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george senior destroyed it ten years before hand ...then after ten years of crippling sanctions ...there was no army to face and the yanks knew that.
they also knew they wouldn't be facing chemical biological or nuclear weapons ...as they only sent a handfull of protective gear by way of show.
'Highway of Death' anyone? Up to 100,000 killed in one day (or two at the most):
Link below. WARNING: includes very graphic picture that some might find disturbing. I have broken the link on purpose:
http: //deoxy.org/wc/warcrime.htm
there was no iraqi army rich kid ...to fight or fucking flee ok!
Actually... the British Army were selling Iraqi T-72's after the y captured whole ones. Their planes are OK, they blocked up the engines and burried them after taking off the wings. They were dug up. You found Iraqi arms for sale to private collecters after the war. They abbandonned alot of it.
I want a tank, tbh. T-55's are cooler. But a 72 is more powerful.
Most of what got Destroyed was in the first Gulf war. Most of the stuff they had left was abbandonned in favour of the current Guerilla tactics - they let the US Army get rid of Saddam, then decided Guerilla Warfare to get their iwn power.
To be honest the 100,000 is bollocks. John Heidenrich in the academic journal 'Foreign Policy' article 'How many Iraqi's died' came to the very plausible figure of 10,000. He based this on the number of bodies recovered (and bodies contrary to popular belief are very rarely totally destroyed), the number of injured captured (and we know casualty evacuation broke down once the bombing started) and the 3:1 dead to injutred ratio - which is the common yardstick.
It is also unlikely that the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualtiers that some people claim took place. It was in Saddam's interests to well publicise civilian death tolls, as he did when the bridge and bunker both containing civilians were destroyed. If there had been mass civilian casualties these would have been well advertised.
The amount of physical destruction wasn't neccessarily related to human losses. The mass air attacks were aimed at destroying the Iraqi capacity to resist, tanks, APCs, artillery pieces. Most of these were unmanned - the crews sensibly sleeping and eating well away from them. In fact one of the reasons for the success of the ground campaign was that many Iraqis were unable to get to their vehicles in time once the coalition forces were in the vicinty and were left to watch as their empty tanks brewed up.
Whilst it is difficult to get the exact figures of the Iraqi forces in Kuwait, the most reliable estimate is 120,000 and it is complete rubbish that 100,000 of them were killed on the Highway of Death. Once the aircraft hit the road, most Iraqis left their vehicles and decamped some distance away. The human losses on the 'Highway of Death' were mercifully light.
Truly NQA you have the most excusatory rational on human slaughter. Not surprising for warmongers though. 10,000 isnt so bad then so long as it isnt 100,000? Or perhaps it's okay cause it was done by us and not, say, Russia or Iran or whatever pet "bad guy" Washington decides to condemn for exactly the same practices it readily and willingly commits.
Go tell the surviving relatives of those slaughtered by our unwarranted trigger-happiness just how "mercifully light" it was.
By our standards set forth in the Nurmberg Principles, this is called a War Crime (and but one case in an ongoing catalogue of such), however you wish to make light of it or spin it with typical pentagon-styled rhetoric.
You still here?
Would it be wrong to bomb an American bomb factory...I don't trust them with weapons you see.
Just give me a clue - who invaded Kuwait? Or do you think that was justified. If you want to support the actions of genocidal dictators invading their neighbours, please do so. But don't pretend you have the moral high ground.
Who invaded Cuba? Bombed Nicaragua? Trained and armed Islamic fundamentalists? Supported and assisted with the murder of 100,000's in Indonesia?
So that means it was alright for Iraq to invade Kuwait? Funny system of 'values' you have.
As for your answers
a) mainly that would have been the Cubans - not one US officer or man landed at the Bay of Pigs - though they did provide some support (unless we're talking about the Spanish-American war in which case you have a point).
b) the US
c) mainly the saudis and the Iranians - the US supported the Mujahadeen, who were not the same as the Taliban or Al-Q
d) that would have mainly been the Indonesians themselves - the evidence for US support is not nearly as strong as Pilger would have the useful idiots of the world believe.
A true military indoctrinated drone you are and so blindly devoted to the very sorts of MIC-crafted revisionism which was exposed as the modus operandi of the Washington-led Military Industrial Complex with the release of the Pentagon Papers. The same practices have continued unabated from then up to the present.
Obviously its beyond your critical capacities to apply consistency of principle, since it is clear the military mentality operates on a level of gross double standards.
The Gassing of the Kurds? Let us recall that this occurred during the Iran-Iraq War, a war fought entirely at the behest of and in furtherance of the political agenda of Washington following the ousting of their longtime pet butcher The Shah.
In that context, any intellectually honest examination will reveal that the Kurds were in fact aiding and abetting the Iranians against their own country. Applying consistency of principle, what sort of response do you suppose (by our own repeated demonstrations of excessive response (aka carpet bombing of Cambodia perhaps or more recently the annihilation of Fallujah)) US or even UK leaders would have made against any of our citizens so aiding an enemy in time of war? Traitors of any nation have never been viewed as poor unfortunate vicitms.
Let us also remember that your own much touted Churchill advocated the very same response against the very same people only a few generations prior. Consistency of principle would demand that his name be summarily relegated to infamy and shame by your truncated moral yardstick.
As for Kuwait, the lies that surround that misadventure (let us recall the fabrications of babies thrown from incubators and other fraudulent testimonials) could fill volumes. Unlikely, in the present context of Rovian revisionism and spin, that the fact Kuwait (under direction from the Bush Sr. administration) purposely refused diplomatic efforts on the part of Baghdad to secure oil export concessions and instead upped its extraction from long contested border regions as a further affront would trouble your surface analysis.
That Kuwait itself also happens to be an artificial emirate carved out of Iraq by prior British imperialism in the region only adds to the longstanding conflict which predates the Iran-Iraq War era.
Applying consistency of principle, let us ask what you suppose Washington would do to Mexico if it attempted a similar gambit along the Texas border? To suggest that no resort to arms would be forthcoming is utter naivete.
But let us return to consistency of principle and accept for argument's sake that Iraq was indeed criminal in its choice of response, as would be the US/UK in similar circumstances.
Nevertheless, the present situation remains no less a war crime of unprovoked, willful and quite documentedly illegal aggression and even more illegal and externally-intentioned regime change. Direct violations of the Nurmberg Principles (which you have shown your double standards in ignoring), the Vienna Convention and The Hague Convention. All these authored by our own governments and duly ratified by our respective representative bodies only to be disregarded by the present administration.
In this, Washington has also contravened the US Constitution itself. Article 6 thereof states explicitly:
Thus your arguments about Saddam being a bad man, however true, provide no sanction for the pursuit of additional acts of foreign aggression against that sovereign nation nor justification for the thousands, tens of thousands or perhaps greater numbers of resulting deaths, displacements and patently illegal detentions. Neither does it abrogate the precepts of those aforementioned conventions, which explicitly forbid the interference by occupying powers (for us as much so as it was for the Nazis against whom those precepts were applied) in the internal political composition of the occupied nation.
In the end analysis, I submit it is you and those of your nationalistic ilk who excuse the same crimes and actions for which you condemn other leaders so long as they are ordered by our own leaders, executed by our own militaries and duly enshrouded in the requisite slogans and PR of "democratisation", "liberartion", et al.
On the enumeration of the historic misadventures raised by Spliffie, I suggest you go back and connect the dots.
a). The Cubans involved were not the organisers nor the facilitators in that effort. That falls directly to the highest echelons of the Kennedy administration and the Pentagon as well as the CIA. Funding, trainging and arming were all done through official channels with merely the execution left to the ex-Batista cronies in order to maintain the longstanding practice of "plausible deniability".
b). Correct. Though in that you clearly seek to ignore the butchery and criminality implicit to Washington's actions. Undoubtedly subscribing to the prior era's ideological excuse of looming communist threat (aka domino theory).
c). Best you go back and reexamine the Taliban's origins. They were one of many groupings that comprised the term Muhajadeen (which you incorrectly posit as some distinct and monlithic group unto itself). They received equal funding, training and arming by the CIA as did all other factions. That they later emerged as dominant following the ousting of the Soviets is merely a further example of the short sighted policies of expediency characteristic of our MIC.
d). The day you demonstrate even a fraction of the investigatory acumen of Pilger is the day you can call anyone who follows his well documented exposes "idiots".
Annotated references on long term US complicity in Indonesian genocide