Unfortunately we will Strike Syria.

I'm pretty positive that Saddam's evacuation of chemical weapons wasn't assisted by the US. That's just crazy. We looked like total idiots on the world stage for not finding them, and is most likely a major reason why no one is backing Obama's stance on Syria.

 

I was talking about helping Saddam gas the Iranians. Sorry.

 

You are right.

Assad would do something like this.

AboveAlpha

- - - Updated - - -

We provided the Iraqi's with satellite data.

We did NOT help them or advocate them using Chemical Weapons.

AboveAlpha

 

In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq's war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein's military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.

The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq's favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration's long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the Reagan administration knew about and didn't disclose.


As you can see the US basically pointed the missiles right at the Iranians and Iraq pulled the trigger.
You cannot wash your hands of this by saying your country didn't do much other than provide sattelite data.

 

Yeah...we knew about it.

But we didn't pull the trigger.

AboveAlpha

 

It's okay to acknowledge the US military has done evil things. Denial does you no good.

 

The members of the U.S. Military take orders from the CIVILIAN Department of Defense.

Members of the U.S. Military are just people like you and I.

AboveAlpha

 

Not really. They serve the interests of corporations, not the American people.

 

Though it sounds cool, there is no need to distinguish our carriers as nuclear, because that's all there is now. The Constellation (CV 62) and Kittyhawk (CV63) were the last conventional powered carriers. The Connie has been decommissioned, and the Kitty is in reserve.
Here; this is an interesting read anyway:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_service
It lends a bit of credibility to AA's bravado when you see that we have 10 CVN's, with 3 more under construction, ALL of which are the largest war ships ever built.
More credibility for AA comes in knowing how dreadfully expensive it is to station each Carrier Battle Group at sea. Each carrier has with it at least 4 fast attack subs, and a complement of surface combatants that varies in number, as well as a repair ship to keep all but the carrier operational. Supplies are constantly brought in by still other ships. A conservative estimate would be that it costs at least $15M every day to do that with a force that size.
Those 2 battle groups that are already there constitute more sea power than the entire Navy of any other country on earth. Each carrier, with its' conventional and nuclear arms carries more explosive energy than the sum total of everything that was discharged in WWII.
This lends more credence to AA's concerns. The people who run our military don't think that a 1 kiloton weapon is all that much, and a few thousand camel jocks are no big deal.
There's got to be a better way.

 

That person is simply incapable of judging facts objectively and realistically. A fantastic article by Dr. Grossman with regard to U.S. military interventions across the globe. They have never improved a thing. All they left behind is carnage, civilian deaths, destruction, failed states etc...etc...

http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

Perfect summary. Up to the point.

COMMON THEMES

 

Right, so the US government does terrible thingsby ordering its military to do them, and its OK for our "allies" to use WMD's we'll even point out where the enemies are. That about sums up the perspective right? So that's why we condone arming and supporting Syrian Rebels, even though they have chemical weapons too right? Doesn't that hypocrisy (*)(*)(*)(*) you off? Maybe just a little bit?

Shouldn't we be better than that?

 

You do realize, of course, that there isn't a single professor at evergreen state that would condone swatting a fly, much less going to war, right? Their school mascot is the Goeyduck (a giant clam,) and there are no grades... teachers and students evaluate each other instead, they have 2 intercollegiate teams in total, and psychedelics and other drugs are EVERYWHERE. I'm not saying it'd be a bad place to go to school, I'm only trying to point out that they're not exactly known to objectively examine US foreign policy or strategic objectives. If they were in charge, they'd invite Assad to a hacky-sack or ultimate frisbee tournament where everyone who participates gets a trophy.

 

Here is the thing.

As far as the Middle East is concerned there is an overall long term plan.

You see...you can talk about being a slave to the Big Corps all you want but we are running out of oil and we are fighting with China for oil rights.

Just see how the U.S. Economy would be with $8 a Gallon Gasoline?

AboveAlpha

 

US is not running out of oil.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/oil/9867659/Why-the-world-isnt-running-out-of-oil.html

 

I'm not interested in your deflections and straw men. You are focusing on the wrong side of the argument. Deal with the information provided. Have they invented anything? No. It's all documented and factual.

Some common themes can be seen in many of these U.S. military interventions.

 

AA is right, it's a bigger picture thing.

But t's more about the fact that we don't want China to have access to it than the US needing it. Their industrial sector, economy and interest in our debts to them are all exploding at exponential rates, while the opposite is true of us, leaving them with the economy and military (when combined with Russia's tech and Navy within the BRICS bloc) as an prospective threat to NATO's total global dominance. By hurting either Russia or China, you hurts BRICS, which is a strategic objective of NATO. Attacking Syria isn't just hitting Syria and Russia, it's also an effort to further cut China's access to African natural resources (in which it's already heavily invested,) via overland routes from the Mediterranean. We've already pretty much cut off any prospect for pipelines into China from the Mid-east without NATO's acquiescence through our activities in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Turkmenistan was almost entirely isolationist until its leader died myteriously in 2006. The new guy is much more friendly to the west. check out the map: View attachment 22621

it definitely follows, if you look at the time-line of US military activity and foreign aid (in collusion with international monetary organizations,) that the US foreign policy since the beginning of the 21st century follows a template discussed in many think-tanks and places like STRATFOR, that closely resembles the September 2000 Project for a New American Century (PNAC) report entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century (the embedded link is for the full report, which is worth a read, but a good summary can be found here.)

Basically, for the purposes of the discussion, the report boils down to this concept:

America is the sole dominant global force (both now and back in 200 when the report was written.) In order for it to stay that way, it has to check the development of China and resurgence of Russia. To do this, it should focus its Naval forces around Southern Europe (Russia) and the Pacific (China) while exerting full spectrum dominance in the Middle East, by "fight[ing] and decisively win[ing] multiple, simultaneous major theater wars,” and then “perform the 'constabulary' duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions.”

That is what it looks like to me, and I've been looking closely at why we're doing what we're doing over there for quite a while now. I go into a deeper explanaition in my first two blog posts here. (post 1 & post 2)

The presentation that any of this activity is mostly humanitarian in nature is political theater. Nothing more. Nothing's gonna stop this train from leaving the station for Syria.

 

I didn't realize I was arguing with anybody or taking sides. I was just passing along information about the source's employer and what angles are supported within that institution. I'm far from cheer-leading US actions here. Read my posts and you'll see that.

 

If that was true then why hasn't Obama approved the keystone pipeline yet considering Harper threatened to sell it all to China.. No, If the US was so against China getting Canadian tar sands oil they would have approved the pipeline. Btw, Canada approved the Chinese government buying up a Canadian oil company in Alberta and they will be selling more. That goes against EVERYTHING you and Alpha have said.yeah that's right. Chinese government owns an oil company on north american soil. And the US didn't do (*)(*)(*)(*) about it

 

China has just been approved to buy one of the US' largest pork production and distribution companies as well, but that doesn't really matter either. I don't believe I said anything about Canadian tar sands oil at all. In fact I don't believe I've discussed that topic anywhere in PF. Extracting tar sands is an expensive process and so is transporting across the ocean, and allowing China to work North America's less productive resources after putting bulwarks in place to keep them from resources closer to home requires them to be more dependent on a lower quality supply that's more easily cut off. Do you honestly think if Harper was told in no uncertain terms by the US to revoke that company's charter that he wouldn't? As far as approving keystone, I'm pretty sure you understand how that could go very badly for Obama politically at home.

It's a pre-emptive strategy and all the pieces aren't in place yet to clamp down definitively. We don't need to do much but keep on the trajectory we're already following to encapsulate Russia and China so that China doesn't do anything drastic in retaliation to our debt to them (beyond what they're already doing with currency manipulation,) or our consumption of their products, and they don't want to lose our consumers either, but they're not naive.

They realize what's going on, and that's why Russia and China just penned a deal that had been stalled for nearly a decade for a massive amount of Russian natural gas to be exported to China and why BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa cooperative bloc) just announced an alternative network for internet protocols that works around NATO, Israel and Five Eyes agreement nations. It's what Lybia's about. It's what US JSOC covert and training operations in Africa are about. It's what the Trans-Pacific Partnership is about and one of the reasons why those negotiations are being kept largely out of the Media. It's why the US has held joint military exercises with damn near every Pacific nation other than China, Russia and North Korea. It's why the US and World Bank committed to giving Yemen $29.14 million in combined military and domestic aid, and 4.7 billion in development funds, respectively, in 2006 - cutting off the Horn of Africa from transportation to the Arabian peninsula via the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden through the use of allied and puppet governments.

I'm not trying to prove anyone wrong here, I'm just relating information I've gained from years of (relatively) objective research. I don't know why I'm getting the hostility like "That goes against EVERYTHING you and Alpha have said.yeah that's right." I thought you were presenting your perspective and asking questions and I was doing the same while trying to answer your questions from what I've learned. If you want to argue, you've got the wrong guy. Seriously. I've put a lot of information out on PF. Check it out, I've probably got a relatively high character/post ratio in comparison to most because I'm usually sharing information and analysis I find interesting and timely. If you want to have a conversation about stuff, fine. If you're about some kind of point-scoring or arguing, I'm not interested.

 

No, you're apparently either some guy who either has access to ALL absolutely secret eyes only info including that which is only open to the President and the guys who do it, OR you're some guy who's read the new copy of "How to Make War" along with/or lots of Tom Clancy and the War Nerd so you know all the Military/Diplomatic alphabet soup and like to make stuff up.

I think it's the latter since, well, see below:

https://support.google.com/earth/answer/176147?hl=en

Google images are commonly from 1 to 3 years old. EXCEPT, of course, and if we accept you, they reflect images crucial to ongoing and extremely important military and diplomatic operations

I'd add some sort of laughie here but it just seems a bit much, don't you agree?

 

Perhaps its part of the pressure on Syria, to keep it going with the plan, it will take a year and perhaps more so those ships may well stay there for that period, meanwhile let the American soldiers spend some $ in Tel Aviv

 

Do you have a link to this information?

 

He does what ?

 

He didn't say he used google earth to find them, nor did he say he used google to find out. He said that YOU could use google (not google earth) to find out where specific battle groups were deployed, and you can. I just did... I believe he said this to point out that general information, as in which body of water and NOT specific satellite imagery or coordinates, is publicly available and NOT classified in most cases.

He can correct me if I'm wrong.

People seem to be piling on the guy when most of his facts are both obscure and accurate, which usually proves out as someone knows what they're talking about. Why not, for sh*ts and giggles, listen to the substance of his info rather than questioning his credentials and looking for any way possible to prove him wrong? ... You just might learn something.

 

Poppycock. Peak oil is upon us. Perhaps it's time to look for alternatives besides cracking open shale deep underground huh?