English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

22:13

@Xanne What facts are wrong?

@M.A.R. Governments do what they do for many reasons.

Some forms of altruism may be among those reasons.

Fuelled by public opinion and their own opinions.

M.A.R.

2. continued - Steger also wrote reports in the 80s and early 90s calling for the EPA to be reined in, claiming the risks of pollution were exaggerated. And you may think he was right! (I don't.) He also advocated for abolishing the estate tax. His writings certainly seem to be consistent with economic dogma of a certain bent, hence I would be hesitant to take him seriously as a scientist. — Giskard 11 mins ago

Isn't this gatekeeping? Just playing the devil's advocate here.

If you consider someone's personal opinions to be conservative, they're unreliable and likely to manipulate their data?

But from afar, from all the discussion around, I dunno if it really is a myth

Cerberus

@M.A.R. Why not? Saddam was no religious fanatic, was he? He was, however, of the Baath party, which is semi-socialist. I think that is part of why the Americans hated him. In addition, he was pretty evil.

M.A.R.

@Cerberus I think he does fit the definition: Some sunnis hate shiites, wahhabis are an extreme example, and he bombed his own shiite people

Cerberus

Well, wasn't that rather an ethnic conflict?

M.A.R.

And the war on Iran and the vehement support it got from the Arab world was partly due to racism, and partly due to Iran's overwhelmingly huge shiite population

Cerberus

22:21

I must admit I don't remember everything about him, and naturally he will have been religious, but his reign was not known for its religious fundamentalism.

M.A.R.

@Cerberus Which? Bombing Kurds?

Cerberus

And shiites?

M.A.R.

@Cerberus Yeah he does look saner than the Saudis

@Cerberus shiism is a religious sect, it's not an ethnicity

Cerberus

Even so, Shiites in Iraq can be said to also be different ethnically from Sunnites, can they not?

M.A.R.

Did? There are pretty widespread conspiracy theories about Saddam being alive, maybe like those about Hitler being alive

@Cerberus I'm not sure but I think they're densely packed in North and North West Iraq, not all of them are Kurds (regimes in the middle East have a history of hating Kurds)

Cerberus

22:23

So I don't think Islamic fundamentalism, Saddam Hussein, and America have a close tripartite conexion.

@M.A.R. I think the Kurds are Sunnis?

M.A.R.

Well I mostly meant America was cool with it until Saddam went nuts

Cerberus

The majority of people in Iraq are Shiites.

They are now mostly in power.

M.A.R.

Why not oppose him when he was bombing civilians with a nerve agent (again, both Iranians and his people)?

@Cerberus Majority? I thought the majority were the sunnis, but yeah, shiites have a lot of power there now

@Cerberus The majority are, but a lot of the shiites are Kurds

Cerberus

Did America ever "support Saddam"? I do not remember this? I was under ten when the First Gulf War broke out, but even then the Americans did not support Saddam—quite the contrary.

M.A.R.

@Cerberus Well yeah that's when they turned on him

Cerberus

22:26

> Shia (/ˈʃiːə/; Arabic: شيعة‎) Muslims make up the plurality of the Iraqi population, with 60% to 65% of Iraqis identifying as Shia Muslims.

M.A.R.

In the Iran–Iraq war the entire Europe, America, and most of the Arab world supported Saddam, both financially and militarily

@Cerberus Wow, didn't know this

I thought it was close to 35 percent or so

Cerberus

> Over time, Sunni Islam became the dominant religion of the Kurdish people, following the Shafi school. There is a very small minority Shia population, who live in central and south-eastern Iraq.

M.A.R.

(Even China and Russia sold them weapons)

Cerberus

@M.A.R. And of those 35% to 40% Sunnis, a large number are Kurds, whom Saddam didn't like either.

M.A.R.

@Cerberus My info is pretty outdated then. I don't even know where and when I've heard it

Cerberus

22:28

So Saddam's base of power was somewhat small.

M.A.R.

But the fact remains that before the year before the Gulf War, the US was pretty okay with whatever Saddam was doing

Cerberus

No as small as in Syria or Ethiopia, but still not a super stable situation in the long term.

@M.A.R. Even though the Americans hated socialists (Baath) even more then than now?

M.A.R.

In a year, the US decided Saddam is now evil and rejected all the democratic proposals made by the Iraqi side to negotiate

@Cerberus Why did they sell socialists weapons to gas their own people?

Cerberus

I don't know; I'm willing to believe you. Perhaps because they hated the Ayatollahs even more, and they saw Saddam as a defence against them?

M.A.R.

I mean, everything between 1975 and 1990, I'm not sure I recall reading something about the US opposing Saddam then

@Cerberus That's what I think. Iran used to be, alongside Israel, the US megabase in the Middle East, and suddenly these odd bearded clerics were ruining all the plans

The US used to be pretty chill with Shah too, until Shah suddenly decided he wants to work for his people for once and was moving towards some sort of independence, that's when suddenly whatever torture methods the prisoners were enduring became human rights violations

Cerberus

22:34

What did the Shah do?

M.A.R.

(And he really didn't, by then, it was too late. He had to kill his own people in protests instead)

Cerberus

> Relations between the U.S. and Iraq became strained following the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy on July 14, 1958, which resulted in the declaration of a republican government led by Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim.[7]
Concerned about the influence of Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) members in Qasim's administration, and hoping to prevent "Ba'athist or Communist exploitation of the situation," President Dwight D. Eisenhower had established a Special Committee on Iraq (SCI) in April 1959 to monitor events and propose various contingencies for preventing a communist takeover of the country.

M.A.R.

@Cerberus I dunno, he was getting old or something, and he had started some social reforms and was becoming more pliant towards the Mullahs towards negotiation and peace. Again, by then (1973 or so) it was too late, it was sorta decided that this Shah has to be overthrown

He had already jailed and murdered and massacred people in 'Khordad 15th', and people already had a popular leader of the protest, who by being exiled got even more popular

> The village of Pishva near Varamin became famous during the uprising. Several hundred villagers from Pishva began marching to Tehran, shouting "Khomeini or Death". They were stopped at a railroad bridge by soldiers who opened fire with machine guns when the villagers refused to disperse and attacked the soldiers "with whatever they had". Whether "tens or hundreds" were killed is "unclear". It was not until six days later that order was fully restored.

@Cerberus Hmm, they sorta did the same thing with Iran after the revolution. Forms committees and try to overthrow stuff, but I didn't about this, because those are some dark years for Iranians

Cerberus

> In December 1961, Qasim's government passed Public Law 80, which restricted the British- and American-owned Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC)'s concessionary holding to those areas in which oil was actually being produced, effectively expropriating 99.5% of the IPC concession. U.S. officials were alarmed by the expropriation as well as the recent Soviet veto of an Egyptian-sponsored UN resolution requesting the admittance of Kuwait as a UN member state, which they believed to be connected.

@M.A.R. Makes sense.

M.A.R.

When you look at the poems from until a decade after the coup, it's all about how everything is pointless and bleak

Cerberus

22:42

Does my latest quotation sound familiar?

M.A.R.

It does!

Cerberus

Hint, Mossaddegh.

M.A.R.

History repeats itself, doesn't it

Cerberus

Indeed.

And it goes on:

> Senior National Security Council (NSC) adviser Robert Komer worried that if the IPC ceased production in response, Qasim might "grab Kuwait" (thus achieving a "stranglehold" on Middle Eastern oil production) or "throw himself into Russian arms." At the same time, Komer made note of widespread rumors that a nationalist coup against Qasim could be imminent, and had the potential to "get Iraq back on [a] more neutral keel."[

M.A.R.

I want a Mosaddegh movie where J. K. Simmons plays Mosaddegh

Alas

Cerberus

22:44

> Kennedy instructed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—under the direction of Archie Roosevelt, Jr.—to begin making preparations for a military coup against Qasim.

M.A.R.

Can't ever see that

Cerberus

> After reaching a secret agreement with Barzani to work together against Qasim in January, the anti-imperialist and anti-communist Iraqi Ba'ath Party overthrew and executed Qasim in a violent coup on February 8, 1963. While there have been persistent rumors that the CIA orchestrated the coup, declassified documents and the testimony of former CIA officers indicate there was no direct American involvement...

In other words, the Americans were still busy planning a coup, but they did not intend for a coup by the Baath Party.

M.A.R.

They got played I guess. Same thing happen to the Brits with our coup. They essentially unwittingly handed Iran to the Americans

Cerberus

It's interesting, though, that the Baath were seen as "anti-communist", despite their socialist background (right?).

M.A.R.

Whatever floats the boat

Cerberus

22:48

> The most powerful leader of the new government was the secretary of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, Ali Salih al-Sa'di, who controlled the militant National Guard and organized a massacre of hundreds—if not thousands—of suspected communists and other dissidents in the days following the coup.

M.A.R.

I mean, apparently Bolsheviks themselves were seen as a counter-revolutionary force back then, like by mainstream media and the politicians and the like, but that fact has slowly been forgotten for some reason

Cerberus

Counter?

M.A.R.

The first thing they did was crush whatever social constructs people had conjured not to be ruled by dictators anymore

Unions and movements and stuff

Cerberus

Yeah, the Bolsheviks were pretty bad.

M.A.R.

So the revolution really lasted a few months, IIRC from a Feb to an Oct, and then the Bolsheviks seized power

Cerberus

22:51

> Meanwhile, the Soviet Union actively worked to undermine the Ba'athist government, suspending military shipments to Iraq in May, convincing its ally Mongolia to sponsor charges of genocide against Iraq at the UN General Assembly from July to September, and sponsoring a failed communist coup attempt on July 3.

M.A.R.

Yet

> During the Iran–Iraq War from 1980 to 1988, the Soviet Union (USSR) sold or gave more military equipment and supplies to Iraq than did any other country, as well as providing military advisers.

Damn politicians are so frustratingly inconsistent!

Cerberus

Yeah.

M.A.R.

The Iraqi weapon for the war was the AKs. The least accurate war movie knows to portray Iraqis with AKs

Cerberus

It's all quite complicated.

M.A.R.

It's a shame that we really don't have any good war movies though

Cerberus

22:55

The article on Iraqi-American relations is quite interesting (I'm quoting from it).

Iraq–United States relations

Diplomatic relations between Iraq and the United States began when the U.S. first recognized Iraq on January 9, 1930, with the signing of the Anglo-American-Iraqi Convention in London by Charles G. Dawes, U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Today, the United States and Iraq both consider themselves as strategic partners, given the American political and military involvement after the invasion of Iraq and their mutual, deep-rooted relationship that followed. The United States provides the Iraqi security forces millions of dollars of military aid and training annually as well as uses its military...

BRB

M.A.R.

I should get to sleep

I have a blood test tomorrow morning, and for some reason the numbers always go crazy when I don't sleep well

Goedenacht

Cerberus

23:23

@M.A.R. Sleep tight.