Every week it seems as if more and more soldiers are dying. Fajullah is still chaotic and possibly on the verge of becoming another Afghanistan with Taliban-like rules such as women forced cover themselves completely in public or face possible death and being denied an education. The turnover of Iraq is premature. Insurgents are kidnapping foreigners and soldiers. More and more scandals are coming to the surface. America should not have gotten involved in this preemptive strike of Iraq. In terms of strategy it was unnecessary and will create more terrorists than it destroys. How many people will join al Queda now as they lose their relatives and friends to bombings? How many more young American soldiers must lose their lives, their innocence and their trust in their country? Saddamn Hussein was NOT linked with 9/11. Nor was he linked with al Qaeda. Perhaps it would have been better if more time had elapsed before the first strike, if more intelligence and fine planning had gone into the war effort. After all, the lives of hundreds and thousands of soldiers and Iraqi citizens were and still are at stake! Not to mention the lives of allies and civilians working to rebuild Iraq. War should only be used as a last resort. War should only be used if all other possible solutions have failed. There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction other than the ones sold to Iraq back in the '80s. The only thing that has come of the war was overthrowing a terrible dictator, one of many. Other than that, the whole war effort has been handled sloppily from the looting at the beginning of the war to the torturing of war criminals to troops with insufficient equipment. Despite all this we are in it for the long haul. The only thing that can be done is to make sure the soldiers have the equipment and resources to finish the job of stabilizing Iraq. We can only hope that the damage to America's image in Iraq and in the world can be undone. But nothing will bring back innocent civilians or the soldiers that have died. War breaks the threads of society.
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
Could someone at least tell me whether it's good or bad or not then? As I want to send it out tonight...
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
At least one factual error that will get you jumped on quickly - the US never sold Sadaam WMDs. It's at bet tangentially related to your overall point, so it may be better to drop that line.
quote: November 1983. A National Security Directive states that the U.S would do "whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent Iraq from losing its war with Iran. [1] [15]
November 1983. Banca Nazionale del Lavoro of Italy and its Branch in Atlanta begin to funnel $5 billion in unreported loans to Iraq. Iraq, with the blessing and official approval of the U.S. government, purchased computer controlled machine tools, computers, scientific instruments, special alloy steel and aluminum, chemicals, and other industrial goods for Iraq's missile, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. [14]
October 1983. The Reagan Administration begins secretly allowing Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt to transfer United States weapons, including Howitzers, Huey helicopters, and bombs to Iraq. These shipments violated the Arms Export Control Act. [16]
November 1983. George Schultz, the Secretary of State, is given intelligence reports showing that Iraqi troops are daily using chemical weapons against the Iranians. [1]
December 20 1983. Donald Rumsfeld, then a civilian and now Defense Secretary, meets with Saddam Hussein to assure him of US friendship and materials support. [1] [15]
July 1984. CIA begins giving Iraq intelligence necessary to calibrate its mustard gas attacks on Iranian troops. [19]
quote:Invoices included in the documents read like shopping lists for biological weapons programs. One 1986 shipment from the Virginia-based American Type Culture Collection included three strains of anthrax, six strains of the bacteria that make botulinum toxin, and three strains of the bacteria that cause gas gangrene. Iraq later admitted to the United Nations that it had made weapons out of all three.
The company sent the bacteria to the University of Baghdad, which U.N. inspectors concluded had been used as a front to acquire samples for Iraq's biological weapons program.
The CDC, meanwhile, sent shipments of germs to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and other agencies involved in Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. It sent samples in 1986 of botulinum toxin and botulinum toxiod - used to make vaccines against botulinum toxin - directly to the Iraqi chemical and biological weapons complex at al-Muthanna, the records show.
posted
So what you're saying is that the US sent materials for making vaccines and materials that could be used for chemical weapons but also many other things to a country, and somehow that means we sold them weapons of mass destruction?
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