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| 5/24 |
| 2004/7/15 [Politics/Foreign/Europe, Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:32295 Activity:very high 60%like:32292 |
7/14 BUNNYPANTS (& BLAIR) LOSE AGAIN
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/25023.htm
\_ Uhm, this is one of the more bizarre edits I've seen. I...don't
know what to say....
\_ You mean you've never heard of Commander Bunnypants?!?!!!!11!
http://csua.org/u/875 (kbtoys.com)
\_ Nice OPINION & EDITORIAL link, CAPITAL LETTERS boy.
\_ Trouble reading? The URL is clearly from the op/ed page.
As if this is the first time an op/ed piece has been
posted to the motd, genius. Some of you knuckleheads are
posting links from blogs as 'proof' of your points! -!op
\_ the NYPOST editorial pages are even more retarded
than most blogs.
\_ In your opinion. And that's what this is all about:
opinion. Since the NYP has greater readership than
\_ i read the nyp every day, you are a moron.
you obviously are not familiar with the history
of the NYPOST, or who owns and runs it,
or that they have been an even bigger journalistic
laughingstock than normal recently.
\_ Which still puts them well above your blogs and
your rude interruption of my post.
\_ oh are you going to cry? i hope so.
useless unthinking republican drone troll.
\_ hahhaha got nothing to say so you resort
to the lowest form of attack. would you
\_ I'm not sure what's more pathetic --
that fact that you got trolled by a
childishly simple ploy, or that you
need it pointed out to you.
like to try again or just give up and
go home?
\_ ok i'm trying to understand the NYPOST's spin on
lord higgins' report, i don't fully understand it yet.
any blog and people actually *pay* to read it and
other people get paid to write it, I'll take that over
some random blog spew anyday. Are you really truly
seriously trying to claim that blogs are anything more
than raw unedited spewage?
\_ It's still dumb. And OP's caps lock was stuck.
\_ It can be dumb. Lots of things are dumb but
to bash someone for posting from the NYP when
others here don't get bashed the same for trying
to use friggin' blogs as a source of proof for
anything is idiotic. Caps don't bother me enough
to make a whole thread about them. If they
bother you that much I'd like to trade my
problems for yours.
\_ The bloggers pull directly from news outlets
across the board, have no financial stake in
diseminating the information, and some are
remarkably intelligent. Your ranting against
them is ill-founded.
\_ They pull directly from news outlets of
their choice no different from Drudge. What
do you think Drudge is? He's the ultimate
news puller but you don't ever have to read
his personal drivel mixed in. Just the
headlines.
\_ wonkette, the blogger you love to hate, is paid
and has an editor. Many bloggers make a living
on their blogs by selling ads. Does this make
them more respectable in your eyes, or less?
\_ Hey, wait, the above said they don't have a
financial stake in blogging? Which is it? And
how does making a living off it make them any
better than Drudge?
\_ ok i'm trying to understand the NYPOST's spin on
lord higgins' report, i don't fully understand it yet.
\_ So... they weren't lying... they just don't like to read?
\_ I bet you the guy who posted this likes to slam Michael Moore, too.
Compared to the post, he's fucking Truth.
\_ Wow, a poor editorial compared to a different poor
editorial, and you can pick which one is THE TRUTH? Oh, I
see. It's the one that agrees with your poor opinions.
\_ So what, in your opinion, constitutes a great Opinion? Heh.
\_ MY OWN!
\_ Your precious?
\_ You know what they say about opinions and assholes...
\_ Nothing is more important than your own? |
| 5/24 |
|
| www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/25023.htm Reprint July 15, 2004 -- One year ago this week, Democratic politicians and much of the media were in a frenzy of Bush-bashing: They'd found the smoking gun proving that the president deceived America into waging war on Iraq. These 16 words from the 2003 State of the Union Address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Demonstrably false, they huffed, citing the claims of Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat sent by the CIA to Africa in 2002 to investigate the issue. A New York Times editorial raised sinister allegations of "a willful effort by the war camp in the administration to pump up an accusation that seemed shaky from the outset and that was pretty well discredited long before Mr Bush stepped into the well of the House of Representatives" to deliver his speech. Wilson himself wrote an op-ed piece for The Times, claiming that "it did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place." A bipartisan report of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence says so. As does the official British investigation, conducted by Lord Butler into that nation's pre-war intelligence and released yesterday. Both reports scorched intelligence failures leading up to the war. But both also concluded albeit to scant news coverage that British intelligence had indeed passed to the CIA credible data about Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from the African nation of Niger. "It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999," according to the Butler report. "The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium compromises almost three-quarters of Niger's exports. True, the information did not substantiate that Saddam Hussein's people had actually obtained uranium but then, "the British government did not claim this." nuclear-weapons program, when United Nations inspection regimes were relaxed or sanctions were eroded or lifted." The Senate report was equally adamant: British and French intelligence reported separately to the CIA about Iraqi procurement efforts in Niger. As for Joseph Wilson, Senate probers discovered that not only didn't he debunk the story, he actually "lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal." How could he know that, Senate investigators asked, "when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports"? Confronted with this evidence, Wilson reportedly admitted he may have "misspoken" to the press. Actually, Bush's 16 words were hardly seen as significant when he first delivered them; they didn't even appear in most news reports of the speech. But they were magnified in importance only after it was learned that some of the documents given to the British justifying the reports were forgeries. Indeed, they were suddenly portrayed as the deciding factor in launching the war. And as for the forgeries, the Butler report concluded that British intelligence hadn't even seen them when it made its assessment, "so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it." But it wasn't George W Bush and it wasn't British Prime Minister Tony Blair. It goes without saying that America has not been well served by its spies before 9/11, and since. Even fully functional intelligence agencies have a hard time sorting the truth from the background noise but national leaders have to make policy choices, anyway. This is not to suggest for a moment that the president and the prime minister didn't ultimately make the correct choice on Iraq. The two reports at issue simply underscore how difficult a decision it must have been. |
| csua.org/u/875 -> www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/837uvzrs.asp But they really should give serious consideration to Michel Aflaq. It was Aflaq, a Syrian intellectual and political organizer, who founded the Syrian and Iraqi Baath parties. It was Aflaq, too, who in 1963 elevated Saddam Hussein to the Regional Command in Iraq's Baath party, and so set him on his course to dictatorship. And it was Aflaq who laid down the ideology that continues to dominate Saddam's thinking today. Saddam Hussein, after all, isn't a general who took over a government by means of a military coup. He's not only a thug, a ruthless tribal leader, a Don Corleone-style Godfather, a power-mad dictator. He is first and foremost a political activist, a party man. Saddam grew up as a cadre in the highly ideological and dogmatic Baath party structure. His speeches, from the time he entered government in 1968 until today, have had a consistent ideological, pseudo-intellectual character, even if in the past decade a layer of Islamist rhetoric has been added. From his first declarations to his last, he has always presented the Arabs as the master race, whose history and accomplishments are glorious. He has always had a mystical belief in self-purification through violence, the notion that the soul is elevated through warfare and killing. And most important, he has always been committed to the life of relentless struggle, of ever-widening wars and confrontations, of perpetual revolution, which undermines all objective truth, all stability, all possibility of rest and peace. He has believed all this in the name of some final and transcendent conquest for himself and the Arab nation. These beliefs and habits of mind he absorbed from the Baath party, and ultimately from its founder-leader. It is Aflaq whom Saddam cites when he insists, as he does frequently, that the Baath party is not like other parties. MICHEL AFLAQ was born in Damascus in 1910, a Greek Orthodox Christian. He won a scholarship to study philosophy at the Sorbonne sometime between 1928 and 1930 (biographies differ), and there he studied Marx, Nietzsche, Lenin, Mazzini, and a range of German nationalists and proto-Nazis. Aflaq became active in Arab student politics with his countryman Salah Bitar, a Sunni Muslim. Together, they were thrilled by the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, but they also came to admire the organizational structure Lenin had created within the Russian Communist party. Due to this limitation, you may experience unexpected results within this site. |