You realize that the UN inspectors, just before we invaded, were acting on our intel and finding nothing? And that the reaction of Bush to this was not to try harder to find anything (since Saddam was letting the inspectors into palaces) but to force them to leave and invade. Doesn’t it seem that he was so afraid they weren’t going to find anything, preventing the desired invasion, that he rushed into it?
You have an amazingly selective memory.
ambushed, I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by arguing with this person on their own intellectually dishonest leve. Sure, the list of sorts of people he describes are despicable. So are murderers, whom he does not mention. Thousands are dead fro no other reason than Bush’s dishonesty and incompetence. Nothing else need be said. If they can’t see that as despicable, just make sure they don’t have your address.
I think he signed his name to quite a few things over the years, starting with everything Congress passed that he felt remotely strongly about. You know, the whole passing/vetoing acts of Congress responsibility that comes with the job…
3 months is plenty of time to do…I don’t know…but something. Even today Clinton recognizes this whole episode as a failure on his and the international community. I would leave the what could have been done to him.
No, they don’t. They don’t (in general) argue with the decision to take military action in Afghanistan intended to find terrorists and dispose of them. They do argue with the decision to invade Iraq and in the process kill hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who are (a) not terrorists and (b) not in the military, based on guesswork and speculation about WMDs and iminent threats and based on an implied but flawed link between Hussein and 9/11, and starting a quagmire of a war that the US and allied forces can never, ever ‘win’ in any meaningful sense.
The old debater’s trick of asserting one piece of rubbish, inserting an ‘assuming this is true’ qualifier and then building more rubbish on top. Once you have demolished the foundations, the rest collapses and doesn 't need to be addressed. So, no, let’s not go with ‘assuming that is true’. It isn’t.
It is always possible to mock the option of working through the U.N. and trying to effect change through negotiation, talking, sanctions and political pressure, because this option can always be presented as if it is weak and lacking in fire, passion and determination. Actually, this option has a lot more going for it than invading a country on illegitimate grounds, murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children, embarking on a military effort that can never result in a ‘win’, and giving anti-American fanatics and terrorists all the recruitment ammunition they could possibly want or need for several generations to come.
Those wishing to despise the ‘diplomacy, sanctions and talks’ option can always refer to the opposition as ‘appeasers’ and invoke whatever historical examples they like, usually including references to the fact that appeasement didn’t have much effect on Hitler. But one can always cite historical examples to suit one’s case. The ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland endured for decades while people to solve them through force, military action, internment and so on. In the end, peace was achieved by holding talks.
I looked in Straight Dope answer archive for anything to do with Iraq.
I was hoping for some expert opinion, or fact revealing information from the man himself in relation to many of the topics brought up in this train wreck. However, just simply typing in “terrorist” and then “Iraq” yielded nothing really. So I can only wonder why an issue as important as the invasion of Iraq, or the assumption that Bush lied to get us there, or the Iraq-Al Queada link hasn’t been touched by Mr. Adams.( If he has please link because I can’t find anything). I assume it is because there is no possible way to delve into anything truly deep in terms of our foreign policy because it is just far too complex and impossible to discern even by the likes of The Great One himself. Basically, imho, Mr. Adams hasn’t touched anything we have been talking about because it is completely futile to even try.
Everything discussed so far is based on half, at best, of what is really going on in terms of our foreign policy. For every article or link supplied supporting someone’s opinion I can supply one as well to support mine. But what’s the point? It would be just a never ending cycle of worthless crap as we argue over things that we really can never settle since we can’t just walk in government offices and go through the files at our leisure, nor be able to make sense of those millions of documents even if we could.
One thing I know for certain is that the real players behind the scenes are probably breaking their arms off as they pat themselves on their collective backs for a job well done. That job being to confuse the masses while they do whatever it is they desire whilst little people like myself and most of you argue over stuff that cannot be proved with 100% certainty either way…unless of course you count the “proof” of various linked articles and opinions posted on various websites (both obscure and big-time) presented as “fact”.
The fact of the matter is that until we all achieve omnipotence we all must just admit that we are just passengers in the car that is part of a large painting depicting what is our foreign policy…so in short just roll up the window and hope the ride doesn’t mess up our hair too much.
There was no such link. Saddam and Al Qaeda were mortal enemies. We did Al Qaeda’s work for them when we invaded Iraq.
I assume you want to institute a draft, right? That’s the only way we could have that many soldiers and Marines. And does “our enemies” mean all Iraqis, or just some? The insurgency against our occupation of the country is mostly composed of Iraqis who never would have been, in any way, our enemies if we hadn’t invaded the country. They weren’t insurgents until we showed up. It’s possible that the more we kill, the more will rise from the ranks of ordinary Iraqi citizens. How many years would you like us to stay and keep doing that? (And, why, exactly?)
Just to be on the safe side, maybe we should withdraw from the country and nuke it until it’s a giant sheet of glass. Does that work for you?
The Straight Dope column’s purpose is to provide entertaining factual answers to questions. It’s not a news column, nor an encyclopedia. It’s an entertainment column that entertains by answering people’s questions. You can submit your question to Cecil and he may or may not answer it.
On September 17 2003 Bush finally admitted ‘We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th.’
Note that this is conveniently after his invasion. Did Bush lie about a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda? I don’t have the caffeine to look for specific quotes right now. I don’t know if he ever directly said there was a link. However he definitely did imply a link. He frequently mentioned Al Qaeda and Saddam in the sam breath, in the same sentence, to give the impression to the Public that a link existed. He clearly intended to link them. Consider this analogy. A mother tells a child to clean his room, and specifically tells him to clean under the bed. When the mother leaves, the child crawls under the bed and then crawls out and procedes to shove everything under the bed. The mother asks, ‘Did you clean your room?’ The child says, ‘I picked up, my toys… and I put my dirty clothes in the hamper… and I got under the bed…’ The mother thinks ‘got under the bed’ means he cleaned under the bed. The child clearly meant to deceive and the mother bought it. Did he lie? Bush didn’t actually say the words, ‘Saddam worked with Al Qaeda to attack the World Trade Centers.’ But his statements were deliberately arranged in such a way that that’s what people would believe. He lied. And he didn’t come clean until he had presented us with a fait accompli.
He hasn’t written a column on Pokemon, either. While EV/IV training and egg groups can be a tricky business, I don’t think he’s avoided the subject because it’s too complex. I would guess (and this is totally IMHO) that he probably wants to avoid any political leaning. OTOH, maybe he just hasn’t had a question; you could send one in yourself.
I would be interested to know how it is you can hold such strong opinions on the subject when you think it’s futile for people to even try and understand. I mean, even if everyone arguing with you is wrong (and they could be, of course), they at least seem to think it’s possible to understand the situation. If you don’t, I would have thought this would be the first objection you’d bring up.
From The Nation (11 September 2006 – emphasis mine):
Cecil writes an answer column, not a general punditry column. The weekly column is written in response to reader inquiries. If no one has actually sent in a question that could be answered in the space of a single column, then there will be no column addressing that issue. Given that there is ample information regarding the rather broad issue of the war in numerous print and electronic media and that Cecil Adams generally addresses the arcane, not the widely discussed, and is not generally perceived as a political observer, it is really not surprising that there has been no column addressing that issue.
He has, however, expressed an opinion as the final sentence of a separate column Did George W. Bush go AWOL during his time in the National Guard?
I think the point is that people who have been arguing with you have been supplying cites, and you have not. If you cannot back up your opinions with facts, then in objective terms, you’re doing a terrible job of debating, as shown in a number of instances here in which it has been demonstrated that you don’t seem to have a grasp of basic facts on the subjects you’re arguing about.
You seem like an entertaining fellow, but you’ve really not made a very serious effort to support your assertions. Waving it all of as “we’ll never get to the bottom of it anyway” seems like a transparent attempt to bow out of a debate in which you’re having your hat handed to you.
Seems like most people here “understand” the situation bases on half the story.
Well we are in a war so maybe a draft is the way to go…
How do you know, exactly, what the insurgency is made up of? Did you google that?
Absence of “evidence” does not necessarily mean presence of innocence.
Some people here are only trying to “understand” the situation because it gives them a platform to attack the president. The more links they find that support their opinions the more trash they can hurl at the current administration…
Oh, certainly, if you’re correct that none of us can understand this issue, all of our opinions are invalid.
The problem I was trying to point out is that if you’re convinced that we can’t have a true understanding of the situation, you should logically have no opinion on it. Whatever any of us believes includes you. I was just wondering how you can manage to both have an (apparently) very strong opinion and think that all opinions are invalid. The two don’t really seem to go.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/628wqxma.asp?pg=1
There ya go!
See how that works? You take a quote our of context and I slam you with a link of my own…
The “facts” as I noted earlier are just links off the internets…
This was never a debate…more like an experiment. I was thinking that its like going to a different planet and seeing what kind of organisms there are crawling around. Like I know that most of the stuff on the news and the internet blogs and such is just opinion, but people here and elsewhere are happy to burp up whatever cite they can squirrel out to support their opinion. Unless all the people arguing me are on the ground CIA ops, or top government officials in the know I really don’t care if I get “my hat” handed to me.