http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080326/ap_on_re_us/iraq_junket Saddam Hussein financed a trip for three anti-war democrats to Iraq prior to the invasion. The three in question stated that they had no idea who was financing the trip, and there's no reason at the moment not to believe them. But that's a pretty big 'whoops - my bad' moment. LOL. Man, Saddam just wasn't a visionary thinker. There are millions of posters on the internet that will do his propaganda for free.
Meh. If diplomatic options really were still on the table at the time, I don't see anything wrong with the Iraqi government offering members of the American government a free trip to Iraq. That's diplomacy in action, isn't it?
If they did it openly, there'd be a record of it and people could make up their own minds. It was done under the table, to the point that the Congressmen in question didn't know about the Hussein government financing their trip. Edit: Just more influence peddling for oil.
What's embarrassing is that Saddam was right when he said he had no chemical weapons and no nuclear weapons program worth mentioning. Well, it would be what's embarrassing if the assorted warmongers who pushed for war with Iraq were capable of shame. The war in Iraq is a monumental disaster, and anyone more embarrassed by this story than by the war in the first place is not particularly connected to reality. On no! Saddam, who was actually right[i/] in this case, tried to avoid the idiocy of the Bush administration by secretly financing legislators' trips to Iraq without their knowledge! This story gets a great big meh. We need politicians who are embarrassed by mortifyingly bad policy, not politicians who are embarrassed by 3 degrees of separation from [-]Kevin Bacon[/-] Saddam Hussein. Shame on anyone who thinks this matters at all.
I'd have given Saddam the benefit of the doubt about chemical weapons if: A) He hadn't been dicking around with the inspection process for ten years B) He hadn't actually used chemical weapons against both the Iranians and the Kurds C) He hadn't been fucking around with the terms of the cease-fire for the same ten years. You keep poking a tied up dog with a stick, don't be surprised that when the dog gets lose it decides to take a chunk out of your ass.
So since you were utterly wrong, how will you change your philosophy to prevent future mistakes along the same lines?
In the future, better verification of information to be used for Public Relations value in the leadup to war will happen.
the "use of force" resolution was already approved and we were on a war footing with Iraq, simply waiting for the logistics to come together. By contrast, Bailey's rather lame reference to '83 was a situation where relations were supposedly warming and there were no hostilities with iraq's government, indeed, they were at war with the one nation we had the most reason to be opposed to at the moment (save the USSR)
But he's not wrong - we were not wrong - about the things JCD listed. Saddam went hell-and-gone out of his way to look guilty and then protests his innocence when the promised attack occurs. from where I sit - that makes HIM wrong, not us.
Wasn't the general consensus in the intelligence community that he was declawed? Didn't the administration have to dig and dig for circumstantial "evidence" to support a tenuous claim to justify a tenet of neoconservatism? We all got hosed on that one.
Dig? Tenet told the administration that WMD was a slam dunk for PR purposes. In ID'ing strategic requirements for what the Administration set as the scope for the War on Terror, taking Iraq was determined to be critical, regardless of WMD.
No, I am saying it was a mistake to go to war over WMDs, which means a short mission with comparatively less men and a finite objective. As you keep forgetting, one of the main contentions about this war among the erstwhile coalition was that the US refused the long-terms, troops-heavy plans of France and Germany and pretended this could and had to be just a short intervention to disarm a ticking bomb. That's what the WMD claim did: It changed the realistic but unattarctive perspective of a long-term massive military involvement, which the US was not up for, into the imaginary mission that was "accomplished" within "weeks, I doubt months".
I, for one, have never protested the charge of "mishandled" or poor decision making - there is some of that in every conflict and more so since Vietnam where politics seems to be much more a concern....I just resist the notion of intentional deception in terms of manipulating the facts.
"There is some of that in every conflict", but this conflict wouldn't even exist if it weren't for the masses of false information. Whether we consider them intentional lies or incredibly poor judgement, the question remians: What can be changed to prevent such disasters in the future?
Packard, with all due respect, you haven't been paying attention if you think I'm a "die hard" about anything at all anymore, least of all the war. It's a verifiable sold stone cold fact that both sides of the political spectrum here, and many foreign sources, were, as of late 2002, still of the opinion that Saddam was on some level a threat regarding WMDs....the discussion on the topic was front and center in american politics for more than five years previous. One might debate at length the valid points you raised earlier....but a presistant denial that such a widespread opinion existed is....well, it tends tyo paint YOU as the "die hard" i think you are on much firmer ground in your previous post about it being a poor justification for war or for the sort of war that was attempted.
The nature of politics, or, put more succinctly, nothing. People screw up....the more power they have, the bigger the screw ups are. and it's not like it happens in a vacuum, like a game of Risk The biggest war monger in the Western world can simply go to war on a whim...there has to be an environment condicuve to that and such environments cannot by any means me made to not exist. conversely, when such environments happen regularly, SOME of them are actual threats....and if one grows too cautious, much death and disaster happens as a result there too. So, we muddle along best we can, sometimes too passive, sometimes too aggressive....the most we can do is seek leadership with relatively pure motives and try to minimize the occurance of either bad outcome or, short of that, pick up the pieces as competently as we can. We live in a flawed world with a lot of flawed people in it - some times assigning blame is pointless.
A die-hard ideologue is someone who takes a claim from his ideology and sees it as rock-hard reality. That is exactly what you are doing when you pretend there was consensus about Saddam's WMDs before the invasion. There wasn't. A second sign of ideology is its imaginary quality: The paranoid tenedency of those who defend it to sidestep those points where it conflicts most clearly with reality. That's what you're doing by softening the issue until you arrive at this vague description: The US claimed they had specific positive information about Saddam's WMDs: They knew where they were and could secure them by invading. The rest of the planet claimed that the information was neither positive nor specific: We weren't sure whether there were any WMDs, and certainly didn't know where they were. We needed more information, which is why we needed more inspections. And that is, of course, what was about: Do we need to give the inspections more time, as the US had contractually agreed to do, or do we have so definitive and specific information about an imminent threat that we do not have to and cannot afford to wait another 7 months? By taking a firm false stance on this issue, the US managed to misplan the war, drive away most of its allies, jettison any credibility it had as a bringer of peace as well as most credibility democracy had in the region and large parts of the rest of the world. The attempts to continually hise these mistakes still make it impossible to plan a better strategy for the mess we're in now, as any discussion of the problems gets warped into an ideological veil that conceals reality.
