It’s right there next to the Whitewater fraud evidence. Go get Ken Starr to fetch it…
:rolleyes: IOW you gots nuffin. No worries, just checkin.
-XT
Yep. Don’t let facts get in the way of a good theory.
Just curious, did you start out with the opinion that the war was for oil, and then you found reasons to support that theory? Or did you look at a (now demonstrated) half-baked set of facts and then come to your conclusion?
Because either way, I’m sure Dick “WMD” Cheney would be really proud of that amazing display of logic.
Oil is essential for the US, this is even more true for the US working/middle class. Cheap oil allows the middle class live in a fashion that in other places only the rich can. They can drive bigger/safer cars, and live in a nicer place then the city slums by affording to commute long distances. So if Bush did invade Iraq for oil, I commend him for it. The working.middle class really can use all the help it can get, and is one of the major factors that people want to come to the US.
But then again I don’t think oil was the reason. I think it was because Clinton and Kerry warned us that Sadam had WMD, and the only responsible thing to do was to take him out, which he did.
Well, again, the issue shouldn’t be “who’s selling oil to whom”, it’s “Can we be sure we can access those oil supplies sufficiently in the future if the state of the ME worsens?”
The NeoCons were pretty open about their oppinion on the subject, being that the US should never be in a position to have to deal with such a dilemma. Regime change would ensure the US is not squeezed by oil suppliers, and would have the desireable effect of spreading democracy and free-market economies to the ME, either directly through American intervention, or indirectly through regional influence. Iraq has no friends, loads of oil, and their military has been effectively destroyed. Hence, they’re the lowest-hanging fruit, and the best candidate for regime-change. “Make sure we have access to the oil we need” isn’t compelling enough on the international stage, so it’s necessary to make Saddam appear to be an urgent threat. 9/11 vastly simplifies this effort (though I don’t mean to suggest in any way the NeoCons somehow orchestrated 9/11 - I consider such ideas as loony as even the most fervent Bush supporter). Using the real threat of international Islamist terrorist organizations, and the fabricated threat of Saddam harboring and/or supplying such criminals, an invasion of Iraq can proceed post-haste. The NeoCons had fantastic luck with both 9/11 and Bush in office: An ostensible justification and a compliant administration. The rest is history.
Excuse me while I pick my chin up off the ground.
kanicbird I commend your candor in admitting that the rest of the world can go fuck itself, as long as you can maintain your lifestyle. Who needs sacrifice? Who needs alternatives? Who needs urban planning? Fuck that shit, just gimme the gas!!! It’s truly refreshing to see someone call a spade a spade.
Personally, I think that we’re all giving President Bush a lot more credit than he may be due. To the OP, what makes you think that all of these machinations were ramrodded through congress and the UN solely by GWB’s sheer conviction and well-documented oratorical skills? I don’t think that Bush himself has as much to gain-let’s face it, he’s been in fat city since he was born- as much as his handlers, cronies, and contributors have. Do you really think He is the moving force behind this adventure?
Translation: “Bush must be innocent, since I haven’t heard anything on Fox News!” :rolleyes:
Pardon me if I don’t expect the corporate-owned mainstream media to hustle their fannies into probing the depths of this corporate-friendly Administration. It’s not as if the nation has a prosecutor with six years and a $40 million budget to go digging for misdeeds (like the Republicans did last decade)…
Ya know…
If this war were all about oil, we’d be paying $0.50 at the pump instead of $2.50 because we’d have taken all the oil for ourselves.
No, We’d be paying whatever the market would bear, with whichever refining company which “won” the contract pocketing the difference.
And we are.
Thanks for reminding me… (drinks)
Only if the attempt to steal Iraq’s resources was successful, and only if those who gain from having access to Iraq’s resources would pass the savings on to you. The first didn’t happen, and the second is wishful thinking on your part. That gas continues to be expensive (by some lights) doesn’t prove anything.
I would think it highly unlikely the NeoCons would be so stupid as to advocate not only “regime change”, but the pillaging of a sovereign nation’s natural resources for the sole, anti-market economic benefit of the United States, and bother with trying to justify their actions by declaring Saddam an imminent threat to American national security. Our motivation would be so transparent, not even they would think it reasonable to keep up the charade, methinks.
And, honestly, I don’t think the NeoCons were out to pillage Iraq. Just make it a nice, democratic, stable, America-friendly nation of happy Arabs who love selling oil on the free market, and who never would threaten the US by jeopardizing the cheap and plentiful supply of that resource. From scratch.
Not a completely inane idea in principle, I suppose. Too bad they couldn’t figure out it was a ridiculously absurd idea in practice.
Well, starting with what people like
Clinton,
and
Who seemed to believe that either Saddam had, or was working towards weapons of mass destruction.
Along with the fact that the UN either believed, or suspected that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
Also, due to Saddam playing Shell Games as well as other examples of his Non Compliance to UN resolutions.
It seemed pretty reasonable at the time to highly suspect, if not outright believe that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
Of course he didn’t.
Now, plenty of people use that fact the weapons weren’t there to back up their claim that Bush lied about them.
I have no problem believing the 9/11 commission report when it said things like
Or, in other words, I believed he genuinely thought that there were weapons of mass destruction based on faulty intelligence.
However, that’s about the only slack I’m cutting Bush. It’s obvious to me that Bush and Rumsfeld don’t know how to run a war. There’s a lot of other problems I have with Bush that caused me not to vote for him the second time around, but those would be for another thread.
Besides the moral issues raised by justifying invading other countries to control their resources, these comments make me wonder if you have ever visited other Western democratic countries. Did you know, for example, that in many of these countries “city slums” essentially do not exist (at least on the scale and magnitude they do here)? Admittedly, the Middle Class may not have quite as big cars or large houses as here but many of them would never trade their higher quality of life in many ways for these things.
Yeah…so how does this “theory” stack up against all the evidence that we didn’t do jack-shit to protect potential WMD sites from being looted. As near as I can tell, we were lucky that the intelligence was wrong on WMD because there is no evidence we had any sort of plan to prevent those WMD from falling into the hands of just about anyone who would then sell them to terrorists, perhaps to help feed their family! Hell, I expected that at the very least they would be parachuting in special ops teams to deal with this problem…It turns out that those special ops teams parachuted in to secure the oil fields instead.
There’s a total disconnect here…Either Bush really believed that Saddam had WMD and that (despite what the CIA was telling him!!!) he would give them or sell them to terrorists or use them against us in which case you’d think he would plan the invasion with all sorts of contingencies to make sure these weapons didn’t end up in the wrong hands…Or, he didn’t really believe that what weapons Saddam might have really posed much of a danger even if they were to end up in the hands of terrorists…Or, he and his administration are the most incompetent idiots on the face of the planet.
And, by the way, by the time we invaded we already knew thanks to the weapons inspections that the intelligence that we were relying on to believe that there were WMD in Iraq was turning out to be “garbage after garbage after garbage”.
Adjust the tin foil. The Translation would be: “rjung is talking out his ass again. Dog bites man.”
As I don’t watch Fox News I couldn’t say if they’ve reported it. However, I haven’t heard anyone else this side of Mother Jones babble such bullshit. I asked you for some cite…use non-Fox cites if you like. Otherwise maybe you should just slink away, yes?
Pardon me if I don’t take the word of a partisan hack such as yourself. I was just being playful before when I called you, not really expecting you to actually back up one of your famous drive bys, but this is getting ridiculous here.
-XT
I explained my opinion, and I gave sites and quotes to back it up. Bush isn’t a good president, and he has many faults. I just don’t believe that lying about the reason for the Iraqi invasion is one of them.
We’ll have to agree to disagree.
Well, so which of the possibilities do you subscribe to that I laid out…Do you think that he really believed that the WMD were a serious threat but was so grotesquely incompetent that he failed to take precautions to prevent those WMD from ending up in God-knows-whose hands or what? It is not enough to say that he didn’t lie about his reasons for going to war…You have to present some sort of logical theory that explains his actions. You haven’t done so. (And, by the way, you linked to things such as a 1997 report to make the claim that he was playing “shell games” with the inspectors. That says little about the latest inspections before the war and also fails to mention the slight detail that it is also now known that the allegations that the inspectors were spying on Iraq, which Saddam was using to justify his non-compliance, were in fact true. It is a little hard to use his unwillingness to allow the inspectors to spy on him for the militaries of known enemies who had already invaded his country once as evidence that he must be hiding massive WMDs. It could be that he just didn’t like having these known enemies spying on sensitive facilities.)
No, *first * you get the money, *then * you get the power, *then * you get the women.