Blast From the Past: The Gulf War, More Evidence that Doesn't Add Up (2131 hits)
Category: PoliticsLabels: ets_sociopolitical_commentary ets_essays
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Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (View user info) at 2007-05-19 17:59:50 EDT
Here is an interesting map featuring the oil fields of Kuwait and the U.S. military presence there. Found it searching for something else and it got me thinking... http://www.energytribune.com/live_images/kuwait_map.gif
July 25, 1990: U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, tells Saddam Hussien in regard to his quarrel with Kuwait, "We have no opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960's, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America."
August 2, 1990: Saddamn Hussein's Iraqi Army invades Kuwait. President GHW Bush and Margaret Thatcher call the invasion "unacceptible", directly contradicting the impression given to Saddam by Ambassador Glaspie.
Does anyone remember the whole "fetus" conroversy before the first Gulf War? Shortly after Iraq's invasion, an organization "Citizens for a Free Kuwait" was formed in the U.S., and with funds from the Kuwaiti government, launched a PR campaign to justify American retaliation. Their efforts included paying a girl named Nayirah to say that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies ut of incubators in a Kuwait hospital and tossing them on the floor to die.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_for_a_Free_Kuwait
January 12, 1991: The Senate voted narrowly, 53 to 47, to send troops.
Today, as you can see from that map of Kuwait above, the U.S. maintains a constant military presence in Kuwait, justified by that Iraqi invasion we helped cause through the words of Ambassador Glaspie.
Some might say Saddam shouldn't have taken the bait, or that her words were misinterpreted, but given the massive defeat suffered by the Iraqi Army, it is highly unlikely that a dictator with Saddam's political savvy would risk such utter defeat without thinking that the U.S. would be in accordance. A less likely, but still plausible scenario, is that the U.S. used their old ally, Saddam Hussein, to further U.S. military objectives. Saddam's reward would be that he could stay in power after the conflict and the U.S. would help Saddam flush out his political enemies.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/49864/
Some of you might call this nonsense, but this is old news. This is the way American foreign policy operates. It is bloody and it is messy and by no means on the level. What's more plausible, that Saddam Hussein would risk a direct confrontation with the U.S. military, a force he knew was far superior, or that, as a long time ally of U.S. interests in the region, Saddam chose to play along with a larger U.S. military and PR maneuver.
Whatever the case, in light of the innumerable other questions we have about other world events, including the current Iraq war, the "war on terror", Afghanistan, 9/11, and the proposed case for confrontation with Iran, and the way they have been portrayed in the news and in the accepted history books, it's not a stretch to think that there was more going on than what we were told about the Gulf War and rarely was it savory. In fact, it explains far more to assume the worst of the United States and its foreign policy than to assume the best, for assuming the best requires a lot of logical leaps and selective amnesia. Assuming the worst seems to bring about a perspective wherein more of the pieces fit without forcing them into the puzzle.
Anyone have anything to add that I might have missed?http://democracyrising.us/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=469&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=151
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6110412
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drmfLdCFmGk&mode=related&search=
By the way...just where are the full transcripts of Saddam Hussein's trial. I was going to link you all to them, but, *GASP*, they don't seem to exist anywhere online! However, I did find lots and lots of pictures of his hanging.
Expanded verion of map below: http://respectsacredland.org/no-us-bases/draft3.jpg
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Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2007-05-21 17:28:00 EDT (#)
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Fucking idiot: http://www.turkishweekly.net/news.php?id=44834
It's still in the works. It's only been a year.
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2007-05-21 16:35:06 EDT (#)
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Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2007-05-20 15:29:32 PDT (#)
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True dat, Adam.
Look at poor Iran sitting there totally surrounded.
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FORTUNATELY THEY ARE BUILDING TEH IRANIAN OIL BOURSE TO STOP AMERICAN HEGEMONY
Submitted by Adamdidit2u (user info) at 2007-05-21 14:38:20 EDT (#)
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Submitted by Caulaincourt (user info) at 2007-05-21 12:48:23 EDT (#)
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why are there bases in france?
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To keep teh germans out
Submitted by Caulaincourt (user info) at 2007-05-21 12:48:23 EDT (#)
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why are there bases in france?
Submitted by apollo88 (user info) at 2007-05-21 07:19:15 EDT (#)
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looking at that if i was iran i'd be shitting it.
Submitted by maiorano84 (user info) at 2007-05-21 02:18:36 EDT (#)
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http://entensity.shittytits.com
Click.
Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2007-05-20 23:59:39 EDT (#)
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On a sort of related subject, here is an article by Pat Buchanan about Ron Paul. I knew there was a reason I liked Pat.: http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20070518/cm_uc_crpbux/op_332799
Submitted by Adamdidit2u (user info) at 2007-05-20 18:58:15 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Yea well consider the overall strategy in relation to Climate change. Radical (i.e. not agreeing with us) governments tend to concentrated around the equator, and if you read through the literature at length a few things are quite apparent.
Developing countries will face the brunt of climate change, because thaier societies tend to be more agriculturally based and therefore very inflexible to distaster (see Ecuador and how El Nino in 97-98 basically destabilized the eniter country)
Cereal yeilds are expected to decrease in these locals by much larger percentages than the north, forcasts vary but are from 20-50%
This whole ethanol bullshit. It's really about energy independance, because if you factor in the cost of our Iraq efforts petro is currently costing the US a pretty penny. With these externalities gone, we can get back to business. Besides, no one in america will face food shortages because we're turning billions of bushels of corn into fuel. No countries like China, Egypt, Japan, and on and on will suffer, because for decades they've been eating up the HUGE surplus generated by the US.
It's win win win in that respect. Cheap Gas, More money for farmers, Another screw to tighten on our competition.
I'll think about it more, I'm sure there are some other gopod implications
Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2007-05-20 18:29:32 EDT (#)
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True dat, Adam.
Look at poor Iran sitting there totally surrounded.
That map doesn't even show the 14 NEW military bases being constructed in Iraq right now, or the Vatican-sizd U.S. embassy.
What it amounts to is, elements inside world gevernments have discovered how to circumvent the U.S. constitution and lobby for the U.S. to use its military as a private security firm, mainly for securing commodities such as oil, opium, cocaine, weapons, anything they can make a dishonest buck on. And FUCK the locals. What do they know anyway? They can't even get their country together...right? Just look at those monkeys! Those little brown people just shoot each other like the inner city blacks do here, don't they! They'll never be free because they're sub-species. Inferior. They're lucky we even let them live, aren't they!
Submitted by Adamdidit2u (user info) at 2007-05-20 18:19:17 EDT (#)
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Whole new meaning to the term "all your base are belong to us"
Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2007-05-20 18:16:10 EDT (#)
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Here's another http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2003/20030324_operation/first_casualty.htm
Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2007-05-20 17:54:47 EDT (#)
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The New York Times Op-Ed, Monday, January 6, 1992
Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?
By John R. MacArthur
In his urgent arguments during the fall and winter of 1990 for military action against Saddam Hussein, President Bush made much of the Iraqi leader's cruelty toward the Kuwaiti people. Mr. Bush's allegations of atrocities by Iraqi forces generally went unchallenged. Mr. Hussein's violent disposal of dissident Iraqis was a matter of record, so few politicians, journalists or human rights investigators were prepared to question the President's campaign to paint his opponent as Adolf Hitler reborn.
Some claims were no doubt true, but the most sensational one--that Iraqi soldiers removed hundreds of Kuwaiti babies from incubators and left them to die on hospital floors--was shown to be almost certainly false by an ABC reporter, John Martin, in March 1991, after the liberation of Kuwait. He interviewed hospital doctors who stayed in Kuwait throughout the occupation.
But before the war, the incubator story seriously distorted the American debate about whether to support military action. Amnesty International believed the tale, and its ill-considered validation of the charges likely influenced the seven Senators who cited the story in speeches backing the Jan. 12 resolution authorizing war. Since the resolution passed the Senate by only five votes, the question of how the incubator story escaped scrutiny--when it really mattered--is all the more important. (Amnesty International later retracted its support of the story.)
A little reportorial investigation would have done a great service to the democratic process. Americans would have been interested to know the identity of "Nayirah," the 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who shocked the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Oct. 10, 1990, when she tearfully asserted that she had watched 15 infants being taken from incubators in Al-Adan Hospital in Kuwait City by Iraqi soldiers who "left the babies on the cold floor to die." The chairmen of the Congressional group, Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, and John Edward Porter, an Illinois Republican, explained that Nayirah's identity would be kept secret to protect her family from reprisals in occupied Kuwait.
There was a better reason to protect her from exposure: Nayirah, her real name, is the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S., Saud Nasir al-Sabah. Such a pertinent fact might have led to impertinent demands for proof of Nayirah's whereabouts in August and September of 1990, when she said she witnessed the atrocities, as well as corroboration of her charges. The Kuwaiti Embassy has rebuffed my efforts to interview Nayirah.
Today, we are left to ask why Mr. Lantos and Mr. Porter allowed such glaring omissions. What made Nayirah so believable that no one on the caucus staff bothered to check out her story?
One explanation might lie in how Nayirah came to the Congressmen's attention. Both Congressmen have a close relationship with Hill and Knowlton, the public relations firm hired by Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the Kuwaiti-financed group that lobbied Congress for military intervention. A Hill and Knowlton vice president, Gary Hymel, helped organize the Congressional Human Rights Caucus hearing in meetings with Mr. Lantos and Mr. Porter and the chairman of Citizens for a Free Kuwait, Hassan al-Ebraheem. Mr. Hymel presented the witnesses, including Nayirah. (He later told me he knew who she was at the time.)
Until he started working on the Kuwait account, Mr. Hymel was best known to the caucus for defending the human rights record of Turkey, a Hill and Knowlton client criticized for jailing people without due process and torturing and killing them. He is also one of the firm's lobbyists for the Indonesian Government, which has killed at least 100,000 inhabitants of East Timor since 1975.
Mr. Lantos's spokesman says that Hill and Knowlton's client list doesn't concern the Congressman, who accepted a $500 contribution from the firm's political action committee in 1988. In fact, Mr. Lantos and Mr. Porter allowed the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, a group they founded in 1985, to be housed in Hill and Knowlton's Washington headquarters. The firm provides a contribution to the foundation in the form of a $3,000 annual rent reduction, and the Hill and Knowlton switchboard delivers messages to the foundation's executive director, David Phillips.
Hill and Knowlton's client, Citizens for a Free Kuwait, donated $50,000 to the foundation, sometime after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990. (The foundation's main supporter is the U.S. Government-financed National Endowment for Democracy.)
Since the gulf war, Hill and Knowlton's collaboration with the Lantos-Porter human rights enterprise has been strengthened by the naming of the firm's vice chairman, Frank Mankiewicz, to the foundation's board in October 1991. Perhaps the Congressmen and directors were impressed by the recent addition of China to Hill and Knowlton's prestigious portfolio of clients. (The firm's clients, Indonesia and Turkey, were notably absent from the foundation's 1990-91 list of human rights "activities.")
Congress and the news media deserve censure for their lack of skepticism about the incubator story. As for Representatives Lantos and Porter, they deserve a medal from the Emir for their work on behalf of the Kuwaiti cause. But their special relationship with Hill and Knowlton should prompt a Congressional investigation to find out if their actions merely constituted an obvious conflict of interest or, worse, if they knew who the tearful Nayirah really was in October 1990.
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John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine, is the author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War and The Selling of "Free Trade."
Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2007-05-20 17:52:51 EDT (#)
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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Citizens_for_a_Free_Kuwait
Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2007-05-20 17:45:46 EDT (#)
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Submitted by wardy (user info) at 2007-05-20 16:27:36 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
you are unbelievable. were you that stoned in the early nineties? are you that stoned now? the wikipedia article you linked says that it's neutrality is in question.
you are worthless.
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There are hundreds of other sources for that information. Pick one. Either repudiate it, or sit the fuck down.
Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2007-05-20 17:44:10 EDT (#)
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Submitted by Realpolitik (user info) at 2007-05-20 15:32:24 EDT (#)
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U.S. Hegemony is key to global stability and trade - read any book on geopolitical thought and you will find this simply, yet profound, concept
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What a retarded reply. Ron Paul's book on geopolitical thought doesn't say that. Neither does Noam Chomsky's http://www.amazon.com/Hegemony-Survival-Americas-Dominance-American/dp/0805076883
It's as if you've considered nothing else... It's as if our schools are now teaching empire is the best way... It's as if the founders never even existed, and their ideas about foreign policy are just too..."old school"...for the modern world. Is that what you're saying?
You're entitled to your opinion, but don't try to hide behind some book as a crutch to prop up an argument you cannot make yourself.
Submitted by MidnightToSix (user info) at 2007-05-20 17:25:55 EDT (#)
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Of course, isn't that at the top of everyone's reading list, right next to "Confessions of a Queer" by Asspacker McGee?
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Submitted by beeltea (user info) at 2007-05-19 21:10:17 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Interesting, although, I don't think it holds much water. I would like to see your source material on April Glaspie's quotes and actions.
Have you ever read "Confessions of an Economic Hit-man" by John Perkins?
Submitted by FilthyAssistant (user info) at 2007-05-20 16:29:03 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Openly partisan +2
Submitted by wardy (user info) at 2007-05-20 16:27:36 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
you are unbelievable. were you that stoned in the early nineties? are you that stoned now? the wikipedia article you linked says that it's neutrality is in question.
you are worthless.
Submitted by ChaosJester (user info) at 2007-05-20 15:51:53 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
Dude, what fantasy world do you live in that everyone plays nice?
This is the Real World here, with Real Consequences. I don't know about you, but I vastly prefer to have evil curmudgeons looking after my country's well-being than naive well-wishers who "just want everyone to get along". Fuck that and fuck you, Sir.
Submitted by Realpolitik (user info) at 2007-05-20 15:32:24 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
U.S. Hegemony is key to global stability and trade - read any book on geopolitical thought and you will find this simply, yet profound, concept
Submitted by Maddog (user info) at 2007-05-20 13:23:10 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
Your data is wrong. For one, there haven't been bases in France since the 60's.
Submitted by Tom (user info) at 2007-05-20 13:10:18 EDT (#)
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Ididdy read my mind, just couldn't quite get it out that articulately.
Not calling you articulate or anything. I know black people hate that.
You're black, right?
Right??
Submitted by Beano312003 (user info) at 2007-05-20 05:56:46 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
what iddqd said.
Submitted by lungfish (user info) at 2007-05-20 04:10:38 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Here's a +2. Now I'm gonna want some lovin' later on. I think you know what I mean.
Submitted by iddqd (user info) at 2007-05-20 01:16:20 EDT (#)
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Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2007-05-19 19:51:36 EDT (#)
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If you know all abut it, then fucking act like it. Stop being such compliant little bitches if you know all about it and this is such common knowledge.
Why are you so fucking eager to give up your liberties for security? Get off your ass and SAY something!
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tell me exactly how youre doing any different to us passive, compliant little bitches?
YOURE POSTING ON A TINY WEBSITE TO ABOUT A DOZEN PEOPLE YOU FUCKING CRAZY PERSON. youre just as passive and youve deluded yourself TOTALLY into thnking that pasting some youtube links and whatreallyhappend links and going off on tangents is an effective way of fighting 'the man'.
cant you see how much of a joke you are?
stop trying to tell us to do stuff and go do it for yourself.
Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2007-05-20 00:09:15 EDT (#)
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My bad. I didn't give it, did I?....
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ARTICLE5/april.html
There's one. Substantiate if you wish. I'm too drunk.
Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2007-05-20 00:08:02 EDT (#)
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Submitted by beeltea (user info) at 2007-05-19 21:10:17 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Interesting, although, I don't think it holds much water. I would like to see your source material on April Glaspie's quotes and actions.
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I gave it. Although there are more if you want to find them.
Submitted by Flack (user info) at 2007-05-19 23:36:46 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
Just when I was starting to enjoy your posts....
Submitted by beeltea (user info) at 2007-05-19 21:10:17 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Interesting, although, I don't think it holds much water. I would like to see your source material on April Glaspie's quotes and actions.
Have you ever read "Confessions of an Economic Hit-man" by John Perkins?
There is no question that the US has underhanded means of spreading power and influence.
This still doesn't mean that protecting Kuwait wasn't justified.
It still doesn't mean that removing a criminal dictator isn't justified.
Saddam Hussein while in power was a ruthless and criminal dictator. I don't know how you can argue with that. To remove him from power was and is probably for the best.
All that being siad, I am not the revolution.
Submitted by Tom (user info) at 2007-05-19 19:55:49 EDT (#)
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I can't. I have work in the morning. I like to hold people accountable as much as you do. I'm on your side. So, theres two. Do we have a third?
Submitted by electrictoothsyndrome (user info) at 2007-05-19 19:51:36 EDT (#)
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If you know all abut it, then fucking act like it. Stop being such compliant little bitches if you know all about it and this is such common knowledge.
Why are you so fucking eager to give up your liberties for security? Get off your ass and SAY something!
Submitted by Tom (user info) at 2007-05-19 19:28:57 EDT (#)
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"This is the way American foreign policy operates. It is bloody and it is messy and by no means on the level."
Oh my God, I just had no idea.
Submitted by professorfuckface (user info) at 2007-05-19 19:08:21 EDT (#)
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you so smart ETS, you've got it all figured out
Submitted by wrinklebeast (user info) at 2007-05-19 18:42:27 EDT (#)
Ranking: -2
ETS: Old and busted.
LOLcats: New hotness.
Does that tell you something, fuckwit?
Submitted by Draco (user info) at 2007-05-19 18:17:03 EDT (#)
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What exactly is the point you're trying to make here?