which, actually, we have been doing anyway)."

How dare you make such an outrageous statement, especially to Canada, which bankrupted its military sending Canadian boys to die in Afghanistan as a FAVOUR to the United States. As a matter of fact, to die at the hands of Americans in Afghanistan. If other countries have more poorly-equipped armed forces, it is either because the country is smaller and poorer than the United States (Canada has a smaller population than virtually any single State) or because the country morals do not include bombing hell out of everyone they can come up with any reason to dislike. Both are true in the case of Canada- which, represents 10% of the world's peacekeepers despite representing less than 1% of the world's population. And since when does Canada seek *more* interference from the United States? I've never met a Canadian who didn't want the American military and government to keep its nose out of our affairs.

If you want to bomb every putative enemy you can think of, go right ahead and enjoy its results (gee, I wonder where anti-Americanism comes from?). But it is incredibly offensive for you to judge other countries harshly for choosing to focus its skills, strengths and limited income on peacekeeping instead of crusades.

 

Self-righteous bull****.

Canadians may send their forces out on proportionately more peacekeeping missions than most countries (if the UN says it's ok for you to do so), but then you recall them back home. We station our troops in other countries and leave them there. That is what keeps the peace. You can argue about why we do that all you wish, but the fact is that there has been peace in many areas of the world due only to large armed forces there, and the majority of those have been American.

The situation of the American pilot who inadvertently bombed Canadian soldiers engaged in live fire drills has already been discussed. The pilot of that plane and the pilot of the accompanying plane are being prosecuted. Your moral outrage, while understandable because of your friends in the Canadian forces, is simply irrelevant.

 

One of Iraq's two vice president has come up with a momentous plan, one which will save all but two lives and solve the conflict between the US and Iraq.

George Bush and Dick Cheney should duel Saddam Hussein and one of his VPs. The U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan could be the referee.

 

has anyone ever read"the americans" by gordon sinclair,a radio broadcast from june 5, 1973 CFRB, Toronto,Ontario Canada.Its still quite relevent today and enlightening.I'm just not sure where you could find it.but it's really worth it.

 

It is 13 months since 11 September, and still the great charade plays on. Having appropriated our shocked response to that momentous day, the rulers of the world have since ground our language into a paean of cliches and lies about the 'war on terrorism' - when the most enduring menace, and source of terror, is them.
The fanatics who attacked America came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. No bombs fell on these American protectorates. Instead, more than 5,000 civilians have been bombed to death in stricken Afghanistan, the latest a wedding party of 40 people, mostly women and children. Not a single al-Qaeda leader of importance has been caught.

Following this 'stunning victory', hundreds of prisoners were shipped to an American concentration camp in Cuba, where they have been held against all the conventions of war and international law. No evidence of their alleged crimes has been produced, and the FBI confirms only one is a genuine suspect. In the United States, more than 1,000 people of Muslim background have 'disappeared'; none has been charged. Under the draconian Patriot Act, the FBI's new powers include the authority to go into libraries and ask who is reading what.

Meanwhile, the Blair government has made fools of the British Army by insisting they pursue warring tribesmen: exactly what squaddies in putties and pith helmets did over a century ago when Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, described Afghanistan as one of the 'pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world'.

There is no war on terrorism; it is the great game speeded up. The difference is the rampant nature of the superpower, ensuring infinite dangers for us all.

Having swept the Palestinians into the arms of the supreme terrorist Ariel Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington, now replenish their arsenal in preparation for an attack on the 22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need reminding, Iraq is a nation held hostage to an American-led embargo every bit as barbaric as the dictatorship over which Iraqis have no control. Contrary to propaganda orchestrated from Washington and London, the coming attack has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction', if these exist at all. The reason is that America wants a more compliant thug to run the world's second greatest source of oil.

The drum-beaters rarely mention this truth, and the people of Iraq. Everyone is Saddam Hussein, the demon of demons. Four years ago, the Pentagon warned President Clinton that an all-out attack on Iraq might kill 'at least' 10,000 civilians: that, too, is unmentionable. In a sustained propaganda campaign to justify this outrage, journalists on both sides of the Atlantic have been used as channels, 'conduits', for a stream of rumours and lies. These have ranged from false claims about an Iraqi connection with the anthrax attacks in America to a discredited link between the leader of the 11 September hijacks and Iraqi intelligence. When the attack comes, these consorting journalists will share responsibility for the crime.

It was Tony Blair who served notice that imperialism's return journey to respectability was under way. Hark, the Christian gentleman-bomber's vision of a better world for 'the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan.' Hark, his 'abiding' concern for the 'human rights of the suffering women of Afghanistan' as he colluded with Bush who, as the New York Times reported, 'demanded the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population'. Hark his compassion for the 'dispossessed' in the 'slums of Gaza', where Israeli gunships, manufactured with vital British parts, fire their missiles into crowded civilian areas.

As Frank Furedi reminds us in The New Ideology of Imperialism , it is not long ago 'that the moral claims of imperialism were seldom questioned in the West. Imperialism and the global expansion of the western powers were represented in unambiguously positive terms as a major contributor to human civilisation.' The quest went wrong when it was clear that fascism was imperialism, too, and the word vanished from academic discourse. In the best Stalinist tradition, imperialism no longer existed. Today, the preferred euphemism is 'civilisation'; or if an adjective is required, 'cultural'.

From Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, an ally of crypto-fascists, to impeccably liberal commentators, the new imperialists share a concept whose true meaning relies on a xenophobic or racist comparison with those who are deemed uncivilised, culturally inferior and might challenge the 'values' of the West. Watch the 'debates' on Newsnight. The question is how best 'we' can deal with the problem of 'them'.

For much of the western media, especially those commentators in thrall to and neutered by the supercult of America, the most salient truths remain taboos. Professor Richard Falk, of Cornell university, put it succinctly some years ago. Western foreign policy, he wrote, is propagated in the media 'through a self righteous, one-way moral/legal screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence'.

Perhaps the most important taboo is the longevity of the United States as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists. That the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (in Nicaragua) and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law, is unmentionable.

'In the war against terrorism,' said Bush from his bunker following 11 September, 'we're going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes.'

Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth.

There is no terrorist sanctuary to compare with Florida, currently governed by the President's brother, Jeb Bush. In his book Rogue State , former senior State Department official Bill Blum describes a typical Florida trial of three anti-Castro terrorists, who hijacked a plane to Miami at knifepoint. 'Even though the kidnapped pilot was brought back from Cuba to testify against the men,' he wrote, 'the defence simply told the jurors the man was lying, and the jury deliberated for less than an hour before acquitting the defendants.'

General Jose Guillermo Garcia has lived comfortably in Florida since the 1990s. He was head of El Salvador's military during the 1980s when death squads with ties to the army murdered thousands of people. General Prosper Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US Government. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot's henchman and apologist at the United Nations, lives in New York. General Mansour Moharari, who ran the Shah of Iran's notorious prisons, is wanted in Iran, but untroubled in the United States.

Al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained tyrants and some 60,000 Latin American special forces, paramilitaries and intelligence agents in the black arts of terrorism.

In 1993, the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war; two-thirds of them had been trained at Fort Benning. In Chile, the school's graduates ran Pinochet's secret police and three principal concentration camps. In 1996, the US government was forced to release copies of the school's training manuals, which recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives.

In recent months, the Bush regime has torn up the Kyoto treaty, which would ease global warming, to which the United States is the greatest contributor. It has threatened the use of nuclear weapons in 'pre-emptive' strikes (a threat echoed by Defence Minister Geoffrey Hoon). It has tried to abort the birth of an international criminal court. It has further undermined the United Nations by blocking a UN investigation of the Israeli assault on a Palestinian refugee camp; and it has ordered the Palestinians to replace their elected leader with an American stooge. At summit conferences in Canada and Indonesia, Bush's people have blocked hundreds of millions of dollars going to the most deprived people on earth, those without clean water and electricity.

These facts will no doubt beckon the inane slur of 'anti-Americanism'. This is the imperial prerogative: the last refuge of those whose contortion of intellect and morality demands a loyalty oath. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the Nazis silenced argument and criticism with 'anti German' slurs. Of course, the United States is not Germany; it is the home of some of history's greatest civil rights movements, such as the epic movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

I was in the US last week and glimpsed that other America, the one rarely seen among the media and Hollywood stereotypes, and what was clear was that it was stirring again. The other day, in an open letter to their compatriots and the world, almost 100 of America's most distinguished names in art, literature and education wrote this:

'Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression. We believe that questioning, criticism and dissent must be valued and protected. Such rights are always contested and must be fought for. We, too, watched with shock the horrific events of September 11. But the mourning had barely begun when our leaders launched a spirit of revenge. The government now openly prepares to wage war on Iraq - a country that has no connection with September 11.

'We say this to the world. Too many times in history people have waited until it was too late to resist. We draw on the inspiration of those who fought slavery and all those other great causes of freedom that began with dissent. We call on all like-minded people around the world to join us.'

It is time we joined them.

/John Pilger

 

Absolutely chock full of half-truths and outright falsehoods. Amazing.

This guy should be a demogogue in some banana republic.

 

Lets pust aside all the other questions for a few moments and try to answer these two simple ones.
Iraq has ignored almost all of the UN peace agreements for the past 10 or 11 years.Including letting in UN weapons inspectors.
Why wont the UN support the enforcement of its own decrees.Doesnt this seem to undermine the authority and power on the UN just a little.
Question 2.Iraq has more oil than anyone.(I could be wrong about this correct me if I am)By rights they should be one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world.
Why is so much of their country still living in third world conditions?
And just as reply to those of you who keep saying
the US will soon be a dictatership.Do you live under a rock worst case Busch will be gone in eight years(less realy he is closing in on the end of his first term).He may not get a second term.
Just some more things to think about.

 

I think that Saudi arabia got more oil, though the people is turning against the us...

I think its ironic that the US condemn Iraq dau to having weapons of mass destruction (they think), supporting terrorists (they think) and breaking alots of human rights.

Same time they suport Israel, and they got weapons of mass destructions, they do suport terrorists, and they to break many of the human rights.

 

I think it's sad that people post stupid things like that on SP.

Ironic is that people criticize the U.S. for interfering when it's none of their business and then, when the U.S. interferes in something that is our business, they conveniently pretend not to notice where our interest lies.

Did you follow that, comrade?

 

Corr Raven:

which generals? the ones who died of old age? Yes, that's relevant. But let's look a little closer at the situations: Hiroshima: let's see, because we dropped the bomb, we didn't have to invade. You do the math.
Vietnam: warcrimes? You bet. Did we prosecute those responsible? You bet. So why would the international community do anything, when we've already policed ourselves?

Turandil: what are you smoking, and where can I get some?