Not a hard bet to make considering that things are going shitty but he is trying to spin them as going well and still trying to take the credit for it! 
Don’t forget the post-war decisions:
So, after the war, the president proceeded to add insult to injury. I think it’s crystal clear who should be taking responsibility for all of this.
LilShieste
Since the US & UK are implicated in these allegations, what makes the difference? Obviously being named in these allegations didn’t deter the US or the UK. Why would these same things deter other countries and not the US and UK?
Yeah, well, that’s what a real leader does.
The kind of “leadership” displayed by Bush is the same stuff that gets mocked by cartoonists.
Absolutely we would be better off if France, Germany, Russia and even Belgium were in it with us. My point is that there was no way in hell that France (who was the leader in the resistence to invading Iraq) was going to help us invade Iraq. Their pockets were being lined by the sweetheart deal, which was using money from the UN’s “Oil for Food” program. It would have been better to call it “Oil for France”. In the beginning we suspected it was because of a few contracts France had made which violated the embargo. Little did we suspect the UN was involved in a much bigger deal, that amounted to a payoff to France for their support of Saddam.
:rolleyes: [sup]Was I allowed to mention Belgium?[/sup]
No, I don’t have ‘proof’ for my opinions. That’s why it is an opinion. One that I have formed from a couple of decades of being involved in foreign policy debates.
And you’re simplifying my position. Or rather, perhaps I presented them in a simplified manner. Such are the limitations of trying to get complex ideas across in a single message. I recognize that the Middle East is not monolithic, and that change will not happen overnight. I’ve never said this war will be easy - it could get much, much harder. Germany was still a mess five years after the occupation. It was still in rough shape ten years after the occupation. So was Japan. Echoes of the occupation still reverberate in Germany 50 years later. I don’t think anyone believes that the Middle East will be like Nebraska in a year, five years, ten years. Maybe it will be peaceful, democratic, and prosperous in fifty years, if we do this right.
Another reason why Iraq was the right target, by the way, was because it was the most stable dictatorship in the region. There is real possibility for reform in Iran, so the correct position to take there was strong diplomacy aimed at fostering a peaceful democratic revolution. But not only was Saddam in a lock-solid position as dictator of Iraq, he had a line of succession already in place. There was no real prospect for change in Iraq for decades. And as long as that maniacal family was in power in that country, it would give an excuse for the dictatorships surrounding that country to maintain their large militaries, build their own WMD, and deflect attention away from their failed policies by scapegoating the U.S and Israel.
Look, even outside the war on terror the Middle East is a powderkeg. Over time, it is also unstable. As oil supplies begin to shrink and prices go up, more money will flow into dictatorships, allowing them to extend their regimes and build up their weapons. Then as supplies run out, those countries will be in real crisis. But by then, we’d have nuclear weapons in the middle east. If the area erupts in flames in fifty years, can you imagine the destruction that could happen?
Invading Iraq establishes a beachhead in the region from which the U.S. can influence change. A democratic Iraq can show how an economy can modernize, grow, and diversify. If Iraq becomes an economic powerhouse in the region, it will have influence. The war in Iraq can become a catalyst for change in the region while change can still happen without nuclear conflagration.
There’s another benefit - IF it turns out that the U.S. has to attack Iran, the invasion of Iraq gives them a front. And in the meantime, having several divisions in Iran will act as a deterrence to Iranian aggression.
Could it all go wrong? Sure. Then we’ll have to try something else. D-Day could have failed too. It was a huge gamble. The first six months of WWII were studded by major failures in battle for the U.S. Wars can not be run perfectly. There are advances, and there are setbacks. Campaigns are fought not with certainty, but with the odds hopefully in your favor. Sometimes when they aren’t, when the alternatives are worse.
But again, look at the benefits the war has already brought: Palestinians no longer get paid $25,000 for bombing Jews. There is no longer a no-fly zone. There are no longer large amounts of American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia (one of Bin Laden’s primary complaints). Libya has flipped over all of its WMD, helping the U.S. roll up a network selling nuclear secrets. Syria is pulling out of Lebanon. The Iraqi people no longer live under a dictator - one who was killing on average tens of thousands of people a year. The U.S. has a large strategic presence right in the home of the terrorists. Terrorists have been flinging themselves at the buzz-saw of the U.S. military and getting chopped to pieces, rather than flinging themselves at American civilians.
Something else to think about - there has been a lot of talk about why Saddam refused inspectors even if he didn’t have WMD. It seems so irrational. Well, the main reason is because he thought he could get away with it. The U.S. had backed down from threats so many times in the past twenty years that it became an article of faith among many that it was a paper tiger. The lesson of Somalia was that all you had to do was drag a couple of dead soldiers through the street, and America would turn tail and run.
That kind of belief creates aggression. It leads to reckless behaviour from tyrants. There has been a lot of talk recently about how Bush has caused the U.S. to lose credibility. On the contrary, the U.S. had already lost its credibility, just as the U.N. has by constantly passing resolutions and then failing to act on them. Well, the Iraq war restored that credibility. If the U.S. has to stand up to Iran or North Korea and say that a line has been drawn in the sand and they’d better back down or else, those words will have a lot more credibility now than they had three years ago. For strong diplomacy to work, it has to be backed by a credible threat of force. The U.S. had lost its credibility in that regard, and as a result was being thumbed at by everyone from Kim Jong Il and Saddam to Slobodan Milosevic (to Clinton’s credit, he took that guy down).
The fundamental problem we face right now is that as technology improves, the ability of terrorists to inflict widespread damage grows. Today it’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Tomorrow it may be nanotech sabotage, or designer germs. In the meantime, regimes that are sympathetic to terrorists are developing space capabilities and long-range missiles. The nexus of these trends portends a world that will become increasingly unstable and dangerous. The theat is as great as the threat of nuclear war during the cold war - it’s just more nebulous and harder to define.
Before those trends intersect, we need to do several things - first, we need to break the connection between rogue states and terrorists, lest terrorists become a weapons delivery system for Iran or North Korea or Syria. Second, we need to improve the world, to foster democracy, because democracy gives citizens the hope to improve their lives through methods other than killing their enemies. Third, we need to foster a debate in the Muslim world. We have to help it through its own reformation, so that the virulent, jihadist strains are removed. The vast majority of Muslims are just like us - people who want to raise their families and live peaceful, happy lives. We must show the way for them to create stable, democratic societies and repudiate the fanatics.
And along with all that, we need to hunt down and kill the current crop of terrorists. Unfortunately, this is ALL John Kerry wants to do - as if killing the ones that we can find now will eliminate the problem. That’s kind of like solving your wasp problem by practicing your accuracy with a fly swatter. It makes more sense to get rid of the nest. Of course, in the process of taking down the nest you sure stir up the wasps, and that’s where we’re at today. The wasps in the middle east are buzzing and angry, but that’s because they are being threatened.
I must be slow. Please enlighten me as to how Iraq was techncially in violation of the cease fire. I’d take issue with the rest, but others have done so sufficiently.
Having several divisions in Iraq…
Can you remind us how many American soldiers were getting killed each day in these places?
Just to point out, if you extend the timescale out long enough then it becomes guesswork whether the policy you support has actually helped or hindered in that regard.
Well, to tell you the truth, I prefer using good judgement to just sort of randomly trying things like invading countries and seeing how it works. That’s not an intelligent way to handle foreign policy in my book.
At any rate, if you wanted to run experiments, why not consider Afghanistan one? Since there is more agreement that it was a necessary experiment rather than a purely optional one, it could serve as a test-bed for these ideas. I think that makes more sense than doing this this test in parallel in several places at once, especially since it makes it more likely that they will all fail due to lack of focus.
What…We’re saving something on the order of $1 billion per year by spending $50 billion+ a year? Do you realize how long the no-fly zone would have had to go on (and/or how quick before the U.S. can now totally withdraw) in order for this to be cost-effective?
Yeah…Now they are just in Iraq. (And, just out of curiosity, do you have numbers on what has happened to the troops that were in Saudi Arabia?)
As others have pointed out (I’ll let someone else dig up the cite), the most amazing thing is how our policy accomplished this even in advance of it’s being implemented…The Libyans were already taking major steps in this direction. Oh, and here is the story on what Libya gave up in terms of its nuclear program:
Speaking of which, you forgot to include in your list of benefits how much friendlier Iran and North Korea, the two other axis-of-evil countries seem to have gotten.
Do you have evidence that Saddam was actually killing tens of thousands of people a year over the last several years? Most of the claims about Saddam’s killing are based on averaging in what he did to the Kurds and even the deaths from the Iran-Iraq war, which says little about how much he was killing once the U.S. had instituted no-fly zones and was containing him, rather than helping him in attacking his neighbors. Meanwhile, the count of civilians killed since the start of the Iraq war is in the range of 13-15,000.
Well, if only there were a small finite number of terrorists in the world, we’d be doing great. But, kind of like in those Jay Leno Dorito’s commercials, the Bush Administration motto seems to be, “Don’t worry…We’ll make more.”
Well, except in late 2002 and early 2003 when he did let them in and let them go wherever they wanted…until they started finding that the U.S. intelligence was “shit after shit after shit” (I’m taking the liberty here of inserting what I guess to be the cruder word that CBS wouldn’t publish) at which point we called off the inspections and started the war.
(By the way, they left in 1998 because Saddam wasn’t cooperating because he claimed that they were spies for the U.S. and Britain, charges that were subsequently found out to be true…Even Hans Blix mentions this as fact. I am not saying that this may not have been partly an excuse on Saddam’s part. But, it is sort of disingenius to come up with all sorts of nefarious reasons for Saddam’s non-cooperation when there are other less nefarious ones that make sense.)
You know…I was going to comment on this but I really don’t know what to say. Some comments just stand on their own!
Well, who knows which of these countries would have joined us since we didn’t give them a chance by continuing the inspections. My guess is that they might never have but that has less to do with their ulterior motives and more to do with the fact that the longer the inspections went on, the more the U.S. “intelligence” would likely be found to be based on fantasy rather than reality.
And, I noticed that you completely ignored SimonX’s question, which I repeat here for you again:
Jshore: None of your criticisms have ANYTHING to do with the larger strategic principles. Your ‘arguments’ amount to saying things like this:
D-Day was the right right thing to do.
Oh yeah? And how many dead are on the beaches of Normandy? Huh???
It was important to take Iwo Jima on the way to Japan
Tell that to the 70,000 dead!
Well, to be honest, I don’t think one should think only in the realm of abstract strategic principles. Your whole post was an extremely well-articulated presentation of the neoconservative vision. Unfortunately, however, I think that that vision has little grounding in reality. My post was an attempt to inject some reality into it.
Take my discussion about the number of people being killed, I think that is an important question and I am disappointed that I haven’t been able to find out any even rough numbers for the rate at which Saddam was killing people over the last several years. And, to be honest, I don’t even know if those numbers will support my point of view or be against it. But, I think this is surely a relevant question if one wants to justify the invasion of Iraq for humanitarian reasons. Using justifications in regards to how many Kurds and Iranians he killed is largely irrelevant to me. I mean, it does give you some evidence of his brutality but noone is arguing about that…rather we are arguing about what is actually happening and what is likely to happen in the future if he remains in charge but is still contained as he has been since the Gulf War.
And, I think that comparisons to D-Day and Iwo Jima are a lot less relevant than, for example, comparisons to Vietnam (although I haven’t personally done a lot of comparing to Vietnam).
You are entitled to your guess, but it has been proved that France and others were receiving what amounted to bribes. That in part is my answer to SimonX. There is also the fact that many of the countries like to hide their heads in the sand while hoping we will do something about the problem. Not getting involved is a sure way of not getting blamed. Same reason that nothing is being done in the Sudan. Everyone also expects us to solve the Iran and N. Korea problems. If world opinion is such a great force why aren’t they able to exert it against someone besides us? Why aren’t they forming a coilition to handle some of these matters?
Good news is our initiative to create a universal international alliance is a roaring success. Bad news is they’re aligning against us.
Well, it has also been proved (to the extent one can “prove” anything in the real world) that Saddam did not have WMDs which is pretty much the whole foundation that this supposed “problem” was based upon. And, furthermore, while it may not have been easy for the inspectors to prove a negative, they were well on their way to showing that the U.S. “intelligence” was “garbage after garbage after garbage”. Even if I am to believe that the French and others were so wholy influenced by baser motives while we, holy as we are, were influenced by our concern for security and freedom and all that, I am still led to conclude that the French were basically right and we were wrong. So, perhaps you are right that the French were right by accident. But, it seems more plausible to me that they were right at least in part because they were not driven by a nutty ideology.
Oh, by the way, since SimonX’s point is apparently that U.S. and British companies were taking bribes too, I don’t really see how your point particularly speaks to his.
And if that had happened, then what? I’ll tell you - there would have been pressure for the U.S. to stand down, and France and Germany and Russia would then have started to pressure the U.S. into dropping the sanctions, right?
And this was exactly Saddam’s plan. Have you looked at the Duelfour report? It clearly shows that Saddam’s plan was to use oil-for-food money to heavily bribe those three countries into A) keeping the U.S. at bay, and B) undermining support for the sanctions. And as soon as the sanctions were dropped, Saddam’s plan was to rebuild his WMD.
Or as David Brooks points out today in the New York Times:
So here’s what you are advocating - waiting for inspectors to go in and find nothing, so that everyone can go home without a war. Then sanctions are dropped, the U.S. loses its casus belli to go into Iraq, and Saddam, newly invigorated with oil money, begins a rapid buildup of WMD.
Had your plan worked out the way you hoped, today the situation might be that Saddam is in power, the sanctions are gone, his military is rebuilding rapidly, and he’s rapidly building his WMD program.
You consider that to be the preferable outcome?
Not quite sure I follow the reasoning. Saddam desperately craves WMD, only the sanctions hold him back. But the sanctions are no good, 'cause Saddam has gamed the system, millions of bucks pouring in, sanctions are porous and “Prohibited goods and weapons were being shipped into Iraq with virtually no problem.”
So the sanctions aren’t holding him back, 'cause they’re porous. He’s got a gazillion bucks, which he spends on palaces. Not on WMD. Not even with our true blue ally Pakistan having a nuclear Amway sale just down the street. And the reason he can’t get these WMD is because the sanctions aren’t working? So he has to wait, to get the WMD he wants so badly, until the santions are lifted. Which aren’t working.
Nope. You lost me.
It is arguable that your reasons were good justifications for the invasion. Then, why wasn’t the debate structured in that way? Regime change for democracy was way down on the list, the immediate threat from WMDs (explicitly stated) and the link to terrorism (implied) were what was used to get the American public behind the invasion.
Do you think there would have been support for the geopolitical reasons you gave? I don’t. If not, do you think Bush was justified in lying about the reasons for the war? If preemptive attacks are proper, don’t you think they are going to be much harder to justify now since Bush lied about the reasons for this one?
And by Bush, I mean the Administration in general. The aluminum pipe story indicates that their misstatements went well beyond understandable confusion from the fog of intelligence.
The only reason I ‘lost you’ is because you are desperately trying to twist everything around in order to make it sound that way. Why don’t you try to honestly understand what some of us are saying, rather than trying to find ways to avoid having to confront the point?
The sanctions WERE crumbling. Saddam was getting all kinds of stuff. But nothing like the weaponry he could buy and build if the sanctions were completely lifted and he was free to spend his money on whatever he pleased without the need for subterfuge.
And the threat of U.N. inspections was hampering his ability to rebuild his WMD.
Saddam’s strategy was, therefore:
A) to play games with the inspections, never letting them in fully but always trying to let them in a bit when the heat got on him. He felt that throwing the occasional bone would keep the U.S. at bay while he could still maintain the threat that he might have WMD, which appears to have been important to him.
B) Use oil-for-food money to bribe government officials and other people in positions of power into supporting the ending of sanctions.
C) Park his WMD programs, retaining the technical capability to re-start them on a crash basis.
He thought he could play a cat-and-mouse game with the U.S. until his bribes and the promise of huge oil contracts caused France, Russia, and Germany to continually pressure the U.S. into dropping sanctions. It almost worked. The sanctions regime was crumbling, there was much consternation about the humanitarian cost of sanctions, France and Germany and Russia were pretty firmly with the program.
This is what the Duelfer report says. While it admits that no actual WMD were found, the conclusions of the report leave me with the belief that taking out Saddam when Bush did was absolutely the best course of action.
And rather than France, Germany, and Russia scoring a great diplomatic victory over the U.S., elements of their governments have been exposed as participating in a giant scam at the expense of the people of Iraq. That money they took was supposed to go for food. Instead, it lined the pockets of officials in those countries and in the U.N., including perhaps Khofi Anon’s son.
And we would have learned none of this had Saddam remained in power.
Well, the Bush administration did try to lay out a lot of these reasons early on. It was accused of incoherence. Do you remember? One day Bush would talk about humanitarian issues, the next he’d talk about WMD. The response from critics was to say, “Well, which is it? WMD or humanitarian? You guys can’t get your story straight!” So the administration decided to pick their ‘best case’ and go with it. In hindsight, perhaps that was a strategic blunder, but the fact is that everyone DID think Iraq had WMD, including me, a lot of you who oppose the war, John Kerry, the governments of Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Russia, and pretty much anyone else who had an intelligence service. Hell, Saddam’s own generals thought they had it! As the U.S. would capture generals in the war and ask them about WMD, they’d say “Well, my division didn’t have them, but the division over the hill did.”
So everyone thought there was WMD, and WMD made a good casus belli, so the administration went with that. But at no time was that presented as the only justification for war. If you listened, you would have heard all the arguments I made above.
But there’s another issue as well, and that is that some reasons just can’t be stated on a global stage. What would have happened if Bush had said that the U.S. was going into Iraq in part to put the squeeze on Iran and Syria? Think that would have played well? Or announcing the intention to reform not just Iraq, but to foment insurrection in other Arab countries? These are things that a President just can’t say, even though they may be wise and good reasons.
And here’s one last thing - My belief is that the war was an inevitability, and I said so at the time. Or rather, there was only one way to avoid that war, and that was for Saddam to capitulate so thoroughly that his regime would be for all intents and purposes ended or at least severely emasculated. Here’s the chain of events: After 9/11, Saddam thumbs his nose at the U.S. The U.S tells Saddam to play ball or else. Saddam says get bent. So the U.S. began mobilizing forces in the middle east. This mobilization had widespread support, including strong support from John Kerry. Remember, he says he didn’t authorize war, but the threat of war to force Saddam into compliance.
So here you have 75,000 American troops on Iraq’s border. What now? How do you possibly get out of that situation without war, without making the middle east far more dangerous? The U.S. had already spent billions on the buildup. If, after all that, the military simply stood down and went home, it would be almost impossible to build the political will to go through it all again, at least for a number of years.
That’s why Bush’s ultimatum did not just include inspections, but also humiliating things like reparations to Kuwait, release of all Kuwaiti prisoners, and an inspection regime that would have required a complete infiltration of all levels of Iraqi government. Because the biggest risk Bush faced was not that Saddam would refuse inspections, but that he would agree. What then? Send inspectors in, for how long? Six months? A year? Two? Five? The inspectors were there for six years the last time, and still hadn’t found anything. So it’s going to be a long, long time. During that time, do you leave 75,000 men sleeping in tents in the desert? Or do you ship them home? And if you ship them home, what do you do if Saddam starts playing games again?
This is the logic of the road to war. Once the buildup started, the trigger really was pulled. There would either be war, or Saddam would essentially do what Khadafi did - opening all his borders, offices, records, and allowing American inspectors and soldiers free reign of the country. And Saddam couldn’t do that, because he had a lot of mass graves to hide, as well as a large bribery program ongoing.