What was the LAST justifiable war the US fought in?

Due to space I did have to leave out the Spanish American and Mexican American wars, WWI and the War of 1812. Forgive me.

though can i say that the afghan invasion WOULD'VE been justified if we hadn't fucked it up so badly? we went after all the wrong people and killed way too many innocents...

when we killed 10 innocent Afghans for every WTC victim.

We should have gone after OBL the same way Israel went against the terrorists responsible for the Munich massacre. Instead, we went for the cheap testosterone high of butchering people of color. How sad!

We killed 30,000 Afghans? I am just curious as to where you got that fact.

in the MSM. Brave reporters such as The Independent's Robert Fisk were witnesses to entire villages bombed out of existence by American planes. Fisk saw arms and legs of little children and infants that our glorious Luftwaffe terminated in revenge for WTC.

Most Afghans had no clue what was happening for TV was banned by the Taliban. Many of them did not know that there was such a place as New York City, much less a WTC. Our war crimes began in Afghanistan, and they now dwarf whatever Bin Laden did on 9/11.

Here is a website that used to track Afghan casualties:

http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm

Even though one of the largest objectives of the Afghan war (ahem, OBL) has not been met, retaliation for 9/11 was completely necessary, and at least somewhat dismantled the terrorist infrastructure. And as a bonus, we deposed a pretty repressive government. There might have been some ulterior motives, but the benefits outweighed the costs.

but women don't count in the American conscience, particularly when they are neither white nor Christian.

There was no reason for us not to take out the Taliban, the folks who provided the cover for the perpetrators of 9/11. I wish we had stayed in Afghanistan and really built it up, though I honestly don't know the state of things over there since the media seems to have forgotten that that country exists.

because of the taliban?

to take out a repressive governement just because it's repressive. If that were the case, Belguim could invade us!!

Invading Afghanistan, if we got OBL, would have been justified, but it doesn't seem like that was ever are mission. W just wanted to rev the country up so he could invade Iraq.

and that is why he needed bases in Afghanistan and in Iraq in order to launch a 2-front invasion. Unfortunately for the boy emperor, the people in the countries he invaded are not playing along.

For those that vote for Afghanistan in this poll: are you aware that the war is still going on, and that outside Kabul there is no one in control, except for warlords such as Dostum?

When the terrorists that supposedly flew those planes were from Saudi Arabia. Can't be bombing anything of our favorite monarchy (sorry UK the queen just doesn't have enough oil). We had been waiting for an excuse to occupy Afghanistan long before 9/11 so shrub and haliburton could build their country long pipeline which of course will connect Iran, Iraq and Syria eventually giving "our" oil a nice straight shot to a port.

What was done to the country of Afghanistan was not justice, it was a bloody and vicious sort of revenge, the slaughter of innocent men, women, and children in some cold-hearted attempt on the part of the elites to illustrate they were doing something for "national security." There was never a need to somehow "make up" for the innocents killed on 9/11/01 by killing more innocents; doing that is unproductive and wholly immoral. The Empire responded to a clear indication of the "success" of its policies with the eager continuation of such policies.

What would be the response if Nicaragua proclaimed that retaliation for the terrorist war waged by the Reagan Administration against its people was "completely necessary," and as a result slaughtered thousands of American civilians?

In fact Bin Laden did something pretty similar, he said that what he did was justified because of the huge number of Iraqi children starved to death by the sanctions. He was wrong, because one atrocity does not justify another. The war against Afghanistan was wrong for the same reason.

we keep using the eye for an eye philosophy pretty soon the whole world will be blind.

was mismanaged at best.

n/t

destroyed the giant Buddhas. Well, maybe a confiscation on the part of civilization. I also think Hussein had to be put out of Kuwait. I hate to admit it tho, I believed the incubator stories, at first. I kept thinking "if Hitler had been put out of the Rhineland or Alsace Lorraine".While Kuwait may be an artificialcountry, it had recognition, and more importantly, allies.

The idea of the Afghan war was roughly as justifable as sending the Chicago PD to perform drive-bys in Milwaukee en masse because Jeffrey Dahmer lived there.

Also roughly as effective.

Had Daddy Bush not screwed that up (FYI- Schwarzkoptf told him, "Give me 48hrs and I'll break the Republican Guard and have Saddam in chains", but Daddy Bush said no- the war was on CNN and it "looked bad".

Saddam invaded his neighbors, and AT THAT POINT, he was a threat. We had a chance to take him out of power, at a time when we WOULD have been looked at as liberators.

We f'd that up pretty good...

Saddam being a threat is just some crap that Bush I's goons made up. Iraq posing a threat to Saudi Arabia is just plain nonsense.

And that "babies taken out of incubators" setup... puh-lase!

And let's not forget the Highway of Death. That was not justified at all. Saddam pulled out his forces out of Kuwait in compliance with UN resolutions, but Bush I ordered the the US troops to slaughter them completely for no reason.

don't think Bush invaded Kuwait? He had a deadline, Jan 15th I think, and he did not remove his troops.

The Highway to Death was a CNN creation. The US soldiers were killing Republican Guard memebers, not civilians. Most of the conscripts were surrendering, and being promised that they would be set free once the US toppled Saddam. Instead, we left Saddam where he was and sent the soldiers back to him, where they were marked as traitors.

My point being, Saddam could have and should have been dealt with in 91.

or did that piece of information escape you? Saddam asked US Ambassador April Glaspy if it was okay for him to invade Kuwait in retaliation for its slant drilling (Bush's Zapata Oil), Ambassador Glaspy replied that it wasn't the US concern.

or provide sources..

and not accept what the MSM tells you. Weren't you alive at the time? I was!

I certainly remember seeing pictures of Glaspie on TV on that fateful meeting. The Bush Administration did not oppose Saddam's invasion at first, they only said they were displeased. It wasn't until PM Margaret Thatcher's visit to the White House a few days later that Bush turned bellicose to what Saddam had done.

Google it: Glaspie, April Catherine

and many of you don't even set foot inside a library, much less browse through the periodicals section (where all the good stuff is).

For those of little faith, here is the internet link to the transcript of the meeting between Saddam Hussein and Ambassador Glaspie:

APRIL GLASPIE TRANSCRIPT

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie - What solutions would be acceptab le?

Saddam Hussein - If we could keep the whole of the Shatt al Arab - our strategic goal in our war with Iran - we will make concessions (to the Kuwaitis). But, if we are forced to choose between keeping half of the Shatt and the whole of Iraq (i.e., in Saddam s view, including Kuwait ) then we will give up all of the Shatt to defend our claims on Kuwait to keep the whole of Iraq in the shape we wish it to be. (pause) What is the United States' opinion on this?

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie - We have no opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960's, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America. (Saddam smiles)



http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ARTICLE5/april.html

and I remember the King of Jordan (father of the present king - the name escapes me) saying 'Saddam swallowed the bait'. And in addition to the babies ripped from their incubators, the alleged satelite photos showing troops on the Kuwaiti-Saudi border (which were never released), troops which were mysteriously absent on the Soviet satelite photos of the same area.

the Gulf War:

In August 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Bush Administration first reaction to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was to view it as an internal Arab dispute. At a White House press conference right after Iraq invaded Kuwait, President Bush was asked if he was considering intervening on the side of Kuwait as one of his option. President Bush gave a rambling and confusing reply: "we're not discussing intervention. I would not discuss any military options, even if we'd agreed upon them, but one of the things…" (Frontline Part A 1986)

President Bush gathered his National Security Council. The question was whether the United States could live with Iraq in Kuwait. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney:

We really needed some time to come to grips with this basic, fundamental question of our strategic assessment of what this meant. Did it matter that (Saddam) had taken Kuwait? (Frontline Part A 1996).

The nightmare to the Bush Administration was that Iraq, which was an oil powerhouse on its own, would be able to dominate OPEC by acquiring the Kuwaiti resources.

Frontline: The Gulf War. Part A. By Eamonn Matthews. Narr. Will Lyman. BBC/WGBH. 1996. Transcript. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/script_a.html>

So there's no indication that the strategy was to deliberately lure Saddam to attack as a pretext to attacking him then, in your opinion? You seem to have researched this.

That's what happened in Afghanistan in '79 after all, as Zbigniew Brzezinski later admitted. According to Andre Gunder Frank:

"The Americans were determined to go to war from the start,"
and Saddam Hussein "walked into a trap" according to the
former French foreign minister Claude Cheysson (IHT March 11).
"State Department officials...led Saddam Hussein to think he
could get away with grabbing Kuwait....Bush and Co. gave him
no reason to think otherwise" (New York Daily News Sept. 29).
The Former White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger has
written at length about how this trap was set unfortunately I have not yet had access to this
documentation]. Bits and pieces of the jigsaw puzzle trap are
also emerging elsewhere, however; and some may be summarily
put together here. The belatedly publicized July 25 interview
between President Hussain and American Ambassador April
Glaspie is literally only the tip of the largely submerged
iceberg of this trap setting story.

There seems to be different versions ot there of what really happened, and I don't really know what to believe.

I had been looking for that :-)

Poppy isn't the person he's prentending to be.

Look who's been the back player since the 60's. Does anybody have a timeline of his positions in the US govt./Society?

1. I was 11. I didn't have a fabulous grasp of geo politics.

2. Saddam was a bad man. For a while, he was our bad man- we did indeed give him money, weapons etc etc.

3. Just because we erred in putting him in, doesn't mean we needed to compound that error by leaving him in for the next 12 years.

in closing ( for now, I'm not done wit this issue), the world had a chance to take this guy out after he invade another country.

Instead, we starved his people for 12 years with "sanctions", fumbeled an invasion, and turned the tide of Islamic rage against us.

good show US! :eyes:

Word to the wise, the internet is not the fountain of information that many people think it is. For one thing, search engines only access less than half of the information that is "out" there. For another thing, electronic information is easily manipulated, changed, or sent into the memory hole (of 1984 fame!).

Hard print can not be changed! You can only burn the books or the newspapers. Much of the information that is critical to our analysis of the issues resides in well-stocked libraries. It is there were we must go to find much of the information that you will not find in the internet.

Here is an example:

The battle for Khafji was a precursor to the thousands of deaths and the carnage that would befall Iraq. The media's reliance on military briefings for its reports to the television audiences back home, rather than in its own reporting in the field, was a disservice to the public it purported to serve.

There were instances in which members of the pool press did actually collaborate openly with the Pentagon in preventing other correspondents from chasing a story. An American NBC pool reporter, Brad Willis, ordered Robert Fisk away from a battle scene in Khafji. Fisk found it incomprehensible that an American journalist would find "the privileges of the pool and the military rules…more important than the right of the journalist to do his job" (Keeble 121).

NOTES:

Keeble, Richard. Secret State, Silent Press. Luton UK: John Libbey Media, 1997.

(hint: the U.S.). Who supplied Saddam with Sarin nerve gas so he could gas the Kurds and plenty of other Iraqis? Again, the US. Saddam was a CREATION of the US.

We placed him in power because he was a Sunni. This is exactly what the British did in Saudi Arabia (in the early 1900's), when they installed the Royal House of Saud. They put them in there so they would be their puppets.

We put Saddam in power so he could be our "Oil Stooge". At some point, though, he turned against his masters, or he became useless, so we turned him into a villain.

Also, I've read that the Kuwaitis were involved in Slant Drilling, so they were in effect taking Iraqi oil.

This is a real tendency: we install dictators who will be used as our puppets, to work contrary to the peoples' interests. At some point, they betray us, or they become useless, or we just want them out of the way. Then they become "Public Enemy #1".

Newsweek Cover:

'How We Helped Create Saddam' -- U.S. Supplied Iraq With Equipment and Materials In 1980s, Including Bacteria That Can Be Used To Make Biological Weapons Administration's Worry: Saddam Could Unleash Bio Weapons On U.S. Troops, Hand Out Bio Weapons To Terrorists

NEW YORK (PRNewswire via COMTEX) -- During the 1980s, when Iraq was at war with Iran, the United States decided to help Iraq and began supplying Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with supplies and military hardware, including shipments of "bacteria/fungi/protozoa" to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), Newsweek reports in the current issue. According to former officials, the bacteria cultures could be used to make biological weapons, including anthrax. The Reagan administration began allowing the Iraqis to buy a wide variety of "dual use" equipment and materials from American suppliers. According to confidential Commerce Department export control documents obtained by Newsweek, the shopping list included a computerized data base for Saddam's Interior Ministry (presumably, to help keep track of political opponents); helicopters to transport Iraqi officials; television cameras for "video surveillance applications" chemical analysis equipment for the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC); and, most unsettling, the numerous shipments of the bacteria, report Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas and Middle East Regional Editor Christopher Dickey in the September 23 cover story, "How We Helped Create Saddam," (on newsstands Monday, September 16).

http://www.rense.com/general29/eppr.htm

invade Kuwait, false "incubator stories" or not.

But remember he was given a "greenlight" from us at the time.

Besides, punishing some guy who invaded a country by INVADING AND OCCUPYING his years later is not my idea of "justice"<

By 1941, Hitler was riding high and there wasn't a plausible way to avoid it.

All the rest could have, and should have, been settled by other means.

I think the war itself was justified, but the execution of the war was badly done.

We should have gone after both Osama/al Qaeda (through military means) and the Taliban (through sanctions) a long time before September 11th, and after September 11th we should have taken the removal of the Taliban from power as secondary to capturing Osama. We killed way too many innocents, and the real truth about Afghanistan and our "success" there has yet to be told.

I think our intervention in the Kosovo conflict was entirely justified. The US has enough wealth that we can and should intervene in genocidal conflicts.

I think the US should have led the world into Darfur long ago.

which should never have happened.

Wars seem to cause more wars.

....were sown in the Gulf War, and the seeds of the Gulf War were sown by the original European colonialists who drew the borders in the Middle East. As well as the creation of Israel after WWII and the Crusades.

Why did * help take OBL's family out of America?

Why is nobody looking into Saudi Arabia (SA) for any of this?

Anybody look to see what happened before 9/11 in Afghanistan? (America wanted to build an oil pipeline. And something about getting ~$40 million from *'s government as well...)

Maybe there is good reason we need to be in Afghanistan. I don't know all the facts. But many questions remain unanswered. Questions which would determine if it is justified or not.

and the US have had a relationship going back to FDR.

Basically, they give us oil, we give them security. Saudia Arabia is an absolute monarchy, and had been ruled over by the House of Saud since it's creation in 1921.

The original Saudi King gained the moral high ground by convincing the Wahhabies to support him when he consolidated power and land, and since then, they have flouted Islamic laws. The outrage and anger of the average devout Muslim has led to the rise of Anti-American sentiment because of this deal between the US and the Saudi royal family.

so...the Saudi people are against us, but the ruling party is firmly on our "side". They have no problem with dirty US money!

some revisionist and Japanophile historians say that before Tojo's November 1941 coup - the "Pacific War" was avoidable - in return for Japanese commercial access to China, Indonesia (oil), and Indo-China (rubber) on equal footing with France, US, UK, Netherlands. The Japanese Foreign Ministry perceived racisim on the part of the west. As I said -- some revisionist and Japanophile historians hold this view.

If we didn't have the Revolutionary war, our country wouldn't exist. And the Civil war? War may not the best choice or even the first choice, but sometimes it is the choice that must be made.

just needed a way to get the American people behind the invasion.

We set up the Taliban. We financed them. We wanted to put a pipeline through. Luckily for Bush, an ex-unicol employee to the job as president of Afghanistan. Of course, the contract with the Argentina oil company was canceled and the one the Unicol company wanted for 10 years was signed. The US was free to grab all that oil that was in the area. It was suppose to be more oil that the Middle East. The oil companies went in. There is not much oil there. They way overestimated the amount.

There was also suppose to be a lot of natural gas there. Afghanistan pipeline would get that gas to India very cheaply. Enron had the electric producing plant that it overcharged Inida for. It ran on natural gas, even though there would be no way to sell the electricity because it would be too expensive, natural gas being very expensive in India at the time. However, it Enron could get cheap gas from Afghanistan - well you get the picture now don't you.

The last legitimate war was WWII.

After reading this tell me how Afghanistan in regards to terrorism differs from Libya? To me the only difference is the was the magnitude of the terrorist acts. Without a system of proscribed actions or processes of deliberation, our foreign policy seems to be a poorly assembled collage of directives subject to public whim.

A country can be honestly belligerent or honestly altruistic. The inconsistency and hypocrisy of America not only leads problems forecasting future events, but in the planning and implementation of appropriate responses as well.

Libya's government survived years of sanctions and other measures. Where as Afghanistan was destroyed as a semi-sovereign state only a month 9/11 and without the U.N. required condition of an eminent threat to the United States.




Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Libya adopted a high international profile based on Pan-Arabism, its virulent condemnation of 'western imperialism', its support of liberation movements around the world and military adventurism in neighbouring African nations. What angered Western countries most was Gaddafi's support of real and so-called liberation movements, and particularly his alleged support of international terrorist organizations. These activities served to isolate Libya further from the international community. The most violent reaction to Libya's politics came from the USA, culminating in the air strike of April 1986 that killed dozens of people, including Gaddafi's adopted baby daughter.

Libya entered a period of isolation following the 1988 bombing of a Pan-Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 259 people on board and 11 on the ground. Libya was accused of planting the bomb, and two Libyans were named as suspects. The US and Britain demanded the suspects be turned over for trial, Libya refused, and the resulting standoff caused the US to force the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Libya.

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/africa/libya/history.htm

After that, every war we fought, and I do mean EVERY war (including Gulf War I and, in a way, the Afghan war), has been for crappy reasons and unjustifiable means.

The Afghan war was justifiable in a way, but it was mishandled miserably. Capturing bin Laden and stopping Al-Qaeda was our TOP priority, not toppling the Taliban and installing a puppet so we can have some sort of "magical oil pipeline bringing natural gas from the Caspian Sea (see F/911)" The aftermath is ridiculous. Chimpy says Afghanistan was a "free" democracy while in fact, it's currently the world's leading supplier of opium. All this talk about "winning the war on terra" and we were LOSING THE WAR ON DRUGS.

ALL wars after WWII were for nothing but American political and military gain.

That's my two cents.

Amazing how the dirt poor white guy fought and died just for the rich white man right to own black slaves...

Although that one was clearly not justifiable.