Are you willing to fight and/or die for your country?

[Crazy_Ivan]

isoFlux Wrote:you call those puppets in office in Iraq their "OWN PRESIDENT"?

You mean Allawi... he\'s just a temporary guy. But he has something that the other \'candidates\' (Paul Brenner and more important, Chalabi) didn\'t have: Because he hasn\'t been publicly active in either of the main ethnic groups (which Chalabi is), and because as yet hasn\'t messed around with US intelligence info (Chalabi knew that they had Saddam hours before the official press release), and seems to have a clean record on taking bribes etc he is a better candidate than any of the perople the US put there before he was put in that position...
Chalabi was kicked because (officially) he had done something with US funds, but i think the real reason that the US wanted to get rid of him was to give the sunnites the message that they would still have something to say in the government. The only valueable things Chalabi had to offer was political experience, and being trusted in the north at the time the US needed it.

Quote:again, read your history. the US has a knack for inserting a puppet into a public, powerful office of a foreign subsidiary, and then assasinating, capturing or invading them later. this is no different. that \"president\" will be in power so long as he wears an American suit and praises Western values. when he doesnt, or decides to go maverick on our ass, he\'ll dissapear from the radar.

They explicitly wanted an elected government... so they will have to deal with the fact that Allawi leaves the stage when the situation returns to normal. If they don\'t want that, why did they opt for elections in the first place...

Quote:where are they? where are all these weapons? do they have them up their ass? what were they (the mass media) screaming before the war started \"THEY HAVE WMDs AND WILL USE THEM ON US UNLESS WE ACT NOW NOW NOW!\" then we get there, and we find, what, 2-3 barrels of industrial waste? lol... sorry, the gap between what politicians say and actual truth is quite large.

Read the same history books you ask us to read... but not the US \'censored\' version that ignores anything their former friends did when they were on the\'good\' side.

In iran there are still the ruins of the contaminated villages that were on the frontline... Official casualty count for the iranian side is around 100,000 EXCLUDING civilians. And there were still corroded chemical rounds laying around the countryside when the americans went in in 2003

You have hundreds of soldiers that have various undiagnoseable health problems, of which experts say that they were caused by exposure to Sarin, VX and some of the other stuff that was stored in some of the bunkers that were blown up in 1991. The only reason the DOD doesn\'t want to tell the truth is that they are afraid of being sued by family members.

Let\'s face it... you have a power hungry lunatic that has proven to be capable of gassing his own citizens, and has the means of delivering conventional and chemical warheads (as he didn\'t clean his stores the way you wanted) on either your allies (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait) or on major airbases that are used by your own forces. All of the UN teams that you have sent there to check if he cleaned up his stuff were being eavedropped and denied access to key installations.

Let\'s play the whole thing over again from the middle of 2002 or so... but with a slighly different plot
The following scenario is based on some guesswork and general info on the region, but is (i think) somewhat realistic.
Saddam gets murdered by a bodyguard or some suicide commando (highly unlikely, but possible)
The most likely scenario that will happen is the following:
Both the kurds and the shiites will take advantage of the situation. The kurdish region will declare itself independent, and most likely will send their troops to reclaim Mosul and Kirkuk. The Turks don\'t want this to happen and will almost certainly react on this... This will cause a long-term problem for the US, as the main pipelines from the russian oil republics go through the eastern part of Turkey.
The shiite part, lacking a government structure will try to keep itself going as far as possible, but eventually will try to get itself into a larger alliance-like union with Iran (which the US absolutely wants to prevent, as tere is a lot of oil there)
For the central part there are 2 possibilities:
1: Both halves will fight over it, with the possibility that the sunnite population will eventually go for a desparate alliance with the kurds to keep their freedoms. This alliance won;t stay long though, but i won\'t speculate further on this...
2: The central part will eventually join their political mates in Syria, adding a lot of population there, and giving a huge intellect boost to Syrian defense projects and other things that will prove problematic for Israel.

Which situation is worse for the USA, a pissed-off europe and UN, with an united iraq, or a situation that can evolve in one of the worst ethno-religuous conflicts in human history.