Iran trying to take over Southern Iraq?

[Brag]

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

Elaborate please? Iran's involvement of troops can be found in multiple articles right now, so I believe him. Here is an example about speed boats in the gulf, and at the bottom, they mention Iran's involvent in Basra again - http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1

Seems to be an internationally known thing.

-S

Iran maintains contacts with all factions in Iraq including the Greenzoners. They are the ones who negotiated the cease fire in Basra. To which Maliki reps traveled to Qum for the talks.

This guy sounds like a White House spinner.

When it comes to patrol boats, Iran constantly patrols along it's coastline and right up to the middle of the Straits of Hormuz. You can't navigate through the area without seeing them on a daily basis.

We have seen an enourmous ammount of exageration about Iran by the present administration and a few camp followers. These are the same people who invented the WMD in Iraq -- their credibility is totally bankrupt.

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by Brag

Iran maintains contacts with all factions in Iraq including the Greenzoners. They are the ones who negotiated the cease fire in Basra. To which Maliki reps traveled to Qum for the talks.

This guy sounds like a White House spinner.

When it comes to patrol boats, Iran constantly patrols along it's coastline and right up to the middle of the Straits of Hormuz. You can't navigate through the area without seeing them on a daily basis.

We have seen an enourmous ammount of exageration about Iran by the present administration and a few camp followers. These are the same people who invented the WMD in Iraq -- their credibility is totally bankrupt.

I guess you also believe that the World Trade Center thing was a conspiracy. I'd probably add in there that you probably think the Holocaust was a lie, and I bet you think the US never landed on the moon either, huh?

That's about the jist of what I get from your post.

-S

[PeriscopeDepth]

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

I guess you also believe that the World Trade Center thing was a conspiracy. I'd probably add in there that you probably think the Holocaust was a lie, and I bet you think the US never landed on the moon either, huh?

That's about the jist of what I get from your post.

-S

Are you kidding? He sounds pretty reasonable to me.

PD

[mrbeast]

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

I guess you also believe that the World Trade Center thing was a conspiracy. I'd probably add in there that you probably think the Holocaust was a lie, and I bet you think the US never landed on the moon either, huh?

That's about the jist of what I get from your post.

-S

Think its more a case of what were you smoking when you wrote that post?

How do you get that jist from Brag's post? Seemed pretty thoughtful and reasoned to me.

[Stealth Hunter]

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

I guess you also believe that the World Trade Center thing was a conspiracy. I'd probably add in there that you probably think the Holocaust was a lie, and I bet you think the US never landed on the moon either, huh?

That's about the jist of what I get from your post.

-S

Actually Subman, given your previous rants and posts, he seems more reasonable than you.

You go for too many assumptions. You were ready to pounce the minute you read the name "Iran". You seem to be the opportunistic one here. Brag brings up several good points. I especially like the one about the WMD's. Bush has made too many wild claims about these people. He told us Saddam had WMD's. No WMD's to be found. He told us Iran was making nuclear weapons. Nuclear program has been offline since 2003. He told us Iran was training insurgents. Really? Did the same sources on the last two things give you this story, too? All the more reason why we should follow you without question like the good little patriotic citizens we are... :rotfl:

He's just looking for war, and so was Cheney, though Cheney always wanted a Middle-Eastern conflict since Old Man Bush took power (though OMB has more sense than his son; Cheney moved in on Bush, Jr. and played him like a violin).

[Wreford-Brown]

[quote=Stealth Hunter]He told us Saddam had WMD's. No WMD's to be found.[quote]

If you want to kill a million people with conventional weapons you need a huge armoury to hide them in. If you want to kill a million people with WMDs you may only need a few barrels, and there's a lot of desert to hide a few barrels in.

If Saddam had WMDs then we may never find them, and in 50 years when the barrels have deteriorated enough to start leaking, no-one in the West is likely to care about a few dead bedouin, even if we find out.

[Trex]

Without getting into the US administration's desires for war, or lack of them, there are some curiously overlooked facts.

1. Saddam did have a huge WMD programme pre-Gulf One. Chemical, nukes, biologicals - the works. He spent untold billions developing the abilty to spread mass death around his region.

2. He had repeated;y used them both in war and in crushing internal dissent. This was not a man reluctant to use a last-ditch weapon.

3. His cooperation with agencies such as the IAEA was, let us say, less than forthcoming. He lied, he hid, he insisted that his people had to be questioned with his secret police present, he seized discovered documents and returned them with chunks cut out. Inspectors were denied access to huge facilities across the country under the excuse that they were 'presidential palaces'.

4. Although it appears that the Iraqis did in fact destroy their WMD stock, they were far less than forthcoming WRT providing proof of this.

5. The Iraqis had definitely continued to work on long-range missiles, specifically banned under the Gulf One treaty and which, given their high CEP, were best suited for delivery of WMD.

All in all, a reasonable man might take Saddam's behaviour as that of a man trying very hard to hide something.

The irony of Saddam's fall is that he could have - at any time up to the day before the USA moved in - stopped the whole thing by simply saying, "OK, we have changed our minds. Sorry for the previous problems. Come on in now and look for yourselves. Your inspectors can go anywhere. We will provide the records you want. You can have unrestricted access to our scientists. We have nothing to hide and are willing to prove it. How can we help you?" Faced with that (and of course real subsequent cooperation), the legs would have been cut out from under even the most rabid Saddam-hater in Washington. Instead, he stonewalled, dodged, lied - and died.

Not much sympathy for Saddam from this end. He was a vampire and deserved everything he got. It's just a pity Washington didn't do much thinking about what had to happen post-Saddam before they launched. Another Marshall Plan and Iraq could have been an R&R choice for tired Yank troops. And it would have cost far less than the war.

[Tchocky]

Originally Posted by Trex

The irony of Saddam's fall is that he could have - at any time up to the day before the USA moved in - stopped the whole thing by simply saying, "OK, we have changed our minds. Sorry for the previous problems. Come on in now and look for yourselves. Your inspectors can go anywhere. We will provide the records you want. You can have unrestricted access to our scientists. We have nothing to hide and are willing to prove it. How can we help you?" Faced with that (and of course real subsequent cooperation), the legs would have been cut out from under even the most rabid Saddam-hater in Washington. Instead, he stonewalled, dodged, lied - and died.

I'm not sure on this one.
What we've found out about the coercive intelligence regime in Washington leading up to the war leads me to believe that it was going to happen one way or the other.
Also, the amount of people in the run-up to the war saying there ain't any weapons, tells me that the whole idea of WMD was a pretext, an excuse. You can't go to war without public support, so you run around keeping the same couple of phrases really close together, "saddam....9/11.....al-qaeda". Overt stating isn't required.

[mrbeast]

Saddam's strategy was a gamble. By keeping the world guessing about his WMD capabilities; by obstructing the inspectors, wheeling out the odd Al Hussain(?) missile infront of the cameras every now and then; he managed to keep his main opponant Iran in check. As Iraq's military was fatally weakened by the Gulf War, WMD capapbilities were all that was preventing Iranian domination. Saddam calculated that the US and her allies would not be stupid enough to remove him as this would hand Iran control of the gulf on a plate.

Unfortunately for Saddam, he had no idea who he was dealing with. G W Bush and the neocon agenda were not like the elder Bush he'd dealt with before.

If the inspectors had been able to visit and see everything they wanted I suspect that they would have discovered the cupboard was bare afterall.

[bradclark1]

Originally Posted by Trex

It's just a pity Washington didn't do much thinking about what had to happen post-Saddam before they launched. Another Marshall Plan and Iraq could have been an R&R choice for tired Yank troops. And it would have cost far less than the war.

Are you sure about that? Yes we sure as hell could have done a lot better than nothing after post Saddam but what we have today would have happened anyway. Our stupid inability to think ahead and the arrogant assumption that we would be seen as heroes by all Iraqi's just accelerated the problem. We just put a blindlfold on and jumped in with one foot. Jumping blind and one footed will always hurt when you land and fall.

[Trex]

Originally Posted by Tchocky

I'm not sure on this one.
What we've found out about the coercive intelligence regime in Washington leading up to the war leads me to believe that it was going to happen one way or the other.
Also, the amount of people in the run-up to the war saying there ain't any weapons, tells me that the whole idea of WMD was a pretext, an excuse. You can't go to war without public support, so you run around keeping the same couple of phrases really close together, "saddam....9/11.....al-qaeda". Overt stating isn't required.

That is however my point. Regardless of what spin was or was not happening inside Washington, had Saddam or his UN ambassador publicly announced (and followed through on) an open-door policy for the inpections, public support for the invasion would have been lower than whale poop. The best defence against darkness is light, after all. Even the hottest hawks could not have surmounted that one, I suspect.

mrbeast has a good point. Saddam, not for the first time, but just about for the last time, misjudged the consequences of his actions. Of course, any tyranny has to keep an iron grip on its own people or risk a coup or revolution; the open-door policy might have been seen as a sign of weakness.

Bottom line - good riddance to him.

Originally Posted by Trex

The irony of Saddam's fall is that he could have - at any time up to the day before the USA moved in - stopped the whole thing by simply saying, "OK, we have changed our minds. Sorry for the previous problems. Come on in now and look for yourselves. Your inspectors can go anywhere. We will provide the records you want. You can have unrestricted access to our scientists. We have nothing to hide and are willing to prove it. How can we help you?" Faced with that (and of course real subsequent cooperation), the legs would have been cut out from under even the most rabid Saddam-hater in Washington. Instead, he stonewalled, dodged, lied - and died.

As I put it earlier, he was playing poker with a guy bent on upsetting the card table and call his bluff with a hail of gunfire.

He just didn't know when to fold.

[Tchocky]

When thinking about those days in February/March 2003, I like to read over Baudrillard.
Tough & gnarly, but I think his analysis, written less than a fortnight before the war, has been borne out in practice.

"Evil" is what arrives without prevention, and therefore without the possibility of prevention. It is, of course, the case with September 11. It is precisely that event that is radically opposed to the nonevent of the war. September 11 is an impossible and unimaginable event. It is carried out even before being itself possible (even disaster films did not anticipate it; on the contrary, they exhausted the imaginary possibility of such an event). It is about the extreme unforeseeable (where one finds a paradox according to which a thing does not become possible until only after it has taken place).
The difference is complete with the current war, which, by contrast, has been envisaged, programmed, and anticipated so much that it does not even need to take place. And even if it takes place in "reality," it will already have virtually taken place and thus it will not be an event. Here, reality is a virtual horizon. This take-over by the virtual is further reinforced by the fact that the announced war is like the double, the clone of the first Gulf war (just like Bush is his father's clone). The crucial event has thus been bracketed by two cloned events.
One can understand better from this perspective how this current war is a substitute event, a ghost event, and a puppet [fantoche] event bearing the image of Saddam. This is an immense mystification -- for the Americans themselves. With September 11 a gigantic task of contraception developed at the same time as a process of mourning. The idea was to ensure that September 11 had, in fact, not taken place, using the same principle of prevention, but this time retrospectively. An endeavor without hope or end.

http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=494

[Stealth Hunter]

[quote=Wreford-Brown][quote=Stealth Hunter]He told us Saddam had WMD's. No WMD's to be found.

If you want to kill a million people with conventional weapons you need a huge armoury to hide them in. If you want to kill a million people with WMDs you may only need a few barrels, and there's a lot of desert to hide a few barrels in.

If Saddam had WMDs then we may never find them, and in 50 years when the barrels have deteriorated enough to start leaking, no-one in the West is likely to care about a few dead bedouin, even if we find out.

I seem to recall that Bush knew their exact location, and expressed it in his speech about going to war with Iraq. Until we find proof, these WMD's never existed.

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by Stealth Hunter

I seem to recall that Bush knew their exact location, and expressed it in his speech about going to war with Iraq. Until we find proof, these WMD's never existed.

You recall wrong. I never heard that. Maybe in your dreams you heard that! All the speeches are on youtube somewhere, so listen to them. I remeber Bush saying that they will find them, but its going to take time to search. Well, the damn Israelies got to it first and destroyed the party in Syria last year.

-S