Now who are the dreamers and the useful idiots?

Those who believe that after 12 years and countless resolutions that Saddam
would have lived up to the promises he was spouting when he new his days
were numbered.

Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Baier [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 3:29 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: Veterans' Day 2003


That article from the Guardian fits with "learning the lesson".
Of course to learn the lesson, it might have been useful to have been there
instead of going AWOL and loosing the memory of a complete year.

War should always be the last option. Why don't todays leaders not lead
from the front but rather from a desk? Might stop or have stopped many wars
before they even began.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1082250,00.html
Dreamers and idiots

Britain and the US did everything to avoid a peaceful solution in Iraq and
Afghanistan

George Monbiot   Tuesday November 11, 2003    The Guardian

Those who would take us to war must first shut down the public imagination.
They must convince us that there is no other means of preventing invasion,
or conquering terrorism, or even defending human rights. When information
is scarce, imagination is easy to control. As intelligence gathering and
diplomacy are conducted in secret, we seldom discover - until it is too
late - how plausible the alternatives may be.
So those of us who called for peace before the wars with Iraq and
Afghanistan were mocked as effeminate dreamers. The intelligence our
governments released suggested that Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were
immune to diplomacy or negotiation. Faced with such enemies, what would we
do, the hawks asked? And our responses felt timid beside the clanking
rigours of war. To the columnist David Aaronovitch, we were "indulging...
in a cosmic whinge". To the Daily Telegraph, we had become "Osama bin
Laden's useful idiots".

Had the options been as limited as the western warlords and their bards
suggested, this might have been true. But, as many of us suspected at the
time, we were lied to. Most of the lies are now familiar: there appear to
have been no weapons of mass destruction and no evidence to suggest that,
as President Bush claimed in March, Saddam had "trained and financed... al-
Qaida". Bush and Blair, as their courtship of the president of Uzbekistan
reveals, appear to possess no genuine concern for the human rights of
foreigners.

But a further, and even graver, set of lies is only now beginning to come
to light. Even if all the claims Bush and Blair made about their enemies
and their motives had been true, and all their objectives had been legal
and just, there may still have been no need to go to war. For, as we
discovered last week, Saddam proposed to give Bush and Blair almost
everything they wanted before a shot had been fired. Our governments appear
both to have withheld this information from the public and to have lied to
us about the possibilities for diplomacy.

Over the four months before the coalition forces invaded Iraq, Saddam's
government made a series of increasingly desperate offers to the United
States. In December, the Iraqi intelligence services approached Vincent
Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, with an offer to
prove that Iraq was not linked to the September 11 attacks, and to permit
several thousand US troops to enter the country to look for weapons of mass
destruction. If the object was regime change, then Saddam, the agents
claimed, was prepared to submit himself to internationally monitored
elections within two years. According to Mr Cannistraro, these proposals
reached the White House, but were "turned down by the president and vice-
president".

By February, Saddam's negotiators were offering almost everything the US
government could wish for: free access to the FBI to look for weapons of
mass destruction wherever it wanted, support for the US position on Israel
and Palestine, even rights over Iraq's oil. Among the people they contacted
was Richard Perle, the security adviser who for years had been urging a war
with Iraq. He passed their offers to the CIA. Last week he told the New
York Times that the CIA had replied: "Tell them that we will see them in
Baghdad".

Saddam Hussein, in other words, appears to have done everything possible to
find a diplomatic alternative to the impending war, and the US government
appears to have done everything necessary to prevent one. This is the
opposite to what we were told by George Bush and Tony Blair. On March 6, 13
days before the war began, Bush said to journalists: "I want to remind you
that it's his choice to make as to whether or not we go to war. It's
Saddam's choice. He's the person that can make the choice of war and peace.
Thus far, he's made the wrong choice."

Ten days later, Blair told a press conference: "We have provided the right
diplomatic way through this, which is to lay down a clear ultimatum to
Saddam: cooperate or face disarmament by force... all the way through we
have tried to provide a diplomatic solution." On March 17, Bush claimed
that "should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can
know that every measure has been taken to avoid war". All these statements
are false.

The same thing happened before the war with Afghanistan. On September 20
2001, the Taliban offered to hand Osama bin Laden to a neutral Islamic
country for trial if the US presented them with evidence that he was
responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington. The US rejected the
offer. On October 1, six days before the bombing began, they repeated it,
and their representative in Pakistan told reporters: "We are ready for
negotiations. It is up to the other side to agree or not. Only negotiation
will solve our problems." Bush was asked about this offer at a press
conference the following day. He replied: "There's no negotiations. There's
no calendar. We'll act on [sic] our time."

On the same day, Tony Blair, in his speech to the Labour party conference,
ridiculed the idea that we could "look for a diplomatic solution". "There
is no diplomacy with Bin Laden or the Taliban regime... I say to the
Taliban: surrender the terrorists; or surrender power. It's your choice."
Well, they had just tried to exercise that choice, but George Bush had
rejected it.

Of course, neither Bush nor Blair had any reason to trust the Taliban or
Saddam - these people were, after all, negotiating under duress. But
neither did they have any need to trust them. In both cases they could have
presented their opponents with a deadline for meeting the concessions they
had offered. Nor could the allies argue that the offers were not worth
considering because they were inadequate: both the Taliban and Saddam were
attempting to open negotiations, not to close them - there appeared to be
plenty of scope for bargaining. In other words, peaceful resolutions were
rejected before they were attempted. What this means is that even if all
the other legal tests for these wars had been met (they had not), both
would still have been waged in defiance of international law. The charter
of the United Nations specifies that "the parties to any dispute...shall,
first of all, seek a solution by negotiation".

None of this matters to the enthusiasts for war. That these conflicts were
unjust and illegal, that they killed or maimed tens of thousands of
civilians, is irrelevant, as long as their aims were met. So the hawks
should ponder this. Had a peaceful resolution of these disputes been
attempted, Bin Laden might now be in custody, Iraq might be a pliant and
largely peaceful nation finding its own way to democracy, and the
prevailing sentiment within the Muslim world might be sympathy for the
United States, rather than anger and resentment.

Now who are the dreamers and the useful idiots, and who the pragmatists?



On Tue, 11 Nov 2003 15:05:11 -0500, Carol Darnell
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Why?
>
>Because it's beautiful...  and because so many people who have died never
>wrote (or ghost-wrote... I really don't care) such a letter to those they
>loved, and who loved them.
>
>At the 11th hour this morning, I recalled my long-gone and much loved
>grandfather, who taught me so much, and shared carefully pressed poppies
>from Flander's Field with me, so many years ago.
>
>He always said that the build-up to war brings out the worst in man -
>fighting it doesn't do much better, but building the peace somehow makes
>the ugliness and horror almost tolerable.  Presuming you live that long and
>learn enough.
>
>He did...  and felt that we hadn't learned much, watching WWII, and Korea,
>and Nam.  He shook his head for our country, wondering at how readily we
>forgot our lessons.
>
>I suspect that were he still alive, his perspective wouldn't have changed
>all that much.
>
>* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
>* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *