Good faith in Iraq War

Factual Questions
1

All of us know what is good faith and what is bad faith. If you think you have to challenge the statement I just made, then I guess you would not have anything contributive to my understanding in the following questions I am going to bring up.
Bush and Blair have just finished their press conference.

I more I hear them and their ‘apologists’ and ‘polemicists’ the more I am asking myself: “Are these guys, all of them, in good faith or in bad faith?”

If they are in bad faith, my next question is whether their bad faith was justified by themselves on the ground that they were acting and still are acting for the defense and safety of the U.S.A. and Great Britain. That kind of a bad faith is still apparently acceptable, at least I can accept that.

Is it to advance enlightened democracy among the Muslim nations in the Middle East? Even done in bad faith, I can accept that. Whatever other agendas, at least enlightened democracy would be making headway among the Muslim peoples, to their own advantage whatever their current resistance.

Now, if it’s for the U.S. empire building enterprise, what’s in there for Great Britain? Anyway I can still accept that, even done in bad faith.

Is it for the oil? If the U.S. will then be assured of good and cheap and dependable oil supply. That is still acceptable to me, whatever the bad faith that went with the Iraq War.

Was it to insure the re-election of Bush. Now, that is where I cannot accept the bad faith; for then it is all purely unadulterated bad faith, no redeeming feature whatsoever.

Those of you here who are better informed and more insightful students of Bush and company and international politics or whatever pertinent subjects and issues, please enlighten me. No, I am not debating anyone; I just want to find out if there are people who think and feel like myself.

Susma Rio Sep

2

The things I have to say about Messrs. Bush and Blair are quite pointed. However, this thread is in General Questions, where such partisan stuff would be inappropriate. If it’s moved, I might answer.

3

Well, first of all, marching into ANY country and kicking the hell out of the established order is a pretty stiff thing to do.

If one must do it, though, it behooves one to have SOME clue about what one is going to set up in the place of the former government.

Letting the American army do this is not a good idea. Armies are not really peacekeeping forces. Armies are designed to do two things really well: Kill people and break things. That’s it. If one is going to have one’s army do ANYTHING, then these two elements should play a major part in the game plan.

In some countries, this IS how they keep the peace… by shooting anyone who does otherwise, or gets out of line. We don’t let our army do that, though, so having them try to keep order or set up any kind of infrastructure is a dicey move, at best.

There is also the matter of the insurgency. A brain-damaged baboon could have told you that NO MATTER why we went into Iraq in the first place, there would be angry Iraqis and other outside agencies who would NOT want us there and would begin guerilla actions against us the instant we crossed the border. True, we are only losing a few people a week… but we are going to be there for a great many weeks to come.

…which brings us to the issue at hand. Did we go in there to establish democracy? I really don’t think so. If that was the case, we could have invaded much of South America, with better results and less travel time. Plus, we could get free cocaine.

So… did we go in there looking for weapons of mass destruction? Good question. It’s a safe bet that after the first Gulf War, Saddam couldn’t have built a nuke if you’d have given him a pound of plutonium and the Ghost Of Allen Oppenheimer. Forget nukes. The best he could have done was to buy one. This leaves gas and bioweaponry. Bioweaponry is right out; you need even more equipment, brainpower and infrastructure to manhandle germs than you do nukes. Gas? Quite possibly. Hell, you can make mustard gas in your garage, with stuff you can buy at the hardware store, pretty much.

…which begs the question of why we haven’t found any yet, or why he didn’t use any on US when we came marching in the front door.

…but Bush is going to go to his grave swearing up and down that we had “darn good intelligence” that Saddam was working on everything up to and including the friggin’ Ark Of The Covenant in there, and no one is going to tell him any different, now or in the future. So WMDs are a moot point. The Prez says they’re there, and if we don’t find any, well, plainly, we just haven’t found them YET, as far as he’s concerned.

So… did we go in there to get Bush reelected? Possibly. SOMEONE needed his ass kicked after 9/11, and Afghanistan isn’t even really a country, per se, so much as it is a kind of ongoing civil war with borders, and nobody here knows anything about it anyway, and we couldn’t very well attack the countries the 9/11 terrorists CAME from, since Saudi Arabia and Egypt are both our ALLIES at the moment… so that left Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Iran, pretty much, as possible targets. Iraq was a no-brainer; their infrastructure’s pretty much been screwed since the first Gulf War, Saddam’s own people don’t like him much, and, well, it was just there, you know? Easy victory, easy money, easy oil.

At first, anyway.

Now, on the other hand, it’s beginning to look like a tarbaby. No, not an ethnic slur, so much as “something that’s easy to hit, but damn hard to untangle from.” If Bush meant the war to be a unifying issue that would sweep him in for a second term, it could well be that he has bitten off more than he can chew, especially with the death toll climbing, and more and more information about his “intelligence” coming out by the day.

This leaves the oil. Well, yes, I think it’s a given. Bush is in so deep with Big Energy that every time he farts, Exxon holds its collective nose. We’ve already learned that he pretty much handed over the oil field development work to Halliburton as a big Christmas present. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that the ONE thing Bush had a pretty firm grip on was what was going to happen to those oil fields once America was in charge over there.

In truth, I have NO clue what Bush was thinking when he got us into this war.

What scares me is the sheer volume of stuff that it’s pretty plain he WASN’T thinking about…