Kangaroo Court
 

Downside, I find you guilty of not doing your research on the Cellar or its members. You are hereby subject to perpetual taunting.

We are adjourned. :)

Thanks. I've always had a knack with ePeople :)

The title of the book Blowback is a techincal term the CIA employs to name the none too rare phenomenon of them supplying and training some resistance group in a foreign country, that group either serving thier purpose or not, the CIA withdrawing support and losing contact with that group, and finally the group using said training and weapons against American targets. The part that blows my mind is that fact that it happens often enough for there to be a name for it. And as a point of reference we run a nationally sponsored terroist training camp right here in the good old US of A, It used to be called the School of the Americas but as that name began to carry some rather negative connotations it was changed to Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC). Whining "Why us?" and the sanctimoniously deciding it must be something they want, addresses none of the actions that directly lead to terrorism. When they serve our purposes they are called freedom fighters, when they don't they're terrorists. Case in point: We gave the Taliban 40 million dollars just last spring for the eradication of poppy fields that the CIA had orginally started. There needs to be a fundamental shift in how the average american looks at the world and one in the way our leader operate in it. Nothing short of that is going to have any long term results.

I fully agree with the first part of this. I would have thought easier access to a variety of news sources on the 'net would make people smarter. But as they say, you can't fix stupid.

I'm not sure if our leaders can really change the way they operate, given the way our government structure is. Taking all the coverups and conspiracies out of it, I wonder if Bush might have been more aware of the possibilities if he didn't delegate so much. And I wonder if he takes more of a lead now in the aftermath of 9/11, though that doesn't appear to be the case.

This was a truly exellent post. This is the best part of it, I think. One person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist.

The question in my mind is CAN Bush take a greater leadership role? I don't know if he has the ability to do so. I was talking more of the cynical attitude of playing different groups off each other in order to gain the advantage for our country (or at least the business interests). I do understand that tough decisions sometimes need to be made, it just seems like we are always trying to get more out of any particular situation than we deserve.

Why Do People Hate the USA?
 

He's not my favorite political analyst but he's got a point here.

And in a photographic montage here, that was my point, too.

P.S. I don't know why I keep looking for this thread in Politics. I must remember: "There's no place like Home, there's no place like Home." -- Dorothy

If the answer is capitulating to anybody who might engage in nuclear terror against the US, I suppose we'd better get used to capitulating, because there's a *scrutload* of people out there willing to threaten that.

In fact, based on that philosophy, we should have surrendered to the Soviets back in 1962.

My country right or wrong.
 

Stephen Decatur, April 1816


John Quincy Adams, August 1, 1816

But is it really capitulating if we don't belong there? I don't like paying to protect the house of Saud, they aren't even the rightful rulers in the first place. And while bowing to terrorism is a mistake, if they are right on a point we should do the opposite just so it looks like we are being tough on terrorism.

As I recall, the US Air Force is there to keep the Iraqis out, not to prop up the princes, who were doing OK on thier own until Iraq invaded Kuwait.

That's what ticked bin Laden off, he figured that Hussein's invasion threat was his ticket back into the good graces of the Saudi rulers (who were his daddy's patrons) ,and when they decided the US was a better ally, he became an opponent of the Saudi regime, who subsequently froze his bank accounts and stripped him of his citizenship.

Bin Laden assumed his personal army would be welcome in Saudi after the Afghan war against the Soviets (financed by the US and with the blessings of the Saudis, as well as the Pakis).

Guess he was wrong....whoda thunk it?

If the Saudis had decided that bin Laden would be their savior, imagine how *that* would have played out (however unlikely a scenario that would have been).

Then you have to ask where did Saddam get his arms? Why us, of course. There is the problem, we are willing to pour money on anyone we think is on our side regardless of what they are doing to thier own people. And there is the answer to the orginial question...

"Us"? Are you perhaps thinking of the Iranians?

The vast preponderance of the stuff Saddam used on the Iranians, the Kuwatis and then on us was supplied by the Soviets, and paid for by the Iraqis themselves.

On a tangent, it's fascinating how as time goes on, fewer and fewer of the people engaging in political discourse actually *remeber* any of the the Cold War, and how totally fscking scary it was.

That's one reason 9/11 struck so many people to the core; we've routinely expected "thine alabaster cities" to remain "undimmed by human tears" ever since the US and the Soviets stepped back from the brink.

But the psychological impact of living every day in the quite reasonable fear that a limited or all-out global thermonuclear exchange could happen at almost any time has to be difficult to fully comprehend for those who weren't around then.

Sorry, you have it backwards. The arms you were thinking about were the ones we tried to trade for hostiges, but the reigm (sp?) that deposed the Shah was most definitely NOT our ally. A google yeilded this site in which the GAO found that we were in fact supplying Saddam.