Letters to the Editor
bloomsbury
Published Letters: 407 Editor's Choice: 5
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history of Saddam and Osama
[Read the article: The strong and tough Democrats]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Saddam Hussein's heroes were people like Stalin and Hitler. This makes him a sociopath but not a jihadist. Saddam Hussein was an illegitimate child. He never forgot how he and his mother were treated by Muslim clergy. He never forgave either.
While he was in control the fundamentalist muslim clergy of Iraq kept a very low profile. That he could ever have made common cause with an out and out fundamentalist like Osama bin Laden is unlikely in the extreme. It would have made a lot of sense to leave Hussein there and for America to concentrate on really defeating a problem of its own making, namely the Taliban. Defeating them militarily was the easy part but the project also required peacekeeping skills: something the US military lacks almost totally. And, of course, the invasion of Iraq was planned for years and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks or terrorism against America. The invasion of Iraq was about oil and establishing military bases in order to control the Middle East and that darn black gold. It certainly hasn't made America safer. If Saddam Hussein hadn't invaded Kuwait, thereby threatening America's oil supply and even the Saudis' oil he could have murdered as many Iraqis and Kurds as he liked. It's easy to prove this statement: in spite of Saddam's genocidal and homicidal tendencies there was absolutely no problem until he invaded Kuwait. The first place Saddam Hussein went when he arrived in the the big city as a 19 year old contract killer was the local CIA office. Somehow he just knew he was their kind of guy. The United States will never do anything unless they perceive it to be in their interest. They didn't go to Iraq to help the Iraqis and many of the American soldiers sent in there believed the lie that Iraq had attacked America on 9/11. They treated the Iraqis accordingly and the insurgency began. It is a matter of historical fact that the CIA created Al Qaeda as part of their effort to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan and their friends the Pakistani Secret Service created the Taliban. Talk about chickens coming home to roost! It seems pretty clear that Saddam Hussein was yet another patsy. If the CIA hadn't had a compulsive need to play a very expensive and nutty game of chess with the Russians the whole world would have been better off. The CIA has been in some very strange beds, including Saddam Hussein's and Osama bin Laden's. It's not a pretty story and it's not heroic. I can understand why so many Americans prefer the fairy tales their leaders and their media tell them. Or maybe they just have trouble following a plot so bizarre it belongs in a trashy thriller.
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thinking caps on
[Read the article: Plastic bags are killing us]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You put a man on the moon and you can't make a biodegradable plastic bag? We already have them in Australia. Obviously it can be done.
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nuclear armed and dangerous 'scholars'
[Read the article: The foreign policy community]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]These foreign policy planners love scholarship the way people who run dog fights love dogs. All life has taught them is to adhere to orthodoxy come what may. They believe that thinking is dangerous and change is always bad. In many ways their mediocrity as thinkers is even more dangerous to the world than the weapons they have to play with.
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Rudy the Recycler
[Read the article: Yeah, but did he drive a Winnebago there?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yes, Rudy was at Ground Zero constantly, having all the steel from the Twin Towers shipped to Asia as fast as he could so that the fire engineers could never examine it. In spite of an editorial in the Fire Engineers magazine saying that the destruction and removal of evidence must cease immediately. It didn't cease. Rudy just ignored the engineers who were absolutely shocked at how he and others obstructed their every effort to examine that steel which had cracked every 30 metres, oh so conveniently, into the perfect length to fit on the back of a truck. Ground Zero was a crime scene and Rudy was certainly behaving strangely. Anyone with a suspicious mind would think he didn't want the fire engineers to find out how and why the Twin Towers came down. The fire engineers were not only obstructed, some of them were threatened, in line with the general pattern of obstruction and concealment that was the hallmark of everything that went on in the aftermath of 9/11. If I were him I would change the subject: he doesn't seem to understand that a lot of people are on to him and his colleagues.