Friday, November 07, 2003
(11:39 AM) | Anonymous:
Have You Seen the Bigger Piggies, In Their Starched White Shirts?
ri-cock-ulous.
For those who don't want to read the article: A prominent Lebanese-American businessman, who is widely-known as Pro-US and has had his claimed greatly varified by US government emails, was approached with an offer by Iraqi officials before the war. The deal included UN-supervised free elections, oil concessions to US companies, and turning over Abdul Rahmen Yasin, an al-queda terrorist who had been in Iraqi custody since 1994. Yasin is one of the most wanted terrorists out there, and is widely held responsible for the 93 WTC bombing. This was the starting point for future negotiations..more might have been possible.
Yet, those Hage went to with the information were ordered not to pursue any negotiations. We all know what happened next.
Donald Rumsfeld said "The American people can take comfort in knowing that their country has done everything humanly possible to avoid war and to secure Iraq's peaceful disarmament," after we started shocking and awing the bejeezus out of them. Some things would seem to say other wise.
I've always wondered why it's standard rule to break communication ties with other countries during war, or in the build up to war. I'm probably missing a basic keystone of military strategy here, if so feel free to say so in the comments, but it seems like the one thing that is needed most in those times is to keep talking. But, of course, that goes by the premise that war is something to be avoided..so who knows.
Maybe I just watched too much Star Trek with Captain Kirk, or some deaf and mute empath, or an 8 foot tall monster looking thing serving as the negotiator bringing together the two sides, and miraculously working out some sort of peace. The trouble is, if you keep talking, it's harder to convince yourself and others that the other side is pure evil, and must be killed at all costs, even that of other, innocent, lives.
Oh, and in other news.. This same government that was so confident of their knowledge of the "Iraq situation" that they no longer needed to, you know, talk to the people they were about to kill regarding possibly avoiding killing them and thousands of others, was recently represented by their Chief before the National Endowment For Democracy. In this recent big, important speech President Bush talked of how "this very week in 1989, there were protests in East Berlin and in Leipzig - and by the end of that year, every communist dictatorship in Central America had collapsed."
Of course, Leipzig and East Berlin..and the rest of those communist dictatorships were in Central Europe..
That's a petty cheap shot at the end of a post, I'm sorry. But maybe, just maybe, if the President can't even correctly read a speech handed to him, he might want to consider hearing out a people apparently ready to give up a heck of a lot to avoid war. Maybe that situation was mis-read as well.
Har.
