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brennakimi writes:... he said china was going to march on israel.

NJ writes:Perhaps you forgot how Germany was all the way inside Leningrad, as opposed to the Red Army being in Berlin. You act as though the Red Army was so utterly dominant when they weren't. You say in the latter part of your post that the elements played a big role in stopping Germany. That's true. I hardly see how Russia can take credit for the weather. They conquered nothing. At most, they stifled the German onslaught. But that was it.

NJ writes:That's right, there wouldn't have been an UK. So what are you complaining about? Have you not seen images of London totally shelled out by the Luftwaffe? You disagree with me in one sentence, and then corroborate my claim in the next??? Can you explain your dichotomy?

NJ writes:Kuresu, you initially said that we would have been speaking Russian, as opposed to German. Well, Russia's efforts did impact the war, and in essence, won the war. So why aren't we speaking Russian?

You act as though the Red Army was so utterly dominant when they weren't.

I hardly see how Russia can take credit for the weather

So why aren't we speaking Russian?

How would you like me to quantify your "fact," a fact that never happened, in order for me to answer the question?

By EASON JORDAN (Eason Jordan is chief news executive at CNN.) New York Times writes: ATLANTA-- Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange
interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard, awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.
For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.
Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.
We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails).
Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed.
I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast
anything these men said to us.
Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences." CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed C.I.A. and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad.
Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home.
I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.
In my opinion, even without chem or bio or nuke weapons, the atrocities inIraq is justification to remove Saddam from power. It was reason enoughwith Milosovich and no-one complained.

Jazzns writes:So spare us your appologetics. If you want to qualify your post as a, "lets look at the bright side" kind of statement than do so please. Because as it stands, the critics of the war are not going to be content to do any kind of post-hoc validation of a hellish situation.

brennakimi writes:but moral outrage is not enough to warrant invasion. it has to be tempered by a chance of success and an actual reduction in harm. further, it has to be the sole reason for the war. instead, our corporations are profitting from continued unrest and atrocity. we've done little or nothing to hault sectarian killings and we've done even less to encourage political cooperation. and now they're talking about disbanding the police force because it's sectarian instead of providing oversight and egalitarian recruitment and prosecuting those who give orders for atrocities. it will do no good to put this force of armed people out on the streets with no jobs and no supervision and full of hatred and violence.

At the time of the invasion, in spite of the UN findings, I believe that even amongst the opponents to the war there was a concensus that the WMD's did exist.

PaulK writes:If you restrict yourself to the U.S it is possible that the majority were fooled by intelligence reports - which were manipulated to suit the White House.