Makes sense.
Heh, when I saw that line, I knew it was you. I’m very glad to see that your habit of making gratuitous insults is indeed a habit, and nothing personal against me. Even on controversial subjects that have been debated for years, if someone disagrees with you, he’s not only wrong, he’s dumb.
But in this case, for a wonder, you are on the right side.
The US pulled its inspectors out of Iraq in 1998 to allow Clinton’s brief bombing and missile campaign (Saddam did not kick them out; Clinton pulled them out. However, after it seemed obvious that Clinton had used information from the inspectors to target the sites he bombed, Saddam did not let them back in.)
So 1998 was the last time we had first-hand knowledge of Saddam’s facilities. Everything stated by politicians of both parties between then and 2003 was based on CIA estimates, supported by phony defectors like “Curveball.” They didn’t know what Saddam had, and they didn’t want to look weak on defense, so they talked tough. I can’t blame them for that; it makes sense to err on the side of caution.
It should be noted, however, that almost every time some right wingnut lists the quotes from Gore or Kerry or whatever, they cherry-pick the part where they say everybody “knows” Saddam has WMDs (whose definition has now been so watered down that it’s nearly meaningless — a hand grenade could qualify as a WMD under some definitions I’ve seen), but they invariably skip the part where the same people caution against invasion. For example, in the Gore speech quoted with approval by DHMO, Gore gives a list of undesirable consequences of an invasion that was right on the money of what actually happened — loss of the international good will we had enjoyed after 9-11; failure to plan for the aftermath of the invasion; distraction from our efforts in Afghanistan; etc.
At any rate, it was on the basis of 4+ years of guesswork and phony defectors that Congress voted in October 2002 to authorize invasion IF, AND ONLY IF, Saddam refused to allow the UN inspectors back in, or the President determined that nothing short of invasion could remove the threat of Iraq’s WMDs.
It worked. Saddam caved and allowed the UN inspectors back in. For the first time in over four years, we would have inspectors on the ground that could confirm or deny the CIA estimates of Saddam’s WMD activity. That should have been the happy ending, and I would have forgiven Bush for his cynical manipulation of public opinion, since it would have saved lives on both sides, if he had abided by the spirit of the law.
On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix submitted a report to the UN that stated that four months of UN inspections of Iraq, including the list of sites that the US claimed or suspected were weapons facilities or stockpiles, and including the Presidential compounds, had found nothing that constituted a threat to the US, or anywhere much more than 100 miles from Iraq. No WMD facilities, no stockpiles, no programs, and no evidence that anything had been moved or hidden to prevent them from finding it.
Contrary to popular belief, they did not give the Iraqis time to hide things — they used helicopters to arrive unannounced at the sites they inspected. They used ground-penetrating radar to make sure there were no false walls or hidden underground areas.
They found nothing regarding WMDs but some discrepancies in the record-keeping of their destruction. The only thing they found that violated any UN weapons sanctions were some (conventional) Samoud-2 missiles that they calculated could fly about 20 miles further than the 93 miles allowed by the Security Council (Washington is about 6200 miles from Baghdad). Although the Iraqis disputed the calculation, they agreed to allow the UN to destroy the missiles. Several had already been destroyed at the time of the report.
Blix concluded that although there had been some initial foot dragging, the Iraqis were now cooperating fully, and even proactively. He thought that the loose ends in the documentation could be tied up in a matter of not years but months, and that the continued presence of inspectors would ensure that any resumption of WMD activity would be detected in time to take whatever action would be required.
In other words, the inspections determined that there was no immediate threat, and that the CIA informers and estimates had been wrong. There was NO DOUBT about that. You could believe that the inspectors had missed some hidden facility somewhere, but no sane person could believe that the CIA had been accurate in its claims about chemical labs on specific sites, when the inspections clearly showed that some of the sites didn’t even have running water.
Bush didn’t care. As required by the bill Congress passed in October 2002, and in full knowledge of Blix’s report saying the inspections had found no threat, he sent a letter to Congress that formally stated that diplomacy had failed, and that he had determined that nothing short of war could remove the threat from Iraq. In that letter, he also associated Iraq with the 9/11 attack, based on no evidence whatever. And he and Cheney and Rumsfeld continued to repeat the discredited intelligence about WMD sites, long after it had been discredited.
Bush deliberately lied to Congress, in writing, because he was determined to invade Iraq no matter what.
May he burn in hell forever.
We’re discussing Iraq here. It’s your OP, remember? And it’s your own professed ignorance we’re attempting to fight here.
Now, how about telling us why you believe an Iraqi life is worth less than an American , as you’ve already told us? Only when we get that clear can we get into how many Iraqis you believe it was acceptable to kill in order to “help” them.
My neighbor is a poet from Iraq. He was jailed by Saddam. He hated Saddam, but hates what we have done to Iraq a lot more. The death and destruction have been horrific. Most of the educated people like him and his family fled . Few have gone back. It is not the place it was, The religious sects no longer live in peace. Women no longer get the freedoms they once had.
Because Iraq and its resources was the target of the neo-conservative right wing political forces much earlier than 2001.
They had complete control of their media message for decades and with the help of major TV and print media outlets in the US, they succeeded in creating a virtual target of war and, unfortunately, many people fell in their trap.
Check out the signatories. Think oil and Halliburton.
They also told us that seizing Iraq’s oil for ourselves would pay for the venture completely. And that completely eliminating all semblance of a government there would let a Randian Libertopia spontaneously create itself. “Cakewalk” and “We’ll be greeted as liberators” were other notable lies that some people, somehow, still believe in long after Bush and Cheney admitted they were lies. And we still come across the obedient lies that the no-fly zones were failing and that the sanctions were ineffective, too - even, sometimes, on this board.
Brief? The no fly zone war lasted from 1999 to 2003.
Some right wingnut? People on the board with other opinions than yours are nuts?
As for the cautioning against invasion, yes, partisan Democrats did often do this in the same speech where they said we needed to stop Saddam. As the loyal opposition, they could hardly endorse core Republican policy in toto, so they objected to the timing of the invasion. They wanted to give the inspectors more time to find the tagged gas canisters which still, to this day, have not been found because they either are at the bottom of lakes, or landfills, or, more likely, are outside Iraq. (Remember what Saddam did with 63 of his fighter planes in 1991 – he gave them to an enemy – Iran – rather than see the US/UK destroy them.)
Do you believe in hell?
How about Blair? Hell, or just purgatory for a few thousand years?
I presume you have no problem if some Christian fundamentalist advises this for Barack Obama, whose policies, after all, overlap a great deal with those of GW Bush.
Who is this they? All the people on your link?
I’d like to see you find where that Richard Armitage or Robert Kagan said it.
Since his lips were apparently surgically attached to Bush’s rear, I expect he gets pulled along to wherever Bush goes.
It’s more than disingenuous to say that the data regarding a possible Iraqi WMD program was ambiguous, and that Bush only made an honest mistake. The intelligence provided by US allies (except for UK) totally went against it. Bush made a point of ignoring that, he didnt go for war because of evidence, he went fo evidence because he wanted a war.
I don’t pretend hell is real. Burn him here.
http://thinkprogress.org/report/the-architects-where-are-they-now/\ The architects of the war have done quite well. They all walked off with fine jobs, great retirements and pockets full of money.
What do you mean? Did he really do that?
I know that Bush childhood friend Terry Throckmorton, remembering back fifty years or so, said that all the kids around there tormented frogs. Do you have any real evidence that Bush in particular did it?
But let’s say it’s true, and cruelty the President did at age 7 explains his foreign policy. Then we have to explain why is it that people who had “End the War” signs on their lawn voted for Barack Obama, who then ratified the Bush timetable for leaving Iraq, while ordering more troops into Afghanistan. What did Barack Obama torture?
The no-fly zones were actually established in 1991, not 1999, but they were not a bombing campaign. I was referring to Operation Desert Fox, which lasted four days, and I consider that brief for a military campaign. I also note that your source repeats the lie that Desert Fox was retaliation against Saddam for kicking out the UN inspectors. According to Richard Butler, the head of the UNSCOM inspectors at the time (and one of Saddam’s severest critics), he pulled his inspectors out of Iraq after being warned by the US ambassador to do so, unless he wanted US bombs to blow them into bits. That is not a direct quote.
No, I have great respect for many on this board with opinions contrary to mine. But I have no respect for people who deliberately cherry-pick one or two lines out of long speeches to make it look like Democrats favored something that they actually opposed.
Sorry, but the Republican obstructionism we’ve seen in the last three years is not the norm, despite what Rush might tell you. I remind you that Clinton/Gore held office for eight years, and could have invaded at any time during those eight years. Although Clinton had a Republican congress for much of his tenure, conservative stalwarts like the signatories of PNAC were begging him to invade. He didn’t, for exactly the reasons Dems listed in many speeches. You didn’t have to be a genius to see that a land war in Asia was ill-advised; you only had to watch “The Princess Bride.”
You seem a bit confused. Most of the speeches listed earlier were from a period when we had no inspectors in Iraq. The Dems wanted them back in to prevent war, which is why they passed the October 2002 legislation. It worked perfectly — Saddam let the inspectors back in, and they found that he had no WMDs, thus averting the invasion. That is, until Bush, unbelievably, signed his name to an obvious lie, to invade anyway.
As for the gas canisters, their shelf life was long expired. At any rate, Deulfer, who was hired expressly to justify the war after David Kay (to his credit) quit in shame and disgust, was forced to conclude that Saddam had abandoned his nuclear and chemical programs in 1991, and his bio in 1995, and had long since destroyed all his stockpiles. The most damning thing he could say was that some factories were theoretically capable of making poison gas, which you could say of any high school chem lab, or even any US home that has bleach and ammonia.
No. But I hope for a lot of things that probably won’t happen.
Hell. Bush at least has the excuse of being a moron.
Obama is trying to get us out of the shitstorms that Bush got us into. I think he is sometimes misguided, especially in the case of not vigorously prosecuting Bush et al for war crimes, but I’ve seen no evidence that he will lie to the American people in order to start a needless and ruinous war.
However, if the worst thing radical Christians do to this country is praying for him to go to hell, I will be very, very pleased.
They didn’t think he was going to be the complete coward and Bush Lite that he’s turned out to be, that’s what.
People, right now, as well as defending Bush’s torturers. Obama is in most ways Bush III; he’s just smarter.
Displaying ignorance is not the same thing as being “dumb.” I have not posted any insults or accused anyone of being dumb. You might want to stop twisting the words of other posters or making personal remarks simply for your own self-aggrandizement, particularly when you are being insulting with accusations of people being "wingnuts.
Knock it off.
[ /Moderating ]
Sorry, my typo, as clear from the link.
This is consistent with my recall of 1990’s newspaper reading:
http://newleftreview.org/A2267
Yes there is more to the story. But I’m going to say that the History Guy site amounts to mainstream media and you are playing the ump here.
It is cherry picking the policy prescriptions out of the denunciations of the other party. Recall that GW Bush was more dovish in the 2000 campaign than Al Gore. John Kerry was even more clearly a liberal hawk:
John Kerry will make his adoring anti-war groupies look like fools
The above link is from a conservative newspaper, but the author was already, by this time, an ex-neo-conservative.
Wow. You have me pegged. Not. If we take out your Rush Limbaugh crack, I agree. Go for the throat partisanship is much worse today – as your own posts here illustrate. This is explained in what I think is the most important text for understanding threads like this:
The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart
Conceded; I was speaking loosely. But disagreeing with you is not the same thing as displaying ignorance.
IMO you post more insults than anyone else I know of on this board, to the point that I was able to recognize you as the author of that post before I looked to verify it.
Are you trying to tell me that in your dealings with your friends or coworkers, you routinely call anyone who disagrees with you ignorant or uninformed? Or do you just do it here, from the safety of your keyboard? If the latter, as I’m sure it is, then even you know it’s insulting.
I did not accuse anyone here of being a wingnut. I simply stated a common tactic of wingnuts. I have no idea whether the people on this board who happen to post quotes are deliberately using that tactic, or are simply cutting and pasting from what they thought were credible sources. However, if anyone here took it as an insult, I apologize to him/her, because I realize that it is up to the respondent to decide whether or not he was insulted.
If the distinction is not clear, It is also a common tactic of wingnuts to wave the flag and say they love our troops. I don’t for a second think that everyone who supports the troops or the flag is doing it in the cynical way that the likes of Beck or Hannity do.
Your opinion is wrong. Referring to a statement as displaying ignorance is not the same as calling someone ignorant, (one may be ignorant of a point of particular facts without being generally ignorant), and not at all like calling them dumb.
This sort of disingenuous claim does not fly, here. Your wingnut reference was in direct response to another poster putting forth a position that you identified as coming from wingnuts.
= = =
Now, take your personal attacks to The BBQ Pit and take your complaints against Moderating to ATMB and stop cluttering up this thread with irrelevant personal slams.
[ /Moderating ]