Nope, not imaginary, merely inferential.
As far as which specific statements Bush Sr. made; feel free to dig them up yourself, I have better things to do than try to make an airtight case for something a Conservative doesn’t want to be true.
Where are the WMD’s?
Okay. Now did you mean to be responding to someone else?
I mean, considering that I’ve never said anything of the sort…
My cite does, indeed, support the fact that “they hate us for our freedom” (which was most certainly not coined regarding Iraqis, insurgents or otherwise), is partially accurate.
No. It specifically said that Qutb believed the west was jahiliyya and that “[o]nly the strict, unchanging law of the prophet can redeem this uncivilized condition.” You cannot have political freedoms under a strict theocracy.
And once you’ve eliminated all the actual differences and points of divergence that he hated (eg. our political, social, sexual, cultural, etc… freedoms), then sure, an oversimplified gloss can cast it as simply ‘cultural distaste’.
Ignoring, of course, what the actual cultural clashes were and what, specifically, he found unpalatable. Namely, the lack of fundamentalist Islam which allowed people to live their lives other than by strict Islamic law.
Yah, that or the fact that Qutb resented people not living under a strict Islamic theocracy.
Could go either way.
So it basically boils down to power. They had a bunch, so naturally they needed more. I second Greg Palast’s theory as linked by BG.
A couple more things…
Some people seem speak of the cost of the war and the trillions “lost” without appreciating that most of the money wasn’t “lost”. Although amazing amounts did effectively disappear, the great majority of that money was spent. Spent on America’s military-industrial complex, more and more privatized. The whole thing worked much like the bailouts, sucking money from taxpayers to billionaires … largely R donors… permanent majority and all that. It’s the very definition of government to them. (All the while, preaching how EVIL taxes redistributing wealth is.)
Forgive me for speculating, but these guys have made it clear that that is how they think. People suggest that they had all these schemes for “American” influence and domination of the region. I think it is worth noting that they define “American” as “me and mine, fuck those liberals”. War/defense was traditionally the Rs issue*. As much as they wanted America to dominate the Middle East, I’m sure they were equally motivated by Rs dominating Ds. And they did until they finally fucked it up so bad nobody could stand it. Imagine if they’d pulled it off. The permanent majority could have happened.
Plus this country loves war. Needs it. We don’t know what to do without one. The lies were transparent to those paying attention, but most *wanted *to fall for it.
*This sentence was really fun to write, because last year I might have written “Defense is an R issue” as if there was no doubt. Not so much these days…
Inferences based on nothing are imaginary, as I am sure you already know.
So, you are making inferences from statements that don’t exist, Bosda is listening to voices that no one else can hear, sailor is defending allegations for which there is no proof, and ElvisL1ves is manufacturing quotes.
All in a thread dedicated to examining somebody else’s lies. 
Regards,
Shodan
While this anecdote has made it into the blogosphere, (without much in the way of corroboration), it should be noted that the comment is claimed to have been made in Marcxh, 2002, substantially later than Bush’s remarks during the 2000 Presidential campaign and much later than Wolfowitz’s term paper and the various meetings and letters of neo-cons rallying around its simplistic ideas.
The rest is not “commentary,” it is the search for the actual answer. Attributing the whole thing to a simplistic phrase uttered by Bush is an act worthy of Bush, himself.
Since the barest hint of an effort on Google demonstrates that ElvisL1ves did not manufacture the quote, perhaps you will refrain from jumping to such conclusions or posting them?
Show me proof of their nonexistence.
Until you do so, I will continue to believe I have seen them. My memory does not usually play tricks on me, so I’m more willing to accept what I remember, rather than what some dude on the internet claims to be cold hard fact.
If that irritates, so be it. Your whole fucking war irritated me.
I genuinely believe Bush was told the following:
- America needs Middle East oil.
- Saddam Hussein has invaded Kuwait once, so after we drove him out we put lots of US troops in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to protect them from another invasion.
- Many Saudis see these US troops in their country as infidels infesting the Holy Land (i.e. Mecca).
- Some Saudis bombed the Towers mainly because of those troops.
Therefore we need to reduce the troops in Saudi, yet not risk Saddam invading Kuwait. It would also help to have a benevolent regime in Iraq.
Putting it all together, we manufacture evidence of WMDs, invade Iraq no matter what Saddam says or does, then reduce the bases in Saudi.
In some cases we can only speculate as to what would have happened if…
In this case we are lucky enough to know what Bush father would have done if he was president because he WAS president. And when he was president he followed a policy which was substantially different and in many ways opposite to his son’s policies later. So there is no speculation needed to know, for example, that Bush the father thought “going to Bagdad” and occupying Iraq was a “bad idea”. So yes, we have some evidence that George the elder liked Clinton’s foreign policies better because when he was president his foreign policy was more like Clinton’s than like his son’s.
His decision to not occupy Iraq, even when it could have been done so easily at that point, shows he understood the situation in a way which Clinton also did and which Bush the son evidently did not.
Schwarzkopf said it best:
All this was way over GW Bush’s head. Way over. Bush father understood it well as did Clinton.
Um, sorry. How does anyone prove non-existence?
I’m afraid you have to find them.
(And the war sickened me, but the above is just standard practice.)
You are wrong. Bush I couldn’t have easily gone into Iraq at that point, because doing so would have completely shattered the coalition he had carefully built. The Saudi’s and other regional powers (including Kuwait) didn’t WANT the US (or anyone else) to go into Iraq and didn’t want Saddam deposed because Iraq acted as a buffer between (Shi’ia) Iran and (Sunny) Saudi and the rest of the Middle East. Had Bush continued on he would have had to do it alone…and without the basing and staging areas in either Saudi or Kuwait, since neither were going to allow the US to stage up for a full scale invasion of Iraq, nor to support said invasion logistically after it happened. Our coalition allies were unified under the concept of pushing Iraq and Saddam out of Kuwait…anything more and that coalition would have melted like a sand castle on a beach during a heavy tide.
So…Bush I had no choice but to limit his and the US’s goals to simply pushing Iraq out of Kuwait, and then hoping that Saddam’s own people would topple him (something that, at the time, the ME contingent of the coalition definitely didn’t support…which was why we pretty much cut those openly opposed to Saddam off at the knees, support wise, except for the no-fly zones).
I’m not saying that the invasion of Iraq was a smart move…but things had changed quite a bit since Bush I’s days (for one thing, Saudi and Kuwait were obviously open to the US using them as a staging and logistics base for an invasion of Iraq by then…since they actually DID allow that. Otherwise, no invasion)…they were both dealing with a completely different situation that impacted their decisions.
-XT
So? Yes, there were a lot of people urging Bush to start his war. but ultimately it was Bush’s decision, and only Bush’s reasons really matter.
The reasons those others had for pushing Bush to do it are of academic interest only, and yes, that’s commentary.
What is your problem? 
The original Time article, for you scoffers.
The Google is truly a wondrous thing.
Nope, Shodan claimed certainty that such statements did not exist. That leaves it up to him to prove their absence. As I said, my memory is good enough for me to believe, and I don’t really care enough about what Shodan believes in this case to do any work for him. Now if you, glee, care enough, you’re welcome to waste your morning digging around in old article archives. As Shodan knows full well, that’s a pain in the ass, which is why he thinks he can get away with dismissing the assertion. What he’ll refuse to admit, is that his dismissal has at most no more value than Bosda’s original claim.
Bush 1 and Scowcroft explaining their decision in their book A World Transformed:
Bolding added.
Exactly. He built a worldwide coalition because he thought that was essential. He knew, like Clinton, that international support was essential for such an enterprise. Bush the son did not want to know this and arrogantly thought America could go against the world and win. Exactly my point.
Ah…my apologies then.
-XT
I gotta go with this. The real tragedy is that he had an opportunity to do something close to this, and have righteousness on his side as well. If only he had focussed on AFGHANISTAN instead.
Costs to whom? Halliburton, for instance, bore only a very small portion of the costs (no more than any other American taxpaying company their size), but got a very large slice of the revenue. And lo and behold, Haliburton (or major stockholders thereof) was heavily involved in the decision to invade.
Back to the OP, I do think that Bush’s decision was based on the supply of a strategic resource critical to him, but that resource wasn’t oil, it was testosterone. The US had just gotten hit hard, and so he needed to hit someone back. When it proved difficult to hit back the folks who had hit us, we needed to find someone else to hit, and Iraq was convenient.