.....Bush will Go Down in Arab History as the Liberator of Baghdad.

In a column in the Saudi daily Arab News, columnist Dr. Muhammad Al-Rasheed praised the American capture of Saddam Hussein, and hailed President Bush as a liberator. The following are excerpts from his column:

<a href='http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD63103' target='_blank'>AHHH, The Sky is Falling.</a>

Rebelkev, I know you enjoy demonizing the Left and I laugh heartily at many of your posts, thanks! You are a funny guy!

Anyway, it is great we've "liberated" those poor folks over there. Being what Saddam's government was, a totalitarian regime with a strong centralized bureaucratic apparatus, many of the folks we "liberated" are now being detained because they worked for the Saddam government. The allies need to detain them to test where their loyalties are. Since the bureaucracies were so large, the "liberated," or a large percentage of them, are now in prison. Their families now miss them because they are in prison. This, in a nutshell, is the nasty business of liberation, occupating, waging a war for conquest. Our people knew this would have to be done, there was no way around it.

From the Iraqi perspective (not all Iraqis) this looks like heavy-handed policies. Thus, many Iraqis are resisting. All of this said, let's reserve judgement on this affair for a few more years after things can normalize over there (and hopefully it will normalize and it won't take a few years).

All in all, my position, as well as the position of many liberals, concerns other aspects of our national policy. First, what is our purpose as a nation? To correct the wrongs the world over? If so, great, now let's go liberate Tibet, Sudan, Indonesia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, China, and Jackson, MS!
I think you can see this is untenable, hence inconsistent policy. If we correct the wrongs of one nation, we need to apply that openly to wrongs committed in other nations.
Second, we have responsibilities here at home. While the United States is indeed a great nation, we are not a perfect nation. We need to address some important aspects to our society that are often ignored. I am thinking particularly on why so many athletes and other entertainers are paid so much for violence or simulated violence? Along the same lines, why do our kids go to school and shoot people up? Similarly, why do American workers go to work and shoot people up? Why are so many people on prescription drugs that Americans seemingly did not need 20 years ago? Why are so many Americans crippled with credit card debt (among other debts)? Why are my insurance bills so high?

This list of open-ended questions can go on and on, but in short, my position is and always has been, let's work to fix America and once we've accomplished some of the goals we set, then let's fix the world.

All of that said, I disagree with the war for some very important reasons:
1. Saddam was not an imminent threat.
2. The war was sold under a guise of threat.
3. The President and his handlers should have found a more tenable argument for war with Iraq at this time.
4. Saddam did not attack us on 9/11.
5. The perps of that massacre are on the loose.
6. North Korea is acting up.
7. Dems and Repoobs alike give too much power to the president to wage war.
8. War should be a last resort.
9. My insurance has gone up despite the capture of Saddam.
10. America has domestic problems that are being ignored.
And this list can go on and on like the freaking enegizer bunny.

Funny, talking to a Republican last night, someone who helped Haley get elected, he said the reason for the war was simple, "it makes us feel better," he said. "the operation in Afghanistan did not provide enough images of Americans kicking arse and so we need a weakling to help us provide the American public with those images."
--he said this on-the-record and it will be printed in my newspaper next week.

GWB... Look around you! There are serious domestic problems right now... But go figure you would follow in the line of Reagan (ignoring AIDS in favor of building up the military) and Clinton sending off the hardest bombing campaign the day of the Columbine shootings.

I'm sure the 10,000 innocent civilians killed by our bombs felt very liberated. :rolleyes:

God I love being right!

Selective memory and a dishonest doctrine
December 21, 2003
Opinion piece for the Toronto Star
by Noam Chomsky

All people who have any concern for human rights, justice and integrity should be overjoyed by the capture of Saddam Hussein, and should be awaiting a fair trial for him by an international tribunal.

An indictment of Saddam's atrocities would include not only his slaughter and gassing of Kurds in 1988 but also, rather crucially, his massacre of the Shiite rebels who might have overthrown him in 1991. At the time, Washington and its allies held the "strikingly unanimous view (that) whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country's stability than did those who have suffered his repression," reported Alan Cowell in the New York Times. Last December, Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, released a dossier of Saddam's crimes drawn almost entirely from the period of firm U.S.-British support of Saddam. With the usual display of moral integrity, Straw's report and Washington's reaction overlooked that support.

Such practices reflect a trap deeply rooted in the intellectual culture generally -- a trap sometimes called the doctrine of "change of course," invoked in the United States every two or three years. The content of the doctrine is: "Yes, in the past we did some wrong things because of innocence or inadvertence. But now that's all over, so let's not waste any more time on this boring, stale stuff."

The doctrine is dishonest and cowardly, but it does have advantages: It protects us from the danger of understanding what is happening before our eyes. For example, the Bush administration's original reason for going to war in Iraq was to save the world from a tyrant developing weapons of mass destruction and cultivating links to terror. Nobody believes that now, not even Bush's speechwriters. The new reason is that we invaded Iraq to establish a democracy there and, in fact, to democratize the whole Middle East.

Sometimes, the repetition of this democracy-building posture reaches the level of rapturous acclaim. Last month, for example, David Ignatius, the Washington Post commentator, described the invasion of Iraq as "the most idealistic war in modern times" -- fought solely to bring democracy to Iraq and the region. Ignatius was particularly impressed with Paul Wolfowitz, "the Bush administration's idealist in chief," whom he described as a genuine intellectual who "bleeds for (the Arab world's) oppression and dreams of liberating it."

Maybe that helps explain Wolfowitz's career -- like his strong support for Suharto in Indonesia, one of the last century's worst mass murderers and aggressors, when Wolfowitz was ambassador to that country under Ronald Reagan. As the State Department official responsible for Asian affairs under Reagan, Wolfowitz oversaw support for the murderous dictators Chun of South Korea and Marcos of the Philippines.

All this is irrelevant because of the convenient doctrine of "change of course." So, yes, Wolfowitz's heart bleeds for the victims of oppression -- and if the record shows the opposite, it's just that boring old stuff that we want to forget about.

One might recall another recent illustration of Wolfowitz's love of democracy. The Turkish parliament, heeding its population's near-unanimous opposition to war in Iraq, refused to let U.S. forces deploy fully from Turkey. This caused absolute fury in Washington. Wolfowitz denounced the Turkish military for failing to intervene to overturn the decision. Turkey was listening to its people, not taking orders from Crawford, Texas, or Washington, D.C.

The most recent chapter is Wolfowitz's "Determination and Findings" on bidding for lavish reconstruction contracts in Iraq. Excluded are countries where the government dared to take the same position as the vast majority of the population. Wolfowitz's alleged grounds are "security interests," which are non-existent, though the visceral hatred of democracy is hard to miss -- along with the fact that Halliburton and Bechtel corporations will be free to "compete" with the vibrant democracy of Uzbekistan and the Solomon Islands, but not with leading industrial societies.

What's revealing and important to the future is that Washington's display of contempt for democracy went side by side with a chorus of adulation about its yearning for democracy. To be able to carry that off is an impressive achievement, hard to mimic even in a totalitarian state.

Iraqis have some insight into this process of conquerors and conquered. The British created Iraq for their own interests. When they ran that part of the world, they discussed how to set up what they called "Arab facades" -- weak, pliable governments, parliamentary if possible, so long as the British effectively ruled. Who would expect that the United States would ever permit an independent Iraqi government to exist? Especially now that Washington has reserved the right to set up permanent military bases there, in the heart of the world's greatest oil-producing region, and has imposed an economic regime that no sovereign country would accept, putting the country's fate in the hands of Western corporations.

Throughout history, even the harshest and most shameful measures are regularly accompanied by professions of noble intent -- and rhetoric about bestowing freedom and independence. An honest look would only generalize Thomas Jefferson's observation on the world situation of his day: "We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations."







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Come on, Kev. Dance around that one, Einstein! :roflol: