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Look, you keep switching back and forth between Iraq and Al Qaida in the same breath. They are very different situations, and the fact that you keep switching like that leads me to believe that you have them conflated in your mind for some reason.
Inasmuch as they are both pretexts for American Imperial expansion the Middle East, yes.
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Anyway, Clinton's bombing of Iraq in 1998 was in direct response to Iraq's giving lots of difficulty to the UNSCOM international weapons inspectors, including attacking helicopter pilots when they tried to fly the inspection teams to planned destinations, attacking photographers with the inspectors when they tried to take pictures of a site, etc. Around this time, evidence of Iraq's WMD plans and actual acivity were uncovered by coalition weapons inspectors:
I'm well aware of the allegations. That said, I consider some of them spurious - one is that a group of guards refused to let them into an HQ; that could be simply cockup rather than conspiracy. You will need to more specific about alleged attacks on inspectors - I don't recall any such. And clearly, no such WMD plans or programmes were in fact uncovered: because as we now know, they were clean since 1991.
This is exactly the 'seeing what you want to see' I suggested. Everyone "knowns" that Iraq has WMD, therefore anything suspicious "must" be indicative of an attempt to conceal.
Nevertheless, the point remains that you simply cannot lay the Iraq debacle on Bush's door alone. Bush did and Clinton were both willing to kill and maim on the basis of their dodgy intelligence reports alone. Clinton, and his Democratic administration, were every bit as convinced that Saddam was armed to the teeth as Bush was. Bush exagerated; he understated the partial data; for these he can and should be held to account. And so should Bomber Bill.
And before you ask, yes I was out on the streets protesting against Desert Fox. You may be pleased to learn that American pilots managed to bomb a flock of sheep, so that only bits of said sheep and their shephard could be found. Of course, nobody was held responsible.
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As you can read, this is REAL PHYSICAL EVIDENCE that Iraq was producing illegal chemical weapons, because it had to be destroyed. Overall, the timeline shows that Iraq was basicaly jerking the inspectors around.
Thats the allegation that has now been comprehensively disproven. You will remember that Scott Ritter testified that "we got it almost entirely wrong", and as I recall he ran USNCOM during this period. This is also the period in which UNSCOM inspectors were revealed to be US intelligence agents, in total violation of the agreed tersm of the inspection.
Once again, these alleged products that justified Desert Fox have never been found.
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Also note that I do NOT think that Iraq had WMD when Bush invaded. Desert Fox was a completely different mission than Desert Storm.
Riiiiight. Is that because you supported 'Fox, huh? There was no evidence - there were merely allegations, since disproved.
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Anyway, pretty much the entire international community recognizes that Al Qaida exists, so I'm not sure why I should believe you when you say it doesn't. Here's my info:
The problem is, the rest of the world does not haver access to US intelligence sources, and cannot verify US claims. And that is all we have to go on.
I never said that AQ certainly did not exist. I say, IF it exists.
But the real problem is that it is not clear if AQ EVER existed in any meaningful sense until the US invented it. As the Wikipedia link reports:
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Although "al-Qaeda" is the name of the organization used in popular culture, the organization does not use the name to formally refer to itself. The name "al-Qaeda" was coined by the American Federal Government based on the name of a computer file of bin Laden's that listed the names of contacts he had made in Afghanistan, which talks about the organization as "the base" of the jihad.
Bin Laden certainly had contacts. He probably had intent. But he probably never had an actual organisation that existed in conspiratorial cells, being organised by an international terrorist master-mind. But now that the US is so insistent there is such an organ, the name has certainly acquired a currency and cachet it never had before. The US is fighting demons largely of its own creation, and own invention.
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Uh, Bin Laden has been identifying himself (and his group) as being responsible for many attacks and bombings on US targets, including 9/11. Do you deny what he says?
As you well know, many rival organisations are proine to claiming reponsibility for any given act of resistance. And if AQ is indeed the paranoid figment of US imagination, then it might even be easy to claim the strike on behalf of AQ as a means of putting the US off the scent.
Frankly, AQ does not behave like any other terrorist organisation anyone has ever heard of. It behaves like a James Bond villain. This alone is reason to doubt is actual existance as a meaningful entity - a threat deduced from nothing more than a single list in the posession of one individual. Seeing what you want to see again, especially as the predictions of huge bunkers in Afghanistan - the cited reason for the invasion - are now utterly discredited.
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Did they offer to help find bin Laden and to bring him to justice?
Why should they, when Bin Laden was administering justice?
But yes, the Taliban did publicly say they would hand Bin Laden over if they knew where he was. There are some suggestions they were lying about that, and did know where he was, but lets bear in mind: the Taliban have absolutely no responsibility whatsoever to the USA. When, for example, will you be handing your killers and torturers over to the Iraqi judicial system?
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Anyway, it had been very well known that bin laden had been conducting terrorist training camps in Afghanistan for years before that.
No its not well known - its violently disputed not least by the very people who wqere arrested by the US in those very camps. They repeatedly report that the camps exiosted for training militia and mujahadeen for work in the India-Pakistan border, for theongoing Palestinian conflict and indeed for anti-Westerrn strikes. But it is quite clear that Bin Laden did not "run" any of these camps - they were run by the likes of Hizbollah and related organs and sympathisers. And these are the people that the US has been obliged to release back to the UK without charge. There are undoubtedly more innocent victims presently languishing in American gulags.
By the way, the Kurds run similar camps for their expats too. And I have known several British Pakistanis who have attended training camps in Pakistan learning to use AK's and RPG's. But you know the real reason they go? Charity donations by paying for that service in Western currency; they have no intention of taking up the struggle thmeselves.
Thus the point is the whole region is rife with armed "terrorist" camps, by which, once again, the term terrorist merely means "army without uniforms". There is absolutely no way the simple coincidence of Bin Laden at such a camp indicates he was ever in charge. He may have been the afternoon guest preacher.
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It wasn't unilateral. The UN and much of the international community demanded it also:
Yes thats true. Unfortunately, we are fools to support America in this regard ever, becuase it will be thrown back in our faces: the US still will never sign up to the conventions governing war crimes which would allow its citizens to be extradited to face justice. What this incident is a demonstration of is only the silly sympathy the world felt for the US after 9/11, and the fact that appeasement of US imperialism does not work.
This message has been edited by contracycle, 04-19-2005 10:26 AM
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