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Wars and conflicts

  • These are Blair’s last days
    3 May 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    9 comments

    Iraq is our greatest foreign policy calamity in modern history and the reckoning has only just begun
    George Galloway Tuesday May 3, 2005 The Guardian UK
    When I first called the prime minister a liar on air over his repeatedly denied plans to invade Iraq - in the wake of the Texas meeting with George Bush in spring 2002 - the BBC presenter was aghast at my presumption. Today there can scarcely be a sentient being in the land who would disagree.
    If Tony Blair had been told a couple of (…)

  • You Can’t Eat A Soccer Ball
    2 May 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    3 comments

    In the Autumn of 2004 in Baquabah, Iraq we made a lot of effort after the razing of Fallujah to win back some support of the Iraqi people.
    A general distrust grew among the local nationals and it was important to not lead into the elections with negative backlash. There was a surge of insurgent recruiting due to the injustice of destroying Fallujah and we wanted to take the wind out of it.
    One of the officer think tanks perched high above real action in Iraq, and high above any common (…)

  • Blair to the Hague for war crimes! ICC Prosecutor "one of the most significant" cases he had seen
    2 May 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    5 comments

    Troops’ families demand public inquiry into war By Severin Carrell
    01 May 2005
    The parents of British troops killed in Iraq are to demand that Tony Blair orders a public inquiry into the war or face legal action in the courts.
    Six families will go to Downing Street on Tuesday to call for an independent inquiry into the legality of the war, after it emerged last week that the Attorney General warned the UK could lose in court if it failed to win the United Nations’ approval.
    The (…)

  • Do we?
    2 May 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    Do we really expect to read the paper tomorrow, a month from now, a year from now and expect no bad news out of Iraq? Apparently, several thousand Iraqis have made it a career choice to kill anything and anybody in the way of what they perceive to be justice. If we are going to pull out with our tail between our legs, shouldn’t we do it sooner rather than later?
    Do we really think we are helping things over there? What are we waiting for?
    Hell no. We are buying time to uninstall as much (…)

  • IRAQ: Making a killing: the big business of war
    1 May 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    3 comments

    While nearly 100,000 Iraqis and 1600 US troops have died as a result of the Iraq war and tens of thousands have been severely wounded, the war has proven to be extremely lucrative for the Houston-based oil services company Halliburton and the San Francisco-based construction company Bechtel. These are the two largest private contractors to the US occupation forces in Iraq.
    Iraq war and “reconstruction” contracts helped Halliburton to turn a profit in the first quarter of this year, after (…)

  • Custer Battles accused of killing innocent civilians, bilking millions and running wild in Iraq
    1 May 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    His career in Baghdad was brief. And it ended badly.
    On a blistering July afternoon, three MP5 submachine guns were pointed at Robert Isakson. The men carrying the weapons wanted his money and his security pass.
    As Isakson tells it, they also wanted his guns, leaving him unarmed in a mess of a country and banned from its safest haven.
    "We were defenseless," says the former cop and FBI agent. He had come to Iraq to help rebuild the devastated country, accompanied by his 14-year-old son, (…)

  • The case for immediate withdrawal
    1 May 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    THE REPUBLICANS and Democrats can agree on one thing—the U.S. can’t withdraw its troops from Iraq right now.
    According to the Bush administration, U.S. forces have to help Iraq complete its transition to democracy, and prevent a slow spiral toward civil war.
    Despite occasional criticisms of Bush’s rush to invade, the argument from mainstream Democrats isn’t much different. “Now that we’re there, we’re there, and we can’t get out,” said Howard Dean, the new chair of the Democratic (…)

  • Revealed: documents show Blair’s secret plans for war
    1 May 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    1 comment

    Tony Blair had resolved to send British troops into action alongside US forces eight months before the Iraq War began, despite a clear warning from the Foreign Office that the conflict could be illegal.
    A damning minute leaked to a Sunday newspaper reveals that in July 2002, a few weeks after meeting George Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Mr Blair summoned his closest aides for what amounted to a council of war. The minute reveals the head of British intelligence reported that (…)

  • Vietnam vets reveal job struggle
    30 April 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    ALMOST half of Australia’s Vietnam War veterans experienced extreme difficulty settling into a job after returning from military service, research has found.
    By Roberta Mancuso
    ALMOST half of Australia’s Vietnam War veterans experienced extreme difficulty settling into a job after returning from military service, research has found.
    The study has been released a day before the 30th anniversary of the war’s end, when Saigon capitulated to the communists and was subsequently re-named Ho (…)

  • Iraq occupation has failed; time to bring troops home
    29 April 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    5 comments

    It was the last question at the first "Lincoln-La Follette" Democratic dinner in Amery, Wis. (I know what you are thinking. Hey, Abe and "Fighting Bob" were Republicans. The answer from Amery was, "True, but today they would be Democrats. So we are adopting them.") The woman asked, "Why is no one outraged by this war?"
    I asked for a show of hands: "How many of you want to bring the troops home now?" Every hand went skyward but her question hung over the audience.
    Where is the voice of (…)