Couple more links:
- The Iraq war can only be defined on where the timeline is:
Before the war: it is clear now that saying that Al-queda was an ally of Saddam was a lie, (the best that could be said was that one Al-qeada leader had a terror camp in Iraq, but it was on a territory Saddam had little control of, and there is evidence that Bush did not blow up the camp because it would weaken the reason to go to war. On light of the Plame affair, the WMD ruse was a lie. There was evidence published in the New Yorker that torture was one of the bits of eventually discredited evidence that took us into Iraq too.
What it means is this: before the war, the Iraq war was not part of the war against terror. It was sold to us based on lies (some of them obtained via torture).
After the war: the only relation to the war against terror I see is that we opened an unnecessary second front, With Saddam gone*, Iran and Al-qaeda got in. and with our presence we are allowing Iraq to become a worse and bigger terror training camp. What Bush is doing in Iraq is to follow the example of El Salvador, so I do have personal experience on what the total victory standard is for Iraq: a cleptocracy. Just sowing the seeds for more injustice and unrest in the future.
2: The war on terror
I prefer TWAT, thank you. 
The war against terror was indeed in Afghanistan, we indeed took the war to the perpetrators of 9/11… and Bush failed to capture the leaders.
Capturing or killing the leaders was indeed, regardless of what the idiot in the White House said, also a police matter.
3: The broader war on terror needs to be a Carrot and stick endeavor, this administration is just the stick. I do think the war in Iraq is draining resources that should be used to control and find the terrorist elsewhere. The current situation is creating more terrorists than before.
*Here it has to be mentioned that we could still have pulled out a Haiti maneuver and got Saddam out of the picture, we then could have controlled the nation with the current power structure, (we could still have eventually arrested the perpetrators of crimes against humanity).
But then again, we could not have secured the oil ministry then, invasion was necessary. :dubious:
IIRC the Germans and French wanted to give another 60-90 days for inspections. And many many more? You make it seem like it was unanimous, which is total bullshit. How about admitting that The UN (which we don’t need anymore right?) and “old Europe” were right in dragging their feet. I’ve also yet to see anyone say that those who claimed SH had no WMD prewar were right. Want to be the first?
Blix already found them not to be there by inspecting the places where US intelligence (read, the Iraqi exiles ripping us off) said they were.
Whether anyone ever told Bush they weren’t found is up in the air. After all, the guy who didn’t know people were dying in New Orleans without an aide making a special DVD might believe anything.
It certainly sounds like they already had their minds made up.
I remember a right-wing friend telling me withen a week of Sept.11 that Iraq might be invovled.
No doubt he got the idea in his head because of this
It has been that way, and it will continue to be that way. It’s part of being a good Amurrican now. Makes ya sick, doesn’t it?
Me too, and no apologies either.
Part of the problem is with the malapropism created when “war” in “War on Terror” is apparently taken to mean something comparable to a literal declaration of war, for instance as it was declared by the U.S. on Germany and Japan in 1941.
But, yeah, now terrorists and their organizations have infested Iraq, so now it must be considered part of the mission of the U.S. in opposing terrorists and terrorist organizations. I think John Mace hit the nail on the head.
So you’ve resorted to basing your main argument on vocabular semantics? Amazing! That’s the same thing the administration is doing!
At least that is what the administration keeps feeding us and is trying desperatly to sell. I doubt that is actually their view at all.
Bush is still peddling the same stories and alibis and evasions, even now that the facts (at least for the reality based people) are in. So, it is NOT ignorance at this point, it is a deliberate bunch of lies.
That is why Libby and Rove keep getting “invites” to the grand jury. Even if it turns out they legally skated around the law without breaking it, it’s still despicable.
Let’s forget how or why we went there.
If this administration knows the efforts in Iraq are not working today and are ineffective in fighting the war on terror and are still promoting it to save face and to line the pockets of their buddies getting rich over there, {see Vietnam} then it definately is NOT part of their war on terror simply because they continue to lie about it. Telling a lie and knowing that you’re lieing is **NOT ** defining your own terms …It’s Lying
Perhaps you are one of the rapidly dwindling species who believes this administration. Fine, no hard feelings. Please don’t call other people loons for not being as gullible as you.
This semantic stuff gets kinda difficult, since the vocabulary is flexible. Which is necessary, I suppose, since the histories they are supposed to explain are fluid.
Like the “WMD” semantic shift. First it was “nuke” this, and “nuke” that. Saddam’s gonna nuke yo mamma! Got 'em right now! Or he will tomorrow morning, same difference.
As this became increasingly implausible, nukes were lumped into “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. The broader category, the class of weapons that included the set of nuclear weapons, but not limited to. Pretty soon, they forgot they ever even mentioned “nuke”. We were at war with WMD. We’ve always been at war with WMD.
A “broader” war, if you will.
The War on Terror was about killing and/or neutralizing the terrorist that attacked us. Now its about killing and/or neutralizing the insurg…terrorists in Iraq, who are attacking us because we are in Iraq. Killing the terrorists who are attacking us. In Iraq.
The “broader” War on Terror. Semantic shifts, very tricky.
So, John, what’s it like being an America Hater?
Are you yet feeling the urge for sodomy and flag burning?
-Joe
I see no distinction between 2 and 3, unless 1 and 2 are the same (not “#1 is part of #2,” “1 = 2.”). Seems to me that McClellan was trying to say she is opposed to the non-Iraq part of the War on Terror based on her opposition to the Iraq part of it.
The Bushg administration created the ““intelligence” that supported their views. The Office of Special Projects was created in the Department of Defense (so as to avoid oversight by the CIA, the NSA, and other professional intelligence outfits) while being held separate from the actual military intelligence community (thus allowing direct supervision by Wolfowitz without interference from the actual military intelligence community) for the express purpose of finding “facts” to condemn Iraq. Any time there was conflicting information, the OSP always claimed that Iraq was “guilty” even/especially when the CIA or other groups raised objections. This ersatz “intelligence” corps simply provided the administration with “plausible deniabilty” when the OSP provided the lies needed to make it look as though there was actual “intelligence” incriminating Iraq. Creating a phony intelligence” group to provide the desired answers constitutes a lie in my book.
As to the other people and nations who thought that Iraq might have had WMD, it is pertinent to note that the expressions of belief from those people and organizations all occurred in the 1990s when Hussein was actively stonewalling the inspectionm process. Once the UIN investigation teams went back in (after removing the U.S. spies from their rolls), they discovered less and less evidence of any WMDs and before Bush began beating the war drum they had nearly all recognized that Hussein had puilled a major bluff. By the time of our contrived invasion, no serious student of the region believed that Hussein had any actual WMD or delivery systems.
The invasion was based on lies used to cover legitimate intelligence, not on faulty intelligence.
Ah, I see: the US didn’t invade Iraq in order to fight terrorists, it has to fight terrorists because it invaded Iraq.
The way this is bent into a justification for the U.S. presence in Iraq would make M.C. Escher take a Dramamine and have a nice liedown.
I remember cultural experts commenting on this great oversight while it was first happening and I think it relates to Tom’s comment in that they illustrate a sort of choreography and set design in intelligence matters:
Meanwhile, in three years we’ve gone from “The War in Iraq” to “The Broader War on Terror” and even this one that makes me shudder:
“a global war against terrorism”:
Is this terminology being used by the Bush Administration now? Is the President admitting that he has taken us into a world war? Or is he implying it for some reason?
Whiskey. Tango. Oh Fuck.