Im more of an isolationist, leave these hell holes to their own devices unless it looks like they could interfere with our nation (primarily militarily)

Originally posted by pause4thought

In reality while Western troops are out trying to 'win' wars across the globe their governments have lost the plot at home.

It just so happens I've just posted this summary on the end of US domination and the rise of China on another thread:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

I am aware what I said is stark, and arguably a worse-case scenario. But the evidence is mounting that no amount of oil-stealing will save the US economy - or reverse its consequent global political demise.

I take no pleasure in such predictions. It's simply a case of accepting the logical result of a total economic/financial meltdown in the US, which looks increasingly likely by the day.




[edit on 4/12/08 by pause4thought]

I agree that the US (and indeed we in the UK) may be in decline- my reasoning would be more along cultural lines, we must be the only civilisation in history that voluntarily committed suicide in terms of its population, history and culture......

Re the oil, one thing is for sure, we don't "steal" it though, we pay for it, and dragged up backwaters like Saudi Arabia through our purchase

How the US armed Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons

On August 18, the New York Times carried a front-page story headlined, “Officers say U.S. aided Iraq despite the use of gas”. Quoting anonymous US “senior military officers”, the NYT “revealed” that in the 1980s, the administration of US President Ronald Reagan covertly provided “critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war”. The story made a brief splash in the international media, then died.

While the August 18 NYT article added new details about the extent of US military collaboration with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during Iraq's 1980-88 war with Iran, it omitted the most outrageous aspect of the scandal: not only did Washington turn a blind-eye to the Hussein regime's repeated use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Iraq's Kurdish minority, but the US helped Iraq develop its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

Nor did the NYT dwell on the extreme cynicism and hypocrisy of the current US administration's citing of those same terrible atrocities — which were disregarded at the time by Washington — and those same weapons programs — which no longer exist, having been dismantled and destroyed in the decade following the 1991 Gulf War — to justify a massive new war against the people of Iraq.

BUSH SECRET EFFORT HELPED IRAQ BUILD ITS WAR MACHINE;

But classified records show that Bush's efforts on Hussein's behalf continued well beyond the end of the Iran-Iraq War and persisted in the face of increasingly widespread warnings from inside the American government that the overall policy had become misdirected.

Moreover, it appears that instead of merely keeping Hussein afloat as a counterweight to Iran, the U.S. aid program helped him become a dangerous military power in his own right, able to threaten the very U.S. interests that the program originally was designed to protect.

Clearly, U.S. aid did not lead Hussein to become a force for peace in the volatile region. In the spring of 1990, as senior Administration officials worked to give him more financial aid, the Iraqi leader bragged that Iraq possessed chemical weapons and threatened to "burn half of Israel." Nor did he change his savagely repressive methods. In the summer of 1988, for example, he shocked the world by killing several thousand Kurds with poison gas.

Even today, the Iraqi nuclear and chemical weapons programs carried forward with the help of sophisticated American technology continue to haunt U.S. and United Nations officials as they struggle to root out elements of those programs that have survived the allied victory in the Persian Gulf War.
.....

While the American rationale was that Hussein was a buffer against Iran, classified records show U.S. support for his regime continued unabated after the official cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War was signed in August, 1988, and after Iraq's chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish villages on July 19, 1988.