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Originally Posted by steeljack
Barb a couple of points I want to pass by you .
1, So you agree , that is the reason we invaded and occupied a soveriegn state , for the oil .........and I suppose you find nothing wrong with the fact ,if this weekends news reports are to be believed that the Iraqi minisiter for natural resources will this week sign an order handing over total control all petroleum and gas exploration, development and production to 3 American energy companies for the next 30 years in return for 'royalty' payments.
Barb, if I was a little bare-assed raggy arab who had nothing else to lose , no matter what religion, I would be out there wanting the "foriegn devils" out,a matter of national pride, and I really expect the insurgancy to increase with increasing support from the average Arab in the street , with anti-American feeling spreading from Morroco right through the Gulf .
2, Something I don't think Washington understands is the idea that nationalism is a new/ alien concept in the Middle-east, these folks are muslims first, then sunni or shia,then tribe, then Iraqi, Egyptian, Yemeni .
Nasser, Saddam Hussien, the Late Shah. Assad (senior) in Syria were all secularists who tried to push nationalism and each one failed and the Mosques remained in control. This is where the terrorism is coming from, in another recent thread photos were posted of the recent Hajj to Mecca, you want fervancy and brainwashing check out the pics, 3 or 4 million pilgrims at a time all obeying and following the mullahs rules maybe a poor analogy but the Nuremberg rallies were childrens tea-parties compared the mass hysteria generated during the Hajj.
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1. No, I don't agree. There were many facets to this, going back to Gulf I, where we so foolishly made truce with Saddam after kicking him out of Kuwait. It was inevitable that at some point we would be forced to resume hostilities.
Before 9/11, the U.S. Intelligence community never penetrated the senior leadership of either Iraq or al Qaeda - two of America's most dangerous and determined enemies. The majority opinion, (with only a few dissenters), believed that secularist Iraqis would never work with radicals like Osama bin Laden and that fundamentalists would never cooperate with an infidel like Saddam Hussein. The journalist Bob Woodward interviewed the head of the Iraq operations group at the CIA, who told him that CIA reporting sources inside Iraq before the war were thin. How thin? "I can count them on one hand," he said, "and still pick my nose." The agency simply wasn't focused on this and, therefore, their majority opinion turned out to be dead wrong.
We now know much more about Iraq and terrorism. In the three and a half plus years since the war began the U.S. government has collected more than two million documents. These include payroll logs, audio and videotapes, strategy memos between senior Iraqi regime officials, letters between government agencies and computer hard drives of top Iraqi ministers. Saddam himself had formulated a plan for insurgency post any future war. However, the U.S. intelligence community has only translated and analyzed about five percent of the documents captured, some of which have been released for public viewing. They don't seem in too much of a hurry to delve into the rest. Why? Could it be CYA at the CIA?
We know that Iraq harbored several of the world's most notorious terrorists - Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal among them. It also gave safe haven to al Zarqawi when he was forced to flee Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. Within days of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Saddam's government facilitated the escape from U.S. authorities of the Iraqi who mixed the chemicals for that bombing. Less than two months later, his intelligence service botched an attempt to assassinate George H.W. Bush during a visit to Kuwait. Saddam trained and funded terrorists, including Abu Sayyef, the al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines, and supplied chemical weapons expertise to terrorist-friendly Islamic fundamentalists in Sudan. In 1995 a senior Iraqi intelligence official met with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda propaganda was broadcast on Iraqi government-run t.v. Iraqi financial records confirm that the government supported, harbored and financed Abdul Rahman Yasin, the 1993 WTC bomber throughout the 1990's. And this is just the tip of the iceburg.
I have no problem with the current Iraqi government inking a deal with U.S. energy companies. Who should they have called.....PEMEX? I think not. They want to increase production and revenues and are looking for investment and expertise.
Frankly, I don't care whether people in the Middle-East like America or not. I'd much prefer that they live in deadly fear of what we will do to them if they support terrorism and promote mayhem around the world.