Israel / Iran

[Delbow]

14 minutes ago, Ridgewalk said:

Good luck with this one.  Seems a bit of a waste of time

Yeah, was thinking of having another crack but he's quite limited

[Al Bundy]

14 minutes ago, Ridgewalk said:

Good luck with this one.  Seems a bit of a waste of time

Still struggling with that simple question I asked?

 

 

[Al Bundy]

1 minute ago, Delbow said:

Yeah, was thinking of having another crack but he's quite limited

Go on, educate me.

[Delbow]

Just now, Al Bundy said:

Looks great.

 

So what you are saying is that if it wasn't for Western influence they would still be able to dress like that?

 

What leads you to believe that?

I'm saying it's possible that they would, yes. It's not my responsibility to educate you, but to understand what went wrong in Afghanistan and why, and the US's role in that, I'd recommend this book

 

Anything about the Shah and the reasons for the 1979 revolution would give insight into the UK's role in the rise of the Ayatollahs in Iran.

[peak4]

1 hour ago, Delbow said:

I'm saying it's possible that they would, yes. It's not my responsibility to educate you, but to understand what went wrong in Afghanistan and why, and the US's role in that, I'd recommend this book

 

Anything about the Shah and the reasons for the 1979 revolution would give insight into the UK's role in the rise of the Ayatollahs in Iran.

Cheers, I'd quite like to read that, but I'm between cataract operations at the moment; maybe I should look for an e-book version

I suspect Brandolini's law comes into play here regarding explanations to some folk, as it so often does on internet forums, so I'm limiting this post to one cup of coffee.  link from Wiki

 

I touched on some of this in a previous post   where I also provided a link to an article by John Pilger   The Great Game of Smashing Nations.

The 2003 Carlton TV video linked to in the article is hard to find these days, but is still available; I've not viewed it for a little while.  

From the linked article;

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned.” Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a program of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities.

Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was 35; 1-in-3 children died in infancy. Ninety percent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers and 30 percent of its civil servants. 

 

See also This post on here (291)     and note the name   Zbigniew Brzezinski.
I [John Pilger]  quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked. “Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?”

 

The Myth of the “Afghan Trap”: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Afghanistan, 1978–1979  article abstract

He admitted that the administration had “knowingly increased the probability” that the Soviets would intervene militarily, and maintained that he had no regrets as the “secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.” He added that on the “day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, in essence: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War,’” and boasted that “for almost ten years, Moscow had to wage an unbearable war for the regime, a conflict that led to the demoralization and ultimately the breakup of the Soviet empire.”

 

Also bear in mind the US led coalition were essentially funding ISIS sympathisers in their efforts to cause problems for Assad in Syria, and also that Bin Laden was initially funded by The US. The US/UK were actively promoting Islamic terrorism to cause problems in the southern Russian states (I'm using "Russian" loosely here) 
Also Bashir al-Assad wasn't the chosen successor in the Syrian regime, his brother was killed in a car crash, so he had to return home from London.
The regime as a whole was never going to kowtow to the US, but I personally believe that had the US come out more in support of Bashir, rather than trying to ferment trouble in Syria, the whole situation in the Middle East could have been quite different to what we have now.
Is the world really ready to rehabilitate Bashar al-Assad?  Telegraph for some explanation of Bashir al-Assad's history.
Syria has seen over a decade of murderous civil war – yet recent overtures suggest a sudden shift in international attitudes to the dictator

 

Who bombed Libya and created the power vacuum there; from where now do so many asylum seekers now set off for Europe?

 

 

 

 

[Delbow]

4 hours ago, peak4 said:

Cheers, I'd quite like to read that, but I'm between cataract operations at the moment; maybe I should look for an e-book version

I suspect Brandolini's law comes into play here regarding explanations to some folk, as it so often does on internet forums, so I'm limiting this post to one cup of coffee.  link from Wiki

 

I touched on some of this in a previous post   where I also provided a link to an article by John Pilger   The Great Game of Smashing Nations.

The 2003 Carlton TV video linked to in the article is hard to find these days, but is still available; I've not viewed it for a little while.  

From the linked article;

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned.” Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a program of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities.

Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was 35; 1-in-3 children died in infancy. Ninety percent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers and 30 percent of its civil servants. 

 

See also This post on here (291)     and note the name   Zbigniew Brzezinski.
I [John Pilger]  quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked. “Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?”

 

The Myth of the “Afghan Trap”: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Afghanistan, 1978–1979  article abstract

He admitted that the administration had “knowingly increased the probability” that the Soviets would intervene militarily, and maintained that he had no regrets as the “secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.” He added that on the “day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, in essence: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War,’” and boasted that “for almost ten years, Moscow had to wage an unbearable war for the regime, a conflict that led to the demoralization and ultimately the breakup of the Soviet empire.”

 

Also bear in mind the US led coalition were essentially funding ISIS sympathisers in their efforts to cause problems for Assad in Syria, and also that Bin Laden was initially funded by The US. The US/UK were actively promoting Islamic terrorism to cause problems in the southern Russian states (I'm using "Russian" loosely here) 
Also Bashir al-Assad wasn't the chosen successor in the Syrian regime, his brother was killed in a car crash, so he had to return home from London.
The regime as a whole was never going to kowtow to the US, but I personally believe that had the US come out more in support of Bashir, rather than trying to ferment trouble in Syria, the whole situation in the Middle East could have been quite different to what we have now.
Is the world really ready to rehabilitate Bashar al-Assad?  Telegraph for some explanation of Bashir al-Assad's history.
Syria has seen over a decade of murderous civil war – yet recent overtures suggest a sudden shift in international attitudes to the dictator

 

Who bombed Libya and created the power vacuum there; from where now do so many asylum seekers now set off for Europe?

 

 

 

 

Cheers for that. Brzezinski's plan was one of the most destabilising decisions ever made about the middle east. There would have been no 9/11 without Brzezinski.

 

What Rashid's book goes on to explain is that once Soviet forces had been humiliated and retreated, the US literally just left Afghanistan to it. "Cheers, you've served your purpose, bye". They left some of Afghanistan's best agricultural land littered with landmines and the country in disarray. They created a power vacuum which the Taliban - an evolution of the Mujahedeen trained and armed by the US to fight the USSR - filled. They still had plenty of weaponry the US had given them. The lack of thought, the callousness, the arrogance that the US showed in leaving Afghanistan to its own devices, having ruined it to achieve America's geopolitical ends, is staggering, and the consequences four decades on are still profound.

[geared]

1 hour ago, Delbow said:

leaving Afghanistan to its own devices, 

Who would you leave it to though?  The communist party was technically still ruling the place, they hobbled along for a couple of years after the Soviets left.  Then the Taliban/Mujahideen took control after a couple of civil wars.

[Delbow]

16 minutes ago, geared said:

Who would you leave it to though?  The communist party was technically still ruling the place, they hobbled along for a couple of years after the Soviets left.  Then the Taliban/Mujahideen took control after a couple of civil wars.

Well this is the problem of interfering isn't it - what do you do next? The least they could have done was de-mine it and try to get their weapons back from the Mujahedeen, anything that would have restored some stability. But obviously the best thing they could have done was leave it alone in the first place. And yet, still they meddle all over the place.

Edited April 17 by Delbow

[peak4]

16 minutes ago, Delbow said:

Well this is the problem of interfering isn't it - what do you do next? The least they could have done was de-mine it and try to get their weapons back from the Mujahedeen, anything that would have restored some stability. But obviously the best thing they could have done was leave it alone in the first place. And yet, still they meddle all over the place.

Indeed so, as my previously linked Pilger article explains; maybe Geared hasn't read it yet.

The Afghanistan coup with its subsequent policy of education for all,  a generally popular government, and increased life expectancy, seemed largely irrelevant to the US & UK who recognised the  possibility of  the using the newly emerging country to destabilise The Soviet Union. 

 

From Pilger again, but various other sources available; this article just pulls many of the points together.

In August 1979, the U.S. embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicized. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly.  

The U.S. was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

Six months later, the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the American-created jihadist threat on their doorstep.

Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles and celebrated as “freedom fighters” by Margaret Thatcher, the mujahedin eventually drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

The mujahedin were dominated by war lords who controlled the heroin trade and terrorized rural women.

Later, in the early 1990s the Taliban would emerge, an ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore black and punished banditry, rape and murder but banished women from public life.

 

Excerpt from Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski U.S. President Carter's National Security Adviser 

The source Marxists.org might not be to everyone's taste, including mine, but it's about the interview, not the hosting website.

 

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention.

In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?

The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter:

We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.

Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentlaism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world?

The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Source: Killing Hope, by William Blum. Article translated from the French.

 

I believe his comment "liberation of Central Europe" refers to the rise of Solidarity in his native Poland (amongst other politics in Europe at the time).

Maybe the Soviets involvement in Afghanistan did prevent them getting involved in Poland, but at what long term cost to the whole of the Middle East, the rise of al-Qaeda, & ISIS, Islamic fundamentalism in parts of Africa, etc.

[Delbow]

Imagine if George W Bush on 9/11 had gone on TV and said:

 

What is most important to the history of the world?

The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war? Because that's been our foreign policy since 1979.