Some are; I know Democrats who’ve left the party over this. Not much point in voting for people who won’t do what you voted them in to do, after all. The Democrats are cutting their own throat. Again.
As for my opinion, while the Democrats don’t have as quite as much responsibility, they have a great deal. It’s not like they’ve seriously tried to stop Bush and friends, after all; in fact, they keep handing him money and otherwise giving him what he wants. They are more flunkies to Bush’s mastermind.
Sure they could have blocked it, but remember at the time our best intelligence indicated that there were WMDs there. Somehow, I think the Administration’s party should bear the brunt of responsibility for errors in that intelligence since the CIA is an arm of the Executive.
I guess I basically agree with that. Although I confess I haven’t been following what’s been going on too closely. What are the actual practical options the dems have had that they haven’t exercised? If they just cut off funding (which I assume would consist of choosing not to renew a funding bill, as opposed to passing a “stop funding” bill which Bush could veto) what would happen? Is it prima facie clear that the result would be a good one?
The “best” action to take at this point, given where we are, imho, is something like making a public statement to the world community that we made a terrible mistake, and asking the UN to get involved in mapping out a plan for peaceful and stable withdrawal. But presumably something like that couldn’t be done without an agreeable president or a veto-overriding majority.
All of this academic discussion about the powers of congress and all seems rather irrelevant to me. Did the majority of the US public not support the war at the outset? I seem to recall opinion polls showing that they did, including many self proclaimed liberals (Al Franken comes to mind). In any case, I doubt that the war could have occurred if the majority of public opinion opposed it - It’s not as if Americans were unaware of it when it happened. Ergo, who are these Republicans and Democrats if no freely elected representatives of the American people? I would say “responsibility” for the war rests solely upon the American people.
What’s your point? Regardless of what the public opinion polls showed, the reason there was a war was that Bush and his cronies were pushing for it, and thus convinced the public. Whatever public support there was for going to war was there because of the initiative taken by the Bush white house, not because it spontaneously arose.
How do you define outset? Before the war began, there was majority support only if the war was UN-sanctioned, which it was not. After the shooting started, as usual, everyone jumped on the bandwagon.
This is where your analogy breaks down, assuming the public is supposed to comprise the Democrats as well.
Here’s mine:
Two friendly gangs have done a lot of jobs together, red and blue. Red wants to hit a bank. Both think it’ll be an easy job. Red sends over a group of incompetents but the blue gang trusts them to plan the heist and gather the intelligence on the bank’s operations. The big day arrives and things go to hell. There are more guards than expected, they don’t have enough people to secure the lobby, and the police show up five minutes faster than what the red gang said. The blue gang is up in arms, yelling at them and asking how they could blow such an easy hit.
The only difference is that in real life no one is going to jail because robbing banks isn’t considered taboo. In fact, it is debated in stunning detail and with crass banality from bars, cafes, barbershops, and office lunch rooms. Oh, and message boards.
Wiki seems to indicate that there was a slight majority. My own recollections indicate that it seems to have gone up and down with events, but in the 6 month or so immediate preceding the war, the majority definitely did. IMO there was never any meaningful public opposition to it in the US (depending on how you define “meaningful”, of course).
It’s been a while since I read Lying Liars, my impression of the passage was that he did tentatively supported the war, or at least, believed Bush’s assertion that an attack by Iraqi WMDs was imminent. In any case, if he didn’t come right out and say it, I don’t particularly blame him.
I remember seeing him speak about it; he said some people missed the sarcasm in the passage. What he wrote was something like “I really believed Saddam might have WMDs he could drop on the Franken family.”
Everybody has WMDs. WMDs are a dime a dozen. There was no regime on earth that we had more boxed in that SH’s. There are plenty of other countries I would have been worried about in 2002 rather than Iraq.
But the biggie was nukes, and we had lots of intelligence that said they probably didn’t have nukes. Bush just chose to ignore all that.
I’ve posted this link a number of times in earlier threads. It’s very interesting to read as we look back, as it’s a poll taken 1 week before Congress voted on the AUMF. It’s hard to see why the Dems were so worried about not voting for it, or at least putting more restriction in it for the actual use of force:
That last question is quite telling. Apparently we mostly knew that Bush’s WMD BS was just that-- a BS excuse to take military action against SH.
It probably was necessary to threaten the use of force to get the inspectors back into Iraq, but Congress gave Bush too much of a blank check on that.
What an interesting thread you dredged up there, Liebral! It really brought things back to me. First, March 2003 was before you changed your name from Libertarian to Liberal in order to mock people like me, thus thwarting my searches to dredge up support for my memories of you being among the most gung-ho. Fortunately, you yourself pointed me exactly where I needed to go. Second, it looks like you were on one of your self-important hiatuses during the runup and only came back to the board on the eve of war to argue some big time, libertarian bullshit weaseling.
When Coldfire said this:
You said this:
Hardly a plea for peace. In fact, it was part and parcel with the warmongering bullshit being spewed around that time. After all, if there was genocide going on, we had to invade, didn’t we?
And then when you’re called on it, you post this:
Boy, for somebody who opposed the war, you sure had a hard on for Saddam, didn’t you? And how about this anti-war screed:
The old Chamberlain canard that was trotted out over and over again by the warmongers who got us into this mess. Just a coincidence that you were saying the same thing, huh?
Yes, it would be a shame if somehow thousands of Iraqis were dying each month. But hey, you know, those deaths were practically guaranteed!
But wait, there’s more! When asked:
You replied:
Oh if only he had disarmed!
Oh wait, he did, and you were totally wrong. And a million people are dead now. How does that feel?
KidCharlemagne notices the steaming piles of truthiness in your posts and asks the obvious question:
To which you reply:
[quote=My position is that it is always a moral act for private interests to liberate people from tyranny. But a government’s only moral action is protection of those who have consented to be governed. Therefore, I support the liberation of those who wish to be liberated, but not by the U.S. military. That military should be used only to defend and retaliate with respect to specific threats to U.S. citizens.
As it stands, Cuauhtemoc’s concern is understandable. The U.S. government is assuming responsibility for people who have given it no consent. As with all government meddling in the affairs of people, there are likely to be unintended consequences.
Still, all that said, given the situation we find ourselves in, I am arguing merely against what I perceive as myopic, jejune, and Neanderthal positions that it is possible to negotiate with Saddam, that an invasion will kill more civilians than diplomacy, or that blame for Iraqi deaths in the invasion accrue to anyone other than Saddam Hussein.[/quote]
That’s the rest of the quote you dredged up to convince people you were against the war. And call me a liar in the process. Always moral for private interests to liberate people? So we should have just sent in Blackwater, huh? That would have worked out great. I’m sure they would have done a much better job than the U.S. military. Why do you hate the troops so much?
When rjung said
You replied with:
Good thing we saved all those lives and didn’t precipitate a total slaughter! And, for someone who was arguing against the war, you sure did a good job of justifying it, didn’t you? And you didn’t stop there. You continued in post 56 of that same thread, citing nerve gas attacks from fifteen years earlier and giving no less than 12 links about what a bad guy Saddam Hussein was. Then, in post 62, you further justify war with this insulting post:
Brain dead liberals? We were right about Iraqi WMDs and the fact that the war was a mistake. You were wrong.
In post 65, you say this:
Yep. Can’t imagine how I got the idea you might have been for the Iraq war.
Notice how, in post 72, those against the war are now pro-Saddam in your pacifist eyes:
Jackel vomit indeed! No one was saying Saddam was a nice guy. They were saying there wasn’t enough reason to violate the principle of no aggressive war that had been laid down at Nuremburg and enshrined in the UN Charter. But you, who now claims that he was against the war, were attacking opponents of the war with the most vritrolic hyperbole possible. The only thing you didn’t do was call them traitors.
Here’s post 80, where you serve the cause of peace by impuging the morality of your opponents by putting words in their mouth.
And, in post 83:
Saddam lovers? Mentor? Spoken like a true war opponent. But you’re not done yet. In post 85, you renege on your promise to leave the thread to go watch the bomb-killing on TV and come up with this:
The invasion will result in the end of civilian casualties. What stunning logic and foresight you have!
After that, your conduct that that thread cause milroyj, of all people, to ask that it be closed.
You will get no retraction from me. You had a total wargasm in 2003, Liberal. Don’t deny it, and don’t call me a liar when called on it. I expect an apology and retraction immediately.
When a username changes, the new name is attached to all previous posts under the old name.
I don’t think that was the case. The indentations which follow are the quote excerpts you attributed to me.
Wow. You’ve been sobbing your eyes out every day for quite a few years now, I reckon: Genocide in Iraq. The whole reason the soldiers are there is to stop the genocide. I won’t criticize the troops either, but I reserve every right to criticize myopia.
No, we didn’t. Which is why I said it was wrong to do so. That’s what “military should be used only to defend and retaliate with respect to specific threats to U.S. citizens” means. It is possible both for Saddam to be a monster and for Bush to be wrong about invading Iraq.
I didn’t say you were favoring genocide, Coldfire. Nice dodge. I said that you must have been crying your eyes out over it for years now. After all, you said that you would shed a tear for every Iraqi who lost his life just for being in the wrong country at the wrong time. That would apply to every Iraqi born in Saddam’s Iraq, wouldn’t it?
I have the same hardon for all tyrants. I hope you do, too. It is possible to condemn the actions of Saddam without supporting an invasion of his country.
Diplomacy with Saddam Hussein? I’m not sure that even Neville Chamberlain would have bought that one. Anyway, I’ve not said that your views are “dismissable”. I just think that it is myopic to wail about possible civilian deaths from the war because if the objective succeeds, these will be the final deaths of innocent Iraqis whereas another month of diplomacy is another 5,000 to 10,000 Iraqi deaths. Two more months is twice that. And so on.
I don’t recall ever hearing it, personally. But all you’ve shown here is that I was shooting down bad arguments about how much better off people were with Saddam than without him.
By the terms of the 1991 cease-fire, Saddam was required to disarm within 45 days. And here we are. Unfortunately, military dictatorships do not lend themselves to things like subversion or assassination very easily. It’s the nature of the structure. When one node is removed, the entire structure shifts immediately to compensate. What is necessary is destruction of the structure itself.
What was I wrong about? Mass graves found in 2003 substantiated that Saddam had buried as many as 300,000 Shiites, Kurds, and dissidents. That does not include half a million children who died so he could live comfortably in his palaces during worldwide trade sanctions following the Gulf War. And it does not include the Iranians and Kuwaitis that he killed. Some 2,000,000 Iraqis and Iranians died during that war.
My position is that it is always a moral act for private interests to liberate people from tyranny. But a government’s only moral action is protection of those who have consented to be governed. Therefore, I support the liberation of those who wish to be liberated, but not by the U.S. military. That military should be used only to defend and retaliate with respect to specific threats to U.S. citizens.
As it stands, Cuauhtemoc’s concern is understandable. The U.S. government is assuming responsibility for people who have given it no consent. As with all government meddling in the affairs of people, there are likely to be unintended consequences.
Still, all that said, given the situation we find ourselves in, I am arguing merely against what I perceive as myopic, jejune, and Neanderthal positions that it is possible to negotiate with Saddam, that an invasion will kill more civilians than diplomacy, or that blame for Iraqi deaths in the invasion accrue to anyone other than Saddam Hussein.
(I fixed your coding for you.) The rest of the quote merely confirms what I’ve been saying. I opposed the invasion because a government is supposed to secure the rights of its citizens, and nothing more. Anything beyond that is a tyranny. But free people ought to be free to rescue people whom they perceive to be suffering. I suspect you’re used to thinking in terms of “we” meaning “government”, but what I said was that the government should not have intervened with its military. If Blackwater felt like it should have rescued people, then that’s what it should have been free to do. I would even argue the same for you if you had thought the Iraqi people were suffering under Saddam.
*s saving five-to-ten thousand lives per month a sufficient “it”?
Are you arguing that he was not a bad guy? Because he really was. I mean really really bad. Bad like Pol Pot and Hitler and all those other crazies. The invasion was not justified, and now that it has happened, there is plenty of suffering caused by multiple sources. My argument that people deserve liberation (but not by foreign governments) does not carry over to the celebration of an invasion.
What makes so many brain-dead liberals think that Saddam and Chemical Ali have unilaterally stopped their murders? Do you have something to say about that, or do you still want to defend the monster?
Murders by Saddam, his sons, and Ali were quite possibly taking place even as we debated. In fact, the New York Times reported a couple months earlier that…
“Since then, Mr. Hussein’s has been a tale of terror that scholars have compared to that of Stalin, whom the Iraqi leader is said to revere, even if his own brutalities have played out on a small scale. Stalin killed 20 million of his own people, historians have concluded. Even on a proportional basis, his crimes far surpass Mr. Hussein’s, but figures of a million dead Iraqis, in war and through terror, may not be far from the mark, in a country of 22 million people.”
Just because the web doesn’t have up-to-the-minute documentation of the attrocities of your hero, you are willing to discount years of documented mass murder? How fucking stupid. If you really want an answer to your dumbass question, go to Goodle and type a few keywords: Iraq, torture, murder, rape, and genocide. You can also get a bunch of hits with “branding”.
I can. I think you got the idea by ignoring what I said and reading the rage in your own mind.
Sorry, but I’m just sick of all this bullshit defense of a fucking monster. Maybe he never really did these things. Maybe he changed his ways this year. Maybe people who live under him don’t suffer as much as you think. Jackal vomit.
It had nothing to do with treason; it had to do with the principle of noncoercion. People were in denial about the atrocities Saddam was committing. Again, one can hold both these postions simultaneously, as I did: (1) Saddam was as sadistic a monster who ever lived, and (2) it was not the place of the US military to invade Iraq.
I just can’t get over the fact that these guys are suggesting that Saddam might have reformed this year, and that numbers over the past decade are irrelevant.
I think you’re sort of drifting at this point. You’ve moved on past the original lie, and are now trying to paint me as rude, which I readily concede I was. Perhaps at this point, you’d like to give the OP his thread back. If you wish to further your vendetta, perhaps the Pit would be a more fitting place.
