So it is not my being right that bothers you but my being arrogant? Okay, I will apologize for being arrogant and you will concede that I am right.
What would you like to know? Ask away.
You could do a poll and probably find most in agreement. Many more that don’t even visit IP because of one Fred Smith.[/quote]
That kind of poll would not last long. It would be considered trolling and a personal attack.
Thanks for shopping. The nile isn’t just a river in…uhm, the Denile…ahh shit.[/quote]
Yeah, if I did that it would be trolling. But if anybody says anything remotely uncomplimentary about any US Republican administration official, Fred will tell them to go back to the open forum and discuss what thier favorite color is. He will tell anybody opposed to the war in Iraq that they have never been to Iraq so don’t have an opinion that counts. Or he’ll keep repeating some lame-ass comment like there is not a river called the Nile or some such bullshit. But that’s not trolling. No it isn’t.[/quote]
Richard, I do see your point, however, there is a certain amount of teasing and backhanded comments that occur in this forum and are taken in stride. If 4 moderators do not see fit to comment that Fred has stepped over the line, then he hasn’t. Trust me, Fred has received A LOT of PMing action from the mods in this forum when he has toed and stepped over the line, and actually I said something on the previous page about allowing Elugua to answer.
If you think there is some kind of favoritism going on here, I think you’re wrong, but still offer the IP feedback forum as a source of clearer explanation and comfort.
Starting a POLL about another poster is clearly against the rules. If you can’t see that, I refer you to the rules.
As for Fred being the big bad wolf. He never scared me off, or Jaboney, or seeker4 or OOC or MFGR or spook and a dozen others, or anyone else who is really interested in this forum. Like he says, if people come in here and cannot back up their opinions with explanations and facts, then they in trouble.
Have a nice night,
sincerely
Jdsmith
co-mod IP forum
Poor babies. 
Can’t backup your bullshit so you try and get someone banned. Typical. Why don’t you guys just move to China…then you can have us shot.
Saddam was at best a “back burner” problem easily managed with a few airplanes and a bit of care. We had that sap spinning his wheels policing up his own country so carefully that al Qaeda wouldn’t have survived 10 minutes had they come into Baghdad on Saddam’s watch. By putting this backwater bozo on the front burner in the midst of an actual struggle to stamp out al Qaeda groups, Bush took his eye off the ball.
The American people gave Bush a lot of lattitude and trust after 9-11, and he repaid that by using the massive weight of our nation’s military power, billions of dollars, and the lives of 2000+ troops on a private obsession. He might as well have blown the budget surplus on hookers and coke for all the good it’s done us.
So join up or shut up.
So join up or shut up.[/quote]
I’m not advocating any new wars. In fact, I’d advocate one less war than we’re stuck with right now. The way I see it, those guys suggesting Syria and Iran should be next in line should, themselves, git on down to the front lines.
No worries. Are we really worried about FS? It’s more like entertainment. I’ll defend my own honor thank you very much. Which is actually not that hard vs. someone who is so desperately locked into one viewpoint.
But - Fred - who said you are right? You keep saying this…must be “new math”, intelligent design or something else…
But enough about me…you’ve still ducked my question - what are your qualifications on understanding the M.E.? Does working on a construction site bossing around some migrant labor make you an expert? Or working behind the walls of some consolate? If the latter is the case and you’re in Taiwan, then you’re clearly on the right career trajectory. 
back on topic for a short moment. The harsh reality is that thanks to some “honest mistakes” with intell (isn’t that what Rumsfeld just said in effect?), humpty is now broken and we have a decades long, multi-billion dollar boondoggle to put him back together again. We no longer have a choice but to put him back together again or we will truly face dire consequences. Great job. On top of that putting a crony as the head of the CIA we’re truly going to disrupt our intell capabilities (not to mention even if plame was useless, everyone she knows is now suspect. And as aptly put by the Commie Left Leaning Unpatriotic Economist “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” We’ve decided (over the objections of our military lawyers) that torture is an acceptable tactic. Great job again. So happy we can be soo right.
Really? A “back burner” problem? Well, that’s the hind-sight spin. Now, let’s look at the facts of what everyone believed prior to the invasion:
[quote="Sandy Berger, Clinton
yoinks, nice post. welcome home tigerman 
Really? A “back burner” problem? Well, that’s the hind-sight spin. Now, let’s look at the facts of what everyone believed prior to the invasion:[/quote]
Yes, a “back burner” problem.
Just wondering where any of those guys were advocating getting half the U.S. combat capabilities quagmired in a tinpot secular dictator’s backyard. If you can find the words, I’ll give you a gold star. Of course, it’s really cute to see Bush lying about it after the fact, pretending that Saddam wouldn’t let the inspectors in … when in actuality it was the warning that the U.S. attack would start that caused the inspectors to leave. That 10,000+ page document turned over by the Iraqis before the war started is still the most complete accounting of Iraq’s WMD situation.
As to what “everybody” believed, I don’t see where “everybody” was advocating disrupting efforts to fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan to divert our massive resources into a WMD wild goose chase in Iraq. Please show me those quotes.
Thanks for playing! 
Good quotes but I am not sure if “everyone” believed in the threat of Iraq. Are there not a number of reports coming out now about intelligence reports that were stating that Iraq did not have weapons etc. but that nobody paid attention to them or they were not being passed on. (at least I am sure I read something about this, I’ll try and dig them up if you want)
This (if true) would be a major problem and should be investigated.
What is it with the MTV generation? It is amazing what short memories people have. Enough people repeat Bush lied, soldiers died and guess what? People start spouting it like it is true. I work in public relations and I am always amazed at things like Beaujolais Nouveau and cigars. Talk about slick marketing campaigns that have people behaving in the most incredibly counterintuitive fashion! So suddenly, all the quotes from Clinton officials mean what? That Bush miraculously supplied them with such documents even before he came to office?
As to Iraq now being broken, that is another myth. Iraq has been broken since 1979 when Saddam took over. We did not break Iraq, we arrived after everything had been broken to take out the vandal who was responsible for most of the damage.
Elequa:
Please feel free to pm me regarding my experiences in the Middle East. They are wide, varied, extensive and substantial. I do not speak Arabic, Urdu or Farsi, but … I have a good understanding of the history, religion, trends, politics of the region and I will be more than happy to stand by that as a reason to congratulate myself on a certain amount of expertise. Besides, now that we know you have been to Turkey, I am still waiting to cfm that a weekend shopping trip in Dubai is the other plank? haha
Stop turning this into a Left / Right issue all the time. Saying that Bush screwed up invading Iraq by no means means that Clinton was somehow correct in his approach. “Desert Fox” was not the answer. Pulling out of Somolia prematurely was also not the answer. The status quo of Northern and Southern Watch was by no means tenable in the long term. But does that make a strong case a war which will lead/led for the kind of commitment we’re in for? I was not convinced then and I’m still not convinced now.
But when you look at the last report by Blix, it wasn’t quite the revealing report we all expected. Basically all it said was that Saddam was hiding something and that we think he is doing something, and here is some unexo - that could be used for delivery of chemical agents - given the amount of unexo scattered over Iraq you were bound to find some - hardly the pretext in my mind for going to war.
Looking in hindsite, some "evidence"that was put forward very aggresively as hard fact is now looking a bit speculous. I’m waiting for an clear admission that they screwed the pooch on the post-war planning (even though Saddam gave us strong and public hints).
FS: PR - now I know where the skill for selective reading and spinning “fact” comes from. That is what you are hired for n’est pas?
You think that guessing correctly a common travel destination is somehow indicitive of your gift for being right. Your taking out of context and magnification of a short trip to Turkey (is that really the M.E, expert?) while at the same time making some pretty broad assumptions about the nature of that trip is pure FS. Never mind being “right” or rational discourse - how to score “points” - Pure PR tactics. Your other tactic is to challenge other to reveal thier backgrounds so that you can pick it to pieces while revealing little about yourself other than vague generalities. You also rely on the fact that I won’t say things like - oh your trip to Iran was all about caviar, how about carpets - last I heard they sell them in Iran as well? As for not speaking the language 22 years and you don’t speak ANY dialect is pretty piss poor. And indicates to me that you did not leave the compounds very much. BTW how is your Chinese?
I will continue over pm. I really don’t feel like sharing too many particulars about myself over the web - especially during work hours.
I’m still looking for things that Bush said that were true. Here’s a man who pays lip service to things so fast even his famous lip-reading father can’t keep up. I especially love the whopper Bush likes to tell about how we had to invade because Saddam wouldn’t let the inspectors in. It’s not just the small lies, he’s adept at the really big ones.
Well, it takes innovative Democrats to find new uses for cigars. Bet we can think of 10 things that can be done with a bottle of BN.
So suddenly all the quotes from Clinton officials show that despite the rhetoric of the 1990s periods when Saddam would periodically stop cooperating with UN inspectors, they were smart enough not to get quagmired by a tinpot dictator.
Saddam was America’s golden boy throughout the Reagan years and at least the first 2 years of the Bush I presidency. It’s pretty silly to see you pretending Saddam’s war with Iran didn’t make him a darn good buddy to America’s leadership. Didn’t you ever see the photo of Rummy heartily greeting his good friend?
However, you’re displaying a key lack of insight with regards to this question. Saddam was messing up his own country, and that’s for Iraqis to deal with. We Americans have our own problems and issues, and we simply do not have the resources to fix everybody else’s problems. Why is Bush trying to export America’s wealth, blood and body parts overseas when there is no connection to any return on this “investment”?
God damn it. What happened to the ignore function… oh well…
You do have your moments!
:bravo: :bravo:
Really? Care to prove that? Strange that for such a golden boy, we refused to sell him any arms in great quantities. Why not? Why less than 1 percent of conventional and less than 3.5 percent of nuclear, missile, chemical (mostly supercomputers which COULD be used for military purposes) while Germany sold 50 percent? Yes, Rumsfeld met him and shook his hand. Chirac meanwhile was doing a lap dance for him.
I realize you have a different view on this but I will be back in two weeks (ME) and again in January-February. I am greatly heartened by the changes. Wish all of you could see the new openness that is blowing through the Middle East. And it’s about time. Time for these countries and their citizens to see the terrorism that they have supported coming home to roost. They need to go through this to become modern. It will be difficult but then so is raising teenagers.
American kleptocracy in action: click here to check out the Iraq bribery scandal breaking loose
[quote]In what is expected to be the first of a series of criminal charges against officials and contractors overseeing the rebuilding of Iraq, an American has been charged with paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks to American occupation authorities and their spouses to obtain construction contracts, according to a complaint unsealed late yesterday.
The complaint, unsealed in the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia, also cites two unnamed co-conspirators who worked in the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American administration that governed Iraq when the contracts were awarded in early 2004. These were the officials who, with their spouses, allegedly received the payments.
“This is the first case, but it won’t be the last,” said Jim Mitchell, a spokesman for the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent office. Mr. Mitchell said as many as a dozen related cases had been referred to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.[/quote]
Sounds like the GOP leadership set up a kleptocracy in Iraq in which crony pigs got their time at the trough so long as they were willing to regurgitate a bit to the side for the officials.
Meanwhile no answers to my questions MFGR?
[quote=“Gilgamesh”]Good quotes but I am not sure if “everyone” believed in the threat of Iraq. Are there not a number of reports coming out now about intelligence reports that were stating that Iraq did not have weapons etc. but that nobody paid attention to them or they were not being passed on. (at least I am sure I read something about this, I’ll try and dig them up if you want)
This (if true) would be a major problem and should be investigated.[/quote]
Here are the facts:
[quote="Lawrence Wilkerson, informs us that even the State Department
He missed a few:
Or, more succinctly:
