So, you agree that this was incorrect and you were wrong?
[QUOTE=NotfooledbyW]
The French and Russians have a right to vote no because they don’t agree. Had Bush put together a nine vote majority then the French could veto the resolution. That is how it works.
[/QUOTE]
You agree that this is NOT how it works? Because that’s what I’m asking you for a cite for, moron. If you want to admit you were wrong, that’s fine…hell, it would be progress. Simply do so without all the other exposition and just say ‘I was wrong’ and we can move on. You might want to consider doing something similar in your discussion with HA, since he’s been asking you for cites for pages now.
:smack: Ok, at this point I’ll fess up to being a dumb ass. I totally misread this “The French and Russians have a right to vote no because they don’t agree. Had Bush put together a nine vote majority then the French could veto the resolution. That is how it works” as “The French and Russians have a right to vote no because they don’t agree. Had Bush put together a nine vote majority then the French could NOT veto the resolution. That is how it works”, since that was how I remembered your original position. You are quite correct that the Russians, French, Chinese, US and UK have the right to vote for or against anything that they don’t see in their interests. Technically, the correct answer is that Bush could have gotten 4 votes for a new resolution (though no chance of that) and the French could then veto, since the rest of the non-permanent members don’t really matter, but I completely misread what you were saying there.
My only excuse is that I’m reading and posting from my phone this week, but my apologies. I need to read back through that post I responded too again before I knee jerk respond.
You might want to address HA’s request for cites however, as that’s still something that you are asserting as a fact yet haven’t been able to provide any other (credible or even non-credible) cite backing up your interpretation.
And let’s be clear that it’s not just HA asking this. I asked the same thing long before HA came back into the this thread, and I think Ravenman might have asked before me.
I wrote 40 words making a specific response to explain why politicians didnt object that Bush failed to comply with the language of the AUMF and HA picks four of my words to distort the context.
Some of those forty words were these, “Just a guess that there were perhaps less than a dozen Senators who cared about the UN language in the AUMF”.
I was not referring to objection to the war.
But that’s how desperate HA is to make a valid point or objection.
September 11, 2001 You know what happened that day. And this was true, Iraq was in material breach of all of its disarmament obligations and had not allowed UN inspectors in since 1998. And Donald Rumsfeld wrote this note:
So on September 12, 2001 Iraq’s violation of international law meant Iraq went from what was a contained threat on September 10, to becoming a serious threat on September 12.
Bush took care of business, ''so he claimed" in Afghanistan but let it be known that the ‘threat’ from Iraq during the War on Terror would not be left to stand.
Bush/Cheney promoted the idea that Saddam Hussein must be removed by military force and that this Administration had the authority to in the war on terror to protect the security of the US and the region surrounding Iraq and was finding a means to do it.
During the summer of 2002 the US and UK stepped up No Fly Zone related bombings of military installations inside Iraq. Those bombings were acts of war already in progress.
Bush wanted the Brits to go along with any possible US and UK led invasion of Iraq to topple the S.H. regime.
At the close of summer 2002 Blair told Bush that he needed justification to join Bush’s proposed invasion. That was some kind of authorization from the UNSC.
Bush really wanted Blair to be a partner in invading Iraq. Cheney not so much. Cheney opposed going to the UN to offer S.H. a ‘final opportunity’ to comply. Bush opposed his powerful VP and went with Blair and the alleged Colin Powell position as Secretary of State.
So after Labor Day, Bush began putting on his ‘desire for peace’ routine. And politically Bush demanded an Authorization to Use Military Force against Iraq … but he qualified that as ‘a way to keep the peace’. He meant that If the US Congress and the Administration were in complete agreement that military force would be used and there was no doubt about it, that would perhaps cause Iraq to finally submit to allowing a return of inspectors and bring Iraq into compliance with international law.
Republicans controlled the House and Dems there one vote advantage in the US Senate. The majorities in the House and in the Senate agreed that Iraq’s violation of international law needed to be challenged and ended.
Around the 10th of October Congress passed the AUMF. Certain members of Congress forced language into the AUMF regarding Bush’s ‘peace talk’ . They included that Bush was being authorized to use military force ‘in order to’ ‘enforce all relevant UNSC resolutions regarding Iraq’/
Here is where UNSC Res 1441 begins to come into play:
Congress, not Bush put this language into AUMF: * (Note the use of ‘strictly ENFORCE through the UNSC’)*
Paragraph (2) was all about going after a New Resolutions from the UNSC that became 1441.
A few days prior to the middle of November 2002 the UNSC unanimously passed UNSC Resolution 1441 that basically had given Iraq A FINAL OPPORTUNITY to Comply’
Bush agreed with it because the USA voted yes with all the other members of the UNSC.
This final opportunity for Iraq did not mean that Iraq was out of what is called ‘material breach’ of its disarmament obligations. It meant that ‘enforcement’ perhaps by military means would be on hold as long as Iraq took advantage of its final opportunity to comply.
So 1441 was the most critical legal basis for justification whether S.H.'s violations of international law needed to be ‘enforced’ by Military Force.
Bush and Blair may have hoped that Iraq would bold enough to attempt to defy 1441. But Iraq did not. Iraq let the inspectors in and initial reports were that Iraq was cooperating from the start in December 2002 in providing access to sites.
The inspectors conducted nearly 500 inspections I believe and found virtually nothing of the WMD stockpiles that Bush and Blair had declared were there there.
But Bush and Blair’s hopes for finding a smoking gun or Iraq’s defiance were fading fast.
Summer heat in Iraq’s open desert on the Blitzkrieg route to Baghdad from Kuwait was festering.
The Nuclear Chief inspector had pretty much announced that Iraq was clean.
The major gold nugget that Bush and Blair could find to justify war was Dr Blix’s reporting that he did not consider one aspect of Iraq’s cooperation to be immediate.
Bush cunningly did not ever cite Blix’s words directly, because a close look meant that Iraq’s cooperation was probably 90% plus there. And more importantly it should be known that Blix also stated that Iraq was cooperating proactively when he made the comment about some initiatives by Iraq were not immediate.
This meant that Bush could not cite Blix’s *‘not immediate’ *comment because he would have to acknowledge the ‘we have proactive cooperation’ reality.
Regardless of the lack of immediacy of the proactive cooperation according to Blix , under the deal that Bush and Blair made with Iraq and the UNSC when they accepted UNSC 1441, Itraq’s cooperation meant that Iraq was being and could be disarmed peacefully.
So Bush pulled off of 1441. Bush could not be enforcing 1441 by military force in any sense if Iraq was ‘proactively cooperating’ under 1441 and therefore ‘complying’ with international law.
Bush ‘whether found legally liable or not’ was the one ‘not complying with’ 1441 which the USA voted into being’ and therefore Bush was the one in violation of international law in March with he ordered the US invasion of Iraq.
And what should be brought out is that Bush was also in violation of the AUMF… both in spirit an by law. Unless you can convince someone that Bush was actually enforcing 1441 when he started Shock and Awe and the beginning of the quagmire, death and destruction that his invasion caused.
Now that you are taking a hard look at what is actually written, XT, you should take a second look at this.
Just so you know XT, when you wrote that Iraq was **‘bringing themselves into compliance’ ** that means Iraq was ‘complying’ with 1441. That was the sole purpose of 1441. To allow Iraq to bring themselves into compliance. And since even you accept that they were doing that, they were complying with 1441.
And if Iraq was complying with 1441 then there was no way that anyone should accept that Bush was enforcing 1441. There was nothing to enforce because Iraq was complying.
So Bush did not comply with the language written into the AUMF. Bush did not use the authority to use military force to ‘enforce all relevant UNSC Resolutions with regard to Iraq’.
Or do you think Bush sent U.S. troops into Iraq to ‘enforce all UNSC resolutions’ including 1441? IF you do will you explain why you would think such a thing?
I did nothing to distort context. Try to follow a simple point here. I didn’t choose those Senators out of a hat. That “less than a dozen” surely includes those three: Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, and Carl Levin. All three strenuously opposed the AUMF and the war. And yet, none of them, or any other Congressman that I can find, has ever said that the war was a violation of the AUMF. They made about every objection to the war one could think of, but left that one (very serious and powerful, if true) out of it. Why? You’ve claimed that there were some Senators who did care. Why didn’t they ever mention this supposed violation of the AUMF?
Ha! Every time I decide to walk away, you crack me up and keep me coming back. If you were a performance artist, I’d call your persona art.
I personally think his ideas are much too important for him to be wasting his time on us numb-skulls on this puny message board. Instead, he should focus his efforts on making the documentary he talked about, and pitching it to the major TV networks. That will get his very important message out to all the American people, so they are Not Fooled By W.
Hell with the networks, get it produced as a Major Motion Picture (I hear Robert Redford is looking for his next project).
I might go to such a movie, mostly because there’d be plenty of room to spread out in the theater and munch my snacks without having to worry about audience noise or people obstructing the view.
Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, and Carl Levin and other anti-war politicians perhaps did not care about the language because they opposed it. The dozen or so Dems who would have ‘cared’ were those who voted yes.
And I already answered your question why it was never mentioned:
And you did take “it was too late to object” out of context. It was too late to object because for one nothing could be gained by objecting because Republicans and War Supporting Dems took over the Senate and already had control of the House. It was too late because once Bush started the war, patriotic ferver kicked in and there was no practical way to start impeachment proceedings during the early stages of the war.
The point and indisputable reality is that the language is in the AUMF and Bush violated it. It is not too late to be pointing that out, just because no one has objected.
When HRC pointed out on MTP in 2007 04 2008 that Bush deceived Congress and she said essentially that Bush lied to her to get support for the AUMF based upon giving inspections a chance to work, She was hammered and badgered to death by such enterprises as the NY Times for calling for trying to justify her vote.
The NY Times that gave the Iraq Invasion their Judith Miller hammered HRC for what she revealed on MTP. That was interesting hypocrisy coming out of that Newspaper.
Now that Obama vs Clinton in 2008 is over, it is past due time to start looking into how Bush failed to comply with the wording of the AUMF.
And my hope is not that Bush is found in some kind of legal difficulty for that violation of the AUMF, it is that people learn that what Bush says now is not true. That he had to invade because Iraq did not cooperate with the 1441 inspectors.
If that were true, there would be no case that Bush violated the language of the AUMF.
It is that Bush gets away with that lie to this day, and one way to hold him accountable is to point out that he did not enforce all UNSC Resolutions, so it is ridiculous for those on the anti-war left to help Bush out a bit by spreading the blame for the war among any Democrat who voted for the AUMF, on a war that is relatively certain would have come about any way. But when the case that Bush denied the reality of Iraq’s cooperation prior to the start of the invasion is ignored as it was and is by many on this forum, it takes away ‘full accountability’ from Bush for making that decision on his own… to force an end to successful UN inspections and attempt to disarm Iraq in the violent way instead.
That decision for violence is all on Bush. It is a mistake to spread that blame on HRC and John Kerry. And a key reason is that the AUMF they negotiated did restrain Bush to use force to enforce UNSC Resolutions. To deny that reality to this day - helps Bush not the truth or the historical reality.
Welcome back, FooledByW. Did you get bored with the other thread you were spouting your garbage in, or was it simply that the gypsy curse requires you to utter the phrase “1441” at least once every quarter-fortnight lest you turn into an aubergine?
As he deemed appropriate. He was The Deemer and The Decider.
And yet you have not been able to cite one single individual who shares this “truth” with you. Not one. We have cited Senators who agree with us. Senators who were in Congress at the time.
The only person denying reality here is you. But we understand. We feel sympathy for you. You were, afterall, Fooled By W.
Bush was the decider but he did not ‘decide’ to enforce UNSC Resolution 1441 any other UNSC Resolution as he was authorized to do.
If you believe Bush 'enforced UNSC 1441, you need to explain how in the hell he could have been doing that, seeing as how Iraq was complying with 1441 when Bush decided it was appropriate to invade.
And I realize that you agreed with Bush’s deciding in writing in July 2003, just a few months after Bush decided it was appropriate to kick the inspectors out. So you have certain sympathies there with Bush that you just can’t seem to part with.
Do you mean this about the Senators who agree with your “us”?
And this was my response to that:
None of your “us” has explained why that phrase is in there.