war nearly over. whats your opinion now?

[Guest superkingdave]

hi just wanted to know if people were more or less happy about the war now it has nearly finished and the iraqis appear to be happy about it.

[Guest HelloDave]

the iraqis appear to be happy about it.

"Appear" being the operative word; just becuase the ones you see on the news are happy doesn't mean they all are! (They might be, but we'll never know by watching the news!) If the American marines rolled into Trafalgar square and pulled a statue down I wouldn't be overjoyed, but I woundn't try and start a fight with them about it either :lol:

IMO you can't take anything you see on the news at face value. If Iraqi state TV had been covering today's events they would have shown US marines destroying something in Bhagdad with shocked people looking on, and then found some p***ed off Iraqis to interview afterwards.

As for the war being nearly over - hmm....

[Guest lutzh]

congratulations to the allied forces and those who take care in freedom of other countries.

i wish i could live somewhere else but not in germany, where the leadership simply desides not to go with the un and the old friends for reasons that i dont know.

did it help anybody? did it stop the war? did it save blood? no in every point...

germany is facing a deep economic depression at the moment but our government is p!ssing off those countries that could help with investments. good job...

i am against every kind of war, against killing of innocent people. but saddam himself killed 5.000 innocent kurds with chemical weapons in `88. this war may have caused 96 killed allied soldiers and some 2.500 killed iraqis. every single victime is a sad story, no doubt. but at the end you have to say its a fair charge for a free iraq and a little less danger in the world from a psycho dictator...

ATTN: this is just my personal thinking and nothing i want to press in to someone else's brain...

cheers, lutz

[Guest Richie M]

Well said Lutz, bravo :lol:

[Guest casper508]

Good or bad for the iraqi people?? Well that remains to be answered IMHO. The earlier the Iraqis take control of their country/oil the better.

Cas

[Guest Emad]

Those people celebrating were mostly Shia's from 'Saddam City' - the really poor part of Baghdad.. And there were only about 200 celebrating, most of the rest were looting by all accounts.. I'm sure the majority of the 5 million people are happy (aside from Baath party ppl), but at the moment the area is still a warzone and I doubt women/children feel its safe to go out. Give it a coupla days for the fighting to die down to see real expression.

Most of the people in/from the Middle East I've talked to said they were happy, but pissed off at that US troop covering that statue with the US flag, interestin..

The US have already started drawing up the interim government - will be headed by a US general. I expect that if they dither too long, the rhetoric from the community leaders will turn into 'our country, bug off'. But the US has to protect its interests, so it'll be an interesting line to tread..

lutzh - the Kurds were uprising. Thats civil war pretty much.. Most leaders tend to squish those decisively (so people don't get ideas). Saddam used chemical weapons (with the US saying they didn't mind). Also, kurds aren't viewed as proper Iraqis.. Still, the guys a bastard and the world will be better off without him.

Lets hope they finish off the Iraqi resistance sharpish and get about restructuring (not like the mess Afghanistan is in at the mo). Ramble off..

[Guest lutzh]

... the flag-thing was so stupid, i dont know what to say about it...

i was just talking about the standing of germany in this situation. i dont believe in peace in the middle east, i am fearing a situation there like in gaza, where i cant say whos wrong and whos right historicaly.

but it would be going too far if i would post my personal point of view about the middle east as is, as will be and how it should be.

and: who cares about my point of view? not even my wife :-)

cheers, lutz

[Guest Emad]

Anyone read 1984? Oceana vs Eurasia.. Hmm.. Ooo er..

Heh lutzh, everyone's entitled to an opinion and its always interestin to hear that of others.. It probably wasn't the wisest idea to piss off the US - the population is getting increasingly anti French/German over there.. Damn, need some of that sleep stuff.. Zzz..

Oh and wives are always right in all situations. Thats what my mommy says anyway..

[Guest mcwarre]

Lutz,

Your wife must know mine cos she doesn't care either. Do you think that there is an underground wives movement undermining our every move???

[Guest mashkhan]

I think it's a bit premature to say the war is almost over

Anyone read 1984? Oceana vs Eurasia.. Hmm.. Ooo er..  

I think Dune is a better example of book resembling the War

Spice=Oil

Lansraat= UN

Iraqi's =Fremen

Mind you Saddam does remind me of Big Brother

[Guest lutzh]

hi mcwarre,

i was wondering if its just me- thank god i am not. there is a movement and i guess it has something to do with sex. but i cant remember since i am married for too loooooong...

cheers and now back to the story,

lutz

[Guest Rob.P]

I'm glad they think the war is coming to a close, but something tells me it is far from over and that there is something else brewing. Everybody hates saddam, but everybody forgets who but him in power and backed and supplied his disgusting chemical war against Iran, the US and UK. Strange sense of Deja Vu, the US cleaning up a mess they ultimatily created, amazinginly reminisent of the Afghan war. The CIA trained and supplied Al-Qeda and Osma was an agent of the CIA (orginally).

Most of the kurds that were gassed were actually gassed by Iran the chemical used wasn't actually in production by Iraq, only Iran, and all the worlds governments know this the facts have been published in the public domain but everyone seems to overlook this.

Don't get me wrong I'm not defending Saddam, all I'm trying to point out is that we only get one side of the story, the only story we'll see is the westerners POV. Unless you have the ability to live in Iraq under the regime for a year or so, we will never know what is really going on.

I can tell you one thing for fact, this war was not about WMD.

This could all be a precursor for the New World Order, who knows what the future holds, see signature below.

[Guest superkingdave]

it gets me when people keep going on about how britain and the us supplied saddam with all his weapons and gas... uk sold him some apcs and a few obselete tanks when he was fighting with iraq and a few other things but at least 75 percent of saddams gas came from france and more than 90 percent of his equipment is from russia. not making any comment on pro/anti war stance i just find it strange when people always jump on the you sold them to them argument

[Guest Rob.P]

Without heating it up, my point being that France and Russia didn't get involved probably because they were fully aware of how it would look.

The US supplied them with the worst weapons though, the biological agents to build bioweapons.

What I'm trying to say is that when you play a game and make the rules up for it, you should stick to those rules and not break them just because you made them, otherwise all the other players will do the same. Which is why most people are against it, because of the way the US went about it. If you answer a violent problem with more violence, then it just gonna propagate more violence, it's a cycle, human history dictates that repitition is the sole skill of humanity as a whole.

Prehaps we could hope for a future where the last remaining superpower stops interferring with countries just to improve it's own economic standing then get nasty when it's set-up fails/backfires.

[Guest Palindrome]

Looks like we've got our newest colony.

[Guest Rob.P]

Ahh those heady days of the Empire, may the force be with us :lol:

[Guest awarner [MVP]]

Looks like we've got our newest colony.

We use to run the country before so it would not be new. The government

could not afford to finance the NHS and Iraq so they made a decision.

by gettting rid of one of them.

[Guest fraser]

We use to run the country before

Yup. Did you know Winston Churchill was the first person to gas the Kurds? Isn't it ironic? Especially as the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfelt, personally did business with Saddam when he knew they were using chemical weapons almost daily.

This war is far from over. There will be sporadic guerilla fighting here and there for some time. Think Vietnam.

Then, should that ever calm down, there will always be people who remain unhappy with the new leadership. Think Northern Ireland.

Then, there are the other states in the Middle East who already hate the US, and do so more now. Lot's of new recruits & financing. Think New York.

Bush's puppet master is an liar. You don't "make the world a safer place" by making more enemies for your country! Especially by taking out a country that was zero threat to you, and has zero involment with terrorists. Clearly, there were other motives for this war, a view made more apparent when you consider the fact that the folk behind it were trying to get Clinton to do it. Prior to the War on Terror. (another 1984 reference for you, continous warfare, read my sig. The War on Drugs was no different).

Where's the War on Poverty? Or political corruption?

[Guest HelloDave]

I thought it was interesting that the "War on Saddam" started just after the "War on Terror" appeared (from the Media at least) to have fizzled out, in other words "we've lost Osama, he might be running a B&B in Chipping Sodbury, we don't know, but to take the media heat of that, we'll attack someone else instead". Whatever happened to "we'll go on fighting until the people responsible for 9/11 are brought to justice"? Yes i'm a cynic, but what will they do when they can't find Saddam? Probably attack someone else to cover up the fact they've lost yet another of America's most wanted!

[Guest fraser]

There's always the special edition playing cards to collect. All it takes is Iraqi leadership Pokemon cards for the child spies, and Orwell's ghost is gonna rise up and kick some fascist ass.

[Guest dan.peterson]

Whatever else this period may mark, the settling of the political dust in Iraq will be formative to the next phase of geopolitics.

This is the time when the left should make its case for the freedom of repressed people, instead it has sqandered its authority on a rather sensationalist and melodramatic anti-war movement. One of the proper roles of the left should be representing the freedom of the individual against oppression, whether that be from the bulldozers of Israel, or the batons of China.

Instead it has allowed itself to be distracted by frivolous anti-Americanism, and short sighted - even immature- agendum.

The left has never offered so little at a time when it is needed so much.

[Guest Rob.P]

I wouldn't worry too much the repressed will be even more repressed when the New World Order kicks in, this is all a precursor for it.

[Guest fraser]

Syria's next by the looks of it. I'm sure that there'll be suggestions that Iraq moved it's "WMDs" there over the next few months, and that they helped Saddam flee Iraq. I estimate the war will start in around 6-9 months time. Strategically, they have to wait until then, as the desert is too hot for the troops during the summer. That's why there was such a rush to conquer the Iraqi resources before now.

The build up for the propaganda on an Iraqi war started very similarly to what they have been saying recently about Syria.

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.

[Guest Big Ron - No Longer a Mem]

The war was supposedly "about" a number of things - WHICH it was changed with a suspicious frquency. WMDs - except even if they find any (which they've been claiming to have done almost daily) I find it hard to equate the "clear and PRESENT danger" they were supposed to have presented with Saddam's failure to USE them even when he had nothing left to lose. I find it hard to square the idea that "it's about terrorism" with a group of escaped Ba'ath party members on the run with an amount of money from a decade of sanction-busting oil-sales (via Syria) that makes OBL look like a pauper - and an even bigger grudge against the USA than he has. I find it hard to square with "supporting the UN" - the USA veto'ed 35 resolutions critical of Israel, and now tries to convince us that they're four-square behind world opinion?

ONE good thing MAY come from this - GW keeping his promise to Tiny Blur about getting serious about the Israel/Palestine "Road Map". But, the timetabling put implementation on a collision course with the next presidential elections. Will GW gamble the loss of Jewish votes? Well, let's put it this way. Promises made by GOVERNOR Bush of Texas to President Fox of Mexico still haven't been delivered, and neither have promises to Russia's President Putin on trade (there's an embargo that goes back to the Cold War. GW was going to lift it in exchange for Putin's support on Afghanistan)

My biggest woeey is that GW has zero comprehension that foreign policy, war and chess ALL have something basic in common; namely that you CANNOT play them one move at a time. "If I take that guy's pawn with my bishop, then I'm a pawn ahead." Except your Bishop is now on a square where it can be taken by the enemy's knight, without loss to him. Oops... you've just traded your bishop for a pawn.

That We "won" in Iraq (and has anyone noticed that in Baghdad - a city of 5,000,000 people - the "cheering crowds" can be measured in DOZENS of people? ) is not really relevant. When a man puts a revolver to your head, with one bullet in the chamber, spins, the chamber and pulls the trigger, your surviving the experience is NOT a measure of his brilliance. It's a measure of his/your pure dumb luck - and his stupidty.

[Guest Rob.P]

Funniest thing I read was a journalist who asked Rumsfield whether they had found any WMD's and what they were doing it about, the reply was along the lines of "We don't have time to look for WMD's, haven't you noticed we're at war", laugh till my sides split. Muppets looking after Muppets.