In article <1t1oiv89ctte2fovel4q9apv1kfggdtpq1@4ax.com>, House Widdershins
says...

And why wont you answer David's question?

David? Who is David??

From Vietnam To Iraq by Edward S. Herman
We had to destroy Iraq in order to liberate it: some eerie similarities between
Iraq and Vietnam.
There are, of course, important differences between the US invasions of Vietnam
and Iraq. In Vietnam, from 1954 and till 1965 the United States simply tried to
impose an imported puppet government on a populace that supported a
deeply-rooted communist leadership and movement, and only in the last phase of
the US intervention did this country move to a full-scale direct invasion. That
invasion ultimately failed to conquer the target country, even after a
multi-year and devastating effort. By contrast, the ongoing invasion-conquest of
Iraq displaced an unpopular regime, although one that had been supported by the
invaders only 15-20 years back when its use of "weapons of mass destruction" was
serviceable to�and the weapons provided by�the current invaders. The Iraq
invasion effort also took little time to oust the target regime, although the
pacification process is just under way.
But there are also important similarities that reflect both the continuity in
character and policy of the imperial state managers and their agents of
propaganda and the minimal constraint on the US exercise of power in the global
system.  One important similarity is that both invasions represent cases of
aggression in the accepted meaning of the word, while in both cases the
propaganda agencies simply brushed aside or ignored such charges and usages,
considering them irrelevant to the operations of their leaders, just as the
right to exterminate the Native Americans and seize Mexican territory had been
unquestioned by their predecessors. In the case of Vietnam, while admitting that
its chosen and imposed minority government couldn�t compete politically with Ho
Chi Minh and the forces we were fighting, US officials and media charged that it
was Ho and the National Liberation Front (NLF) that were committing aggression
in resisting the rule of our puppet. We even coined the wonderful phrase
"internal aggression" to describe the resistance of the South Vietnamese to our
imposed government -- the people in the country were committing aggression,
whereas we were "defending South Vietnam," meaning protecting against its own
citizenry a government of our choosing. The media never challenged this
Orwellian usage.
Of course, US officials claimed to be fighting for
"self-determination" and "freedom" for the South Vietnamese who were committing
this internal aggression against our puppet. The reasoning here was never too
clear, but it ran along this line: people would never choose communism freely,
so that those who did make that choice were surely brainwashed, and they would
want the rule of our puppet if they were properly instructed, which those who
survived our onslaught would have been if we had won. It didn�t work out despite
our killing vast numbers, but the mainstream media never doubted that we were
fighting the good fight, for self-determination and freedom. They never blanched
at "internal aggression," and only got very unhappy when we couldn�t pull it
off, the costs (to us) turning out to be excessive.
The media also never blanched at the fact that the US-chosen leader of South
Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, was an expatriate who was imported directly from the
United States, and who US officials as well as Diem himself recognized as having
no significant support in the country he was assigned to lead.  The recent US
import of Ahmed Chalabi following its military victory, a man who had not set
foot in Iraq for 45 years, but who is apparently prized by Vice President Cheney
and targeted for a leadership role by the conquerors, is in a great tradition of
backyard "good neighbor"�as well as Vietnam�policy.
Bush and Blair have committed an even more straightforward aggression in Iraq, a
case as clear as Mussolini�s attack on Ethiopia in 1936 or Hitler�s invasion of
Poland in 1939, with an armed invasion of conquest against a small, distant
country that posed no threat to the aggressors, who were unable even to get a
Security Council legal cover for their attack despite bribery and intense
arm-twisting. It goes almost without saying that the mainstream media are no
more able to call this attack aggression than the Italian and German media of
the 1930s called their attacks by their right name.
Another similarity between the Vietnam and Iraq invasions is the brazenness with
which the United States ignored international opposition and brushed aside
attempts to settle the conflicts by means other than violence. In Vietnam, the
United States ran roughshod over the settlement terms of the Geneva Accord of
1954, imposed its own tyranny on the southern half of Vietnam, and then, when
this puppet regime faltered, disregarded numerous UN, NLF and allied attempts at
a compromise solution in favor of full-scale invasion and aggression. In the
Iraq case, the United States, which had appeased Saddam Hussein almost without
limit prior to his invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, thereafter insisted on
aggressive and genocidal sanctions, and, finally, carried out an aggression to
accomplish "regime change" against the will of the bullied and threatened
Security Council and the vast global majority.
In the case of both Vietnam and Iraq, the "international community" failed to
halt the aggressions or to penalize the aggressor in any way. In the case of
Vietnam, Japan and South Korea were greatly enriched as suppliers of the US
invasion-occupation, and no boycotts or severed relationships were imposed by
anybody. (Such penalties were imposed on the Soviet Union after it shot down a
Korean civilian airliner in 1983, but not on the United States even after it
invaded Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, devastating the region and killing
millions.) The UN General Assembly passed a resolution against the US use of
chemical warfare against Vietnam by an 83 to 3 vote in 1969, but this was never
translated into policy action by any member of the international community.
After the war, the United States boycotted its victim for 18 years, with the
cooperation of the international community, including the international
financial institutions. The World Bank, which maintained a generous loan and
gift program on behalf of dictator Suharto�s Indonesia throughout the years of
its genocidal invasion and occupation of East Timor, supported the US boycott of
Vietnam, making clear the political basis of its lending operations.
This same subservience to US power was clearly observable in the international
community�s handling of the invasion of Iraq and its preliminaries. The UN had
allowed itself to be used by the United States and Britain from 1991 through
February 2003 in an inspections-sanctions regime that was both fraudulent and
genocidal. The fraudulence flowed from the fact that the inspections were used
by the United States not just to remove Saddam Hussein�s weapons of mass
destruction�the nominal objective and the one written into the inspections
agreement�but to punish him and force him out in "regime change"�the real aim,
openly reiterated by US officials, but with no effect on the willingness of the
UN and international community to support the inspections system. It was also
evident in the complete failure of the UN to extend the removal of weapons of
mass destruction to Israel, as was also called for in Security Council
Resolution 687. The United States disapproved that part of the agreement,
therefore it was ignored. Meanwhile, it could use alleged deficiencies in the
inspections regime to enforce sanctions on Iraq that killed over a million Iraqi
civilians. In the end, when the United States could not get Security Council
approval for an invasion, it did it anyway in straightforward violation of the
UN Charter.
As in the case of the Vietnam War invasion, the UN and international community
not only failed to stop the invasion of Iraq, they took no actions to penalize
the aggressor. In fact, the UN has been cooperating with the aggressor in
planning for joint operations in the conquered state, so the UN is regaining a
modicum of "relevance" as collaborator in picking up the pieces broken in the
aggression and giving it de facto international sanction.
US officials and their supportive propaganda system claimed that our benevolent
aims in Vietnam went beyond merely defeating "internal aggression," and included
allowing the Vietnamese the right to "self-determination." If we seemed to be
fighting against self-determination because our puppet was exceedingly unpopular
and admitted an inability to compete with the communists on a purely political
basis, this was because the people there didn�t know their own interests and
minds, which US politicians and military officials across the Pacific Ocean did
know. So we had to "destroy the town [country] in order to save it," in the most
famous line of official-military lunacies coming out of that war of aggression
and mass killing. (Second best is the words of the banner hung over the Vietnam
military camp run by General George Patton Jr.: "Killing is our business, and
business is good.")
In the case of Iraq as well, officials and pundits naturally claimed that the
invasion had benevolent goals, and had nothing to do with oil, or a desire to
dominate the oil-rich Middle East, or to serve Israeli (and God�s own)
interests.  No, it was to "disarm" Saddam Hussein, and to instill respect for
Security Council rulings. In the actual invasion phase of US-British operations,
as it became clearer that the missing weapons of mass destruction were not going
to be used or found, the stress shifted to the desire to free the oppressed
Iraqis. The appropriate revision of the Vietnam formulation to make it current
is: "We had to destroy Iraq in order to liberate it." You may be sure the media
have not dwelt on the US role in bringing the demon into power or its support
for him before August 1990; or the US role in the mass killing by the "sanctions
of mass destruction" imposed between 1991 and 2003 of the people we are now
"liberating." Nor will they spend much time on the issue of Saddam�s threatening
weapons of mass destruction that supposedly justified the invasion earlier�or on
the disrespect for the UN Charter and Security Council rulings displayed in the
invasion itself, or in the failure to demand respect for UN rulings on Israel,
or the absence of any concern for "liberating" the Palestinians in the occupied
territories.
Both the Vietnam and Iraq invasions were characterized by an enormous imbalance
of forces and the use by the United States of massive firepower and highly
civilian-destructive weapons, including a number that are considered "weapons of
mass destruction." The aim in both wars was to keep US casualties low, for
domestic political reasons, and capital intensive war was the means. But such
means tend to be at the expense of heavy civilian casualties in target states.
It is for this reason that the Pentagon has been eager to keep reporters
out�maybe even killing a few of them "accidentally" as a warning on the costs of
irresponsible journalism�or, under pressure and second best, to "imbed" them
with troops, bonding them with the soldiers and keeping them under better
discipline.
During the Vietnam War the United States used vast quantities of napalm,
phosphorus-based bombs, cluster bombs, flechettes, heavy bombs with great
destructive power, poison gas, and chemical warfare against forest cover and
against rice crops under a program called "Operation Ranch Hand." Many of these
weapons were "improved" over the course of the war, which served as a helpful
testing ground for the Pentagon and means of enhancing weapons efficiency. The
use of several of them, like gas and chemicals, were clearly in violation of
international law, and others were arguably so.  But just as there was no
penalty for carrying out a war of aggression, the greatest of all war crimes, so
naturally there were no penalties for using illegal weapons against a
defenseless peasant society.
In all recent US wars this country has used depleted uranium, as well as
ever-improving cluster bombs, and highly destructive ton-or-more bombs. Depleted
uranium is a radioactive "dirty" weapon that poses a serious health threat to
civilians in the target areas, as well as soldiers, and its use is almost surely
a violation of international law. But the Pentagon likes it, the United States
uses it, and therefore the media and "international community" ignore its use.
It was used in Iraq, along with cluster bombs and big bombs, against another
enemy without an air force. Let us hope that the Pentagon was able to learn from
this further testing ground to produce even more efficient dirty and cluster
bombs in the next round of its civilizing mission.
In Vietnam, the United States was fighting not only internal aggression but
"terrorism" by the internal aggressors. The latter would not fight fair, and
after experiencing US weaponry, instead of standing up to be shot or bombed they
used all kinds of guerilla tricks that reduced the always unfavorable ratio of
Vietnamese to US military deaths (maybe from 50 to 1 to 20 to 1). These tricks,
plus the fact that they would kill Vietnamese collaborators, made them
"terrorists,� whereas the US use of napalm, heavy artillery and B-52s on
"suspected Vietcong villages" or Phoenix mission killer squads was counterterror
and a response to these people�s outrageous refusal to recognize our right to
choose their leaders. This same usage quickly entered the 2003 Iraq invasion
terminology, with the paramilitary forces and occasional suicide bombers labeled
terrorists; the invaders merely the "allies" and "coalition" warriors blasting
their way through Iraq in assaults and mopping up operations. No terror here
even if vast numbers were in terror, by the same rule that bars the use of the
word aggression and the same power that makes the aggression another accepted
"fact on the ground."
The killing of civilians was more massive in Vietnam than in the invasion of
Iraq in March-April 2003, in large part because the resistance was far greater
in Vietnam and the terrain more difficult, and the war went on for years; but
there was also more killing because global attention and access to the victims
was less in Vietnam, especially in the south controlled by the United States and
its puppet regime (which is why napalm was used only in the south, against the
people we were allegedly saving from aggression). In both cases the slaughter of
target country soldiers by hi-tech weaponry was huge: over the years much of the
finest Vietnamese manhood was mowed down or destroyed in ruthless bombing raids,
just as many thousands of young Iraqi soldiers were mowed down trying to use
small arms against enormous artillery and air firepower. The Iraqi imbalance
even moved some US soldiers: "They�re just dying," said Brigadier General Louis
Weber, commenting on the fact that one brigade killed at least 1,000 Iraqis by
direct fire alone on a single raid into Baghdad. "At the Karbala Gap the Iraqis
put up a good fight, but to no avail because we had the firepower. It was way
too easy." (Staff Sergeant Ira Mack). "For lack of a better word, I feel almost
guilty about the massacre. We wasted a lot of people. It makes you wonder how
many were innocent [sic]. It takes away some of the pride. We won, but at what
cost?" (A soldier privately, in the Christian Science Monitor, April 11, 2002).
This is a continuation of a long Western imperialist tradition. In his study of
The Social History of the Machine Gun [Pantheon: 1975], John Ellis notes how "In
Africa, automatic weapons were used to support the seizure of millions of square
miles of land and to discipline those unfortunates who wished to eschew the
benefits of European civilization." The African fighters, no matter how brave,
were unable to cope, so that at Omdurman, for example, the ratio of casualties
was 28 British and 20 of their allies to 11,000 Dervish dead. In the Iraq
invasion of 2003, the ratio of military personnel casualties was some 150
US-British dead to unknown thousands of Iraqi soldiers, probably somewhere
between 10-20,000, so the ratio was somewhat lower than at Omdurman, but still
staggeringly unbalanced in favor of the technologically advanced imperialism.
Ellis points out that the ability to kill vast numbers of Africans (and Asians,
etc.) and seize their lands rested heavily on the belief "that Africans were not
quite human, and therefore beyond the pale of Imperialist morality. Even so,
consciences could be mollified yet more if they quietly ignored the fact that
the breathtaking victories of the British were largely attributable to vastly
superior firepower."
Ellis also notes that the pages of the journals of the day were remarkably free
of any "pictures of machine guns actually in action against the natives." The
journalists of that day preferred to focus on the "doughty heroes. Nobody wished
to know about the real reasons for their success." Does that sound familiar?





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From:         Wider Anal Sham

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From: House Widdershins <sinistre@concentric.net>
Organization: Concentric Internet Services

This will likely be my final post to usenet. 

You're a proven liar.  You've posted hundreds of times since then!

......kiss my ass....   

NO WIDER SHAM, NO!!