I think I understand your point. My support for the troops is that I don’t blame them for obeying orders or believing as they believe. I hope they return safely home, and I hope we as a nation pull them out of there ASAP so there are as few deaths American and Iraqi at the hands of Americans as possible.
The next question is if and when we pull out and the violence there continues will we be blamed for that as wel, because we unable to fix it after we broke it?
And if so - because I’m sure the answer is yes - how much of that blame is deserved?
Tough question isn’t it? To some degree I’d say we do have partial responsibility but people are ultimately responsible for their own choices. I understand Iraqi’s and other Arabs believing that the US wants military and economic control of the middle east and seeing us as foreign invaders. Once we are gone and that excuse for violence is removed there will be a bloody battle for control. They could choose otherwise but they won’t. I’m not convinced that’s our fault.
I remember reading articles about how US sanctions against Hussien were causeing such hardship among the Iraqi people and how awful we were. I noticed that none of these articles actually blamed the ruler oif the country for allowing those sanctions to continue when he could simply cooperate to help his own people.
Unfortunately, this sounds a little like Rumsfeld’s comment about historic sites being looted: “in a free society, people are free to commit crimes.” It’s not false, but the foreign terrorists never get into the country and the insurgents don’t “make their own choices” if the US doesn’t invade. It’s indisputable that we “broke” Iraq.
I can’t vouch for what you remember, but I don’t think that’s how the conversation went. I seem to recall that US leadership had committed to continuing the sanctions regardless of Iraqi compliance.
Like you I’m pretty sure that we can’t fix what we broke. I don’t see how a culture and society that we don’t understand very well can be fixed in the way that GW speaks of, i.e. a western style, secular democracy. I believe that would require something like imprisoning all of the adults and children over 2 years old and starting over.
No arguement here about the past. We can’t undo bad decisions. My point is what happens now and what can we do about it? We can accept the responsibility that our poor planning opened the door for looters. Now what. Staying and trying to establish a democracy we can work with is likely to fail miserably. If we pull out there will no doubt be a bloody civil war. Faced with these choices we still must choose.
My point was not the details of the timeline. It was that the articles I read exclusively blamed the US for the damage done rather than mention the fact that there was a leader of Iraq who bore the primary responsibility for his citizens.
That doesn’t free us from the consequences of our own decisions but it doesn’t make us responsible for his, or in present day theirs. Those that choose to resist US presence in the middle east choose which method they will use. We are not responsible for the specifics of their choices. When some nut decides to strap a bomb to himself and blow up a group of his own countrymen that’s his responsibility not ours.
Thats been my feeling all along. We can’t place a democracy among a population that just isn’t ready for it. They have to want it and be willing to work for themselves. That requires the evolution of a culture from within. We can encourage and push and entice in that direction, but we can’t make that choice for them.
However, when it is Bush, Cheney, Libby, Rove or any other one of the inner circle leaking info, then its all hunky dory. National interest justifies anything they want to do, including misrepresenting to Congress and putting forth a false reason for war. When things go sour, you can then blame the congress that supported you, based on the faulty data YOU fed them.
President Bush pulled classified intelligence access for 92 senators:
the First Senate Report, that is not in any way ambiguous:
This is merely more info, and it coincides with what I have already cited. Congress was lied to, just like the rest of us were lied to. Now Bush dares to say, on Veterans Day even, that the people calling him on it are the liars, not him. That takes huge immense BRASS balls. Or severe insanity.
I think this point is something that can not be repeated often enough! We should be yelling this one at every opportunity. In fact, it boggles my mind that more people aren’t bothered to death by this! Why haven’t even the Democrats in Congress been demanding that the President explain to them in full detail just what his plan to keep WMD out of the hands of terrorists was during and after the invasion. Because if they had any such plan, they did a freakin’ spectacular job hiding it!
Another point that hasn’t been made yet in this thread (or just touched upon) is the difference between what we knew in October 2002 and what we knew by March 2003. In October 2002, we arguably might have had good reasons to believe that Saddam had WMD. However, by February / March 2003, the inspectors had shown that the U.S. intelligence was complete and utter crap. This did not prove that Saddam definitively did not have WMD, since it is nearly impossible to prove a negative like that, but it did prove that our reasons for being so cock-sure that he did were simply fantasy and fiction.
Oh yeah, another point, here is what Bush actually said the other day:
It amazes me that Bush actually makes this statement: “When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power…”. That is simply amazing. He is admitting what some of us said all along which is that the son-of-a-bitch was a freakin’ liar and that the resolution about Iraq was not about “keeping the peace” as the President claimed but rather that he had already made the decision to go to war. He just admitted this!
[He also has a somewhat generous definition of “strong bipartisan support”. I suppose you could call the support for the resolution that in the sense that a fair number of Democrats supported it. But, a majority of the Democrats in the House actually voted against the resolution. And, while a majority of all of the Democrats in the Senate voted for it, a majority of the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee (i.e., those with the best, but by no means total access to the intelligence) voted against it.]
I am dumbfounded that anyone at all continues to believe Bush. I am dumbfounded that he got away with presenting doctored evidence to Congress. He has, all his life, always gotten away with everything.
I vote insane; as far as I can tell, these are people who believe their own propaganda.
My favorite example is the WMD debacle; why didn’t they plant any ? They certainly have no moral scruples to stop them, nor do they lack loyal followers to do the work. For months after the invasion, I expected we would “find” a large cache of weapons, “vindicating” the invasion. I believe it never happened because these people believe what they say, regardless of lack of evidence and any inconsistances. They are True Believers, and honestly think their beliefs override reality; reality is for the “reality based community”, not them.
Well for what it’s worth, I was just informed by An Annointed True Believer that I am a rabid America hater and a Glen Close (whatever the hell that means). I guess I should tear up my army discharge papers, throw away my “road guard ribbon” and quit my government job. That way I can devote more time to America hating. Is there something wrong in wanting my country to actually follow the fine sounding words it was founded on? Silly things like honor, freedom, justice, truth, decency, etc. Is it now a criminal act to want my country to be an example of what could and should be?
Churchill once said of us something to the effect that Americans always do the right thing after exhausting all other options. In a sly way, he was calling us clueless, but havining our heart in the right place. What would he say about us now? What would Washington, Lincoln, Ike, Kennedy, Roosevlet or Goldwater say? How about Jefferson? Carter has already come out and said he is pretty disgusted. Who knew it. An ex president is an America hater too.
Huge balls + delusional = BERSERK.
It was predictable that GW would screw things up because he always has. The trajedy in this case is that his father’s rich friends can’t bail him out of this one and he has taken the rest of us with him.
He has committed us to a war that is unwinnable by military methods (Unless, of course, you just kill everyon). He has alienated the great majority of the rest of the world, and he has increased the national debt to the point where servicing it is getting to be a real problem, with no end in sight.
And that’s without mentioning the dire effects of his economic and tax policies on the middle class. The news just recently tells of the proposal by his tax revision panel to restrict home mortgage interest deduction on the income tax and drastic changes in the college loan program. At the same time a tax break for capital gains and other changes of benefit to business and those in the tax bracket of Warren Buffet are pushed hard for.
Sure. Since you asked about blame, I was just saying that I expect we’ll get a lot of it, and that might not be unfair.
I suppose no one expected better from him.
No, but in some ways we are responsible for the situation that created the choices, so as I was saying, we’ll be blamed for that.
That’s not news. The right wingers I’ve met seem have some sort of bizarre hatred for the man that I can’t fathom. Some of them were going ballistic when they learned a US Naval vessel(I think it was a submarine) was to be named for him.
It means that if you were married to Kevin Kline, you would let Mary Kay Place fuck him just because her biological clock ticking had gotten kinda loud. You BITCH!!!
I think it is absurd to suggest criticism here in the States makes the insurgency in Iraq stronger. I doubt most insurgents know what’s going on here. Regardless of what we say, though, I would suspect the deaths of their family members, the ongoing strife in their streets and lack of security and infrastructure in much of the country has a somewhat stronger influence on their motivations.
Well, I halfway agree with you. I think that they expected to find something that they could point to justify the invasion. That they found nothing probably did come as a surprise. You might even notice that once the invasion began there was a continual lowering of expectations. No longer were we looking for hundreds of tons of this and that…all of a sudden one or two drums of some decaying chemical agent would have sufficed. (Of course, in the end what sufficed was some “WMD program related activities”.)
But, I don’t believe they believed themselves in regards to there being a real danger from Iraq’s WMDs. Certainly, they don’t seem to have been at all concerned about them falling into the hands of terrorists. Or else, they were so mind-numbingly inept that it is beyond my comprehension to understand.