Supposing the decision had been made about war prior to that news conference. Does anyone expect the administration to announce it? Statements about what decisions have or have not been made concerning war are necessarily secret until the war commences. Unless, of course. you have been Fooled by W.
That is not true. I have never suggested that Bush had no interest in going to war. I do not accept his feigning favoring peace and seeking war as last resort, because he was publically LYING about the reason that keeping the peace was not possible. It is the lie that you stooges agree with Bush so devotedly. Bush said he wanted to keep the peace while at the same time saying peace was not possible as long as Saddam Hussein was not cooperating with the inspectors.
Bush openly expressed his interest and desire for war by LYING that Iraq was not cooperating. IF Bush did not LIE about Iraq’s cooperation then we all could have believed that he really wanted peace.
You are extremely confused by your mushy agreement with Bush’s biggest LIE about Iraq. You do not understand that once Iraq began cooperating proactively according to Blix, there was very little Iraq needed to do to make a ‘true’ PEACE SEEKING ‘Bush’ call off the invasion and let peaceful disarming continue. But Bush decided to lie and you agree with that lie. If you disagreed with Bush’s lie about Iraq’s cooperation you would be agreeing with me.
Where have I said I was convinced a war would not happen. Nothing you say is true. Absolutely nothing. There was a reason to protest the war long before Bush signed on with Blair to through the UN route. As I said, protest was needed against the Rumsfeld and others expressed irrational rationale for war against Iraq. That was Do nothing or do war. I didn’t see demanding to ‘do nothing’ would stop Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld. But getting the third way formalized never meant to me to stop protesting. It meant reality got us where we were when 1441 was passed and that the protest should be more focused on supporting the peaceful disarmament process and demanding that Bush tell the efn truth about it. Bush never did tell the truth about it… while faking that he was exhausting all peaceful means.
Protest was necessary because no one should have trusted Bush or believe Bush would be justified to take Saddam out as Mace and XT have admitted they were fooled into believing that.
IF you protested Ravenman what sign did you hold.** We believe you Dubya.. Iraq is not cooperating ..however No Blood for OIL?**
In real time, Mace, you are correct to have used the word “supposing”. That is all anyone outside the Bush Administration could do. I avoid dealing with suppositions and mind reading where the facts cannot be known.
What I did know in real time was Bush’s bold faced lying about the level of cooperation by Iraq on March 8 2003. The truth was publically known that Iraq had for nearly a month. according to Blix. had been providing what he called proactive cooperation by Iraq on resolving some longstanding unresolved issues.
Bush was lying through his teeth saying he was in favor of the UN disarming Iraq peacefully but Iraq was not cooperating. I knew that because Bush was saying he wanted peace, but he was lying about what would have easily kept the peace. And when a President lies that blatantly and constantly and is never challenged on it… one could continue to hope for a peaceful outcome… but not think it too likely to happen.
So I protested prior to the AUMF, through the passage of 1441 and never stopped protesting to this day.
After the start of the invasion, all Bush’s lies about Iraq’s cooperation continued. But you were saying the war was justified and legitimate. And you thought those absurd thoughts after Bush had been lying to you that Iraq didn’t cooperate so he ‘had to’ invade.
I didn’t believe those Bush lies, but you Mace said the war was justified to you although Bush lied that Iraq did not cooperate.
WHy do you still believe such an obvious Bush lie to this day John Mace?
I think Bush really thought SH was a threat, either to the US or the region generally. I’m not delving into who lied or who did not lie. I’m just saying that I made my own assessment of whether I thought SH was a threat to the US, and I came to a different conclusion that you and Bush did. I was not Fooled by W into thinking the way he did. I think for myself.
You wrote a few months after the start of the bombing, ground invasion, and occupation that the USA was justified in doing all that maiming and killing and reaping havoc on a sovereign nation that did not attack us nor was it tied in anyway to al Qaeda and the attacks on 9/11. (I am not quoting you verbatim.. .I am paraphrasing the posts that I have put up earlier)
But you said it was justified.
At that point in time I said it was NOT justified because I could see from January 2003 and beyond that Iraq had allowed UN Inspectors in and had provided access to those inspectors wherever they wanted. Peaceful disarmament was definitely working and anyone one with a mind of their own that was not mesmerized by the Bush lies that Iraq was not cooperating could see it.
I saw it you blind. I knew Bush was lying about those inspections everytime he or anyone of his agents spoke about Saddam not cooperating. I knew it Mace because I paid attention.
And when Blix said in late February and March that the cooperation on substance was not immediate but it was proactive cooperation on old unresolved longstanding matters, then I knew that there was nothing Bush could ever say or point to that would justify an invasion. I knew it Mace. You were fooled by Bush into believing that Iraq did not cooperate. That is really being fooled because the reality was before everyone’s eyes. It was not inside secretive information.
It was available to you, yet you CHOSE and still CHOOSE to believe Bush’s absurd and ridiculous lies that Iraq did not cooperate. That goddamn liar even says that after 1441 Iraq didn’t let the inspectors in.
And you side with that ignorant war mongering maniac … who supposedly told Chirac that this invasion was about the Biblical battle of Gog and Magog or whatever the hell that was all about.
Bush, Gog and Magog | Andrew Brown | The Guardian
You side with The Gog/Magog commander because you have bought his justification for the war that Iraq defied the UNSC for a decade including under 1441 and that is a recorded FACT on this and other threads on this forum.
Quit trying to present yourself as something else.
Saying you wouldn’t have invaded Iraq because of tactical reasons or some such double-speak does not negate your opinion to this day that the invasion of Iraq by Bush was justified or legitimate. Only a fool who believes Bush spoke the truth about Iraq’s last months of cooperation would say that mess was “JUSTIFIED”.
You need to renounce you, yourself and John Mace straight in the eye in the mirror, for being so drastically fooled by Dubya on what happened after 1441 was sought by Bush and signed onto by Bush. Nothing he has ever said about it is true. Absolutely nothing. And those lies are who he ‘justifies’ his decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 in what he called the FINAL DAYS of DECISION.
I think it’s justified to overthrow a brutal dictator like SH. It would be justified for the US to overthrow the Kim regime in NK, too.
But just because it’s justified doesn’t mean it’s wise. It was not wise for the US to invade Iraq and I don’t thin it would be wise to invade NK now, either.
[QUOTE=NotfooledbyW]
XT had the wool pulled over his eyes by Bush in March 2003 and has not taken that wool off as of today. XT still believes the inspections were not working… Just exactly as Bush wants everyone to keep believing.
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You quoted me there, and you still don’t understand. Militantly unsurprising. You basically are incapable of reading and understanding what you are reading.
Only if I was willing to listen too and believe Bush…which I wasn’t. And I wasn’t misinformed about that aspect…Saddam absolutely was a threat to at least 1/5th of the worlds reserves, since he had direct access to it and could do what he liked. Remember all those oil fires during the first Gulf War?? Or were you asleep then as well?
How did that work out for you? The thing is, the whole question of the inspections was ambiguous at that point. Even Blix was only cautiously optimistic. By the time we started putting troops into the field in the spin up to the war it was too late. I attempted to explain this to you numerous times, but you are too freaking stupid to understand what anyone besides yourself writes.
Again, it’s clear you don’t actually understand what my position was at that time, despite the fact I’ve tried to explain it to you several times. We are back to a man trying to explain calculus to a particularly stupid and stubborn rock. You don’t get it…you will never get it.
I didn’t give a damn about the inspections because I realized they were what they were…a pretext for military action. There was no wool pulling over my eyes. Bush didn’t trick me you moron. My fault lay in cost to benefits and thinking that Bush et al could pull off an invasion and occupation competently, had some sort of plan for each, as well as an exit strategy.
I say invading Iraq was both unjustified and it was unwise. The US invasion of Iraq was a “war of choice” and it was most definitely a “war of aggression” against a very weak military opponent at the exact time when the only potential threat that Iraq could possibly carry out was being dealt with by Iraq and the UN Security Council and the majority of nations were wise enough to advise dumbass Bush to allow the inspections to continue.
Of course it was not wise. In fact it was ignorant to consider a ground invasion when the UN inspectors were disarming Iraq peacefully at that time.
So that is a goddam no-brainer Mace.
But to say it was justified is even more ignorant than anything about this war.
Did you write to Bush telling him it was unwise to invade Iraq, but if you decide you ‘have to do it anyway’ and kick those stupid UN Inspectors out of Iraq… I’m with you Dubby… I got your back… Because it is justified in my view.
This would be a preferable Messages to Bush in 2003… You will be stupid to do this and on top of that you have absolutely no justification to do it as long as those UN inspectors you claim to have wanted are reporting proactive cooperation coming from the Iraq side. Try to be wise dumbass. Let the inspections continue. And six of ten Americans in February 2003 felt the same way about letting the inspections continue.
There was nothing to justify the US invasion of Iraq.
First Bush was not acting in accordance with the AUMF that Congress passed in 2002. No one here has tried to claim that Bush was enforcing UN Resolution 1441 as the AUMF required him to do. So there is nothing justified about the way Bush did it in defiance of the AUMF.
Second, Bush was not enforcing the UN Resolution he sought and received. Bush acted in total opposition to what the UNSC preferred to do with respect to 1441. No one has disputed that also. There was nothing justified by the way Bush treated the UNSC and respect for international law. Bush was the outlaw in March 2003. Not Saddam Hussein.
Third, Bush was deliberately lying about Iraq’s lack of cooperation. Lying about something as a pretext for starting a war can never be justified. That is an insane policy. We should never declare our President to be so privileged as to be justified to lie us into a war.
Fourth, whatever threat could be conceived coming from Iraq in September 2002 when Bush offered that war would not be necessary if Iraq agreed to be disarmed, was dramatically reduced after UNSC Res 1441 was passed. After the UNSC Resolution was passed giving Iraq a FINAL OPPORTUNITY to COMPLY there was a significant drop in any potential danger coming out of Iraq. UN observers in the from of weapons inspectors were on the ground in Iraq. That reduced the threat regardless of what or how long it took for Iraq to begin proactive cooperation.
The threat was low enough in September 2002 for Bush to hold out a chance for a peaceful resolution. So it is absolutely unrealistic and false to declare that by March 2003 the threat from Iraq had increased to the point that war by then was an absolute necessity.
Fifth. Dr Hans Blix said Iraq was cooperating in a proactive way.
Sixth. Iraq made an offer to Bush in December 2002 to let the CIA come into Iraq and try to show exactly what they thought their intelligence could lead to or prove. Iraq could not have given Bush and the UNSC any more proactively cooperation than that early offer. Bush rejected and would not even consider that offer.
So Mace, you should see by now that the ground invasion that Bush launched in March 2003 had absolutely no justification for it at all. No justification for it whatsoever. Yet you say it was all justifiable.
Well, that’s your opinion. Mine is different. The US had no responsibility to fund and maintain the NFZ over Iraq, and we had every reason to believe that if we stopped doing os, SH would be back to his old tricks. SH was not the legitimate ruler of Iraq by any objective meaning of the term.
Now, I have no interest in trying to convince you that I’m right about this. I don’t think there is “right” or “wrong”, only varying opinions. I’m comfortable with my position, and don’t need any validation from you either way.
Are you saying that you know for a fact that the Post 1441 inspections were, “a misleading or untrue reason given for doing something in an attempt to conceal the real reason”?
What was untrue or misleading about what the UNSC decided to do at GW Bush’s request? I think the UNSC post-1441 inspections were really accomplishing what they were instituted to accomplish. And that is disarm Iraq peacefully. But you are saying that the UNSC was conducting those inspections as a pretext for military action?
IF you are saying Bush had set up the inspections as a pretext for military action, he really failed to set them up properly. They IN FACT turned out to be the best argument against military action, and that is because the truth of the matter is, Bush could not control what Saddam Hussein did and what the UNSC did and wanted to do.
So why would you think Bush would set up a pretext for military action when he could not control the activities of the pretext?
And why are you so arrogant to believe that little sucker nobody like you who favored striking Iraq and killing Iraqis over a perceived and unproven market commodity threat, should be respected for the doofus opinion that inspections didn’t matter because they were just a pretext for military action.
The people on this planet who give a damn about their job of eliminating the threat of WMD deserve more respect than what a Bush duped fool says about it.
One young man working on the inspection team lost his life in Baghdad in an auto-accident, and where sat you XT, pompously agreeing that war was justified because of the threat to all the Gulf Region’s oil that you seem to know so much about, that you would kill Iraqis to resolve it.
Then your only apology for being suckered by Bush into believing that inspections meant nothing and Iraq was not cooperating is that there was no cost to benefit reward *for getting all those people killed and maimed, was that **you trusted a man who lied to you daily for about two and half months **about what was going on with the inspections; you believed that Bush would handle the cost to benefit of killing people and toppling their government with high powered weaponry and the finest trained warriors the world has ever seen, * much better than he actually did.
And you claim you didn’t have the wool pulled over your eyes XT?
Come on XT. And you criticize me for seeing Bush for the liar, about inspections, that he truly was and still is.
I strongly dissagree with your view that there is no right or wrong opinion on Iraq. My god what have we become as witnesses to an event where tens of thousands of innocent human beings were wrongfully and needlessly killed and maimed in a brutal war that a US President decievingly started, and his case and justification for that war turned out to be entirely wrong.
But my question comes in reply to Mace’s detached and morally spineless proposal that there is no right or wrong with regard to the US invasion of Iraq. It is why does Mace so vilely attack posters who express a view that the invasion of Iraq was not justified?
I present facts and quotes to back what I see as knowable truth about how the invasion of Iraq was sold, and Mace ridicules and bemoans my facts and reasoning as if it does matter that some things about this tragic war could be right and could be wrong.
It appears that when the facts and logic fails him Mace seeks solace in old clichés such as everyone is entitled to their opinion.
Well, then you’re strongly disagreeing with something I never said.
What does your statement, “** I don’t think there is “right” or “wrong”, only varying opinions** mean” then?
I see Shodan was not asked the relevant question back in 2004 which is why did Bush lie when he told us that Iraq was not cooperating under 1441 during the first three months of 2003.
I see the kind of thoughtless uninformed views were passed around on the SD Forum back then. Bush lies about cooperation do not appear to have been duscussed or challenged around here.
I think I brought this up in the Hubris thread, but here it is again: If Bush was convinced that Iraq did have WMDs, and yet the inspectors were not finding them, wouldn’t he reasonably take that as evidence that Iraq was not cooperating with (i.e., concealing things from) the inspections?
Not cooperating with inspections doesn’t just mean turning the inspectors away at gunpoint, you realize.
It now seems fairly certain that nothing was being concealed from the inspectors, but then again, we now know that much of the pre-war intelligence was junk. The proper reaction to the inspections finding nothing, and indeed, discrediting the intelligence, would be to question the core assumption that Iraq had and was concealing WMDs. This was not done, either out of confirmation bias, or because the WMD issue was just a selling point for a war that was conducted to achieve a regime change. In that case, the inspections were just a pretext for war, and when they didn’t find anything useful, war proceeded anyway, thanks to that blank-check AUMF.
Oh yeah, this left-leaning board has always been in the tank for Bush.
That is concerning whether there is justification for overthrowing SH. Justification only. But “justification” is not the only factor when determining whether something is the right thing to do or not. In this case, the bigger issue (IMO) is whether it is in the interest of the US, and it was absolutely not.
We knew by February 2003 that US and UK intelligence was junk.
SH offered Bush to let the CIA in for first hand intelligence gathering. Bush rejected that and other offers. That was public knowledge at the time.
To use military force Bush was required to use it to enforce UNSC Resolutions. 1441 became the Resolution governing all previous resolutions. Bush in no way was enforcing UNSC Resolutions.
There was no timeline for Iraq to be verified fully disarmed. Iraq was obligated to cooperate under 1441. Iraq did proactively cooperate. It was not Bush’s call to define acceptable cooperation under 1441. It was the Council 's call and they considered the cooperation sufficient.
You have swallowed Bush’s lies about cooperation just like most here have.
To defend Bush’s lie on that matter is an all out full scale defense of Bush. You can’t twist your way around it.
Without justification of the use of massive deadly force in the original consideration there should be no discussion or weighing whether an invasion such as the one into Iraq can be the right thing to do.
Justification must be in the affirmative first or don’t do it.
There was no justification to invade Iraq after 1441 passed and UN inspections resumed and were better than ever.
“We” did, but “we” weren’t the ones authorized by Congress to start a war.
Was that offer evidence that Iraq had nothing to hide, or evidence that Iraq was confident that they’d hidden their WMDs so skillfully as to evade all inspections, UN or CIA? The answer depends on your preconceived ideas.
If one were certain that Iraq did, in fact, possess WMDs, every event from September 2002 onward could be interpreted as evidence for that belief: the initial non-cooperation giving Hussein’s people enough time to hide everything, the CIA offer, the inability of the UN teams to find anything, all of it.
1441 didn’t rescind any previous resolutions (although it should have; never forget just how inept the UN actually is). Bush was empowered to enforce all UN resolutions relevant to Iraq. He decided it was necessary and appropriate to use military force in order to enforce UNSC resolutions 660 and 678, which he ws empowered to do.
Key phrase being “under 1441”. Bush didn’t invade under the auspices of 1441, because he didn’t need to. He had his own military authorization.
Just so we’re clear: the war was probably illegal under international law; the only possible defense of it would be resolution 678, which did authorize member states to “use all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area”, and was still in effect. That’s rather weak, but it is something.
The war was not illegal under domestic law.
You are completely wrong. Iraq was cooperating, albeit not immediately. Unfortunately for them, that wasn’t enough for Bush and Blair, for reasons we can only speculate about.
I didn’t defend a lie, I merely questioned your certainty that it was a lie, meaning a false statement made with the deliberate intent to deceive, as opposed to just being badly wrong and engaging in fallacious thinking.
But, since you wage war on nuance, uncertainty, and gray areas, I’m unsurprised that you’re convinced that I’m engaged in an all out full scale defense of Bush, for the sin of not agreeing with everything you write.
That’s an interesting opinion. I disagree.
[QUOTE=NotfooledbyW]
Come on XT. And you criticize me for seeing Bush for the liar, about inspections, that he truly was and still is.
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No, I criticize you for being a clueless idiot who is a waste of electrons on this message board. You can’t read, you can’t understand, and basically it’s a waste to even attempt to talk to you or engage you on this or any other subject. Whether you are a troll or just one of the stupidest of genus homo to come along since we first started walking upright (though my guess is Habilis would be genius compared to you), or perhaps a combination of both really is irrelevant at this point. You are boring and repetitive and simply no fun to laugh at any more. Ado, dipshit. Since it seems you have confined yourself to posting in this thread, perhaps it will contain the stupidity and prevent it from spreading to the rest of the board.