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i beg a pardon ,but the most effective propoganda is simply a truth .

That or A lie told often enough becomes truth.

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Right,it's a typical fake war,rather closer to money stealing.The Soviet war in Afganistan was much more cheaper and bloody.

I actually can't tell from that what you mean. The Americans seem to be doing quite nicely compared to that war, which - correct me if I'm wrong - was among the greatest failures of SU, seeing that at a very great cost it didn't achieve practically anything except for destabilizing the region?

(BTW, the movie you are linking - this is not one of those patriotic/nationalist war movies, this time glorifying another mindless waste of lives in an attempt to export the communist world revolution? Also comments point out that the claim that no-one has ever conquered Afghanistan is not quite true. In addition to the Mongols, wasn't Alexander the Great one who did just that? And ... is the current war about conquering the country?)

Quote: Original post by dpadam450
The real truth about why may never be known. Nobody knows why we went to Iraq and Bush made dinner jokes "No weapons of mass destruction over here" (crowd and him laugh).

Bush knows why. Eventually the truth will come out. Unfortunately, by the time it does, the criminals who lied to justify the foregone decision to invade Iraq will all have died in their well feathered beds... I think the reason why the US invaded Iraq was because the President and Vice President at the time were raging cowards screaming in panic and flailing about wildly searching for a convenient punching bag.

Quote: Original post by dpadam450
Problem is though that we are in a 'fake' war in my opinion. A real fight is what Russia did when they invaded Georgia. You fight and tell civilians GTFO or your fault. In Afghanistan we pay for every house door we break and are trying to win the hearts of civilians. So if we aren't in a real war, because I see no reason too, I think we should leave.

Any war in which people die isn't fake and every war shouldn't be waged as a total war...



Although Obama said nothing about OBL last night, it seems to me that OBL must be captured before the US can leave Afghanistan.

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
Whole ethnic and religious groups are repressed, killed and forcibly segregated in other countries, e.g. Israel

Would you care to elaborate on that?

Quote: Original post by LessBread
I think the reason why the US invaded Iraq was because the President and Vice President at the time were raging cowards screaming in panic and flailing about wildly searching for a convenient punching bag.

We were already beating up on Afghanistan, so I don't know why a second punching bag would be necessary, if that's all Iraq was.

I agree with those who say that only a select few in the Bush administration know the real reasons, but I'm sure that oil played no small part. Who is profiting from Iraq's oil these days, anyway?

Rumsfeld wanted to prove his zany ideas about waging war, plenty of folks who had Bush's ear had been wanting to get Iraq "right" since the first Gulf war, daddy-issues Bush 43 could stick it to his father by taking out Saddam, military munitions makers and other contractors benefit greatly from an increased demand for their goods. And I'm sure there's more reasons I don't know about or could not even guess at, and I'll be damned if I can rank them in terms of relevancy.

Quote: Original post by BerwynIrish

Quote: Original post by LessBread
I think the reason why the US invaded Iraq was because the President and Vice President at the time were raging cowards screaming in panic and flailing about wildly searching for a convenient punching bag.

We were already beating up on Afghanistan, so I don't know why a second punching bag would be necessary, if that's all Iraq was.

They tore all the stuffing out of their first punching bag and needed to find another... [grin]

Quote: Original post by BerwynIrish
I agree with those who say that only a select few in the Bush administration know the real reasons, but I'm sure that oil played no small part. Who is profiting from Iraq's oil these days, anyway?

Oil Companies Look to the Future in Iraq (November 30, 2009)

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After months of secret negotiations between the Oil Ministry and the companies, two new deals and the completion of a third were announced in recent weeks. A consortium of Eni, an Italian oil company, Occidental and Korea Gas signed a preliminary agreement to develop the Zubayr field, which has an estimated 4.1 billion barrels of oil.

Shortly thereafter came the formal ratification of the only deal reached during the June auction, a partnership between British Petroleum and the China National Petroleum Company for Iraq’s Rumaila oil field, one of the largest in the world, with an estimated 17.8 billion barrels of oil.

Within days of that deal’s ratification, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell signed an initial contract to develop West Qurna, Iraq’s most sought-after field in part because it is believed to have at least 8.6 billion barrels of oil.

The government said it expected production from the three fields alone to vault Iraq’s output to 7 million barrels a day from 2.5 million barrels a day within six years, which would move it from the world’s 13th largest producer to the fourth, according to Department of Energy statistics.
...

See also: Did Big Oil Win the War in Iraq?

Quote: Original post by BerwynIrish
Rumsfeld wanted to prove his zany ideas about waging war, plenty of folks who had Bush's ear had been wanting to get Iraq "right" since the first Gulf war, daddy-issues Bush 43 could stick it to his father by taking out Saddam, military munitions makers and other contractors benefit greatly from an increased demand for their goods. And I'm sure there's more reasons I don't know about or could not even guess at, and I'll be damned if I can rank them in terms of relevancy.

Cheney wanted to re-establish the "Imperial Presidency" that was dismantled after Watergate, except he called it "The Unitary Executive".

Why Iraq? The State of Debate on the Motives for the War

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However, there is a broader sense in which we can understand the idea of an “oil motive” for war. The campaign against Saddam Hussein, this argument goes, arose not from the desire to control Iraq’s actual oil reserves, but from the threat Saddam supposedly posed to the stable flow of oil from the Gulf region as a whole. Arguments about an oil motive rest on much stronger ground when seen from this broader perspective. Although there is little evidence that control of Iraq’s oil was a main goal for the Bush war planners (rather than merely an anticipated collateral benefit), ensuring a continued oil supply from the Gulf region has been a longstanding U.S. strategic interest.
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More broadly, few aspects of the Iraq war have been more thoroughly discussed than neoconservatives’ role in promoting it. There can be little doubt that Israel-related concerns were central to the thinking of administration neoconservatives, such as Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and Elliott Abrams, and that these men played a significant role in advocating and shaping the war. However, several distinctions must be made when assessing an “Israel motive” for the Iraq war.
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But although there is scant evidence that the Israelis were strong war backers, it is also easy to understate their support. For one thing, the war seemed to enjoy much stronger support among leaders of the Likud Party—from whom U.S. neoconservatives often seem to take their cues—than among the Israeli political establishment as a whole. For instance, once and future prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli leader with the closest ties to neoconservatives, was an outspoken war supporter. [22] It is also undeniable that the Israeli political establishment threw its public support behind the campaign once the Bush administration made clear that war was inevitable.
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Afghanistan would not do. Former presidential counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke recalls a conversation with Rumsfeld shortly after the attacks: “Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq, and we all said, but, no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said there are lots of good targets in lots of places but Iraq had nothing to do with it.” [31]
...
We should also note, however, that this motive grew out of the other motives discussed above. 9/11 may have convinced the United States that it needed to send a message, but longstanding concerns about oil and Israel help explain why it was determined to send this message in the Middle East. If the Bush administration had simply intended to make an example of a terror-supporting country, there were several other regimes that would have made more logical targets; the administration’s pre-existing fixation upon Iraq was based on factors that had little to do with terrorism.
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As with the strategic preeminence motive, the democracy motive grew out of preexisting strategic concerns about oil and Israel. Many advocates supported democracy promotion in the Middle East not so much for its own sake but rather because they believed, following neoconservative-aligned Arabists like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, that only political liberalization could defuse the resentment that fueled terrorism. Implicit in this rationale was the assumption that the U.S. military presence in the region to protect oil supplies, and its unstinting support for Israel against the Palestinians—the two policies widely understood to be the largest sources of anti-American sentiment among Muslims—were non-negotiable.
...

Quote: Original post by Gil Grissom

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
Whole ethnic and religious groups are repressed, killed and forcibly segregated in other countries, e.g. Israel

Would you care to elaborate on that?

I don't want to go too off topic, as often the truth about Palestine is often simply branded as "anti Semitic", etc... So up-front, I'm not anti-Israel or anti-Jew (I do think Zionism is racist though), I just find it really sad that this particular conflict has gone on for half a century and has no resolution in sight.

For a history recap you can read Wikipedia, but quickly: The land on which the state of Israel is built used to be called The Palestinian Territories. At the end of WW2, the UN presented a plan to split the territories into two states - one state for Arabs, one state for Jews (who needed a place for post-holocaust refugees).
One side rejected the plan, but the other side went ahead and implemented part of it anyway by forcibly removing Arabs from their homes and claiming that land as belonging to "the Jewish people". They even collected all the possessions from these homes and redistributed them to their own people.

To this day, Palestinians still have their property stolen/destroyed at will if it is deemed in the interest of the state Israel, there's plenty of documented deliberate (and accidental) killings of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military (and for completeness, vice versa too), and any Palestinians lucky enough to be able to travel or live inside of Israel are stuck in apartheid -- they don't have access to the same services, they have to use different colored license plates so they can be easily discriminated against, and they're governed by martial law instead of the civil judicial system. In other words, they have no rights.

There's plenty of other examples of: intolerance (e.g. digging up the remains of Muhammad's relatives and thousands of other Muslims to build a "museum of tolerance"), human rights violations (e.g. using collective punishment) or breaches of treaties (e.g. using cluster bombs in residential areas), plus they actually do have chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and aren't afraid to use them.

This obviously doesn't compare to Saddam gassing villages, etc, but it's the kind of thing any modern democratic country should be ashamed of. Somehow though, everyone just turns a blind eye to it. The mainstream media (at least here and in the US) even goes as far as to always portray Israel as the innocent victim without ever explaining both sides of the story, i.e. *why* it is that so many people kill each other in those territories...

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
To this day, Palestinians still have their property stolen/destroyed at will if it is deemed in the interest of the state Israel, there's plenty of documented deliberate (and accidental) killings of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military

Do you have any recent examples of this in mind (not the accidental killings, obviously)?

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
and any Palestinians lucky enough to be able to travel or live inside of Israel are stuck in apartheid -- they don't have access to the same services, they have to use different colored license plates so they can be easily discriminated against, and they're governed by martial law instead of the civil judicial system. In other words, they have no rights.

Isn't that because the Palestinian state is not a part of Israel and thus palestinians are treated just like any other foreigners?

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
plus they actually do have chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and aren't afraid to use them.

Again, do you have a recent example of Israel using chemical/biological/nuclear weapons? If not, then what is this assertion based on?

Quote: Original post by Gil Grissom
Do you have any recent examples of [the Israeli military deliberately killing civilians] in mind?

No I didn't have any specific instances in mind because it's common knowledge.
A simple google search turns up a disturbing article from March this year as the first result. I'm sure you can even find some footage on youtube if that kind of thing is your bag.

Quote: The soldiers’ testimonies include accounts of an unarmed old woman being shot at a distance of 100 yards, a woman and her two children being killed after Israeli soldiers ordered them from their house into the line of fire of a sniper and soldiers clearing houses by shooting anyone they encountered on sight.

“That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy, who asked him why a company commander ordered an elderly woman to be shot.

Quote: Isn't [the discrimination against Palestinians] because the Palestinian state is not a part of Israel and thus palestinians are treated just like any other foreigners?

Firstly, your government doesn't even *recognise* the state of Palestine! They've even gone as far as to simple denounce the people who declared independence as "terrorists"...

Israel agreed to let the PA govern the occupied territories, but still assumes full control whenever they feel like it. The people who live in these areas are not Israeli citizens, but they are governed/controlled by Israel -- that's really not at all the same as "any other foreigner".

There are occupied territories where both Israelis and Palestinians live. These areas have two sets of infrastructure - two road systems (Israeli paved highways, raised above dirt roads for the Palestinians), two electricity networks, two justice systems...

Furthermore, Arabs who do actually have Israeli citizenship are legally discriminated against, which makes them second class citizens.

The word is apartheid.

Quote: Again, do you have a recent example of Israel using chemical/biological/nuclear weapons? If not, then what is this assertion based on?

I didn't say they've used them. I said they possess them.

They've traditionally been deliberately vague about their capabilities, but have made threats about "going to any length" to stop Iran from getting nukes, or to stop attacks on it's homeland. In my opinion, if you simultaneously say "you don't know how dangerous we are" and "we'll go to any length", that means you're willing to use your WMDs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction

Some more Wikipedia links, if you're actually interested in learning about the complexity of the problem (it really isn't as simple as the news makes it out to be):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Israel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Palestine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_the_apartheid_analogy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-occupied_territories
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_process_in_the_Israeli-Palestinian_conflict
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Return
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_National_Fund


Anyway, the point of bringing this up wasn't to dispel ignorance of the Palestinians plight. The point was the racial repression is tolerated when it's carried out by your allies, but it's abhorrent when carried out by your enemies...

[Edited by - Hodgman on December 2, 2009 9:02:05 PM]

This guy seems to have figured out why America's still in Afghanistan: Let us never forget just what's at stake in the war in Afghanistan: nothing less than the success of the war in Afghanistan.

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
No I didn't have any specific instances in mind because it's common knowledge.

Hmm, it's also common knowledge that Napoleon was short and that seasons are caused by Earth moving closer to or further away from the Sun. Doesn't make it true, though.

Quote: The soldiers’ testimonies include accounts of an unarmed old woman being shot at a distance of 100 yards, a woman and her two children being killed after Israeli soldiers ordered them from their house into the line of fire of a sniper

Sounds like an unfortunate mistake, pretty common in similar situations.

Quote: “That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy, who asked him why a company commander ordered an elderly woman to be shot.

So there are some bad people. In Australia, I bet there are a few rapists and murderers. You don't claim, based on that, that the Australian government rapes and kills australian civilians, do you?

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
Firstly, your government doesn't even *recognise* the state of Palestine! As far as your government is concerned, it's all Israel, which means these people were born and raised and still live in Israel. So by that definition, they're not even foreign!

That's not quite true. I'm not sure which government you are talking about, but if you mean US government, they did push for a fully independent Palestinian state for quite a while.

Also, I suggest that you decide first whether you consider palestinians to be a separate state or part of Israel. If you think they are a part of Israel, then you shouldn't object to israeli military going into Gaza any more you object to it going into Tel Aviv. And, of course, any demands of separatists should be illegal, and any terrorism should be punished according to israeli law. If you think palestinians live in a separate state, then it makes sense if you demand israeli military to withdraw, but it doesn't make any sense when you simultaneously demand palestinians to be eligible for israeli medical benefits, for example.

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
Israel agreed to let the PA govern the occupied territories, but still assumes full control whenever they feel like it. The people who live in these areas are not Israeli citizens, but they are governed/controlled by Israel -- that's really not at all the same as "any other foreigner".

I think it's quite similar. At the end of WWII, the allies assumed fill control of Germany. Very recently, the allies (a different set of allies this time) assumed full control of Iraq. (Well, not quite full, but then again, israeli control of Gaza is not full either.) That doesn't make neither germans nor iraqis americans, nor does it make them eligible for american medical insurance or other benefits.

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
Furthermore, Arabs who do actually have Israeli citizenship are legally discriminated against, which makes them second class citizens.

Would you care to provide an example of such legal discrimination?

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
I didn't say they've used them. I said they possess them.

Didn't you say "they aren't afraid to use them"?