Yes you still hear that shit. :rolleyes::rolleyes:
I do find it fascinating that there is so little interest in knowing why this war happened. Together with 9/11 and Afghanistan, this is one of the biggest happenings of ‘our time’.
Yet somehow the minds switch off when confronted with the rather obvious question “Why did the US go to war with Iraq?”
Three kinds of response:
Those that readily bought into the superficial propaganda: “They, attacked us! on 9/11” or “We had to do something about their Weapons of Mass Destruction(!!) or they would attack us within 15 minutes!!”
Why do we still hear those propaganda answers that have been debunked so many times over?
‘Buggered if I know, so how about those Lakers’.
This is a war of agression, that fact alone should cause outrage, where the US caused the death of over 100.000 civilians, let alone all the other misery brought upon the Iraqi people.
And you don’t care why?
Or are you too ashamed and is that why your mind switches off?
You’re joking, right? There has been enormous interest in why the war happened both now and in the run up to the war actually happening. tomndebb has summed the reasons pretty well in this thread already. It wasn’t something hidden from anyone who was actually paying attention to what was happening to what was going on in the run up prior to the war; it was obvious that WMDs was a convenient reason to use and that nothing barring Saddam stepping down (an impossibility) was going to prevent war. There is an enormous disconnect between this and believing in the face of all evidence to the contrary that 9/11 was a Truther Conspiracy Theory Is Actual Fact and the US government/ZOG/The Illuminati/Whatever faked the WTC attacks. It’s an even wilder step to decide that 9/11 was an inside job and the reason behind it all was Iraq wanting to use the euro when trading for oil back in 2000.
Actually, we do care why, which is why we didn’t switch our minds off and either think WMDs was the actual reason for the war or that 9/11 was an inside job. I’m sure you’re very familiar with cognitive dissonance to think what you do.
At the time, I supported the second invasion because Saddam Hussein was a evil and unstable dictator who we, the USA, had supported in our realpolitic opposition to Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. The USA supplied Iraq during the long and bloody conflict with Iran. As far as I remember, the USA supplied Hussein with the chemical weapons that he eventually used against his own people, the Kurds. Hussein was a madman with two crazed heirs who jousted for position of ‘Evil Number One Son’ by committing various violent acts of depravity.
So, in my mind at the time, I felt we were justified in invading to destroy this rabid animal and his psychopathic offspring.
Obviously, I was wrong.
This is merely some perspective from a man who watched the entire thing on his television.
There you go again!
Who the fuck mentioned "9/11 was a Truther Conspiracy Theory Is Actual Fact and the US government/ZOG/The Illuminati/Whatever faked the WTC attacks. "?
The question was about Saddams’ intention to switch from dollars to euro’s.
Yes, the OP was about switching to euros from dollars but it was answered in the first few posts: a) Saddam switched in 2000, b) he did not have the clout to get all other oil producers to follow his line, and c) it would have had no impact on the US economy if they did.
Once you start down the line that the invasion was part of a grand plan and for motives other than the ones **tomndebb **has set out you have to start explaining how the precondition that made the invasion conceivable - 9/11 - came to happen so opportunely for the conspiritors. Then you get into all the 9/11 CTs about inside jobs and orbs and invisable missiles.
And suggesting there is no interest in why the Iraq war started is nonsense - there is reams of analysis in print.
The fundamental reason why Bush invaded Iraq is that he was a cowboy who was not qualified for the office, and yet a great many people were credulous enough to take him seriously.
As I said at the time, even if SH had WMDs, it still was no reason to invade. Plenty of countries have WMDs, and there was no indication SH had any ability to use them against us. We had that country in a box like no other country was.
However, the reason we invaded has less to with Bush than with Cheney (and the other so-called neocons). I don’t think Bush, with different advisers, would have pushed this idea himself. That doesn’t shift the blame or responsibility, but as Ravenman said, Bush was out of his league and deferred too much policy making to people he considered more experienced and wise in such matters.
You emphasize that U.S. supplied the heinous dictator as though that justified the War. I don’t understand the connection: U.S. was making amends for earlier mistakes?
Yes, Saddam was a sadistic brute almost beyond compare, but that’s also what he was in the 1980’s when the very same Cheney and Rumsfeld were supplying him with arms and money. The Kurds he gassed in the 1980’s couldn’t be brought back to life; instead the Cheney-Rove Administration killed a million Iraqis themselves.
The problem was never that Bush’s War was immoral(*), but that it was stupid.
(* - Of course Bush’s War did become immoral as well as stupid when it came to be about demonstrating “Creative Destruction” and enriching favored contractors, rather than the welfare of the Iraqi people.)
It’d be comforting to believe that there was a substantive reason for the Iraq war, even a reason as weak as the “petroeuro” theory. Even if true, it still wouldn’t have justified what we did, but at least it would have been a somewhat plausible rationale (though a venal and idiotic one at that).
But near as I can tell, there was no legitimate strategic purpose for it, and the best explanation is that it was a political calculation. We whup Iraq again, we get Saddam, the conservative voters get fired up and give the Republicans an unassailable majority for the next decade or so. They get to nominate the judges, appoint the regulators, cut taxes, invade Iran, etc.
While I don’t think of Bush as being a committed Neo-Con, I am not sure that it took much to get him to go after Iraq. Security advisor, Richard Clarke, who was pushed out of the administration, has talked about Bush demanding to see a connection between the WTC/Pentagon attacks and Iraq within a day or so of the attacks. In addition, I recall statements Bush made during the 2000 election in which he indicated that his father did poorly by not invading Iraq and noting that he would not let such an opportunity slip from him.
“While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein” this does not refer to the Iraq war but to the need for an American military presence in the gulf regardless of what happened to the Iraqi regime.
There were six months between the introduction of a UN resolution concerning Iraq and the start of the Iraq war. During that time the arguments for and against were repeated over and over again. Are you people too young to remember that or were you just not paying attention?
I bought into a lot of the propaganda being put out by the neo-cons. I thought it was a good cause, but I had reservations. Bush was not preparing the people for a long occupation (my early estimate was 20 years of occupation) and Congress didn’t seem to get that that was where we were going. I hope we as a nation can learn from this, but it looks unlikely.
I still think that if we’d been serious about dealing with Saddam’s legacy, we could have gone another way. We got a war because the administration decided on war, for war’s sake.
You aren’t remembering very well then. The US did not supply Iraq; they most certainly did not supply Iraq with chemical weapons. US support for Saddam was tepid at best, the most substantial thing the US did to help Iraq was to provide satellite imagery of Iranian positions in the Fao peninsula in 1988 at the very tail end of the war. The primary sources of Iraqi arms during the war more or less in order were the USSR, China, France and Britain. Note that I said sources, not suppliers; Saddam wasn’t getting arms for free. The US neither provided nor sold so much as a single tank, ship, combat aircraft or artillery piece to Saddam. Some of the parts used in the Iraqi chemical weapons programs did come from US suppliers, but the majorities were bought from European suppliers with a large part coming from German firms. There’s an article here at FAS about it. The equipment used in making chemical weapons isn’t marked ‘chemical weapons’ in big bright letters; there is a legitimate civilian use for equipment used in the manufacturing of chemical and biological weapons in a variety of fields such as chemical industries, medical industries and producing insecticides. It was clear what Iraq was using them for during the war however, so selling them this equipment on the fiction of civilian use was flimsy at best. Again though, the ones selling them this equipment wasn’t the US government, the majority came from German firms such as Karl Kolb and NPI.
I’m not really sure what point you’re making here. I posted the quotation because I found it interesting that those people claimed it was important for the US to have a military presence in the area, then three years later nothing could be said to stop them putting a very large number of American forces in Iraq. I’m not inferring anything from that.
I read a piece by an Australian who theorized that the U.S. invaded because Saddam was trying to get oil traded in Euros instead of dollars. The reason that this would be bad for the U.S. is that when all those dollars that are just circulating among all the nations to buy oil with were not needed for that purpose anymore, they would come back home, causing massive inflation.
Let’s assume for the moment that this is true (it’s not) and apply some critical thinking skills. The solution to avoid this inflation is - destroy the WTC and cause a major recession?
Just a factual note here: the total amount of American currency in circulation is in the neighborhood of $800 billion, most of which is held outside the United States.
In comparison, one of the most common ways of measuring how much money exists in the US economy – basically adding the cash in circulation to the amount of deposits in checking and savings accounts that are easily accessed by people – reveals that our money supply is closer to $10 trillion.
Does that Australian’s forecast of “massive inflation” sound plausible to you?
How did the world trade center get into it? That was destroyed by Saudi Arabians.
And it seems your question is how does the U.S. avoid the inflation, which would imply you mean that the U.S. destroyed the WTC and cause the recession? That doesn’t make sense, so I will assume one of us doesn’t understand what you are trying to say.
