Bill Sykes' - In Retrospect
III.
(September 2006)
Bill
Sykes looks back in retrospect at material which has
been published in previous editions of "View from
America", in an attempt to determine whether the
subject matter written then is still applicable in
today’s world.
Please note
that Bill Sykes had the first of these retrospective
articles published on the "Open
Writing" website.
Preface:
Just to refresh reader’s memories, and particularly
my own memory, as to what has been discussed previously,
I see that in Article #1, presented upon the www.openwriting.com website,
we looked back at the Middle East situation and I focused
primarily upon the Israeli/Lebanon war in an article
entitled "Understanding the Middle East ".
Article #2, applied your thoughts to a different subject
which was still peripherally war associated but was
different in subject matter as it centred around the
plight of Great Britain where home grown Muslim youths
were allegedly said to have been planning acts of terrorism
against people traveling by air from London Heathrow
airport to the United States by destroying the aircraft
with explosive devices whilst the aircraft were over
the ocean in the mid-Atlantic.
When is a civil war not a civil war?
So how shall I tackle the subject matter of Article
#3 - I hate to burden you the readers with another
war scenario, but the civil war in Iraq, (yes civil
war - when the body count of Iraqi people is exceeding
3,000 a month it is certainly a sectarian civil war
no matter who instructs you to the contrary), and it
has been raging between the Sunni and the Shiite people,
(with the Kurds currently on the sidelines), since
America won the war and occupied Iraq, and no matter
how many times President Bush and his cohorts deny
the fact - this is a civil war.
This is far too important a subject to be left in a
dormant state as a spillover into local Middle East
nations, such as Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Egypt, plus
the current on-going civil wars in certain African
nations, such as the ethnic cleansing in Darfur where
fighting has been going on for many years and is a
daily and deadly occurrence, and then there’s
the Pakistani/India conflict over the ownership of
Kashmir, and the Far East is not what I would call
a stable area of the world when one looks at Korea,
and Indonesia, so how much further a field could the
violence spread - well lets take a look.
The latest
attempts to overthrow the Prime Ministers of Hungary
and Thailand and the current unrest in Burma apparently
indicates that the lack of personal discipline is spreading
and revolution is taking place worldwide. So when taking
into account the spreading violence I feel that I must
suggest one more time that world wars have been started
under much less provocation and the instability of
the current situation which has been mentioned many
times in previous articles is certainly not a good
omen for a future "peace in our time" scenario.
The American people’s support for an
unpopular war is rapidly waning.
The 43rd President of the United States, George
W. Bush, and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
have recently re-started a campaign to try to stir
up support from the American people for the very unpopular
wars that they have got us in to under false pretences,
as the general public’s support is rapidly waning
for a war that should never have been fought in the
first place for the reasons given.
I therefore think that the timing is very appropriate
for me to look back in retrospect at some of the articles
that I have written in the past which have covered
the American/Iraqi war since its inception and see
how the information of yesteryear compares with the
situation as it stands today.
The Secretary of Defense puts his foot in his mouth and is taken to
task by the media.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld really blotted
his copybook in a recent speech when he suggested in
as many words that any American who is, or was, opposed
to the American/Iraqi war should be classified as pacifists
similar in character to a number of pre-World War Two
pacifists in Britain who it was stated did not want
Britain to enter into a war with Hitler’s Nazi
Germany.
(Or words to that effect).
Perhaps Mr. Rumsfeld should heed the words of the distinguished
CBS World War Two reporter Edward Murrow who I believe
said at the time of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s
anti-Communist purge that, "Dissent should not
be confused with desertion".
An American TV commentator recently slated Rumsfeld
and quite rightly took him to task for the contents
of his speech and the implication that any one who
opposed the American generated wars in the Middle East
were pacifist by nature.
It appeared to me that
there were some questionable statements and possible
omissions in the commentary, as I gathered from his
words that he believed rightly or wrongly that British
Prime Minister Chamberlain’s pre-World War Two
negotiations with Hitler were acts of a pacifist nature,
(which in some ways could readily be understood to
be so), and that Britain should have replaced Chamberlain
with the more forceful Winston Churchill.
Apparently this commentator didn't realize
that in the late 1930s, Great Britain was totally unprepared
for war and that perhaps Prime Minister Chamberlain’s
apparent dithering could possibly have been a subtle
delaying tactic in order for Britain to prepare itself
for the upcoming onslaught.
If Chamberlain had been replaced by Churchill, (considering
Churchill’s bull in a china shop approach to
wars and other things), at a time when Britain was
totally unprepared for war it may have resulted in
a German occupation of Great Britain similar to the
one that occurred in the Channel Islands.
If that unpleasant action had occurred, could one possibly
assume that King Edward the Eighth would have been
recalled from exile and re-instated as a puppet King
and perhaps Oswald Mosley would have been appointed
Prime Minister.
Who knows - just whimsical musing on my part about
the terrible possibilities that could have happened,
which fortunately for the British people did not happen,
and I therefore must give
Prime Minister Chamberlain the benefit of the doubt
even though at the time I must admit that I also regarded
his rather pathetic speech of "Peace in our time",
to be somewhat of a pacifist nature.
The commentator also conveniently forgot to mention
that the people of the United States were also more
than a little reluctant to join the fray until they
were forced to actively participate in the European
war after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
In all fairness I must admit that America did save
Britain’s skin in the early days of the war by
providing monetary aid and military weapons to support
a nation that was already under the gun in many ways.
Circumstances to be considered in the question
as how and why the American/Iraqi war all started.
It
must
be
remembered
that
President
Bush,
and
some
members
of
his
Administration, apparently wanted to obtain retribution
for
the
September
2001
terrorist acts on American soil and found it convenient
to
attack
Iraq,
even
though the people of Iraq at that time were never proven
to
be
associated
with
Al Qaeda and none of its citizens were involved in
the
terrible
terrorist
actions
on American soil, and also one must remember that a
majority
of
the
terrorist
attackers originated from Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps we should also look back at the forgotten
war in Afghanistan.
We apparently have forgotten that American funds and
weaponry were provided to Taliban forces, (which incidentally
included in its leadership Usama bin Laden), in order
for the Taliban to fight against the Russian forces
and when the Russian invaders called it a day and departed
we sent American troops into the hostile environs of
Afghanistan - to do what - why to fight a war against
the Taliban of course and eventually declare Usama
bin Laden to be American enemy number one. Remember
the old saying, "Yesterday’s friends maybe
tomorrow’s enemies or vice versa" well
here we have a prime example. I have never yet
found a suitable answer as to why Russia invaded that
hostile land in the first place and failed miserably
- so why did the United States think that it could
do better.?
This edition of Bill Sykes looking back in retrospect
will include:
On this particular occasion I have extracted articles
from the following previously published articles of
"View from America" in a vain attempt to
qualify the progress, or lack of progress, in the American
occupation of Iraq, and I’ve also included some
information on the stalemate with the Iranian Government
with respect to its continued expressed intentions
of going ahead with its nuclear programs.
The articles included in this edition are as follows:
Article #3A. Extracted from the May
2003 edition of "View
from America" .
Entitled: Were the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq
justified?
Article #3B. Extracted from the December
2003 edition of "View from America".
Entitled: The world in turmoil.
Article #3C. Extracted from the February
2005 edition of "View from America".
Entitled: Upcoming Iraqi election.
Article #3D. Extracted from the March
2005 edition of "View from America".
Entitled: Iraq fails to meet deadline for preparation
of Constitutional document.
Article #3E. Extracted from September
2005 edition of "View from America".
Entitled: President Bush issues another warning to
Iran.
Article #3F. Extracted from the September
2005 edition
of "View from America". Entitled: Bush
issues another warning to Iran.
Article #3G. Extracted from the April
2004 edition of "View from America".Entitled:
Questions and comments.
Footnotes:
President Bush finally admitted in a speech on Wednesday the 6th of September
2006 that America has incarcerated people suspected of plotting against American
interests over the years since the September 2001 incident, in secret foreign
prisons in order to extract information from them and now under pressure from
world opinion he is talking about having them transferred to the Guantanamo Bay
prison facility.
The subject of America sending suspected terrorists to be tortured in foreign
prisons to gain information will be extracted from previous editions of "View
from America" and it is my current intention to discuss this subject matter
in Article #4 which will be made available in the October 2006 edition of Bill
Sykes looks back in retrospect.
Five years ago today, on the 11th of September 2001, I wrote my first monthly
edition of the "View from America" newsletter for Huddersfield One
and I believe that I have asked this question many times since, "If the
American Government had not interfered in the affairs of other sovereign nations
and let them fight their own wars, and at the same time really looked after the
welfare of its own people, would the world in general have been a better place
today?".
One can only assume that it would.
We welcome feedback about any of the contents
of these articles. Please send all correspondence
to bill_sykes@huddersfield1.co.uk
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