President Bush was on “Meet the Press” this morning. MSNBC has the transcript.

There’s lots of other good stuff being talked about in the show. Whether you like Bush or not, he puts out his arguments and reasons behind Iraq here and if you’re going to disagree with his positions I’d challenge you to read his arguments. I would also like to state that I don’t support everything President Bush does and I’m beginning to wonder about the budget after seeing and hearing discussion about it elsewhere. “Meet the Numbers” (at Josh Claybourn’s) addresses the budget in relation to the President’s discussion on Meet the Press.

Categories: Politics

Dean’s response to the Janet Jackson half time incident in Sunday’s Super Bowl: “I find that to be a bit of a flap about nothing,” the former Vermont governor said. “I’m probably affected in some ways by the fact that I’m a doctor, so it’s not exactly an unusual phenomenon for me.” (Reuters story)

Categories: Politics

At Healing Iraq Zeyad has come up with a list of oil bribes undertaken by Saddam’s administration in Iraq. (Originally published in an Iraqi newspaper.)

These shady deals were all done under the auspices of the UN and the Oil for Food program. The bribes add up to a total of 3.3 billion barrels of Iraqi crude oil (worth over 70 billion dollars). Here is the translated list. And here the original in Arabic.

Now you know why Iraqis suffered from the UN sanctions. Now you know why hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children had to die during the last ten years. Now you know why those people were vehemently anti-war.

I would like to assert that the economic and humanitarian problems in Iraq are certainly related, and the U.S.’s reasons for going to Iraq include both of these. Saddam wanted his way, the money was spent, but not in accordance with the program’s supposed rules. WMD’s are another discussion, but there were plenty of humanitarian reasons. International law would play a part, but these violations were unenforced by the UN. The bribes were reason enough for France and Russia to not complain. Just look at the list. They got mad flo. (Russia received 1.366 billion barrels!)

Update: Russian total corrected. After thinking about it, the mistake is probably due to the use of commas in numbers to signify the decimal point in other parts of the world instead of the “.” we typically use in America.

Categories: Politics

Whoever you vote for as president, please don’t vote for this man.

And if you do, let me know so I can count on your support for dropping out of school, reading a lot of books, and running for president in about 14 years.

Categories: Politics

*Updated:* 11:50PM MST, 12/21/2003

The Cautioneer has a post in which he shows some of the justification for the war in Iraq. It’s a response to a post and subsequent discussion at Nowheresville.

(Herein are contained my thoughts on the war based on what I know and believe to be true. Some if it may be wrong ’cause I know I’m not perfect and don’t know all there is to know about Iraq, so I’m willing to listen to reasoned debate on this. Not all of this post is related to those posted at the other sites, but also thoughts I’ve been having prompted by friends.)

In any case, if you want to know some of the reasons the US has gone to war with Iraq, just check out Cautioneer’s post. There are other motives as well, but I believe these (Iraq violations of UN agreements and state-supported terrorism) are at the heart of George W. Bush’s policy and interests. Economics may also play some part in the war.

The economy is certainly a factor in the war with Iraq. However, the slumping US economy circa war-start would be a bad reason to start a war. I don’t think this is Bush’s motivation in Iraq. Although wars can assist the economy to overcome stagnation, it takes a large war to do this and economies can enter a recession upon war end because of decreased military production and spending. Perhaps the war helped the economy recover in some way, but the ammount of factors involved with the economy are huge and a lot of it is government policies (esp. taxes) and giving business time to adjust to market changes.

Sure, we want their oil, too. I’d rather have it than giving it to the French. As it was, without changes Saddam would’ve continued to pocket a lot of the money himself. The UN Oil-for-Food program in Iraq supposedly allowed oil sale and trade occur so the money could be used for humanitarian purposes, but this didn’t happen. “Since oil began to flow under the program, in December 1996, the UN raised $64 billion in revenue from the sale of Iraqi oil. Humanitarian imports, which began to arrive in Iraq in March 1997, total no more than $45 billion.” (World Magazine) There’s other documented evidence of the money being misspent. Even on the economic side of things, with the removal of Saddam the Iraqi people will have more economic freedom and prosperity than possible under a dictatorship.

Maybe Bush is playing us all for fools and he doesn’t give a hell about anyone. Being in Iraq and removing Saddam shows he does care. Even with other interests involved, in the end the people in Iraq are better off now than they were a year ago. Hopefully at the end of our “occupation”, they’ll be stable enough to remain better off for a long time. Sacrifices have and will continue to occur to get there. I hope it will be worth it in the end. In the course it’s on, I think it will be.

*Outside Resources*
Oil for palaces - World Magazine: The UN’s oily dealings, GooFigure

Categories: Politics