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2003-01-28 00:00:00
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With company policies like
"
s...,
2003-01-29 00:00:00
Addressing the
State of the Union Address:
it was a
fine sounding speech
until he says the word "Iraq", at which point it collapses under the weight of exaggeration and unsupported claims.
"The United States supports [the Iranian people's] aspirations to live in freedom." I haven't seen the US
do anything to support them, we refuse to engage Tehran and have the country under embargo. The silent
treatment isn't what I'd call a supportive policy, apathetic might be a better choice of words.
"We now know that [the N. Korean] regime was deceiving the world and developing those weapons all along."
Niether Clinton or Bush
pursued the original program
(much of what is described about the Clinton policy here is echoed by
declassified documents, note
that while Bush decries the famine in North Korea nothing is suggested with respect to
"relief from the extensive economic sanctions the U.S. has long imposed.", or what he describes as North Korea
"starving its own people"). The light water reactors were supposed to be completed by 2003, as per the
1994 Agreed Framework.
Funding
was not agreed upon until 1999, with the US holding up the process (only Japan and South Korea had made
financial committments by the time the project cost was decided in 1997, at $5.2 billion, the US and EU
jointly signed on for $400 million). All sticks and no carrots,
on both sides, as before, this 1993
report predicts exactly what has occurred, "If the light-water reactor deal goes sour, then the North could
always fall back on the graphite-moderated reactor's capacity to produce weapons material."
We're more or less watching history repeat itself with North Korea, and so far as I'm concerned
it's little or nothing to be terribly alarmed about (or at least wouldn't be if anybody up top was being serious
about it, hello proliferation!). The same, frankly, goes for Iraq's threat to American security
and history
repeating itself. It's almost avante garde how scratched up the vinyl is.
Following a long list of questionable and increasingly well-aged "evidence" that Iraq is pursuing WMD (such as the
aluminum tube story)
Bush says, "The only possible explanation [for Iraq's pursual of WMD], the only possible use he could have for
those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate or attack." Or as a deterrent to foreign attack, like, say, the
reason Israel has over 200 nuclear warheads, and as every country with nuclear capability has ever used them, except
of course for the United States of America, when there was no deterrent: hence many people's approbation over SDI
as a first-strike weapon.
"Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?"
Well Al-Qaeda announced a jihad against the US right around the time we planted a military base in the holy land,
which strikes me as a formal announcement of intentions.
He goes on, "Trusting in the sanity and restraint
of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option."
followed with a series of crimes committed by Saddam in the 80s when he was recieving US support and being hailed
by Reagan and Bush Sr. as a proponent of freedom and democracy.
Bush announced many plans that sound like promising means to buy out the opposition to war,
such as a little over one billion in funding for hydrogen fuel
cell research and 15 billion over the next five years for anti-HIV programs in Africa. At such prices
the opposition will have to be
bought out cheap,
considering the preparations for war on Iraq have probably already exceeded these amounts. How we'll afford any of it
after billions in tax cuts (pushing an end to dividend taxes that won't help the majority of people whose only
stocks are already in tax free retirement accounts) and a $150 billion budget deficit he doesn't bother trying to explain,
I'm guessing he'll whip out of a voodoo doll and work some of Reagan's old political magic,
"Well sir, I don't know."
:: posted by buermann @ 2003-01-28 00:00:00 CST |
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