Firm? That sounds rather like a goalpost that might move a time or two, and frankly, I’m too old to go chasing it. They all had the same intelligence. Whether it was firm, I leave to the Congress in charge of overseeing it.
See, this is what I don’t understand about people like you. Hussein murdered, by all accounts, over a million of his own citizens during his reign. That works out to over 28,000 people a year, year in and year out, for every year he was in power. And this doesn’t even take into account the millions more who were tortured and terrorized under his rule. In addition, some half a million were killed in his war with Iran, and a similar number of Iranians were killed as well. There’s another million. Add to this the number of Iraqis that died as a result of ineffective sanctions that didn’t mean squat to Hussein.
So even including the so-called 13,000 dead Iraqis, most of whom were military personnel trying to kill our soldiers, there were and are still fewer people dying in Iraq since our action began than were dying under Hussein. And the rate of killing, of course, has dropped tremendously since Hussein’s military has been defeated.
Do you care about human life in general, or only those whose loss seems to bolster your own objections to the war? If you care about human life in toto, I would think your response would be positive, as is mine.
And oh, yeah…he doesn’t have (and won’t get) WMD. That’s a good thing for his neighboring countries, for Israel, and for us, as there’s no chance any Iraqi WMD will fall into the hands of al-Qaeda.
Oh, goody! We can keep this shit up indefinitely and still be able to tell the world we aren’t quite as bad as Saddam. Makes your chest swell with pride, doesn’t it?
You don’t get it and apparently don’t want to. Do you disagree that we’ve killed a lot of people we didn’t have to? Or that we’ve tortured a lot of others for no good reason? WE did that, not Saddam. It’s been our problem ever since Bush made it our problem, and the consequences from that point on have been ours, too. But all you can point to is a questionable, unknown body count now vs. an uncited body count from before - btw, cite?
I think you misunderstand, there, Worldie. If you will give my comment–a rhetorical question actually–a closer look, you’ll see that there is a question mark at the end. I was responding to ElvisL1ves’ assertion that everyone who said Iraq had WMD was ordered by Bush to say so. This is clearly ridiculous, and the intention of my post was to point this out.
Unfortunately I don’t have time to look up cites for this, but from what I’ve read
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The U.S. has played loosey-goosey with Hussein for years, building him up when it suited our needs and invading when we felt like it. He’s a despot, so what were we doing providing arms? The reason we “knew” he had WMD is 'cause he got 'em from us. I think it was Rumsfeld who described him as an ally some years ago; I know I’ve seen photographs of them together, shaking hands and smiling.
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They wouldn’t have been trying to kill our soldiers had our soldiers not been present. And I think the 13,000 is the civilian count, not the military, although I’m not positive. As my Hubby always says, he can’t stand Bush but if some foreign nation were to invade here, he’d sure as hell take up arms against them.
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If caring about human life is the issue, there are plenty of “trouble spots” in the world crying for our attention. Unfortunately our record of saving people is full of blemishes because, while we’re great at blowing things up, we don’t know dick about establishing new governments for people.
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Somehow I doubt that Saddam’s Shop o’ Goodies is the only purveyor of weaponry around; we’ve sure as heck given anyone with anti-American tendencies new reasons to search for suppliers.
Not quite? Not by a long shot. And remember, a lower body count isn’t the only reason we’re there. It’s not even the main reason. But it’s a good sidebar benefit to the action we’re taking to protect ourselves.
Well, yes, Mr. Moore, I do. Despite the fact that your assertion was completely missing from anything my post was addressing (hence the comparison to Michael Moore as these are his tactics), I think we’ve gone out of our way, and sometimes put even our own soldier’s lives in jeopardy, to avoid killing innocent civilians. I’m not saying none have been killed, but we are making a far greater and more risky effort to avoid it than has any major military force in history.
But the “protect ourselves” rationale is, and always has been, nothing but a flimsy pretext based on no good evidence.
I love the circularity of the Bush defenders’ position on this:
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Bush defender: We went into Iraq because it was an imminent threat to us.
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Critic: Well, we now know that, in fact, Iraq presented no imminent threat to the United States…
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Bush defender: Well, maybe not, but Saddam Hussein was a real bad guy and we’re there to save his people and lower the body count.
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Critic: Well, there’s no doubt SH is a bad guy, but we were happy to support him before. And we shouldn’t go around launching pre-emptive strikes in defiance of the United Nations just because we feel someone is a bad guy and a dictator. Where would it stop?
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Bush defender: But we’re not just going in to lower the body count, we’re going in to protect ourselves.
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Go back to 2., and repeat as necessary.
Bush defender: Hindsight is 20/20.
Critic: Bush lied!!
Yeah, except there were plenty of critics saying before the whole invasion that the WMD thing was a crock.
I’m not trying to be flip but I don’t remember this being the case. I know many people believed that WMDs weren’t the real reason Bush wanted war, but I thought the majority of credible sources believed that there were WMDs. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Hans Blick and Scott Ritter were two highly credible skeptics.
I believe if you dig through the Great Debates archive, you’ll find a fair number of anti-war Dopers who were arguing along the lines of “the inspectors haven’t found anything, and odds are, any WMDs Saddam has (a) is probably an insignificant amount, and/or (b) probably turned to useless chemical goop when they expired” (chemical and biological weapons have a shelf-life of only a few years, at best).
The only way Saddam could have posed an “imminent threat” the way the Bush Administration sold it was if he had an active WMD-production capability, and none of the evidence at the time indicated he had any such thing.
Saw a chunk of it tonight, O’Really, with a straight face, talks about how important an event the “shootout” was, then promises to have guests on to analyze and comment upon it and how important it was! This guys thinks he leaves footprints in the sidewalk!
Actually it was a long way from being established as fact and there were a lot of commentators who felt that the evidence was far from compelling. Especially in the light of certain ‘crucial’ evidence (aluminium tubes, enriched uranium) being discredited and the inability of inspectors to locate WMDs despite US & UK assurances that their exact location was known.
As for looking for ‘credible’ dissenters, surely Dr Hans Blix’s opinion should have been taken rather seriously? I find this unsettling reading:
Ah gotcha, makes more sense now.
One of the things that I find totally laughable is that couldn’t SH have premptively attacked the US? After all, we were about to wipe him off the planet, the very reason we invaded to prevent him from doing to us.
It certainly is, but not as ridiculous as the idea that I said anything that a sentient being could construe that way. Nobody “ordered” you to think or say anything. You’re drinking the Kool-Aid voluntarily.
It’s the only one that’s survived contact with reality.
Aside from giving contracts to Halliburton.
And while we’re fucking around in Iraq, the real war on terror is going to shit.
“Report: Afghanistan could implode”
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/07/29/uk.afghan.iraq/index.html
Okay, let’s look at the chronology here.
KidCharlemagne said:
“This wasn’t O’Reilly’s defense; it was his point. He was asking Moore, given that many independent analysts from different countries ( including those opposed to the war) agreed that Saddam had WMDs, why is Bush necessarily a liar?”
(Note he said many different countries. And, as I’ve said here before, most of the countries in the Middle East and Europe, Russia, the U.N, the FBI, the CIA, and even Bill Clinton himself, believed Hussein either had or was developing WMD.)
In response to KidCharlemagne’s post, you said:
“To a large degree, he was being told there were WMD’s because he was, in effect, ordering people to tell him that.”
In light of the overwhelming international and internal opinion that Hussein did indeed have, or at the very least was working to develop WMD, just who was it then that you were referring to when you said that the people who told Bush there were WMD were doing so because he ordered them to do so? You didn’t exclude any of these countries and agencies when you made your declaration. And if you intended your remark to exclude them, what then would be your point, as their beliefs would only bolster the position of those you claim were only advising Iraqi WMD because Bush ordered them to?
**SA ** said I ordered him to think something. He’s nuts.
“Overwhelming opinion”? “Everybody thought so”? Standard fare from the loyalist side. But that is not the case. There was a lot of crap that, if put together and looked at just so under the right light, suggested that as a possibility, yes. But “everybody” *else * was aware of the shakiness and ambiguity of the case even then, and of the existence of other explanations that were at least equally well-supported. “Everybody else” didn’t go get people fucking killed over it, either. Tell me, when Powell put together the strongest of this “evidence” at the UN, didn’t you wonder that that was all there was?
And that, if you’ll recall honestly, is why the UN sent the inspectors back in - to find out the facts. The team was just two weeks from reporting back that the WMD story didn’t pan out when Bush ordered the invasion anyway, something he could have done months before. Why? What explanation do you offer for that other than the obvious, damning one?
Tell me, what did you think of Cheney and Rumsfeld setting up the Office of Special Projects to give them the “intelligence” answers they wanted when the CIA tried to be truthful and objective? Are you ignorant of that little episode? If not, doesn’t that fall under “ordering people to tell you what you want to hear”?
Tell me this, too - how does it feel to have been fooled so badly? Do you realize it even now?