I never called Bush “transparently evil.” I’m saying he was predictable. That’s what you aren’t following.
No, I was just commenting on the IMO nonexistent chances of Bush being impeached when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.
Actually, at the time I didn’t much care about the electoral outcome, because I didn’t see much difference between the two parties. I have modified my views on that subject since then.
You can’t have “tight restrictions” that fail to restrict anything.
The actual “tight restriction” is Art I Sec 8 of the Constitution in which Congress makes the decision whether or not we go to war, instead of passing that power off for the President to use as he sees fit.
If memory serves, that’s almost exactly what I responded to a hundred or more posts ago, so this is clearly not a wise use of my time.
I don’t think I can state my position any more clearly. The War Powers Resolution authorizes the President to use military force in response to attacks on US troops. That is a fact, not my opinion.
US troops were fired upon by Iraq, satisfying the conditions of the WPR. That is a provisional fact; I have no document supporting it, but I’ve never seen it disputed.
Bush therefore had a legal pretext to invade Iraq, flimsy though it was. I don’t think anyone disputes that he wanted to do so. I don’t think anyone disputes that he was willing to use a shaky pretext to do so. So the only substantial difference between us is whether he was afraid of being impeached if he did so without further authorization.
I doubt very much that he was. If Reagan wasn’t impeached for Iran-Contra, a Republican Congress was not going to impeach Bush for anything he had a legal pretext for, and probably for not much that he didn’t have a legal pretext for.
You ask why Bush would want Congressional endorsement of his actions, but why wouldn’t he? He couldn’t invade yet anyway; it took months to amass the Coalition troops for invasion. He literally had nothing to lose, because a no vote on the AUMF would not deny him his authorization under the WPR; it would take a completely different resolution that explicitly denied him that authority, and there was no chance that a Republican congress would pass one.
Then you need to get the WPR repealed, and you need to get Congress to impeach any President who commits troops to combat without getting permission from Congress. Which is many, if not most of them.
A no vote might send a mixed message to SH, no? But you act as though he just did it on a lark. Hey, why not? I’ve got plenty of time? So what if Congress might say “no” or add some onerous restrictions.
No, it makes no sense. Bush knew he needed Congressional approval for a massive land invasion, and he would be risking a lot, politically, if he did it with the explicit sanction from Congress not to. If he didn’t need it, he would have been much better off not asking for it.
I can check that for you this evening. I believe Republican leadership in the House and the Senate convened with Rove & Co and put together a plan to put anti-war Democrats in purple districts on record opposing the great war on terror president who never sleeps to keep us safe.
So much for HumanAction’s press for out of many sensible war policy rises.
You can’t simultaneously argue that the Iraq use of force resolution is “tight” and all the other rules are loose. Especially when the Iraq war was orders of magnitude larger in every single respect than any other non-authorized use of force you can name.
How would that hurt Bush? If Saddam thought Bush might not invade, then he would not admit the inspectors, and Bush would have a much better case for war. In late 2002, I knew Bush was a shit, but I didn’t know there were no WMDs in Iraq.
It was a win-win scenario for Bush. If Congress voted yes, especially to the White House version of the bill, then great, he was all set. If they voted no, he could demagog that into Dems being weak on national security, and it wouldn’t keep him from invading anyway.
But there was very little risk that they would vote no. This was just a year after 9-11, and everybody, including me, assumed that Saddam still had WMDs. Hillary and Kerry had telegraphed their opinions of Saddam long before the debate on the AUMF, and it was obvious to clods like me, let alone the House and Senate whips, that the bill would pass.
Unlike Bush, I truly wanted war to be a last resort, but I was not willing to take it off the table if Saddam failed to admit the UN inspectors. And although I wasn’t as prescient as some in this thread, I’m pretty sure I was to the left of about 80% of the country on that issue.
Truman entered the Korean War without Congressional authority. Over five million US troops served. Over 36,000 dead, over 92,000 wounded. You need to double those figures if you want to compare apples to apples, since the US population was less than half what it is today.
Edit: and the most flak he got for it was when he relieved MacArthur.
Point well taken. I was thinking of the WPR era, but that one scores the full two points.
I am not ignoring what led to Bush making a bad decision and that includes the vote that authorized him to do it if diplomatic efforts failed, which was correct in my view. You continue to ignore that it was certainly fair to assume at that time that without the AUMF that Bush requested to force the UN/Iraq to act, Bush would and could revert to the Cheney preferred non-UN route. The Cheney camp wins - the Powell camp loses.
War is not likely to be averted in that scenario. You prefer to call US Senators wimps, dopes and opportunists because turns Bush lied to them mostly because you can’t accept things that block the only way you want to see it, so you knock it down without some basis or ignore it.
The Powell to the UN was huge. First it got inspections and then it gave us the truth about Bush’s intel. It was no good.
Bush invaded anyway.
Truman had UNSC Resolution 84, for one thing, and Congress voted in August of '50 to fund the UN war effort. Only somewhat analogous, and pre-War Powers Act.
Um, so are you now admitting that the Democrats were afraid of looking soft? Or were they pursuing the proper resolution? Which is it?
Dude, you’re the one arguing that the resolution passed by Congress was, in fact, sensible.
I haven’t ignored it, I’ve disagreed with it. The Levin Amendment would have achieved the same ends.
I have done no such thing.
You sure seem to have a hard time dealing with people disagreeing with you.
Why did they err? What is their error. If they thought it best to take Bush at his word and that way, both avert war and see Iraq verified disarmed.
There was only one kink in the plan, and he turned out to be the liar. And wish to fault Lawmakers for being lied to.
Often it is interesting to see what points do not get a response from certain posters:
The further point being as confirmed by ‘Human Action’ is that the vote to authorize force cannot be a war crime. That means whoever decided no matter how he gets to make the decision, would be responsible for committing the war crime.
Did Bush have a choice? Was he mentally competent to understand what he was doing. Could he not see that the peaceful efforts he says he wanted were there?
Anti-War Democrats, specifically in the House voted anti-war. The Republicans were trying to pick off some of their seats.
HRC and John Kerry were not what I would consider anti-war Dems and they were not in purple states… They needed to vote their own minds on the AUMF (Oct2002)
What’s with the ‘afraid of looking soft’ verdict? How would you know?
You accept what the majority in the House did using politics to gain seats with the threat of war, and you ask us to accept your method of letting the many decide how to deal with our national security.
No thanks.
In any case the majority did decide what to do, and how to do it. You get no guarntees in Democracy that every thing gets done the way you want it.
The way decided in October did work, and you wrote that you agree that it worked until one man destroyed the peace. but then you want to go back to the way it was before Iraq was trying hard to avoid war and share blame with them. Those that had to put up with the politican shenanigans of the majority in the House and the President of the United States. And you ignore what the Republicans were doing - putting the Presient out their … telling people that a vote for authority was a vote to keep the peace.
All could know that Bush was exaggerating the threat, but they could not know two important things.
(a) What the UN and Iraq would do about inspections
(b) What Bush would do politically and with propaganda served by cherry picking the intelligence community and the Defense Department and with the stenographers in the media trying to out fox FOX on being an Iraq inavsion hawk.
Bush did not tell Congress members that he wanted a Levin Amendment to KEEP THE PEACE. Bush was going to get the language he wanted because the House was in the bag for him. I gave you a reason or two why the Levin Amendment went nowhere. That is the Powell/ Cheney dispute and going the UN route the way Bush wanted it. You ignored it.
Perhaps some here should see how a very typical conservative to this day justifies Bush’s decision to kill and maim Iraqis to disarm them as if it were absolutely necessary. I call it perpetuating the GREAT RUSE MYTH. The idea that Saddam Hussein bluffed that he had WMD all the way up to the end. This is from a Forum called the Political Conundrum. RenoBob is one typical rightwinger Bush invasion of Iraq sympathizer and defender. DKS ends up matching ths forum’s “Human Action’s” views that HRC’s vote is also to blame, but much less emphatic about that. Anne is a strong anti-war liberal who is not consternated about HRC’s vote.
(I use HRC’s vote as the typical moderate Democrat politician who did not endear the anti-war left to her candidacy with her vote to give Bush the authority to use military force IF NECESSARY. There were others like Senator Kerry of course.)
Please note that to RenoBob, the entire inspection process meant absolutely nothing. Nothing. In that righwinger’s mind, Bush decided its war in October 2002, and Congress Approved including many Democrats, so what is the problem. It is as if the Democrats really really wanted to maim and kill Iraqis, and then when the war went south, they all bailed on Bush.
It is my viewpoint, that the inspection process and wanting that to work by Democrats who vote for war if necessary, dissolves Reno+Bob’s narrative in his crazy right winger mind.
When I match the fact that the Rachel Maddow, otherwise excellent documentary, also does not mention the inspection process, along with a great PBS documentary that skips from the Vote in October to Colin Powell’s blow up in anger at France’s FM DeVillipain because France as a member of the UNSC has announced it favors several more months of inspections, and the PBS goes straight to the start of the war. Three months of crucial developments took place from January 1, 2003 to March 7, 2003 involving the inspection process.
But after ten years since the invasion, we still can’t get a documentary or major news reflection on that aspect of the push for war.
For noticing this, coming here, I get trounced with being an oddball and conspiracy therorist and a re-writer of history.
Just some thoughts for the record if nobody cares.
There was some attempts at pushing of the GREAT RUSE MYTH by one or two on this board also I beieve.
“I voted to give the president the authorization to go to war, but I didn’t think he’d actually use it! Yeah, right. :rolleyes: “ -John Mace 02-19-2013 10:23 PM.
Roll eyes? Eh? Are you not one who agrees that it was a big mistake, or bad decision on Bush’s part to force the abandonment of the succeeding inspection process in March 2003 in order to wage war instead.
So why is it a ‘roll eyes’ to believe in October 2002 that if the inspection process began to work and continued to progress better than ever before, that any Commander in Chief of the US Military and President of the Untied States of America that had publically promised to ‘keep the peace’ for your vote, would not keep it?