Rather than the “regional” reasons, how about the reasons presented to the United States citizens…
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WMDs
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WMDs
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Iraq-Terrorist connections
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WMDs
Do you think that Bush believed there were WMDs there, mofangongren?
I think he either didn’t believe and didn’t care … or else he was so sloppily undiligent in carrying out his official duties that he should have known. My sense is that Bush is incurious in carrying out his job – say what one will about O’Neill, Clarke and others who have been around Bush, but there is a common theme emerging in this presidency of a guy who doesn’t really force the people around him to do their best. He doesn’t cross-examine his people or appear even to compare the inconsistencies in information presented to him. He doesn’t hold people accountable for their screwups but only appears to enforce on who is loyal or not.
I don’t care if they find the golden streets of El Dorado while digging the foundations of yet another detention camp at Gitmo or uncover the fabled “fountain of youth” in Basra… I’m not a fan of this whole war-rationale musical chairs game.
Sure.
[quote=“President Bush on 12 September 2002, speaking to the American people”]Our common security is challenged by regional conflicts – ethnic and religious strife that is ancient but not inevitable. In the Middle East, there can be no peace for either side without freedom for both sides. America stands committed to an independent and democratic Palestine, living beside Israel in peace and security. Like all other people, Palestinians deserve a government that serves their interests and listens to their voices. My nation will continue to encourage all parties to step up to their responsibilities as we seek a just and comprehensive settlement to the conflict.
Above all, our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent ambitions. … And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale.
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In one place – in one regime – we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms … exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront.
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[b]Events can turn in one of two ways.
If we fail to act in the face of danger, the people of Iraq will continue to live in brutal submission. The regime will have new power to bully, dominate and conquer its neighbors, condemning the Middle East to more years of bloodshed and fear. The region will remain unstable, with little hope of freedom and isolated from the progress of our times.[/b] With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of September 11th would be a prelude to far greater horrors.
If we meet our responsibilities, if we overcome this danger, we can arrive at a very different future. [color=red]The people of Iraq can shake off their captivity. They can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world. These nations can show by their example that honest government, and respect for women, and the great Islamic tradition of learning can triumph in the Middle East and beyond. And we will show that the promise of the United Nations can be fulfilled in our time[/color] .
[/quote]
Well, looks like Bush was talking about the effect of reform in Iraq on the entire region, and also that he was talking about this long before the invasion of Iraq, while he still believed that Iraq possessed WMD.
I guess some people just haven’t been paying attention.
The solution in the Middle East, as I see it, is for everybody to get off everybody else’s land – no exceptions. Half measures and one-way streets are doomed to failure from their own hypocrisy.
“The people of Iraq can shake off their captivity.” Did they, now? That is a key phrase. Keep in mind that freedom earned goes down a lot better than freedom given. In the American Revolution, we took our country for ourselves. The French provided a little help in those days, but other than their philosophers’ influence upon our founding fathers there was not much drive from within France for us to develop what we did. This was not “democracy imposed” in any sense.
Whether or not the reforms in Iraq succeed depends ultimately on the Iraqis, not the US. I believe that the Iraqis can succeed, if assisted and supported.
Absolutely. I agree. Still, I think it was up to the Iraqis to choose better government for themselves.
spook -
Sorry Dude…the Bekaa is still Lebanon. And its where the money is. Hezbollah and Syria do not want to lose that funding source.
I don’t think that was going to happen any time soon.
I agree but feel that would have been OK. We were able to outlast the Soviet Union and most of the other tinpot dictators. Just a few more assholes left…
"Do you recall our civilian leadership’s rationale for a pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein? President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and, yes, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told the world that the United States had no choice but to invade Iraq. They said Saddam was hiding chemical and biological weapons, and that his scientists would be able to produce a nuclear weapon in a few years.
Do you remember those who predicted that the operation would be financed in large part by sales of Iraqi oil?
There was no need for much post-war planning because there wasn’t going to be any post-war.
But as the invasion forces regrouped, the world witnessed an orgy of looting and burning of government ministry buildings, and even the power plants upon which a city of 11 million people depended. There was no one to prevent it.
After nearly 18 months, the Pentagon admitted that a team of nearly 1,000 intelligence officials and scientists had combed Iraq for evidence of chemical and biological weapons or any sign of an active nuclear weapons program. They found nothing.
This war that was supposed to be a cakewalk has taken the lives of 1,510 American troops and sent thousands more home, maimed by improvised explosive devices that tear off arms and legs.
American taxpayers have paid more than $200 billion in two years for a war we were told wouldn’t cost much, if anything, and the cost in fiscal 2006 will be at least $70 billion more.
Now the administration tells us that we had to attack not because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda, but because he wasn’t a democrat. Sadly, however, the costs of trying to make Iraq a democracy probably would have been lower, and the chances of succeeding better, if we hadn’t gone to war with flimsy evidence and wishful thinking."
[color=blue]Joseph L. Galloway, co-author “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young.”[/color]
I think that was only the rationale for pre-emptive war. It was not however the sole rationale for the war.
[quote=“spook”]
Now the administration tells us that we had to attack not because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda, but because he wasn’t a democrat. Sadly, however, the costs of trying to make Iraq a democracy probably would have been lower, and the chances of succeeding better, if we hadn’t gone to war with flimsy evidence and wishful thinking."
[color=blue]Joseph L. Galloway, co-author “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young.”[/color][/quote]
That’s just not true.
How many times do I need to post Bush’s speeches from prior to the invasion explaining the reasons for invading Iraq?
Tigerman,
We just disagree about what was being emphasized before the war and we’re both quoting from the record so I don’t think repetition of well-known arguments is going to change the fact that many see shifting arguments and rationales where you see consistency.
And rather than the debate being over and settled now I think it’s just beginning because we have the advantage of having all the raw facts and the perspective of hindsight to sift through them for answers. James Galloway is a military historian who is currently doing just that.
In fact I think we’d be doing ourselves a national disservice if we regarded this as a case closed at this point.
One open question I still puzzle over is what possible rational explanation besides a deliberate campaign of disinformation there could be for an administration sitting atop a vast, highly sophisticated intelligence network issuing flat-out statements of dire fact – and being completely wrong about them.
I just don’t buy the arguments that it was gross incompetence or ‘the other guy was doing it too.’
Not partly wrong, but completely wrong, and engaging now in transparent attempts to either change the subject or revise the history of the times in an attempt to cover over the discrepancies.
Scott Ritter: Iraq Vote Fixed
Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter said Tuesday that January’s historic election in Iraq, which set off a wave of democratic reform throughout the Middle East, was fixed.
Nice to see that someone still listens to Scott Ritter. I mean other than the man’s psychiatrist.
[quote=“spook”]Tigerman,
We just disagree about what was being emphasized before the war and we’re both quoting from the record so I don’t think repetition of well-known arguments is going to change the fact that many see shifting arguments and rationales where you see consistency.[/quote]
Perhaps. However, the fact that I can show consistency with the record proves that the argument is not shifting.
Bush is surely the dumbest president you’ve had in a long time. On a par with Dan Quayle, perhaps. And the rank incompetence on display in his administration is frightening.
Looting at Weapons Plants Was Systematic, Iraqi Says
How is it that you can get one thing right (invading Afghanistan and Iraq), but get so many things utterly wrong? Even though we all knew that there was no immediate threat from WMDs, and that, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out before the war, the president would not be sending a couple of hundred thousand troops to Iraq’s frontier if there were (i.e. he’s not quite that stupid), the administration gave WMDs as the primary rationale for the war.
Which was not the right argument to make, but never mind. Before the war it was WMDs all day, every day. Then they didn’t find anything. Now it’s looking increasingly as if, pace Bush’s utter lack of a reconstruction program or planning for winning the peace, the potential for destruction posed by Iraq’s weapons industry/infrastructure is greater now than if the US had never invaded.
[quote]In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein’s most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government’s first extensive comments on the looting.
The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away.
Dr. Araji said his account was based largely on observations by government employees and officials who either worked at the sites or lived near them.
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Dr. Araji’s statements came just a week after a United Nations agency disclosed that approximately 90 important sites in Iraq had been looted or razed in that period.
Satellite imagery analyzed by two United Nations groups - the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or Unmovic - confirms that some of the sites identified by Dr. Araji appear to be totally or partly stripped, senior officials at those agencies said. Those officials said they could not comment on all of Dr. Araji’s assertions, because the groups had been barred from Iraq since the invasion.[/quote]
No, a 45-minute to doomsday scenario was never realistic, but, on the other hand, Iraq was armed to the hilt. What kind of idiot, numbskull president decides to invade a country like Iraq in the 21st century without any semblance of a plan for securing the weapons in the country afterward? How could people have walked off with all of this stuff? The installations were tracked by satellite, for fuck’s sake!
The Bush administration’s sheer idiocy is maddening.
You know what they say… there’s a very thin line that separates idiocy and genius… and often the two appear indistinguishable… sometimes, they are the same.
You know, after 60 years of wrong-way policy in the middle east… if in ten or twenty years there is real reform there… then, I think all of this complaining about errors in failing to secure this location or that will be regarded rightfully as nothing more than nitpicking.
Bush’s problem isn’t stupidity and his virtue isn’t genius. His real issue is that he’s an idealogue and his ideology is Christian fundamentalism.
The last U.S. president in a similar vein was Lyndon Johnson. Like Bush, Johnson’s Achilles’ Heel in his own holy war against the forces of darkness was that he so passionately believed in a few truths that the whole truth suffered routinely whenever it challenged the supremacy of those few chosen truths.
Bush has followed the same road in Iraq. He so passionately believes that his administration is the right hand of pure righteousness that a few inconsistencies, a few expediencies – bushels-full of non-sequiturs – will be overlooked by all people of good will as inconsequential in the big scheme of things and the fact that some won’t only means that they’re either “mindless” or filled with irrational hatred.
Our only hope now – and it’s looking increasingly promising at this point – is that while fools rush in where angels fear to tread, the fools aren’t always wrong.