This war is illegal!

rlb21079 · May 31, 2003

Quote from KymarFye:

<img src="http://home.pacbell.net/ckmcld/Caution_You_re_Not_as_Funny.gif" border="0" alt="">

Fair enough, you want serious. Here's serious. Your arguments for, and the arguments of others against the war in Iraq are futile. You have zero influence on the outcome. There are very few with substantial power either here or abroad, and it is among that select group of individuals that the true war is being waged. By participating in, "THIS war is good / THIS war is bad," debates one can see you have obviously deluded yourself into thinking your opinion matters. Well, my friend, neither your nor my opinion amounts to anything of value - and why? - because we have no power to make these opinions action.

What you might want to consider, is asking yourself, "what is?" What is the game being played here? Who has something to gain in this situation? When you can begin answering these questions with relative ease - and thankfully, this does not require very detailed information, because it is unavailable to us peonic individuals - you can then begin making decisions as to how you will or will not interact with this 'game.'

For now I am content with carving a profitable niche within the larger game. The reason is...no drum roll necessary... I have no better option. At this stage I have no clout and little wealth. I am following the actions of those in power not to form an opinion, but merely to stay aprised of what goes on around me. The reason is one day I may want to step up to the plate and take my swings and this process of analysis may prove useful. Maybe not. But until then I do not take personally what goes on in war or peace for it serves me no purpose. I feel no moral obligation because I have no way of effecting any kind of change. And, by removing myself in this way my vision of the, to continue the game analogy, playing field is much clearer.

So I ask you in all seriousness, why do you defend the war? How does this serve you in any way? Might it be a psychological desire for affiliation?

Yours Truly,
RLB

OPTIONAL777 · May 31, 2003

Full Story here: http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/1,,2003250508,00.html

My horror at PoW sex abuse pics
By JOHN SCOTT
and MICHAEL LEA

THE young mum who uncovered the Iraqi PoW sex snaps scandal said last night: âI felt sick to the stomach at those pictures.â

Kelly Tilford, 22, called police after developing a film in her photo shop.

The shocking pictures â revealed by The Sun yesterday â showed male Iraqis apparently forced into sexual positions by their British captors. In another a prisoner was suspended by rope from a fork-lift truck driven by a laughing Brit.

Fusilier Gary Bartlam, 18, of Tamworth, Staffs, is being grilled by the Armyâs top criminal investigator â amid fears the scandal is the tip of an iceberg.

Disgusted Kelly said she knew she had to call police after seeing the horrific scenes in Gulf War II snaps she had just developed.

Kelly said: âI immediately realised something terribly wrong had happened and something had to be done about it.

âI started shaking and was panicking in case the guy came back before I could raise the alarm.â

She spoke out last night as Bartlam, of the 1st Battalion the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, was in custody.

Four snaps on Bartlamâs roll of 25 exposures shocked the mum-of-two.

OPTIONAL777 · May 31, 2003

Actor Sean Penn Bashes Bush, Iraq War in Newspaper

Reuters
Friday, May 30, 2003; 8:16 PM

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Actor Sean Penn published a 4,000-word open letter in the front section of the New York Times on Friday defending his December trip to Baghdad and criticizing the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

Penn would not comment on why he chose to place the full-page advertisement, preferring to "let the essay speak for itself," the actor's publicist Mara Buxbaum said.

Penn wrote that he was moved by a sense of patriotism to question the underlying purpose of U.S. policy to force out Saddam Hussein, who he described as a "beast among men."

"Our flag has been waving, it seems, in servicing a regime change significantly benefiting U.S. corporations," said Penn, questioning whether rebuilding the nation would benefit the "people of either Iraq or the United States."

Penn said U.S. claims that an invasion was necessary over fears of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were false.

"We found that our secretary of state presented plagiarized and fictitious evidence of WMD's in Iraq to the American people and the world," he wrote. "Any responsible person must ask, in whose hands our flag now waves and what perception the world may have of it in those hands."

Penn's agent declined to comment on how much the advertisement cost. A Times spokeswoman said the standard price for a full page ad in that section of the newspaper is about $135,000.

"We see Bechtel. We see Halliburton. We see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld," Penn wrote. "We see dead Iraqi civilians. We see no WMDs. We see chaos in the Baghdad streets. But no WMDs. We see the disappearance of a murderous Iraqi dictator, who relented his struggle and ran without the use of WMDs."

Friday's piece was not the first Penn has placed in a major newspaper. He wrote an open letter to President Bush published in October 2002 by The Washington Post at a reported cost of $56,000, expressing his anti-war views and concerns about the administration's "intolerance of debate."

Penn wrote in the Times that following the October letter, "I was hit by a tidal wave of media misrepresentation, and even accusations of treason."

OPTIONAL777 · May 31, 2003

Straw, Powell had serious doubts over their Iraqi weapons claims

Secret transcript revealed

Dan Plesch and Richard Norton-Taylor
Saturday May 31, 2003
The Guardian

Jack Straw and his US counterpart, Colin Powell, privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programme at the very time they were publicly trumpeting it to get UN support for a war on Iraq, the Guardian has learned.

Their deep concerns about the intelligence - and about claims being made by their political bosses, Tony Blair and George Bush -emerged at a private meeting between the two men shortly before a crucial UN security council session on February 5.

The meeting took place at the Waldorf hotel in New York, where they discussed the growing diplomatic crisis. The exchange about the validity of their respective governments' intelligence reports on Iraq lasted less than 10 minutes, according to a diplomatic source who has read a transcript of the conversation.

The foreign secretary reportedly expressed concern that claims being made by Mr Blair and President Bush could not be proved. The problem, explained Mr Straw, was the lack of corroborative evidence to back up the claims.

Much of the intelligence were assumptions and assessments not supported by hard facts or other sources.

Mr Powell shared the concern about intelligence assessments, especially those being presented by the Pentagon's office of special plans set up by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz.

Mr Powell said he had all but "moved in" with US intelligence to prepare his briefings for the UN security council, according to the transcripts.

But he told Mr Straw he had come away from the meetings "apprehensive" about what he called, at best, circumstantial evidence highly tilted in favour of assessments drawn from them, rather than any actual raw intelligence.

Mr Powell told the foreign secretary he hoped the facts, when they came out, would not "explode in their faces".

What are called the "Waldorf transcripts" are being circulated in Nato diplomatic circles. It is not being revealed how the transcripts came to be made; however, they appear to have been leaked by diplomats who supported the war against Iraq even when the evidence about Saddam Hussein's programme of weapons of mass destruction was fuzzy, and who now believe they were lied to.

People circulating the transcripts call themselves "allied sources supportive of US war aims in Iraq at the time".

The transcripts will fuel the controversy in Britain and the US over claims that London and Washington distorted and exaggerated the intelligence assessments about Saddam's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programme.

An unnamed intelligence official told the BBC on Thursday that a key claim in the dossier on Iraq's weapons released by the British government last September - that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes of an order - was inserted on the instructions of officials in 10 Downing Street.

Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, admitted the claim was made by "a single source; it wasn't corroborated".

Speaking yesterday in Warsaw, the Polish capital, Mr Blair said the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in the dossier was "evidence the truth of which I have absolutely no doubt about at all".

He said he had consulted the heads of the security and intelligence services before emphatically denying that Downing Street had leaned on them to strengthen their assessment of the WMD threat in Iraq. He insisted he had "absolutely no doubt" that proof of banned weapons would eventually be found in Iraq. Whitehall sources make it clear they do not share the prime minister's optimism.

The Waldorf transcripts are all the more damaging given Mr Powell's dramatic 75-minute speech to the UN security council on February 5, when he presented declassified satellite images, and communications intercepts of what were purported to be conversations between Iraqi commanders, and held up a vial that, he said, could contain anthrax.

Evidence, he said, had come from "people who have risked their lives to let the world know what Saddam is really up to".

Some of the intelligence used by Mr Powell was provided by Britain.

The US secretary of state, who was praised by Mr Straw as having made a "most powerful and authoritative case", also drew links between al-Qaida and Iraq - a connection dismissed by British intelligence agencies. His speech did not persuade France, Germany and Russia, who stuck to their previous insistence that the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq should be given more time to do their job.

The Waldorf meeting took place a few days after Downing Street presented Mr Powell with a separate dossier on Iraq's banned weapons which he used to try to strengthen the impact of his UN speech.

A few days later, Downing Street admitted that much of its dossier was lifted from academic sources and included a plagiarised section written by an American PhD student.

Mr Wolfowitz set up the Pentagon's office of special plans to counter what he and his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, considered inadequate - and unwelcome - intelligence from the CIA.

He angered critics of the war this week in a Vanity Fair magazine interview in which he cited "bureaucratic reasons" for the White House focusing on Iraq's alleged arsenal as the reason for the war. In reality, a "huge" reason for the conflict was to enable the US to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia, he said.

Earlier in the week, Mr Rumsfeld suggested that Saddam might have destroyed such weapons before the war.

KymarFye · May 31, 2003

Quote from rlb21079:

Fair enough, you want serious. Here's serious. Your arguments for, and the arguments of others against the war in Iraq are futile. You have zero influence on the outcome. There are very few with substantial power either here or abroad, and it is among that select group of individuals that the true war is being waged.

***

So I ask you in all seriousness, why do you defend the war? How does this serve you in any way? Might it be a psychological desire for affiliation?

Yours Truly,
RLB

You appear to hold a simplistically mechanistic view on the role of public discourse in a democratic society. I believe that this subject is actually quite complex, and I don't believe it can be addressed very satisfactorily in a context such as this one. That said, I am certainly willing to concede that, in regard to the war in Iraq or to any current event of great interest, the unique influence of any individual citizen on the "outcome" is likely in relative terms to be minuscule in the extreme, less even the influence of a typical individual soldier on the outcome of a campaign, or, to draw a different parallel, the role of a single antibody in the fight against a disease. All the same, the army, the mass society, and the human immune system are the sums of all their minuscule parts, and do not exist apart from them.

Though functioning as one tiny, largely redundant synapse within a massive distributed social intelligence may not be highly gratifying to the ego, in my opinion it - acting as a responsible citizen - remains a valid and worthwhile undertaking. To adapt the calculus to your egocentric terms, it very much "serves me" to live in a society where questions of significance are debated widely and vigorously, and where the discussion continues and understandings evolve even after the particular relevant decisions have been made. Cultures which possess the capacity for such discussion, along with the customs, habits, and assumptions that make it possible, tend to succeed, both in providing intellectually richer and materially more comfortable lives to individuals, and also in military or economic competition with cultures where civil society is stifled.

Quite apart from the virtues and benefits of citizenship, for many of us debate on an interesting topic is a pleasure in itself - at least when one's opponents are capable of arguing their own positions intelligently. Such debate is worthwhile as an intellectual exercise, can lead and motivate participants to deepen their own understandings and reach new ones, and, at least in theory, can help improve discussion and interaction in whatever community (or virtual community) in other areas. Furthermore, because I believe that, in addition to being interesting and useful for discussion, the war was just and necessary, I am happy to defend it, here or wherever.

As I think about it, the reasons for participating in discussions on the war seem so rich and so obvious that it seems odd to have to defend them. That you cannot see them or, if you do see them, that you so readily discount them, says much about the social alienation that your posts so often express, and that appears associated with a life-philosophy designed to evade the choice that modern life puts before all of us as we mature - in a phrase of Theodor Adorno's, "to remain a child, or to become just another adult." It's typical of your approach also that you seem to presume that a more likely explanation for supporting the war in these discussions would be "a psychological desire for affiliation" - as though the existence of such a desire would somehow cheapen or contradict whatever alternative or parallel explanations there might be for taking and arguing a position.

If the only purpose in life that you can recognize is immediate self-aggrandizement and the direct, instrumental gratification of your own ego, then the contribution you make, either now or when, as you hopefully state, you someday possess "clout" and can "step up to the plate" to "take your swings," is unlikely to be a positive one. It would be easier to encourage you in your dreams if, even while languishing to this "peonic" level, you developed and exhibited some devotion to values and ideals that seemed worthy of support.

I will say this for you: At least you still show some interest in other people, in the larger world, and in, for lack of a better phrase, the search for truth, even if you tend to argue against or belittle others for showing the same interests. If you really believed your own arguments - implicitly that there is no purpose served by advancing discussions on internet message boards - you'd have no reason to make them. You might respond that you do not need reasons: You may merely be acting irrationally or non-rationally, in effect randomly, but, again, a tendency toward random, irrational acts is something that a responsible adult will tend to discourage and oppose, perhaps while seeking psychological explanations for such anti-social behavior. I would encourage you to begin the work yourself, not least for the sake of your own narrowly defined interests as an individual.

Serious enough for you?

alfonso · May 31, 2003

Quote from KymarFye:

Furthermore, because I believe that, in addition to being interesting and useful for discussion, the war was just and necessary, I am happy to defend it, here or wherever.

In that case, does it bother you at all that, as the evidence clearly shows, imo, the war was waged for reasons neither of justice nor of necessity?

KymarFye · May 31, 2003

Quote from alfonso:

In that case, does it bother you at all that, as the evidence clearly shows, imo, the war was waged for reasons neither of justice nor of necessity?

Obviously, I don't agree with your opinion at all. So, no, I'm not bothered. As for the WMD issue, none of us knows the whole story. If you do not know the truth, then calling someone a liar, as Trader55 has done, is itself dishonest. Every such claim is itself, in a sense, a lie.

In any event, as I've stated before, the existence of deliverable WMDs in Iraq on the day the war started or in the months or years previous was not to my mind a critical issue. If, as the picture is filled in, the credibility of some political leaders and intelligence agencies is permanently damaged, that will be unfortunate for them and for their ability to execute important tasks in the future. It may affect my views of them, but it will not affect my views about the justness and necessity of the war.

As for the more general question, it would be conceivable for a war to be just and necessary, but for those who directed or did the actual fighting to have done so for the wrong reasons. I might believe that a battle to remove an odious and dangerous regime while prosecuting a larger war was just and necessary, and support the action, even if I believed that some or all of those who were fighting it were only doing so because they had, say, financial or political or personal interests at stake.

We make compromises of this sort all the time in life and public affairs. If I'm suffering from a disease and go to a doctor, I might prefer to see one who honestly cared about me as an individual, but, if the antibiotic he prescribed for me actually cured me, then whether he did so because he liked me and was dedicated to serving others, or instead hated me and his profession and was merely going through the motions while collecting a paycheck, or didn't even believe it was the "right" thing to do medically or morally, would remain mostly irrelevant.

In an alternative context, in some situations it may be justifiable, even expected, for a strategist or politician to prevaricate about aspects of a military enterprise - that is, to do the right thing, for the right reasons, but for reasons other than those openly stated - though this can be a complicated issue.

OPTIONAL777 · May 31, 2003

Quote from KymarFye:

Obviously, I don't agree with your opinion at all. So, no, I'm not bothered. As for the WMD issue, none of us knows the whole story. If you do not know the truth, then calling someone a liar, as Trader55 has done, is itself dishonest. Every such claim is itself, in a sense, a lie.

In any event, as I've stated before, the existence of deliverable WMDs in Iraq on the day the war started or in the months or years previous was not to my mind a critical issue. If, as the picture is filled in, the credibility of some political leaders and intelligence agencies is permanently damaged, that will be unfortunate for them and for their ability to execute important tasks in the future. It may affect my views of them, but it will not affect my views about the justness and necessity of the war.

As for the more general question, it would be conceivable for a war to be just and necessary, but for those who directed or did the actual fighting to have done so for the wrong reasons. I might believe that a battle to remove an odious and dangerous regime while prosecuting a larger war was just and necessary, and support the action, even if I believed that some or all of those who were fighting it were only doing so because they had, say, financial or political or personal interests at stake. In some situations, it may be justifiable, even expected, for a strategist or politician to prevaricate about aspects of a military enterprise, though this can be a complicated issue.

We make compromises of this sort all the time in life and public affairs. If I'm suffering from a disease and go to a doctor, I might prefer to see one who honestly cared about me as an individual, but, if the antibiotic he prescribed for me actually cured me, then whether he did so because he liked me and was dedicated to serving others, or instead hated me and his profession and was merely going through the motions while collecting a paycheck, or didn't even believe it was the "right" thing to do medically or morally, would remain mostly irrelevant.

Do we know the whole story? No, of course not, so why not just suspend any judgment at this point on the matter?

However, that doesn't mean that after a reasonable time of search, we can't begin to form opinions on the real motivation and intelligence behind this operation.

How much time is reasonable? (and is it reasonable to keep out trained weapons inspectors that the UN wanted to bring in)

6 months? A year? Two years? When is the cutoff date?

Why no timetable? Why no timetable for plan for the establishment of an Iraqi based government?

Seems to me like this could go indefinitely, and some would just continue to defend the administration's actions due to their political bias and agenda.

Even in a legal trial, there is a limited time frame for discovery. Bush was adamant about his need not to allow further discovery by the weapons inspectors pre-war, but now he wants as much time as is needed?

KymarFye · May 31, 2003

Quote from OPTIONAL777:

Do we know the whole story? No, of course not, so why not just suspend any judgment at this point on the matter?

Yes, that's quite reasonable regarding the specifics of the WMD story. In the meantime, however, those of us who supported the war do not need to accept that some set of particular answers regarding the actual state of the Iraqi WMD program are critical or central to the larger issue.

However, that doesn't mean that after a reasonable time of search, we can't begin to form opinions on the real motivation and intelligence behind this operation.

How much time is reasonable? (and is it reasonable to keep out trained weapons inspectors that the UN wanted to bring in)

More...

It's been suggested by some individuals knowledgeable in the field that the proper role for UN inspectors, in keeping with their historical experience and actual expertise, might be to assess and potentially to verify the coalition's report at the end of the process.

6 months? A year? Two years? When is the cutoff date?

Why no timetable? Why no timetable for plan for the establishment of an Iraqi based government?

More...

What purpose would a "timetable" or "cutoff date" serve other than to give adversaries something to use against our interests? A cutoff date or timetable - for WMD investigations or establishment of an Iraqi government - just says to an opponent, "If I can hold on until that date, then I can win...." Far more effective to say to them, and to ourselves, "We will be here as long as it takes for us to do things right."

Seems to me like this could go indefinitely, and some would just continue to defend the administration's actions due to their political bias and agenda.

Even in a legal trial, there is a limited time frame for discovery. Bush was adamant about his need not to allow further discovery by the weapons inspectors pre-war, but now he wants as much time as is needed?

More...

I believe you're misreading the Bush policy, and conflating heterogenous issues. Before the war, the WMD issue relating to the inspectors was "full and immediate compliance," and the Iraqis' refusal to provide it. One key point was that the inspectors could go on inspecting for months if not years, even in large numbers, and never get much of anywhere without Iraqi cooperation. That putting the picture together after the war it taking longer than some might hope or expect is entirely consistent with this position.

alfonso · May 31, 2003

Obviously, I don't agree with your opinion at all. So, no, I'm not bothered. As for the WMD issue, none of us knows the whole story. If you do not know the truth, then calling someone a liar, as Trader55 has done, is itself dishonest. Every such claim is itself, in a sense, a lie.

You don't agree that the evidence suggests the war was not fought for reasons of justice and necessity?

I think it is patently it obvious that it was not.

Given that, regardless of whether you think the outcome of there being a war is good or not (you do, I don't), all I'm asking is if it bothers you at all that the war was, in all likelihood, prosecuted for other reasons?

In any event, as I've stated before, the existence of deliverable WMDs in Iraq on the day the war started or in the months or years previous was not to my mind a critical issue. If, as the picture is filled in, the credibility of some political leaders and intelligence agencies is permanently damaged, that will be unfortunate for them and for their ability to execute important tasks in the future. It may affect my views of them, but it will not affect my views about the justness and necessity of the war.

Well, that's your view, and your entitled to it. Hopefully you can understand for that the rest of the world, WMD was the issue, and, as such, we're rightly concerned.
You keep returning to the justice and necessity of this war, but I must admit to being stumped as to how you determine it to be either.

I don't want to be accused of holding up what took place to some magical theoretical standard no nation could ever live up to, but, with all the inherent weaknesses in a system of global governance, wouldn't even you agree that "justice", if the word is to live up it's meaning, would be what the consensus decision of the institutions set up to make those decisions determine it to be? As opposed to the whim of the tough guy on the block, which, as far as I can tell, is pretty much the anti-thesis to justice?

And necessity? With respect to the immediacy of the attack? Not possible to hold off one minute longer? Even now, with the advantage of hindsight, where it seems to me it was clear the war was quite unnecessary, at least the timing of it, you would still lean towards necessity?
The only way I can see to justify the necessity angle is to say, what's done is done, we're there now, so any threat, current or future, regardless of how real or immediate, has now been decidedly eliminated. I guess you could say that, but to me, the thousands of Iraqi lives it cost, and the hundreds of thousands more it ruined, were a pretty high price to pay for it.