Livyjr
Feb 18 2005, 02:44 PM
And right here, right now, I want to make a positive post to the men of my own "community", here in OUR America, who served in some large part to make up the memories of my own life, in what I would call my own formative years; memories that have sustained me now for some fifty years or better!
These men in this following article are real people!
They are men of A.B.'s generation, who, like A.B., went off to war for a cause that they believed in, and so, with right on their sides, IN THAT STRUGGLE, they prevailed!
From the earliest moments of my life, I was surrounded by men such as these, and my "values" were instilled in me, BY MEN SUCH AS THESE, and many others just like them, men back from HELL, itself, like Marty Mahar in this article!
"Stand up straight, son, don't slouch; what kind of child do you want people thinking your mother raised?"
That's all they had to say, and so, that is what they said; and you heeded those words, because you could see the man behind them lived them, before he spoke them to you, and, so you did what he said!
Leading by example.
I cannot say that I personally know each of these men, but I do know Mr. Marty Mahar, and so, I can vouch for the example that he has been to me, in my own life.
If Marty Mahar could come back here after Iwo Jima, and find a way to cope with life over here, after war, then I as a Viet Nam veteran would do the same, in his image!
That I can shake Marty Mahar's hand to this day, to me, is quiet advice to me to keep living life the way that I have these last fifty or so years, now.
SO!
Continuity!
Not a bad thing, at all!
And that to me is what MY America is all about, and on this day, I just wanted to share that with all of you out there in OUR America, and with the candid world as well, who watches and waits, to see who we in OUR America shall end up being; friend or foe!
And that is up to us.
As for me, like these men in this article to follow, I finally have come to peace, here on this earth of ours, and so, I am foe to no one!
Read on:
"Iwo Jima veterans recall eight square miles of hell"
By CAROL DeMARE, Staff writer, Albany, New York Times Union
First published: Friday, February 18, 2005
Albany -- A young corporal from Troy was with the first wave of Marines to hit the beaches of Iwo Jima at 9 a.m. on a Monday 60 years ago.
After weeks of U.S. bombing of the tiny Pacific island, the time had finally come to take it.
On Thursday, Marty Mahar, who was a corporal and combat infantryman, and five other veterans of the Marines' 5th Division recalled Feb. 19, 1945, in bone-chilling detail.
"It looked like a rock to me, that volcanic island," the 81-year-old Mahar recalled thinking as his landing craft moved in toward the beach.
They hit it at 8:59, a minute early.
Some 30,000 Marines went in that first day.
Ben Ravida, 79, of Albany, remembered the terrain.
"There were terraces of volcanic ash, everything was sinking in, the trucks were sinking."
"The island was only eight square miles," said Ravida, a corporal with the artillery.
But Jima had three airstrips, and that made the taking of the island strategically crucial to continue bombing raids on mainland Japan.
All but one of the local men interviewed Thursday said they stormed Iwo within the first hours of the assault.
The sixth, Jim Burns, 82, of Niskayuna, a sergeant reconnaissance photographer, took pictures from the sea of the foreboding island, part of the Japanese Empire, 660 miles south of Tokyo.
The men will never forget the thrill of seeing the American flag raised atop 550-foot Mount Suribachi, a volcano, on Friday, Feb. 23, 1945, four days after the landing.
Some saw both flags go up.
The smaller one went up first, followed by a second flag-raising that was memorialized by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal and put the Marines on the military map forever.
The vets recalled the sensation of seeing B-29 Superfortress bombers land on the island's large airstrip, Motoyama Airfield No. 1, after it was taken from the Japanese.
"We took the airstrip on the third day, and four or five days later the first planes landed," Mahar said.
"They had been ditching them in the ocean."
Bill Close, 66, of the Marine Corps League of Albany, served from 1956 to 1960 and has studied the importance of the battle of Iwo Jima.
"B-29s were flying from Saipan, trying to make bombing raids on Japan, 1,200 miles away, but it was too long; pilots were crashing into the ocean, running out of gas," he said.
"Iwo was 600 miles from Japan."
Burns added, "The planes could refuel (in Iwo) and continue on, and in addition those planes that had mechanical trouble (or had been shot) could land there."
Once the first airstrip was taken and reconditioned, it also was used for fighter planes that escorted the bombers, Burns said.
The World War II veterans had gathered at the Albany home of Ted Yund, 84, who was a second lieutenant, to reminisce about the battle in which nearly 7,000 Americans died and more than 26,000 were wounded.
Altogether, 60,000 Americans participated in the fighting that began Feb. 19 and ended March 16.
Some 27 Medals of Honor were awarded.
More than 19,000 Japanese died during the 36 days of fighting.
Yund, who worked in graphic arts, and his wife, Grace, reared 14 children, and have been the hosts for many gatherings of Iwo Jima veterans.
This weekend in Washington, D.C., those who fought in the battle will commemorate the 60th anniversary.
Mahar, a retired letter carrier and former Troy mayor, will be there.
On Feb. 25 at Stratton Veterans Administration Hospital, the veterans will have their annual re-enactment of the flag-raising at 9 a.m.
The Marine Corps League sponsors it.
Yund hit the beach at 2 p.m. that first day.
"I had a premonition when I got up to the front -- so to speak; all the place was a front -- I would be killed or wounded," he said.
"Thank God I was wounded."
He was hit in the lower abdomen and his right leg was broken.
Mahar was wounded on the 13th day; he was shot in the back of the head and lost his right ear.
Burns lost an eye.
"It was hell," Yund said.
"It was just agonizing."
"You just hoped and prayed that you'd live through the day and night."
"It was scary."
"Shells were going off."
"People were dying next to you."
The island looked deserted, but 20,000 Japanese were "all living underground," Yund said.
The Japanese "built an underground city" with tunnels, Close said.
"They even had a field hospital underground."
Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi knew the island was his last stand and that he would never see his beloved Tokyo again.
He took his own life.
Al Huba, 86, of Guilderland, a telephone company retiree, remembers leaving from Hilo, Hawaii, on New Year's Eve.
The Marines weren't told their mission, but they had an inkling.
The day before the invasion, with the armada docked in Saipan harbor, the voice of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal came over the speakers, recalled Huba, an artillery sergeant.
Forrestal was with the fleet, and announced that the objective was Iwo Jima.
He told us "our bombers were running out of gas, being shot up and we were losing them," Huba recalled.
Tony Ravida, 87, of Albany, Ben's brother, went onto the island around noon.
"From a distance, that mountain looked terrible," he remembered in a telephone interview.
He was with a communications unit and saw the flag-raising.
"We saw the men climbing up and the men pushing the pole up and the wind taking the flag and blowing it back, and we all cheered like mad, of course," Tony Ravida said.
"Then we got back in our foxholes; they were still fighting," he said.
"I saw it right after it went up," Yund said.
"I was working the beach area at the time, and out of nowhere I heard this screaming and yelling, and everybody was looking toward the mountain, Suribachi, and that's when I saw the flag."
Huba was on the airfield, firing.
He said, "I heard the bells and whistles, and we didn't know what was going on, and we looked back and saw the first flag around 10:30 a.m."
"The bells came from the 200-plus ships in the harbor."
An officer wanted the first flag to stay with the 28th Regiment, so he sent for another flag from a ship.
The second flag, which was 56 inches by 96 inches, went up about 2:30 p.m.
Marines took a pipe, shot holes in it so they could tie the flag, and then hoisted it.
Rosenthal was there.
Mahar was on the airfield and couldn't hear the cheering.
"My buddy from Troy said, 'We must have taken Suribachi, because the flag is flying.' "
Ben Ravida called the flag "a morale-booster; everybody went gung-ho."
"I heard a roar and we looked and we went crazy."
"The flag was up."
"I thought that was the end of the war."
"Was I wrong!"
Livyjr
Feb 18 2005, 05:10 PM
QUOTE(Livyjr @ Feb 18 2005, 04:43 PM)
And how about this Dick Perle character, will you now!
"Sometimes the things we have to do are objectionable to others," he said.
And well, Dick, YES, THEY ARE!
The lying, for example!
I did find that quite objectionable, if truth can now be told on that subject!
Too many lies!
WAY too many lies, at least for me, anyway!
SO!
Yes, Dick, you are right when you say that what you and your crowd have been doing IS QUITE OBJECTIONABLE!
IT IS!
WAR!
It just is good business, and so, we have it!
In fact, the other day, I caught a radio news item that related the increase in jobs in OUR America directly to the Bush Co. war budget.
SO!
We need war!
And the bet of many people that I talk with in the veteran's side of things think we are going to have more!
Much more!
And here it is starting, right before OUR eyes!
Iraq redux!
World - Reuters
"Lebanese Opposition Demands 'Independence Uprising'"
2 hours, 11 minutes ago
By Alistair Lyon
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Opposition figures urged the Lebanese to join an "independence uprising" against Syria's grip on their country Friday, escalating a war of words following former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri's assassination.
Hariri's killing in Beirut Monday sparked anti-Syrian fury among many Lebanese and renewed world pressure on Damascus to loosen its political grip and remove its troops from Lebanon.
Tourism Minister Farid al-Khazen resigned in a further sign of political turbulence and Syria named a new military intelligence chief.
Khazen, a Maronite Christian, became the first minister to quit because of the assassination and said he had done so because the Syrian-backed government was unable to "remedy the dangerous situation in the country.
"There is no substitute for national dialogue on the basis of the Taif agreement," he said, referring to the deal that ended the 1975-1990 civil war and committed Syria to moving the troops it keeps in Lebanon to the eastern Bekaa Valley.
Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and figures from the disparate opposition movement blamed the government and its Syrian backers for Hariri's death and called for its resignation.
After meeting Friday, they urged Lebanese to back a peaceful "independence uprising" -- the first time they had used the term.
Parliament must also suspend all debate unrelated to the assassination, they told a news conference, until the truth about who killed Hariri emerged.
"This isn't just the opposition," Jumblatt earlier told reporters.
"All the Lebanese are with Hariri, a free Lebanon and Syrian withdrawal."
Hariri moved toward a similar position in the months before his death.
It was not immediately clear what form of protest the uprising would take.
Protesters set fire to the tents of Syrian farm workers near the northern town of Tripoli, the latest attack on Syrians in Lebanon.
No injuries were reported.
BACK TO BUSINESS
Traffic jams returned to Beirut streets Friday after three days of mourning for the Sunni Muslim billionaire.
"We ask the state to unveil the perpetrators ... and not to close the file of the martyred Hariri along with the long list of other unresolved crimes," Sheikh Ahmed al-Kurdi told worshippers in a downtown mosque near where Hariri was buried.
Lebanese of all religious beliefs have flocked to Hariri's grave to bring flowers and light candles since his funeral on Wednesday turned into a mass anti-Syrian street protest.
Several hundred people marched toward the grave Friday evening shouting independence slogans.
Financial markets were busy but mostly stable on their first trading day since Hariri's death, despite tension and President Bush's latest demand for Syria to pull out its 14,000 troops.
The Lebanese pound closed unchanged, but the central bank had to sell dollars, as it had pledged to do, to defend the currency against pressure from jittery investors.
Shares in the Hariri-founded Solidere real estate company, Lebanon's biggest firm, fell the maximum 15 percent allowed.
Officials said President Emile Lahoud had finally gone to pay condolences to Hariri's relatives, who had refused to let him or other top officials attend Wednesday's funeral.
He told them he would do all he could to find the culprits, a statement from his office said.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad named his brother-in-law, Major-General Asef Shawkat, as head of military intelligence to replace retiring Major-General Hassan Khalil.
Syrian sources said the change took effect Monday, Khalil's 60th birthday.
In August, Assad issued a decree barring the extension of service terms of all officers in the armed forces.
Bush said Thursday Syria should comply with a U.N. resolution demanding its troops leave Lebanon and should allow parliamentary elections scheduled for May to be free and fair.
He recalled the U.S. ambassador to Syria this week in reaction to the bombing, but has said Washington does not know who was behind the killing.
Syria has denied involvement.
Livyjr
Feb 18 2005, 05:30 PM
QUOTE(jeffmoskin @ Feb 18 2005, 05:00 PM)
From time to time, I run into an 82 year old doctor who was on a hospital ship (7th fleet) just off shore.
He only saw the injured marines who were hale and hardy enough to be evacuated off island.
An earlier post about the author James Bradley whose father was a doc ON the island recalled that all he could was give comfort to the dying.
My friend, Dick, said that after a while, he worked like a mechanic fixing cars, not making an emotional connection with the horrors of war much less the insanity of it.
He just did his job, and he undoubtedly saved a lot of lives.
War IS madness.
Once started, however, the options for a successful exit start to disappear.
Look at Iwo Jima: 4,189 Marines were killed and 19,938 wounded.
Unbelievable.
And yet, the Japanese were dug in underground, and we needed the three airfield on that stinking island as a launching pad for the assault on Japan.
Was it worth it?
Who knows?
"Victory was never in doubt. Its cost was." - Marine Major General Graves Erskine, March 14, 1945
Was it worth it?
A question that can never be answered, jeffmoskin, I fear, for as you say, once war has started, the options rapidly disappear; live or die is about all that is left, once the fancy boys have started the show!
In that case of Iwo Jima, the fancy boys were the Japanese, and it is interesting that they so resemble the Bush Co.'s of today, here in OUR America.
There is a book floating around out there entitled "The Tunnels of Cu Chi", and that is the area of Viet Nam that I was in, and these tunnels are a visitor's attraction today in Viet Nam, I am told.
As I understand it, there were over seventy miles of tunnels in that area, and God alone knows how many Vietnamese were down in them, basically in an impregnable position, because bombs couldn't really do much damage to the tunnels, and we were too big to get down in there, to go after them.
And out they would come, to have their way with us, and then "POOF", they would be gone!
"Visit the Vietcong's World: Americans Welcome"
By Seth Mydans, New York Times, July 7, 1999
CU CHI, Vietnam -- The rattle and pop of automatic weapons greet a visitor.
Young women in the black pajamas of the Vietcong flit through the woods.
A man in green fatigues picks his way down a narrow trail, leading a small platoon of foreign tourists.
This is the site of the Cu Chi tunnels, one of the most famous battlegrounds of the Vietnam War.
Today it is one of the country's prime tourist attractions, part of a new industry of war tourism.
Sometimes, these spots seem to be memorials to wartime propaganda as much to the war itself.
Following the man in green fatigues, the tourists arrive at an open-sided hut, where the women in black show them to their seats.
There, on a big-screen television set, the Vietnam War plays on: B-52's drop strings of bombs, villagers run for cover, communist guerrillas fight back.
For those who still don't get the message, a narrator says:
"Cu Chi, the land of many gardens, peaceful all year round under shady trees ..."
"Then mercilessly American bombers have ruthlessly decided to kill this gentle piece of countryside ..."
"Like a crazy bunch of devils they fired into women and children ..."
"The Americans wanted to turn Chu Chi into a dead land, but Cu Chi will never die."
Knitting past and present jarringly together, the gunfire in the film mingles with that of the nearby firing range, where visitors can pay $1 a bullet to shoot an AK-47 rifle.
Since the war ended in 1975 with a communist victory, Vietnam has rebuilt and moved on.
It is almost impossible to find anyone who still talks like the soundtrack of the Cu Chi film.
Even the young women in black, who work as guides and ground keepers, dismiss the hard language, repeating instead today's government line:
We're all friends.
But in their new struggle for foreign currency, the Vietnamese are exploiting their harsh history, offering visits to long-forgotten places that were once considered vital to America's national interests.
Most of the visitors here are foreigners; the Vietnamese who come are mostly schoolchildren with their teachers.
The Cu Chi tunnels, a 75-mile-long underground maze where thousands of fighters and villagers could hide, are at the top of the list of tourist spots for Ho Chi Minh City, 45 miles to the southeast.
Another is the city's Museum of War Remnants, with its displays of captured weapons and its catalog of horrors, which only recently amended its name, with changing times, from the Museum of American War Crimes.
Hue, the ancient capital, familiar to many Americans as the scene of heavy fighting in the Tet offensive in 1968, is the hub of a network of war tours.
Streetside kiosks offer lists of attractions: "Khe Sanh, Dong Ha, Marble Mountain, China Beach, bombed-out church, DMZ with statue of Ho Chi Minh."
Even the site of the American massacre at My Lai has been turned into something of a theme park, with a cemetery, museum, professional storytellers and a memorial reading, "Forever hate the American invaders."
There are plans to develop the DMZ -- the wartime demilitarized zone separating the north and the south -- as well as parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, neither of which now offer much for tourists to see.
Many of the visitors to these sites, like most of their guides, are too young to remember the war.
Relatively few tourists come from the United States.
For most people who come here, the war is a distant curiosity.
But for the last few years, since travel to Vietnam became more open, groups of American veterans have come in search of remembered battlefields.
A small number of American tour companies specialize in guiding them and gaining permission to visit remote areas.
"They get a feeling of closure; that's the big benefit of going back as a veteran," said Richard Schonberger, director of veterans programs at a travel agency in Washington called Global Spectrum.
"We left suddenly," he said.
"Now you know how the story ended."
"All the Vietnamese are very friendly."
"It's a different country now."
That can be disorienting, said Chuck Searcy, the Hanoi representative of Vietnam Veterans of America, which now runs prosthetics and rehabilitation programs.
"Everything has changed," Searcy said.
"Almost every time, the vets are disappointed."
"They can't figure out where anything was: Was it here or was it that hill over there?"
"That piece of rusted metal was the gate to a big army base."
"You go to Long Binh: It's an export-processing zone now."
One American tour company uses a global positioning satellite to pinpoint battle locations for its clients, said Paulette Curtis, a graduate student in social anthropology at Harvard who is studying returning veterans.
"I've been to Hill 10, Hill 37, Hill 55 and Hill 65," she said, naming old battlegrounds.
There isn't much to see.
"You go to Khe Sanh and it's just coffee plantations and black pepper trees."
"The world of the vets' tour is completely different from the rest of Vietnam."
The sites that have been restored for tourists, with their soft drink stands, hawkers and eager guides, are almost as unrecognizable.
At Cu Chi, the visitor is greeted by a sign reading:
"Please try to be a Cu Chi guerrilla."
"Wear these uniforms before entering tunnel."
Black pajamas, pith helmets, rubber sandals and old rifles are available.
Here and there, swimming pool-sized holes in the ground are neatly labeled: "B-52 crater."
The woods are dotted with souvenir kiosks selling these items: a lighter made from a bullet, a pen made from bullets, a bullet on a chain, rubber sandals, an "I've Been to the Cu Chi Tunnel" T-shirt.
Also abundantly available, as they are wherever tourists are awaited in southern Vietnam, are Zippo lighters engraved with reproductions of the swashbuckling mottos that were popular among American G.I.'s:
"Death is my business and business has been good."
"I know I'm going to heaven because I've already been to hell: Vietnam."
"I am not scared just lonesome. Vietnam 68-69."
The tunnels themselves are undeniably impressive.
Throughout the war, the South Vietnamese Communists, or Vietcong, continually expanded the three-level network, which included mess halls, meeting rooms, an operating theater and even a tiny cinema.
When the war was over, the people of Cu Chi went to work on the tunnels once again, widening parts of them and adding steps and lighting so that foreign tourists could wriggle in for a look.
"I got claustrophobia big time," said Lawrence W. Goichman, a recent visitor from Stamford, Conn.
"I crawled about 30 yards and then I took the first emergency exit."
But he added:
"It's very clean down there."
"The guide said they have someone dusting every day."
"They actually let you eat the food that the people that fought were eating."
He said he enjoyed his visit to Cu Chi.
But he said the Vietnamese still have some work to do in developing their tourist sites.
"Let's put it this way," Goichman said.
"It wasn't as good as Disneyland."
Livyjr
Feb 18 2005, 05:53 PM
QUOTE(Livyjr @ Feb 18 2005, 05:37 PM)
This one, jeffmoskin, is going to be very interesting to watch, indeed!
And here is another "prong" of this matter which needs to be watched!
Maybe the Bush Co. is going to go for a double-kill this time, Syria and Iran all in one great big "WHACK!"
International News
"Bush declares solidarity with Europe on Iran - Diplomacy is first choice, he says, but force cannot be ruled out"
On military action against Iran, U.S. President George Bush says "never ... say never."
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 3:51 p.m. ET Feb. 18, 2005
BRUSSELS - President Bush said Friday that Iran is trying to use the United States’ refusal to join European talks over Tehran’s nuclear program as an excuse for not giving up uranium enrichment.
In interviews on the eve of a trip by the president to Europe, Bush stressed that the United States preferred diplomacy and did not want to use military action against Iran over the nuclear question.
“What they’re trying to do is kind of wiggle out."
"They’re trying to say, ‘Well, we won’t do anything because America is not involved.’"
"Well, America is involved."
"We’re in close consultation with our friends,” Bush said.
He was speaking to Germany’s ARD television, one of a series of interviews he gave Friday prior to a trip to Belgium, Germany and Slovakia next week.
The European Union, represented by France, Britain and Germany, has been trying to persuade Iran to scrap any nuclear weapons-related activities in return for economic incentives.
The United States has rejected European calls for the Bush administration to bolster the EU’s leverage by getting involved in the bargaining and offering incentives of its own for Iran to end uranium enrichment activities.
Washington wants Iran to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions — which Tehran denies having — and comply with International Atomic Energy Agency obligations, stop support for terrorism and allow democratic reforms.
In the ARD interview, Bush insisted that he wants a peaceful, diplomatic solution to the problem and said any talk of a military attack is “just not the truth.”
“We want diplomacy to work, and I believe diplomacy can work so long as the Iranians don’t divide Europe and the United States."
"And the common goal is for them not to have a nuclear weapon,” Bush told Belgium’s VRT television channel.
'Never ... say never'
“First of all you never want a president to say never, but military action is certainly not, is never the president’s first choice,” Bush said, when asked if he could rule out military action against Iran.
“Diplomacy is always the president’s, or at least always my first choice and we’ve got a common goal, and that is that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon,” he said in the interview taped in Washington and broadcast before his arrival in Brussels Sunday for summits with NATO and the EU.
Bush suggested there was no divergence between the policy of Washington and Europe on Iran and said they could succeed together in ensuring that Iran did not develop an atom bomb.
“We’ve got a common goal and that is that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon ..."
"I think if we continue to speak with one voice and not let them split us up and keep the pressure on, we can achieve the objective,” he said.
“I’m convinced again that if the Iranians hear us loud and clear and without any wavering, that they will make the rational decision,” Bush said in an interview with France 3 television.
Israel said Wednesday that Iran was just six months away from having the knowledge to build nuclear weapons.
European leaders are hoping to convince Bush to take a bigger role in the negotiations with Iran.
Former Irish Prime Minister John Bruton, the European Commission’s ambassador to the United States, said this week the leaders’ goal is “getting the United States involved in a more committed way” in their talks with Iran.
Bush is expected to use his trip to try to soothe ruffled feathers after a first term in which he has been criticized in Europe for riding rough-shod over the views of European leaders, particularly France’s President Jacques Chirac.
Russia proceeds with aid for Iran reactor
His comments came amid debate over Iran's nuclear intentions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that he is convinced Iran does not intend to develop nuclear weapons and said he plans to visit the nation.
Putin, at a meeting with Iranian National Security Council chief Hasan Rohani, also said Russia would continue its nuclear cooperation with Iran.
Moscow has helped Iran build a nuclear reactor, a project that has been heavily criticized by the United States which fears it could be used to help Tehran develop nuclear weapons.
"The latest steps from Iran confirm that Iran does not intend to produce nuclear weapons and we will continue to develop relations in all spheres, including the peaceful use of nuclear energy," Putin said.
"We hope that Iran will strictly adhere to all international agreements, in relation to Russia and the international community," he said, adding that he had accepted an invitation by Iran's leadership for him to visit the country.
Russia's nuclear chief is expected in Iran next week to sign a protocol on returning spent nuclear fuel to Russia, the only remaining obstacle to the launch of the Russian-built reactor.
If the signing goes ahead as planned on Feb. 26, it would pave the way for the deliveries of Russian nuclear fuel for the Bushehr reactor, which is set to begin operating in early 2006.
The protocol is aimed at reducing concerns that Iran could reprocess spent nuclear fuel from the $800 million Bushehr reactor to extract plutonium, which could be used in nuclear weapons.
Moscow says that having Iran ship spent nuclear fuel back to Russia, along with international monitoring, will make any such project impossible.
By Reuters and the Associated Press.
end quotes
Boy, it might just be me, but the Bush Co. sounds like he is talking the same trash talk that he talked about Saddam Hussein, before he launched his HOLY WAR for possession of Iraq's oil reserves - "Give up the weapons that you don't have, Saddam, and if you don't actually show us the weapons that you don't have, the weapons that we made up to fool the American people, then we're coming over there to bust your a**!"
Go, Bush Co., go!
WAR!
It is the answer; the only answer, to Bush Co.'s budgetary problems, anyway!
When he gets done here, somebody is going to be one rich man, and folks, that is not going to be us!
We'll be the poor relations who paid to have it be so, and make no mistake whatsoever about that!
Livyjr
Feb 18 2005, 06:13 PM
And in counter-point to jeffmoskin's comments on the Japanese tunnel complex on Iwo Jima during WWII, here is another look at the Tunnels of Cu Chi, which, if memory serves, actually date back to almost that same period, when the Japanese had overrun Viet Nam during WWII:
"Tunnels of Cu Chi" - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from Cu Chi tunnels)
The tunnels of Cu Chi are among the most interesting military campaigns of the Vietnam Wars.
Not only were they used by Viet Cong guerrillas as hiding spots during combat, but they also served as communication and supply routes, hospitals, food and weapon caches and living quarters for numerous guerrilla fighters.
The role of the tunnel systems cannot be underestimated in its importance to the Viet Cong in resisting American operations and protracting the war, eventually forcing the Americans into withdrawal.
The district of Cu Chi is located 40 kilometers to the northwest of Saigon near the so-called "Iron Triangle".
Both the Saigon River and Route 1 pass through the region which served as major supply routes in and out of Saigon.
This area was also the termination of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Because of this, the Cu Chi and the nearby Ben Cat districts had immense strategic value for the Viet Cong.
Mai Chi Tho, a political commissar stationed in Cu Chi describes the region as a “springboard for attacking Saigon.”
He goes on to say:
“We used the area for infiltrating Saigon-intelligence agents, part cadres, sabotage teams."
"The Tet Offensive of 1968 was prepared - the necessary troops and supplies assembled - in the Cu Chi tunnels.”
In the beginning, there was never a direct order to build the tunnels; instead, they developed in response to a number of different circumstances, most importantly the military tactics of the French and U.S.
The tunnels began in 1948 so that the Viet Minh could hide from French air and ground sweeps.
Each hamlet built their own underground communications route and over the years, the separate tunnels were slowly and meticulously connected and fortified.
By 1965, there was over 200 kilometers of connected tunnel.
As the tunnel system grew, so did its complexity.
Sleeping chambers, kitchens and wells were built to house and feed the growing number of residents and rudimentary hospitals created to treat the wounded.
Most of the supplies used to build and maintain the tunnels were stolen or scavenged from U.S. bases or troops.
The medical system serves as a good example of Vietnamese ingenuity in overcoming a lack of basic resources.
Stolen motorcycle engines created light and electricity and scrap metal from downed aircraft were fashioned into surgical tools.
Doctors even came up with new ways of performing sophisticated surgery.
Faced with large amounts of casualties and a considerable lack of available blood, one man, Dr. Vo Hoang Le came up with an resourceful solution.
"We managed to do blood transfusion" Vo said "by returning his own blood to the patient."
"If a comrade had a belly wound and was bleeding, but his intestines were not punctured, we collected his blood, filtered it, put it in a bottle and returned it to his veins.”
By the early 1960’s, the Viet Cong had created a relatively self-sufficient community that was able to house hundreds of people and for the most part, go undetected by large amounts of American troops based, literally, right on top of the tunnels.
For the Viet Cong, life in the tunnels was difficult.
Air, food and water were scarce and the tunnels were infested with ants, poisonous centipedes, spiders and mosquitoes.
Most of the time, guerrillas would spend the day in the tunnels working or resting and come out only at night to scavenge supplies, tend their crops or engage the enemy in battle.
Sometimes, during periods of heavy bombing or American troop movement, they would be forced to remain underground for many days at a time.
Sickness was rampant among the people living in the tunnels; especially malaria, which accounted for the second largest cause of death next to battle wounds.
A captured Viet Cong report suggests that at any given time half of a Viet Cong unit had malaria and that “one-hundred percent had intestinal parasites of significance.”
In spite of these hardships, the Viet Cong managed to wage successful campaigns against a professional army that was technologically far superior.
The tunnels of Cu Chi did not go completely unnoticed by U.S. officials.
They recognized the advantages that the Viet Cong held with the tunnels, and accordingly launched several major campaigns to search out and destroy the tunnel system.
Among the most important of these were: Operation Crimp and Operation Cedar Falls.
Operation Crimp began on January 7th with B-52 bombers dropping 30-ton loads of high explosive onto the region of Cu Chi, effectively turning the once lush jungle into a pockmarked moonscape.
Eight thousand troops from the 1st Infantry, 173rd Airborne, and the Royal Australian Regiment combed the region looking for any clues of Viet Cong activity.
The operation was, for the most part, unsuccessful.
On the occasion when troops found a tunnel, they would often underestimate its size.
Rarely would anyone be sent in to search the tunnels, as it was so hazardous.
Besides being too small for most Western men to fit through, the tunnels were often rigged with explosive booby traps or punji stake pits.
The two main responses in dealing with a tunnel opening were either: to flush the entrance with gas or water to force the guerillas into the open or simply toss a few grenades down the hole and “crimp” off the opening.
Needless to say, the clever design of the tunnels along with the strategic use of trap doors and air filtration systems rendered American technology ineffective.
From its mistakes, U.S. command realized that they needed a new way to approach the dilemma of the tunnels.
They began training an elite group of volunteers armed only with a gun, a knife, a flashlight and a piece of string in the art of tunnel warfare.
These specialists, commonly known as “tunnel rats” would enter a tunnel by themselves and travel inch-by-inch cautiously looking ahead for booby traps or cornered Viet Cong.
Despite this revamped effort at fighting the enemy on its own terms, U.S. operations remained wholly unsuccessful at eliminating the existence of the tunnels.
In 1967, General William Westmoreland tried launching a larger assult on Cu Chi and the Iron Triangle.
Called Operation Cedar Falls, it was, in principle, exactly the same as Operation Crimp, but with 30,000 troops instead of the 8,000.
On January 18th, tunnel rats from the 1st and 5th Infantry uncovered the Viet Cong district headquarters of Cu Chi containing a half million documents concerning all types of military strategy.
Among the documents were maps of U.S. bases, detailed accounts of Viet Cong movement from Cambodia into Vietnam, lists of political sympathizers, and even plans for a failed assassination attempt on Robert McNamara.
With this one exception, Operation Cedar Falls failed to achieve its objective of destroying the communist stronghold in the region.
Throughout the course of the war, the tunnels in and around Cu Chi proved to be a source of frustration for U.S. military in Vietnam.
The Viet Cong had been so well entrenched in the area by 1965 that they were in the unique position of being able to control where and when battles would take place, thus forcing the Americans on the defensive in a war where they clearly could have had a military superiority.
By helping to covertly move supplies and house troops, the tunnels of Cu Chi allowed guerrilla fighters in South Vietnam to prolong the war and increase American costs and casualties to the point of their ultimate withdrawal in 1972.
Retrieved from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnels_of_Cu_ChiCategories: Vietnam War
Livyjr
Feb 19 2005, 01:46 PM
QUOTE(Abu Beacon @ Feb 19 2005, 12:47 PM)
Stress!
It's not a good thing.
That's what we all hear from all the experts.
I believe it.
Some people handle it better than others.
Either way, we would be better off without too much of it.
There must be a point to this.
Yes, there is.
There are certain ' hot buttons ' that can really frustrate and anger people.
My hot button is this new class of people who have taken up residence and appropriated the seats of power in OUR America. ( A good Livyjr expression )
They are the " Untouchables ", in a totally different way from the caste of people in India who have the same label.
These Untouchables can lie with impunity.
These Untouchables can torture prisoners illegally without being investigated.
These Untouchables can have secret, illicit meetings and keep the American citizen from knowing what was talked about or what decisions were made in their name.
These Untouchables can send Americans off to foreign lands to be killed or maimed badly and, unbelievably, convince the citizenry that it was not only the last choice they had, but was also the right thing to do.
These Untouchables can make deals with big business, not in the best interest of the American people who they swore to protect and take care of.
They are very sly.
They fool enough people into believing they ARE protecting and looking out for the best interest of the those they are selling out.
This could go on and on.
Perhaps someone else knows of ways these Untouchables are getting away with actions which are exactly contrary to the well being of the majority of the American pople.
Why are they so --- Untouchable?
A.B.
Boy, A.B., beware the power of an old man when he gets the bit between his teeth!
And good going here, A.B., telling things the way YOU see them, instead of just being another "yes, sir, oh, no sir" kind of "Stepford" American, like a robot, or a zombie!
And this is a real good question that you pose above here, to be quite truthful with you!
When I came home from Viet Nam, in my mind was to look up the "MAN" who had sent us over there to destroy that country and the people who were in it, in the name of the tri-partite "GOD" of America: "GEETUS, MOOLAH, and MAMMON"!
Whose voice was it that I heard in my ears that night as we sat there in a helicopter, hovering above a village full of nothing but children and women, while flares were going off, lighting the place up like day, and CS gas morter rounds were impacting in the village to drive the people out into the open so we could follow the order that was coming over the radio and into my ears: "KILL THEM ALL!"
"KILL THEM ALL!"
All these years later, I still hear that voice in my head, and think about that night, and what might have happened, BUT FOR the Lt. who was the aircraft commander that night!
"Anyone back there who pulls a trigger WILL ANSWER TO ME!"
This with his hand on his own .45!
And so he countermanded the order coming in over the headphones, to me, the man IN THE GOD SEAT with the rifle who was supposed to heed that order!
Several weeks later, that Lt. and all the rest of that crew were shot out of the sky by our own artillery, if you can believe that.
And they burned all the way down!
And I still remember that, as well, my friend out on the ground with his legs burned off, in a crawling position which said he survived the crash itself, and only died after either getting out himself, or being thrown out on impact, one of the two!
SO!
That makes me a "last man", and still, I persist in wondering what happened that night that they were shot down!
I know that something had to have happened after we got back that night, because in essence, that Lt. countermanded a direct order from Bn. TOC, but I don't know what that was, since I was but a lowly enlisted man, and so, I was not privy to things which went on at the "higher" levels of the chain of command.
Whatever happened, that Lt. and all that crew but me were all killed, by our own fires, they say!
For that to have happened, either there was a terrible mistake on the part of that Lt., OR, he was vectored into the path of that artillery!
There is not a third option that I am aware of.
Was he killed to keep him quiet?
I always wonder that, A.B.; I always do, BECAUSE it is within the realms of possibilities, as the saying goes.
And that is the source of the power that these "untouchables" have over the rest of us; this ability to simply destroy us if we "get out of line"!
People think this all a bunch of "hoo-hah", of course, but that don't change anything, or make it go away.
And your story above about Dennis Kucinich is a case in point.
And your previous story in another post in here about Jesus, and who he upset, so as to get himself killed is another case in point!
It's about power, A.B., raw power!
It goes right to people's heads and does something to their minds.
I know this to be true myself, having sat there in the "GOD SEAT" with that rifle!
If you don't quit "cold turkey" and walk right away from it, you are lost forever, and A.B. many were, and many still are, and in the future, likely many will be!
There but for the grace of God go we!
Now, I have not answered your question, I know, but hopefully, between us, we have ripped the cover off of something, and that cover, once off, may be difficult to put back on, if only enough other Americans can find the courage of their own moral convictions to do as you have done; ASK WHY THIS CRAP EXISTS, HERE IN OUR AMERICA!
Livyjr
Feb 19 2005, 03:10 PM
And since it is a "slow news" day right now, I am going to insert this article for the record in here on how a "warrior" in OUR America saw war, some years ago:
Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC
War is just a racket.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people.
Only a small inside group knows what it is about.
It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else.
If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight.
The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent.
Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers.
There are only two things we should fight for.
One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.
War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to.
It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison.
Truthfulness compels me to.
I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps.
I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General.
And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers.
In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time.
Now I am sure of it.
Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service.
My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups.
This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914.
I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.
I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street.
The record of racketeering is long.
I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?).
I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.
In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket.
Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints.
The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts.
I operated on three continents.
"Several Chapters from Smedley Butler's 'War is a Racket'"
Chapter One
WAR IS A RACKET
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.
It is the only one international in scope.
It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict.
At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War.
That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns.
How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle?
How many of them dug a trench?
How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out?
How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets?
How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy?
How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious.
They just take it.
This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few - the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war.
(The general public shoulders the bill).
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting.
Newly placed gravestones.
Mangled bodies.
Shattered minds.
Broken hearts and homes.
Economic instability.
Depression and all its attendant miseries.
Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
Again they are choosing sides.
France and Russia met and agreed to stand side by side.
Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement.
Poland and Germany cast sheep's eyes at each other, forgetting for the nonce [one unique occasion], their dispute over the Polish Corridor.
The assassination of King Alexander of Jugoslavia [Yugoslavia] complicated matters.
Jugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies, were almost at each other's throats.
Italy was ready to jump in.
But France was waiting.
So was Czechoslovakia.
All of them are looking ahead to war.
Not the people - not those who fight and pay and die – only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.
There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.
Hell's bells!
Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?
Not in Italy, to be sure.
Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for.
He, at least, is frank enough to speak out.
Only the other day, Il Duce in "International Conciliation," the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:
"And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace..."
"War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it."
Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says.
His well-trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war – anxious for it, apparently.
His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter's dispute with Jugoslavia showed that.
And the hurried mobilization of his troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of Dollfuss showed it too.
There are others in Europe too whose sabre rattling presages war, sooner or later.
Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal if not greater menace to peace.
France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to eighteen months.
Yes, all over, nations are camping in their arms.
The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose.
In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit.
Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan.
Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan.
Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese.
What does the "open door" policy to China mean to us?
Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year.
Or the Philippine Islands?
We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.
Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war - a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.
Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit - fortunes would be made.
Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up.
By a few.
Munitions makers.
Bankers.
Ship builders.
Manufacturers.
Meat packers.
Speculators.
They would fare well.
Yes, they are getting ready for another war.
Why shouldn't they?
It pays high dividends.
But what does it profit the men who are killed?
What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts?
What does it profit their children?
What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?
Yes, and what does it profit the nation?
CHAPTER TWO
WHO MAKES THE PROFITS?
The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000.
Figure it out.
That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child.
And we haven't paid the debt yet.
We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children's children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent.
But war-time profits - ah! that is another matter - twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent - the sky is the limit.
All that traffic will bear.
Uncle Sam has the money.
Let's get it.
Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time.
It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket - and are safely pocketed.
Let's just take a few examples:
Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people - didn't one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war?
Or saved the world for democracy?
Or something?
How did they do in the war?
They were a patriotic corporation.
Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year.
It wasn't much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it.
Now let's look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918.
Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find!
Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good.
An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.
Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials.
Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000.
Then came the war.
And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making.
Did their profits jump - or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain?
Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!
Or, let's take United States Steel.
The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year.
Not bad.
Then along came the war and up went the profits.
The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000.
Not bad.
There you have some of the steel and powder earnings.
Let's look at something else.
A little copper, perhaps.
That always does well in war times.
Anaconda, for instance.
Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000.
During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.
Or Utah Copper.
Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period.
Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.
Let's group these five, with three smaller companies.
The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000.
Then along came the war.
The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.
A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.
Does war pay?
It paid them.
But they aren't the only ones.
There are still others.
Let's take leather.
For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000.
That was approximately $1,167,000 a year.
Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent.
That's all.
The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year.
Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per cent.
International Nickel Company - and you can't have a war without nickel - showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly.
Not bad?
An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.
American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war.
In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.
Listen to Senate Document No. 259.
The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues.
Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war.
Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional.
For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war.
The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.
And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war.
If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers.
Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders.
And their profits were as secret as they were immense.
How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public - even before a Senate investigatory body.
But here's how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.
Take the shoe people.
They like war.
It brings business with abnormal profits.
They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies.
Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy.
For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France.
But they did well by Uncle Sam too.
For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes.
There were 4,000,000 soldiers.
Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier.
My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier.
Some of these shoes probably are still in existence.
They were good shoes.
But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over.
Bought - and paid for.
Profits recorded and pocketed.
There was still lots of leather left.
So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry.
But there wasn't any American cavalry overseas!
Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however.
Somebody had to make a profit in it - so we had a lot of McClellan saddles.
And we probably have those yet.
Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting.
They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas.
I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches – one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats.
Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!
Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.
There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France.
I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.
Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war.
Why not?
Everybody else was getting theirs.
So $1,000,000,000 - count them if you live long enough - was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground!
Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France.
Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300 per cent.
Undershirts for soldiers cost 14¢ [cents] to make and uncle Sam paid 30¢ to 40¢ each for them - a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer.
And the stocking manufacturer and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers - all got theirs.
Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equipment - knapsacks and the things that go to fill them - crammed warehouses on this side.
Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents.
But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them - and they will do it all over again the next time.
There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.
One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches.
Oh, they were very nice wrenches.
The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches.
That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls.
Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them.
When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer.
He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches.
Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.
Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn't ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback.
One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard.
Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels!
Not one of them was used.
But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.
The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too.
They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit.
More than $3,000,000,000 worth.
Some of the ships were all right.
But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn't float!
The seams opened up - and they sank.
We paid for them, though.
And somebody pocketed the profits.
It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000.
Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself.
This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits.
That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way.
This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at.
It is quite a tidy sum.
And it went to a very few.
The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.
Even so, it has had some effect.
The State Department has been studying "for some time" methods of keeping out of war.
The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring.
The Administration names a committee - with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator - to limit profits in war time.
To what extent isn't suggested.
Hmmm.
Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.
Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses - that is, the losses of those who fight the war.
As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three.
Or to limit the loss of life.
There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed.
Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.
CHAPTER THREE
WHO PAYS THE BILLS?
Who provides the profits - these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent?
We all pay them - in taxation.
We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers.
These bankers collected $100 plus.
It was a simple manipulation.
The bankers control the security marts.
It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds.
Then all of us - the people - got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86.
The bankers bought them.
Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par - and above.
Then the bankers collected their profits.
But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.
If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad.
Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States.
On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans.
In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men - men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago.
The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.
Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks.
There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day.
They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed.
We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.
Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face"!
This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda.
We didn't need them any more.
So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades.
Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.
In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens!
Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches.
These already have been mentally destroyed.
These boys don't even look like human beings.
Oh, the looks on their faces!
Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.
There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time.
The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement - the young boys couldn't stand it.
That's a part of the bill.
So much for the dead - they have paid their part of the war profits.
So much for the mentally and physically wounded - they are paying now their share of the war profits.
But the others paid, too - they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam - on which a profit had been made.
They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities.
They paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain - with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.
But don't forget - the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too.
Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money.
During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service.
The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment.
In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money.
When we captured any vessels, the crew all got their share - at least, they were supposed to.
Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway.
Then soldiers couldn't bargain for their labor!
Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn't.
Napoleon once said,
"All men are enamored of decorations...they positively hunger for them."
So by developing the Napoleonic system - the medal business - the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated.
Until the Civil War there were no medals.
Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out.
It made enlistments easier.
After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.
In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription.
They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.
So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it.
With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill.
To kill the Germans.
God is on our side...it is His will that the Germans be killed.
And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies...to please the same God.
That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die.
This was the "war to end all wars."
This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy."
No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits.
No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here.
No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents.
They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure."
Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too.
So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.
All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill...and be killed.
But wait!
Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community.
Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance - something the employer pays for in an enlightened state - and that cost him $6 a month.
He had less than $9 a month left.
Then, the most crowning insolence of all - he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds.
Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days.
We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back - when they came back from the war and couldn't find work - at $84 and $86.
And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!
Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill.
His family pays too.
They pay it in the same heart-break that he does.
As he suffers, they suffer.
At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly - his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.
When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too - as much as and even sometimes more than he.
Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made.
They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.
And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.
CHAPTER FOUR
HOW TO SMASH THIS RACKET!
WELL, it's a racket, all right.
A few profit - and the many pay.
But there is a way to stop it.
You can't end it by disarmament conferences.
You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva.
Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions.
It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.
The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted.
One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation - it must conscript capital and industry and labor.
Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted - to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.
Let the workers in these plants get the same wages - all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers - yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders - everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!
Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.
Why shouldn't they?
They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered.
They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches.
They aren't hungry.
The soldiers are!
Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war.
That will smash the war racket - that and nothing else.
Maybe I am a little too optimistic.
Capital still has some say.
So capital won't permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people - those who do the suffering and still pay the price - make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.
Another step necessary in this fight to smash the war racket is the limited plebiscite to determine whether a war should be declared.
A plebiscite not of all the voters but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and dying.
There wouldn't be very much sense in having a 76-year-old president of a munitions factory or the flat-footed head of an international banking firm or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manufacturing plant - all of whom see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war - voting on whether the nation should go to war or not.
They never would be called upon to shoulder arms - to sleep in a trench and to be shot.
Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.
There is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected.
Many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote.
In most, it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote.
In some, you must own property.
It would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the World War and be examined physically.
Those who could pass and who would therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of war would be eligible to vote in a limited plebiscite.
They should be the ones to have the power to decide - and not a Congress few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in physical condition to bear arms.
Only those who must suffer should have the right to vote.
A third step in this business of smashing the war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only.
At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up.
The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists.
And they are smart.
They don't shout that "We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation."
Oh no.
First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power.
Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people.
Just like that.
Then they begin to cry for a larger navy.
For what?
To fight the enemy?
Oh my, no.
Oh, no.
For defense purposes only.
Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific.
For defense.
Uh, huh.
The Pacific is a great big ocean.
We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific.
Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles?
Oh, no.
The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.
The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united States fleet so close to Nippon's shores.
Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.
The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline.
Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor.
She never would have been blown up.
There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life.
Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes.
Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can't go further than 200 miles from the coastline.
Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance.
And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation.
To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.
We must take the profit out of war.
We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.
We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.
CHAPTER FIVE
TO HELL WITH WAR!
I am not a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past.
I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.
Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had "kept us out of war" and on the implied promise that he would "keep us out of war."
Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.
In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds.
The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.
Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?
Money.
An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President.
The President summoned a group of advisers.
The head of the commission spoke.
Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:
"There is no use kidding ourselves any longer."
"The cause of the allies is lost."
"We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars."
"If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money...and Germany won't."
"So..."
Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War.
But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in utmost secrecy.
When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a "war to make the world safe for democracy" and a "war to end all wars."
Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of democracy than it had then.
Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies?
Whether they are Fascists or Communists?
Our problem is to preserve our own democracy.
And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the World War was really the war to end all wars.
Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences.
They don't mean a thing.
One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified.
We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences.
And what happens?
The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm.
No admiral wants to be without a ship.
No general wants to be without a command.
Both mean men without jobs.
They are not for disarmament.
They cannot be for limitations of arms.
And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war.
They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.
The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent war but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe.
There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability.
That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane.
Even this, if it were possible, would not be enough.
The next war, according to experts, will be fought not with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles and not with machine guns.
It will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases.
Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale.
Yes, ships will continue to be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits.
And guns still will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits.
And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturer must make their war profits too.
But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.
If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples.
By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war - even the munitions makers.
So...I say, TO HELL WITH WAR!
Livyjr
Feb 20 2005, 08:46 AM
TENACIOUS: tending to hold fast; not easily pulled apart; cohesive, tough; persistent in maintaining or adhering to something valued as habitual!
OUR America!
What really is it?
Is it today the same as it was in 1776, for example?
Or is that all really gone?
And who can even answer that question, as who would be the "authority"?
George W. Bush, the "lost man"?
As president of America, or the world, does George W. Bush "get" to tell us who we are, or does he get to define us, out there on the world stage?
Or is he just himself, another human being out there on the face of this earth, like all the rest of us common folk in here?
And who can answer that?
Well, I would say, "EACH ONE OF US", for a start, anyway!
WE ARE WHO WE ARE, and George W. Bush is neither in charge of that, nor can he define who or what we are, nor can the Republican National Committe, nor this "Racey" Ott fellow that the Republicans had in charge of something or other to do with Mr. George W. Bush in this last election, nor this Mehlman fellow that is now a high something-or-other in the Republican National Committee, which is the home of hatred and bigotry in OUR America these days, in my opinion, anyway!
And here, of course, I might just be doing a little venting, but AS AN AMERICAN, I really was made to be "upset" by the division caused in this country by this Republican crowd in this last election, and as far as I am concerned, that is not yet over, which was part of my reason for nudging Mr. A.B. to get his corner set up, and the stove lit, because now that the election is over, it is time to do some "re-assessment", especially as to this "heart and soul" of America, and just what exactly it might be, now that we are in the 21st Century, and an apparent "New World Order" that is being directed by this Republican crowd, at the apparent direction and instigation of this NEW CON crowd who appear to be some powerful "sub-group" within the Republican Party with direct control of the reigns of power of that thug-like organization.
SO!
We have branched out in here, with the setting up of that thread, "A.B.'s Corner", which is introspective in nature, while this one will continue to look at issues, and since we go all over the place in here, anyway, there really won't be much of a change in here.
But my thoughts obviously change, as time goes on, and as I hear other people's thoughts in here, especially, and their concerns, which I do think about; quite a bit, actually!
One of the "areas" where people need to do some "accepting" is in what is called "politics", here in OUR America, and that is what this above story on George W. Bush is supposed to be a focus about, as ALL POLITICS in the world ARE NOT THE SAME, and likely never will be, and so, we as a nation should not be out there trying to make everyone an American!
And we should not even be thinking along those lines, for it is delusional thinking on OUR part to be thinking that all these other people out there in the world have no society, or civilization, or whatever, until we come to bring it to them!
If ever there was a height to arrogance, that would be it in my estimation!
As nations go, we are quite a young one, and we should not lose sight of that fact, ever!
My thoughts right now, anyway!
To be continued!
SO!
Stay tuned!
Live, late-breaking!
Life, in OUR America!
Livyjr
Feb 20 2005, 09:18 AM
QUOTE(Livyjr @ Feb 20 2005, 07:35 AM)
SO!
We grow as a community in here, with A.B.'s Corner now being open for business, where nostalgia, in a sense, anyway, is the "commodity", and I personally think that is a good and healthy thing!
It gives us diversity, and a sense of continuity, when people go back through their own memories, and say, "Hey, wait a minute, I have been through worse than this, and I have survived", or they recall the hardships and travails that their own parents or grandparents went through, and they realize, from that, just what the word "tenacity" can really be all about, and tenacity is not an empty word at all!
And then we have Mr. George W. Bush:
Politics
"Private tapes shed light on candidate Bush - Conversations on political foes, drugs recorded by old friend"
The Associated Press
Updated: 9:36 p.m. ET Feb. 19, 2005
NEW YORK - Private conversations with George Bush secretly taped by an old friend before he was elected president foreshadow some of his political strategies and appear to reveal that he acknowledged using marijuana, The New York Times reported Saturday.
The conversations were recorded by Doug Wead, a former aide to George W. Bush’s father, beginning in 1998, when Bush was weighing a presidential bid, until just before the Republican National Convention in 2000, the Times said in a story posted on its Web site.
The tapes show Bush crafting a strategy for navigating the tricky political waters between Christian conservative and secular voters, repeatedly worrying that evangelicals would be angered by a refusal to bash gays and that secular Americans would be turned off by meetings with evangelical leaders.
On one tape, Bush explains that he told one prominent evangelical that he would not “kick gays, because I’m a sinner."
"How can I differentiate sin?”
Politics!
There was a time in my area of OUR America, in the place where I was born, known as the "Bloody Thirteenth Ward", where "politics" was a realm alleged to be inhabited by saloon keepers, and thugs, and goons, and the ordinary folk, if they knew what was good for them, well, they just stayed out of that business, and as an American, I have always been curious about that, to be truthful.
WHY?
Why wouldn't Americans want to have control over their own destiny, through the workings of THEIR government, and my conclusion, in MY OWN AREA of OUR America, is ethnicity!
And before anyone flies off the handle, here, I don't mean bigotry!
What I mean is that during those days, many "citizens" right here where I am were either first or second generation immigrants, AND SO, they had memories of lives dominated by repression in other countries, and fears of that repression, and so, somehow, they just could not rise up to a life of true liberty, while I, a later generation, knew nothing but liberty, and here, liberty MUST NOT BE mistaken for freedom, or licentiousness, neither of which is liberty!
Think on OUR Pledge of Allegiance: "Liberty and Justice for ALL!"
Not "freedom for all!"
A big difference.
Or "My Country Tis of Thee, sweet land of liberty"!
Again, "LIBERTY", and not freedom!
When I was young, we talked of liberty!
Now, it seems all I hear about is freedom, and usually it is some thug or goon hammering and yammering at me, a combat veteran, that "freedom is not free", and therefore, I am to bow down and kiss the very ground that George W. Bush might have walked on, because according to these thugs and goons, I am free ONLY because of George W. Bush!
Well, you know what?
That is the biggest load of horse crap that there ever was!
I am free because I am free, and I work to keep it that way, DESPITE GEORGE W. BUSH and this crowd of thugs that is now the Republican Party, here in OUR America!
If ever my "freedom", or liberty was at stake, IT IS NOW, and the threat is not from outside OUR America; it is from within, and that threat is embodied right in George W. Bush!
He is the threat to me, and no other that I am aware of!
His witless belligerence, his mindless bellicosity, his bigotry, his hypocrisy, as is apparent from this news article above, where he admits to being a "sinner", like everyone else in the world probably is as well!
Which brings me to this following "piece" which I just retrieved from Volume I of "Life in OUR America":
Beware the brave man!He may be a hero, willing to risk his very life, but he will also be willing to endanger the lives of others.After all, he is a risk taker and therefore does not see the wisdom in conservation, compassion, and carefulness.Such a person will threaten others, force his will upon others, and even murder others, not out of passion, but out of something much deadly - rationale!He will justify his actions according to ideology, patriotism, religion and principle.When attacked, a brave man goes forth in strength, power and confidence.
In that boisterousness, there is little awareness of the subtle.
Life is not simple, and it takes a great deal of time to master.
Perhaps that is why the brave are youthful while the wise are old!
- Deng, Ming-Dao
end quotes
Beware the brave man!
True words, BUT ....
Even more, BEWARE the man who is not brave, but is instead a schemer, and is willing to don appearance and garb for the sake of appearing as the brave man!
He is even more dangerous, because in the end, it is his scheming which brings down the nation!
Don't believe me?
Read some history, and find therein an example of where a schemer has brought his nation high, and then held it there, for an enduring period of time, such as a lifetime of a whole generation, as opposed to a few transitory years!
And when you can find such an example, and post it here, or where ever for all the candid world to read, then, and only then, shall I be made a believer!
Use Rome for an example, perhaps, or England, which used to "own the show" over here, until OUR forefathers in LIBERTY gave that schemeing, tyrannical crowd the boot back in the 1700's; and good riddance!
Until then, I think that I shall take my comfort more in those who have grown old, gracefully, as the "peacemakers" of this earth!
They in the long run just might be a little more "blessed" than the brave man, and that is why I cleave to them, myself, having had enough of brave men and war in my own short lifetime, down here on this earth of OURS, and here, in OUR America.
Livyjr
Feb 20 2005, 12:58 PM
QUOTE(Abu Beacon @ Feb 20 2005, 12:02 PM)
Our America.
Keeping it that way is not going to be easy.
There are probably some postings on the Forum today concerning Tim Russert's program " Meet The Press. "
Generally, a very positive program.
The only statement made that seemed a bit disingeuous to me was McCain's saying he could not understand why the Europeans were not more willing to get involved with helping us in Iraq.
Yes, you do know, Mr. McCain.
Yes, it is in their best interest to help get this mess solved.
So why do they not help more?
Because, as you very well know Mr. MCCain, they cannot help being human and it is difficult for heads of nations to be told how cowardly they are, how mealy mouthed they are, how self serving they are by an upstart, hip shooting cowboy from Texas who tells them in the beginning they are not needed, and also being told by a sharp tongued Sec'y. of Defense that they are " Old Europe " and not needed. "
With you or without you. "
That's what they heard.
A.B.
QUOTE(jeffmoskin @ Feb 20 2005, 12:22 PM)
But wait...there's more.
1. "Old Europe" has tasted war, up close and personal, and is not in a hurry to taste it again.
2. "Old Europe" was owed a lot of money by Saddam, which they NEVER would have loaned without Iraqi oil as collateral.
Unless Cheney's mafia agrees to share some of the spoils (fat chance), there is no reason for them to cooperate.
3. "Old Europe" is now "United Europe."
They are cutting deals with China. They are cutting deals with Mercosur in South America.
They are talking of a European Army, which really means NATO minus the USA.
The Bushies need to wake up and see what has happened during their umm... CRUSADE.
The world is changing.
And we are being left behind.
Out in the cold.
You know, A.B., and jeffmoskin, if someone told me that God had picked out Al Gore to invent this internet, JUST SO THIS FORUM COULD EXIST, and hence, the three of us from all across the span of time, and the areal extent of the United States could meet in here to "chat", as Committees of Correspondence did back in the days of the American Revolution, I would have no trouble whatsoever believing it to be true, because, it sure is a miracle to me, one that has transformed my life in a very short amount of time, and in a very positive manner!
And talk about synchronicity, or that good old-fashioned juxtaposition:
Top Stories - AP
"Bush Seeks to Repair European Relations"
1 hour, 2 minutes ago
By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
BRUSSELS, Belgium - President Bush is seeking to repair rocky relations with European allies embittered by the Iraq war and frustrated that the White House often ignored their views.
The president and his wife, Laura, left Washington early Sunday and were to arrive at night in Brussels.
Hoping to set a different tone for his second term, Bush will meet over five days with some of his toughest critics: French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, both of whom fiercely opposed the U.S. led invasion.
Bush also will see Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has alarmed the West with Moscow's retreat from democracy.
The United States and Europe too often "talk past each other," Bush said in an interview before his departure, and that it was time to reinvigorate relations among allies.
An alliance of 88 environmental, human rights, peace and other groups planned two days of protests in Brussels, beginning Monday, to demand "no European complicity" in a U.S.-designed world order.
Brussels police readied 2,500 officers — 1,000 more than the usual number for the three or four summit meetings that bring European Union leaders to the Belgian capital every year.
While seeking to move past old divisions, Bush and European leaders still face major differences.
Washington opposes Europe's plans to lift a 15-year-old arms embargo against China.
Bush has been cool toward Europe's negotiations to persuade Iran to abandon its suspected nuclear weapons program.
The White House prefers asking the U.N. Nations Security Council to punish Tehran.
Hard feelings linger from Bush's opposition to the Kyoto climate change treaty and the International Criminal Court.
An issue where the allies may find common ground is a demand that Syria withdraw its forces from Lebanon — a declaration prompted by the assassination of a former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, in a massive bombing in Beirut.
In a speech Monday, Bush intended to express hopes for closer trans-Atlantic ties.
Courting France, the president has a private dinner with Chirac.
On Tuesday, Bush is attending NATO and EU meetings.
Wednesday finds the president in Mainz, Germany, for a meeting with Schroeder.
The trip ends Thursday with talks with Putin in Slovakia.
Bush's talks with the Russian president are the most important of the trip, said Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Putin "has come out very recently and said the Iranians are not producing nuclear weapons, it's only nuclear power, and, therefore, he's going to go ahead and continue helping them."
"And I think that's a stern conversation they need to have," Rockefeller told "Fox News Sunday."
The question on European minds is whether Bush, after offering olive branches during his visit, will put his conciliatory words into practice and engage in give-and-take diplomacy with allies.
Many Europeans are skeptical.
"Clearly Bush has learned in his first term that there are limits to what America can do by itself," said Ivo Daalder, a European expert on the National Security Council staff during the Clinton administration.
"He only has to look at Iraq where 85 percent of the foreign troops, 90 percent of the casualties and 95 percent of the reconstruction dollars are American," Daalder said.
In a signal of unity, NATO is expected to announce Tuesday that all 26 allies finally have agreed to contribute to the alliance mission to train Iraq's armed forces, even though some will only work outside the country or just help cover costs.
The world's most powerful military alliance has struggled to find the 160 instructors it needs to complete the first phase of the operation, which offers training for senior officers within Baghdad's heavily guarded "Green Zone."
Across Europe, Bush is widely disliked.
European perceptions of an arrogant America were symbolized for many people by photos of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
The hard feelings were aggravated over the last four years by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's dismissal of Iraq critics as representing "old Europe" and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's statement that France should be punished and Germany ignored for opposing Bush.
Rice has improved relations recently by making Europe her first destination after being sworn in as secretary of state.
Rumsfeld, too, suggested he has turned a new leaf by saying his earlier criticism came from the "old Rumsfeld."
Livyjr
Feb 20 2005, 02:44 PM
QUOTE(Livyjr @ Feb 20 2005, 12:58 PM)
You know, A.B., and jeffmoskin, if someone told me that God had picked out Al Gore to invent this internet, JUST SO THIS FORUM COULD EXIST, and hence, the three of us from all across the span of time, and the areal extent of the United States could meet in here to "chat", as Committees of Correspondence did back in the days of the American Revolution, I would have no trouble whatsoever believing it to be true, because, it sure is a miracle to me, one that has transformed my life in a very short amount of time, and in a very positive manner!
And here I am just coming back from "A.B.'s Corner", which I am beginning to think of as the "warm side of town" in here.
It must be that stove!
BUT .....
As A.B. said in a post in there about the times of the "Great Depression", sometimes, there is work to be done, and so, you have to get up away from the fire and go out into the world to let your voice be heard, lest all you cherish be lost from you forever, and hence this thread, which is where that work gets done, at least for me, and that takes us back up to this story above, on the Bush Co.'s trying to now "woo" Europe, to win back some "favor", I guess it would be called, and to me, IT IS JUST A LITTLE LATE FOR THAT NOW, isn't it?
The Bush Co.'s are reduced to crawling, in front of all the candid world, BECAUSE OF ALL THEIR STRUT AND SWAGGER AND CONTINUOUS STREAM OF LIES OF YESTERDAY!
And how about that?
Comeuppance, it is called, where I was raised up, here in OUR America!
"Don't get above your raising!"
"Be humble!"
"Walk SOFTLY", especially when the stick you carry is a big one!
But these are all lessons and admonitions for a lesser man than George W. Bush, apparently, and so, now it appears that he is going to have to learn them, as an American president, when he really should have learned these things as a child!
When I was young, fifth grade, I believe it was, I was reading a series of books about other Americans of the past, like George Washington Carver and Thomas Edison, and Abraham Lincoln, and all of these books looked at the lives these people led as children!
Adversity!
A seeming constant companion, and yet, in all of these books, those "children" overcame that adversity and made something of themselves.
And I found inspiration in these books for my own life, and growth as a person of this world, for I was taught from my earliest days just after WWII that I was in fact a citizen of the world, and not just the United States!
Now, George W. Bush and I are the same age, but that is about the only similarity that I can find between us, to be truthful!
As to upbringing, we seem to have been born and raised on separate planets, and in many senses, we were!
George W. Bush was born aristocratic royalty, and I was born a commoner, and the twain remain worlds apart to this day; and I would not trade with him for anything, because, then I would be him, and that is something I just don't wish to be!
Too much lying; too many lies; too much disingenuosness; too much scheming, in his world, and I want nor need no part of any of it!
Been there, saw it, didn't like it, didn't do it, tried unsucessfully to end it, failed, got thrown out, and now I am here, comfortable with who I am and the nothing I have to show for five years of college to get a Master's degree as an engineer, because I can still look people in the face, in the eye, knowing full well that "material comfort" is not all there is to "life", and that the lies people in my community have been told by their government did not come from me, nor did I tolerate or acquiesce to the lies!
Power!
It corrupts!
Absolute power!
That corrupts absolutely!
SO!
Now, the Bush Co.'s are crawling, and what a sight that is, for all the candid world to see!
Does it make me "happy"?
Does it give me "satisfaction" to see this happening?
NO!
It does not!
It takes a certain type of person to get satisfaction out of another's misery, and I am not that person, BUT ....
On another "plane", there certainly is a moral lesson in here, that I am seeing, and in some way, that does give me a degree of "comfort", which does not shame me to say, since "comfort" in no way implies glee or satisfaction with this "humbling" of the Bush Co.'s!
After all, THEY SOWED THE SEEDS; and to be real truthful, I am damn glad to see them having to now eat the meal!
It confirms a sense of justice that I have; that real "justice" is greater than us, and so, can act to restore itself when people such as George W. Bush and his crowd seek to bury it deeply away, forever!
A.B. and jeffmoskin have it exactly right above, and especially A.B., where he says that the Bush Co.'s went out of their way to ridicule and outright threaten ALL IN THE WORLD, including us, who did not simply turn off our brains so as to become mindless and then get ourselves into "lock step" with the lying Bush Co.'s, and this CRUSADE of theirs to take over all the world and re-make it into an image of George W. Bush and the lying Bush Co.'s!
Being as old as I am, George W. Bush should have learned something, AS I DID, from Millhouse "Tricky Dick" Nixxon, but apparently, he did not; OR ...
He sure did not learn the lesson that I saw in all of that Nixxon business, which is that EVEN American presidents cannot get away with being liars!
YES!
An American president was a liar!
And oh my God, the world is now going to end because I said that in here!
Well, malarky to that!
The world is not going to end, and I do not respect Millhouse Nixxon!
And I DO NOT HAVE TO!
My respect must be earned, just the same as I must earn the respect of others!
You earn respect by being worthy of it, and that is not just a function of you saying you are; YOU MUST PROVE IT BY ACTING WORTHY, 24/7, or at least, that is so among the commoners in this nation; but not apparently, among the aristocratic royalty, such as is George W. Bush!
Him, I guess, is just due respect because of the station of his birth, at least in his own mind, AND SO ....
Now, he is crawling!
Well good, George, because you know what?
It is character building, and you sure could use a good dose of that!
So crawl, George, and do it with grace and dignity, and maybe, just maybe, you'll learn something from the experience, and it just might end up making a better person out of you; although while you are down there with all the sycophants and toadies and courtiers and the ilk that inhabits that pestilential city of Washington, D.C., that just might be too much to hope for!
Livyjr
Feb 20 2005, 03:32 PM
QUOTE(Livyjr @ Feb 20 2005, 03:06 PM)
And while the virtual ink is barely dry on these words right above here, about the Bush Co.'s having to do some "crawling" here, we have this following concerning the alleged present-day activities of the alleged "SAVIOR OF ALL THE WORLD" and the "SMITER OF ALL THAT IS EVIL THEREIN", or almost all of it, anyway, as regards the "smashing to smithereens" of the insurgency in Iraq by the Bush Co. crowd:
Top Stories - Reuters
"Report: U.S. in Secret Talks with Iraqi Insurgents"
Sun Feb 20,10:11 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers are conducting secret talks with Iraq's Sunni insurgents on ways to end fighting there, Time magazine reported on Sunday, citing Pentagon and other sources.
Controversial Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi said on Sunday the outcome of any negotiations between insurgents and the U.S. military would not be binding for a new Iraqi government.
"I know nothing about such negotiations."
"Those negotiations will in no way bind the elected government of Iraq," he said.
"The issue here is not negotiating with the killers who are killing the Iraqi people," he added in an interview with ABC's "This Week."
Somewhere, there is a story out there about a "program" of bombing attacks allegedly sponsored by the CIA, AGAINST Iraqi citizens BEFORE Saddam was ever removed, and as I recall that story, which I had posted in the John Kerry forum, now defunct, I think this Chalabi was implicated in that program, where a movie theater was bombed, and a bus, as well, according to my recollections!
And I am searching for that story right now, but in the meantime, we have this on this Ahmad Chalbi, who now somehow is becoming the "George W. Bush" of Iraq, despite having been rejected in favor of this Allawi puppet, who is now on his way out, too, from all appearances:
International News
"Pentagon stops payments to Iraq’s Chalabi - Funding to end for exile whose motives were in doubt"
May 18: Ahmed Chalabi, a key player in the Bush administration's plans to go to war against Iraq, has been fired by the Pentagon.
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 8:09 p.m. ET May 18, 2004
The Pentagon has stopped funding Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile it once hoped might help lead Iraq but whose intelligence reports and motives were doubted elsewhere in Washington, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
The Pentagon had been giving Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress roughly $340,000 a month.
A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Pentagon made its May payment to the INC, and that it was the final one.
The official said there has been no decision on whether there would be any further Pentagon relationship with Chalabi’s organization.
“The nature of any future interactions with the INC is undetermined at this time,” the official said.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said cutting off money to the INC “was a decision that was made in light of the process of transferring sovereignty to the Iraqi people.”
“We felt it was no longer appropriate for us to continue funding in that fashion."
"There’s been some very valuable intelligence that’s been gathered through that process that’s been very valuable for our forces."
"But we will seek to obtain that in the future through normal intelligence channels,” Wolfowitz told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
Under review for weeks
U.S. officials for weeks have said the U.S. government was debating cutting off the INC, saying they had questions about the intelligence it provided as well as about whether Chalabi was motivated chiefly by a desire for power.
Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi National Council, has pressed recently for full Iraq control over the country’s security forces and criticized U.S. tactics.
An exile who lived abroad for more than four decades, Chalabi was convicted in absentia of bank fraud in 1992 by a military court in Jordan, where he had founded a bank that failed.
He says the charges were politically motivated.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
end quotes
Never a dull moment with this Bush Co. crowd in power down there in Washington, D.C.!
Never a dull moment at all, and that is the problem these days, with this knee-jerking Bush Co. crowd!
No dull moments mean no balance, no stability, and in the long run, as Mr. Sun Tze said a long time ago, and as military experts of OUR own have confirmed since, NO NATION EVER BENEFITS from a protracted struggle; such as the inept, knee-jerking Bush Co.'s now have us embroiled in over there in Iraq, where the original mission was simply to steal the oil from Saddam!
Only the special interests ever benefit from protracted struggles; and that is not us; elsewise, we would have no reason to be in here talking about it!
We'd be on the Riviera or something, living life large!
If we could live with ourselves, that is, and I guess that crowd can; elsewise the crap would have stopped long before this, but it has not, and likely will not, because too much money is still at stake, and this crowd has a powerful greed; the Conquistador's Disease, that only gold can cure!
Livyjr
Feb 20 2005, 03:45 PM
QUOTE(Livyjr @ Feb 20 2005, 03:06 PM)
Top Stories - Reuters
"Report: U.S. in Secret Talks with Iraqi Insurgents"
Sun Feb 20,10:11 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers are conducting secret talks with Iraq's Sunni insurgents on ways to end fighting there, Time magazine reported on Sunday, citing Pentagon and other sources.
Controversial Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi said on Sunday the outcome of any negotiations between insurgents and the U.S. military would not be binding for a new Iraqi government.
"I know nothing about such negotiations."
"Those negotiations will in no way bind the elected government of Iraq," he said.
"The issue here is not negotiating with the killers who are killing the Iraqi people," he added in an interview with ABC's "This Week."
And my apologies for my faulty memory here!
It is the puppet Allawi who was implicated in this alleged CIA bombing program against the Iraqis, BEFORE the Bush Co. invasion to steal the oil!
Published on Wednesday, June 9, 2004 by the New York Times
"Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90's Attacks"
by Joel Brinkley
WASHINGTON, June 8 — Iyad Allawi, now the designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990's to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the C.I.A., several former intelligence officials say.
Dr. Allawi's group, the Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosive devices...
Ex-CIA officer Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period "blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed."
Dr. Allawi's group, the Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Baghdad from northern Iraq, the officials said.
Evaluations of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign varied, although the former officials interviewed agreed that it never threatened Saddam Hussein's rule.
No public records of the bombing campaign exist, and the former officials said their recollections were in many cases sketchy, and in some cases contradictory.
They could not even recall exactly when it occurred, though the interviews made it clear it was between 1992 and 1995.
The Iraqi government at the time claimed that the bombs, including one it said exploded in a movie theater, resulted in many civilian casualties.
But whether the bombings actually killed any civilians could not be confirmed because, as a former C.I.A. official said, the United States had no significant intelligence sources in Iraq then.
One former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was based in the region, Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period "blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed."
Mr. Baer, a critic of the Iraq war, said he did not recall which resistance group might have set off that bomb.
Other former intelligence officials said Dr. Allawi's organization was the only resistance group involved in bombings and sabotage at that time.
But one former senior intelligence official recalled that "bombs were going off to no great effect."
"I don't recall very much killing of anyone," the official said.
When Dr. Allawi was picked as interim prime minister last week, he said his first priority would be to improve the security situation by stopping bombings and other insurgent attacks in Iraq — an idea several former officials familiar with his past said they found "ironic."
"Send a thief to catch a thief," said Kenneth Pollack, who was an Iran-Iraq military analyst for the C.I.A. during the early 1990's and recalled the sabotage campaign.
Dr. Allawi declined to respond to repeated requests for comment, made Monday and Tuesday through his Washington representative, Patrick N. Theros.
The former intelligence officials, while confirming C.I.A. involvement in the bombing campaign, would not say how, exactly, the agency had supported it.
An American intelligence officer who worked with Dr. Allawi in the early 1990's noted that "no one had any problem with sabotage in Baghdad back then," adding, "I don't think anyone could have known how things would turn out today."
Dr. Allawi was a favorite of the C.I.A. and other government agencies 10 years ago, largely because he served as a counterpoint to Ahmad Chalabi, a more prominent exile leader.He "was highly regarded by those involved in Iraqi operations," Samuel R. Berger, who was national security adviser in the Clinton administration, said in an interview.
"Unlike Chalabi, he was someone who was trusted by the regional governments.""He was less flamboyant, less promotional."
The C.I.A. recruited Dr. Allawi in 1992, former intelligence officials said.
At that time, the former senior intelligence official said, "what we were doing was dealing with anyone" in the Iraqi opposition "we could get our hands on."
Mr. Chalabi began working with the agency in 1991, and the idea, the official added, was to "decrease the proportion of Chalabi's role in what we were doing by finding others to work with."In 1991, Dr. Allawi was associated with a former Iraqi official, Salih Omar Ali al-Tikriti, whom the United States viewed as unsavory.
He and Dr. Allawi founded the Iraqi National Accord in 1990.
Both were former supporters of the Iraqi government.
Some intelligence officials have also suggested that Dr. Allawi, while he was still a member of the ruling Baath Party in the early 1970's, may have spied on Iraqi students studying in London.
Mr. Tikriti was said to have supervised public hangings in Baghdad.
The former officials said the C.I.A. would not work with Dr. Allawi until he severed his relationship with Mr. Tikriti, which he did in 1992.
Several intelligence officials said the agency's broad goal immediately after the Persian Gulf war in 1991 was to recruit opposition leaders who had senior contacts inside Iraq, something Dr. Allawi claimed.
The Iraqi National Accord was made up of former senior Iraqi military and political leaders who had fled the country and were said to retain connections to colleagues inside the government.
"Iyad had contact with people the agency thought would be useful to us in the future," Mr. Pollack said.
"He seemed to have ties to respected Sunni figures that no one else had."
The Hussein government was dominated by Sunni Muslims.
The bombing and sabotage campaign, the former senior intelligence official said, "was a test more than anything else, to demonstrate capability."
Another former intelligence officer who was involved in Iraqi affairs recalled that the bombings "were an option we considered and used."
Dr. Allawi's group was used, he added, "because Chalabi never had any sort of internal organization that could carry it out," adding, "We would never have asked him to carry out sabotage."The varied assessments of the bombing campaign's effectiveness are understandable, the former senior intelligence official said, because "I would not attribute to the U.S. sufficient intelligence resources then so that we could perceive if an effective bombing campaign was under way."
Dr. Allawi is not believed to have ever spoken in public about the bombing campaign.
But one Iraqi National Accord officer did.
In 1996, Amneh al-Khadami, who described himself as the chief bomb maker for the Iraqi National Accord and as being based in Sulaimaniya, in northern Iraq, recorded a videotape in which he talked of the bombing campaign and complained that he was being shortchanged money and supplies.
Two former intelligence officers confirmed the existence of the videotape.
Mr. Khadami said that "we blew up a car, and we were supposed to get $2,000" but got only $1,000, according to an account in the British newspaper The Independent in 1997.
The newspaper had obtained a copy of the tape.
Mr. Khadami, it added, also said he worried that the C.I.A. might view him as "too much the terrorist."end quotes
And didn't I just say something about never a dull moment when these Bush Co.'s are around?
Livyjr
Feb 20 2005, 04:02 PM
QUOTE(Livyjr @ Feb 20 2005, 03:06 PM)
Top Stories - Reuters
"Report: U.S. in Secret Talks with Iraqi Insurgents"
Sun Feb 20,10:11 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers are conducting secret talks with Iraq's Sunni insurgents on ways to end fighting there, Time magazine reported on Sunday, citing Pentagon and other sources.
The Bush administration has said it would not negotiate with Iraqi fighters and there is no authorized dialogue but the U.S. is having "back-channel" communications with certain insurgents, unidentified Washington and Iraqi sources told the magazine.
The magazine cited a secret meeting between two members of the U.S. military and an Iraqi negotiator, a middle-aged former member of Saddam Hussein's regime and the senior representative of what he called the nationalist insurgency.
A U.S. officer tried to get names of other insurgent leaders while the Iraqi complained the new Shi'ite-dominated government was being controlled by Iran, according to an account of the meeting provided by the Iraqi negotiator.
"We are ready to work with you," the Iraqi negotiator said, according to Time.
And where does the truth really lie, here, with respect to this "insurgency" in Iraq?
Well, if it is like Viet Nam, there are negotiations going on, as the above article says, and there are operations also going on, to crush them!
Who will win?
Stay tuned:
International News
U.S. soldiers and local residents look into the wreckage of a car in Mosul on Saturday, after explosions that killed one insurgent and wounded two others inside.
"U.S., Iraqis in new operation to curb insurgency - Shiites in mourning after 3 days of attacks leave nearly 100 dead"
The Associated Press
Updated: 8:03 a.m. ET Feb. 20, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. Marines and Iraqi security forces launched a joint operation Sunday to crack down on insurgents in troubled cities west of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, Shiites stung by two days of suicide bombings that left nearly 100 dead attended services in fortified funeral tents on Sunday in hopes of avoiding a third straight day of attacks.
Shiite politicians, poised to take power for the first time in Iraq’s modern history, have vowed not to allow the bloodshed to begin a civil war despite attacks Friday and Saturday that left at least 91 dead and more than 100 wounded.
“We built barriers, barricades and we are searching everybody who enters the funeral so that we do not meet the fate of my friend,” Sattar Wahhab, a 35-year-old worker, said outside a funeral tent in western Baghdad.
Although 50 chairs were set up inside the tent in Baghdad’s Bayaa district, only 10 people turned up.
On Saturday, a suicide bomber entered a similar tent in the same neighborhood and blew himself up, killing three people.
Attackers had also targeted such ceremonies on Saturday.
U.S., Iraqis launch operations
U.S. Marines and Iraqi security forces launched a joint operation in several cities in the Anbar province, including the provincial capital, Ramadi, where authorities imposed a curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., the military said in a statement.
“The security measures in and around the provincial capital are designed to ensure the safety of the populace by controlling access into the city,” the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force said in a statement.
Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad, has long been a center of insurgent activity.
Iraq’s major Sunni Arab tribes and political parties met in Baghdad to discuss their role in Iraq’s new government.
The tribes are apparently looking for a role in the new government and drafting of Iraq’s new constitution.
Iraqi President Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer, a Sunni Muslim and head of the Iraqis list that won five seats in the Jan. 30 election, was to attend.
Sunnis largely stayed away from the polls, many because they feared threats of retribution from insurgents.
Iyad al-Sameria, a senior leader of the Iraqi Islamic party, a Sunni group that boycotted the elections, said his party wasn’t invited to the meeting.
Iraq’s interim national security advisor, Mouwafak al-Rubaie, said the recent suicide bombings were attempts “to create a religious war within Iraq."
"Iraqis will not allow this to happen, Iraqis will stand united as Iraqis foremost, and Iraq will not fall into sectarian war.”
Al-Roubaie’s Shiite clergy-backed United Iraqi Alliance, which received nearly half the election votes, was to decide early in the week on their choice for prime minister.
On Saturday, eight suicide bombers struck in quick succession in a wave of attacks that killed 55 people as Iraqi Shiites commemorated the seventh century death of a leader of their Muslim sect.
Similar attacks Friday killed 36 people and injured dozens.
It was the second year running that violence marred Ashoura, the holiest day of the Shiite religious calendar, but the two-day spree had a smaller death toll than the 181 killed in twin bombings in Baghdad and the holy city of Karbala a year ago.
Insurgents appeared to have struck at will in some areas despite stepped-up security that was prompted by last year’s deadly Ashoura blasts.
But in Karbala, the Shiite holy city 50 miles south of Baghdad, no violence was reported on Saturday.
The dead this year included a U.S. soldier who was killed in Baghdad when American troops responded to calls for assistance from Iraqi forces unable to cope with a slew of attacks.
The U.S. command on Sunday announced the death of a U.S. Marine killed in action Saturday during a military operation in Anbar.
It gave no other details.
In violence Sunday:
In Baghdad, a roadside bomb targeting a convoy of Iraqi troops killed two Iraqi National Guardsmen, police 1st Lt. Ali Hussein al-Hamadani said.
In the same area, coalition gunners in a convoy opened fire on a car that approached too closely, killing an Iraqi man, said police 1st Lt., Muthana Hussein.
In the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, police found two corpses Saturday of men thought to be former police officers who’d been shot in the head, a morgue director said Sunday.
Six charred bodies were discovered several days ago floating in the Tigris River in Suwayrah, about 25 miles south of the capital, hospital officials in Kut said.
The six men were each found handcuffed and shot in the head, chest and back.
Their identities were not known.
