I just realized that this thread is a Lazarus among us, but even though many of the players formally involved may or may not respond, the opening
premise, that the US went to invade for the alien tech reminded me of a news blurb that I remembered and did not sit right with me at the time.
Iraqi leaders hold first meeting on nation's future
UR, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraqi opposition leaders and U.S. officials on Tuesday held the first of several meetings aimed at charting Iraq's future just
days after a U.S.-led invasion toppled the regime of President Saddam Hussein.
Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite leaders gathered at an air base in the southern Iraqi town of Ur, near a 4,000-year-old ziggurat (observatory).
Saddam's party gets the boot
UR, Iraq--Under a white-and-gold tent at the biblical birthplace of Abraham, the United States assembled Iraqi factions Tuesday and told them it
has "absolutely no interest" in ruling Iraq. Some Muslims boycotted the meeting and thousands demonstrated nearby, shouting: "No to America and no
to Saddam!"
Perhaps someone else can find more information about the event, but a sunrise breakfast at the Ziggurat at Ur on the Spring Equinox. The idea of it
gives me the 'esoteric' willies...
DocMoreau
Edit to add these tidbits:
Oil to Syria Shut Down
Newsmax Wires
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
WASHINGTON -- U.S. forces have disabled a pipeline that has been delivering oil from Iraq to Syria in violation of a U.N. embargo, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday.
"I cannot assure you that all illegal oil flowing from Iraq into Syria is shut off; I just hope it is," Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news
conference.
The 11 suspected chemical and biological laboratories found in trailers buried near Karbala are not "smoking guns" in the search for Iraq's alleged
weapons of mass destruction program, CNN reported Tuesday. An Army expert on chemical and biological weapons said tests indicated the laboratories
were more likely intended to be used in the creation of conventional munitions.
The smash of civilizations
The best-known of the civilizations that make up Iraq's cultural heritage are the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans,
Persians, Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sassanids and Muslims. On April 10, 2003, in a television address, Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people were
"the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity". Only two days later, under the complacent eyes of the US Army, the Iraqis
would begin to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning.
In September 2004, in one of the few self-critical reports to come out of Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, the Defense Science Board Task
Force on Strategic Communication wrote: "The larger goals of US strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the
radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they
intended."
Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the indifference - even the glee - shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward the looting on April 11
and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning on April 14 of the National Library and Archives, as well as the Library of Korans at
the Ministry of Religious Endowments. These events were, according to Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, "The greatest cultural
disaster of the last 500 years." Eleanor Robson of All Souls College, Oxford, said, "You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of
Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale." Yet Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game and shrugged it off with the
comment, "Freedom's untidy ... Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes."
The Baghdad archaeological museum has long been regarded as perhaps the richest of all such institutions in the Middle East. It is difficult to say
with precision what was lost there in those catastrophic April days in 2003 because up-to-date inventories of its holdings, many never even described
in archaeological journals, were also destroyed by the looters or were incomplete thanks to conditions in Baghdad after the Gulf War of 1991. One of
the best records, however partial, of its holdings is the catalog of items the museum lent in 1988 to an exhibition held in Japan's ancient capital
of Nara entitled Silk Road Civilizations. But, as one museum official said to John Burns of the New York Times after the looting, "All gone, all
gone. All gone in two days."
[edit on 13/5/2008 by DocMoreau]
[edit on 13/5/2008 by DocMoreau]
