Warren G. Harding Quotes
Practically all we know is that thousands of native Haitians have been killed by American Marines, and that many of our own gallant men have sacrificed their lives at the behest of an Executive department in order to establish laws drafted by the Assistant Secretary of the Navy...I will not empower an Assistant Secretary of the Navy to draft a constitution for helpless neighbors in the West Indies and jam it down their throats at the point of bayonets borne by US Marines
The Assistant Secretary of the Navy to whom he referred was none other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Warren G. Harding, 1865-1923, 29th President of the United States (Republican, OH), Presidential Campaign Speech, 1920
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At that time Jews in Palestine were in the minority. The issue of how to obtain the land was hotly debated amongst Jewish groups. Jabotinsky was at one extreme—colonize and take the land just as the Arabs had done to the Jews when there was a Jewish majority. His view did not however prevail. The policy was to buy the land from individual Arabs and Jewish land up to 1948 was obtained that way. In that year the UN partitioned Palestine and 11 Arab armies attacked the new state of Israel and asked the Arab civilians to leave the area so that the Army could cleanse it of Jews. Many did not, and they or their descendants are still on their land or have sold it. The Arabs who left, were suspected of being possible collaborators or terrorists, and they have never been paid for their land or allowed to return. Compensation is still in dispute. At the same time Jews driven out of Arab countries by law and the military have never been compensated or given any right of return either.
Without much fanfare, the United States was beginning to deploy naval power internationally.
See {636935}for the policy decision that triggered this order.
This quotation is a good example of how tolerant some nations can be in terms of maintaining diplomatic relations and trade relations with other countries. The American and English governments chose to simply protest and condemn the slanderous statement but decided that the Prime Minister was pandering to his political local Islamic base, so took no further action and kept open diplomatic relations. Mahathir had a history of being very accusatory of the West with respect to anything that affected the Arab Muslims. The number of Muslims killed by the Americans and British in the Iraq War was very small compared to the huge number of Muslims killed by other Muslims in their Sunni Shiite civil war. While Bush and Blair both generated support for the Iraq invasion by making claims of WMD development in Iraq that were false, it is not clear whether or not they knew their statements were false, should have known that they were false, created an atmosphere against Iraq that was likely to produce false accusations, or were simple misled by poor intelligence. Mahathir, of course, chose to assume the worst case, and claim it was true, which is what many people think Bush and Blair did in analyzing the intelligence on Iraq.
Warren Gamaliel Harding was the 29th president of the United States, serving from 1921 until his death in 1923. A member of the Republican Party, he was one of the most popular U.S. presidents to that point. After his death, a number of scandals, including Teapot Dome, came to light, as did his extramarital affair with Nan Britton; those eroded his popular regard.
