DR. Tony Parsons said, "One of the greatest atrocities in human history was committed against America". Was he referring to Native American Indians?
Guest 77
Interesting UK Daily Mirror Article
by DakotaRed 75 Replies latest jw friends
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Simon
I think I would feel easier if there was more evidence but so much of it so far has turned out to be fabricated, cobbled together bits and pieces that are frenkly unconvincing. The weapons inspectors who are actually there are saying totally different things such as "no evidence of any Nuclear weapons" etc ...
The thought that they are trying to fake the reason for the war is bad enough. The fact that they have done this so badly is truly frightening!
I fear for my children's future and do not think that the events of the last 6 months have made the world a safer place. Look at where we are now? Major countries falling out over it. Was this really necessary? Couldn't it have been easily avoided? After 10 / 12 years ... why the rush?
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RandomTask
What grates with many people is that America is quick to dismiss the thousands and millions that die each year, in part because of it's policies. It seems, for instance, that the 2,000 people who died that day are worth much more than the 30,000 foreign children who also died that day ... and every other day since from starvation and preventable disease. What crime did they commit that they should not get the same attention other than die poor and off-camera? It refuses to take part in 'the rest of the world' when it comes to things like climate change / pollution control but expects the world to merrily dance to it's tune when it wants to go to war.
Simon, you again dodge the point. Many accuse America of being a danger when in fact we have been overly subdued.
How many Billions of dollars does America give the rest of the world in just food value alone. I'm not talking foreign aid, which is money given to governments, but in food and medicine and supplies America has given Billions and continues to give Billions year after year. Then even more in foreign aid. But we have seen how the tyrants that rule these poor people, tyrants like Saddam Hussein, misuse the wealth that they have, living in palaces as their people starve in the streets.
Is america perfect? No, but why are people so willing to point the finger at America and not at the very ones responsible for the harsh conditions in these countries, the ones who have a direct ability to try and change things, but rather push their own people farther downward in order to blackmail billions more out of the US. How come there are no demonstrations in the streets against tyrants like Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il who are keeping their own people down in order to grow their militaries, develop weapons of mass destruction and build their own wealth and power.
September 11 represented a direct threat not only to me as an american, but you too Simon as a Brit and any others who live in a free and democratic society. Its not just that 3000 people died, but that a group of people out there in the world laid down the gauntlet and said, "we want to kill you, every one of you and this is only the beginning". We MUST defend ourselves against such a threat.
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Sara Annie
It seems, for instance, that the 2,000 people who died that day are worth much more than the 30,000 foreign children who also died that day ... and every other day since from starvation and preventable disease. What crime did they commit that they should not get the same attention other than die poor and off-camera? It refuses to take part in 'the rest of the world' when it comes to things like climate change / pollution control but expects the world to merrily dance to it's tune when it wants to go to war.
Are you actually asserting that the US doesn't give copious amounts of aid or attention to those world matters? Are you kidding?
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Simon
More money is spent on Lipstick each year than on feeding people. Cows get more money spent on them in farm subsidies than people.
I can't believe that people still point to Saddam and say "look, we're great ... we're getting rid of people like him". Who put him there and kept him there? Whatever he has done to his own people ... don't some other people share the responsibility?
Stop thinking short term and look at the bigger picture ... it's the dabbling in these countries and interferance by the west that has created the problem we have now. It is not something that has just 'appeared' that we have to ride in "pistols drawn" to sort out. It is something we created.
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ThiChi
Simon: why blame the US?
When American Aid Brings Food for Naught
By Dave Kopel
MOST AMERICANS, be they for or against nonmilitary foreign aid, assume that such aid benefits mainly poor people in the Third World. But the vast majority of American development aid does little for its intended beneficiaries and instead helps groups that are actively hostile to the poor.
Who but the most hard-hearted reactionary could oppose American food aid? Anyone who examines carefully where the food goes.
Bangladesh provides a case in point. The government keeps two-thirds of the food delivered under the main U.S. aid programs and sells it at market prices to provide a fifth of the government's operating budget.
Most of those who receive the government's grain are in the middle class. According to the World Bank, 27 percent of U.S. food aid goes to the police, military, civil services and employees of large corporations; 30 percent goes to predominantly middle-class holders of ration cards in six major cities, and 9 percent goes to supply mills to grind flour for urban bakeries.
Since the urban population poses a threat of revolution, the government pacifies the cities with cheap grain.
Bangladesh's rural poor do not get even the one-third of the remaining food aid, because rural ration distributors, who are political appointees, sell much of their allotment on the black market. Joseph Stepaneck, an economist with the U.S. Agency for International Development, estimates about 80 percent of the aid goes to "those with cash in towns and cities." Ten percent of the food eventually does reach the rural poor.
In the fall of 1974, when the price of rice rose, cardholders bought rice at a fifth of the market price. Meanwhile, at least 30,000 rural poor adults died because the government refused to divert a few thousand tons to the countryside.
Except in very bad years, Bangladesh raises enough food to feed its population. The problem is not underproduction, but an inequitable distribution system that favors the urban elite.
In addition, as a 1976 U.S. Embassy cable stated, ". . . The incentive for the Bangladesh government to devote attention, resources and talent to the problem of increasing domestic food-grain production is reduced by the security provided by U.S. and other donors' food assistance." Although a 1976 Senate report recommended that food aid to Bangladesh be phased out over the following five years, aid to Bangladesh continues.
Even in cases of disaster, food aid often is counterproductive.
After the 1976 earthquake in Guatemala, the United States, Catholic Relief Services and CARE rushed in $8 million worth of food. But Guatemala's farmers had just harvested a record crop.
Transportation, not more food, was what the country needed. Not only did the food shipments drastically depress the grain markets, they interfered with the rebuilding effort. Survivors spent their time lining up for food instead of engaging in reconstruction. Villages began to turn to new, often dishonest leaders whose main talent was convincing bureaucrats to send aid to a particular village. Corruption increased.
If simply handing out food to governments and people doesn't help, what about giving food to those who work on community projects?
This is the approach of the U.S. Food for Work program.
Marginal workers are hired to build roads, plant forests and the like. The problem is that improvements such as roads benefit only the land-owning elite, and widen the gap between them and the landless poor.
An AID study of the program in Bangladesh concluded that it strengthened the "exploitive semifeudal system which now controls most aspects of village life."
The costs of food aid are high. A conservative estimate of nonfood costs associated with U.S. aid to Guatemala found that the direct transportation and distribution costs totaled 89 percent of the cost of the food. More important than the costs to the donors are the costs to the recipient nations. Distribution of food aid siphons scarce local skilled personnel to projects that do nothing to promote community self-sufficiency. By driving down prices, food aid also harms the people who are key to Third World economic growth:
farmers.
According to a theory advanced during the Kennedy administration, helping poor nations build their economic infrastructures - roads, utilities and the like - was deemed essential to Third World development. But it doesn't work that way.
In Indonesia, the United States has been assisting a $26-million rural electrification program. Since wealthier landowners and shopowners use electrical power to mill rice, landless laborers who depend on milling work for survival income, mostly women, are left jobless. An AID field officer admitted that the net impact of the electrification would be fewer jobs for the poor.
Rural poverty not only causes suffering, it impedes industrial development. Because of poverty, the broad market necessary to fuel industrialization does not exist. U.S. aid to nations that refuse to make a priority of curing rural poverty is at best ineffectual, and at worst counterproductive, since it strengthens feudal groups that stand in the way of economic growth.
One U.S.-backed program in Haiti provides a fine model for all American development aid. The Inter-American Foundation, a small agency that is not part of AID, provides some of the funds ($62,778) for a program run by the Catholic Church in Le Bourne parish.
Unlike most foreign aid, this program was run by peasants, not faraway bureaucrats. It focused on the training of community leaders, who in turn trained other community leaders.
The leaders worked with other peasants to carry out projects: building warehouses so that grain need not be sold at depressed harvest-time prices; buying simple farming tools to be shared on a rotating basis; teaching reading, so that tenant farmers could understand their contracts with landlords.
Because the people themselves have implemented the program, they are beginning to realize that they are not helpless, and need not forever be victimized.
Future American aid should follow the principles of the Haitian program. Aid should be targeted at the grass-roots level through indigenous community groups; it should not pass through urban governments. Project ideas should be worked out with the recipients, not imposed from above.
The Agency for International Development and the U.S.-dominated World Bank need a thorough housecleaning.
They have too many experts who move from aid agencies to agribusiness jobs. Comfortable dealing with urban elites, agency bureaucrats have too little field experience and contact with the rural poor.
Foreign food aid proceeds from the shallow premise that people are hungry because there is not enough food.
But the problem is not a food shortage, for even Bangladesh has more than enough arable land to feed its population. People are hungry because they are poor, and they are poor because narrow elites control most of the wealth in most of the Third World.David B. Kopel, a lawyer who lives in Brooklyn, was a campus organizer for Oxfam America at Brown University.
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RandomTask
First off, you again dodge the point by not acknowledging that the US and other western countries give Billions a year in aid to these countries. Then you defend Saddam and others like him by saying how the US propped him up in the first place. Your heroes the French, German and Russians are actually the ones who are propping up and have propped up Saddam more than the US ever has, no wonder they don't want us going in there, the weapons Saddam would use against us would all be of French and Russian origin. But does that change the fact that he is a despotic tyrant who is a threat to our security? No it does not. The "big picture" as you so well put it is that we need to deal with these threats seriously, not by playing Saddam's fool, as he would like us to do and as he is doing with Hans Blix and the UN, but by taking an active role in removing the threat.
Saddam could use a PR guy like you.
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Englishman
Simon,
You make a fair point I guess.
What's my beef?
Well, the US finally got a megadose of what we Brits had been experiencing for many years at the hands of the IRA. Now, whilst we were getting all the hundreds of bombing incidents at the hands of the IRA, many Americans thought that it was pretty cool to be able to claim allegiance to Ireland as their forebear country and actively supported the IRA, courtesy of Noraid.
So, whilst the US has my deep empathy for what happenned on 9/11, please don't forget that we've been enduring terrorism for years longer than you have.
..and we don't make a song and dance about it either.
Englishman.
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Simon
Interesting article about aid: http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2001/12/04/foreignaid-usat.htm
At least things seem to be improving.
This one paints a bleaker picture though: http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAid.asp
RandomTask: You appear to deliberately misrepresent me. I will try and respond inline ...
First off, you again dodge the point [what point?] by not acknowledging that the US and other western countries give Billions a year in aid to these countries [I acknowledge they give a lot, what I'm saying is they don't give enough or as much as they make out]. Then you defend Saddam and others like him [where have I defended any of the things he's done?] by saying how the US propped him up in the first place [this is a fact]. Your heroes the French, German and Russians [I haven't said they are my heros] are actually the ones who are propping up and have propped up Saddam more than the US ever has [believe what makes you comfortable], no wonder they don't want us going in there, the weapons Saddam would use against us would all be of French and Russian origin [they may ... they may not ... he's had plenty of USA weapons over the years including chemical weapons]. But does that change the fact that he is a despotic tyrant [yes] who is a threat to our security [unproved ... no evidence that he has WoMD]? No it does not. The "big picture" as you so well put it is that we need to deal with these threats seriously [and sensibly], not by playing Saddam's fool [or Bush's / Blair's fool], as he would like us to do and as he is doing with Hans Blix and the UN [they are doing a good job ... just what they report isn't what the US wants to hear], but by taking an active role in removing the threat. [again, what threat? was Iraq about to invade us?]
Saddam could use a PR guy like you. [bush coudl use a propagandist like you ]
Please don't misrepresent what I say if you want to have a sensible discussion. -
hillary_step
Hello,
There were few complaints when the US went into Afghanistan and removed the Taliban from power. They were hunting terrorists and world opinion was very much in their favor. Bush informed the world that he would seek out and destroy any terrorists anywhere and by and large the whole world, even many of the leaders of Arab states supported this enterprise. Pakistan, which is a terrorists coffee shop, aligned itself with the US and has made some inroads into capping terrorists comfort within its borders. It has sustained many civilian casualties in order to do this.
However, it must be acknowledged that the crisis with Iran and 9/11 are two very distinct issues. The US admits that they have found NO evidence linking Saddam, who is a secular Muslim with Osama Bin Hiding who is not.
The UK has experienced its fair share of terror over the years, as has France, Germany and many of the countries who now stand against the US decision to attack Iran before the UN inspectors have completed their task. It is hardly surprising given this fact, that many sniff an agenda that might not have the same purity as the initial desire to rid the world of terrorists. After all, the 'proof' given to the world by Colin Powell as a reason to flatten Iran, is at best contrived and at worst fraudulent in content. Attacking Iran without the benefit of a mandate agreed by all nations will give rise to a new generation focused on martyrdom. Hussein will fall from power, but very likely the instability that his departure would cause would be replaced by a morally outraged Muslim right wing, the very people who orchestrated the 9/11 tragedy. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
I would be prepared to take seriously President Bush's promise to rid the world by whatever means of terrorists, when he turns his attention to Northern Ireland where terrorism and its accompanying trauma is a daily routine and has been for deacdes. NORAID receives much of its funding through collection campaigns made among the 78 million people of Irish descent on the East Coast of the US. Bush cannot afford to upset these voters and as such will conveniently by-pass Northern Ireland's terrorists. It is these sort of double standards that is giving way to an air of caution in many peoples minds, including millions of US citizens it has to be said, about engaging in war without mandate. The war of course is inevitable and has already started. SAS troops are over the Kuwait border laying communications networks as we speak. But I digress....
It would be prudent for people to realize that this issue is not about America, France, Germany etc. This issue is about decisions, namely making the correct ones, careful decisions that will not destabilize the region and by default the world any further. We are all involved in this whether we like it or not. American Foreign policy the past few decades, which has always by tradition been John Wayne shaped, has not served well the citizens of the US. Some people seem to realize this, and unfortunately some do not.
HS