In the months before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and his senior officials spoke of preserving Iraq's"patrimony" for the Iraqi people. At a time when talking about Iraqi oil was taboo, what he meant by patrimony was exactly that -- Iraqi oil. In their"joint statement on Iraq's future" of April 8, 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair declared,"We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq's natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit."[1] In this they were true to their word. Among the few places American soldiers actually did guard during and in the wake of their invasion were oil fields and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. But the real Iraqi patrimony, that invaluable human inheritance of thousands of years, was another matter. At a time when American pundits were warning of a future" clash of civilizations," our occupation forces were letting perhaps the greatest of all human patrimonies be looted and smashed.

There have been many dispiriting sights on TV since George Bush launched his ill-starred war on Iraq -- the pictures from Abu Ghraib, Fallujah laid waste, American soldiers kicking down the doors of private homes and pointing assault rifles at women and children. But few have reverberated historically like the looting of Baghdad's museum -- or been forgotten more quickly in this country.

Teaching the Iraqis about the Untidiness of History

In archaeological circles, Iraq is known as"the cradle of civilization," with a record of culture going back more than 7,000 years. William R. Polk, the founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, says,"It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and, above all developed the skill of writing."[2] No other places in the Bible except for Israel have more history and prophecy associated with them than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer), and Mesopotamia -- different names for the territory that the British around the time of World War I began to call"Iraq," using the old Arab term for the lands of the former Turkish enclave of Mesopotamia (in Greek:"between the [Tigris and Eurphrates] rivers").[3] Most of the early books of Genesis are set in Iraq (see, for instance, Genesis 10:10, 11:31; also Daniel 1-4; II Kings 24).

The best-known of the civilizations that make up Iraq's cultural heritage are the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sassanids, and Muslims. On April 10, 2003, in a television address, President Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people are"the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity."[4.] Only two days later, under the complacent eyes of the U.S. Army, the Iraqis would begin to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning.

In September 2004, in one of the few self-critical reports to come out of Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication wrote:"The larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended."[5] Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the indifference -- even the glee -- shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward the looting on April 11 and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning on April 14, 2003, of the National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowments. These events were, according to Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist,"the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years." Eleanor Robson of All Souls College, Oxford, said,"You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale."[6] Yet Secretary Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game and shrugged it off with the comment that"Freedom's untidy. . . . Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes."[7]

The Baghdad archaeological museum has long been regarded as perhaps the richest of all such institutions in the Middle East. It is difficult to say with precision what was lost there in those catastrophic April days in 2003 because up-to-date inventories of its holdings, many never even described in archaeological journals, were also destroyed by the looters or were incomplete thanks to conditions in Baghdad after the Gulf War of 1991. One of the best records, however partial, of its holdings is the catalog of items the museum lent in 1988 to an exhibition held in Japan's ancient capital of Nara entitled Silk Road Civilizations. But, as one museum official said to John Burns of the New York Times after the looting,"All gone, all gone. All gone in two days."[8]

A single, beautifully illustrated, indispensable book edited by Milbry Park and Angela M.H. Schuster, The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), represents the heartbreaking attempt of over a dozen archaeological specialists on ancient Iraq to specify what was in the museum before the catastrophe, where those objects had been excavated, and the condition of those few thousand items that have been recovered. The editors and authors have dedicated a portion of the royalties from this book to the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.

At a conference on art crimes held in London a year after the disaster, the British Museum's John Curtis reported that at least half of the forty most important stolen objects had not been retrieved and that of some 15,000 items looted from the museum's showcases and storerooms about 8,000 had yet to be traced. Its entire collection of 5,800 cylinder seals and clay tablets, many containing cuneiform writing and other inscriptions some of which go back to the earliest discoveries of writing itself, was stolen.[9] Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the artifacts have been recovered in Iraq, and over a thousand have been confiscated in the United States.[10] Curtis noted that random checks of Western soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the U.S. then found more. Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled in from Iraq; in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland, 250. Lesser numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad.

The 616 pieces that form the famous collection of"Nimrud gold," excavated by the Iraqis in the late 1980s from the tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, a few miles southeast of Mosul, were saved, but only because the museum had secretly moved them to the subterranean vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq at the time of the first Gulf War. By the time the Americans got around to protecting the bank in 2003, its building was a burnt-out shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it. Nonetheless, the underground compartments and their contents survived undamaged. On July 3, 2003, a small portion of the Nimrud holdings was put on display for a few hours, allowing a handful of Iraqi officials to see them for the first time since 1990.[11]

The torching of books and manuscripts in the Library of Korans and the National Library was in itself a historical disaster of the first order. Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and the old royal archives concerning the creation of Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto Márquez, the Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal de La Destrucción de Los Libros (2004), about a million books and ten million documents were destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003.[12] Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent of the Independent of London, was in Baghdad the day of the fires. He rushed to the offices of the U.S. Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau and gave the officer on duty precise map locations for the two archives and their names in Arabic and English, and pointed out that the smoke could be seen from three miles away. The officer shouted to a colleague,"This guy says some biblical library is on fire," but the Americans did nothing to try to put out the flames.[13]

The Burger King of Ur

Given the black market value of ancient art objects, U.S. military leaders had been warned that the looting of all thirteen national museums throughout the country would be a particularly grave danger in the days after they captured Baghdad and took control of Iraq. In the chaos that followed the Gulf War of 1991, vandals had stolen about 4,000 objects from nine different regional museums. In monetary terms, the illegal trade in antiquities is the third most lucrative form of international trade globally, exceeded only by drug smuggling and arms sales.[14] Given the richness of Iraq's past, there are also over 10,000 significant archaeological sites scattered across the country, only some 1,500 of which have been studied. Following the Gulf War, a number of them were illegally excavated and their artifacts sold to unscrupulous international collectors in Western countries and Japan. All this was known to American commanders.

In January 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, an American delegation of scholars, museum directors, art collectors, and antiquities dealers met with officials at the Pentagon to discuss the forthcoming invasion. They specifically warned that Baghdad's National Museum was the single most important site in the country. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute said,"I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected."[15] Gibson went back to the Pentagon twice to discuss the dangers, and he and his colleagues sent several e-mail reminders to military officers in the weeks before the war began. However, a more ominous indicator of things to come was reported in the April 14, 2003, London Guardian: Rich American collectors with connections to the White House were busy"persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq's heritage by prevention of sales abroad." On January 24, 2003, some sixty New York-based collectors and dealers organized themselves into a new group called the American Council for Cultural Policy and met with Bush administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws.[16] Opening up private trade in Iraqi artifacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they could receive in Iraq.

The main international legal safeguard for historically and humanistically important institutions and sites is the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed on May 14, 1954. The U.S. is not a party to that convention, primarily because, during the Cold War, it feared that the treaty might restrict its freedom to engage in nuclear war; but during the 1991 Gulf War the elder Bush's administration accepted the convention's rules and abided by a"no-fire target list" of places where valuable cultural items were known to exist.[17] UNESCO and other guardians of cultural artifacts expected the younger Bush's administration to follow the same procedures in the 2003 war.

Moreover, on March 26, 2003, the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), headed by Lt. Gen. (ret.) Jay Garner -- the civil authority the U.S. had set up for the moment hostilities ceased -- sent to all senior U.S. commanders a list of sixteen institutions that"merit securing as soon as possible to prevent further damage, destruction, and/or pilferage of records and assets." The five-page memo dispatched two weeks before the fall of Baghdad also said,"Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures" and that"looters should be arrested/detained." First on Gen. Garner's list of places to protect was the Iraqi Central Bank, which is now a ruin; second was the Museum of Antiquities. Sixteenth was the Oil Ministry, the only place that U.S. forces occupying Baghdad actually defended. Martin Sullivan, chair of the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for the previous eight years, and Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and a member of the committee, both resigned to protest the failure of CENTCOM to obey orders. Sullivan said it was"inexcusable" that the museum should not have had the same priority as the Oil Ministry.[18]

As we now know, the American forces made no effort to prevent the looting of the great cultural institutions of Iraq, its soldiers simply watched vandals enter and torch the buildings. Said Arjomand, an editor of the journal Studies on Persianate Societies and a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote,"Our troops, who have been proudly guarding the Oil Ministry, where no window is broken, deliberately condoned these horrendous events."[19] American commanders claim that, to the contrary, they were too busy fighting and had too few troops to protect the museum and libraries. However, this seems to be an unlikely explanation. During the battle for Baghdad, the U.S. military was perfectly willing to dispatch some 2,000 troops to secure northern Iraq's oilfields, and their record on antiquities did not improve when the fighting subsided. At the 6,000-year-old Sumerian city of Ur with its massive ziggurat, or stepped temple-tower (built in the period 2112 - 2095 B.C. and restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century B.C.), the Marines spray-painted their motto,"Semper Fi" (semper fidelis, always faithful) onto its walls.[20] The military then made the monument"off limits" to everyone in order to disguise the desecration that had occurred there, including the looting by U.S. soldiers of clay bricks used in the construction of the ancient buildings.

Until April 2003, the area around Ur, in the environs of Nasiriyah, was remote and sacrosanct. However, the U.S. military chose the land immediately adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways measuring 12,000 and 9,700 feet respectively and four satellite camps. In the process, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truckloads of dirt in order to build 350,000 square feet of hangars and other facilities for aircraft and Predator unmanned drones. They completely ruined the area, the literal heartland of human civilization, for any further archaeological research or future tourism. On October 24, 2003, according to the Global Security Organization, the Army and Air Force built its own modern ziggurat. It"opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility, co-located with [a] . . . Pizza Hut, provides another Burger King restaurant so that more service men and women serving in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget about the task at hand in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent that takes them back home."[21]

The great British archaeologist, Sir Max Mallowan (husband of Agatha Christie), who pioneered the excavations at Ur, Nineveh, and Nimrud, quotes some classical advice that the Americans might have been wise to heed:"There was danger in disturbing ancient monuments. . . . It was both wise and historically important to reverence the legacies of ancient times. Ur was a city infested with ghosts of the past and it was prudent to appease them."[22]

The American record elsewhere in Iraq is no better. At Babylon, American and Polish forces built a military depot, despite objections from archaeologists. John Curtis, the British Museum's authority on Iraq's many archaeological sites, reported on a visit in December 2004 that he saw" cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate" and a"2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicles."[23] Other observers say that the dust stirred up by U.S. helicopters has sandblasted the fragile brick façade of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 B.C.[24] The archaeologist Zainab Bahrani reports,"Between May and August 2004, the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both of the sixth century B.C., collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters. Nearby, heavy machines and vehicles stand parked on the remains of a Greek theater from the era of Alexander of Macedon [Alexander the Great]."[25]

And none of this even begins to deal with the massive, ongoing looting of historical sites across Iraq by freelance grave and antiquities robbers, preparing to stock the living rooms of western collectors. The unceasing chaos and lack of security brought to Iraq in the wake of our invasion have meant that a future peaceful Iraq may hardly have a patrimony to display. It is no small accomplishment of the Bush administration to have plunged the cradle of the human past into the same sort of chaos and lack of security as the Iraqi present. If amnesia is bliss, then the fate of Iraq's antiquities represents a kind of modern paradise.

President Bush's supporters have talked endlessly about his global war on terrorism as a" clash of civilizations." But the civilization we are in the process of destroying in Iraq is part of our own heritage. It is also part of the world's patrimony. Before our invasion of Afghanistan, we condemned the Taliban for their dynamiting of the monumental third century A.D. Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in March, 2001. Those were two gigantic statues of remarkable historical value and the barbarism involved in their destruction blazed in headlines and horrified commentaries in our country. Today, our own government is guilty of far greater crimes when it comes to the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, and few here, when they consider Iraqi attitudes toward the American occupation, even take that into consideration. But what we do not care to remember, others may recall all too well.

NOTES

[1.] American Embassy, London," Visit of President Bush to Northern Ireland, April 7-8, 2003."

[2.] William R. Polk,"Introduction," Milbry Polk and Angela M. H. Schuster, eds., The Looting of the Iraq Museum: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), p. 5. Also see Suzanne Muchnic,"Spotlight on Iraq's Plundered Past," Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2005.

[3.] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Owl Books, 1989, 2001), p. 450.

[4.] George Bush's address to the Iraqi people, broadcast on"Towards Freedom TV," April 10, 2003.

[5.] Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication (Washington, D.C.: September 2004), pp. 39-40.

[6.] See Frank Rich,"And Now: 'Operation Iraqi Looting,'" New York Times, April 27, 2003.

[7.] Robert Scheer,"It's U.S. Policy that's 'Untidy,'" Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2003; reprinted in Books in Flames, Tomdispatch, April 15, 2003.

[8.] John F. Burns,"Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasures," New York Times, April 13, 2003; Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan), The Ransacking of the Baghdad Museum is a Disgrace, History News Network, April 14, 2003.

[9.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit, pp. 209-210.

[10.] Mark Wilkinson, Looting of Ancient Sites Threatens Iraqi Heritage, Reuters, June 29, 2005.

[11.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit., pp. 23, 212-13; Louise Jury,"At Least 8,000 Treasures Looted from Iraq Museum Still Untraced," Independent, May 24, 2005; Stephen Fidler,"'The Looters Knew What They Wanted. It Looks Like Vandalism, but Organized Crime May be Behind It,'" Financial Times, May 23, 2003; Rod Liddle, The Day of the Jackals, Spectator, April 19, 2003.

[12.] Humberto Márquez, Iraq Invasion the 'Biggest Cultural Disaster Since 1258,' Antiwar.com, February 16, 2005.

[13.] Robert Fisk,"Library Books, Letters, and Priceless Documents are Set Ablaze in Final Chapter of the Sacking of Baghdad," Independent, April 15, 2003.

[14.] Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 10.

[15.] Guy Gugliotta,"Pentagon Was Told of Risk to Museums; U.S. Urged to Save Iraq's Historic Artifacts," Washington Post, April 14, 2003; McGuire Gibson,"Cultural Tragedy In Iraq: A Report On the Looting of Museums, Archives, and Sites," International Foundation for Art Research.

[16.] Rod Liddle, op. cit..; Oliver Burkeman, Ancient Archive Lost in Baghdad Blaze, Guardian, April 15, 2003.

[17.] See James A. R. Nafziger, Art Loss in Iraq: Protection of Cultural Heritage in Time of War and Its Aftermath, International Foundation for Art Research.

[18.] Paul Martin, Ed Vulliamy, and Gaby Hinsliff, U.S. Army was Told to Protect Looted Museum, Observer, April 20, 2003; Frank Rich, op. cit.; Paul Martin,"Troops Were Told to Guard Treasures," Washington Times, April 20, 2003.

[19.] Said Arjomand, Under the Eyes of U.S. Forces and This Happened?, History News Network, April 14, 2003.

[20.] Ed Vulliamy, Troops 'Vandalize' Ancient City of Ur, Observer, May 18, 2003; Paul Johnson, Art: A New History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 18, 35; Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 99, fig. 25.

[21.] Tallil Air Base, GlobalSecurity.org.

[22.] Max Mallowan, Mallowan's Memoirs (London: Collins, 1977), p. 61.

[23.] Rory McCarthy and Maev Kennedy, Babylon Wrecked by War, Guardian, January 15, 2005.

[24.] Owen Bowcott, Archaeologists Fight to Save Iraqi Sites, Guardian, June 20, 2005.

[25.] Zainab Bahrani,"The Fall of Babylon," in Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 214.

This essay is extracted from Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis: The Crisis of the American Republic, forthcoming from Metropolitan Books in late 2006, the final volume in the Blowback Trilogy. The first two volumes are Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2004).

This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.

Copyright 2005 Chalmers Johnson

Peter K. Clarke - 10/9/2007

Read Richard Clarke (no relation). His recollection is consistent with the facts, in contrast to Rove's propaganda.

Peter K. Clarke - 10/9/2007

Yes, I remember that episode, when any action on Iraq was sacrificed by Republicans in Congress obsessed with Clinton's private parts.

Peter K. Clarke - 10/9/2007

What happened at Abu Ghraib under the direct policies of Rumsfeld & Co were atrocities ("extremely cruel, brutal, and cruel acts"). Many a solid conservative voice has since called for resignation as a minimum punishment for this horror which would never have been exposed were it not for the guilty small fry photographing themselves.

To deliberate ignore and censor a vast array of intelligent and expert opinion warning against a sudden, hypocritical, half-assed, unplanned deception-ridden, and unilateral invasion of Iraq because Karl Rove thought it would help win the 2004 presidential election was at least arguably the act of traitors (those who "betray trust" and are "false to obligations and duties").

I got these definitions from my dictionary (Webster's). I suggest you use one as well, Mr. Ryan, and you could well begin by looking up and noting the differences between "hysterical" and "blunt" for one, and between "irrational" and "forthright", for another.

Peter K. Clarke - 10/9/2007

The "opinions and conclusions" of W, Rummy, etc, in Iraq were not just "different" than mine, they were different than 200 years of American policy and practice.

American troops were stationed all over Europe for decades after 1945, and, for the most part, welcomed there during that long time. It is doubtful whether this could have happened if America had invaded Germany in 1937 based on a Nazi-like doctrine of "pre-emptive attack" and tried to run it for the benefit of American companies. Nor did FDR "conclude" that he needed to invade Germany in 1939 in order to run as a "war president" in 1940. FDR had a lot of questionable policies, but he was not demonstrably incompetent.

Having an "opinion" that torture and humiliation is a legitimate tactic against prisoners, may be "different" but that does not make it acceptable.

Historical facts, like the failure to secure and guard ammunition respositories in Iraq in 2003 , or the deliberate suppression of intelligence that warned against the difficulties of ruling Iraq post-Saddam, are not matters of "opinion".

Thank God, Karl Rove does not write history books.

Peter K. Clarke - 10/9/2007

"They" or "their" are used approximately eight times in the above comment of Mr. Blake to mean, variously, Iraqis, Iraqi insurgents, Arab governments, citizens of Mideastern countries, Islamic extremists, terrorist groups, Arabs generally, and Moslems generally. This is the sort of shallow, crude, twisted, thoughtless and self-centered thinking that (in, of course, qutie different cultural and psychological contexts) leads to suicide bombings.

Peter K. Clarke - 10/9/2007

And G. W. Bush and his admin thought that the greatest national security requirement of the USA on September 10, 2001, was a multi-billion dollar whizz bang "missile defense system" to protect against intercontinental attack from China. On September 12, 2001 the greatest need was to invade Iraq. Paying attention to facts can yield profound insights.

Peter K. Clarke - 10/9/2007

This article could and probably will be condemned for going too far. For example, I doubt whether very many among even those who consider the Bush administration to be the worse in American history would go so far as to rank its cultural crimes in Iraq as "far worse" than those of Afghanistan's Taliban.

At the same time, however, the article is insufficient when it comes to connecting dots and drawing conclusions. The atrocities of the inept Bush admin. chickenhawks in Iraq go well beyond failing to rein in graffiti-spraying marines or stop looters, beyond even the crass dereliction of duty that led to a largely unplanned, haphazard, undermanned and unprovoked conquest of a country in defiance of American history and principles, and common sense.

If George W., Rummy, Cheney etc. had been upfront about the costs and manpower needed to invade Iraq without trashing the hell out of it and its historical treasures, they would never have been able to cow a spineless Congress and a half-brain-dead populace into going along with their cakewalk con-job. The greatest crime here is that these traitors to America are not standing trial for their offenses to the country and its national security. This is not a matter of some mythological dichotomy between "left" and "right" whatever those long since wornout and trite phrases might be taken to mean. It is matter of truth, justice, and increasingly, historical accuracy,

Peter K. Clarke - 10/9/2007

The historical record is clear. The great war hero G.W. Bush was stumbling and bumbling around muttering about Iraq right away after 9-11, and the Afghanistan mission was cut back prematurely in order to ramp up for the Iraq fear-mongering BS campaign, plus Baghdad cakewalk fantasizing, plus flight deck landing photo op campaign ad manufacturing. Despite manifest foolishness throughout America's federal government it was, however, not possible to completely ignore the fact that Bin Laden and the Taliban were based in Afghanistan, not Iraq.

Arnold Shcherban - 7/27/2005

By the way, Peter, you have to admit here that J. Lederer
is right (no pun intended) (exactly as I was saying all along): current White House adminsitration's foreign policy is just fortified continuation of the normal
foreign affair business of this country; bit more agressive and open, but not completely out of the traditional line.

Arnold Shcherban - 7/26/2005

The main issue is that until "we" stop quacking such clearly false in all dimensions and obviously ideologically and politically motivated utterances, as
"we are at war", nothing much will change. More of that:
the "war" that "we are at", i.e. occupation of Iraq in
clear violation of the international laws and UN definitions of the agression, signed by the US goverments, will continue up to the second coming, as continues US presence in Afghanistan.
If you mister call what real 'we' witness now in Iraq
a war, it is a war instigated and initiated by this very country of ours with the occupation that only crazy or
criminal folks can appreciate and respect.
Every objective and honest human being has the right(for politically active it is obligation) to denounce their native country and the troops when the latter act, as they
do (and did) in Iraq. This was done by Soviet dissidents
in the case of the USSR's invasion into Afghanistan, and
since the US Iraq's invasion and continuing occupation
was (and is) based on even more false premises and involved even more violations of international laws, there is no place for double standards now.

But it seems to me that you are one of those who ground
thier arguments on double standards, so I'm doubtful you'll be willing to even consider unbiased, non-partisan position on the issue in question.

Niall Padraig Mc Kiernan - 7/26/2005

First - if you dont yet understand why we went to war, stop reading DNC bumperstickers and use your brains. That aside - we are at war - like it or not folks - I trust that while you are against the war - that you remain respectful to our country and its troops and support your country. You dont have to agree - thats ok and thats American - but the minute you start slamming your troops you become more unamerican then you probably intended to.

Arnold Shcherban - 7/24/2005

Mr. Luke,

The overwhelming majority in the world has already come to
definite conclusion about the war in Iraq: it was an act
of unprovoked agression, based on the falsified or, at the very least, deliberately distorted information, motivated by the imperialistic designs of the right-wing US elite and criminal greed of certain US-UK power interests' groups.
Since we live or want to live under democracy, i.e. the power of majority for majority, the opinions of relatively small minority of "men and women of good will"
lies below the level of statistical significance, to say the least.

John Cameron - 7/24/2005

I respectfully ask that all citizens read the excellently researched writings of this truly important learned gentleman.

Tony Luke - 7/24/2005

It seems to me that it is hysterical and irrational to resort to excessive hyperbole, name-calling, and condescension to support your arguments. For example, the rhetorical excess you used in calling what happened at Abu Ghraib an "atrocity" and a "horror." There have been some real atrocities and horrors committed in this world and Abu Ghraib is not one of them.

Regarding the whole war in Iraq, some day I hope you'll be able to step back and take a more dispassionate look at the situation. Ideally, you will come to recognize that others--such as the President, Secretary Rumsfeld, and Karl Rove--can come to different conclusions about it than you and that they can do so not because they are evil, corrupt, incompetent, or treasonous, but because reasonable men and women of good will can have differing opinions and conclusions.

John H. Lederer - 7/22/2005

Actually the muttering about Iraq started under the Clinton administration -- you remember-- when the democratic Senate declared that regime change in Iraq was an aim of U.S. policy.

Scott Michael Ryan - 7/22/2005

Well, your point of view is clear anyway (LOL). I would suggest that you offer some proof about your interesting assertion that, "...G.W. Bush was stumbling and bumbling around muttering about Iraq right away after 9-11"..., and that. "...it was, however, not possible to completely ignore the fact that Bin Laden and the Taliban were based in Afghanistan, not Iraq."

Scott Michael Ryan - 7/22/2005

Using words like "atrocity" and "traitor" shows the poster to be both hysterical and irrational, IMO.

Arnold Shcherban - 7/21/2005

Bush hater - yes, loaded language - yes (so what?), but hysterical, irrational - hm...
What was the speck of hysteria and/or irrationality that you sir found in the 'semper stupid' posting?

Scott Michael Ryan - 7/21/2005

On September 12th, huh? And the US went into Afghanistan first, why? Perhaps as some sort of appetizer? As you said, paying attention to facts can yield profound insights. And not paying attention makes you look foolish.

Scott Michael Ryan - 7/21/2005

Time to chill out pal. Hysterical phrases and loaded language continue to show you to be just another irrational Bush hater. It is hard to take you seriously, even when you do come up with the odd comment that actually is accurate.

Tony Luke - 7/20/2005

Wow! And I thought it was just a pronoun.

Matthew Blake Faw - 7/19/2005

Extremists are always the one's who cancel out all of those bad accusations towards the Bush administration. Keep in mind that I by no means am bashing a religion here. We have extremists in all religions. However, here's something for the record. Islamic extremists, who happen to be mostly Arab, are some of the richest people in the world. Yet their people are some of the poorest. These extremists have killed more of their own people than any occupying force. We have made these governments and extremists filthy rich; therefore paving the way for their total disregard for the betterment of their own people. They expect apologies from us. Well, we have heard no such apologies from these extremists who have killed our own civilians, damaged our holy sites in and around the WTC, yet they expect us to apologize for damaging one of their mosques, when they use it to store weapons and "hide". I have no regrets, nor should our government for trying to liberate these people from tyrant dictators who continue to become crazy wealthy while taking, in brutal fashion, from their own people. History will punish those who are doing wrong for their wrong doings. But I have a hard time finding wrong in our attempted liberation of oppressed people. No, it hasn't been perfect, and it never will be. But the fact we have tried and are resilient is certainly in our favor. Remember this. We never surprise anyone with our presence. We give ample warning of our presence. Extremists do not afford us nor their own people that luxury. Anyone who says this is about oil is totally uneducated about the true situation in Iraq. Oil is only a scapegoat. Thinking outside the box appears to be a forgotten process!!!