Re: "smoked salmon socialists"

"pearl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Dreamers & Idiots
> Britain And The US Did Everything To Avoid A
> Peaceful Solution In Iraq And Afghanistan
> By George Monbiot
> The Guardian - UK
> 11-11-3
>
> Those who would take us to war must first shut down the
> public imagination. They must convince us that there is no
> other means of preventing invasion, or conquering terrorism,
> or even defending human rights. When information is scarce,
> imagination is easy to control. As intelligence gathering and
> diplomacy are conducted in secret, we seldom discover -
> until it is too late - how plausible the alternatives may be.

We only tried alternatives for 12 years. How much longer
did you want us to wait? Until Saddam died of old age
and his sons were in charge?

> So those of us who called for peace before the wars with
> Iraq and Afghanistan were mocked as effeminate dreamers.

Sounds about right.

> The intelligence our governments released suggested that
> Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were immune to diplomacy
> or negotiation.

The author of this article thinks we should have negotiated with the
TALIBAN?

Look, when you come and you blow up a couple of skyscrapers in my country, I
consider negotiations to be over.

>Faced with such enemies, what would we do,
> the hawks asked? And our responses felt timid beside the
> clanking rigours of war. To the columnist David Aaronovitch,
> we were "indulging... in a cosmic whinge". To the Daily
> Telegraph, we had become "Osama bin Laden's useful idiots".

Fellow travelers.

> Had the options been as limited as the western warlords
> and their bards suggested, this might have been true. But,
> as many of us suspected at the time, we were lied to.
> Most of the lies are now familiar: there appear to have
> been no weapons of mass destruction and no evidence
> to suggest that, as President Bush claimed in March,
> Saddam had "trained and financed... al-Qaida".

There have been chemicals found, there have been programs
going on in Iraq multiple times to develop nuclear weapons, and
I don't think you'll be able to deny that one.

The war's not even over yet.

As for the link to Al Qaeda look at these:
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/iraqwar/story/0,4395,185673,00.html
http://tampatrib.com/nationworldnews/MGAP2N36FND.html

>Bush
> and Blair, as their courtship of the president of Uzbekistan
> reveals, appear to possess no genuine concern for the
> human rights of foreigners.

No concern for the human rights of foreigners? The wars on the Taliban
and on Saddam Hussein only removed oppressive governments and set the
stage for democratic ones to replace them.

> But a further, and even graver, set of lies is only now
> beginning to come to light. Even if all the claims Bush and
> Blair made about their enemies and their motives had been
> true, and all their objectives had been legal and just, there
> may still have been no need to go to war. For, as we
> discovered last week, Saddam proposed to give Bush and
> Blair almost everything they wanted before a shot had been
> fired. Our governments appear both to have withheld this
> information from the public and to have lied to us about
> the possibilities for diplomacy.

Sure, just fool us a little bit longer, till he had enough time to
finish what he was working on.

> Over the four months before the coalition forces invaded
> Iraq, Saddam's government made a series of increasingly
> desperate offers to the United States. In December, the
> Iraqi intelligence services approached Vincent Cannistraro,
> the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, with an offer
> to prove that Iraq was not linked to the September 11
> attacks, and to permit several thousand US troops to enter
> the country to look for weapons of mass destruction. If the
> object was regime change, then Saddam, the agents claimed,
> was prepared to submit himself to internationally monitored
> elections within two years. According to Mr Cannistraro,
> these proposals reached the White House, but were "turned
> down by the president and vice-president".

The people would not have voted for anyone else but Saddam, "internationally
monitored" or not, because they knew if they didn't, they'd get their family
kidnapped and tortured.

That's why Saddam was the only candidate on the ballot in previous
elections.
Who would run against such a tyrant? Why would such a tyrant let anyone do
so?

> By February, Saddam's negotiators were offering almost
> everything the US government could wish for: free access
> to the FBI to look for weapons of mass destruction
> wherever it wanted, support for the US position on Israel
> and Palestine, even rights over Iraq's oil. Among the people
> they contacted was Richard Perle, the security adviser who
> for years had been urging a war with Iraq. He passed their
> offers to the CIA. Last week he told the New York Times
> that the CIA had replied: "Tell them that we will see them
> in Baghdad".

They had 12 years to comply. Last ditch efforts weren't cutting it.
They were trying to avoid us going in because they knew their time
was up.

> Saddam Hussein, in other words, appears to have done
> everything possible to find a diplomatic alternative to the
> impending war, and the US government appears to have
> done everything necessary to prevent one.

LOL!!!!! We tried for a long time.

>This is the
> opposite to what we were told by George Bush and
> Tony Blair. On March 6, 13 days before the war began,
> Bush said to journalists: "I want to remind you that it's his
> choice to make as to whether or not we go to war. It's
> Saddam's choice. He's the person that can make the
> choice of war and peace. Thus far, he's made the wrong
> choice."

It was his choice. If he would have immediately given up the
locations of all his secret stuff  as well as stepped down
from power then it could have been prevented.

> Ten days later, Blair told a press conference: "We have
> provided the right diplomatic way through this, which is
> to lay down a clear ultimatum to Saddam: cooperate or
> face disarmament by force... all the way through we have
> tried to provide a diplomatic solution." On March 17,
> Bush claimed that "should Saddam Hussein choose
> confrontation, the American people can know that every
> measure has been taken to avoid war". All these statements
> are false.

The statements are not false.

> The same thing happened before the war with Afghanistan.
> On September 20 2001, the Taliban offered to hand
> Osama bin Laden to a neutral Islamic country for trial if
> the US presented them with evidence that he was
> responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington.
> The US rejected the offer. On October 1, six days before
> the bombing began, they repeated it, and their representative
> in Pakistan told reporters: "We are ready for negotiations.
> It is up to the other side to agree or not. Only negotiation
> will solve our problems." Bush was asked about this offer
> at a press conference the following day. He replied: "There's
> no negotiations. There's no calendar. We'll act on [sic] our
> time."

You expect us to negotiate with the TALIBAN?

> On the same day, Tony Blair, in his speech to the Labour
> party conference, ridiculed the idea that we could "look for
> a diplomatic solution". "There is no diplomacy with Bin
> Laden or the Taliban regime... I say to the Taliban:
> surrender the terrorists; or surrender power. It's your
> choice." Well, they had just tried to exercise that choice,
> but George Bush had rejected it.

He's right. You can't sit down and have tea
and crumpets with a bunch of slimy evil terrorists.

We weren't about to negotiate with the Taliban. They
didn't turn over Bin Laden. They should have given him
up immediately and directly.

> Of course, neither Bush nor Blair had any reason to
> trust the Taliban or Saddam - these people were, after
> all, negotiating under duress. But neither did they have
> any need to trust them. In both cases they could have
> presented their opponents with a deadline for meeting
> the concessions they had offered.

There was a deadline: Immediately.

<snip the rest as its repetitive>

-Rubystars