bleubird

Is it not about corporate need?War is about corporate need(greed).The civil war was the start of the corporate greed machine.Bad meat bad shoes bad arms.
It is all about the corporation.
Read Jefferson on corporate threat.

Sue Sponte

Perhaps I'm naive, but I thought the Gulf War was based on the "pretext" of Iraq invading Kuwait. Most U.S. citizens found that an admirable cause.

Say what you wish about the current plans for invading Iraq, of which I am deeply troubled, but the first war with Iraq was not founded on similar pretext.

moon

Naive indeed, given that the U.S. had itself invaded Panama only a few months earlier!

Not only that, but the U.S. gave Iraq the green light to invade Kuwait, drawing them into a trap to provide the pretext to occupy Saudi Arabia and lay siege to Iraq.

Zar

Yes, well compared to the present morass, the 1991 US/Iraqi Gulf War had a far superior pretext to what we have today. Of course, debate rages on the relationship the U.S. had with Iraq before, during and after this "war", and over the causes of it, and the comparative analysis of Bush I's response with other things going on in the world at the time (i.e., US military action in Panama). It seems to have been a border dispute over adjacent Kuwaiti/Iraqi oil fields which Saddam accused Kuwait of slant drilling. In the wake of the destructive Iran/Iraq War a few years earlier, Saddam apparently calculated he couldn't let that oil be taken and apparently didn't think he'd get utterly smashed like he did by the U.S.

Zar

I think it is exceedingly easy to see that the point being made is that governments (even the U.S. government) are not above lying or misrepresentation to get their way, and they should be viewed with skepticism. It is not meant to "prove" that they are lying now about Iraq, but to illustrate that a certain skepticism is valid and healthy.

Another approach might be to say :"Trust your government completely". Some seem to think this is the way to go forward, although it is difficult to make the case that history shows complete trust to be warranted.

Probably the only workable way to say this without just being a silly sap is to 'fess up and say: "They may be son's of bitches, but they are my sons of bitches!" At least its honest.

bleubird

History,history,history.
Who created Saddom?
How many democratic goverments are there in area?
How did british oil affect( effect)the whole mess?
Oil,oil,oil.
Remember the Maine!

bleubird

History,history,history.
Who created Saddom?
How many democratic goverments are there in the area?
How did british oil affect( effect)the whole mess?
Oil,oil,oil.
Remember the Maine!

Gurdur

Yes of course; Soviet pilots led by Stalin in person won the Battle Of Britain, Stalin and Soviet shock-troops led the North African, Italian and Normandy landings, defeated Rommel at El Alamein, oh, and the Non-Aggression Pact between the Soviet Union and Germany --- leading to the dismemberment of Poland between them --- was all an imperialist lie.

Roll on agitprop !

Zar

Yeah, the "side show" characterization of the allied powers is wrong, but the Soviets were important to the victory without a doubt. What a brutal part of the war that was...

Gurdur

heh, it's a bit more than just that; the Soviets were also important to the re-armament of Germany.
From 1923 onwards, the Germans had (in complete defiance of the Versailles Treaty) a secret tank-building workshop in the Soviet Union, and later mutual designing of new aircraft.

Stalin had a long history of secret cooperation with Germany; in 1939/1940, Communists worldwide were ordered to sabotage the war against Nazi Germany --- that is, they were ordered to help Nazi Germany.
In cooperation with Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied eastern Poland in 1939, leading to a couple of famous massacres.

When British intelligence, acting on Polish information, informed Stalin that Hitler was preparing to invade the Soviet Union, Stalin pointblank refused to believe all the evidence presented, and in fact apparently had a mini-nervous-breakdown lasting two weeks when Germany did invade.
BTW, just before the invasion of the Soviet Union, there were several deserters from the German army who warned the Russians what was about to happen; acting on Stalin's orders, those deserters were not only not believed, they were handed back to the German army to be shot.

Oh, and the Germans would never have made it so far into Russia and for so long if Stalin hadn't so obligingly had almost the entire leadership of the Red Army murdered in purges from 1936 onwards.