Why Did Bush Invade Iraq? - Part 2

Politics International Politics
#1

Fred, I’m getting tired of having to carry you. It’s time to wean yourself from Fox News infoganda and rejoin the real world:

"Talks on the formation of an Iraqi government are expected to resume shortly in Baghdad.

Politicians from the Shia coalition that won January’s Iraqi election have expressed renewed hope of reaching a deal with Kurdish leaders.

Kurdish officials, the second largest group to emerge from the election, have been less optimistic, insisting there are outstanding issues.

The inaugural session of parliament is scheduled for Wednesday.

The first session of the new Iraqi parliament is expected to go ahead on Wednesday, with or without agreement, though correspondents say this is likely to reduce it to a largely ceremonial occasion.

The Shia United Iraqi Alliance, which has one just over half the seats in the assembly, has been locked in negotiations for several weeks with the Kurds."

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4347665.stm

#2

You are right, they are still talking, but I bet that they reach a satisfactory conclusion. I guess I must have just been reading this in the media or was it the 15th frontpage headline about how the Europeans have gotten Iran to give up its nuclear plans. Whoops!

#3

So, conservatives are not the only ones who heard Bush state this as a reason for invading Iraq before the war…

The rest of yous need to clean your ears out.

#4

Oh they’re clean.

#5

Cake:

Please explain to me where the chemicals that were to have been blown up in Amman that was predicted to kill 80,000 to 120,000 people came from…

Syria? Nope. Never made those kinds of chemicals. Doesn’t have the technology. Jordan? Nope. Again, no such technology. Only country known to have made those exact chemicals was Iraq but hmmmm those chemicals did not exist since Saddam had destroyed everything in line with UN regulations. Or did he… What do you think?

Remember that just because we have not discovered any wmds does not categorically mean that there were no wmds. It just means that we have not been able to prove that he had them. Then again, it was his duty, his obligation to prove that he did not. Tough luck. He’s gone. Hurray for America.

#6

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17211-2005Mar31.html

So much for the evidence being a slam dunk – “yeah, yeah” is enough to get America in a war when Bush is on the job.

[quote]As former secretary of state Colin L. Powell worked into the night in a New York hotel room, on the eve of his February 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council, CIA officers sent urgent e-mails and cables describing grave doubts about a key charge he was going to make.

On the telephone that night, a senior intelligence officer warned then-CIA Director George J. Tenet that he lacked confidence in the principal source of the assertion that Saddam Hussein’s scientists were developing deadly agents in mobile laboratories.

"Mr. Tenet replied with words to the effect of ‘yeah, yeah’ and that he was ‘exhausted,’ " according to testimony quoted yesterday in the report of President Bush’s commission on the intelligence failures leading up to his decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

That was one among many examples – cited over 692 pages in the report – of fruitless dissent on the accuracy of claims against Iraq. Up until the days before U.S. troops entered Iraqi territory that March, the intelligence community was inundated with evidence that undermined virtually all charges it had made against Iraq, the report said.[/quote]

#7

US relied on ‘drunken liar’ to justify war

No it wasn’t Bush.

observer.guardian.co.uk/internat … ?gusrc=rss

#8

Cake – ooohh that darn Chalabi again! He’s like the bad penny, just turning up at all the worst times.

#9

I thought that the judicial system in the USA was innocent untill proven guilty. So fred what will your defense be if you are charged with some crime under false assumptions that you might commit some crime at some time using some weapon. They should have proved he had them and had the capabilty and the intent to use them. Not just assume based on made up facts or the words of those with something to gain.

#10

Gallup Poll, 26 April 2005

"Half of Americans (50%) say the Bush administration deliberately misled Americans about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. This is the highest percentage that Gallup has found on this measure since the question was first asked in late May 2003. At that time, 31% said the administration deliberately misled Americans. This sentiment has gradually increased over time, to 39% in July 2003, 43% in January/February 2004, and 47% in October 2004."

#11

Spook – 50% of Americans say the Bush administration deliberately misled Americans about Iraq WMDs. The other half probably doesn’t dare say anything because they don’t want to have their basic rights as citizens taken away. We now see that if you speak up or even “might” speak up, the Bush administration will take swift action to ensure you can’t go to public meetings held at taxpayer expense.

#12

mofangongren,

It’s been a bad week all around for the home team, hasn’t it? Iraq still hasn’t formed a government after all these months, in no small part because of the bogus CPA requirements for forming a “sovereign” government they were saddled with. Syria’s exited Lebanon, leaving the homeboys high and dry as the only bonafide occupiers in the Middle East now. The Iraqi Survey Group reported yesterday that the neoconservatives are now officially 0 for 5 in that there is no evidence Iraqi WMD ended up in Syria after all, which means, well, they really were just a figment of fevered imaginations as the American people are increasingly realizing.

And North Korea, the real “Evil” in the “Axis of . . .” is on the verge of conducting its first underground test of a nuclear weapon. Who was asleep at the wheel on that one? Certainly not our government or the Pentagon. Most likely also the fault of a bunch of corporals and privates somewhere.

Meanwhile the much vaunted Saudi elections have swept in a “Golden” slate of hard-core Islamists with about the same political agenda as the sixteen Saudi extremists who piloted the death planes into the Twin Towers.

#13

Spook – There are several problems with the Bush administration, but I’ll rattle off a few of the basic ones:

  1. A fundamental lack of accountability – what does anybody have to do to get fired around there? It appears time and time again that loyalty is a much more important trait than actual competence. The buck stops nowhere within the Bush White House. The model Bush appointee is more akin to a clique of teenage girls (cheering on a wide range of stupidity) instead of a grown-up buddy (i.e., somebody you could count on to tell you the hard truth over a beer).

  2. A fundamental lack of due diligence – did Bush ever check his own kid’s homework? Time and time again, Bush’s team has been proven dead wrong on the fundamentals, but is anybody ever asking the hard questions to put these appointees or staffers to the test? Apparently not. Look at the accounts of O’Neill and others who have been in the White House – apparently Bush’s ability to cross-examine his cabinet consists of running a quick check to see whether the answers fit into his preconceived notions.

  3. Denial, denial, denial – the Bush administration tries to treat inconvenient facts the same as they treat dissenting opinions, which is to basically ignore that such facts exist. The result is a government that slips further and further away from reality. This winter, we were treated to the spectacle of Bush administration flacks trying to say the Iraq election would be a cure-all pill for Iraq’s ails, but with the insurgency getting tougher and tougher, we’re left waiting to hear Bush tell us how his other “V-weapons” are going to save the day.

  4. Lack of trust of the American people – the secretive nature of the Bush White House and their willingness to put out lots of payola and unaccredited propaganda demonstrates that they cannot trust the American people or even our own democracy to work.

  5. Inability to uphold basic American liberties – in a war of ideas against the terrorists, the Bush administration has consistently taken the low road. We’re now a nation that ships Canadians to third-world hell holes to be tortured. We torture people ourselves, jamming lightsticks up the keisters of detainees. Aside from the indefinite detentions in Gitmo, we have all the Arabs and Arab-Americans who have been thrown into jail cells with no recourse to lawyers. However, aside from so-called “security” issues, we see the Bush administration is glad to deny American citizens access to otherwise public, taxpayer-funded government events based on nothing more than those persons’ possible political beliefs. It’s been a pretty sad 5 years for anybody who cares about the freedoms that had made America special for 225 years.

#14

Whoops

Syria ending its occupation is a bad thing? How morally confused are you? Would you equate the US removal of Saddam with the Syrian occupation of Lebanon? Which occupation brought democracy? Which brought just corrupt occupation?

No evidence they did but no evidence that they did not either. Explain the explosives and poison chemicals that were to be used in Amman. Where did they come from?

Let’s see. This stems from 1994 so that would be Carter (surprise surprise) and Clinton. Looks like Carter has racked up another foreign policy triumph though I no doubt am convinced he “meant well.”

Or it could be Carter.

Well if that truly reflects their views, much better to have them out in the open debating this in their OWN country rather than heaving terrorists our way right? Don’t worry. Better than the past 40 years of doing nothing surely?

#15

[quote=“mofangongren”]1) A fundamental lack of accountability –
2) A fundamental lack of due diligence –
3) Denial, denial, denial –
4) Lack of trust in their people --[/quote]

I do not want to claim that this is totally off-mark when describing the Bush administration.

What I just wonder is … where is the news? Ain’t all governments or administrations more or less like this? In my perception, they are and I mean independent of nation, political leaning or period of history. How far they may push this is defined by their political system but even in democratic systems I see the above four points to be very common anywhere I look.

I must admit, I also heard these stories of those ‘noble leaders with only the common good on their mind’. But I never really took what Disney or the Grimm brothers told for real.

#16

games – fair enough. I would argue that the Bush administration is comparably worse on all scores. Let’s compare a bit against other administration:

  1. fundamental lack of accountability? Check out the people who came and went from the Reagan, Bush-41 and Clinton presidencies. Basically, these were all administrations that at least struggled with the idea of trying to reward competence not loyalty.

  2. fundamental lack of due diligence – Again, you would really have to back to Harding to find a president who was less concerned about whether his underlings maintaining high standards. Look at Clinton, Bush-41, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Ike, Truman, FDR, and so on. All of these guys were at least asking their people good, tough questions.

  3. Denial, denial, denial – looking at Clinton, Bush-41, Reagan, etc., you have presidents that were at least willing to deal with bad news or inconvenient facts. The worst accusation people can come up with about Clinton is that the man denied his little cigar excursions into Lewinsky’s cavernous cooter. Most presidents until Bush-43 seemed to more or less assume that bad news would eventually get out and that it was better not to let these things fester. Bush-43 appears to be quite different on this score.

  4. Lack of trust in their people – Keep in mind that this is an administration that keeps getting dinged on breaking the rules against distributing “propaganda” (yes, that’s the term used in the decisions). Until Bush 43, the very idea of blocking American citizens from attending public, taxpayer-funded events based solely on their possible political beliefs would have been utterly foreign. In comparison, check out the Clinton-era “town hall” meetings, in which he regularly invited opposition lawmakers to share the stage with him (and they did). In the Clinton days, the only screening of participants for the Town Hall meetings was to ensure broader participation of American citizens in the meetings, to get something that approximated a demographic and economic portrait of the U.S. The transcripts make it clear that Clinton was not taking softball pre-prepared questions from party staffers.

#17

I’d hate to be on trial in a place where this reasoning prevails. There is no evidence that I did commit a crime but there is no evidence that I did not so I can still be accused.

#18

The Smoking Gun, 23 July, 2002

"SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents. . .

C (Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw) reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. . .

. . . It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

[color=blue]"A SECRET document from the heart of government reveals today that Tony Blair privately committed Britain to war with Iraq and then set out to lure Saddam Hussein into providing the legal justification.

The Downing Street minutes, headed

#19

All these details are fine and good but unless you point out that EVERY Western as well as the Russian and Israeli intelligence agencies ALL believed that Saddam had wmd programs (whether this is right or wrong) your statements are somewhat misleading.

Now, we KNOW that Saddam did not have wmd programs BUT it was up to HIM to prove that he did not. He refused and would not cooperate and actually had an active disinformation campaign to ensure that people believed that he did. Why? Because he believed it would protect him. Read the full Duelfer report.

Anyway, the British citizens will have to take this information and decide how to vote. We did in November 2004 and Bush won. Get over it.

#20

Well that will be about 1.5 years behind schedule but considering that many of the major goals have been accomplished, this look like it is going to go off pretty close to the plan anyway. So much for staying to dominate Iraq. I imagine that we will keep bases however just as we do in Turkey and Central Asia and Afghanistan and like Japan, Korea and Germany it will be for their own good.

[quote]US hoping to start its withdrawal from Iraq in December
By Oliver Poole in Baghdad
(Filed: 02/05/2005)

The American military has set a target of December for handing over responsibility for security to Iraqi army and police units, says a classified document being circulated among senior officers.

It is the first time that a date has been put forward for the phasing back of US involvement in controlling the insurgency that has raged for more than two years.

The proposal envisages that after the planned election of a five-year parliament in December the American military would withdraw from patrolling, starting a gradual pull-out from the country. America and Britain have declined to detail an exit strategy in public for fear of encouraging insurgents and being seen to cut and run.

However, the deadline illustrates American confidence that the development of Iraq’s security forces is proceeding as planned.

The police now number almost 87,000 officers and the army has 72,500 troops. A further 19,000 men and women are being trained.

An American officer confirmed that the withdrawal document had been circulated. He emphasised that it was intended as “prudent planning”.

“No one in the chain of command is pushing us to complete our work faster or compromise our developed processes to meet some arbitrary timeline,” he said.

Mowaffak Al-Rubaie, Iraq’s chief security adviser, told CNN’s Late Edition yesterday that larger withdrawals would not take place until the middle of next year.

US military confidence in the security forces has grown in recent months, with Iraqi army and police units conducting several independent operations that resulted in the capture of large rebel cells and the discovery of several significant weapons caches.

Coalition troops formerly described their role as training Iraqi units; the new message is that they “mentor” them. This involves Iraqi forces conducting their own missions, often accompanied by US and British advisers.

Last month Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said he expected British troops to start withdrawing from Iraq next year, a move that would fit in with the proposed American timetable. But for that to happen the rise in rebel activity would have to be halted and elections in December conducted as planned.[/quote]

telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh … ortal.html