Letters to the Editor
bloomsbury
Published Letters: 361 Editor's Choice: 5
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it's like comparing apples and oranges
[Read the article: What will they really do about Iraq?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ask yourself Collin Alexander,did the allies occupy Germany because it floated on an ocean of oil? No. Did they do the crazy things in Germany that America has done in Iraq? No. Was Saddam Hussein Hitler? No.The truth is that Iraq had a deal with the Saudis only to drill as much oil as they did so that the oil price could only ever go up. Saddam changed that by not pumping oil one week because he was pissed off with Israel which made the price rise steeply and then pumping to the limit he was allowed under the food for oil scam the next week which made the price drop through the floor. Something had to be done. And it was. The 'insurgency' has nothing to do with Al Qaeda or Iran. A perfect example is the way the Medhi Army was formed. General Jay Garner was busily organizing local elections in Iraq when he was fired by Rumsfeld for organizing elections and refusing to sell Iraq's oil fields to friends of the neo-cons and Mr. Bush. Plus the man was a registered Democrat, clearly unfit for the job. The election for Mayor of Najaf was well advanced by this time and the front runner for the job spoke prophetic words when he heard it had been cancelled. He was a moderate by the way. 'If they don't give us our freedom what will we do? We're patient but not for long.' Immediately after the elections were cancelled local Shias formed the Medhi Army and started talking with bullets instead of ballots. When a paper printed by Moqtada al Sadr criticised Bremer, 'Jerry' closed it down. The Sheikh's militia then killed 21 U.S. soldiers and took control of Najaf for months. To have to watch Betrayus and Ryan Cockroach spewing their lies to congress about Iran and the Medhi Army is enough to make anyone who knows the truth vomit copiously into their hat. The comparison with World War II is a false comparison. America went into Iraq for no good purpose and no good has come of it. How could it? And now Bush and Cheney are trapped. If they get out, their friends the Saudis will have to watch helplessly while Iraq actually begins to pump that ocean of oil and sell it, my friends, to the highest bidder. The oil price will drop and Iraq will be reconstructed with oil money under an Islamic government. Needless to say this can't be allowed to happen (America will have lost another disastrous war and OPEC would collapse) and yet it has to happen because the alternative is continuing chaos and violence probably for decades and even a spreading of the war into neighbouring countries. The occupation of Germany was a moral imperative, a clear responsibility but the occupation of Iraq was a capricous choice, a deluded experiment, motivated by greed and lust for power made by moral pygmies.
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the war, the war, the war
[Read the article: McCain's gassy tax relief]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Any discussion of oil and cars and pain has to include the information that since 2003 the Saudis' oil reserves have increased in value by 7.920 trillion dollars. If McCain wants to stay in Iraq for a hundred years I dare not calculate the cost - in any terms. Getting rid of this tax or keeping it is not the problem. It's just another knee jerk 'cut taxes' scam from the party that loves cutting taxes- and closing schools and building jails. The real problem is that the Republican party's true electorate is in Saudi Arabia. As long as that's true nothing with regards to oil can be fixed by taxation or any other means. The west is heading for bankruptcy whatever happens because of the Iraq war. The Vietnam war had a similar effect leaving inflation and world wide recession in its wake. Iraq is much, much worse. Someone always has to pay but, count on it, it's never the rich and the mega rich. They have better things to do with their money than clean up the mess: bribing politicians for instance and paying off the media so they can get away with murder, for instance. Until OPEC, the cartel from hell, is fixed and the world moves away from oil to other sources of energy, and the Bush, Abdullah, Turki, Bandar Bush nexus is ended, arguing over this tax is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. This is McCain's pitch to those concerned about the price of oil -now on its way to $120 a barrel - and of course it does nothing whatsoever to deal with the looming car crash of the globalized economy or the cost of oil. That's just another fairytale. It putting out a fire in your backyard while the whole forest burns over your fence.
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good
[Read the article: New York Times editorial scolds Clinton ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When the NY Times scolds you, you must be doing something right.
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who's the bum?
[Read the article: Does a vagrant-fighting "bum bot" give robots a bad name?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]How American.