provocation

Bush, Saddam and the Kuwait invasion

Submitted by antarchi on July 27, 2010 - 02:33

An extract from William Engdahl's Century of War

...Iraq, unlike Khomeini's Iran, emerged from the costly war with an enormous foreign debt burden. In 1988 she owed an estimated $65 billion to various creditors...

The Anglo-American gameplan was to lure Saddam Hussein into a trap he could not resist, in order to provide a pretext for military intervention from the united States and Britain, professedly to secure the safety of world oil supplies. In June 1989, a top-level delegation from an organisation known as the United States-Iraq Business Forum, which included Kissinger Associates' Alan Stoga and senior executives of Bankers' Trust, Mobil Oil, Occidental Petroleum and other large US multinationals, came to Baghdad at the request of Saddam Hussein. He wanted to discuss an Iraqi post war plan to develop his country's agricultural and industrial potential.

Iraq had a five-year $40 billion plan to complete the large Badush Dam irrigation project, which would have enabled her to become self-sufficient in food production; Iraq at that time depended on US Government Commodity Credit Corporation grain imports for as much as $1 billion worth of grain in 1989. In addition, Iraq proposed to the US group major investment in building up its petrochemicals industry, agriculture fertiliser plants, an iron and steel plant, and auto assembly plant, as part of an effort to develop the country. The American businessmen told Saddam he must first restructure his foreign debts, and in return agree to privatise Iraq's national oil resources, or a major portion of it. According to best British and American geophysical calculations, Iraq was perhaps the largest unexplored oil region in the world, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union.

but you were sitting there provoking them to kill

Submitted by antarchi on June 4, 2010 - 01:00

No reply, no reply, no reply... and then suddenly, when I threaten to send a complaint about complaints to the ECU... this:

Dear ...
I understand you feel
I note you felt
let me assure you that you are wrong
we do appreciate that you may disagree
thank you, you are logged.

Yrs
the bbc

an offshore turkish island

Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 13:21

The upshot [of the violence], clearly planned in advance, was the eviction of Greeks from Turkish areas in Nicosia and other cities, and the seizure of municipal facilities, to create self-contained Turkish enclaves: piecemeal partition, on the ground. Its organisers could be sure of British complaisance. The day before the rampage... the new governor, Labour’s future Lord Caradon, had assured its leaders that the Turkish community would enjoy ‘a specially favoured and specially protected state’ under future British arrangements. A few months later, the colonial secretary was publicly referring to Cyprus as ‘an offshore Turkish island’.

— Perry Anderson

The Divisions of Cyprus

CYPRUS

Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 13:15

For Britain, Cyprus was a Mediterranean stronghold it had not the slightest intention of relinquishing. Indeed, upgrading its strategic role as soon as British garrisons in the Canal Zone were judged insufficiently secure, the High Command in the Middle East was transferred to the island in 1954. A year later, the colonial secretary... told the Commons that possessions like Cyprus could never expect self-determination. Nor, since London refused to allow any legislative assembly in which the four-fifths of the population in favour of Enosis would enjoy a majority, was there any question even of self-government.

Perry Anderson in The Divisions of Cyprus

Most of the quotes on this page are taken from Perry Anderson's excellent article. Britain's behaviour towards the island, as described and documented here, provides some stunning examples of the underhand methods employed by this Great Nation in order to hold onto its ill-gotten colonial gains. Provocation, double-dealing, reckless disregard for anyone except ourselves, and tacit (or otherwise) support for ethnic cleansing were all employed behind a wall of upstanding British values, well-dressed, well-spoken, morally concerned. Gordon Brown can be proud.

backing the turkish pogrom

Submitted by antarchi on April 27, 2008 - 12:53

In September 1955, as Cyprus was being discussed at a three-power conference in London, the Turkish secret police planted a bomb at the house where Kemal Ataturk was born in Salonica. At the signal of this ‘Greek provocation’, mobs swarmed through Istanbul looting Greek businesses, burning Orthodox churches, and attacking Greek residents. Although no one in official circles in London doubted that the pogrom was unleashed by the Turkish government, Macmillan – in charge of the talks – pointedly did not complain.

— Perry Anderson

The Divisions of Cyprus

provoking a fight

Submitted by antarchi on March 24, 2008 - 14:10

I think certain people were spoiling for a fight in NATO at that time, ***. If you ask my personal view, I think the terms put to Milosevic at Rambouillet were absolutely intolerable; how could he possibly accept them; it was quite deliberate. That does not excuse an awful lot of other things, but we were at a point when some people felt that something had to be done, so you just provoked a fight."

— Lord Gilbert

Minister of State in the MoD from 1997-1999 (Evidence to the Select Committee on Defence, June 2000)

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