quote:

ORIGINAL: JessFranco

This isn't about backing freedom, it's about preventing the use of airstrikes against rebel targets.

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ORIGINAL: Chief Wiggum

Yeah Fuck the System! it's not like Congo has any Oil is it?

none at all.

not even 180 million barrels sitting underground. or just under a billion cubic metres of natural gas. Or 30% of the worlds diamond stocks, which are needed to make drills so we can get oil from underground.


oh.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Chief Wiggum


So your saying that, the only reason that we're bombing Libya is to gain access to their oil?

the same oil, that US, UK, EU, and Asian Oil firms already have contracts to drill for and export. The majority of which were awarded to US and UK companies.

The same drilling places that we had to evacuate when this all kicked off.

Surely if this was all about getting our hands on Oil, we would have stayed out of it, and quietly let gaddaffi murder and repress his people like he has for the last 42 years.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Fluke Skywalker


There's one thing having export contracts, there's another thing entirely controlling a country's leadership because then you effecively own the oil. You can then move in and get a much heavier return on the 'investment'.

Libyan oil will be privatised allowing foreign corporations to take over production - it's a pattern that's been seen before a hundred times when it comes to appropriating the resources of non-Western countries and a classic US tactic - identify a resource, buy off the government, if you can't then knock them off, privatise the country and sell off to the corporations.

It's amazing people are buying the bullshit about 'humanitarian intervention' when there's been so many cases for intervening (like the Congo) which have been completely ignored.

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ORIGINAL: Fluke Skywalker

It's about directly stealing the oil and gas wealth of a nation, it goes way above E+P deals and is worth slightly more than a 900million BP contract. The Congo has been ignored which is why five million people have died in ten years - a UN peacekeeping force is not comparable to what a direct military intervention could acheive - but of course none of this matters because the resources of the Congo have already been accounted for. Robert Mugabe is another case in point, we could easily have taken this guy out and saved an enormous amount of suffering but we haven't lifted a finger.

quote:


In terms of helping popular movements against dictatorial regimes, the US (and sadly at times us along with them) have spent decades routinely backing dictators, helping them to power, arming them and training them to torture and kill their own. There is an absolute mass of evidence to back this up.

Strangely we are not doing much to push for democracy in Bahrain aside from a few strong (weasel) words from Obama - if we can help it we'll cut the dictators under our control some slack. The ones we don't control we attack and knock off and ensure they get a taste of 'democracy' like Iraq, an occupied and destroyed country with it's oil production privatised and it's wealth creamed off by foreign oil companies.

quote:


Libya will have a puppet government installed and it's resources will be privatised and opened up to US/ Western corporations - it's been done before on many a occasion across South America, the Middle East, Africa and South East Asia, and of course it will happen again.

To quote Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve about the Iraq War :

"I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil."

It's ALL about the control of resources

quote:

ORIGINAL: Chief Wiggum

quote:

ORIGINAL: Fluke Skywalker

It's about directly stealing the oil and gas wealth of a nation, it goes way above E+P deals and is worth slightly more than a 900million BP contract. The Congo has been ignored which is why five million people have died in ten years - a UN peacekeeping force is not comparable to what a direct military intervention could acheive - but of course none of this matters because the resources of the Congo have already been accounted for. Robert Mugabe is another case in point, we could easily have taken this guy out and saved an enormous amount of suffering but we haven't lifted a finger.

so let me get this straight, because there are a couple of points here.

1 - I'm fairly sure you have the word "stealing" and the phrase "acquiring through legal means, the contracts that generally require an investment of around a billion pounds (which includes contract signing fee, the construction of infrastructure neccessary to get any oil out, the drilling of test wells, employment of local staff), to pump oil out of the ground within a certain geographic area and paying roughly 50% (depending on the contract) of the profits to the sovereign nation that owns the oil for the privelidge, all without the guarantee that there will be any actual oil under the piece of land that you bid on". and this suggests that the only way that oil should be obtained is through state-owned oil companies - which tend to be hugely inefficient, require significant investment that 3rd world countries (sorry LDCs) generally don't have and cause rampant corruption within the organisation and locale of the mining.

Countries that have that much oil don't have the investment? Of course they do, except it's in our interests for them not to be state controlled (as when we knocked off the democratically elected Iranian leadership in 1953 who decided to nationalise thier oil).

2 - so it's ok to invade a soverign nation without the backing of the UN (which is what you're suggesting should happen when you say direct military intervention, which would be in vilation of international law) just as long as there isn't any oil or resources.

My point is you can go around the world knocking off dictators all day long and I'll applaud you for it. But the facts show that a) we seem to knock off more governments with resources, and b) quite a few of the dictatorships are actually our stooges. When they get out of hand our press conditions the sheep and then we can attack.

3. it's perfectly ok to assasinate foreign leaders / feasible to mount an invasion in a landlocked country where we would have no friendly countries neighbouring (thereby precluding any significant supply chain to our troops), against a force whose prime antagonism is the British are the colonial oppressors.

I don't see your point here - we either send our armies to war for humanitarian reasons or we don't. We wouldn't pick and choose if we really cared, and the fact that we pick and choose is the telling point - we don't care, we just pretend we do to excuse the next round of attacks on resource rich nations.

quote:


In terms of helping popular movements against dictatorial regimes, the US (and sadly at times us along with them) have spent decades routinely backing dictators, helping them to power, arming them and training them to torture and kill their own. There is an absolute mass of evidence to back this up.

Strangely we are not doing much to push for democracy in Bahrain aside from a few strong (weasel) words from Obama - if we can help it we'll cut the dictators under our control some slack. The ones we don't control we attack and knock off and ensure they get a taste of 'democracy' like Iraq, an occupied and destroyed country with it's oil production privatised and it's wealth creamed off by foreign oil companies.

Bahrain - home to the US fleet in the Arabian gulf as well as the site for the US central command in the middle east. the uprising in Bahrain - dominated by Shia that would like to see closer links with Iran. You can probably see why we're not making too much noise about this. but suffice to say it's not so much to do with Oil, as it is to do with the strategic centre for the US in the Middle East being in downtown Manama.

You said it yourself, the US fleet is based here so it's alright to shoot protesters? Bahrain is a US backed dictatorship, a sunni leadership presiding over a shia majority, they have a right to protest.

quote:


Libya will have a puppet government installed and it's resources will be privatised and opened up to US/ Western corporations - it's been done before on many a occasion across South America, the Middle East, Africa and South East Asia, and of course it will happen again.

To quote Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve about the Iraq War :

"I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil."

It's ALL about the control of resources

Except we already had a fairly pliant dictator in Libya already - sure he had a state owned oil company, but sure as hell all the profits from the oil were sent through the Libyan Investment Company to be invested in UK markets, Sure he may have celebrated the return of al-meghrahi a bit hard - but since 2003 gaddafi has been our guy, need a friendly arab voice? Muammars our man. need an E&P contract? go and see Sayf.

why, when we already had access to the Oil and BP were about to start producing, did we decide that "yeah fuck it, we'll just go and back these rebels, no idea if they'll give us the oil or not, but lets bomb the shit out the guys that we've just got back into the international fold" it makes no fucking sense.

It makes perfect sense for US oil companies and corporations who will cream the money off once they control the country. There's the rather big matter of removing China from the equation - they have significant energy investments in Libya and have been targeting Africa as a way to cover their energy needs. These are power games of the highest order.


The thing is Fluke - you are very adamant in your chomskian view of international politics, I think that the view is far too simplistic and we can spend all day and all night arguing about it, I'm fairly sure it's not worth my time (or yours) to continue this

quote:

ORIGINAL: Chief Wiggum

quote:

ORIGINAL: Fluke Skywalker


You think Chomsky, arguably the foremost intellectual commentator on US foreign policy is simplistic? He totally and utterly dissects US foreign policy, the use of media to propagate lies and condition people to wars and exposes the dark underbelly of Western foreign policy that is hidden from the vast majority of people.

We have spent 100+ years backing dictators, knocking off democracies, destabilising and invading countries to appropriate their resources - I'd love to believe like you clearly do, that we are doing this because we've suddenly woken up and turned our backs on decades of Machiavellian foreign policy but honestly Chief - I'm just not that naive.

Whilst he can write well, my feelings on Chomsky can be pretty much summed up by the following - I wouldn't go to an engineer to explain particle physics, in the same way I wouldn't go to a linguist to explain International Relations.

The thing with Chomsky is that he starts off with the view that Imperialism is the worst atrocity out there, and that western imperialism is the worst of the worst, he then goes and finds information that reinforces this belief, no matter what the source. he's more of a polemicist rather than an intellectual, the latter, I would say, should look for evidence that challenges their starting point. He fails to look rigourously at the regimes that the west is fighting, or criticise them at all. a case in point would be his position on Serbia in the late 90s, evidence was found that showed the existence of Serbian concentration camps housing bosnian muslims. did this evidence, or the Srebrinica massacre challenge his assertion that we only intervened for hegemonic purposes? did it fuck - he even went as far as to allege that the photographs in question were not of starving inmates looking out, but refugees trying to get in.

did he question the use of rape, wanton murder and repression of the Kosovars by serb forces, did he think that this was quite a good time to use western military power to good effect? no, he asserts that this action was purely to promote NATO's prestige.

He also fails to see that whilst it is harder to find evidence of Human Rights abuses in the enemies of the west, this is not necessarily because they didn't happen, but rather an indictment that larger abuses are occurring - if you look at a country like North Korea you don't read of human rights scandals on a daily basis, yet in countries with freer presses you hear of regular abuses

He also dismisses the factor of US fear of the soviet military in the cold war, citing that economic and social factors were more important - again I believe that he is wrong on this - in a bipolar world (as it was then) with both sides having atomic (and later nuclear) weapons, I think that this is the most important of all the factors in the cold war, if you and another person are pointing guns at each other it's pretty much the starting point of any discussion on what you're doing.

However my main criticism of him is that he is exactly that a critic, and as far as I can see has made no suggestions on making the world a better place, or a better system of government that liberal democracy that would actually work. he describes himself as a "libertarian socialist" for my mind the two are exclusive trains of thought as socialism requires a strong state to enforce the redistribution of wealth, where as libertarianism requires a weak state to allow it to flourish.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Chief Wiggum

e]ORIGINAL: Fluke Skywalker

quote:

ORIGINAL: Chief Wiggum

quote:

ORIGINAL: Fluke Skywalker


You think Chomsky, arguably the foremost intellectual commentator on US foreign policy is simplistic? He totally and utterly dissects US foreign policy, the use of media to propagate lies and condition people to wars and exposes the dark underbelly of Western foreign policy that is hidden from the vast majority of people.

We have spent 100+ years backing dictators, knocking off democracies, destabilising and invading countries to appropriate their resources - I'd love to believe like you clearly do, that we are doing this because we've suddenly woken up and turned our backs on decades of Machiavellian foreign policy but honestly Chief - I'm just not that naive.

Whilst he can write well, my feelings on Chomsky can be pretty much summed up by the following - I wouldn't go to an engineer to explain particle physics, in the same way I wouldn't go to a linguist to explain International Relations.

I'm sorry but just because he is an internationally renowned expert in linguistics does not mean he is incapable of commenting on US foreign policy. He is a deep political thinker and it's no wonder that so many in the West don't like him, because quite simply he lays out the facts (like John Pilger).


The thing with Chomsky is that he starts off with the view that Imperialism is the worst atrocity out there, and that western imperialism is the worst of the worst, he then goes and finds information that reinforces this belief, no matter what the source.

Have you examples of him using unreliable sources? Because he seems pretty well researched to me.

he's more of a polemicist rather than an intellectual, the latter, I would say, should look for evidence that challenges their starting point.

Nope he's a bona fide 100% intellectual.

He fails to look rigourously at the regimes that the west is fighting, or criticise them at all. a case in point would be his position on Serbia in the late 90s, evidence was found that showed the existence of Serbian concentration camps housing bosnian muslims. did this evidence, or the Srebrinica massacre challenge his assertion that we only intervened for hegemonic purposes? did it fuck - he even went as far as to allege that the photographs in question were not of starving inmates looking out, but refugees trying to get in.

Serbia is a really interesting case because the truth is so well hidden : Milosevic was a tyrant but the reason for the NATO attack was (like with so many other attacks) because he did not want to give up soverignty and bow down to IMF reforms, have a read of this eye opening piece by John Pilger which makes parallels with the lies surrounding Iraq.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7439.htm


did he question the use of rape, wanton murder and repression of the Kosovars by serb forces, did he think that this was quite a good time to use western military power to good effect? no, he asserts that this action was purely to promote NATO's prestige.

You're saying he denied rape and murder took place?

He also fails to see that whilst it is harder to find evidence of Human Rights abuses in the enemies of the west, this is not necessarily because they didn't happen, but rather an indictment that larger abuses are occurring - if you look at a country like North Korea you don't read of human rights scandals on a daily basis, yet in countries with freer presses you hear of regular abuses

I don't think I've ever heard him say he doesn't believe human rights abuses aren't occuring outside the West. It's pretty blatantly obvious they do occur.

He also dismisses the factor of US fear of the soviet military in the cold war, citing that economic and social factors were more important - again I believe that he is wrong on this - in a bipolar world (as it was then) with both sides having atomic (and later nuclear) weapons, I think that this is the most important of all the factors in the cold war, if you and another person are pointing guns at each other it's pretty much the starting point of any discussion on what you're doing.

Nope for example Operation Condor in South America and the rise of Suharto in Indonesia are both examples of where America were apparently fighting the 'Commie Threat', but once they'd got the dictators in power we saw the classic carving up of the wealth of the nations for US corporations. The Russians (like the War on Terror) were a useful excuse to propagate conflict and steal resources and pile on the defence spending.

However my main criticism of him is that he is exactly that a critic, and as far as I can see has made no suggestions on making the world a better place, or a better system of government that liberal democracy that would actually work. he describes himself as a "libertarian socialist" for my mind the two are exclusive trains of thought as socialism requires a strong state to enforce the redistribution of wealth, where as libertarianism requires a weak state to allow it to flourish.

That's a pretty weak criticism - he has fundamentally exposed Western foreign policy for what it is and your problem is he (apparently) has no ideas for how to make the world a better place? Surely you can work that one out for yourself.

Plus for once I'd like to ask you what you think of the numerous dictatorships the US has backed over the years, in South America, South East Asia, Africa, the Middle East. You seem to support all of these actions - how do you justify them?

quote:

ORIGINAL: Fluke Skywalker


I'm sorry but just because he is an internationally renowned expert in linguistics does not mean he is incapable of commenting on US foreign policy. He is a deep political thinker and it's no wonder that so many in the West don't like him, because quite simply he lays out the facts (like John Pilger).

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Have you examples of him using unreliable sources? Because he seems pretty well researched to me.

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Nope he's a bona fide 100% intellectual.

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Serbia is a really interesting case because the truth is so well hidden : Milosevic was a tyrant but the reason for the NATO attack was (like with so many other attacks) because he did not want to give up soverignty and bow down to IMF reforms, have a read of this eye opening piece by John Pilger which makes parallels with the lies surrounding Iraq.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7439.htm

You're saying he denied rape and murder took place?

quote:


In Chomsky’s words, Turkey is guilty of “massive atrocities” against the Kurds; Indonesia of “aggression and massacre” of “near-genocidal levels” in East Timor; Israel of “murderous and destructive” operations in Lebanon; but there is no mention of Kurdish, East Timorese, or Palestinian atrocities.[3] By contrast, Chomsky uses no such emotive language when discussing the Serbian killing of Albanians; they are a “response” and “reaction” to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) attacks. Meanwhile the KLA was guilty of “targeting Serb police and civilians”; “killing six Serbian teenagers”; the “killing of a Serb judge, police, and civilians”; and so on. The picture Chomsky consequently sketches is of atrocities by both sides and, since KLA actions were “designed to elicit a violent and disproportionate Serbian response”, the implication is that the Milosevic regime was less to blame than the KLA.[4] When a US client massacres innocent civilians it is wholly to blame; when a ‘socialist’ regime does so it is the victims who are primarily to blame.

quote:


That's a pretty weak criticism - he has fundamentally exposed Western foreign policy for what it is and your problem is he (apparently) has no ideas for how to make the world a better place? Surely you can work that one out for yourself.

quote:


Plus for once I'd like to ask you what you think of the numerous dictatorships the US has backed over the years, in South America, South East Asia, Africa, the Middle East. You seem to support all of these actions - how do you justify them?

quote:

ORIGINAL: Chief Wiggum

quote:

ORIGINAL: Fluke Skywalker


I'm sorry but just because he is an internationally renowned expert in linguistics does not mean he is incapable of commenting on US foreign policy. He is a deep political thinker and it's no wonder that so many in the West don't like him, because quite simply he lays out the facts (like John Pilger).

you miss my point, as somebody that studied IR, we quickly learnt that Chomsky is not the person to cite in essays or subjects. in fact I'm not sure that you would find Chomsky on any reading list for any decent university course in Politics. hell even in my "Globalisation and its malcontents" and "US Foreign Policy" modules he wasn't on either the required or the recommended reading lists.

that could me being snobby, or it could be an indictment on the quality of his work.

Or what does it say about the quality of your degree? The way you carry on it seems to me that you have been trained up to be another apologist for Western foreign policy. Have you read any John Pilger by the way, was he on any of the reading lists?

quote:



Have you examples of him using unreliable sources? Because he seems pretty well researched to me.

well lets start of with his statement that brought him back to prominence after years of slowly fading into insignigficance, in which he claimed moral equivilance between the events of september the eleventh 2001, an attack designed to kill as many civillians as possible, and the 1998 bombing of the al-shifa pharmaceutical factory (which happenned at night when most of the people working in the surrounding industrial area wouldn't have been there)

He alleges that this caused the deaths of 10,000 people through the decrease in the availability of medicines in Sudan. in this statement he cites the former German Ambassador and Human Rights watch with supplying this information.

Human Rights watch never produced any such information.

The German Ambassador, in the statement that chomsky cites, even admits that he was taking a guess.

looking at data from the aid agencies that work in Sudan, such as Oxfam, Medicines sans frontiers to name a couple. they reported no increase in deaths following the attack.

To be fair I've not read about this so I'd have to find out before getting back to you.

now should you look at september the 11th, the word bank has said that the lack of economic growth that resulted from the attacks cost the lives of 40,000 children.

so yeas I do find his moral equivilance a little nauseating.

Lack of economic growth caused the deaths of 40,000 children? Are you taking the piss here - do you know how many people have been actually killed by US foreign policy adventures as opposed to an estimate by an organisation which is a corporate neo-colonial tool? (According to former CIA agent John Stockwell about 6 million).

quote:


Nope he's a bona fide 100% intellectual.

in the field of linguistics, yes.

quote:



Still an intellectual - are you saying experts in one field cannot comment on subjects outside of their field with any degree of authority? That's rubbish and you know it.

Serbia is a really interesting case because the truth is so well hidden : Milosevic was a tyrant but the reason for the NATO attack was (like with so many other attacks) because he did not want to give up soverignty and bow down to IMF reforms, have a read of this eye opening piece by John Pilger which makes parallels with the lies surrounding Iraq.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7439.htm

You're saying he denied rape and murder took place?

Fluke do you remember Living Marxism, and how they disputed that Serbian concentration camps existed, and that an ITN story on the subject was wilfully misleading? Well Noam is of the opinion that LM was right, and that ITN should never have sued for libel, despite the fact that ITN were awarded so much damages that LM went out of business.

I also think that Marko Atilla Hoare puts it better than I ever could

quote:


In Chomsky's words, Turkey is guilty of "massive atrocities” against the Kurds; Indonesia of "aggression and massacre” of "near-genocidal levels” in East Timor; Israel of "murderous and destructive” operations in Lebanon; but there is no mention of Kurdish, East Timorese, or Palestinian atrocities.[3] By contrast, Chomsky uses no such emotive language when discussing the Serbian killing of Albanians; they are a "response” and "reaction” to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) attacks. Meanwhile the KLA was guilty of "targeting Serb police and civilians”; "killing six Serbian teenagers”; the "killing of a Serb judge, police, and civilians”; and so on. The picture Chomsky consequently sketches is of atrocities by both sides and, since KLA actions were "designed to elicit a violent and disproportionate Serbian response”, the implication is that the Milosevic regime was less to blame than the KLA.[4] When a US client massacres innocent civilians it is wholly to blame; when a 'socialist' regime does so it is the victims who are primarily to blame.

The KLA have recently been exposed as CIA backed organisation (as exist in many countries where civil war has taken place). Considering the CIA's history in knocking off governments you have to forgive me for buying Chomski's argument, there is a weight of evidence exposing how America's finest operate. In terms of balancing levels of killing, I think it's safe to say that in the examples you mentioned, the Palestinians, East Timorese and the Kurds have been the subject of significantly more aggression and suffered more death than the powers Chomsky is supposedly biased against, especially when you consider in all of these examples the power of state is brought against civilians.

quote:


That's a pretty weak criticism - he has fundamentally exposed Western foreign policy for what it is and your problem is he (apparently) has no ideas for how to make the world a better place? Surely you can work that one out for yourself.

quote:


Plus for once I'd like to ask you what you think of the numerous dictatorships the US has backed over the years, in South America, South East Asia, Africa, the Middle East. You seem to support all of these actions - how do you justify them?