It’s a shame you’ve decided to keep it to yourself for the most part. It sounds like a good read.

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The lack of preparedness of the country would not be helped by an increase in military spending, nor do I think it would be seriously reduced by a drop in some military expenditure.

I’m pretty sure that nobody in power is actually fighting on the battlefield on this issue. The only lasting way to stop terrorism would be to build up goodwill, something that has failed *spectacularly*. Defense spending seems like a stop-gap to buy time for a real solution. The cure I think is a lot closer to a live-and-let-live foreign policy.

Amen.

When we pass laws to that allow the government to rape what we used to regard as inalienable rights and protections, to allow us to “legally” torture, hold people indefinitely without charge, et cetera ad nauseaum – in short, when they manage to convince us to take away what makes us fundamentally different and (IMO) superior to any other nation in the history of our planet, they have indeed won a great victory.

“Those who sacrifice liberty to obtain temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”
– Ben Franklin

Osama’s greatest triumph wasn’t taking down some skyscrapers. It was making the citizens of one of the proudest nations on Earth cower in fear and regard one another with suspicion for the better part, now, of a decade, and it makes me sad.

All that I wrote came simply from my own curiosity. I wanted to know the truth behind the official government positions, so I did the research and wrote a 50+ page report, pretty much for myself, so I could understand what really happened and why. Over the years, I’ve made slight adjustments based on new information, which clarified things a bit more. I completely stand by the facts presented.

Nothing knocks the patriot air out of one’s lungs like the last thing you posted.

I’m curious, since this was a Clintonian policy, shouldn’t the various right wing chest pounders on this site come yelling for bringing him up on war crimes charges?

Would you be so kind as to site where you copied this information from? I’m curious what your sources are. If this is exactly as you present it, it’s hard to see how it can be justified. Albright’s statement that “it was worth it” is doubly confusing since, as the victims of a dictatorship, the civilians could not affect any change, regardless of how crippling we would make life for them (not that this is a morally defensible manner of attack, but even from a purely strategic stance, it makes absolutely no sense).

“So basically, George Bush sat on his hands for nearly seven years and naturally it’s Obama’s fault he hasn’t made this problem disappear in 15 months.”

This basically is my feeling on the subject when bringing it to politics. What was going on for 7 years and after spending billions and probably trillions on terrorism related costs that this is still not a fixed issue?

And I really don’t find Peggy Noonan’s ideas all that impressive but rather how she talks makes her appear more thoughtful than she really is.

“A reaction might take place as a result of the US government’s hitting Muslim civilians and executing more than 600,000 Muslim children in Iraq by preventing food and medicine from reaching them. So, the US is responsible for any reaction, because it extended its war against troops to [a war against] civilians.” Osama Bin Laden on CNN, 1997

What was this in reference to?

On May 11, 1996 Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State in the Clinton administration was asked by 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl about the reported 500,000+ Iraqi children who died in Iraq as a direct result of U.S. imposed sanctions. Her reply stunned many, “I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price was worth it.”

The history of the sanctions (rarely, if ever discussed in mainstream media) begins with the strategic bombings of critical infrastructure within Iraq during the 1st Gulf War. The U.S. dropped over 90,000 tons of bombs, intentionally destroying civilian infrastructure, including 18 of 20 electricity-generating plants and the water-pumping and sanitation systems. The bombings themselves were a direct violation of the Geneva Convention against the specific targeting of infrastructure “indispensable to the survival of the civilian population,” thus making them a war crime.

Recently released de-classified documents from the Defense Intelligence Agency revealed that the U.S. knew full well that Iraqi water needed purification with chlorine in order to avoid “epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis and typhoid.” Later documents revealed that the U.S.-imposed sanctions SPECIFICALLY embargoed the import of chlorine needed to purify the water systems. Additionally, the U.S. sanctions forbade the import of the parts needed to repair the damaged purification and sanitation systems.

The results of these actions are well documented. Colonel John A. Warner III wrote in Airpower Journal, “…as a result (of the destruction of these facilities), epidemics of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid broke out, leading to perhaps 100,000 civilian deaths and doubling the infant mortality rate.” Anupama Rao Singh, the United Nations Children’s Fund Representative in Baghdad observed that food shortages were virtually unknown in Iraq prior to what the State department admitted were the “toughest, most comprehensive sanctions in history.” Richard Garfield’s universally accepted mortality studies put the number of Iraq children killed because of the sanctions at 350,000. The Lancet study, for the British Medical Society, estimated it at 550,000. Denis Halliday, the U.N. coordinator in Iraq called the sanctions, “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq,” calling their implementation “genocide.” His resignation in 1998 in protest received little if any coverage by the U.S. corporate media.

The examples could go on for quite a while. If the Corey Chambliss’s of the world want to learn a lesson from 9/11, they need to research what caused 9/11. Changing our aggressive, imperialistic foreign policy would emasculate the fringe Islamic fundamentalists in the region, who pray on anti-American resentment and hopelessness as their biggest recruitment tool.

This would ultimately reduce anti-western terrorism to the level of a police matter, as opposed to a military matter.

Additionally, the trillions of dollars earmarked for “defense” (a euphemism for tax-subsidized corporate war profiteering) could be used to provide universal health care & free college educations to all U.S. citizens, lower the national debt, provide grants for medical and scientific research and development, provide much-needed jobs and infrastructure improvements, and so on. It’s a fiscally conservative concept. The problem is, neo-cons are only fiscally conservative when it comes to government spending on the public good, not waging war, where the sky is the limit and “deficits don’t matter.”

In any case, it’s a better plan than the usual imperialist warmongering strategy, which led directly to the 9/11 attacks and has killed thousands of American soldiers as well as hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens.