Ron Winn
The Iraqis were "not playing by the rules.
Sun Jul 13 16:37:24 2003
208.152.73.190

The Iraqis were "not playing by the rules.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Metoyou" ron_winn@lineone.net
To: "Everyman" silver@nwinfo.net
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2003 11:50 AM
Subject: Mr Internet Man

Its over now but if 21st century war fare is to be understood then what has
happened in Iraq will have to be accepted if the enemy is not to be a
superpower. What has happened in Iraq? The Iraqis were "not playing by the
rules." This was a comment from a high ranking officer in the British army.
Iraqis were changing from army uniforms into civilian clothes and suicide
bombers started to approach checkpoints in cars. This turned against them
when soldiers manning checkpoints took evasive action and no risks and many
innocent families who were trying to escape the fighting were wiped out.

What wins a war? Probably the most important is loss of moral of the enemy.
But killing enemy civilians whether by intent, accident or by plain
incompetence will have the opposite effect. So what can one expect from the
invaded who has been bombarded by cluster bombs, 2000lbs bombs, tomahawk and
cruise missiles, fired from a faceless and long distance invader. A long
period of UN weapon inspections, and living under the threat of troops
amassing outside one's border for weeks before the invasion and a 12 year
period of sanctions together with all the fighting talk from the West
leading up to the invasion?

Was the West playing by the rules all those years and playing by the rules
using the weapons inspectors, intentionally to spy out the potential enemy
and even extracting from the Iraqi government a report of what was in the
country's armoury ? Was the West playing by the rules when it knew exactly
what they would be up against before the invasion? Were they playing by the
rules from their advanced technological command centre miles away from the
war zone?

What do you do when you are under attack and people around you are being
blown to smithereens? You grab the first weapon at hand and defend yourself
although there is nothing you can do against cluster bombs. The British army
headquarters in Kuwait denied their use by the British army but this was
reversed by the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon. So the British army must have
really enjoyed being counter commanded by their civilian armchair general.
Perhaps in the 21st century war there should be a new government title - the
Offensive Secretary. At least orders coming out of this department would not
be misnomers. In fact there is nothing much that can be done against 2000lb
bombs or Tomahawk or Cruise Missiles unless you have the air force that
equals the invader. But it is a tactic in the 21st century war that you
first ensure the enemy doesn't have one. Unfortunately however, this tactic
disables your enemy from playing by the rules.

So in this 21st century war that has been called a duck shoot, the duck has
to play by the rules. Either it has to take to the skies and fight in the
skies and crap on the enemy vehicles or it has to stay on the ground and get
blasted or come out with its wings in the air. These are the only ways it
will be considered to have played by the rules.

The West can play by the rules provided they say that the enemy's civilian
causalities are unintended or intended to be kept to a minimum. Since this
is always assumed to be the case it does not take very much to actually say
but it is still considered to be playing by the rules.

Failing the production of evidence that Iraq was building a big weapon of
mass destruction (they were, years ago building a big gun with materials
supplied by the British) I am not proud that the British army became part of
a coalition but I am in what they have set out to do in Basra. Now, I hope
both the British and Iraqi people can both start playing by the rules.
Humanitarian rules of common decency and respect for one another.

Regards
===============================================
When Presidents Deceive
White House manipulation of intelligence goes back at least to Theodore Roosevelt.
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Jacob Heilbrunn is an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times.

July 13, 2003

WASHINGTON — Democrats have pounced indignantly on the recent revelation that President Bush relied on forged documents when he asserted last January that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Niger. "This may be the first time in recent history that a president knowingly misled the American people during the State of the Union address," said Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe.

But far from being an aberration, presidential manipulation of intelligence is an American tradition practiced by Democrats and Republicans alike. During the past century, presidents, in displays of both self-deception and deliberate chicanery, have used highly suspect intelligence to justify action or inaction abroad.

The manipulating began with America's rise to empire early in the 20th century. The architect of that empire, Theodore Roosevelt, relied upon America's only organized espionage unit, the Office of Naval Intelligence, to provide him with inflated threat assessments. To help justify building more American battleships, he seized on rumors reported by the U.S. naval attaché in Berlin that Japan's Adm. Heihachiro Togo was traveling around Germany buying weapons with bags of Chinese gold. He also demanded and got inflated estimates of foreign navies' shipbuilding programs. Naval intelligence officers were too cowed by Roosevelt to dispute his notion that battleships were key to American military supremacy. The result, writes Christopher Andrews in "For the President's Eyes Only," was that "at the outbreak of the First World War, the United States was to be desperately short of destroyers."

Nor was Roosevelt's domestic foe, Woodrow Wilson, immune to the temptation to exaggerate intelligence findings. With U.S. entry into World War I looming, Wilson played up German subversion, going far beyond what was actually known in insisting that Germans had filled "unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators, and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf And many of our own people were corrupted."

After World War II broke out, in an attempt to frighten the U.S. into entering the war, the British provided Franklin Roosevelt with false intelligence documents suggesting a Nazi plot to take over Latin America. Roosevelt was warned by the State Department and FBI that the British claims were greatly exaggerated. In particular, they questioned the authenticity of a letter that was supposedly from the Bolivian military attaché in Berlin.

Nevertheless, in a fireside chat Sept. 11, 1941, Roosevelt warned that Hitler was infiltrating Latin American governments to gain "footholds and bridgeheads in the New World, to be used as soon as he has gained control of the oceans. Conspiracy has followed conspiracy." On Oct. 27, in his most important foreign policy speech before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt relied on a map he had been warned had probably been forged by British intelligence: "I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler's government — by planners of the New World Order This map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well."

On Aug. 4, 1964, Lyndon Johnson took the plunge into intelligence manipulation. In order to justify radically escalating the Vietnam War, he appeared on national TV with the sobering news that a U.S. ship had been attacked that day in the Gulf of Tonkin. Although there had been a skirmish in the area two days earlier, the events of Aug. 4 were not at all clear. Johnson delivered his message to the American people despite the fact that the ship's captain had already reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff his doubts about whether the attack had taken place, saying that "reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather reports and overeager sonar men may have accounted for many reports." The captain concluded by suggesting a "complete evaluation before further action."

Richard M. Nixon and his secretary of State, Henry A. Kissinger, also showed themselves willing to exaggerate or downplay threats in order to justify actions. In the administration's early years, Kissinger exaggerated the Russian missile threat, as he wanted Congress to approve an antiballistic missile system. But by 1972, he was soft-pedaling the Russian threat in an attempt to win approval for the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty. Later, when the CIA spotted Soviet infractions of SALT I, Kissinger, according to Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones in "The CIA and American Democracy," "exploited his dominant position to hush up the evidence."

During the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, intelligence again became highly politicized. Pressure from the administration for worst-case estimates prompted a declaration from the CIA that the Soviet Union was in no danger of collapse — even as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was dismantling the "evil empire." And while the administration was trying to sell arms for hostages to Iran, CIA official Robert Gates prevented Iran analysts from disseminating information to a White House that was uninterested in hearing news that didn't support the overture to the mullahs. Gates' reward for his loyalty to the Reagan administration was to be promoted in 1991 to head the agency by President Bush, who had himself been CIA director.

Given the historical record of the presidents who came before, it would have been more surprising if Bush had not manipulated intelligence.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-heilbrunn13jul13,1,6444766.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary