A non-embedded reporter looks at Iraq. Article by Tom Engelhardt and Dahr Jamail:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt33.html
The real reason for wars:
Governments cause wars, Citizens fight wars, and die in them.
"A tyrant is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader." ~Plato
Anyone who even starts to understand the powers behind governments will know that wars are almost never fought to accomplish the justifications that are publically proclaimed.
Governments (and the people in governments) cause wars, and benefit from them. Citizens fight wars, and die in them.
Since the fighting of wars is proclaimed to be a patriotic calling, the most patriotic people generally die in them.
Tyrants, and would be tyrants, have no better way to purge their populations of freedom loving dissidents.
-- William Shakespeare SUMMED IT UP in one line in "King Lear"
"Be it thy policy to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels."
It takes very little knowledge of history to know about the perpetual condition of war that plagued European history. France and England had ONE war that lasted 116 years.
Yet all of those kings were first cousins. They had hemophilia all the way from Russia to England because they we so inbred. The "good guy, bad guy" con game has worked for centuries, and is no different today.
While pretending to fight communism in Viet Nam, the United States aided, and traded with, communism all over the world, on credit. American wheat diverted Soviet workers from the fields into the war factories, so that they could supply North Viet Nam. The American Mac Truck Company built the largest truck factory in the world, on the Kama River in the Soviet Union. Those trucks went to North Viet Nam on a highway build with U. S. aid.
War is used as an excuse to raise taxes, and to abolish civil liberties.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
-- Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials.
Description of Straw Man fallacy
The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores the actual opposing argument and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated, irrelevant, or misrepresented version of that position.
A "Straw Man Argument" is a misrepresentation of the opposing view, set up in such a way that it is easy to demolish. This is meant to bring the opponent's position into disrepute, by ascribing to him positions that he never endorsed, or some minor point that is not really at issue. The intention is to avoid having to address the real arguments. A person creates a Straw Man as an easy opponent, because he is not capable of dealing with the issue that actually WAS presented. The person creating a Straw Man hopes to burden his opponent with an unpopular, or indefensible, position. The use of this tactic is actually an admission of defeat on the question that was actually presented, and was evaded.
John P
