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8 Brave European nation - 2 cowards.
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush received a boost Thursday for his push to disarm Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction as eight European leaders declared their solidarity with the U.S. position.
In a statement published in newspapers across Europe, the leaders said the September 11 terror attacks on the United States "showed just how far terrorists -- the enemies of our common values -- are prepared to go."
"We know that success in the day-to-day battle against terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction demands unwavering determination and firm international cohesion on the part of all countries for whom freedom is precious," the statement said. (Full story)
The statement was signed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, Portuguese Prime Minister Jose-Manuel Durao Barroso, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy, and Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller.
France and Germany would have been there, but they were busy profiting off the oil for food and medicine program by selling more weapons to Iraq.
In a statement published in newspapers across Europe, the leaders said the September 11 terror attacks on the United States "showed just how far terrorists -- the enemies of our common values -- are prepared to go."
"We know that success in the day-to-day battle against terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction demands unwavering determination and firm international cohesion on the part of all countries for whom freedom is precious," the statement said. (Full story)
The statement was signed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, Portuguese Prime Minister Jose-Manuel Durao Barroso, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy, and Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller.
France and Germany would have been there, but they were busy profiting off the oil for food and medicine program by selling more weapons to Iraq.
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Comments
You really should go be a speech writer for Bush, pnj. You swallow the rhetoric and propganda so easily in your youthful naivete.
This isnt about courage or cowardice, this is about wisdom and knee-jerk foolishness in Geo-politics. Those who arent prepared to rush headlong into what will inevitably lead to even great problems both for the Middle East as well as the West are doing so with dilligent regard for the value of international stability and the rule of law, as well as political foresight, not fear.
Time will teach you the lessons you fail to heed know. You can bank on that.
And of course, nevermind the numerous US firms who have profited with trade with Saddam, all nicely edited out in the 8000 pages that Bush and Co absconded with from the UN so noone could point any blame at us for complicity.
These 8 signatories (7 of which not exactly heavyweights in the international arena) are B. & B's latest attempt to gain support for their war. I don't know about other countries but what I can tell you for sure is that no-one in Spain save the Prime Minister supports a war on Iraq. And I'm pretty confident that is the case in other countries, especially in Italy.
If anyone is being coward in here are some of the said countries, its rulers only too willing to please their Master. I don't think France, Russia or Germany are going far enough but at least they are letting the US know that it won't get its UN approval by bullying and patronising.
Ah, I see now that you have interviewed the entire population of Spain. Amazing. :rolleyes:
You need to recheck your sources regarding The Bear.
and schroeder was elected on a promise NOT to go to war with Irap unless there was conclusive proof in the form of the weapons inspectors finding something - there hasn't been, so they won't. they may in the future, but not yet - quite simple really....
and you trust in the unbiased reporting of CNN as well....GREAT idea....
American companies didn't profit off the oil for food program in the way France did.
CNN is no more biased than the BBC which did a whole big report on IRA recruitment and fund raising in the US which implied things that weren't true. The IRA could have used charities for the poor as a cover for fund raising but the BBC made it out like people in the US knew. Also the BBC tried to influence politics in the UK by releasing that report as the UK and US geared up for war.
You also dismiss too readily (and without any real knowledge of the matter) how greatly US companies have profitted from Saddam in all the years since our own government helped install him in the first place.
As for IRA funding, you have obviously never been in the more hardline Iriah pubs in Boston I can see. Many people in the US have given to the IRA with full knowledge of where the money was going and it wasnt raised by anyone posing as a charity.
Every post sounds like a copy paste of an Ari Fleischer press conference Im sad to say. You really need to your eyes opened to the way things really are both in Washington and in the rest of the world.
Countries act in their own national interest. Ie, doing what's best for themselves. What is in the national interest of US isn't necessarily true for other countries.
Listen, we all read the news. Posting article after article after article is useless to a point that it gets more than a bit annoying. Especially articles from trash like the NY Post, which i wouldn't wipe my ass with.
Addition: There's a new doll that looks like Shroeder. It has him dressed like Elvis only he's singing something about taxes. He wiggles his hips. Or rather the doll does.
There are shades of complicity in everything. Welcome to a global economy. France has a very pronounced pattern of acting unilaterally, even in the face of world opporobrium, when it sees fit to do so, in it's "national interests", yet demanding no other nation do the same. They do have a strange pattern, not anecdotal incidents, but a pattern of dealing economically with many regimes we consider objectionable. They have no problem doing so even when it runs counter to our national interest. The Germans are so morally spineless and narcissitic as to defy comprehension. One would think they would do the most to erase the memory of the horror they foisted on the world.
Jean Francois Revel's excellent book, "How Democracies Perish" discusses the fact that many democratic societies, because of the very freedoms of speech and press that they support, tend to focus to such an extent upon their minor flaws that they fail to present opposition to the truly evil forces that would wish them harm. It is as if we believe that, for example, ..."we cannot oppose Castro's prisons / human rights abuses because I saw that we have problems in the US prison system and look at poor Rodney King, after all." It's sadly true, and would be so if it were not for strong leadership which can simultaneously understand our own deficiencies while clearly seeing the gross horrors across from us.
And Alessandro I'm glad you're not going to use the NYPOST to wipe your butt with cause...they use a lot of black ink son. And that's all I'm gonna say on that.
G8 Ranger dude, really thought-provoking. You sounded like you described so many people in Hollywood. Like Jessica Lang saying in Spain: "I'm embarassed to be an American." To which I say, Well, bha bye.:crazyeyes
You're missing the point. Most of the articles are not contentious at all. "Saddam is Bad", "European Companies Sell Stuff to Iraq That They Shouldn't", "US Has Evidence to Justify War"...these are all old news. Few people outside of Steelgate are going to contest this.
Personally, I wonder why you think that the revelation that French and German companies sold stuff to Iraq is so surprising. Or why the German and French governments are to blame for this. I guarantee you that the Prime Ministers of each country didn't go up to the directors of these companies and convince them to sell the stuff, those companies did it to make money......its like blaming the US government for Enron.
Alessandro, your logic is mystifying and laughable.
Enron does not represent a regime whose institutions of government, armed forces and allies are all inimical to the interests of any democratic nation. Nor was Enron ever the object of United Nations resolutions that included, but were not limited to, a formal blockade intended to deny that nation material or treasure that would be used to devlop FURTHER already-possessed weapons of mass destruction. Nor is Enron an unstable dictatorship that brutally attacked, raped and pillaged and brutally occupied it's competition as a means of corporate tactics, thereby establishing it's standard of acceptable international behavior.
If a government allowed, even tacitly, it's business interest to function in opposition to UN resolutions which that government allegedly supported, then that is more than duplicitous; It is traitorous to the institution that sponsored the resolutions. This is not "business". This is blockade running. The businesses engaging in such an activity should have been STOPPED, boarded and forced to give up their cargo if we found it to be a violation.
Or sunk.
Read what I wrote again, more carefully. I was comparing holding the governments of France and Germany responsible for the sales of their companies WITHOUT THEIR KNOWLEDGE. Now, if these governments knew, then by all means...but the fact is they almost certainly did not. You're talking about tracking these sales through several front companies in the 4th and 6th largest economies in the world. If you could explain to me how they would do this, I would be very interested to hear it.
And I'm not against taking the Iraqi regime either, I support it. You don't have to convince me of the strategic implications or the inhumanity of the regime.
It is a fact that the governments of both France and Germany are under much greater oversight and government interference than any US company. Thanks to trade unions, guilds, etc., are bound to know much more than merely how much a company makes. These governments, lacking the armed forces to do so, use their economic muscle as a substitute for military power projection to exert international influence. I have family members who work for Airbus. Do you not think the French government is acutely aware of Airbus' competitive position versus Boeing when jockeying for Air France's or Aeroflots business?
I'm not privy to the intel, but based upon empirical data from past situations, we will find French/German government awareness of illegal trade with Iraq. Whether it is revealed or hushed up by the diplomats will be interesting to see.
Don't mean to sound harsh, but the Enron comparison simply fails the test. There may be another one, but not that one.
Time will teach you the lessons you fail to heed know. You can bank on that." Clandestine - Uber Poster
Actually, it is PRECISELY about courage and cowardice. Cowardice may be too emotional a term for some. Let's say "complicity with a depraved state".
It is about wisdom for the long term, even at the cost of short term struggle. Recall that if France had shown the temerity to stand up to Germany's initial aggression and expansion which was in full, flagrant violation of the Versailles treaty, while Germany's armed forces were small and Hitler's power was weak, it might have completely averted World War II. Internal documents show that such an action, pitting a fully armed France agsinst the still-weak Germany would have come at a relatively small cost but would probably led to Hitler being thrown from power. Of course, this "what if game" can go on ad infinitum, but most people lying in the well-tended graveyards in Normandy, in England would be willing to vote for that course of action. It would have been much more to the world's advantage. At least I happen to believe we could have done without World War II. Don't you?
My example is only one that demonstrates that timely action, prudent use of force and courageous action, temperate, measured and SUPPORTED BY UN RESOLUTIONS, WHICH THIS IS, can have the stabilizing effect that inaction cannot bring?
Don't preach to me about failing to learn the lessons of "time". You would do with a little remedial study yourself.
Unless the German and French authorities had knowledge that the aluminum tubes or whatever were not ordinary metal but rather super strength in design, for gas centirfuges, I doubt that they would have looked at them any differently than any other related export. And the fact of the matter is that it probably would have taken an expert to tell the difference.
The Enron example was merely to illustrate the point that large companies can easily hide illegal business from the authorities until it is too late. By no means was I implying that there is a correlation between illegal accounting practices and illegal exports, just that companies can get away with them despite government oversight.
A better example would be the export of satellite and missile technology by two American defense firms to China that was in the news recently. Despite being in an industry where there is very little chance that they were exporting non-weapons tech, and despite the fact that these are probably the most closely watched exports out of the country, McDonnell Douglas and Boeing (I think those were the two) managed to get away with it. If they could get away with it, I think its safe to say that German and french companies would be able to as well.
Better example. And many of us see an absolute connection between exports to China and the amount of political access they purchased from our then President. And many of us consider it on the borderline of treason for our executive branch to have been so corrupted and to have potentially compromised our security in that manner and for little more than political campaign contributions.
"For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world yet lose his immortal soul...But Richard...for Wales?" A Man for All Seasons.
The record shows that France and Germany have pursued a course of gradual loosening of the strong rhetoric of the Gulf War and a subsequently less attentiveattitude toward their obligations under the post-war agreements. The amount of illicit materials being slipped into Iraq has steadily increased and we, the US, could not stop it without embarrasing our "allies" to one degree or another. So we chose to ignore it in overt channels. I'm sure we "expressed grave reservations" over embassy dinners. But no more than that. Now, we are moving to action. One does not compound one mistaken policy with more of the same.
Despite my dislike for Clinton's expanded trade with China, I doubt that these sales of the most dear technology we have would have ever happened with explicit or implicit support form the government. Its simply too risky to national security, even for Clinton. Shaving a few billion off the trade deficit won't offset the danger of China gaining a comparable nuclear arsenal
For the same reason, I doubt that the German and French governments were involved in their sales, even given their more lenient stance toward Iraq. (Which I disagree with)
Arguing for reducing the embargo on non-military supplies, of course, that's well known. Giving the tools to make WMD to Saddam, that's beyond my conception of common sense or logic. A few hundred million dollars isn't going to sway those countries....Russia, maybe. Why would they risk regional security, which they have a vested interest in, for what amounts to a drop in the bucket for their economies? It's not like we're dealing with North Korea here, they don't need the money.
But seriously, why am I a little concerned that we have the full military backing of Poland of all places? what exactly are they going to do?
One has said that the members of the EU should speak as one voice.
Perhaps dissenting voices shouldn't be allowed, afterall we are all Europeans and not nations in our own right now...?
I like the fact that you mention trade as a reason not to go war, on a global scale $1.5bn isnt really a massive amount, i know it sounds a lot but I dont think its big enough to be a good reason.
Yet we are being told by the left wing that trade is the reason we are going to war.
Go figure...