EPTOn March 30 2011 02:42 Ganjamaster wrote:
I agree categorically with everything you present except for blaming the CIA (and the school of the Americas, for that matter) for installing the National Reorganization Process in Argentina, which is entirely to blame on the Argentine oligarchy in collusion with the army to install a plutarchy. This is offtopic, so im not going to delve any further but still point out that the US influence in this process had a tangential, secondary support role at the most.
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On March 29 2011 21:37 Biff The Understudy wrote:
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I won't spend whole day discussing that and we are absolutely off topic, so I will answer one more time on specific points.
1- Soviet were not installing dictature in South America. USA installed dictatures not again Stalinist dictatorships, but against popular will and any kind of left wing government. Allende was not a dictator. There were no Soviet presence in Argentina. The fact is that in their paranoid crusade against the "reds" (operation Condor, someone?), America installed and supported fascist dictatorship on the whole continent in democratic countries which hadn't asked anything. The ennemy was not soviet dictature, it was any movement of emancipation or any communist/scialist influence, idea or movement.
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On March 29 2011 20:39 DeepElemBlues wrote:
If your opinion is based on nothing or almost nothing then why not say so?
There are lots of testimonies of other US soldiers about Iraqi opinions of them, and other sources as well. Your landlady is a silly example, she wasn't in Iraq at the time was she? He was.
I disagree with your characterization of Iraq today and think your "don't get reported" remark is a cover for lack of evidence. As for the assertion that we're the only thing keeping it from blowing up, we only have 50,000 soldiers there. That is nowhere near enough. There's more than a million Iraqi soldiers / national police / police (national police are basically paramilitary and police have at least AK-47s). If the country was going to go crazy in violence because we didn't have enough soldiers to stop it, it would have. We've had less than 100,00 for a while. This is what I mean when I say you don't have your facts straight.
Why not invade China or three quarters of the world? I've given my answer to this question like three times in this thread, check my recent posts in it and argue with my answers instead of asking the questions over and over again.
The Soviets were installing dictatorships all over the place, unfortunately in some of these cases democracy would have meant Soviet overthrow soon after, and some fucked up shit happened that we should be ashamed of being involved with, but that doesn't mean we did it for shits and giggles, Argentina would have liked bowing down to Moscow a lot less (would have happened sooner or later if we hadn't struggled against the USSR around the world) than to being a "puppet" (stretching that term very loosely) of the US.
As for "dozens of thousands," you can't mean Argentina alone, you must mean all of South and Central America, and let's see, adding Cuba, FARC in Colombia, Shining Path in Peru, etc., well I hope you see that adding up a "Communist vs. Capitalist Death Toll Contest" to see who's "better" is trivial.
I have to break this down it's so crazy.
1. That came out of left field and is pretty much nonsense. American business didn't get much direct gain out of Iraq other than the munitions industry. Certainly not Big Oil. All that money Halliburton got for restoring the oil wells? It's going to be pumping out oil under contract for European oil companies and the Chinese state oil company mostly.
I guess we should have done a better job of invading them for our business.
2. Yeah okay. Bush started his campaign at the UN on September 11, 2002, we invaded 9 months later. This "scared us into it" is crap. NINE MONTHS. We weren't scared stupid for NINE STRAIGHT MONTHS. That is just insulting.
3. Democracy wasn't a lie, WMD was a mistake not a lie.
What has actually happened says mostly and the situation today says almost entirely the opposite. Why do you think we went after the Mahdi Army who were slaughtering Sunnis and al-Qaeda who was truck bombing and suicide bombing Shiites? Did protection of the victims have nothing to do with it????????
I thought it was more kind of "this happened, there's a broader discussion past just this particular incident to be had," and that was going on. Iraq and Libya got thrown in (and I think civilians killed or injured in those places is relevant to this discussion). But of course it became war for oil/business Bush lied lied lied stuff that I won't reply to anymore because no one is going to change any opinion about it and it is off-topic.
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Your agressivity doesn't make you right. Starting your post by bullshit such as "The rest of your post is factually inaccurate to the point where it's worthless" doesn't make you right either.
I know perfectly my landlady is not representative of Irak people. I talked about her because the guy was saying 95% irakis were happy about US troops being there, on his personnal experience.
Irak is still a complete chaos. It may be a bit less worse than in 2005 and 2006 but on't pretend that the situation is great; the day you guys step up of the country it collapses into civil war and you know it perfectly. Your administration doesn't have a way out, and the situation is still absolutely nightmarish. We don't talk about it as much as before, that's it.
Situation in Afghanistan is absolutely critical. Frecnh army was saying they had absolutely no idea how it was going to end; and if it was only possible to defeat the talibans.
Now, Irakis failed to get rid of Saddam. Right. They would have done it another time. Or not at all. That's not the point. Should we invade China to teach them democracy? Why not? Should we invade the three quarter of the planet who don't have our conception of freedom and don't share the our values, and our interest?
Why do you guys care so much that Irakis don't live in a dictature considering the fact that you installed dictatures in South America for 30 years which were at least as deadly as Saddam was?
You see, my mother had to flee Argentina under Videla who was almost directlyt installed to power by the CIA. At the time, fighting the reds was worth few dozen thousand of innocent life.
So let's make it clear. You are in Irak because it was an opportunity to make business for your corrupt administration. US people were hysterical after 11/9 and that it was the right moment for your admiistration to manipulate everybody and start an illegal war. Now you are there, and everybody knows that the bullshit about democracy freedom and MDW was a lie.
I have the right to be a bit suspicious when someone says that US soldiers deserve respect because they are there to protect anybody. US military in Irak is an occupying force, behaving like an occupying force. No sympathy whatsoever for me.
I know perfectly my landlady is not representative of Irak people. I talked about her because the guy was saying 95% irakis were happy about US troops being there, on his personnal experience.
Irak is still a complete chaos. It may be a bit less worse than in 2005 and 2006 but on't pretend that the situation is great; the day you guys step up of the country it collapses into civil war and you know it perfectly. Your administration doesn't have a way out, and the situation is still absolutely nightmarish. We don't talk about it as much as before, that's it.
Situation in Afghanistan is absolutely critical. Frecnh army was saying they had absolutely no idea how it was going to end; and if it was only possible to defeat the talibans.
Now, Irakis failed to get rid of Saddam. Right. They would have done it another time. Or not at all. That's not the point. Should we invade China to teach them democracy? Why not? Should we invade the three quarter of the planet who don't have our conception of freedom and don't share the our values, and our interest?
Why do you guys care so much that Irakis don't live in a dictature considering the fact that you installed dictatures in South America for 30 years which were at least as deadly as Saddam was?
You see, my mother had to flee Argentina under Videla who was almost directlyt installed to power by the CIA. At the time, fighting the reds was worth few dozen thousand of innocent life.
So let's make it clear. You are in Irak because it was an opportunity to make business for your corrupt administration. US people were hysterical after 11/9 and that it was the right moment for your admiistration to manipulate everybody and start an illegal war. Now you are there, and everybody knows that the bullshit about democracy freedom and MDW was a lie.
I have the right to be a bit suspicious when someone says that US soldiers deserve respect because they are there to protect anybody. US military in Irak is an occupying force, behaving like an occupying force. No sympathy whatsoever for me.
If your opinion is based on nothing or almost nothing then why not say so?
There are lots of testimonies of other US soldiers about Iraqi opinions of them, and other sources as well. Your landlady is a silly example, she wasn't in Iraq at the time was she? He was.
I disagree with your characterization of Iraq today and think your "don't get reported" remark is a cover for lack of evidence. As for the assertion that we're the only thing keeping it from blowing up, we only have 50,000 soldiers there. That is nowhere near enough. There's more than a million Iraqi soldiers / national police / police (national police are basically paramilitary and police have at least AK-47s). If the country was going to go crazy in violence because we didn't have enough soldiers to stop it, it would have. We've had less than 100,00 for a while. This is what I mean when I say you don't have your facts straight.
Why not invade China or three quarters of the world? I've given my answer to this question like three times in this thread, check my recent posts in it and argue with my answers instead of asking the questions over and over again.
The Soviets were installing dictatorships all over the place, unfortunately in some of these cases democracy would have meant Soviet overthrow soon after, and some fucked up shit happened that we should be ashamed of being involved with, but that doesn't mean we did it for shits and giggles, Argentina would have liked bowing down to Moscow a lot less (would have happened sooner or later if we hadn't struggled against the USSR around the world) than to being a "puppet" (stretching that term very loosely) of the US.
As for "dozens of thousands," you can't mean Argentina alone, you must mean all of South and Central America, and let's see, adding Cuba, FARC in Colombia, Shining Path in Peru, etc., well I hope you see that adding up a "Communist vs. Capitalist Death Toll Contest" to see who's "better" is trivial.
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So let's make it clear.
1. You are in Irak because it was an opportunity to make business for your corrupt administration.
2. US people were hysterical after 11/9 and that it was the right moment for your admiistration to manipulate everybody and start an illegal war.
3. Now you are there, and everybody knows that the bullshit about democracy freedom and MDW was a lie.
1. You are in Irak because it was an opportunity to make business for your corrupt administration.
2. US people were hysterical after 11/9 and that it was the right moment for your admiistration to manipulate everybody and start an illegal war.
3. Now you are there, and everybody knows that the bullshit about democracy freedom and MDW was a lie.
I have to break this down it's so crazy.
1. That came out of left field and is pretty much nonsense. American business didn't get much direct gain out of Iraq other than the munitions industry. Certainly not Big Oil. All that money Halliburton got for restoring the oil wells? It's going to be pumping out oil under contract for European oil companies and the Chinese state oil company mostly.
I guess we should have done a better job of invading them for our business.
2. Yeah okay. Bush started his campaign at the UN on September 11, 2002, we invaded 9 months later. This "scared us into it" is crap. NINE MONTHS. We weren't scared stupid for NINE STRAIGHT MONTHS. That is just insulting.
3. Democracy wasn't a lie, WMD was a mistake not a lie.
Show nested quote +
I have the right to be a bit suspicious when someone says that US soldiers deserve respect because they are there to protect anybody. US military in Irak is an occupying force, behaving like an occupying force. No sympathy whatsoever for me.
What has actually happened says mostly and the situation today says almost entirely the opposite. Why do you think we went after the Mahdi Army who were slaughtering Sunnis and al-Qaeda who was truck bombing and suicide bombing Shiites? Did protection of the victims have nothing to do with it????????
Show nested quote +
What exactly does the discussion from the last few pages have to do with civilians being killed in Afghanistan?
I thought it was more kind of "this happened, there's a broader discussion past just this particular incident to be had," and that was going on. Iraq and Libya got thrown in (and I think civilians killed or injured in those places is relevant to this discussion). But of course it became war for oil/business Bush lied lied lied stuff that I won't reply to anymore because no one is going to change any opinion about it and it is off-topic.
I won't spend whole day discussing that and we are absolutely off topic, so I will answer one more time on specific points.
1- Soviet were not installing dictature in South America. USA installed dictatures not again Stalinist dictatorships, but against popular will and any kind of left wing government. Allende was not a dictator. There were no Soviet presence in Argentina. The fact is that in their paranoid crusade against the "reds" (operation Condor, someone?), America installed and supported fascist dictatorship on the whole continent in democratic countries which hadn't asked anything. The ennemy was not soviet dictature, it was any movement of emancipation or any communist/scialist influence, idea or movement.
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As I told you my mother fled Argentina. At the time, a young person was a suspect. If you were a friend of a "subversive" that was enough to make you disappear. Systematic torture, executions, denonciations, have been the common lot of Argentina for more than a decade. The question is not "communism vs capitalism". Question is about an imperial power and its ideological paranoic stance against whole people's will. USA has fucked up the whole South American continent for half a century. And believe me, I know very well what I am talking about.
Just a little thing: FARC and other terrorist groups are completely irrlevant. Counting the number of death caused by people who claim being marxist and say that it's the crime of communism is as stupid as counting the number of death made by vegetarian people and saying it's the crimes of vegetarianism. USA foreign policy is a coherent whole. "Marxists in South America" in the other hand doesn't mean anything. There is no link whatsoever between leftist in Argentina or Salvador Allende adminsitration and FARCS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
A minimum of 60 000 death, probably much more. Please, read the whole article. You may learn stuff which are not really talked so much about in mainstream american medias.
2- Let's make it clear. You didn't go to war for the interest of America. You went to war for the private interest of members of your adminsitration, linked very closely with industries which benefited enormousy from the war. Namely oil, but also weapon, security and construction industries. This war is the result of your politcal system, which is the definition of corruption: collusion between private and public interest. Your political institiution is structurally corrupted, if we agree on this definition of the word.
3- America has been hysterical for years after 11/9. It's not that I think you guys are idiots. It's ust that it has been a huge traumatism and that's kind of normal. The general consensus for a war which made no sense at all, the lack of opposition for stuff such as the patriot act which is the most anti-democratic bullcrap you ever had, or the ridiculous reaction to France which was the only country who really pointed out that it made no sense at all (lol liberty fries) is what I call a hysterical climate. Your government exploited it.
4- Nobody ave a crap about democracy in Irak. Your administration didn't go to war because of MDW and they admitted it. Two lies. They manipulated public opinion with fear of MDW although they knew perfectly that the reason to suspect that Saddam had any were loosy and that in this regards, countries like North Korea were much more dangerous.
5- You talk about protection of victims. The victims are victim of a civil war and chaotic situation that we created with our armies. You invade a countrry, it turns into total chaos, and then we say lucky we are there because people are getting killed. Irak war was the best thing which could happen to Al Qaeda and other fundamentalists and extremist groups.
We have fucked up middle east. We european, american and russians. Afghanistan didn't have any problem before russians invaded it. Saddam was helped enormously by euro americans a some point because he was fighting Iran. Iran was screwed up by British who installed the Shah to be able to exploit oil. etc etc etc etc... This area is a victim of imperialism, european, soviet and american and theses invasions are just the last chapter of that history.
I'm sure you can now understand, even if you don't agree, why I don't feel full of pride and respect when I see american soldiers in middle east. I don't think you say anything stupid, but I have reasons to have a completely different point of view.
Let's leave it there if you agree.
Just a little thing: FARC and other terrorist groups are completely irrlevant. Counting the number of death caused by people who claim being marxist and say that it's the crime of communism is as stupid as counting the number of death made by vegetarian people and saying it's the crimes of vegetarianism. USA foreign policy is a coherent whole. "Marxists in South America" in the other hand doesn't mean anything. There is no link whatsoever between leftist in Argentina or Salvador Allende adminsitration and FARCS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
A minimum of 60 000 death, probably much more. Please, read the whole article. You may learn stuff which are not really talked so much about in mainstream american medias.
2- Let's make it clear. You didn't go to war for the interest of America. You went to war for the private interest of members of your adminsitration, linked very closely with industries which benefited enormousy from the war. Namely oil, but also weapon, security and construction industries. This war is the result of your politcal system, which is the definition of corruption: collusion between private and public interest. Your political institiution is structurally corrupted, if we agree on this definition of the word.
3- America has been hysterical for years after 11/9. It's not that I think you guys are idiots. It's ust that it has been a huge traumatism and that's kind of normal. The general consensus for a war which made no sense at all, the lack of opposition for stuff such as the patriot act which is the most anti-democratic bullcrap you ever had, or the ridiculous reaction to France which was the only country who really pointed out that it made no sense at all (lol liberty fries) is what I call a hysterical climate. Your government exploited it.
4- Nobody ave a crap about democracy in Irak. Your administration didn't go to war because of MDW and they admitted it. Two lies. They manipulated public opinion with fear of MDW although they knew perfectly that the reason to suspect that Saddam had any were loosy and that in this regards, countries like North Korea were much more dangerous.
5- You talk about protection of victims. The victims are victim of a civil war and chaotic situation that we created with our armies. You invade a countrry, it turns into total chaos, and then we say lucky we are there because people are getting killed. Irak war was the best thing which could happen to Al Qaeda and other fundamentalists and extremist groups.
We have fucked up middle east. We european, american and russians. Afghanistan didn't have any problem before russians invaded it. Saddam was helped enormously by euro americans a some point because he was fighting Iran. Iran was screwed up by British who installed the Shah to be able to exploit oil. etc etc etc etc... This area is a victim of imperialism, european, soviet and american and theses invasions are just the last chapter of that history.
I'm sure you can now understand, even if you don't agree, why I don't feel full of pride and respect when I see american soldiers in middle east. I don't think you say anything stupid, but I have reasons to have a completely different point of view.
Let's leave it there if you agree.
I agree categorically with everything you present except for blaming the CIA (and the school of the Americas, for that matter) for installing the National Reorganization Process in Argentina, which is entirely to blame on the Argentine oligarchy in collusion with the army to install a plutarchy. This is offtopic, so im not going to delve any further but still point out that the US influence in this process had a tangential, secondary support role at the most.
I'm second hand argentinian, so you probably know the matter much better than me. Do you know that French officers from the Algier Battle (such as Aussares, etc...) were sent by France to Argentina to teach counter-inserruction and anti-subversive methods (read: how to torture suspects) to the Argentinian military?
Such a dark page of both countries history. But yeah, that's really off topic.
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