I was speaking generally. As in, “In a world where WMD and Nuclear weapons are becoming more available, rogue regimes that express the desire for them and have shown intent to use them are not safe to have around.”
I’m also saying that that was the rationale. It may turn out that the rationale was flawed, and it’s looking more and more likely that U.S. intelligence was wrong on many things. That doesn’t change the fact that this was the reason for going to war. NOT ‘for oil’.
Look up ‘analogy’ in the dictionary. I said nothing about demanding reparations from the Iraqi people.
That was the stated rationale, yes, but that wasn’t necessarily among the real ones, as has been discussed at great length here. “Flawed intelligence” is as far as you’re willing to go, but even that we now pretty much know to be far too kind. But you’re getting there, bit by bit.
Re “reparations”, whose oil fields are we talking about? Iraq’s, right? Well, who is Iraq if not its people? Whose oil is it then?
So, out of sheer patriotic stupidity, we liberals must TOTALLY ignore that WHOLE Bush-Cheney/Halliburton thing, eh? Because the Bush Admin, would NEVER stoop to paying off their political cronies like that, would they?
Oil is fungible but WILL run out eventually. turning our national parks into refineries is a short term option that doesn’t help much in the short run (i.e. economically) and will hurt a lot in the long run (environmentally).
At least you’re starting to admit your past mistakes in reasoning. It’s the first step to rationality.
Nope, but I think I’m entitled to an opinion (checks, balances, democracy, and all that).
You may not be party to the information, but in the UK the Joint Intelligence Committee assessment (bear in mind that the JIC is in fact very well “shooled [sic] in intelligence/counter-intelligence, international affairs, anti-terrorism”) that was handed to Tony Blair before the war did become public. Bear in mind when you read the following that the UK intelligence reports were a large part of Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN.
Wanna know what the JIC said to Blair, back in February of this year? Please read this carefully.
In other words, “invade Iraq, make the Al Qaeda situation much worse”. Armchair quarterback I may be, but the intel people in my part of the world who really do know their shit entirely back up the Liberal assessment.
Given everything that’s happened (including the transparency of the deceit), and how many debates I’ve seen Sam post in, this is probably the saddest post I’ve read on these boards.
I don’t know if it’s denial or plain stupidity but, sometimes, you just want to despair.
Too bad you didn’t give the faintest clue as to what that reason was.
I did. Exactly where did you, in those five lines, get specific? You didn’t. And the post you were responding to (which I’m assuming you quoted in relevant part; if you didn’t, your bad) didn’t either.
One thing I will never, EVER understand, as long as it continues to happen, is the phenomenon of posters misrepresenting previous posts. Folks (that is, cedric45 and those similarly oblivious), here’s a clue-by-four to hit yourselves over the head with: your earlier posts are still there. We can go back and read them. It’s not like conversation, where neither your memory nor mine of what you said five minutes ago is 100% reliable.
End of that rant. For now.
They aren’t mutually exclusive. The war can be “about oil” in the sense of minimizing disruptions to the oil supply over the long term, and yet still be “about oil” in the sense of making sure that Halliburton and other well-connected Bush/Cheney buddies get more than their share of the boodle. And at the same time be “about oil” in the sense of giving the US government an unusual degree of influence over the producing and exporting decisions of at least one oil-rich Middle Eastern nation.
I’m very aware of the extent of American dependence on foreign oil. But that’s getting needlessly apocalyptic, don’t you think? America withstood the 1973-74 OPEC oil embargo, and the Ayatollah’s supply disruption of 1979-80. It wasn’t pleasant, and they both resulted in severe recessions - well, severe as we measure such things, at least.
We’re even more dependent on foreign oil today, but OTOH we’ve got a more robust, more efficient economy than we did in the 1970s. I’m not worried about our economic survival, should the Islamic oil producers unite and turn off the spigot again.
Are the Arabs going to conquer Iran, or vice versa? Iran isn’t an Arab nation, and isn’t interested in being subsumed into a basically Arab conglomeration.
I doubt that even the Arab nations you mention have any chance of voluntarily uniting, and no Arab nation is strong enough to conquer the others anyway. Besides, we’d block such aggression - which we’d be on much stronger moral footing to do. This would be more akin to kicking Saddam out of Kuwait than it would be to kicking Saddam out of Iraq.
Even if the “securing” is done by invading another nation? Whoa.
How much oil can we drill for in ANWR, do you think? Best guess is about 4 months’ supply, at current US consumption rates. And ANWR is believed to be the best untapped oilfield we’ve got.
When it comes to oil in our oceans, that tends to be less about liberals and conservatives than a NIMBY thing, as evidenced by Jeb Bush’s opposition to drilling off Florida’s coast.
At any rate, if we were able to reduce consumption by 3.5% over projections for the next ten years, we’d save as much oil over that period by such conservation measures as we expect to be able to extract from ANWR. And that’s really small potatoes; we’ve done much better than that in the not-too-distant past. The only thing that’s lacking is the political will, on the part of our leaders, to make that a priority.
Actually, the fungibility of oil is Reason #1 that it might well be “about oil” in the broad sense of minimizing supply disruptions over time.
You’re barking up the wrong tree here, Sam. The potential threat was never that of Saddam shutting off the spigot, but that of a potential Islamic revolutionary government in Saudi Arabia shutting off its spigot, a la Iran, 1979.
The pre-war supposition was that should that happen, Iraq was the nation most able to quickly ramp up production to take up the slack. (Oops: another prewar supposition bites the dust. No biggie; there’ve been bigger ones.)
The problem was that an unfriendly Iraqi government would have little reason to do so. But a regime that felt it owed its very existence to the benevolent Americans, OTOH, very well might. Especially if its president was named Chalabi. Revolution in Arabia, with drastic cuts in oil exports from that land? Iraq makes up the difference, worldwide production remains steady, everyone’s happy except the Arabian revolutionaries.
I again refer you to Iran, 1979, and the Middle East generally, 1973-74.
I see Elvis has already answered this one more than sufficiently.
The former is a rather interesting question. How much has Islamic extremism risen since the 70’s and 80’s? How many terrorist acts were there then versus now? Seems to me the frequency was pretty high. Tensions may be higher at the moment than on average during the 80’s, but I’m not aware of any monumental changes in Islamic fundamentalism since that time. There were suicide bombers. There were hijackings. Perhaps there wasn’t much in the way of suicide hijackings, but that singular tactic doesn’t really indicate a theological or even necessarily an ideological change. And if we continue to use Iran as an example from recent history, we’d note that there has actually been a secularizing backlash since the revolution in '79.
While it’s certainly possible that a revolutionary gov’t might lead the Saudis to turn off the oil temporarily, they wouldn’t survive long by doing so. Without oil money, how does a Saudi gov’t provide for its people and realistically, its own security? The concept of a Pan-Arabic nation is even more unlikely, as has been pointed out…
Granted, OPEC if it ever got its act together could put a serious hurt on the Western world. But they want their oil money just as badly as we want their oil. Those economies don’t just go away overnight based on pure ideology alone.
So no. The sky isn’t falling. When was the last time the Middle East was remotely stable? Under British Rule? Under the Ottoman Empire?
Whoa there! Take it easy! We may be closer in opinion than you think.
That was the point I was trying to make. I wish I could express myself as well as you have done here. (Well, actually I can… it just takes 10 or more drafts to get it right and I got a business to run.) Liberals use the middle reason almost exclusively and that by itself is worthy of ridicule. “Freeing the Iraqi people” (ack!) makes more sense although that exclusive view is just about as “worthy”.
I’m not a pessimist but I find that looking towards the downside has a benefit… if I’m surprised, at least it’s a pleasant one.
A few western European nations had no interest in becoming Soviet either. Didn’t stop that from happening. I can’t help but imagine that the same type of situation occuring in the mid east would be a hell of a lot more bloody. Especially if anyone decides it’s a good time to wipe out Israel. Nuclear warfare anyone?
No one thought the “Iron Curtain” would ever go away either but it happened seemingly overnight. I think this is the scenario more likely to occur than the forcible union mentioned above. We’d have no moral footing to do anything if the Arabs announced they decided to bury the hatchet and unite into one big happy family. Presenting a totally non-aggressive front would be a huge world political coup for the Arabs, no?
You should see me stick out my tongue and make bbbbbbbbbbtttt noises!
I’m not so sure any group of humans are that rational. (remember tulip mania? the crusades? nazism?) All you need is a leader who can and will work to replace economic reality with a fanatical religious mindset. (Hitler had less to work with didn’t he? National/racist pride worked for him and I’m certain that any religion has much more power.)
We’re pretty self-sufficient and self-reliant at our household but I seriously question our ability to hold out longer or even better than someone squatting in a cave/desert suffering-and-doing-without-to-the-greater-glory-of-Allah.
An apartment dwelling American who believes that food “really does come from the grocery store” wouldn’t stand a chance.
" I may be a bit naive, and it has been a while since I served on active duty, but I can’t recall ever sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner at 6:00 AM. Air Force One touched down at Baghdad International Airport, under cover of darkness, at 5:20 AM Baghdad time. Bush was on the ground for two and a half hours, his plane departing Baghdad at around 7:50 AM. Considering that it likely took some 30 minutes for Bush to disembark from Air Force One and travel by a heavily secured motorcade to the hangar where the troops were assembled, that means our military men and women were downing turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and non-alcoholic beer at a time when most people would be eating eggs, bacon, grits, home fries, and toast.
But there on national television, when most Americans were preparing to sit down to their own traditional Thanksgiving dinners, we saw a tape of President Bush serving mashed potatoes and corn to American troops at a “traditional” Thanksgiving meal in the early hours of the morning. What’s more, when a clearly exhausted Bush strode around a curtain – after a “What’s My Line” mystery guest routine by Iraq proconsul L. Paul Bremer – 600 American troops were said to be “shocked and awed” by Bush’s surprise appearance. I would have thought most of the troops, many of whom are support personnel who work relatively normal working hours, would have been more surprised when they were ordered to get up before sunrise to eat Thanksgiving dinner between 6:00 and 7:30 A.M."
How many state-of-the-art Arab airplane/tank/submarine manufacturers are there?
Hitler had so many lucky factors falling together that it’s almost absurd: the top-notch military training (at least for the Wehrmacht’s significant early years), the overwhelming fear of the Allies from the First World War, the failure of early Allied organization (as well as outright command) on multiple fronts, the brilliance of some German strategists such as Manstein who carried Hitler through France (despite Hitler’s second guessing, which would first wound him at Dunkirk and ultimately destroy the Wehrmacht in Russia), and, as implied, the raw power of the Germany economy. The German Army may have had a large number of non-Germans serving it at war’s end, but almost all its major victories were accomplished by German troops with a sense of unity, not some mismash of divisive and scattered nationalities. [The only major exception to this was in North Africa with the Italians, and that (despite its potential importance) was largely a sideshow given by one skilled tactician fighting a losing battle.]
There’s a reason we have this thing called “Godwin’s Law”, you know. If anything, more nationalism and radical fundamentalism in the Middle East will continue its tendency to divide Arab nations, not unite them. Try asking Jesuits and Mormons to agree to a unified theocracy sometime and see what happens…
