Looking for evidence linking Iraq to Al-Qaeda/911/WMDs.

[Daemon Sophic]

I still like the idea put forward a few years back. Pay all the farmers double what they normally get for their poppies, then continue to pay them that sum every year, forever, only if they grow food crops in the future.

- You halt poppy production.
- You grow food crops locally for the Afghan people.
- You make a whole lot of farmers and local people better off and much happier about U.S. involvement, with friendly inspectors dropping by to make sure there's no poppy, and to hand out the money with a friendly U.S. face attached to it.
.....and......
- It all costs less then keeping one battalion in the field.

 

[dust1n]

I still like the idea put forward a few years back. Pay all the farmers double what they normally get for their poppies, then continue to pay them that sum every year, forever, only if they grow food crops in the future.

- You halt poppy production.
- You grow food crops locally for the Afghan people.
- You make a whole lot of farmers and local people better off and much happier about U.S. involvement, with friendly inspectors dropping by to make sure there's no poppy, and to hand out the money with a friendly U.S. face attached to it.
.....and......
- It all costs less then keeping one battalion in the field.

Who's going to pay Afghan farmers twice the cost of poppy for normal food indefinitely?

 

[Daemon Sophic]

Who's going to pay Afghan farmers twice the cost of poppy for normal food indefinitely?

As I said, it was an off-hand proposition made several years ago.
With your question I checked some statistical sites to discover how many hectares of land in Afghanistan are used for opium poppy production, and the average pay to the farmers for each hectare grown.
The total for the double pay, on average, for each year.....is.....roughly 1.3 billion dollars.
That's a lot more than the $50-100 million needed to keep a battalion in the field.
However, 1.3 billion per year is a WHOLE lot less than the 60 to 70 Billion (with a B) per year, that we are paying in our tax dollars to keep the war going at its current level. And let's face it. Our involvement there at all is primarily to hunt and capture (or confirm killing) of one man (who is either dead already, or hiding in Pakistan).

So in answer to your question Dust1n.....you and I would pay (wisely and gladly) rather than continue our current folly.
P.S. - add $500,000,000 per year for a few years to bribe and pay spies/assets to assassinate or confirm the death of our one human target.....and you still got yourself one heck-of-a deal. :yes:
P.P.S. - pull out our military, payroll the general citizenry, and our target will have a heck-of-a lot less followers, and a lot less places to safely hide. If you don't like that, then answer this question. How has that 7 year, $250 Billion goose hunt been going so far?

 

[Aquitaine]

As I said, it was an off-hand proposition made several years ago.

With your question I checked some statistical sites to discover how many hectares of land in Afghanistan are used for opium poppy production, and the average pay to the farmers for each hectare grown.
The total for the double pay, on average, for each year.....is.....roughly 1.3 billion dollars.
That's a lot more than the $50-100 million needed to keep a battalion in the field.
However, 1.3 billion per year is a WHOLE lot less than the 60 to 70 Billion (with a B) per year, that we are paying in our tax dollars to keep the war going at its current level. And let's face it. Our involvement there at all is primarily to hunt and capture (or confirm killing) of one man (who is either dead already, or hiding in Pakistan).

So in answer to your question Dust1n.....you and I would pay (wisely and gladly) rather than continue our current folly.
P.S. - add $500,000,000 per year for a few years to bribe and pay spies/assets to assassinate or confirm the death of our one human target.....and you still got yourself one heck-of-a deal. :yes:
P.P.S. - pull out our military, payroll the general citizenry, and our target will have a heck-of-a lot less followers, and a lot less places to safely hide. If you don't like that, then answer this question. How has that 7 year, $250 Billion goose hunt been going so far?

Sounds good to me.

I still don't get our rulers' decisions that a full-scale invasion of specific countires and establishment of new Governments in them are neccessary (or effective) for hunting members of international terrorist organisations.

 

[Alceste]

Interesting. Didn't Hamid Karzai formerly work at UNOCAL before? I haven't been able to verify that just yet though.

I can't answer your question, but I recommend you pick up Ghost Wars. I bought it for a present one Christmas but only managed to read a third of it before I had to wrap it ad hand it over. I think you'd really like it, and it may or may not answer your question. After a respectful grace period I will borrow it from the recipient and read the rest.

 

[Alceste]

well it appears it no longer considers it un-Islamic and its ISAF and the Afghans that are eradicating it. I agree the Taliban methods were more efficient but I prefer our methods.

Are you sure?

 

[kai]

yeah positive!!! but i am not getting into who can post the worst picture contest.

 

[dust1n]

As I said, it was an off-hand proposition made several years ago.
With your question I checked some statistical sites to discover how many hectares of land in Afghanistan are used for opium poppy production, and the average pay to the farmers for each hectare grown.
The total for the double pay, on average, for each year.....is.....roughly 1.3 billion dollars.
That's a lot more than the $50-100 million needed to keep a battalion in the field.
However, 1.3 billion per year is a WHOLE lot less than the 60 to 70 Billion (with a B) per year, that we are paying in our tax dollars to keep the war going at its current level. And let's face it. Our involvement there at all is primarily to hunt and capture (or confirm killing) of one man (who is either dead already, or hiding in Pakistan).

So in answer to your question Dust1n.....you and I would pay (wisely and gladly) rather than continue our current folly.
P.S. - add $500,000,000 per year for a few years to bribe and pay spies/assets to assassinate or confirm the death of our one human target.....and you still got yourself one heck-of-a deal. :yes:
P.P.S. - pull out our military, payroll the general citizenry, and our target will have a heck-of-a lot less followers, and a lot less places to safely hide. If you don't like that, then answer this question. How has that 7 year, $250 Billion goose hunt been going so far?

Haha, point taken. Too bad we already spent the 250 billion, even though it's enough wealth to eradicate human suffering...


And it's been 8 1/2 years.

 

[dust1n]

Sounds good to me.

I still don't get our rulers' decisions that a full-scale invasion of specific countires and establishment of new Governments in them are neccessary (or effective) for hunting members of international terrorist organisations.

Full-scale invasions of specific countries and establishing governments just guarantees corporations to rape that countries resources, and establish a new market for them, once we have used those resources to make them into goods!

 

[kai]

Full-scale invasions of specific countries and establishing governments just guarantees corporations to rape that countries resources, and establish a new market for them, once we have used those resources to make them into goods!

do you have source for that ? I mean do you have an example of this?

 

[Alceste]

do you have source for that ? I mean do you have an example of this?

Maybe you can come up with an example of a significant US military intervention since WWII where the goal has not been to open that region to foreign investment by establishing a government (often a brutal dictatorship) that is kindly disposed toward capitalism and capitalists.

 

[dust1n]

do you have source for that ? I mean do you have an example of this?

Philippines, Cuba (until the revolution...)

 

[dust1n]

Maybe you can come up with an example of a significant US military intervention since WWII where the goal has not been to open that region to foreign investment by establishing a government (often a brutal dictatorship) that is kindly disposed toward capitalism and capitalists.

And you don't even want to know what we did Pre WW2.

 

[gnomon]

Maybe you can come up with an example of a significant US military intervention since WWII where the goal has not been to open that region to foreign investment by establishing a government (often a brutal dictatorship) that is kindly disposed toward capitalism and capitalists.

Vietnam War
Korean War
Battle of Mogadishu
Bosnia
Berlin Airlift
Lebanon
Every military action in South America involved in the drug wars
Desert Storm

That's just some examples. However, there are many examples of US military/CIA in many nations, especially Iran and South/Central America more conducive to capitalist investments than other reasons.

The number of US actions, military, since World War II are quite numerous from the large scale wars to the many military efforts to something as small as aiding groups to flee destabilized nations.

But the largest actions, being the Vietnam War, Korean War and the first Gulf War were not about establishing foreign investments.

And you don't even want to know what we did Pre WW2.

We can thank Woodrow Wilson for much of that.

 

[dust1n]

Vietnam War

Just speculation:

"The United States began waging a war in the Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam in the early-1960s and continued well into the 1970s, unleashing an unprecedented barrage of firepower on the southern half of that country, below the seventeenth parallel. What is perhaps less well known is that the war in fact followed an equally enormous and failed nation building project. Beginning in 1954, the United States attempted to invent a nation below the 17th parallel, the dividing line decided at the Geneva Conference that same year.

Immediately, the United States began pouring money and expertise into Vietnam to bring off this transformation. A staggering array of specialists and technicians, from civil police, public administration, public finance, military, counterespionage, propaganda, industry, agriculture, education and more immediately descended upon Saigon, the southern city made the capital of the whole project. These experts, along with the U.S. government and military installed Ngo Dinh Diem, removed all viable opponents, began a crackdown on dissidents killing tens of thousands and jailing as many or more, and began to physically transform southern Vietnam. United States government contractors, such as Michigan State University and the construction firm Johnson, Drake and Piper, went to work on the creation of a national communications, transportation and police network. This "mission" built or rebuilt hundreds of miles of roadways and dozens of bridges, dredged hundreds of miles of canals, built airfields and deep draft ports to receive a continuing and growing volume of economic and military aid. They built roads connecting all parts of Vietnam to Saigon, which they promised would result in greater access for both government officials and peasants to sell their crops to a larger market. They trained and equipped a rapidly expanding military force to keep Diem in power and they began to piece together a para-military security force and a Vietnam Bureau of Investigation (VBI) modeled on the American FBI. They even inaugurated an identity card program to catalog the identity and keep track of every Vietnamese in the interest of maintaining security. Nothing would be left to chance; no rogue force would tip the expensive American apple cart. By 1960, the United States had poured into this project over $1.4 billion.


The project failed. Ordinary Vietnamese in concert with northern Viet Minh cadre began to openly resist the whole campaign. By the early 1960s, the United States came to rely almost exclusively on military solutions to put down the growing opposition, soon a broad-based and popular insurgency opposed to continued occupation and Diem's rule, now referred to as My-Diem or American Diem. John Kennedy increased direct American involvement from around 680 to over 16,000 troops as "advisors" who, despite their title, participated in combat. The administration, at the same time, vastly expanded the military forces built earlier to defend Diem and insure he remained in power. Opposition to the occupation grew at a steady pace. The whole project continued to unravel. By late 1963, a coup de tat finally removed Diem and his influential family from power.


From 1964 into 1965, the experiment was vastly militarized. From around 23,000 troops in Vietnam by the end of 1964, the next year there were 185,000, and the next there were over 385,000. American force levels peaked at around 542,000. By all accounts a traditional society, southern Vietnam needed an infrastructure to receive this influx of military aid. Responsibility for building that necessary infrastructure was given over to the largest construction entity ever, the RMK-BRJ (Raymond International, Morrison-Knudsen, Brown & Root, and J.A. Jones Construction). Calling itself "The Vietnam Builders" and receiving highly lucrative "no bid" contracts, this consortium of private corporations was to turn southern Vietnam into a modern, integrated military installation that would enable the United States to properly defend its client. The Vietnam Builders entered into a contract with the federal government, via the U.S. Navy, as the exclusive contractor for the huge military buildup that was to come; there would be no open bidding or otherwise competitive process."

James M. Carter

 

[kai]

Maybe you can come up with an example of a significant US military intervention since WWII where the goal has not been to open that region to foreign investment by establishing a government (often a brutal dictatorship) that is kindly disposed toward capitalism and capitalists.

Korea? or is being disposed toward capitalism wrong somehow?( didnt see gnomons post , but i go along with it )

 

[kai]

Philippines, Cuba (until the revolution...)

What?

 

[Alceste]

Korea? or is being disposed toward capitalism wrong somehow?( didnt see gnomons post , but i go along with it )

Murdering millions of people in order to promote capitalism is wrong, yes. Surely you agree.

 

[Alceste]

Vietnam War
Korean War
Battle of Mogadishu
Bosnia
Berlin Airlift
Lebanon
Every military action in South America involved in the drug wars
Desert Storm

That's just some examples. However, there are many examples of US military/CIA in many nations, especially Iran and South/Central America more conducive to capitalist investments than other reasons.

The number of US actions, military, since World War II are quite numerous from the large scale wars to the many military efforts to something as small as aiding groups to flee destabilized nations.

But the largest actions, being the Vietnam War, Korean War and the first Gulf War were not about establishing foreign investments.
.

I can see we've been reading entirely different history books.

 

[kai]

Murdering millions of people in order to promote capitalism is wrong, yes. Surely you agree.

yes but who murdered millions in Korea to promote capitalism? by your reckoning WW11 was a war to promote capitalism and your probably right but whats the problem with capitalism fighting totalitarian regimes etc?