i r ur viros, nsaing yuz...,
2007-08-21 22:46:31
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no parallel...,
2007-08-22 20:44:25
we have met the enemy...:
Michael Cohen is thick, he sez:
facts are facts and the reality is that Saddam prevented the inspectors from doing their job.
Amazingly, Mr. Cohen has thus far failed to get the point that the inspectors were not doing their job, as they were preoccupied in their efforts to assassinate Saddam Hussein, which had the effect of undermining whatever inspecting they had remaining time for.
Complying with UN resolutions, you see, can be made considerably more difficult when one's life has been repeatedly threatened and government wracked by terrorist attacks and country bombed on a daily basis. One might even say UN resolutions become irrelevant when such egregious violations of the charter, nevermind the resolutions you are supposed to comply with, are being so routinely violated. The American and British governments were, sadly, preventing inspectors from doing their jobs.
This preposterous argument, in defense of the defensibility and high moral rectitude of pro-war arguments, is all the more absurd considering the Bush Administration - so concerned were they that the inspectors do their jobs - preventing inspectors from doing their jobs not once, but twice.
When the Bush administration blocked the unconditional return of inspectors in September 2002 and made their return conditional on the passage of an additional UN resolution repeating what all the previous UN resolutions said it prevented inspectors from doing their jobs for three months. Instead of making sure inspectors did their jobs the Bush administration began something akin to carpet bombing.
When the Bush administration invaded Iraq in March of 2003, once again, it prevented inspectors from doing their jobs, and continued to prevent them from doing their jobs once they were in control of the government.
Concluding, Cohen obliges that:
Saddam stopped complying with inspections because Madeleine Albright gave a very silly speech in March 1997 strongly hinting that sanctions against Iraq would never be lifted.
This very silly speech was a repetition of what was US and UK policy since 1991, as publically declared by George H.W. Bush many times and reiterated by Bill Clinton before he took office. The UNSC resolutions promised that economic sanctions would be lifted from Iraq once inspections certified it had been disarmed. The official policy of the United States and Britain was to promise Saddam that they would violate the same UN resolutions they were demanding Saddam comply with.
The ultimate result of these violations of the UNSC policies we ourselves wrote was a genocidal level of death and suffering, a result long ago predicted by the Department of Defense.
And that, my friends, is what Michael Cohen would surely agree is a justifiable and well defended moral case for war. Against us.
