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Originally Posted by JR
uhm... yeah. Bush lied. we are all dumb. had absolutely no information available to us other than what some claim was the "lie" that Bush spoon fed us all. i feel so stupid. and here i thought Iraq attacked kuwait, violated the terms of the cease fire for 10 years, refused to account for weapons stocks, refused to cooperate with weapons inspectors and so on and so on and so on and so on.
and congress was lied to. here i thought the senate intelligence committee and other government bodies had access to 95% or more of the same intelligence that bush had access to - yet they were ALL lied to. interesting.
i feel stupid.
damn you bush!
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You may be right – you should very well feel stupid, if you believe the hogwash you just posted.
The oversight committees are given what the administration wants them to have.
The other governmental bodies that you speak of are all under the Executive Branch. Congress does not (and should not) have an independent intelligence agency.
Saddam was a bad guy. Nobody argues that he was other than a bad guy, but people (like you) keep dragging that into the conversation as if that proves something. He, like many of our current and former allies, did plenty of mean nasty things.
Some of those mean nasty things (like gassing Iranians) he probably did at our behest. After all, we could only "accidentally" shoot down so many airliners.
Some of the things he did against the Shia and the Kurds he did because we let him. In this, U.S. Administrations put United States conduct in the rarified company of the Soviet actions regarding the Warsaw uprising during World War II - they rose up with our encouragement, but failed to get the support they needed because of our ties to Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
None of that justifies what he did, but in the scale of things, there are lots of other mean nasty guys out there who probably warrant as much or more attention than Saddam. Are we going to remove them all?
It's hard to use his thumbing his nose at the international community when we weren't willing to wait an additional six months to allow the inspectors to do their job – the job he was finally letting them do. The list of requirements the U.S. put out to avoid an invasion were cut from the same cloth as the ones Austria handed Serbia in 1914, and like 1914, I suspect if they were met we'd have found another pretext to go to war.
I, for one, wish people would quit focusing on being lied to about the war. That's as traditional as Apple Pie. With the arguable exception of World War II, there have been lies told about every foreign conflict we've ever been in. The War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Hearst, er, Spanish American War, WWI, Korea, and Vietnam were all conflicts about which great lies were told to the American people.
Even in WWII, we had been effectively fighting on the Allied side for a year and a half in the Atlantic, and in 1941 imposed economic sanctions on the Japanese that most people knew would result in a conflict. It's despicable, reprehensible, and about as American as a hot dog and a beer at a baseball game.
By the Administration's own words - today, at least, now that the pretense of WMD can't even be sustained by a puppet like Cheney - we entered Iraq as a front on the war on terrorism.
Odd logic, that. Our bosom buddies the Saudis fund most jihaddists, and fund the mosques by which jihad is spread throughout the Western world. The nationality of most of the 9/11 hijackers wasn't Iraqi, was it? There is not and never has been a relationship between Iraq and the people who have attacked New York City, London, Madrid, Australia (via Indonesia) and other countries so far.
I wish people would quit focusing on being lied to, and start focusing on the fact that the U.S. has achieved the goals that Bush/Cheney/Rice/Powell/Rumsfeld/Blair/Howard set out for them when they started this war. The current situation in Iraq is not the results of a miscalcuation at all.
I do not for a minute believe that Bush/Cheney/Rice/Powell/Rumsfeld/Blair/Howard were stupid enough to believe that Americans would be greeted as liberators, at least not for long after the "Saddam is gone" euphoria to wear off. I believe they knew fully well what would happen if they invaded Iraq with approximately 1/3 the troops that Bush I had at his disposal – when he made the TACTICAL decision not to proceed.
So ... I think a reasonable argument could be made for delivering Bush/Cheney/Rice/Powell/Rumsfeld/Blair/Howard to the Hauge and put them on trial for crimes against humanity.
I think you could make the argument that the chaotic condition of Iraq today was the objective goal of the war plan. Terrorists are operating at will in Iraq today for one reason, and one reason only - we let them in. Actually, that's not completely correct - most of the terrorists operating in Iraq today are purely domestic.
Please note that I didn't say I believe that - I said you could make a reasonable argument for that.
It makes as much sense as anything else about this clusterfuck, and is every bit as reasonable as the smoke you're blowing.