Is Donald Trump's Campaign A Spoof?

[ParisInAKilt]

1 hour ago, Ally Bongo said:

In what way does this make Bernie Sanders a liar ?

I didn't say that he specifically was a liar, but he's a hypocrite and dishonest at best, because he rightly criticised Clinton for Iraq but look at his own record on US foreign policy, again rightly criticised her for taking corporate money and basically being a complete neo con and then he goes and endorses her knowing fine well she's the last politician who wants to help the American working class, people he claimed to represent. 

[ParisInAKilt]

2 hours ago, Ally Bongo said:

Was wanting regime change in Iraq wrong ?  

Definitely.

Is there any evidence to suggest the US have ever intervened in the affairs of other countries purely on humanitarian grounds? 

Edited February 13, 2017 by ParisInAKilt

[Ally Bongo]

5 hours ago, ParisInAKilt said:

I didn't say that he specifically was a liar, but he's a hypocrite and dishonest at best, because he rightly criticised Clinton for Iraq but look at his own record on US foreign policy, again rightly criticised her for taking corporate money and basically being a complete neo con and then he goes and endorses her knowing fine well she's the last politician who wants to help the American working class, people he claimed to represent. 

The alternative was Trump

What else would you expect him to do ?

5 hours ago, ParisInAKilt said:

Definitely.

Is there any evidence to suggest the US have ever intervened in the affairs of other countries purely on humanitarian grounds? 

I suggest you go and do some research on Iraq & Saddam's crimes before you use the word definitely

Your second point is immaterial

[ParisInAKilt]

26 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

I suggest you go and do some research on Iraq & Saddam's crimes before you use the word definitely

I use the world definitely because the American government supported Saddam for many years while he committed the same very crimes. It's beyond naive to think this suddenly became an issue for the US in early 2000's on humanitarian grounds. 

[ParisInAKilt]

39 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

What else would you expect him to do ?

Not endorce a candidate that stands for everything he claimed to be against. 

[phart]

Iraq was invaded as a favour to Israel. It was Israeli partisans that pushed the whole agenda, it was israeli intelligence that falsely connected Atta to Prague and Anthrax, made up the shit about mobile weapons labs etc.

 

Bernie Sanders didn't even vote for the Iraq war by the way.

[phart]

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/video/flashback-rep-bernie-sanders-opposes-iraq-war

here he is opposing the war in a long speech.

[ParisInAKilt]

3 minutes ago, phart said:

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/video/flashback-rep-bernie-sanders-opposes-iraq-war

here he is opposing the war in a long speech.

He did vote in favour of the Iraq liberation act 98 though 

[Ally Bongo]

So - we should have left Saddam in charge and Bernie should have gave his backing to Trump

Hopefully Trump will do some more stuff this week to get the thread back on track

[ParisInAKilt]

4 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

So - we should have left Saddam in charge and Bernie should have gave his backing to Trump

Nice deflection  

[phart]

18 minutes ago, ParisInAKilt said:

He did vote in favour of the Iraq liberation act 98 though 

He's voted for every military action apart from Iraq (which was a political decision) before and after. I'm just stating that he didn't vote for the Iraq war.

If the folk in favour of regime change were the folk who would have to enact it, it'd suddenly not become that important after all. Folk walked to Spain to fight facism. George Orwell traveled (got shot through the throat). Too many Hawks as it is.

[Ally Bongo]

58 minutes ago, ParisInAKilt said:

Nice deflection  

It's an argument we have had on here more than once and i dont think we need another 6-7 pages discussing the finer points of it again so i just thought i'd agree with you .....

[ParisInAKilt]

3 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

It's an argument we have had on here more than once and i dont think we need another 6-7 pages discussing the finer points of it again so i just thought i'd agree with you .....

Have we? 

Inventing up things I haven't claimed is an interesting way of claiming to agree with me. 

For the avoidance of any doubt, saying Sanders didn't need to endorce Clinton doesn't meant he had to endorce Trump. 

As for Iraq if you want to ignore the inconvenient facts about Saddam and his relationship with the US then so be it. 

[Ally Bongo]

5 minutes ago, ParisInAKilt said:

Have we? 

Inventing up things I haven't claimed is an interesting way of claiming to agree with me. 

For the avoidance of any doubt, saying Sanders didn't need to endorce Clinton doesn't meant he had to endorce Trump. 

As for Iraq if you want to ignore the inconvenient facts about Saddam and his relationship with the US then so be it. 

What message would it have sent out if Sanders hadnt endorsed Clinton ? He would have been just as well endorsing Trump dont you think ?

You seem to want to take this thread in several different directions with points that have very little to do with the price of cheese

Saddam had a relationship with the USA 

That relationship broke down  

 

 

 

[ParisInAKilt]

17 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

You seem to want to take this thread in several different directions with points that have very little to do with the price of cheese

 

 

 

Americans foreign policy history isn't relevant in this thread? Interesting. 

[ParisInAKilt]

19 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

Saddam had a relationship with the USA 

That relationship broke down  

 

 

 

And that's it? 

[ParisInAKilt]

24 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

What message would it have sent out if Sanders hadnt endorsed Clinton ? He would have been just as well endorsing Trump dont you think ?

He doesn't agree with her policies. 

No, don't follow that link. 

Its pretty straightforward to disagree with Clinton without agreeing with Trump. 

[phart]

Nah Saddam was given tacit approval by the ambassador (April Glaspie is her name, via James Baker) to attack Kuwait who were sideways drilling into their oil-fields. John Mearsheimer (heavy-hitting political scientist) wrote about it extensively with some other dude in a foreign policy paper i read. Basically saying they gave the "green light" for Saddam to attack.

[Eisegerwind]

39 minutes ago, phart said:

Nah Saddam was given tacit approval by the ambassador (April Glaspie is her name, via James Baker) to attack Kuwait who were sideways drilling into their oil-fields. John Mearsheimer (heavy-hitting political scientist) wrote about it extensively with some other dude in a foreign policy paper i read. Basically saying they gave the "green light" for Saddam to attack.

Yep, the Kuwait's had been given numerous warnings about the sideways drilling, a technique that was flatly denied as impossible and lies by UK  government.

[phart]

Just to expound further and give an example of the propaganda.

 

The video below is all lies, set up by a PR.

The Nayirah testimony was a false testimony given before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990 by a 15-year-old girl who provided only her first name, Nayirah. The testimony was widely publicized, and was cited numerous times by United States senators and President George H.W. Bush in their rationale to back Kuwait in the Gulf War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_(testimony)

 

[Ally Bongo]

The US relationship with Saddam has been going on since circa 1968

The US (which could have been predicted long before) ran out of options. 

It was too late to keep their nebs out

From the NY Times in 1997

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/23/opinion/its-time-to-think-straight-about-saddam.html

NICOSIA— Past equivocation weakens today's U.S. efforts, through the United Nations, to find and destroy Iraq's presumed terror weapons.

Saddam's foolhardy invasion of Kuwait enabled President George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker to assemble and lead a crushingly powerful military coalition to eject Saddam from Kuwait and remove the threat he posed to Western oil resources.

Today, of those coalition allies, only Britain seems willing to join in sending military might against Saddam again, if the UN arms inspectors are blocked.

Before the Russian-brokered return of the inspectors on Nov. 21, there was a hint of desperation in the way Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her aides vainly tried to cobble the old coalition back together. Even Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were unwilling to join U.S. military action, short of a direct military provocation by Saddam.

Past unwillingness to acknowledge the Saddam threat for what it is has seriously weakened the U.S. political posture in the region. Traditional foes of Iraq such as Syria, which opposed it in the Kuwait war, are drawing closer to Baghdad. With the stalling of the Arab-Israel peace process, they fear a future war with Israel in which restored Iraqi power could be crucial.

Jordan, squeezed between Saddam and a desire to preserve the battered 1994 peace treaty with Israel, joins the chorus demanding an easing of the UN embargoes on Iraq.

Weary Iraqi foes of Saddam appear to have suspended hope of establishing a U.S.-recognized Iraqi government in exile.

Turkish military occupation of areas of northern Iraq, in pursuit of dissident Kurds, indirectly further strengthens Saddam's power in the north, because it strengthens his temporary Kurdish allies and weakens his Kurdish adversaries.

Added to all this is a fundamental perception in the Middle East that Washington has never really been serious about removing Saddam from power. Evidence supports this, and much of it is found in the world of oil and the politics of oil.

U.S. concerns about safeguarding Western oil supplies were uppermost when the allied coalition went to war against Saddam in 1991 — just as they must be today, along with fear of his weapons. But in 1991, not all the sins were on Saddam's side.

Many oilmen in the West understood that Kuwait and others kept oil prices down by overproducing, which was one of Saddam's grievances.

Also, there is evidence that Kuwait was engaged in slant-drilling of Iraqi oil, under the border. As one oil executive put it, slant-drilling is enough to get you shot in Texas or Oklahoma.

True, the Kuwait-Iraq border was poorly demarcated.

A few days before the August 1990 Iraqi invasion, the Bush administration, according to Iraqi transcripts, had its ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, tell Saddam that the United States took "no position" on those boundaries. (The State Department, without contesting that version of the ambassador's instructions, said that she had cautioned Saddam against rash action against Kuwait.)

U.S. waffling with Saddam goes back much further. After attacking his unpopular neigbor and adversary Iran in 1980, which was then considered a greater threat to Western interests than Iraq, Saddam apparently believed that he had the hidden support of the Rea-gan and Bush administrations — until in the spring of 1990 he threatened Israel openly with attack by chemical weapons.

The United States gave Saddam critical military intelligence on Iran, generous loan guarantees, and sales of dual-use equipment such as helicopters. It encouraged or turned a blind eye to assistance from American private industry and Europe to Iraq's conventional and nuclear armament efforts, such as France's rental to Iraq of Super Etendard fighter-bombers to attack Iranian oil targets.

General Norman Schwarz-kopf, supreme allied commander in the Kuwait war, has confirmed that President Bush ordered him to end that war once Kuwait was freed, rather than follow through to Baghdad to destroy his regime.

Many in the Mideast see Saddam as the devil the United States loves to hate, whom successive U.S. administrations have preferred to keep in power in a weakened condition.

Every time the United States wounds him with a cruise missile attack or other minor military punishment, his domestic image grows and so does his neighbors' fear, which is changing into a kind of respect.

The UN embargoes help to satisfy these neighbors by keeping all but the small humanitarian Iraqi oil exports of the UN oil-for-food program (plus some oil smuggled to neighbors) off the world market. (This month Saddam suspended the oil-for-food exports, insisting that the United Nations must improve distribution of food and medicine.)

This serves the main ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia, by giving the Saudis what was, before the war and the emargoes, the Iraqi market share of more than 3 million barrels a day.

As long as Saddam or another Iraqi regime chooses to conceal evidence of terror weapons, no inspection is ever likely to discover all of it. The know-how, in any case, remains locked in the minds of Iraqi scientists and technicians and any foreign helpers.

Today there seem to be two possibilities, both unpleasant.

A first would be for the United States and Britain to acquiesce in the Russian-French-Chinese policy in the Security Council. Most Muslim allies of the United States, vexed by their perception that it does nothing to push Israel into a peace settlement with Syria or the Palestinians, support that policy. It amounts to tacit acceptance of Saddam's secret rearmament.

U.S. or British advocates of this, if there are any, might argue that the United States and Britain, with or without Israel, could undertake to destroy Saddam's arsenals and computer files through covert action.

The second possibility would be an all-out military offensive to forcibly remove Saddam and his thuggish family once and for all, and with them his despotic regime, from power.

No reasonable person can envy leaders who must make such hard choices. But is more waffling an option?

[phart]

The guy who wrote that article John K Cooley, i'm glad you're citing him, considering the books he wrote.

Especially this one which is reviewed

" John Cooley uncovered the truth about the west's creation of the extreme forces that attacked the US on 9/11. As an authority on the Middle East, he has been right so often he has few equals. In An Alliance Against Babylon: the US, Israel and Iraq, he breaks the silence on the pivotal role Israel has played in the west's imperial adventure in Iraq: indeed, how the tail in Tel Aviv has so often wagged the dog in Washington. "

As i'm citing him a bit when i'm talking about the second Iraq war.

 

 

Edited February 13, 2017 by phart

[ParisInAKilt]

Phart mentions propaganda and on cue Ally posts something from the New York Times.

[Eisegerwind]

15 minutes ago, Ally Bongo said:

The US relationship with Saddam has been going on since circa 1968

The US (which could have been predicted long before) ran out of options. 

It was too late to keep their nebs out

From the NY Times in 1997

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/23/opinion/its-time-to-think-straight-about-saddam.html

NICOSIA— Past equivocation weakens today's U.S. efforts, through the United Nations, to find and destroy Iraq's presumed terror weapons.

Saddam's foolhardy invasion of Kuwait enabled President George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker to assemble and lead a crushingly powerful military coalition to eject Saddam from Kuwait and remove the threat he posed to Western oil resources.

Today, of those coalition allies, only Britain seems willing to join in sending military might against Saddam again, if the UN arms inspectors are blocked.

Before the Russian-brokered return of the inspectors on Nov. 21, there was a hint of desperation in the way Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her aides vainly tried to cobble the old coalition back together. Even Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were unwilling to join U.S. military action, short of a direct military provocation by Saddam.

Past unwillingness to acknowledge the Saddam threat for what it is has seriously weakened the U.S. political posture in the region. Traditional foes of Iraq such as Syria, which opposed it in the Kuwait war, are drawing closer to Baghdad. With the stalling of the Arab-Israel peace process, they fear a future war with Israel in which restored Iraqi power could be crucial.

Jordan, squeezed between Saddam and a desire to preserve the battered 1994 peace treaty with Israel, joins the chorus demanding an easing of the UN embargoes on Iraq.

Weary Iraqi foes of Saddam appear to have suspended hope of establishing a U.S.-recognized Iraqi government in exile.

Turkish military occupation of areas of northern Iraq, in pursuit of dissident Kurds, indirectly further strengthens Saddam's power in the north, because it strengthens his temporary Kurdish allies and weakens his Kurdish adversaries.

Added to all this is a fundamental perception in the Middle East that Washington has never really been serious about removing Saddam from power. Evidence supports this, and much of it is found in the world of oil and the politics of oil.

U.S. concerns about safeguarding Western oil supplies were uppermost when the allied coalition went to war against Saddam in 1991 — just as they must be today, along with fear of his weapons. But in 1991, not all the sins were on Saddam's side.

Many oilmen in the West understood that Kuwait and others kept oil prices down by overproducing, which was one of Saddam's grievances.

Also, there is evidence that Kuwait was engaged in slant-drilling of Iraqi oil, under the border. As one oil executive put it, slant-drilling is enough to get you shot in Texas or Oklahoma.

True, the Kuwait-Iraq border was poorly demarcated.

A few days before the August 1990 Iraqi invasion, the Bush administration, according to Iraqi transcripts, had its ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, tell Saddam that the United States took "no position" on those boundaries. (The State Department, without contesting that version of the ambassador's instructions, said that she had cautioned Saddam against rash action against Kuwait.)

U.S. waffling with Saddam goes back much further. After attacking his unpopular neigbor and adversary Iran in 1980, which was then considered a greater threat to Western interests than Iraq, Saddam apparently believed that he had the hidden support of the Rea-gan and Bush administrations — until in the spring of 1990 he threatened Israel openly with attack by chemical weapons.

The United States gave Saddam critical military intelligence on Iran, generous loan guarantees, and sales of dual-use equipment such as helicopters. It encouraged or turned a blind eye to assistance from American private industry and Europe to Iraq's conventional and nuclear armament efforts, such as France's rental to Iraq of Super Etendard fighter-bombers to attack Iranian oil targets.

General Norman Schwarz-kopf, supreme allied commander in the Kuwait war, has confirmed that President Bush ordered him to end that war once Kuwait was freed, rather than follow through to Baghdad to destroy his regime.

Many in the Mideast see Saddam as the devil the United States loves to hate, whom successive U.S. administrations have preferred to keep in power in a weakened condition.

Every time the United States wounds him with a cruise missile attack or other minor military punishment, his domestic image grows and so does his neighbors' fear, which is changing into a kind of respect.

The UN embargoes help to satisfy these neighbors by keeping all but the small humanitarian Iraqi oil exports of the UN oil-for-food program (plus some oil smuggled to neighbors) off the world market. (This month Saddam suspended the oil-for-food exports, insisting that the United Nations must improve distribution of food and medicine.)

This serves the main ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia, by giving the Saudis what was, before the war and the emargoes, the Iraqi market share of more than 3 million barrels a day.

As long as Saddam or another Iraqi regime chooses to conceal evidence of terror weapons, no inspection is ever likely to discover all of it. The know-how, in any case, remains locked in the minds of Iraqi scientists and technicians and any foreign helpers.

Today there seem to be two possibilities, both unpleasant.

A first would be for the United States and Britain to acquiesce in the Russian-French-Chinese policy in the Security Council. Most Muslim allies of the United States, vexed by their perception that it does nothing to push Israel into a peace settlement with Syria or the Palestinians, support that policy. It amounts to tacit acceptance of Saddam's secret rearmament.

U.S. or British advocates of this, if there are any, might argue that the United States and Britain, with or without Israel, could undertake to destroy Saddam's arsenals and computer files through covert action.

The second possibility would be an all-out military offensive to forcibly remove Saddam and his thuggish family once and for all, and with them his despotic regime, from power.

No reasonable person can envy leaders who must make such hard choices. But is more waffling an option?

That's a very biased look at things. The 'thuggish and despotic regime' was running the most 'democratic' most liberal society in the middle east whilst keeping an array of religious extremists outside it's borders and suppressing similair religious extremists inside it's borders.

[Ally Bongo]

2 hours ago, Eisegerwind said:

That's a very biased look at things. The 'thuggish and despotic regime' was running the most 'democratic' most liberal society in the middle east whilst keeping an array of religious extremists outside it's borders and suppressing similair religious extremists inside it's borders.

"Anyone who says that - "ok Saddam was a bad guy but"  doesnt know what they are talking about.

You hear that said quite a lot

They dont know. They dont know what fascism feels like

They dont know what it's like to see families forced at gunpoint to applaud the torture and execution in public of their other family members

They dont know what it's like to see the 180,000 members of the Kurdish people, at a minimum, killed by poison gas in the Northern Provinces of Iraq

They dont know what it's like to see at least that number of Shia arabs killed in Southern Iraq

They dont know what it took anglo American, British American policy, to put a no fly zone from 1991 onwards over those two zones to make sure that those two genocides could not be replicated.

They dont know what it would be like to be a citizen of Kuwait or Iran seeing Saddam Hussein's army coming over the horizon attacking your civilians in that way, abolishing in one case the whole existance of a member state of the Arab League, the Islamic conference and the United Nations - abolishing it, annexing it, making it part of Iraq.

They didnt hear the speech from Saddam Hussein saying the only mistake he ever made was that he invaded Kuwait before he had finished the nuclear weapon - he should have done it the other way round - that he was making at the Tuweitha reactor which we found as a result of the Kuwait war when we werent even looking for it.

We lived at this man's permission for a long time

We lived by his warrant

Only his stupidity allowed us to be as complacent as we were and in the meantime fighters in Northern and Southern Iraq were fighting against a tyrant that we should have been fighting ourselves.

We have removed a keystone state in the middle east from the control and sole ownership of a psychopathic crime family who owned all of Iraq and treated it's people as if they were disposable citizens.

I remind you that this keystone state is a choke point on the gulf and an arterial carotid point of the World economy that cannot be left under the control of a fascistic mafia.

May i remind you further that it exists between the exorbitant sunni wahabi theocracy of Saudi Arabia and the no less exorbitant shia theocracy of Iran, that it is the keystone that allows us, yes us, to say if we can recuperate Iraq, if we can recuperate it's oil industry, if we can stop it being the private property of a psycopathic crime family we can not only help the Iraqis but we can undercut the monopoly/duopoly of shia Iran and Wahabi Saudi Arabia.

Does anyone think this is a matter of indifference ?

We have brought one of the World's great war criminals to justice and put him and his crime family along with complicit associates on trial in public in a country where until recently it was death, very slow death, to posess a cell phone or satellite dish

That we have undone what UNESCO calls the greatest crime against the human ecology ever committed - the destruction of the marshes of Southern Iraq, the oldest wetlands in the Middle East, the smoke and destruction of which could be seen from the space shuttle, so terrible was the environmental decay.

C Hitchens 2008

(before Iraq descended into that film The Crazies)