Waveform Politics; A War to End Democide: Volume 3

By Gary Clifford Gibson

Why did the war to free Iraq from Saddam Hussein occur? Was the conflict a moral war to end a democide during the sanctions era and to build a democracy? The national debate and the author's essays continued through the war and onto the era of a troubled 'peace' and national elections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257421169

Book preview

Author

Deconstructing Iraq’s Election Jan. 30, 2005

GaryCGibson - 01:38pm Jan 31, 2005 EDT (#6 of 35)

Why don’t gravitons just flow out of all dimensions as loop particles that don’t interact with dimensional walls as a sort of Hawking radiation and remove all mass/energy from the Universe?

The Iraq election is a milestone considering the etiology of events leading to it. I offer my congratulations to the people of Iraq and the administration for bringing it off.

Yet readings recently in Ezra and Nehemiah, Haggai and other minor prophets have brought to mind the intrinsic problems of political stability and transition in Mesopotamia, as well as the history of Israel in being attacked by hostile neighbors as the struggled to rebuild the walls of the city of David.

It should be hoped that an American withdrawal of military forces from Iraq can proceed in ratio to the need of the Iraqi Government to have foreign troops to police their own society against the ravages of International Terrorists.

In the Old Testament scriptures it is recounted that God had repeatedly employed foreign armies to correct Israeli transgressions, and in turn the foreign armies were destroyed along with their governments by other foreign militaries. The history of the Middle East seems a progression in teleology that continued even to the modern era to allow the word of God and opportunity for salvation through faith in His Son Jesus Christ to be heard by the masses of the world.

Even as recent of historical progressions as the Muslim invasion of Spain stimulated a more rapid and evangelical Christian response in Europe. The Muslim occupation of the Middle East retarded that civilization’s development sufficiently to allow European nationalism to grow, and to withstand the incursions of the fierce Mongolians.

As the faithless Soviet empire withered away, some of the gospel of Jesus Christ was able to reenter throughout the former empire. Muslim fundamentalist challenges have prompted a renewed interest in correcting decadent elements of western civilization, and brought the possibility of a nascent democratic action to the Fertile Crescent, albeit one challenged implicitly by an overweening transnational corporate force that presents greater challenges to egalitarianism than the British and the stamp act did to Bostonians.

Democracy is a political function of the union of individualism in common civil rights. Forces of socialism and neo-Corporatism oppose individualism, especially Internet writing individualism, as do theocratic governments, ad hoc Pharisee hegemonic neo-Corporatist trans-national corruptions, and power cliques for-themselves.

History has so many paradoxes. One of the names for ancient Jewish leaders was nasi. The Bhagivad Gita may have it’s leading phoneme etymologically from an ancient Persian word for God; Baga. The Persians and Medes historically were the Aryans that invaded the Indus civilization circa 2500 BC to give a different religious leadership and caste system to those interesting Indians that has lasted nearly to the present.

Cyrus, it shouldn’t be too controversial to say, did not provide for the restoration of the Jewish Temple of God solely, he also repatriated all the statues and implements of worship to all the captured and pillaged people of the empire he conquered in Babylon.

Good luck Iraq, may you have many millions of gallons of McCloskey 20 year self-priming exterior acrylic paint ahead of you (available at Wal-Mart).

GaryCGibson - 04:25pm Jan 31, 2005 EDT (#30 of 35)

Why don’t gravitons just flow out of all dimensions as loop particles that don’t interact with dimensional walls as a sort of Hawking radiation and remove all mass/energy from the Universe?

The question about what the oil of Iraq will mean to Iraqi individuals is an interesting point.

In the United States politics tend to become dominated by extremists of the left and Neo-Corporatist right that annihilate individuality, individual and independent opinions and so forth from the political debate. Then, of course, transgendermed sexual preferences meeting trans-national political corporations tend to eclipse mere independent and personally conservative political concerns and interests too.

No one in Iraq rightly owns the oil fields presently. Perhaps the government could be said to own it, yet it is almost certain that transnational corporations will pressure the Iraqi government to sell out the fields. Eventually restive Iraqi nationalists will seek to renationalize the oil fields to be on par with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Alaskan North Slope Oil Field ownership situation is a comparable case in point. The people did get a bit with the permanent fund royalty investment, yet who will do that for ordinary Iraqi’s? A permanent fund to distribute a thousand dollars a year if possible to every Iraqi citizen would be a good way to buy votes and loyalty for a new Iraqi Government.

Essentially the Alaskan Permanent Fund experiment was a modest success, yet concentrated wealth stymies diversified progress, government ownership of resources sold for profit also tends to corrupt, in partnership with corporate kickbacking crooks of course. Governments should conserve ecosystems yet permit fair apportionment or privatization of natural resources to citizens that should initially have some sort of ’aboriginal’ right of citizenship/ownership worthy of compensation when public resources are sold.

When Government programs in democracies become profitable enough, bold predators tend to discover them as piñatas that are meant to be broken and banked. Certain unscrupulous advantaged concerns perhaps devise methods to yoke the public into financial servitude, and descry efforts to become unshackled as ’leftism’ or ’anarchy’.

Iraqi citizens have never had a part ownership of the oil fields historically, and certainly carpetbaggers possibly duping U.S. and British military forces into support may seek to dominate the profit end of the pipeline where possible. It may be a proud thing to be a U.S. military personnel supporting neo-Corporatism and sometimes the citizens, yet they have little choice of resigning if their civilian leadership is goofy.

Of course, the analysis of some Americans will tend to stop reasoning at Halliburton, Exxon, Bush, Zapata and so forth trusting that faith in the oil extraction process is morally the high ground, and that only the left, with support from the gist of Lenin and Castro, could possible see anything else than the Halo surrounding Secretary Rice (Rice U denied me admission to the graduate philosophy program) and VP Cheney, or the certain divine inspiration leading Pres GWB. toward the promised oil fields and SUV’s ahead, with talk of Hydrogen vehicles ’out there’ enough to obfuscate the next four years of oil lethargy, infrastructure rot, and the termination of independent issue leadership and progress from U.S. politics.

Plainly, the U.S. Air Force should be developing electromagnetic accelerators for heavy and frequent space launching. The navy developed EMG cannon for ships...the Air Force should work toward the real cheap way off-whirld. NASA and the Air Force are working with the Euros toward a lunar mission in 2008 and a heavy lift capability, yet it is EMG’s that are the way for the masses to get off the ground.

The view from poverty perhaps provides a cold light that differs from the view from a continuum of comfort.

GaryCGibson - 05:10pm Jan 31, 2005 EDT (#35 of 35)

e9781257421169_i0002.jpg

You don’t represent liberalism well OB; it would be a Harvard Lampoon at best, perhaps like G.W.’s MBA, besides the straw man technique to obfuscate corrupt government policies isn’t a useful method.

Extremist party politics simply attack, often erroneously, some other party to obfuscate issues and their own corruption, incompetence or so forth. With just two parties it works quite well, and disserves the U.S. Public effectively, although with their propensity for couch potato politics and aloof comfort perhaps the U.S. constituency deserve what they have in office.

A more literate, thoughtful, philosophical electorate would insist on better primary candidate choices, and their electability would be more thoroughly vetted. The nation would not run a nice self-described war criminal against the oil sogoshosa heir and allow its energy and transport infrastructure to become co-opted by transnationalization, nor be indifferent about 3 million illegal aliens annually roaming over the southern border while a crank trillion dollar homeland security policy busts the federal budget to the advantage of certain soshogosa.

A more effective defensive posture could have protected the nation for a tenth of the cost even if it had to run all airplane immigrants through crème de menthe sheep dip.

It is more helpful to address issues in a rational way, methodically, selectively and carefully in order to have some chance of making meaningful political analysis and consequences follow. Government should be in the public’s interests, and business should look after it’s own interests. A Government-Transnational Corporate Symbiosis is not inevitably in the interests of the people of the United States.

Gary C Gibson - 11:23am Feb 1, 2005 EDT (#61 of 92)

Psalm 75:4 and to the wicked, ’Do not lift up your horns. 5 Do not lift your horns against heaven; do not speak with outstretched neck.’

_________ Origami

It is interesting that you have identified the opinionated professor that was referred to in similar terms of disrespect, as did some cowardly right wing talk radio goons. I find it reprehensible that academics that have labored so long and hard on a competitive tenure track experience such callous verbal abuse. I would think the nazi party practiced similar purges in the late Weimar Republic and early Nazi era. The Christian Churches of Germany were purged of the politically incorrect unwilling to support extreme racism and genocide.

Professor Churchill wrote a controversial essay on Sept 11, 2001, before the attacks...

That essay, authored the same day as the terrorist attacks, cited the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children in the wake of U.N. sanctions placed on Iraq after the first Gulf War as a reason why Americans should not have been surprised to be targeted.

My support for the Gulf War round two for the cause cited above...to end a democide in Iraq that the leftists ignored on NPR essentially all the way up to the war and even to the present. In some ways, Senator Kennedy and the Democratic Party were Iraq holocaust deniers, or indifferent political accomplices.

Professor Churchill of course has a background as a leader of the American Indian movement; collectively the aboriginal Americans have experienced a history of racism and democide for themselves. Intellectual honesty is requisite for any efforts to understand history rightly and move on toward a more perfect world of human enterprise, unless of course one is so utterly cynical as to act as if all truth is superfluous toward the end of simply acquiring material, worldly power.

That social philosophy is the sort of wickedness that provided the edge in one branch of hominids homicidally eliminating others before and even beyond the Neolithic. The cartoon has one caveman brandishing a firestick saying that he’d invented fire, and next to him is a caveman with a nuclear cooling tower with an atomic symbol upon it. The first caveman asked the second; what did you invent?"

The United States should not suffer ignorance, evil, fascist crudity, corruption of human and political decency and accept utter idiocy in politics and the media to reduce humanity to a sick, depraved, and morbidly regressive status.

The United States has or had a history of strong individualism before the cold war era. The right of individuals to develop their own interests on the frontier and in free enterprise was assaulted only by foreign and domestic organizations of vast size that reduced individuals to production units within a management sociopathic paradigm. Certain flunkies of power, certain golems, have always been flattering, toadyish sycophants of power, and today, they believe that Global Corporations are the good hand that provides the dog biscuits of bliss to them. That sort of wicked, ignorance may be tolerated in the U.S.A. and prosper, yet it is ultimately an alien and corrupting evil that supports any Satanic organizational power objectives that provide cash payments.

The U.S.A. must always find its core in individualism, individual civil rights and enterprise, and respect for equality before the law regardless of wealth status, while respecting the rights and opinions of minorities in the nation.

It is useful not to permit evil to hide behind false political labels and false political scenarios/dia

Gary C Gibson - 11:54am Feb 1, 2005 EDT (#65 of 92)

-In reply

Does Minnesota, where you’re portion of ’our universities’ are located perhaps, have a Rubik’s cube of KKK speakers completing the lecture square? Will it invite Donavon McNab to lecture if they beat New England? Will Randy Moss attend? Does the Grand Wizard of the Triple K live in Minnesota, and does Guy Noir have any information about him or her? Has the American Indian Movement been affiliated for a long time with the Triple K in Colorado, or do they have any of ’our universities’ in Colorado for the Sons of Geronimo or Sons of Norway, or Sons of Nate Turner to attend?

When I rode a bike to Minnesota a few years ago someone stole it at Detroit Lakes while I was out in the woods briefly, can the Minnesota lecture speakers with their incisive social analytical ability find it? I reported its disappearance to the sheriffs department...

I applied for admission twice to the Northern Studies MA Program of the University of Alaska Fairbanks seeking to get a graduate degree that would permit some earnings as a rural Alaska educator. It should have been one of ’our universities, I should think, as a land, sea, space grant college, and was rejected. I have no Universities in the United States, I am reluctant to conclude, the 3.8. Undergraduate average including CLEP scores from my U.S.N.Y. B.A. simply wasn’t good enough for the program created by the wife of a judge on the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals with a doctorate in education. She wrote a book on how everyone knows someone in the U.S.A. within four or five acquaintances I seem to remember. Yet I’m sure none of them knows where my nice Japanese tenspeed is, or if the Minnesota Klan GD will be lecturing at the Mayo Clinic on Aboriginal Americans.

As an alumni ’Whale’ from U.A.S.E., I was chagrined at being blocked from U.A.F.’s ’Nanook’ or Mighty Quinn of the north line up with the harpoon and all. I am sure I could have fit in somewhere, even without training in combat sambo.

Gary C Gibson - 02:23pm Feb 1, 2005 EDT (#91 of 91)

Smith’s pivotal point was that government should not interfere with free enterprise. Yet he posited cottage and small ’pin factories’ instead of transnational conglomerations corrupting governments. He did not anticipate that Corporations could rival, subvert or trivialize governments in real influence-especially amplified by technological broadcasts. The East India Company and Hudson’s Bay Company were early prototypes of transnational corporations.

The Chinese have a multi-millennia history of government tyranny and popular ’serfdom’. Even in the era of ’free Shagnhai’ Big Ears Two and the Green Gang wreaked crime amidst civil pathos.

It is disappointing that some have such categorically bad opinions about American colleges and Universities. I believe that is simply silly.

The economics class, the philosophy, the political science courses and the rest of the humanities, social sciences and sciences still cover the best of what human knowledge has to offer.

Sure there may be a dog & pony show of radical speakers to amuse the youth-yet that isn’t a new phenomenon. Universities have a little more content than talk radion.

I consider it equally naive and silly to believe that any corporation is implicitly good. The correlative notion that any transnational corporation will necessarily work for the best interests of the polity of the United States of America is quankishly devoid of reflection...

If the United States is to remain a nation by and for the people, the people must have representatives in congress that work for the national interest first instead of second behind global corporate interests as it those will provide a trickle down providing optimal political development for Minnesota.

Some do not realize that Biblically wickedness is the evil with human intent to cause harm to others (unlike the suicide SUV driver in California that should have been charged with multiple counts of vehicular homicide or manslaughter instead). Evil is just anything bad caused even by nature. Thus Corporations could have wicked policy through design, and evil policy through ignorance and greed (such as in gross pollution causing birth defects, cancer and death to the masses).

Foreign and transnational corporations are not American. When so many transnational relationships form the political will of the people of the U.S.A. becomes progressively degraded. One must be ignorant to be unaware of that high probable association.

The Christ in Space-Time

A scrap of Universe

cascades the Higgs Field from quantum uncertainty

a word spoken to begin good vibrations

the hum of strings

Moves the sky into being space-time rhyme hyper expanding extra

dimensional strings interacting forces of protocol form amidst wavecules

Gravity is born to retract waveform mass

assembling string clumps particles begin to matter

galaxies, quasars, stars and nebulous dust

congregate together amidst the primeval ocean of probability

Until the seventh chord is sounded

space clumps are slowly made

when the day dawns of pre-determined worlds

God rests and the anti-gravity field overcomes

In a cosmological constant Higgs Field acceleration

a Universe of space-time rationed faster

as a function of phenomenality set right

mankind surfs the way of the 7th day

Drawn from a pre-incarnate idea the sounds are spoken

a seventh trumpet section upon the shore for John revealed

what for humanity is presently left upon that shore

an eternity beyond space-time and it’s

statistical entropy

Night follows day

being follows nothingness

life supplants death

Jesus Christ is the way.

Gary C Gibson - 02:55pm Feb 1, 2005 EDT (#93 of 131)

Psalm 75:4 and to the wicked, ’Do not lift up your horns. 5 Do not lift your horns against heaven; do not speak with outstretched neck.’

Damn, you are sick boy.

FAKENAME

Take your Mien campf and shove it along with your Mao’s little red book and whatever other little corrupt scribblings you can shake out of what you may call your brain housing unit.

I will even need to write another stanza or two for my poem about the Yellow Emperor, discovering what a really bad dude he was after all...

Huang Ti; rains, shadows, sunlight

The Yellow Emperor’s tomb

still, above Huang Ling after four millennia

new as Abraham passed heaven’s gate

clumps of grass, yuccas, dry cactus littorals

drums of earth, air, fire, water

compacted sandstone, etherialized oceans

Plate orogeny, upthrust clocks

ice floating lightly, aggregate rocks

accompany founders of civilizations

souls enter into God’s rest

rations, rebels, confusion about sin

Sinology, soteriology, Kublai Khan, Minh, blots

catapults, missiles, ch’ao Ch’in mu Ch’u

electromagnetic mass drivers

equality forks beyond the world beaucoup

free experience, wind, paint the oceans, mounds

of mass and time; Jesus saves

the future horizons.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/archives/2000/02/14/0000004722

http://www.angelfire.com/journal2/wen/myths.html pre-historic China

http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/chinhist.html A ’Concise Political History of China’

http://www.talesofoldchina.com/shanghai/people/t-peop01.htm Big Ears Tu http://www.mystae.com/streams/ufos/emperor.html Huang-ti

Gary C Gibson - 03:15pm Feb 1, 2005 EDT (#97 of 131)

Psalm 75:4 and to the wicked, ’Do not lift up your horns. 5 Do not lift your horns against heaven; do not speak with outstretched neck.’

From Mao to Jiang: The saga of China

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/archives/2000/02/14/0000004722

A Brief History of Shanghai http://www.autumnjade.com/shanghai_history.html

The Economic History of China http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/55/indexl.html

19th Century Chinese History

http://www.texancultures.utsa.edu/txtext/chinese/chinesehistory1.htm

Chinese ’Warrior’ Tours http://www.warriortours.com/intro/history/

China; A Country Study http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/cntoc.html

e9781257421169_i0003.jpg

A History of American Slavery with Economic Notes

http://innercity.org/holt/slavechron.html

Beyond Face Value; Depictions of Slavery in Confederate Currency

http://www.lib.lsu.edu/cwc/BeyondFaceValue/beyondfacevalue.htm

http://www.nber.org/papers/W10952 on government corruption

Papers on 18th Century History

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/history.html

e9781257421169_i0004.jpg

A History of Economics resource http://www.thoemmes.com/economics.htm

A History of Economic Thought Website http://homepage.newschool.edu/het/

Adam Smith-The Wealth of Nations

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/adamsmith-summary.html

Misc. Social Sciences studies-excellent links

http://dmoz.org/Science/Social_Sciences/Economics/Economic_History/

e9781257421169_i0005.jpg

Directory of Corporate Archives in the U.S.& Canada

http://www.hunterinformation.com/corporat.htm

Latin American Colonial Economic History http://www.laceh.com/

A History of Taxation http://www.taxworld.org/History/TaxHistory.htm

Gary C Gibson. - 11:25am Feb 2, 2005 EDT (#129 of 131)

John 10:16 I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.

It is my hope that President Bush will refrain in the state of the Union address, from pillaging the reputation of Iran, isolating them in his paradigm of popular opinion from the big dinner table of popular nations, threatening the Iranians with possible invasion and so forth. The United States fundamentally misunderstands Iranian history in the state department perhaps, or maybe White House ineptitude blunders from leader to leader by transferring American values and paradigms onto an inappropriate and dissimilar context.

One might of course note the inappropriate match up of international relations aesthetics between the administration’s ’axis of evil’ diatribe and the Persian history of Zoroastrian dualism cosmically to intellectually ’see’ the innate opposition insult of the presidential parameter.

The Persian were a proud people, initially the Aryans that invaded the Indus civilization to establish the caste system and affect the course of sub-continent religious development thereafter, that eventually were invaded and conquered in turn by a number of tribes including those of the Mongols and Osmanlis/Ottoman Empire.

The Persians were occupied for more than 500 years, and struggled to liberate themselves or at least conserve a national identity while occupied. As a consequence of the Ottoman rule with it’s Sunni identity the occupied Persia reinforce their Shiite identity. Its leaders could be a de facto national underground.

Until the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, and a coup a little later (about 1920) in ’Iran’/Persia, the Persians had no political sovereignty, they were a nation that had been subjugated and perhaps humiliated for half a millennium. The administration should seek to offer the carrot, the sugar in the coffee, the international face of kindness and patience to the Iranians to perhaps begin to develop a belief that the U.S.A. and transnational corporate puppeteers are not simply a continuing colonial power seeking to trod them under foot.

The 20th century history of Iran was nearly as grim as the preceding 500 years. With corrupt royal rulers of Iranian/Persian ancestry the people were still oppressed. They still looked to their Shiite leaders for liberation and an alternative political reality. Unfortunately the U.S. blundered in midcentury into interference in Iranian affairs supporting a coup and emplacement of a ruler friendly to oil interests, I believe. This began the creation of an appearance to Iranians, perhaps, that the U.S.A. was another ottoman like power.

Then of course there was the late Shah victimized by the Iranian revolution. He’d been such a friend to the U.S.A. buying all the newest weapons and doing business with the oil companies, yet his rapid westernization of Iran was more offensive to the people that were tortured brutally by the Shah’s secret police agency-SAVAK than if Larry Flint were to become absolute dictator of the American bible belt-Midwest/south.

With the loss of prestige following the U.S. flights from Vietnam (with honor), and a restive populous with an aggrieved Ayatollah abroad the Iranian revolution occurred, and radical students took the American Embassy residents hostage. That is they severed diplomatic relations without loss of life, I believe, and returned the Americans intact a year or two later.

America’s response since has been to brand Iran as a terrorist nation, and perhaps it has sought to oppose U.S. interests with support to terrorists from time to time, I can’t say. Yet is noteworthy that much of the planet has continued to use gross violations of human rights as normal guerilla or counter-terrorism modalities while the U.S. and the Euros and some others sought the Geneva Convention’s high ground, until recently with the evils of the Presidential torture proclamations/wavers.

...

Gary C Gibson. - 11:35am Feb 2, 2005 EDT (#130 of 131) ...

The President should walk softly and carry a big stick, instead of braying (that is a popular deprecatory term for Democrat utterances on talk radio presently) loudly in playing to the home crowd as if they were a lot of daft imbeciles persuadably by tax cuts and trinkets while threatening with the sharp fears of hyper-tech bombers and cruise missiles the former Persian geopolitical region driving the Iranians further into distrust of U.S. intentions. It may take a while for a people to cool off from foreign occupation, and beanings from Bush probably don’t help matters. His cowboyish Randy Johnson fastballs may work against the Red Sox and even get past Sammy Sosa occasionally in the season ahead, yet it would tend to widen the gap of distrust in bilateral Iranian-U.S. relations.

The U.S. administration can utilize of variety of means to simultaneously encourage Iranian trust regarding peaceful, honorable and civilized relations while participating in international conventions to continue to discourage the proliferation of nuclear weapons where possible, and to discourage international and domestic terrorism.

I believe, albeit with a modest research database, that the Iranian response of a return to Shiite fundamentalism when threatened or oppressed by foreign invaders is a 600-year-old practice deep in Persian tradition. If the United States can take up a non-threatening overt posture to Iran, over time it might encourage the Iranians to venture somewhat farther away from their traditional Shiite, paternal ecclesiastical core and into the peaceable international realm of trade, travel and the exchange of ideas and cookies (there needs to be some humor in here someplace).

The U.S.A. can use it’s James Bonds, its Epsilon Forces, its Global Proliferation and weapons inspections negotiators if it must, to safeguard against direct threats to American or mass civil interests elsewhere, yet the fundamentally wrong policy of intimidating, isolating and giving the appearance of threatening Iranian sovereignty and cultural independence seems a counter-productive U.S. policy. If the administration actually cares about peaceful and eventually productive relations politically with Iran it should relinquish the bellicose general speech making against that historically oppressed people and work with more subtlety to achieve a simple and just international brotherhood and sisterhood of nations in the Koran latitudes.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/24/iraq/main541815.shtml

http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=972 winners and losers-election predictions for Iraq

Gary C Gibson - 01:44pm Feb 2, 2005 EDT (#141 of 144)

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/2002/paper.htm#3 quote follows

Meanwhile, UNICEF’s 1999 survey of child mortality in Iraq provided some chilling facts. In a summary of the study, prepared for the distinguished British medical journal Lancet, researchers Mohamed Ali and Iqbal Shah presented the following findings: Infant mortality rose from 47 per 1000 live births during 1984–89 to 108 per 1000 in 1994–99, and under-5 mortality rose from 56 to 131 per 1000 live births. (35)

In addition to death, disease and general impoverishment, some reports showed that the sustained sanctions in Iraq were having numerous other negative effects. Emigration was sapping away many of the best and brightest. Workers’ skills were disappearing after years of mass unemployment. Women had lost jobs disproportionately in the shrunken workforce. Stress and psychiatric illnesses had ravaged families. Social cohesion had steadily unraveled

Neighboring states such as Jordan, Syria, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey have clear interests in a lucrative export trade with Iraq, which greatly influences their policy towards this powerful neighbor. (78) They get oil-for-food contracts and they are involved in the smuggling trade as well. (79) Egypt saw its exports to Iraq soar from $105 million in 1997 to almost $1 billion in 2000. UAE exports to Iraq rose from $24 million to over $500 million in the same period. Syria and Turkey benefit from transiting Iraq’s oil exports, for they are bordering states through which Iraq’s oil flows, both legally and illegally. Additionally, Jordan has a special deal for Iraqi oil at reduced prices for its domestic use. France, Russia and China (permanent members of the Security Council) also have very substantial interests in commercial relations with Iraq, selling hundreds of millions of dollars in goods every year to Baghdad. Of the first $18.29 billion of oil-for-food contracts approved by the Security Council, $5.48 billion went to just these three countries. Further, Russia and France are owed billions of dollars by Iraq from arms sales prior to the Gulf War, loans they hope will be repaid through enlarged trade, oil deals, and growing Iraqi prosperity. Finally, Russian, Chinese and French companies are buyers of Iraq’s oil.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/2003/0727right.htm

quotes follow from the article in the times by David Reiff at the URL above ...

□ I could not give a speech anywhere in the U.S. without someone getting up and accusing me of being responsible for the deaths of 500, 000 Iraqi children.-Nancy Soderburg on the Security Council/Clinton era

□ 500,000 Iraqi children -- a figure that originated in a Unicef report on infant mortality in sanctions-era Iraq end quotes

By all means adequate support should be given by the United States and the coalition of the willing to Iraq to transition toward a healthful society as their military role decreases. Vitamins in gross lots might be purchased generically for one for very low cost mass distribution. The Iraqi security forces can provide the remedies to the terrorists increasingly as they get up to speed.

The Iraqi Government will need to coordinate their oil revenues with reapportionment of ownership to the people of Iraq through a citizenship share right, which could be sold after a year or two as the citizen decides.

I’d venture the opinion that an Iraqi permanent oil sales fund with each citizen endowed with an inalienable share would provide the core of the unified, consolidated Iraqi Social emergency Security Net.

Perhaps they can provide incentives for generic vitamin producers to locate in Iraq.

Gary C Gibson - 04:31 pm Feb 2, 2005 EDT (#160 of 164)

Psalm 75:4 and to the wicked, ’Do not lift up your horns. 5 Do not lift your horns against heaven; do not speak with outstretched neck.’

The Economist had a useful and interesting article on the Iraq domestic status, January 29, 2005...page 21.

This is a fairly objective anti-war group’s figure on the number of Iraqi civilian casualties since the March 2003 Gulf War Round Two. This web site does generate a lot of pop up ads, yet it’s statistics are from between 15,000 and 17,000 civilian casualties.

http://www.IraqBodyCount.com

The economist article was generally pessimistic regarding the immediate prospects for peace. While 32,000 guerillas have been terminated another 40,000 are estimated to exist, with approx. 160,000 helpers.

Americans certainly have a choice of directions about how to stabilize the situation. They may chastise the administration for being involved at all, in a sort of detached from fact approach, or they may provide suggestions about how to improve the situation a piece at a time.

Alternatively one can urge immediate or scheduled withdrawal, as if the schedule implicitly involved a rational way to create stability modeled perhaps upon the ARVNization of the Vietnam War.

It does seem that the election was actually popular with most Iraqi’s. Approximately 1300 Iraqi policemen have already been killed in the line of duty, and only 5000 to 12,000 of the 127,000 soldiers in the Iraqi Army are really combat skilled and able to effectively pursue the goon forces of death.

While the Iraqi Army is eventually slated to reach about 270,000 soldiers, it will obviously be quite some time before they reach a combat performance level able to handle the goon insurgency. While the Kurdish portion of the nation may be first at fighting the insurgents, and while the Shiite portion of the nation may field better anti-goon coverage, obviously Anbar province with its goon triangle will present a formidable challenge for some time to the lawful government of Iraq.

The Bush administration and its military deployment will experience the problem of an interminable fragging from the left at home, that will utilize the stabilization force deployment casualties as a general anti-Republican bludgeon, it will experience legitimate national opposition to the continuing 5 billion dollar monthly war expense while the federal budget is bleeding profuse red ink under an evidently incompetent financial manager using the war as an excuse, seemingly, national security as a decoy for an inability to support environmentally rational technologies, and of course the profound reluctance of the nation to send soldiers to suffer casualties abroad when the beneficiaries of the deployment won’t sell oil to America for something like 20 dollars a barrel.

The Iraqi people desire that foreign-occupier-free utopia that all but certain lackeys wish for nationally, and the U.S. forces will be perceived by some to be not tireless allies bravely shouldering the burden of structuring liberty and democracy for thankless yet potentially wonderful people, but rather an alien occupying force.

The administration and the nascent Iraqi Assembly will need to perform the juggling act of tossing several fragile political structures into the air simultaneously, withdrawing U.S. forces at the appropriate date, building up national trust in the elected government, and keeping the cannibals from suicide-bombing their way into power with a new terrorist dictatorship.

Gary C Gibson - 05:33pm Feb 2, 2005 EDT (#164 of 164)

Nor perhaps the neo-Corporatist implications, not to mention the possibility of intolerance. I doubt that George’s Brother will get elected President in 2008, although if Hillary has a secret protocol with the Republicans maybe they have created a secret imperial dynasty to rule the U.S.A. that RWR won’t talk about.

Gary C Gibson - 11:12am Feb 3, 2005 EDT (#201 of 206)

’A change will affect at least four levels, that of the entity itself, its environment, its internal structure, & the medium of communication’-abbrv. C.S. Smith

R.M.A., or Russian Martial Arts, were a lethal combat form that continued unchanged by technology until about the 9th century. Eventually the remnants of its many forms reached the Soviet era, where one Voroshilov (not the fiction general from Solszhenitsen’s ’August 1914' (an excellent book) was ordered to gather up the styles into one modern unarmed combat form. It became known as combat sambo spetznatz, from the Russian samozashchitya bez oruzhiya. Social and all complex systems may change over time; both organic and inorganic.

Some complex systems may change all at once in a momentous transition that has been described mathematically in catastrophe theory, or piece by piece with concatenated changes flowing up the hierarchical structure.

The form and structure of complex systems have been compared to the analysis of aesthetic forms of art that considers the topical features and internal relations of objects. Usually the sensual perceptions of the object of art are a product or consequence or even equal element with the structural relations. Some graphic art drawings of buildings and their lines for example, or Chinese watercolor paintings, or the artworks of Malcolm Etcher have shown the relationship between form and aesthetic, sensual perceptibility implicitly.

Many interesting aesthetic relations of complex systems were considered in an MIT anthology on the subject ’On Aesthetics in Science’. Political systems also were included within the treatises on crystalline and atomic structural relations and the nature of change and sensibility. The late Cyril Stanley Smith wrote one very fine paper ’Structural Hierarchy’.

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/bib/nf/w/jdthwchs.htm

I would like to point out that the opinion of some discussions posters that certain leftist writing here are socialists is probably a consequence of the writing style these often use of ’talking past’ their ’opponents’ as if they were motivated by a dialectical materialist paradigm that lumps all noncommunist into one imperialist/business camp. Yet to return to structural hierarchy...

The essay on aesthetics in science is a useful reading for basic political understanding of the nature of social and political phenomenon undergoing change. It is something like theories developed by Kuhn perhaps. I cannot quote from the book, yet the webpage has a few useful style examples....

4. Complex structures cannot originate instantaneously but are formed in time; ______ laws.

http://www.geocities.com/~n4bz/gst/gst4.htm Notes Structural Hierarchy from Cyril Stanley Smith

GaryCGibson - 11:43am Feb 3, 2005 EDT (#205 of 206)

’Structural equilibrium in given conditions reaches a balance ’tween requirements of different levels. Change in any influences others’-abbrv. of C.S. Smith

It is useful to have specific legislative remedies to actual political problems. In seeking to fine tune or overhaul the engine of economic and social functions, actual, non-abstract mechanical opinion should be preferred to dialectical criticism of the mechanics, or redistribution of the sparkplugs.

Somewhat surprisingly, Senator Reed’s democratic response to the State of the Union address did seem to provide some specific economic directions incorporating an awareness of labor supply/illegal migration and L/M curve phenomenon, the problems of Neo-Corporatism, the decay of the national infrastructure and so forth.

From what I heard of each speech, the President’s held many items of interest to those with Neo-Corporatist and or Globalist concerns, yet minimized domestic issues as of little importance; being loyocul.

It is the unstated homosexual agenda, and other unsaid neo-socialist items latent on the Democratic platform that disquiet the listeners. Hopefully addressing specific economic issues will be an increasing trait of the Democratic leadership. If the Republican Party is unchallenged by skillful and adroit Democratic leadership, such as needs to exist, they can disregard or pacify the voters with media saturating fluff while working to degrade Americans, especially the poor whom need to find work in their working lifetime and not simply calculate what beans they can get in retirement.

The major problem with the President’s social security approach was that it was ’gutless’ and could only transfer the range of the financial and social corruption onto another arena. With a retired population averaging 10,000 more than working Americans, and with the aging population demographics including longevity, a social insurance program cannot afford to be a guaranteed payout to people to prosperous to need it.

A private investment structure for social security may provide investment funds for the stock market today, yet tomorrow it will lock up state ownership over business, lock out start up businesses from growth as happened in the European Social Welfare experiences, and lock down change and transition at the largest business scale.

No one earning more than 50,000 dollars a year in retirement needs social security, over 30,000 annual income the payments should be drastically reduced in scale. A social insurance program that isn’t need based simple cannot function without corrupting economic and social health within the post-modern demographic, longevity, environment, immigration and birth rate criteria.

Social Security is still the third rail of U.S. Politics and the President avoided stepping on it. To do so he needed to have the guts to tell half the taxpayers that the free lunch for the prosperous is over. Instead he would like to create a vast, corrupting, Neo-Corporatist/state socialist hegemon to intimidate the entrepreneurs of the future, perhaps still seeking to evolve away from fossil fuels socially.

A hot wire in freeways for metered electric cars would also require guts that the President has, yet are mortgaged to Global Oil Companies.

Following the Iraqi Election…

Gary C Gibson. - 04:33pm Feb 16, 2005 EDT (#42 of 42)

The physical Universe exists within the will of God. At the largest and smallest scales it’s parameters are unknowable except as revealed by Non-Contingent Being.. The scalable universe is rational.

USA Today reported that Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, a 58-year-old Shiite is the leading candidate for Prime Minister of Iraq.

http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20050216/a_jaafari16.art.htm

With the election past, and parliament set to form a constitution for the Iraqi’s to vote upon, with another election after it is approved to elect a government for 4 or 5 years in Dec 2005, I believe, Iraq has some reasonable opportunity to form a majority aspect of it’s secular political destiny in the intermediate future.

The Shi’a took 48 percent of the vote, and Kurds 26 with 14% going to the party of the present PM. Sunni’s have been recalcitrant and have begun to ask to participate in the assembly to form the constitution. It is encouraging that Iraq politics have gone that well so far.

Iran will feel somewhat more secure and less threatened by Iraq when the new government, with a fair and open democratic process, has been around long enough to express its political friendship toward Iran. Various forms of the Persian empire owned Iraq for hundreds of years; the people of the south are first cousins and have much in common.

The U.S. Government should be aware that at some time juncture continued belligerency toward Iran can also form difficulties in Iraq potentially with Shia more sympathetic to their neighboring cousins than to multi-national oil companies. The choice between blood and the paycheck would be difficult for them of course, its hard to say how those Middle Easterners would choose when pressed by political agitators into forced option sorts of situations of either/or.

A graceful foreign policy in the Middle East would be more helpful than the blunt club of savage attacks diplomatically and otherwise. Intelligence, verve, skill, charisma and leadership in actually better environmental ways to exist for a majority and a minority too is generally popular with those dissatisfied with demagoguery.

When American selects strong and able, compassionate, sympathetic and rational leaders of skill and international experience it benefits by their ability to at least not do harm to U.S. interests abroad. Their are many situations in Iraq and the Middle East that could lead to protracted engagement of military forces and few that lead to disengagement. Yet like the management of the environment and the economy, interests abroad will only improve when the best and the brightest apply their abilities to find meaningful and workable avenues of progress that can lead and leave an oppressed people with not only hope, but with substance too.

The U.S.A. cannot find or hope to attain financial repayment for its political investment in Iraq. Oil is directly harmful to American economic interests, and ownership of Iraqi oil should be apportioned to the people of Iraq initially. Al Qa’eda began the recent war on terrorism with a financial attack on the WTC people it believed were manipulators and controllers of Muslim interests abroad, wrongly. Yet the administration has continued Al Qa’eda’s deleterious financial drain on needed federal budget allocations. Winning the war on terror includes not losing a financial war to terror.

Homeland Security

Gary C Gibson - 06:33pm Mar 6, 2003 EDT (#43 of 157)

CBS Radio reported that John Walker Lynde was assaulted in federal prison last Monday by a member or members of a white supremist gang. They reported that his Muslim protectors withdrew their protective cordon from Lynde because he was not ’radical enough’ of a Muslim. The timing was interesting because Sunday Al Qa’eda’s operations officer was reported arrested in Pakistan.

Evidently the news reached the Muslims so quickly that they could calculate that if Lynde was predictably assaulted by ’white supremacists’ the news would be reported in time to perhaps create a little propaganda association about ’white supremists’ attacking a Muslim while the U.N. Security Council is in deliberations to decide if should allow a closure of Saddam Hussein’s regime now by Americans or later perhaps. The cost of troops waiting in the middle east that compel Saddam Hussein to nominally comply with U.N. disarmament enough to seem plausible is paid by the United States and Britain and not the four France, Germany, Russia, or China whom are happy enough to indefinitely continue inspections.

If inspections are to continue indefinitely while 300,000 military personnel are in the Gulf Region to compel Saddam Hussein to comply at least a little bit then the nations that wish to continue the disarmament process months or years while Iraqi civilians continue to perish under Saddam’s rule should quite fairly pay for the cost of stationing U.S. or U.N. forces in the region. In order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest perhaps 50 billion dollars could be held in trust by the U.N. that would be contributed by France, Germany, Russia and China for payment to the U.S. or U.N. force contributing nations for their extended service in the event that the disarmament process continues more than another year or fails requiring an American or U.N., military intervention to end the regime presently governing Iraq.

The Iraq difficulty seems to be that the conduct of Saddam Hussein’s government does not satisfy the United States Government that it is not a threat to the security of the United States. As Iraq is a much smaller military power it must use other means than direct aggression to further its regional political plans of hegemony or war upon other nations or support terrorism against the United States or other nations. The means that Iraq uses may include utilizing the disarmament process as a way to create disharmony to multilateral relations amongst the United States and its trading partners, offering enough evidence of compliance to forestall military action against it while accomplishing surreptitious advances in weapons and terrorist infrastructure and/or causing the United States to invest in an interminable middle-eastern military deployment for containment activity that brings substantial costs to the United States and diverts domestic and international political developments to the nonproductive activity of enforcing U.N. terms of cease-fire from the Gulf War.

The political relations crucible between the United States and Iraq seems to be reducible to the intent of the United States to conclude the Gulf War cease-fire terms for Iraq including disarmament directly after more than a decade of unsatisfactory performance by Iraq in the agreement, and the desire of Iraq not to go farther than a minimal and token participation in the cease-fire agreement that would be sufficient to accomplish several political objectives, some mentioned above, that are perceived by the United States as being threatening to the security of the United States to an extent sufficient to prompt resolution of the situation in armed military conflict with Iraq’s government.

Gary C Gibson - 06:40pm Mar 6, 2003 EDT (#44 of 157)

The train wreck analogy continued...

The crucible seems analogous to a large train and a small train heading into a one-railway tunnel from opposite directions with neither party willing to yield. Each train is yet a short distance from the tunnel’s entrances. The U.S. is concerned to prevent the Iraqi train from going through the tunnel to emerge on the side with American security interests because it may have VX, GB, Terrorists, and Fission bombs etc. Iraq doesn’t want to stop because it is on its own side of the tunnel still and it believes that other nations (Germany, France, Russia, China) will not let the U.S. train enter the tunnel with their permission. Iraq convinces the four powers that it hasn’t any bad stuff on the train and isn’t going anywhere anyway (as to war with neighbors if sanctions end or terrorist support ops).

War is an expensive and terrible process to adjudicate international conflicts so it is worth writing a few words.

Saddam Hussein and his government evidently has a credibility problem with the United States and some other nation’s leaders regarding the actual state of his political and legal attitudes toward the United States and other powers that entered the Gulf War in order to evict the Iraqi army of invasion from Kuwait. Can that situation be substantively remedied in a brief enough time space to satisfy the Bush administration? Do the four powers that seek to protract the inspections process have a realpolitik exit strategy or end-game that would address the issue mentioned above that is the manifest cause of the U.S. administration’s reason for resumption of the Gulf War to conclude the disarmament process by entry of a failure to comply judgment on Iraq and military removal of Saddam Hussein and the Bathy Party from power in Iraq?

Could the four powers seemingly in support of indefinite U.N. inspections have proprietary political motives for continuing the inspections that evidently do not seem top address adequately the concerns of the Bush administration as referred to above? Would that concern be allayed by the voluntary deposit of 15 billion dollars from each nation into a U.N. Trust Fund in addition to regular U.N. contributions that would be released to the U.N. budget if the inspections process continues for more than a few months or fails? In that way the U.S. could continue to pay for the cost of stationing military forces in the Gulf Region in order to pressure President Hussein into compliance if that is deemed necessary, without receiving any of the U.N. Trust Fund itself that could create the appearance of a conflict of interest.

In the history of EurAfrica Muslim nations warred upon European interest from 660 a.d unto 1450 and beyond. The last Muslim forces were cast out of Spain in 1492 and in the Balkans much more recently. The Crusades were an effort to attack the Muslim invaders at the center to reverse the pincers invasion of Europe that had proceeded for nearly a half millennium by that time. The ancient millennial conflict of Muslims against European/western interests should not be resumed as a Jihad by Muslim extremists nor confused by Muslim peoples of the Middle East as a true factor in the difficulty with Iraq. The issue is about Saddam Hussein’s history of invading area nations with the political power and proximate cause responsibility, killing Kurds with chemical weapons, offering sanctuary and sympathy for terrorists-and in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks on America that is an offense within a paradigm of the Bush administration evidently, torture and extreme repression of his own citizens and importunate conflict with a peaceful regional drift toward democracy and free enterprise in the post-cold war political environment.

The above factors are objectively existent it would seem. I would dissent, as would perhaps most, if a sort of western capitalist secret protocol to just take oil as an economic resource, or forcible conversion of the peo

Gary C Gibson - 01:16pm Mar 7, 2003 EDT (#59 of 157)

The Crusades were an effort to attack the Muslim invaders at the center to reverse the pincers invasion of Europe that had proceeded for nearly a half millennium by that time.

e9781257421169_i0006.jpg

BUZZARD2

I’ll explain why I disagree with your conclusion. The north shore of Africa was part of a European political region since Alexander’s successors arrived in the 4th century B.C. Then, basically the Romans arrived to take control. The Roman Empire of course had to vie with the Carthaginians whom were a Phoenician people originally with colonies around the Med, but Scippio Africannus of course ended Carthage’s independence for good.

As the Imperial Roman Empire of the west decayed the Eastern Empire of Byzantium ruled the North African sections until the European barbarians such as Vandals and Goths took control of many of the Roman possessions. Vandals ruled in much of North Africa.

The Byzantine Empire expanded throughout Anatolia (Turkey) converting its people into Greek Speaking Christians largely.

Before the 7th century when Muhammad’s syncretistic heresy of Judeo-Christianity unified Arabs into a radical military force able to attack and rapidly conquer all the European possessions in North Africa, then in Spain and war against the Byzantine possessions such as Anatolia, most of the region was under the rule of European peoples and had been so for hundreds of years. The Byzantine Empire was a European Empire. Its origin was in Rome. Its people spoke Greek, it had a Greek Orthodox Church.

The Muslim Moors invade Iberia (Spain) in 711) http://www.frommers.com/destinations/portugal/0235037064.html

Muslims attacked Constantinople in 717-718

http://campus.northpark.edu/history/WebChron/EastEurope/ConAttack.htm

l

The first crusade happened in 1095 as Pope Urban urged a counterattack on the Muslims...a excerpt of a version of what he said ...

http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/firstcrusade/Overview/Overview.htm

e9781257421169_i0007.jpg

http://mlandon.8m.com/middleeast/METimeline2.html useful timeline of ancient history

The Western Roman Empire was ancient history in the 11th century. The Frankish Kingdom of Charlemagne and medieval Europe had grown into a stronger regional people. The Pope was in schism with the Byzantine Empire and there was much complex politics back and forth. Muslims were in Spain though it was slowly being recovered. Muslims had attacked Byzantine land for nearly 8 centuries before finally capturing it all in the 15th century.

The attack in the Middle East by Europeans in the 11th century was a counterattack on the pincers of invasive Muslim forces as I wrote before. The time from the invasion of Iberia and the first Muslim attack on Constantinople to the 4th crusade is about a half-millennium or more (I haven’t time now to get the exact year of the 4th crusade...I believe it was in the 14th century).

Gary C Gibson - 06:16pm Mar 7, 2003 EDT (#69 of 157)

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/maps.html History maps useful for discerning the borders of ancient empires.

Muslims attacked European powers from East and West. European powers defended on East and west and counterattacked in the middle.

e9781257421169_i0008.jpg

BUZZARD1

I quite disagree. The point is entirely valid.

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/Europe600AD.html Europe 600 a.d.

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/EveofMuslimera.html ’Middle East on the eve of the Muslim era’

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/%7Ers143/map1.jpg ’Muslim expansion to 661'

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/IslamTo750.html

Muslim Empire to 750 ad

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/NorthAfrica1.html North Africa, Spain and the Mediterranean in the 9th Century C.E.’

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/EuropeByzantiumAbout1000.html ’Europe and the Byzantine Empire 1000 C.E.’

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/Mediterranean1097.html Mediterranean lands in 1097 note that the Sultanate of Rum already occupies most of Anatolia

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/Crusaders.html ’Egypt and Syria showing Crusader states in the 12th Century’

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/MediterraneanAfter1204.html ’European lands after 1204'

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/%7Ers143/map5.jpg ’The Muslim World a.d. 1300'

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/Mongols.html ’The Mongol World in 1300'; another agent of change that influenced Europeans, Christians, Muslims and Middle-easterners

Iberia and Anatolia were attacked and invaded by Muslim forces beginning between 711 and 717. That is a pincers movement. The Umayyad Caliphate and then the Abbasid Caliphate ordered attacks. First the North Shore of Africa fell within 25 years of the death of Muhammad...and Europeans lost all of their colonies their. Then the Iberian Peninsula fell on the western edge until Charles Martel stopped the Moorish advance at the battle of Tours to begin the long slow reverse continuing until 1492. On the Eastern front Muslim tribes pushed steadily into Byzantine territory over from 717 until their final conquest of Byzantium. It was a long slow advance of war by different Muslim elements. The Byzantines learned how to defeat the Arab Muslims, but the Turkic tribesman of Osmanlis continued an invasion of Anatolia advancing as Byzantine Emperors gave up territory through failure to manage their militaries and budgets well.

These are historical facts. See Treadgold’s book A Concise History of the Byzantine Empire.

e9781257421169_i0009.jpg

Europeans counterattacked in Iberia and the Byzantines fought to regain lost land as best they could. The Crusaders attacked in the center...Israel. The reasons are more than one or two. It would be silly to speculate that if the Muslim pincers on the east and west of Christian Europe had not occurred, and Europeans had remained in possession of their north African territory, that they would have counterattacked Muslims in Israel that were not there.

The Crusades occurred within a geopolitical/historical context that I have briefly described in these three posts. My points are valid historically.

http://www.allempires.com/empires/byzantine1/byzantine1.htm brief on the history of the Byzantine Empire

Gary C Gibson - 06:18pm Mar 7, 2003 EDT (#70 of 157)

e9781257421169_i0010.jpg

It is your logic not mine. Logic such as in classical and symbolic logic are objective methods of analyzing the structure and content of arguments. Historical material is available about the international relations and ecclesiastical relations of the era. Read Treadgold’s book especially.

http://id.essortment.com/whatarecrusade_rsab.htm An article on the Crusades

I have also written about that point on another thread. The fourth Crusade was in debt to Venetian Bankers financing their trip, and a claimant to the Byzantine Throne offered to pay their debt six times over if they would attack Byzantium. The Crusaders did attack and put the new Emperor on the throne, which then chose not to pay because he didn’t have the money. The Crusaders then trashed Constantinople. They never made it to the Middle East.

http://www.ku.edu/kansas/medieval/108/lectures/first_crusade.html An article on causes of the Crusades.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/07/waa/ht07waa.htm ’Timeline of Anatolia and the Caucuses’ 1000-1400 a.d.

Gary C Gibson - 04:08pm Mar 8, 2003 EDT (#73 of 157) BUZZARD1

e9781257421169_i0011.jpg

Perhaps you regard the North African, middle eastern and Anatolian lands that were European possessions, the attacks by the Umayyad, Abbasid, Seljuk and Osmanli forces upon Byzantine Anatolia as not parts of North African and eastern flank attacks by Muslim powers on European ruled lands.... and that the eastern Muslim war on European governments and power did not commence until after they had already warred for 750 years on those European ruled possessions, conquered them and advanced into the Balkan nations and Vienna.

The Seljuk Empire of 1100 a.d. is an example of the intermediate steps in the Muslim conquest of Anatolia and advance to Vienna’s walls. The Seljuk Empire ruled nearly half of Anatolia (Turkey). By the time the Osmanli’s nation the Ottoman Empire finally conquered Constantinople, it was an isolated and toothless island city with virtually no power.

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/Seljuk.html

The history of Muslim conquest of the Balkans is more complex. I haven’t time for that presently.

Gary C Gibson - 04:16pm Mar 8, 2003 EDT (#74 of 157)

Most intelligent individuals looking at the maps/url’s I posted of the expansion of the Muslim powers would find it difficult to contradict the observation that Muslim powers attacked from the east and west upon European ruled lands including those of North Africa and Anatolia, and that it was de facto a pincer’s movement.

e9781257421169_i0012.jpg

BUZZARD1

The Muslim attacks continued interminably except for brief interregnums of Muslim conflicts for leadership, until military reverses by counterattacks turned the tide of battle.

The history of the ancient world from zero to 1648 isn’t simple to learn. I scored a 99% rank on the CLEP subject exam of ancient history (western to 1648); yet, I traveled to Europe twice and read a lot of history books to get that. The theory of a Muslim pincers advance I sketched above isn’t something I read anywhere so far as I recollect...it was assembled from years of reading the best history books available in general areas of history. In learning, reading, considering history the effort is to get to the truth, not to recite politically correct fiction.

I believe that many historians specialize to much in western history and fail to read the history of the Orthodox Empire, that of Russia, that of the nomadic people of central Asia, and the way powers such as the Sassanid Empire, warriors such as Tamarlane, the Varangians and especially the continuity of power/transitions in the Muslim world acted in concert/clashes with developing European nationalism and its experiences in former lands of the Roman Empire, the Orthodox believers and Muslim powers.

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/SasanianEmpire.html

Iberia and Anatolia were attacked and invaded by Muslim forces beginning between 711 and 717. Gary C Gibson. 3/7/03 6:16pm

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/Europe600AD.html Europe 600 a.d.

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/EveofMuslimera.html ’Middle East on the eve of the Muslim era’

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/%7Ers143/map1.jpg ’Muslim expansion to 661'

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/IslamTo750.html ’Muslim Empire 750 a.d.’

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/NorthAfrica1.html North Africa, Spain and the Mediterranean in the 9th Century C.E.’

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/EuropeByzantiumAbout1000.html ’Europe and the Byzantine Empire 1000 C.E.’

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/Mediterranean1097.html Mediterranean lands in 1097 note that the Sultanate of Rum already occupies most of Anatolia

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/Seljuk.html Seljuk Empire in the 11th Century http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/Crusaders.html ’Egypt and Syria showing Crusader states in the 12th Century’

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst372/readings/maps/MediterraneanAfter1204.html ’European lands after 1204'

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/%7Ers143/map5.jpg ’The Muslim World a.d. 1300'

http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~lhsjamse/courses/timeline.htm ’Barbarians and Civilization timeline’

Gary C Gibson - 01:13pm Mar 11, 2003 EDT (#100 of 157)

Muslim forces attacked European-ruled lands for 750 years with few years off. The Muslim forces attacked from the east and west, as I wrote initially. They were as determined to conquer lands of the former Roman Empire as you seem to be to not only present a different historical point of view on the issue, but to assault mine until I no longer post.

e9781257421169_i0013.jpg

BUZZARD1

That is not my premise. I have pointed out already that a pincers maneuver is not an encirclement. A pincers maneuver