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15 Aug 05 - 07:41 AM (#1542077) Subject: BS: Noted with minimal comment From: dick greenhaus U.S. Forces Raid Iraq Chemical Facility BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - U.S. forces raided an insurgent facility that may have been producing an unspecified type of chemicals (sic), the U.S. military said Saturday. It was unclear what was being produced or whether the materials were intended for weapons, the statemnt added. U.S. troops,acting on a tip from detainees under interrogation, raided a "suspected insurgent chemical production facility" in northern Iraq last Tuesday, the statment said, without specifying the location. However, the military cautioned that ongoing testing at the facility was "insufficient to determine what the insurgents had been producing." The military said it also was investigating which insurgent group was operating the facility. The military has found many suspected chemical sites in the past, none of which ended up containing chemical or biological weapons. Testing of such sites can take several days. One of the main reasons ststed for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was to destroy Saddam Hussein's purported weapons of mass destruction. None were ever found. The statement said officials were examining chemical evidence, but did not say if chemicals were stored at the faciliity. "We are continuing to investigate the production and storage facilities to determine what type and quantities of chemicals were produced at the facility," said Col. Henry Franke, a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer with the multinational force. Talk about possible maybes..Good hedges make good neighbors? |
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15 Aug 05 - 08:23 AM (#1542094) Subject: RE: BS: Noted with minimal comment From: Sandra in Sydney noted. |
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15 Aug 05 - 10:31 AM (#1542207) Subject: RE: BS: Noted with minimal comment From: freda underhill also noted, from an article in Asia Times Online; August 11 2005: ..The chief beneficiary of the occupation and the chaos it produced has not been the Bush administration, but Iran, the most populous and powerful member of the "axis of evil" and the chief American competitor for dominance in the oil-rich region. As diplomatic historian Gabriel Kolko commented, "By destroying a united Iraq under [Saddam] Hussein ... the US removed the main barrier to Iran's eventual triumph." A second key development neutralized the American ability to turn its military might in an Iranian direction: the rise of the Iraqi resistance. During the several months after the fall of Baghdad, the Saddamist loyalists who had initially resisted the US occupation were augmented by a broader and more resilient insurgency. As the character of the occupation made itself known, small groups of guerrillas began defending their neighborhoods from US military patrols. The rise of the Iraqi resistance drastically changed the equation for the Iranian leadership. .. So the Iranians began pushing ahead with their nuclear program; and while no one could be sure whether their work was aimed at the development of peaceful nuclear energy (their claim) or nuclear weapons (as the Bush administration insisted), their moves made it conceivable that they might actually be capable of building a bomb in the many years that it would take - it now became clear - for the US to have any chance of pacifying Iraq. The increasingly destructive, devolving American occupation in Iraq also deflected the anger of an Iranian population that had been growing restless under the harsh clerical hand of Iran's political leaders. At the time of the invasion, opinion surveys in Iran indicated both "widespread discontent within the Islamic republic" and a generally positive attitude toward the United States. ("The average Iranian does not bear ill will against America.") American officials interpreted this to mean that "the clerics may have lost the upper hand" in Iran. However, this widespread discontent quickly dissipated under the pressure of regional events; and two years later, Iranians elected as president Mahmud Ahmadinejad, a fundamentalist militant and electoral underdog, who eliminated the US-favored "moderates" in the first round of voting and then, in a runoff round, soundly defeated a less radical representative of the Iranian establishment, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani. Moreover, he ran on a platform that advocated making Iran's nuclear program - then at a halt while negotiations were once again underway with the Europeans - a priority. Unlike his defeated opponent, who said he would "work to improve relations" with the US, Ahmadinejad claimed "he would not seek rapprochement". In other words, instead of deterring or ending the Iranian nuclear effort, the US invasion and botched occupation encouraged and accelerated it, lending it national prestige and rallying Iranian public opinion to the cause. The China connection Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran stand one-two-three in global estimated oil and natural gas reserves. China's leaders, in search of energy sources for their burgeoning economy long before the American invasion of Iraq, had already in 1997 negotiated a US$1.3 billion contract with Saddam to develop the al-Ahdab oil field in central Iraq. By 2001, they were negotiating for rights to develop the much larger Halfayah field. Between them, the two fields might have accounted for almost 400,000 barrels per day, or 13% of China's oil consumption in 2003. However, like Iraq's other oil customers (including Russia, Germany and France), China was prevented from activating these deals by the UN sanctions then in place, which prohibited all Iraqi oil exports except for emergency sales authorized under the UN's oil-for-food program. Ironically, therefore, China and other potential oil customers had a great stake in the renewed UN inspections that were interrupted by the American invasion. A finding of no weapons of mass destruction might have allowed for sanctions to be lifted and the lucrative oil deals activated. When "regime change" in Iraq left the Bush administration in charge in Baghdad, its newly implanted Coalition Provisional Authority declared all pre-existing contracts and promises null and void, wiping out the Chinese stake in that country's oil fields. As Peter S Goodman reported in the Washington Post, this prompted "Beijing to intensify its search for new sources" of oil and natural gas elsewhere. That burst of activity led, in the next two years, to new import agreements with 15 countries. One of the most important of these was a $70-billion contract to import Iranian oil, negotiated only after it became clear that a US military threat was no longer imminent. The long-term oil relationship between China and Iran, sparked in part by the American occupation of neighboring Iraq, would soon be complemented by a host of other economic ties, including an $836-million contract for China to build the first stage of the Tehran subway system, an expanding Chinese auto manufacturing presence in Iran and negotiations around a host of other transportation and energy projects. .. China and Russia soon began shipping Iran advanced missile systems, a decision that generated angry protests from the Bush administration. ..Iran can target US troop positions throughout the Middle East and strike US Navy ships. Iran can also use its weapons to blockade the Straits of Hormuz through which one-third of the world's traded oil is shipped. With the help of Beijing and Moscow, Tehran is becoming an increasingly unappealing military target for the US. Three pre-existing groups with strong ties to Iran quickly established their primacy in the major Shi'ite areas of Iraq. ..Given their historical connections to Iran, this ascendancy cemented a sort of fraternal relationship between the emerging Shi'ite leadership and Tehran's clerical government. In light of all these developments, Juan Cole commented: "In a historic irony, Iran's most dangerous enemy of all, the United States, invaded Iran's neighbor with an eye to eventually toppling the Tehran regime - but succeeded only in defeating itself." Recently, former Central Intelligence Agency official Philip Giraldi asserted in the American Conservative magazine that, as of late summer 2005, the Pentagon, "under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office" was "drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan mandates a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons ... As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States." The breadth and depth of the assault, according to Giraldi's Air Force sources, would be quite striking: "Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option." Since many targets are in populated areas, the havoc and destruction following such an attack would, in all likelihood, be unrivaled by anything since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After escaping the Cold War specter of nuclear holocaust, it seems unimaginable that the world would be forced to endure the horror of nuclear war in a regional dispute. However, the record of Bush administration belligerence makes it difficult to imagine America's top leadership giving up the ambition of toppling the Islamic regime in Iran. And yet, given that the conquest of Iraq led the administration unexpectedly down strange Iranian paths, who knows where future Washington plans and dreams are likely to lead - perhaps to destruction, certainly to bitter ironies of every sort. The Iranian nightmare; By Michael Schwartz ; August 11 2005, Asia Times Online; www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GH11Ak01.html (Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz) |
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15 Aug 05 - 10:31 AM (#1542209) Subject: RE: BS: Noted with minimal comment From: katlaughing We used to call them a "possible, for sure maybe! |
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15 Aug 05 - 10:57 AM (#1542229) Subject: RE: BS: Noted with minimal comment From: dick greenhaus WE must avoid, at all costs, the possibility of a conceivable risk of a potential hazard! |
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15 Aug 05 - 01:41 PM (#1542342) Subject: RE: BS: Noted with minimal comment From: GUEST Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran stand one-two-three in global estimated oil and natural gas reserves. China's leaders, in search of energy sources for their burgeoning economy long before the American invasion of Iraq, had already in 1997 negotiated a US$1.3 billion contract with Saddam to develop the al-Ahdab oil field in central Iraq. By 2001, they were negotiating for rights to develop the much larger Halfayah field. Between them, the two fields might have accounted for almost 400,000 barrels per day, or 13% of China's oil consumption in 2003. However, like Iraq's other oil customers (including Russia, Germany and France), China was prevented from activating these deals by the UN sanctions then in place, which prohibited all Iraqi oil exports except for emergency sales authorized under the UN's oil-for-food program. Ironically, therefore, China and other potential oil customers had a great stake in the renewed UN inspections that were interrupted by the American invasion. A finding of no weapons of mass destruction might have allowed for sanctions to be lifted and the lucrative oil deals activated. When "regime change" in Iraq left the Bush administration in charge in Baghdad, its newly implanted Coalition Provisional Authority declared all pre-existing contracts and promises null and void, wiping out the Chinese stake in that country's oil fields. There in a nutshell is the reason we're in Iraq. Bev and Jerry |
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15 Aug 05 - 01:44 PM (#1542348) Subject: RE: BS: Noted with minimal comment From: CarolC Looks like we're still fighting 'The Cold War' after all... |
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16 Aug 05 - 12:54 AM (#1542854) Subject: RE: BS: Noted with minimal comment From: The Fooles Troupe The problem is that the current Regime of Power in the USA is brilliant in coming up with clever short sighted possible victory stratagems, that will in the long term be destined to work against what the USA thinks its interests are. |