Guardian: Bush planned for war all along. & knew it was unlikely there were WMDs.

[StarLightDeath]

I do think we had a lot to do with the root causes of 9/11

If only we understood the terrorists better. Why? WHY???? Why are we so blind to our own folly?! Repent now America for your sins!

[Arrian]

No you moron, learn from the past. It's not appeasement or weakness to examine whether foreign policy decisions made in the 1970s/80s may have impacted the growth of movements such as A.Q. It's not about blame. It's about making smarter decisions in the future. Goodness forbid we consider the mere possibility that a given policy was misguided.

Hey, SLD: did Jimmy Carter make any mistakes? Could they have impacted the world and hurt us in the long run? SURELY NOT! I MUST BE A COMMUNIST TO THINK SO.

-Arrian

[Gatekeeper]

I see this thread has degenerated into the *usual* anti-America, pro-America sh*t, so why bother even trying to contribute anything useful to it?

Every right-wing and left-wing demagogue can go to hell, insofar as I'm concerned. Such demagogues are nothing more than flip sides of the same twisted, corroded coin. Control freaks!

I hate Bush. I hate Moore. I hate Putin. I hate Chavez. I hate ... well, this is getting repetitive. Suffice to say, they're f*cktards one and all.

Gatekeeper

[StarLightDeath]

Jimmy Carter is a ****ing commie traitor. His presidency was a god damn joke. You don't reason with terrorists, you kill them. What created them is Islam. You see the same conditions all over the world, Islam is the root of terrorism.

[Gatekeeper]

Give it up, Arrian. It's not worth it anymore. Let 'em burn the house down. Just make sure not to be in it when they light the match.

[StarLightDeath]

I blame the vietnam era for all the weak and pathetic liberals that we have today.

[Arrian]

Originally posted by StarLightDeath
Jimmy Carter is a ****ing commie traitor. His presidency was a god damn joke. You don't reason with terrorists, you kill them. What created them is Islam. You see the same conditions all over the world, Islam is the root of terrorism.

How does this conflict with "we had a lot to do with the root causes of 9/11" then, SLD? You realize that Jimmy Carter is part of "us" right? You can hate him all you want, but he was President of the United States.

Accordingly, my comment stands - even in your bizzaro world.

-Arrian

p.s. Teh Great Reagan had some dealings with terrorists & other various thugs. Traitor that he was.

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Gatekeeper
Give it up, Arrian.

NO! I WILL WIN! I WILL KEEP TYPING AND THEY WILL SEE I AM RIGHT! NEVER SURRENDER!!!!

Oh, wait, it's 5:15 on a Friday. **** this ****in' ****. Mmm... beer.

-Arrian

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Sandman
I don't see this 'hate' you're hinting at. Examples?

It's funny what one misses when surrounded by it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4259187,00.html

A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully
Special report: terrorism in the US

Charlotte Raven
Guardian

Tuesday September 18, 2001

Most people in the world had more than one response to what happened to the US last Tuesday. I think it is safe to say that apart from three or four Palestinians, everyone is sad to see so many of their fellow humans killed in such horrendous circumstances. That goes for most Muslims and the great majority of those who might have been quite pleased to see the US get a different kind of comeuppance. For this second group, in which I include myself, the unqualified sympathy extended to the victims is underpinned by a feeling that few have dared even to whisper. My next-door neighbour said it, and so did a rogue Palestinian whose views have not yet been censored in the name of "taste". They are better placed than I am, as a broadsheet commentator, to admit to a part of them that thinks that the US might benefit from an insight into what it feels like to be knocked to your knees by a faceless power deaf to everything but the logic of its own crazed agenda.

There's nothing shameful about this position. It is perfectly possible to condemn the terrorist action and dislike the US just as much as you did before the WTC went down. Many will have woken up on Wednesday with that combination of emotions. Some were more "ha" than sorrow, but most had the proportions right and none should be accused of inhumanity. If anti-Americanism has been seized, temporarily, by forces that have done dreadful things in its name, there is no reason for its adherents to retreat from its basic precepts. America is the same country it was before September 11. If you didn't like it then, there's no reason why you should have to pretend to now. All those who see its suffering as a kind of absolution should remember how little we've seen that would support this reading. A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully and, weeping apart, everything the US body politic has done in the week since the attacks has confirmed its essential character.

Given this, it is amazing that so many commentators should feel the need to stand shoulder to shoulder with a government that few used to support. Apparently, it is every American's duty to display their anti-terrorist credentials by refusing to criticise anything about its response to the crisis. For us British, the most pressing task is to reassure our friends across the pond that we don't support the demolition of their cities by ridding ourselves of any trace of anti-American sentiment. Apologising to the US ambassador for the "ill timed" Question Time in which one or two people suggested that America's slate was no cleaner than it had been the previous week, Greg **** shamed us all. The great thing about the media in this country is that they aren't often reduced to the univocal drone that expat friends complain of in the US. Those who have been there through this crisis have told me how much they miss Newsnight and how little respect they have for media that believe the whys and wherefores of this situation are somebody else's concern.

Like so many of the ideas America is going to war to defend, free speech is a nice thought that hasn't panned out in practice. The US may think of itself as a nation that nurtures debate but if that happens at all, it's only when there's nothing at stake. At this crucial moment in its history, it has eschewed the clamour of conflicting positions in favour of the voice it always returns to when its foundations are shaken. That voice is deeply dumb. Unable to engage with causality and contemptuous of attempts to do so, it explains what it sees in terms that bear no relation to reality.

When America speaks from its heart, it retreats into a language that none but its true-born citizens can begin to understand. At the root of this is an overwhelming need to control meaning. America can't let the world speak for itself. It was taken unawares last Tuesday and part of the trauma of that event was the shock of being forced to listen to a message that it hadn't had time to translate. The subsequent roar of anger was, amongst other things, the sound of the US struggling to regain the right to control its own narrative.

It did this by declaring war. By this means, Bush ensured that America only had to sit with the inexplicable for a couple of anxious days. After that, the sense, so unfamiliar to them, of not knowing what had happened or what it meant was replaced by the reassuring certainties of John Brown's body and calls for national unity. By turning what should have been a criminal manhunt into an all-out war, Bush was asserting his right to define America's reality. Instead of submitting to the reality, he created the situation he wanted, fashioning a plausible, beatable enemy that bore only a passing relation to the ragbag of loons in Bin Laden's camp. They weren't a worthy enemy of America, so rather than confront what this might mean, Bush has made one up. "International terrorism" has been talked up in the past week to the point where it almost looks like an ideology. Much as the US might want this to be the case, it isn't. Saying you're going to "eradicate" it is like pledging to defeat shooting.

Rather than run the risk of seeing what might happen if it listened to the rest of the world, America is going full square into a war that doesn't exist. It would rather have a virtual victory than submit to someone else's agenda. While understandable, this tendency is one of the reasons why some people still have issues with it.

Issue is found with the American response to an attack that came from what amounted to a department of a foreign government.

[notyoueither]

Why do you ask for examples when the attitude is self-confessed?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,551086,00.html

They can't see why they are hated

Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad

Special report: Terrorism in the US

Seumas Milne
Thursday September 13, 2001
The Guardian


Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.

Article continues

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.
But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.

As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.

If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.

It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.

It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.

But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.

All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.

Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.

It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power.

Including the writer, one would assume...

[Fake Boris]

What's your beef NYE?

Things like:

From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.

sound like the voice of reason. Do you remember the public reaction right after 9/11?

[StarLightDeath]

Where do you live Boris?

[Fake Boris]

lala land

[StarLightDeath]

Ah, Canada. I knew it had to be outside the US because I know that if you said some of the **** that you say on here you would have a very difficult life in the US.

[SlowwHand]

They have elections in Iraq now.