Bin Laden offers truce?

[LadyGodiva]

Is anyone actually going to believe this new information? I tend to have problems trusting people who say one thing one day, and then decide to change their minds. Maybe it's my Caribbean heritage that has influenced me, but I'm sure there is more going on here than meets the eye. I was chatting with a lady in my neighbourhood and she said that "God must have touched him...". Yeah, right!

JJ, can't wait to hear what you have to say, seeing that you're closer to him (BL) than we are :).


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4743768/

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[jjwq8]

So that's all right then.

Everybody out and once the last man leaves we'll stop shooting at you?

If Osama is reading this...................AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON PAL!


Does he realistically believe that he is capable of influencing foreign policy? If yes then we have the US media to thank for giving him the notion of incredible self importance. He is the titular head of a tiny organisation that got lucky a number of times. Sooner or later the luck will run out and when it does I sincerely hope that everyone in the organisation is pink mist.

Corporate profiteering is precisely how he received his millions. How convenient then that having been the recipient of such beneficence he can now label it abhorent.

Frankly he is right that multinationals should not be profiting out of misery but if not them then who? Given the conditions in Iraq, that he is probably helping to foment, is it any wonder that people are unwilling to risk their lives unless handsomely compensated?

I live 45 minutes from the border. I adore the Iraqis, but there is insufficient money in the world to clear the US budget deficit and pursuade me to cross the border.

[John K]

Jeremy,

Just to help me understand the " other side of the coin".

What would your approach have been if you were the President of the United States from 1990 to present day.

Lets start with the invasion of Kuwait. Just a summary from the outside looking in perspective. How would your foreign policy have differed from the course of action that historically took place.

I'm asking this not to criticise you, just to see a different point of view.:)

[Shaughnn]

I'd like to comment on John K's question just a little. I think that I would have pressured Kuwait to remove the obstacles for Iraq paying off it's Iran-Iraq war debt that Kuwait repeatedly errected to prevent Iraq from ever getting out from under their thumb. From what I've read, the invasion of Kuwait had more to do with that war debt and Kuwait's tactics to perpetuate it than anything else. And without an incentive to invade Kuwait, maybe we all can have focused a little more on domestic policy.
In addition, I'd have listened to my appointed advisors when they told me that there was a domestic terror threat. The first World Trade Center bombing and the bombing in Oaklahoma City were enough to confirm that the threats to the United States came from both outside our borders and from within. Had the FBI recieved the personel and other resources which *Congress* denied it, more analysis of collected data could have been conducted and possible threads tied together.
The quustion John K asks is very very broad though so I'll just keep my answer to these two topics for now.
Shaughnn

[jjwq8]

Actually the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was not predictated by war debt, but Kuwaits failure to abide the terms of a commercial agreement between Kuwait and Iraq regarding the lifting and selling of oil from their shared Rumailah Oil Field. Kuwait essentially falsified figures to deny Iraq some $2 Billion in reveunes over the period of the Iran-Iraq war. It was Iraqs demand that this debt be settled that led to the border tensions and the now infamous meeting with Ambassador Glassbie where Saddam was advised that the dispute was inter arab and that Washington would not intervene. Given Saddams character what the hell did they think he would do with all the army he'd placed along the border.

At the time of the invasion the concensus of opinion was that if Saddam stayed in Kuwait, then the only ones out of a job would be the ruling Al Sabah family. Hmm.

Promulgating true Democracy would essentially have the same result.

As to foreign policy well it may sound trite but if I were Pres and I hadn't had to make concessions to attain the office, I would pull the plug on Israel and level the playing field. I would declare Jerusalem an international city and put all my weight behind getting the UN to endorse it.

The Gulf War MK I would have occurred and it would not have ended so inconclusively. Why not incur international condemnation. You get it anyway.

[Shaughnn]

Jeremy,
I agree that the Rumailah oil fields scandal was the straw that finally broke the camel's back, but I'll remind you that it was precisely that money which Kuwait denied Iraq that was required to pay down the choking debt the Iraqi government was drowning in. At every try to pay down the debt, the Kuwait government somehow slipped in and undercut the Iraqi profits. After appeals to various outside parties to mediate, including the U.S. I believe, the annexation of Kuwait would have seemed to be the only solution to unsaddleing Iraq from their Iran-Iraq War debt.
I'll ceed that you are MUCH closer to the source than I and if you say my information is inaccurate, I'll probably accept that. Just wanted to say that my comments were on the neccessity of the Rumailah Oil field revenues and why I thought their failure led to the Kuwait invasion.
Shaughnn

[John Bridge]

Whatever the cause of the Gulf War, I think it should have been finished.

As to Israel, I don't see anything wrong with allowing the Jews a little sprit of land they can call their own. It's not a huge piece of real estate. It's not even the best land. Leave 'em be. :)

[Shaughnn]

I'll agree to that John! The problem being that President George H.W. Bush Sr. didn't have the mandate to accomplish anything more than what was done. Had he crossed that line the United States might have been guilty of crimes which we might not have wanted to deal with.
But I'm gonna disagree with you on the Isreal thing. If someone pulled up in a truck and unloaded a heard of people I didn't know and then tried to tell me that this was *their* house now and that I needed to move along and like it because *they* said so, I'd sure as heck put up a fight. A pretty damn nasty one that went on for as long as I was able to keep it going in fact. Isreal founding was a huge mistake whcih has been perpetuated by United States military subsidies. I say pull the rug out and let them learn to either become better neighbors or find someplace less controversial to live.
Shaughnn
PS: Ever notice that the most vocal, irrational and rabid Isreali settlement fanatics are always expatriated Americans. Can we PLEASE start sending out better ambassadors?!?

[John Bridge]

Better do a check on your ken of the history of that region. Start back duing WWII and work your way up to about the fifties. Might change your understanding of the situation. :)

[Shaughnn]

If you've got some reading recommendations John, I'll be glad to look them up and give them a once through. Two that I like to suggest to people are "The Crusades through Arab Eyes" by Amin Maalouf and "History of the Arab Peoples" by Albert Hourani. Hourani's was a bit confussing at first, with all of the many subgroups and the social and religius factions but it ended up being a very good overview of the region's history and it's very fluid peoples. Maalouf's book presents the struggle to "hold Jerusalem" by many different factions through the three Crusades. And appearantly, the only time Jerusalem knew relative peace was when it was held *jointly* by the Arabs, the Jews and the Christians. When all three claim dominion over the "blood of Abraham', Solomon's Justice seems to be the only justice they will accept.
Shaughnn

[jjwq8]

Shaughnn,

What is now being termed "war debt" was at the time considered aid. Remember that the Iranian Revolution was still very fresh and the rectal sphincters of the ruling families on this side of the Gulf were chewing the buttons off their seat cushions. Saddam was employed as their mercenary (admittedly most anxious to please) to ensure that the revolution remained something confined to the lands of the peacock throne.

When the Iranians took Faw there was apoplexy here. Every male in the country (citizen and expat) was expected to register for a call to arms. I did. No reluctance whatsoever. I was ready to defend my home. Compare that with what happened in 1990.

The citizenry largely legged it. The vast majority of those who stayed were Shia's who resisted the occupation because it was the right thing to do, not because Tehran had ordered it.

[Shaughnn]

Thanks Jeremy. I had always thought that the Iran-Iraq War was over Iraq's need for it's own Gulf port, and that was why it took Uum Qasr. I hadn't known that the rest of the region were also using Saddam as their tool to dampen the spread of Iranian revolution (like the United States was also doing)
Shaughnn
PS Growing up on the campus of the University of San Francisco, I had a lot of friends whose parents had come there to study from around the world. One of those friends was another 5 year-old from Syria who told me that he would one day have to go back to his country to join the army there and kill people. That has always stuck in my head and now more than 30 years later, I still pay attention to happenings in the Middle East and think about him.

[jjwq8]

Umm Qasr has always been an Iraqi port. Its significance is that it is the only Iraqi port that does not share a frontier with Iran because it is behind the Faw peninsula.

The border drawn up by the RH Edward Heath MP in the early sixties actually meandered in and around the town and port of Um Qasr. Kuwait didn't need the land, showed little interest in it and in consequence Iraq encroached to the point of actually moving the border south a few hundred meters to give itself unfettered use of the facilities it was developing alone.

Post 1991, the border was put back where Heath had drawn it, in my view a foolish mistake as it now means that Iraqi shipping must transit Kuwait territorial waters (and be subject to any levies thereby) simply to dock in its home port.

Another dust-up waiting to happen once the current mischief is resolved

[Shaughnn]

Thanks again Jeremy,
I must have mistaken the movement of that border for the taking of the city. I knew it had something to do with Iraqi shipping though. :)
Shaughnn

[J~Sin]

Dude republickin's suck, war sucks, media sucks, and our foreign policies suck.
~Last night I had a dream, this girl was taming a cobra in a clay pot. Later in the dream I was hanging with a girl I know smoking some pot. She brought out a cobra that she said she took from N.A.S.A before they could send him into space. The snake was tattooed on his belly. Wanna know what his name was? AMERICA! No bullshit, I honestly dreamt this last night, and I'm still kinda freaked out by it.

Peace...(we need it, I pray for it, but nobody wants it) J~Sin

[Davestone]

J~sin,i noticed you didn't say terrorists suck,ritualbeheading sucks,killing children sucks,killing political rivals to gain power sucks,sending poisonous gas to unsuspecting villages sucks,tricking girls into slavery and prostitution sucks,bombing innocent civilians sucks...and the list goes on,none of which we are guilty of,other than collateral damage.And as Colin Powell told the British media,"The only land America has ever asked for is land to bury our dead."That's empire building?as some would say.No one wants to have people die in wars,but you can't stand by and let situations get to the point you can't stem the tide anymore. The fervent pitch of terrorists is favorable to a terrified undereducated mass of people,and strength is in those masses. Better to fight there than here,and there will be a fight,unless people think the terrorists will treat them better than their current government.