[CTRL] George Bush I: The Man Who Helped Make September 11 A Reality
-Caveat Lector- http://www.jihadunspun.net/newsarchive/article_internal.php?article=25763list=/newsarchive/index.php; George Bush I: The Man Who Helped Make September 11 A Reality Sep 11, 2002 William L. Anderson As Americans embarrassingly stumble into a mawkish remembrance of those awful attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a year ago, I would like to take time to honor (if that is an appropriate word) the man who more than anyone else made those attacks a reality: George H.W. Bush. While conservatives blame Bill Clinton and Democrats still are looking to find if the present George W. Bush Administration was culpable (it was), I would like to turn to the real source, the man whose legacy we seem to have forgotten. If anything, conservatives claim that the only problem of Bush I was the failure to take out Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. Actually, I would like to question whether or not there should have been a war in the first place and point out that the Gulf War, for all of the supposed glory it brought the U.S. Armed Forces, was a huge disaster that continues to this day to have awful repercussions upon much of the world. To understand the magnitude of Bush Is folly, we need to return to 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait in early August. The previous fall, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe had fallen and the once-formidable U.S.S.R. was beginning to break up, as the Cold War had ended. For people who had lived their entire lives under the shadow of all that the struggle between East and West had been, this was a wonderful and heady moment. With the end of the threat of nuclear war between the U.S.S.R. and the USA having ended, for a brief moment, it seemed that prospects for a larger peace could not have been greater that is until that fateful day when Iraq invaded Kuwait. In another era, this invasion would have gone unnoticed, as the actions of one desert regime against another would not have had any effect upon the world scene. However, because of the fact that a huge portion of the worlds crude oil comes from the Persian Gulf region, that was enough to make politicians panic, as people began to assess the possibilities of Saddam Hussein having control over that oil. The U.S. Government dealings with Hussein himself provide an informative study of how not to engage in foreign policy. During the 1980s, when Iraq was at war against Iran, which had held a large number of Americans as hostage in the last year of Jimmy Carters administration, Hussein was seen as a U.S. ally. Like the Muslims who hold to the belief that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the U.S. Government courted Hussein as a moderate who could stand as a bulwark in the region against the fanaticism of the Iranian Islamic regime. After all, Iraq was a secular country, despite its overwhelming Muslim population, and there was a thriving Christian community there. Even when an Iraqi warplane attacked a U.S. ship in the Persian Gulf in 1987, killing dozens of U.S. sailors, the U.S. Government, then under Ronald Reagan, accepted Iraqs apology for its mistake in much the same way the U.S. Government told the public that the deadly 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty also was a mistake. Even when Husseins armed forces used poison gas against Iranian soldiers, Iraq was still regarded as a moderate regime in State Department language. In July 1990, however, it all changed. After the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, indicated to Hussein that the Bush Administration would not object to an invasion of Kuwait, the Iraqis took the U.S. at its word and sent its armies over the border, meeting almost no resistance. (At the time, there was a legitimate dispute at the Iraq-Kuwait border involving the Kuwaiti practice of drilling sideways under the border to extract oil from pools in Iraq. No one seems to have remembered that this was Husseins main gripe, although Iraqis never have regarded Kuwait, which once was part of Iraq, as a legitimate state in the first place.) After Iraq invaded Kuwait, Bush demanded that the Iraqis leave at once. Saddam, once our ally, all of a sudden was a demon, a threat to world peace and someone who was obsessed with obtaining and building weapons of mass destruction. The Saudi Arabian Royal Family also privately expressed fear that Saddam (who probably was more popular in Saudi Arabia than the corrupt rulers of the royal family) would turn his military might towards them. The Saudis, as well as the Israelis and others who saw this as a golden opportunity for a U.S. military response, began to raise the specter of Iraq controlling the worlds largest single oil source. Journalists began to write about the possible reappearance of the dreaded gas lines, forgetting that the chaos at the gas pumps in the USA during the 1970s was the direct result of government price controls on domestic crude oil and gasoline. The prospect of the U.S. Armed Forces being able to set up
[CTRL] George Bush I: The Man Who Helped Make September 11 a Reality
-Caveat Lector- ~~for educational purposes only~~ [Title 17 U.S.C. section 107] George Bush I: The Man Who Helped Make September 11 a Reality by William L. Anderson As Americans embarrassingly stumble into a mawkish remembrance of those awful attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a year ago, I would like to take time to honor (if that is an appropriate word) the man who more than anyone else made those attacks a reality: George H.W. Bush. While conservatives blame Bill Clinton and Democrats still are looking to find if the present George W. Bush Administration was culpable (it was), I would like to turn to the real source, the man whose legacy we seem to have forgotten. If anything, conservatives claim that the only problem of Bush I was the failure to take out Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. Actually, I would like to question whether or not there should have been a war in the first place and point out that the Gulf War, for all of the supposed glory it brought the U.S. Armed Forces, was a huge disaster that continues to this day to have awful repercussions upon much of the world. To understand the magnitude of Bush I's folly, we need to return to 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait in early August. The previous fall, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe had fallen and the once-formidable U.S.S.R. was beginning to break up, as the Cold War had ended. For people who had lived their entire lives under the shadow of all that the struggle between East and West had been, this was a wonderful and heady moment. With the end of the threat of nuclear war between the U.S.S.R. and the USA having ended, for a brief moment, it seemed that prospects for a larger peace could not have been greater that is until that fateful day when Iraq invaded Kuwait. In another era, this invasion would have gone unnoticed, as the actions of one desert regime against another would not have had any effect upon the world scene. However, because of the fact that a huge portion of the world's crude oil comes from the Persian Gulf region, that was enough to make politicians panic, as people began to assess the possibilities of Saddam Hussein having control over that oil. The U.S. Government dealings with Hussein himself provide an informative study of how not to engage in foreign policy. During the 1980s, when Iraq was at war against Iran, which had held a large number of Americans as hostage in the last year of Jimmy Carter's administration, Hussein was seen as a U.S. ally. Like the Muslims who hold to the belief that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the U.S. Government courted Hussein as a moderate who could stand as a bulwark in the region against the fanaticism of the Iranian Islamic regime. After all, Iraq was a secular country, despite its overwhelming Muslim population, and there was a thriving Christian community there. Even when an Iraqi warplane attacked a U.S. ship in the Persian Gulf in 1987, killing dozens of U.S. sailors, the U.S. Government, then under Ronald Reagan, accepted Iraq's apology for its mistake in much the same way the U.S. Government told the public that the deadly 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty also was a mistake. Even when Hussein's armed forces used poison gas against Iranian soldiers, Iraq was still regarded as a moderate regime in State Department language. In July 1990, however, it all changed. After the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, indicated to Hussein that the Bush Administration would not object to an invasion of Kuwait, the Iraqis took the U.S. at its word and sent its armies over the border, meeting almost no resistance. (At the time, there was a legitimate dispute at the Iraq-Kuwait border involving the Kuwaiti practice of drilling sideways under the border to extract oil from pools in Iraq. No one seems to have remembered that this was Hussein's main gripe, although Iraqis never have regarded Kuwait, which once was part of Iraq, as a legitimate state in the first place.) After Iraq invaded Kuwait, Bush demanded that the Iraqis leave at once. Saddam, once our ally, all of a sudden was a demon, a threat to world peace and someone who was obsessed with obtaining and building weapons of mass destruction. The Saudi Arabian Royal Family also privately expressed fear that Saddam (who probably was more popular in Saudi Arabia than the corrupt rulers of the royal family) would turn his military might towards them. The Saudis, as well as the Israelis and others who saw this as a golden opportunity for a U.S. military response, began to raise the specter of Iraq controlling the world's largest single oil source. Journalists began to write about the possible reappearance of the dreaded gas lines, forgetting that the chaos at the gas pumps in the USA during the 1970s was the direct result of government price controls on domestic crude oil and gasoline. The prospect of the U.S. Armed Forces being able to set up permanent bases also appealed to a number of Democrats
