The Iraqi governmnet executed 34 people in a single day last week, and judicial killings are running at over 600 people a year. Extra-judicial killings by state sponsored actors are much higher, and still higher are killings by various violent factions.
Meantime there are less than a third as many operational hospital beds as before the invasion, and less than 20% of the doctors. There are three million maimed people in Iraq. Available electricity in MW/h is about 30% of pre-invasion levels.
I am waiting for a neo-con acolyte to tell us now how the “liberal intervention” has greatly improved the lot of the people of Iraq.
Craig you had a volunteer on the beavering thread, rude not to acknowledge him!
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Crab: “Tony12 are you responsible for the noisy campaign of TonyOPMOC drunken spleen posts? …”
Tony12: No. Too busy working most of the time. I am a much more simple soul. We do classical music videos, documentaries and interviews – mainly for the internet so we have the right codecs for delivering content, not just for broadcasting or making DVDs.
John Goss – “The truth speaks for itself!”
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But it doesn’t – in the short run anyway. Not as far as 90% of the UK Daily-Fail-reading public are concerned, The problem isn’t with Bush/Blair/Obama/Haliburton – it’s that 90% of the UK/USA public don’t give a monkeys about the rest of the world – or even about their own democracy or civil rights – as long as their petrol is cheap, their Backberrys are connected, and there’s crap TV to watch.
Unintentional by deception ‘Courtenay’ – this is how we roll…
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In reckless pursuit of a cataclysmic rush in a heart-beat.
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A sobering post.
Iraq is in great shape! Goy suffering helps the Master Race of Yisrael feel good.
Courtenay Barnett,
I had a good laugh, Indeed failures to a man of the bastards.
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The foreign policy of these lunatics was the reason I forwarded the notion of the tripartite Saudi, not so long ago.
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The plain fact is US has underestimated Iran by far. This goes for the rest of the US cohorts. The stupidity of the latest round of sanctions has already paid off; Coryton Bankruptcy.
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I wrote on this in /beavering-away thread, but no one seemed to care about it:
Fedup
24 Jan, 2012 – 10:11 pm
The mistake both Tariq Azis and Saddam made was believing that the west played by all these fancy rules they made up when in actual fact the only rules the west follows is mafia ones. Probably they believed, as a member of the saintly United Nations their positions as members of a bona fide government would be protected under international law. In fact the west is just one big criminal enterprise.
@ Fedup,
“The plain fact is US has underestimated Iran by far.”
The way I read it is that it really is a lose-lose scenario if the war kicks off. It will quickly develop a dynamic of its own and the MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – ( and factors which cannot be contained and/or conrtol in a situation of warfare) – will both quickly impact the whole world in a most bloody and brutal way.
So – who cares?
Well – I do. Anyone else concerned?
“could go as high as $4.4 trillion before it’s all over”
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“Operation Ajax was regime change at its cheapest and most effective. It cost a mere $1,000,000 to run”
http://www.firmmagazine.com/features/910/What's_Libya_Got_to_Do_With_It…%3F.html
Courtenay Barnett,
I am on record on the very subject.
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The notion of a little bit of war that is being so assiduously propagated, is an unlikely scenario. Any potential war scenario will be very quickly spinning out of control and would eventually involve at least Russians to begin with, and soon after Chinese too.
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Craig has been busy blowing the cover of the bastards who have been plotting away in the background to push their own lines of policy, which are in fact to the detriment of the national interests of UK, and US.
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You bet I care too, and I am damn concerned about it.
We care Fedup.
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Still raising heckles Boni? – wot? ya bin court ina monsoooon?
@ Guest and Fedup,
Guest – this new war with Iran won’t be war on the cheap – like CIA Kermit Roosevelt back in 1953.
Fedup – Mad people, who don’t care about human life, humanity, or human decency – want to kick off this war in the service of global hegemony. Call it “imperial hubris” if you like.
It will be explosive and uncontrollable – so which sane person would want to venture there?
Courtenay Barnett, and Mark Golding – Children Of Iraq
‘US, unleashed dog kowtowing to Israel’
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Worthwhile to listen to. Raises the point about “Natanyahu ought to send a Mossad assassination squad to kill Obama”
“sane person”
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Is there truly such on this world ?.
Kathy – I do like your honesty – that was a brave statement; thankfully enlightenment is pervasive and truth permeates through young minds- so the ‘grand plan’ is finite; the journey back to the black hole whence we came has been slowed, eventually to stop while the past is rewritten and the ‘enterprise’ forgotten.
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Not too painfully I hope.
@ Fedup,
” The United States is no longer a super power that ‘can make decisions that are in her own best interest,’ but the country is like an ‘unleashed dog’ that is simply kowtowing to the Israelis, said Mark Glenn, of the Crescent and Cross solidarity movement in a Wednesday interview.”
Says it all…
@ Kathy,
” The mistake both Tariq Azis and Saddam made was believing that the west played by all these fancy rules they made up when in actual fact the only rules the west follows is mafia ones. Probably they believed, as a member of the saintly United Nations their positions as members of a bona fide government would be protected under international law. In fact the west is just one big criminal enterprise.”
Myself a lawyer, in part I agree with you. Why “in part”?
Well – sometimes the rules as a baseline are actually usefully and can be applied to good effect for justice.
On the other limb, there are the situations that you allude to – and you are absolutely correct – it then becomes – might is right.
But – what else can we do but struggle for some justice under the rules – until – cum the revolution?
Over to you Kathy…
Blame it on spell check:-
“the rules as a baseline are actually usefully”
Of course – “useful”
Correction made – to good effect – hopefully?
Ignore – get on with the debate and forget my indulgences at this point.
“indulgences”
– or –
“Indulgencies”
Not spell check obviously – too much grog. So – goodnight.
Craig, damn right! It’s tragic. Absolutely tragic. But what to do about it? We can all say “told you so” because none of us were in favor of invading Iraq. We can point to the same thing happening again with Iran but who’s listening? The fuckwits are marching again, the march to war, and fuck all is going to stop them picking another fight. But again, doesn’t do much good for the Iraqis who are left in pieces. To be honest, life wasn’t a bed of roses for them before we went in, but it sure is a hell of a lot worse now…
Kathy
‘The mistake both Tariq Azis and Saddam made was believing that the west played by all these fancy rules they made up when in actual fact the only rules the west follows is mafia ones.’
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Saddam made the mistake of persecuting his people in full knowledge of the fact that the West would use its fancy rules to justify invasion and full knowledge of their mafia system.
His biggest mistake was to make himself blind to the moral alliance that exists between the Christian and the Muslim world against tyrannny and oppression. He had been deluded into serving Nationalism, in reaction to Western deception and domination of the Middle East.
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Our very own stupider than stupid David Cameron is trying to play a pathetic card, in Europe and in the world, of British Nationalism. What a wanker. Every time there’s a problem, and the Arab Spring is a problem because it leads to conflicts of interests between trading nations, up goes the jingoist flag. Every time the Eurozone has a problem, the same.
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All I can say is that if he has to play these idiotic, but in Saddam Hussain’s case extremely dangerous Nationalistic games, he exposes the UK to this Achilles heel of Nationalism which caught Saddam Hussain. I think somebody probably pays our politicians to take this country down this dangerous road, for their own tactical gain. It is beyond belief that the Houses of Parliament is populated with such ignoramusses that they have to be fed this crap in order to survive, like blind, featherless nestlings.
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Nobody minds the odd self- caused Charlie Chaplin stunt, but why do we have to watch this boring farce of Nationalism being repeated over and over and over again? To make the Zionist/Islamist Freemason New World Order look more sane?
How Melanie Phillips was allowed to propagandize about Iran, amongst other topics, last night on Question Time. Mark Steel hardly got a look in.
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http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1327615675.html
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Q Will a new Director General at ZBC improve matters when Mark Thompson retires at the end of the year? Probably not. I heard Helen Boaden and Caroline Thomson being touted as his replacements on Radio 4 Today. I remember the Death on the Med travesty, the non showing of the DEC appeal after Cast Lead and Caroline Thomson’s attempts to defend the decision, the response or more exactly the non-response of Helen Boaden. Head of News, to complaints about Israel bias in the reporting from Palestine, etc etc. Could also add the holding of the government line in the build up of the Iraq war, the reporting of the student protests )remember the shocking treatment of Jody McIntyre by Ben Brown. The list is endless. Dissent is rarely allowed or heard.
Lesson No 1. Get your first job as a bank chairman’s assistant. From then on, it’s a cert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hester
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‘Stephen Hester is to get 3.6 million shares in the bank worth £963,000, along with a salary of £1.2m. Sky News learned that RBS’s directors agreed the payout at a board meeting on Wednesday. RBS group chairman Sir Philip Hampton said the company was “aware of the difficulties in trying to reconcile the competing objectives of all our stakeholders”, especially on pay.’
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He will do even better if there is a share price rise on these 3,600,000 shares. The current price is just over 27p
I find your analysis boring and sophomoric.
How the UK Media Legitimise the Idea of a War on Iran
26 January 2012
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The UK media has over the last three months obediently towed the line of western leaders in their increasingly hostile posturing towards Iran.
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Despite their reporting of (to give a few examples) a covert war on Iran, the entry of a US spy drone into Iranian airspace, and the recent assassination of another Iranian nuclear scientist, our media overwhelmingly empathises with the concerns of the US and the UK governments.
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The UK media echo the sentiments of David Cameron (Iran’s chosen path ‘threatens the peace and security of us all’) or William Hague (Iran ‘is continuing to breach United Nations resolutions and refusing to come to meaningful negotiations on its nuclear programme’), whose statements lack sufficient evidence and are based on little more than speculation. Yet the rhetoric goes unquestioned in news reporting.
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The findings of the November 2011 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report, showing no evidence of nuclear weapons development, appear of no importance. Julian Borger (the Guardian’s security correspondent), for example, has disclosed that a former IAEA inspector claimed there to be ‘no smoking gun’ in the report, yet this fact has had little effect on his subsequent reporting.
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http://www.newsunspun.org/article/how-the-uk-media-legitimise-the-idea-of-a-war-on-iran
Another good day for the free people of Iraq! 28 killed and 50 injured in another blast…
http://www.presstv.com/detail/223321.html
Apparently Iran’s parliament will debate on Sunday whether to stop exporting oil to EU now rather than May. I have heard loads of people are writing to the Ministry of Oil and demanding it. It is said this could be ratified by end of Sunday!
well said kathy, the largest criminal enterprise, always working with the mafia, are the CIA and Mossad, historical links made during the first and second world war are still intact and used.
Mary, I was nearly sick listening to Question time and its unreal time allocation for its panel of speakers. That siren had it all wrong last night, on drugs as much as on avoiding the question regards to Israeli nukes.
Equally that odious Lib Dem, he did not want to stop speaking, he seems to be out for a front bench job of sorts. The public reactions was opposed to the same same propaganda and did not get much flustered about her tirades, but it was awefull.
@Nexus4
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Certainly this Foust knows nothing about Uzbekistan. I read his shitty article and his conversation with you on Twitter. His arguments are typical for someone who is concerned with geopolitics more and puts forward short and medium term interests before long term. In long term and even in medium term US is going to lose in Central Asia to China and this is inevitable. Policy of sweetening brutal dictatorships will play on Chinese hand and Foust and him alike seems to be least concerned with this at the moment.
@Nexus4
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Yes, and this one from Foust’s shitty article “(was Andijon a consequence of Murray’s crusades?)”
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Is he serious? What a stupid and cynical statement? And this PoS (piece of sh..t) considers himself to be an expert?
Ingo,
I missed the quetion time last night, but my hubby who watched it said exactly what you said.