Yet you took time to respond. "Who is the greater fool? The fool or the fool who follows him"-Obi wan Kenobi
Ummm.......you missed the point. You're welcome for saving you money. It was a joke. Granted, not a great one, but quite obvious that it was indeed a joke about the incredibly huge financial burden. And yes I was occasionally in harm's way, but that never bothered me. Those dudes who deployed over and over (half their careers) really earned their money.
I have to disagree with this. The Hussein regime was a truly brutal one that cost countless Iraqi lives. Should we have gone there? Probably not. Was it right to unilaterally invade a sovereign nation without threat? No. Was the WMD argument bullshit? Absolutely. Did we conduct the war properly? Without question no. There was noe xit strategy at all. Were we potentially complicit in torture? It seems so. But, the statement is that nothing has improved. Iraq may be in state of instability right now, but I would rather they have a shred of chance of becoming a better nation than they were under Hussein. Saddam killed many of his people over many years throiugh torture and mass killings. He killed over a million Iranians, mostly innocent every day folks, in his foolhardy war in the eighties, to say nothing of the casualities among his own people. He further engaged in another wars a few years later killing many more in the Gulf region. As painful as the collatoral damage has been, there is a legitimate argument that the safety and security of neighbouring countries, and in due course, Iraqis, has been improved. So yeah, as unjustified as the endeavour was, there has been a bit of good to come from it IMO. That is not to say we should use it as a template to execute regime change anywhere we want at a whim.
El Chup has a good point. My son is sending me a link to a documentary about Iraq ten years after, from the point of view of the locals.
Yes, and Bush didn't. He lied about that too. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, using the shortcut "a liar will never say...". I didn't mean that a liar will never use the words "I was wrong" in any of his lies. Of course he will. A liar will use any words he finds useful in his lies. What he won't do is treat a position he knows to have been a lie like a mistake, which would suggest the need for a change of future procedures, the need for apologies and restitution, and many other things.
What were the odds of anything happening to them if a smoking gun document was leaked which revealed that they were lying? Zero. Ain't no way any US President is going to sent to the Hague for war crimes. Nor are they likely to be called on the carpet for any such thing by the US Congress. Doubt me? Just look at what happened with Obama over Libya. The GOP screamed and moaned about how what Obama was doing was violating the law, yet they never once tried to take the matter to court, or pass a law requiring Obama to change his actions. Or the whole "enhanced interrogations" business. Nobody' high up has gone to jail over that, even though such things were clearly authorized by senior ranking officials and are violations of international law. Hell, LBJ thought Nixon was guilty of treason, but kept his damned mouth shut. Christ, can you imagine what would have happened if LBJ had nailed Nixon on that? Apollo might never have been canceled. Watergate certainly never would have happened. So, let's look at how things were when they were getting ready for war, Congress was effectively controlled by the GOP and the President, the Dems generally rolled over and let Bush get whatever he wanted, if for no other reason than his approval ratings were so high. Had a memo leaked out, after the US went into Iraq, which showed that they knew long before we went in that there were no WMDs, what do you think would happen? Ya think they would have been impeached? Not a chance. At most, you'd see a repeat of what happened with Nixon and Ford. Cheney takes the fall, gets pardoned (like Scooter Libby), Bush hand picks his new VP, if the scandal blows up even greater, and it looks like Bush is going to be removed from office, he resigns, and the VP gives him a pardon. There's some weeping and wailing, but that's about it. Perhaps the GOP loses some seats in Congress, perhaps not. Either way, Bush and Cheney stay out of jail, as do the rest.
But keeping Saddam in power wasn't the only alternative to starting this war. Indeed, starting a war on the basis of a lie that alienated allies, gave credence to your enemies' propaganda, and made proper planning for nation-building impossible was one of the worst imaginable ways to build a better Iraq.
Nice garamet. Don't back down from your incorrect statement, just accuse me of not being able to read the subtlety of your bullshit. Considering the fact that we were already in the middle of an overhaul of our entire intelligence aparatus in response to the 9/11 Commission, we stuck around for another 8 years, spending 2 trillion dollars securing and rebuilding Iraq (not to mention the thousands of killed and over 100k scared and maimed), I'm not sure how much we still 'owe'. So why don't you fucking answer my question and tell me what more you want? Admitted mistake, stuck around and cleaned up mess, left country better off than before. What else?
So you're saying that when the US governemtn believed the results of their intelligence services to be utterly beyond doubt, this happened at a time when they were already dissatisfied with their intelligence service? This is supposed to convince me that they were telling the truth when they said there was no way US intelligence could be wrong? What I was talking about was what I'd need to see to believe the false intel spewing from the Bush administration was an honest mistake. And that's a coherent explanation for how those mistakes were supposed to have happened, found out, and reacted to. Of course, if the reform of US intelligence services after the 9/11 commission has the scope you just gave it, there is no way left to justify any reliance on the unreformed intel services' results as certain, no matter how you spin it. What you owe is a completely different question, and one I find frankly useless. If pressed, I'd say what the previous administration owes begins with Rumsfeld on a wooden box with a hood over his head and electrodes on his genitals, but what purpose would that serve? Everyone paying what they owe leaves everyone dead, my country first among the buried. I guess the really relevant question would be what do we need to regain trust among allies. And that really boils down to showing that the present and future US government will have reliable information, untarnished by obvious mistakes as well as lies, and coherent motives. The insistence on a version of history that is totally unconvincing doesn't help, but it's not really central either way. Closing down Gitmo, the Patriot Act and the more recent departures from US values, as well as adopting a clear position on international law, human rights, and UN membership, would be much more essential. How about you? Do you believe the US has truly recovered from the mistakes that followed 9/11? (Germany certainly hasn't.) Or is there anything left you'd want?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Intelligence_Commission Ask and ye shall receive. Anything else I can do for you?
It would have been really cool if the whole yellow cake uranium request was signed by Juan Epstein's mother!
Time to revisit an eight-year-old internet classic: That footnote is particularly relevant to some of the discussion here. It doesn't matter whether the Bush administration was making specifically false statements they knew to be false re: WMD or whether they were merely creating a false impression of certainty; either way they were clearly lying and as proven liars should have had everything they claimed about Iraqi WMD totally discounted.
So. You are saying "It doesn't matter that the Bush Admin. actually told NO LIES about WMDs. The important thing is everyone was getting the IMPRESSION Iraq had WMDs anyway". So, the Bush Admin. is responsible for people not taking their statements at face value and inferring something else? Has it ever occurred to you that Saddam Hussein being an avowed enemy of the United States for TWELVE YEARS, through repeated U.S. bombing campaigns, that the American people were highly inclined to believe he had WMD programs regardless of the evidence? And wasn't that a reasonable assumption?
To add to my above post: My thinking about the second Iraq war at the time could properly be characterized as being tied to the principles that "good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance" and "fibbers’ forecasts are worthless." One of the reasons I, personally, was so skeptical of claims of Iraqi WMD was the shamelessness of the other lies being told to push the war. In particular, the constant effort to convince the nation that there was some kind of operational connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida was an egregiously blatant lie. Anyone paying a lick of attention knew that Hussein, as a brutal secularist in a country in prime position for an islamist takeover, was at the very top of the al Qaida shit list. Putting men like Hussein six feet under is the entire purpose of al Qaida's existence. Once that lie was out there it took a distinct ignorance to not discount the rest of the Bush administration's claims in its push for war. Considering that the case for a WMD program was nonspecific and rather weak to begin with--lots of bare assertions about knowing where WMD were and how easy it would be to find them, little talk about exactly what the WMD were or how we knew about them, and totally contradicted by independent weapons inspectors' reports--the fact that known liars with a motive to lie about the specific topic of WMD in Iraq were making the case clinched it for me.
If something is that important then it should not be in only the footnote. The main text asserts that President Bush and others in his administration were clearly lying without offering any proof they were whatsoever.
Why even bother with Dayton? Seriously, would anyone here try reasoning with a flat Earther? Or a teenage girl? Or an Enterprise shipper? Dayton is more stupid than all of those, and even worst yet, narrow-minded. You can't reason with him.
Ten years later and the issue is still unresolved. It'll probably take a few more decades before any reasonable analysis will be agreed upon. And a few decades later said analysis will probably be debunked.
Sure you can reason with me. But if you're starting with the premise "The U.S. should not have removed Saddam Hussein from power" then you are wasting your time. Saddam Hussein is dead and gone. Good riddance and thank God. I'll never believe his elimination was not a good thing. Now, if you want to suggest alternate means that the U.S. should've gone about it, then I'm quite willing to listen.
Clyde seems to think it isn't clear whether the war was a good idea. This is exactly the position we should expect from Clyde, because he is pathologically unable to commit to a specific stand on anything.
I highly doubt anyone is losing sleep over his demise. Yeah, he's better off as worm food, but the quotes don't lie...unlike Cheney and Rumsfield.
From 'The American Conservative', of all places! http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/saddam-husseins-revenge/
