Originally posted by: daveshel
Interesting analysis. He may be somewhat optimistic in thinking we can unring the bells, but he has thought further ahead than I have as to the furure if Iraq. (Guess I am consumed with thinking about regime change here at home.)
"Lew Rockwell...is an opponent of the central state, its wars and its socialism." (From his about page.)
I wonder where that puts him on the political compass.
I think he is libertarian. He understands things well.
OTOH, our friend syzygy does not understand things well, even when people explain it to him over and over again.
Syzygy, it's as if the DEA kicked down your door, arrested you and hauled you off to jail, and then proceeded to destroy everything in your home looking for drugs that an informant led the DEA to believe were being stored and manufactured in your house. It turns out you didn't have any drugs or drug manufacturing equipment in your house and the DEA was completely in the wrong to invade your home and arrest you.
Now this could happen in a variety of ways... someone who does not like you got arrested for possession of drugs and told lots of lies to the DEA about you so he would get in less trouble for his crime, leading them to believe you possessed and manufactured drugs, knowing that the DEA would destroy your house and haul you off to jail and pretty much ruin your life.
Or someone within the DEA who does not like you tells his agents to get together enough circumstantial evidence to make it look like the DEA has probable cause for invading your house. This is what happened in the case of Iraq... members of the US' (And allies') intelligence agencies were pressured by our leige, Mr Bush, to slant evidence indicating that Iraq was possessing and manufacturing illicit drugs (err, WMDs) so that in the eyes of the world, and most importantly the US electorate, in order to justify an invasion of Iraq. The reason most of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd world nations on this planet objected to the US invasion of Iraq (before it happened) is because they did not believe the US had a legitimate case (which it obviously did not).
After your house is torn to smithereens by DEA stormtroopers, how would you feel, if you were not guilty?
If, by chance, the DEA had been "kind enough" to allow you to "prove your innocence" prior to having your house ransacked, just how would you go about proving that you had no drugs in your house? In the case of your home, assuming it's not that large, you could invite the DEA into your house, fifty agents or so with dogs and stuff, and say, "look around, there is nothing here." Those fifty agents or so would basically be able to "cover" every inch of your home at the same moment and surmise that you were in fact not guilty. However, if the DEA had a policy to only send 2 agents for such "welcomed-inspections" of accused-drug-possessors, then the DEA could claim that their 2 agents were not able to be in every room at the same time, and that someone was moving the drugs from room to room while they were in other rooms. They would say, you haven't proven anything, our failure to find your drugs is not proof that they aren't there, you just moved them around while we were looking or hid them somewhere where we failed to look.
So how would you prove it, my cunning friend? You must be really brilliant if you know a way to "prove a negative" because no one in human history has ever done so. I can not prove there is no God, I can not prove that there are not aliens, I can not prove that there are no invisible people and I can not prove that there are not 90 foot tall men - it's impossible to prove the non-existence of anything without eye-witness to every possible place of existence at the same point in time. Do you understand that simple concept, sir? It was not possible (because his domain (his nation) was (much) larger than the field of vision of the eye-witnesses (inspectors) at any given point in time) for Saddam Hussein to prove that he did not posess WMD, although he did allow the UN to inspect and did deliver (as required) a 19,000 page report to the UN detailing his previous WMD posessions and his disposal of such WMDs (and delivery mechanisms and production facilities).
In the case of Iraq, it would have taken the UN sending several million people into Iraq, like Hands-Across-America back in the 80s, except it would be Eyes-on-every-square-inch-of-Iraq in order for Hussein to prove his innocence. The United States and allies were never willing to accept that Iraq was "not guilty" (of possession of WMD - the primary charge - the only charge used to justify the invasion, the missing Kuwaitis you mention are a moot point, since they weren't used as justification) although the US and allies never had sufficient evidence for a legitimate case. OK, now your house is ransacked, your innocence has been proven to the world. The DEA refused to accept your statements that you were not posessing drugs no matter what you told them, and now your house is destroyed and it is revealed that the drugs they accused you of posessing in your home are not in fact in your home. What's to be done about your house? Does insurance cover something like that? If your "house" happens to be an entire nation of 29 million people?
The UN alone didn't have the resources required to place eyes on every square inch of Iraq at the same moment in time to guarantee that WMD did not exist there. So the accuser, primarily the US, could continually say "Saddam is lying, he moved them between inspections, the UN didn't look in the right places." The US probably did have the resources to pay enough people to be eye-witness to every inch of Iraq (however many millions of people that would take), but if they were going to spend all those resources, why not just spend a lot less and invade and steal all the oil and hopefully discover in the process whether WMD actually exist there or not?
This war wasn't about WMD, it was about OIL and installing a puppet government that would be completely US-friendly in regards to that OIL. If it had been about Guaranteeing that WMD did not exist in Iraq and Guaranteeing that no existing WMDs left Iraq.... we would have needed millions of loyal American and coalition soldiers, not a hundred thousand who can barely contain things with thousands of barely loyal mercenaries, much less all by themselves. People smuggling WMD aren't going to attack US forces, they are going to evade them, and right now (since the occupation began), that's a very easy thing for them to do, because we simply do not have enough forces there to cover every inch of coastline, every border, every airport, and now, long since the beginning of the occupation (when it is likely that all the WMDs found their way out of Iraq, if they existed) we've already put someone else in charge.
It's like we sent a group of 100 people to search the pentagon (the world's largest office building) for an ounce of drugs, while thousands of pentagon workers could come in and go out of the building as they pleased since there are far more than 100 doors, and since those 100 guys were kinda busy ducking behind desks to avoid getting shot. Do we know if that ounce of drugs is there or not? No, it could be, it could have been taken out through one of the many doors that weren't being watched, it may never have been in the Pentagon to begin with, but the important thing is, we killed the top 52 guys and put in new guys in their place (just like Stalin-inspired Hussein did himself ~30 years ago) and now all the thousands of guys working at the pentagon take orders from our guys instead of the guys who used to be in charge.
That's what "Operation Iraqi Freedom" was all about... taking control of Iraq. Conquering Iraq... Iraq's resources, Iraq's oil, Iraq's people, Iraq's economy. Like the DEA seizing your home, even though they never found any drugs in it. The Rule of Law does say (and has for a long time) that ain't right. It said it wasn't right when Iraq seized Kuwait... so explain the difference. If the DEA seized your house, but wasn't able to prove it's allegation, it would have to return ownership of the house to you. The Rule of Law doesn't allow the DEA to say, "well we can't prove it, but we really thought there was contraband in that house, so we are going to keep it (the seized home)."
Now, I have explained to you what the rest of the world sees (besides the 200 million (out of 6 billion) or so people who see it your way). They see the United States acting as an aggressor - they see (and saw at the time) that the US was making up things in order to justify attacking poor and defenseless Iraq. (Iraq was poor, from a decade of sanctions, a third world country before that, and defenseless, as the US/UK airstrikes during that decade ongoingly destroyed most of their defenses, and comparably tiny - one tenth the population of the US) They see that they were justified in not believing the US assertion that Hussein had WMD, because no WMDs have been found (or used). They feel the outrage that you would feel if the DEA stormed into your 75 year old neighbor's house, tore everything up, arrested her and seized her house without ever finding any drugs in her house. Sane people say, "That ain't right." Sane people think, "The DEA shouldn't be able to do that, it's just not right. The DEA owes that poor old lady her house back and all her things they destroyed." When it comes to nations, sane people think, "Holy shi*, there is an insane mugger on the loose, I wonder who he'll rob next. The US goes around conquering whoever it wants, making up any reason it wants and has nobody to answer to."
So what happens the next time we get attacked by actual real-life terrorists? Do we just nuke Iran, making the assumption that they were somehow related to it, and then just try to suppress any evidence that says someone else did it, so we don't look like we did something that ain't right? Do you think that would help, or do you think that would make people more leery and hateful towards the US, more likely to think "what do we have to lose, the US is insane and out of control" and attack us even more? It's pretty obvious that the actual real life terrorists who attack us, and Israel, and Saudi Arabia, and lots of other countries aren't afraid of dying. Everybody knows they are going to die someday anyway, and if they believe the US truly is an evil country, what's to stop more and more people from dying fighting it? To most people, the word of the US intelligence community is not credible, the word of the US President is not credible and the word of Blair, Sharon, and any mid-east rulers who ally with the US is not credible... so even if the US were to retaliate against someone who in reality was behind the forthcoming terrorist attacks, most of the world will believe we retaliated against the wrong guy - that we attacked yet another country because it was lucrative for us, not because it was a threat to us or involved in attacks on us. With Iraq, Bush cried wolf, and the US has lost all it's credibility around the world, and thus no matter what it does, right or wrong, we Americans will be villified and hated and will accrue an ever-increasing number of enemies. Thanks Mr Bush, way to go. That's great statesmanship.
As shown above, the conquering of Iraq didn't have anything to do with WMDs... the administration could care less about WMDs, else they would have invaded with a force that could have prevented them leaving the country unhindered. Also, the war had nothing to do with terrorism. The single guy from Al-qaeda who was supposed to have met with an Iraqi diplomat was in the USA when the supposed meeting (allegedly in Prague or the Hague (sorry, I often confuse those cities)) took place! That was the only support for an Iraqi-terrorist-tie and it turns out to be total bs fabrication.
The war to conquer Iraq was simply a conquest with the added benefit (to the current administration) of "seeming like" a continuation of the "war on terrorism" and the other benefit of being a distraction from the true terrorist enemy which Bush is afraid of and incapable of fighting. George Bush must have thought basically the same thing as Clinton "wow, I don't know what the f*ck to do about these guys, is there anything I actually can do besides completely give the middle east to extremist muslims?" They are in every country on the planet, they don't wear uniforms, they don't walk around telling people they are terrorists or what they are going to do or when they are going to do it. They are really hard to tell apart from "non-terrorists." How do you deal with that? As Michael Moore so eloquently said, "George Bush went on vacation." Then, when he came back, he decided to do nothing about those terrorists (virtually the same solution that Clinton came up with), and started a war with Iraq (hoping the US people would believe that it had something to do with terrorism and doing good deeds (like liberating the downtrodden)) since (a lot of) the American people were gung-ho for more war and since regime change in Iraq (i.e. conquest in the 20th-21st century American style) was something most of Washington has been wanting for a long time.
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