Given that the military teams that were looking for the WMDs are standing down and being replaced by another outfit that’s apparently not dedicated to that single purpose, I’d say we’ve reached about as clear a line of demarcation as will be available.
Sure, WMDs could turn up at any time, but if we’ve closed down our main search operation, then who am I to blow against the wind?
And since we seemingly were never really worried about them to begin with, why not?
“The U.S. captured ‘Dr. Germ’ today, to go along with ‘Dr. Anthrax’”
It’s Mrs Anthrax. You need to brush up on your Iraqi villainology.
While I was much less optimistic than you about securing all the weapons I also would have guessed that some Iraqis would spill the beans about them. So it’s not easy to say what’s happening or whether the weapons even exist.
What I find inexcusable though is the delay in securing potential weapons sites. One month after the fall of Baghdad only 50% of potential sites in the area have been secured. They have allowed many of these sites to be looted. And now they seem to be winding down the weapons search team. It’s as if they aren’t particularly worried about the WMD
Those aren’t good justifications for the war as it occurred. We went against the UN’s, and most of the planet’s wishes in invading Iraq, because we were led to believe that weapons of mass destruction posed an immediate threat.
The justifications you listed above would have been good reasons for continued UN inspections, and possible military actions by UN forces.
But for a unilateral invasion by the US and a tiny handful of allies, with stiff opposition from governments around the world and the condemnation of the UN, they suck pretty hard.
So, let’s see. Bush was able to bamboozle his entire cabinet as well as a large number of democrats (let’s ignore the 60% of the US populace for now). He’s now able to make those same people completely forget about the reason for the war, and will miraculously create some WMD sites in Iraq in time for the next election. All this without a single major media outlet catching on.
But he’s also an intellectual lightweight. Can someone please explain how this all hangs together again? I’m getting real confused…
Not at all. The reasons I cited would NOT have been solved by inspections. Inspections don’t prevent people from being shot and dumped into mass graves. The stories coming out of Iraq now have exceeded even my pessimistic assumption about the evils of the Saddam regime. Did you see the footage of those dazed people walking around looking into WELLS, because they thought their family members had been thrown into them and were living in subterranean dungeons? It was heartbreaking.
And how about those 150 children blinking at the light after spending years in jail because their parents wouldn’t join the Ba’ath party?
How would inspections have stopped that? If you had your way, those little kids would still be freezing in the dark wondering where their parents were.
THAT was worth stopping, and to hell with what France and Russia think about it. They helped support the murderous bastard who was responsible for it.
If the world had been against attacking Germany, and you knew that humans were being shovelled into ovens like cordwood, would you have sat back and said, “Well, that’s that then. France doesn’t want us to.”
No matter how your politics bend, you cannot escape the fact that a great evil has been eradicated from the planet. And war was the ONLY thing that could bring that about. Saddam’s regime was stable, he had heirs in place and a brutally effective intelligence service quashing opposition. That son of a bitch and his sons could have kept those poor people under their thumbs for another fifty years.
My attitude is this: Due to 9/11, and the prospect of WMD, along with the fact that Saddam was in violation of U.N. resolutions, there was a window of opportunity to rid the world of a cancer. Doing so was moral and just.
But that doesn’t mean lying about it was right. If it turns out that Bush indeed lied, there should be hell to pay. But it still doesn’t make sense to me. Do you think Tony Blair lied? He’s always struck me as a standup guy. Were the Polish and Australian intelligence services in on the conspiracy? They believed in the existence of those weapons as strongly as the U.S. did.
My guess at this point is that if weapons are never found and all evidence suggests they were destroyed a long, long time ago, then the likely reason for the bad intelligence is that either they were gamed along by the Iraqis’ refusal to allow inspections and came to assume the worse about every piece of intel they got. Coupled by the fact that they knew what the administration hoped to find may have caused bias or outright deception to creep into the system.
But time will tell. Right now, this situation is simply perplexing. I don’t know what to make of it, and I’m not drawing conclusions one way or the other. The best I can do is tell you where I’ll stand if the evidence should fall on one side or the other.
You want to bring up Democrats complicity in all this. I’m all for it. A bigger bunch of gutless wonders has never been assembled, outside of the halls of Congress. Save for Paul Wellstone, who, as you no doubt will recall, the Pubbies spent millions trying to torpedo. And now that you metion it: any idea what happened to the Wellstone Amendment, that one about how corporations who had incorporated offshore to scab on thier taxes couldn’t get defense contracts? Kinda wonder what happened to that one, don’t you?
No, truth be known, the Democrats have nothing to be proud about in this shitstorm.
Sam, the evidence has fallen. Its staring you right in the face. The very best case that can be made is that GeeDubya and Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Moloch Industries, believed a bunch of crap, against all reason, because they wanted to. I don’t give a shit what the Poles believed, or the Australians either, for that matter. I don’t vote there, whatever dishonorable enterprise they get up to, its not done in my name, by my army, by men sent to kill to protect me and mine.
Clearly, its time for some of that good old fashioned “accountability” that Fearless Misleader is so fond of.
When you take on the responsibility of policing the world, you’d better have the world behind you. Otherwise, you’re imposing your values forcefully upon an unwilling planet.
Whatever atrocities were being perpetrated by Saddam’s regime, don’t you think they should have been ended with the support of the UN?
Or is it now the duty of the US to go around policing the world for human rights violations, unilaterally deciding what’s inhumane enough to warrant an invasion?
Individual vigilanteism is wrong, whatever the impetus, because it undermines the system of justice that society depends on. National vigilanteism is dangerous on a much, much larger scale.
The truth is, there is a mechanism in place for dealing with nations in violation of human rights standards. Whether you think it works or not, it’s dangerous for one country to decide that the mechanism can be bypassed.
How would you feel if China decided that North Korea was too inhumane a regime, and invaded it? Would it make you just a wee bit nervous? What China decided that Guatemala was just to inhumane a regime to allow to continue to exist?
The UN provides an international structure in which such decisions can be made. It has its flaws, but subverting its authority is liable to carry enormous consequences.
Yeah, but are you the kind of guy who, if he suspects his neighbor is beating his wife, will go bust down the door and shoot the neighbor? Or would you call the police first?
I’d like to think our country would be the type to call the police.
It’s a big subject, obviously; there are several systems interacting within the UN to set human rights standards, and then monitor and enforce those standards. And I believe that this mechanism has done more to advance the international cause for human rights than all of the wars in history.
I’d also like to point out that, before crowing about how great the Iraqis will have it now that Saddam has gone, we should wait a few years to see what kind of government replaces him. So far, our track record in substituting humanitarian governments for tyrannical governments isn’t much to be proud of.
Visible: Can you cite an example of the UN Commssion on Human Rights actually correcting persistent human rights issues in any country? I’m not asking about getting one guy out of jail from time to time, but getting a country to eliminate the system that got that guy in jail in the first place. Seems like WWII did an awful lot for the human rights of most of the inhabitants of Europe and a large part of Asia. And, IIRC, this is the same Human Rights Commission that now has Cuba as a member, right?
BTW, I agree that the story of Iraq hasn’t even begun yet. I’ll be surprised if some kind of strongman is not in charge within the next 5-10 yrs. Hopefully he’ll be in more of the mold of Musharif rather than S.H.
Expecting something as basic as human rights to change drastically on a country-by-country basis in a short period of time is, IMHO, unrealistic. You’re not just asking governments to change their policies; you’re asking millions of government employees to change their beliefs about right and wrong, you’re asking populations to change their ideas about what treatment is acceptable and what is unacceptable. It’s not the sort of change that can be made by going in and toppling governments, for the most part.
Which is why I’m a fan of the UN’s approach. It takes time, it takes patience, it takes collaboration and communication, but it will change the fundamental beliefs of the people involved. It’s not as flashy as a war, but in my opinion, it’s more likely to have long-term benefits.
For example, I believe that in this country, my human rights are being violated. I’m gay, and I live in the US, and I have fewer rights than people of heterosexual orientation do. Now, while I consider this to be a problem, I don’t think that the solution involves toppling the government, or going around shooting homophobes. If I want to have my rights recognized, it’s going to take a long campaign of public relations, focused on these issues, which will gradually bring these problems to the attention of the majority here in this country, and make the abuses of the past unacceptable. This is, I believe, how long-term effective social change takes place, and as frustrating as it may be to endure the process, I think it’s the only process that has a chance of working.
Now, I know that my situation in no way compares to the magnitude of abuse suffered by elements of the Iraqi people under the Hussein regime. But I do believe that by cutting off the head of the government, we’ve opened the door for continued abuses of other kinds, because we haven’t addressed the underlying causes of the abuse. The torturers are still at large; the police force that was employed by the regime still live in these communities. There are still a myriad of different elements within the society that hate each other, consider each other to be subhuman, and believe that whatever happens to the other faction is deserved, no matter how inhumane.
If you want to change a society, change the people. If you change a government, all you’ve changed is the government.
Well, before waxing poetic about the lives saved, let’s see some lives saved insofar as Iraq remains, after one month a place of anarchy. Score settling is rampant, rapes and murders rising, theft and destruction rampant.
Lot’s of things are heartbreaking, Sam, come out to the region and live here and you’ll be filled with heartbreak apparently.
That’s of course not a particularly useful yardstick for national policy, as you would be arguing if this was not your ‘sweetheart’ in office.
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And how about those 150 children blinking at the light after spending years in jail because their parents wouldn’t join the Ba’ath party?
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Sure, how about the pregnant woman with arms blown off by bombing? Etc.
And others might not be dying of cholera, or having their parents murdered in a wave of anarchy.
Save your ammo for when things actually improve.
So did the US, Sam, although you love to forget that. Indeed US intel helped get Sadaam’s faction in power. There are no clean hands in this, for all your anti-factual pretensions to the contrary.
Now that the Pandora’s Box has been opened, it remains an open questionas to what will happen and whether there will be real improvement.
Ah, the Nazi analogy, a nice cheap rhetorical trick. Of course, Nazi Germany was not just doing so in its own terrirtory, but internationally, there was a clear cassus belli.
Of course one would expect now that Sam will now be in favor of any and all interventions where humanitarian issues are pressing. I presume he now supports intervening in Congo-Kinshasha and Sierra Leone etc. Muscularly. Ah yes, and Yemen, with it’s nastiness, and Syria, and Pakistan with equally nasty prisons, etc.
The hard reality of the world is a lot of nasty things go on, and one has to make hard calculations about the costs and benefits – as well as put together a good case to the rest of the world.
Cheap opportunistic usage of human rights concerns, hyprocritically waved like a bloody flag to distract from the real power rationales does nothing bug cheapen the standard and cast legit concerns in a bad light.
The war was conceived and sold in the main on the security basis. Period, the human rights, “saving” the Iraqis and all those fine cheap little words are mere window dressing, as is the cheap and opportunistic concern of all those fine little westerners who in general could care less about the bloody ‘rag heads.’ We need only go by the BBQ pit to see these guys characterized as savages and sub-human at present.
Now if it turns out, as it apparently is, the security threat was oversold and perhaps fabricated as a means of floating Wolfie, Rummy and Perle’s little pet idea of remaking the region via pure excerise of power, well then one will just have to lap it up.
But the better analogy, as Collounsbury might have suggested if he’d gone in that direction, is that as you’re walking home, you pass lots of women being raped. You ignore all of them - don’t even look for a police call box, don’t even stop cracking jokes to your friends. Then you pass one more, and you break into the nearest gun shop, haul an AK-47 and some ammo off the shelf, and blow the guy’s head away. Then probably walk away*, leaving the guy’s brains dripping onto the victim, and go back to what you were doing, passing some more rapes along the way that you also ignore, in the same fashion as before.
Exercise your own moral judgment all you want to. But when the local nasties were going through villages and chopping people’s arms off in - where, Sierra Leone? - that was pretty heartbreaking, too. And we could’ve probably gotten a UN mandate to intervene there, given the state of absolute lawlessness and the absence of any visible ulterior motive on our part. But did we? No. And we won’t if it’s happening again now without getting in the news much, and we won’t if it starts up again next year or the year after. As Collounsbury has said, there’s a lot of heartbreaking stuff going on in the world, but that in itself isn’t much basis for a foreign policy.
There’s one more problem with the rape analogy, and that’s the matter of immediacy. A rape is happening right now, not an hour ago or an hour from now: if you’re going to act, the moment is now. The case of Iraq was ongoing, of course, like Burma, like Zimbabwe, like many other places around the globe. A better analogy might be to an abused wife. Sure, you should rescue her, but rushing in right now doesn’t make any sense until you’ve figured out a plan for her to stay rescued. It’s clear that the Bush administration was at war with itself, even as we marched into Baghdad, on what our plan was to keep Iraq rescued. And apparently still is. The current chaos in Iraq amply reflects that.
Under international law, such as it is, the mere existence of a regime of brutal thugs isn’t justification for a unilateral invasion by a rescuing power. That’s probably good, since ‘rescue’ is defined by the rescuers; see Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Afghanistan (1979), and to switch sides, Iran (1953) and Chile (1973), among other examples. As others have pointed out, we’d be pretty upset if China were to unilaterally ‘rescue’ a foreign nation.
I know we’re the “good guys”, but our good intentions don’t always work out well abroad. In Afghanistan, the warlords whose rule sparked the Taliban in the first place are said to control the country, excepting Kabul. I’m not sure that constitutes rescue. And with the widespread lawlessness inside of Iraq, it’s no given that our intervention there will amount to rescue. If you’re killed by a thuggish leader, or killed by local gangster thugs, you’re just as dead.
I think thuggish regimes can sometimes be so bad that the international community ought to get rid of them. I further think the Western nations, starting with the USA, should work to define a set of formal but flexible guidelines to act as yardsticks for determining when a regime is sufficiently thuggish that mere sanctions are an insufficient response. If the UN won’t go along, maybe NATO could be the vehicle for the development of such standards.
But if there are no standards, no rules, and any country with the power can intervene where it likes, there is no rule of law, but only might-makes-right. If that’s what we’re claiming to rescue others from, we might do well to put forth a set of rules for such interventions that we too can live by. But our going it alone is an invitation to less benevolent nations than the USA to justify unilateral foreign interventions in the same manner. And when we object, we will have no basis for doing so. We will have opened the door for exactly the sort of international lawlessness that we should be closing doors on.
“Expecting something as basic as human rights to change drastically on a country-by-country basis in a short period of time is, IMHO, unrealistic.”
Visible: What’s your definintion of a “short period of time”? The UN has been in existence since just after WWII. You stated that there was a UN mechanism for securing human rights and that it had accomplished more than any war. I challenged that with WWII and asked you to give an example of the UN securing human rights. Sorry, but your answer was a total cop out. And if you think human rights abuses in Iraq did not stem directly from the gov’t, I’m open to hearing why you think that is so.
It sounds like you’ve got a Great Debate in mind, but this isn’t the thread for it. If you feel like starting a new thread on the human rights record of the UN vs. the human rights record of wars, please feel free. I’ll be happy to join in. But the topic isn’t furthering this particular discussion much.
Your own answer is a complete diversion from the real issue.
WMD = Weapons of Mass Delusion.
We were under a confirmed and imminent threat, everything hinges on that, and Bush lied.
The CIA advised that intelligence did not confirm WMD, the French, Russians and many others had reasons to think it was all hokum.
The sheer cost of this war on so many levels will be with us for a long time to come, the US taxpayer has forked out a fortune, all for a lie, not a small bit of misleading, but one huge ginormous whopper.
It now turns out the the US was taken to war without the express consent of its people, by that, I mean that if consent was given on the basis of lies then it was not given at all.
Think about that.
Think about your Consitution.
Think about checks and balances.
Clearly these have all failed, unless Bush fails to get re-elected.
The debate about how what the UN can and cannot do is immaterial, this war was concieved and set in motion on the back of fabrication, US service staff died, many thousands of Iraqis died and with the unstable sutuation many more Iraqis will.
For a bunch of lies.
The US people had their prejudices fed so well by the media, and this is how support for the war was obtained.
I don’t know how you feel about it, but for me it is seriously disquieting.
If Bush had openly stated a policy of human rights enforcement as the sole reason for the war, then he might have struggled to gain support, but it would not be a lie.
And now US companies are vying for multi-billion dollar contracts to rebuild a country destroyed at the cost of US and Iraqi blood, and the directors of those companies will be paying themselves huge bonuses for their great business ‘acumen’.
All in the name of a huge lie.
All over the mid-East the US has completelty emptied its account of credibility, all over the rest of the world it has severely damaged its own international standing.This cost is intangible, but it could be very high.
When the US tries to prevent the next bunch of world trade agreements, or oppose moves to reduce CO2 emissions it will find that any moves proposed by it will be far more closely examined for US self interest.
I seriously doubt that any nation on earth actually thinks that the US had to lie about its motives for invading Iraq, was because it was desperate to free the Iraqi people of a despot, I don’t even think that the US itself does.
