So, What was the point to the US invading Iraq?

[Der_Trihs]

@aldiboronti

Not reasonable? Thousands of people died when Saddam used chemical weapons against them during the Kurdish uprising in 1988. He certainly had them then and you don’t think a reasonable person might have concluded there were more where those came from?

They were known to be destroyed, and the Bush administration clearly knew it. They made a point of attacking before the UN could complete its inspections, and US troops totally ignored all the so-called “WMD sites”. As well as outright lying again and again; where are the mobile WMD labs and the fleet of chemical armed drones?

@aldiboronti

No, do your enemies the courtesy of believing them not to be James Bond villains but sincere men, albeit misguided.

Nonsense; there are predators all over, people motivated by greed, hatred and cruelty. And I don’t owe Bush and his fellow war criminals any courtesy whatsoever; they are torturers and murderers.

Pretending that the other side is secretly well meaning will just get your screwed over, like the Democrats have been with their persistent attempts to convince themselves that the Republicans can be reasoned with and actually care about the welfare of the country.

[BrightNShiny]

@aldiboronti

No, do your enemies the courtesy of believing them not to be James Bond villains but sincere men, albeit misguided.

As you attempt to post a bunch of misinformation about the state of Iraqi WMDs just prior to the war in order to defend war criminals. Spare us the lectures.

[The_Fornicator]

@aldiboronti

Not reasonable? Thousands of people died when Saddam used chemical weapons against them during the Kurdish uprising in 1988. He certainly had them then and you don’t think a reasonable person might have concluded there were more where those came from? If so then we have very different concepts as to what constitutes reasonable belief.

The material for that literally handed to Saddam by Donald Rumsfeld

What do you think the UNSCOM inspectors were inspecting for the seven years prior to Bush’s invasion?

There was nothing left. Blix confirmed it, people like Scott Ritter yelled about it. Bush ignored it.

[Sitnam]

@handsomeharry

Suicide bombing isn’t so much a strength of conviction as it is desperation/despair/etc…

I don’t believe those motivations must conflict at all.

[tagos]

@aldiboronti

Not reasonable? Thousands of people died when Saddam used chemical weapons against them during the Kurdish uprising in 1988. He certainly had them then and you don’t think a reasonable person might have concluded there were more where those came from? If so then we have very different concepts as to what constitutes reasonable belief.

You know full well what both basic chemistry about decay rates, you know full well what weapons inspectors were reporting and you know full well the ‘intelligence’ was shaped to support the desire.

Apart from being based in Washington rather than an extinct volcano they were James bond villains. And on I don’t grant them or their cheerleaders anything but contempt. They should be hanged as war criminals not given the benefit of the doubt.

[NotfooledbyW]

@Charlie_Wayne

I see that Baghdad is now about to fall into the hands of the Islamists and I want to ask the question …

I am one who believes Bush and Blair should be tried for war crimes for deciding to kick peaceful UN inspectors out of Iraq to launch an invasion instead. However your starting premise is not a clear enough reality to be bandied about in an informative discussion about Iraq and how the trajectory from peaceful UN insurrections became a tragic and unnecessary decade long war.

Baghdad is not about to fall into the hands of terrorists. Shiites control the government and they are more anti AlQaeda than Saddam Husseins Baathistd were . Kurds are not Islamists not are they likely to be overrun by them.

Iraq’s Sunnis may be using this terrorist offensive to drive the central government out of their regions but they have eliminated AQ from their midst before and I see no reason to believe they would not do it again.

[NotfooledbyW]

@TonySinclair

It wasn’t a preposterous belief, up to November of 2002, when the UN inspectors were readmitted. But they quickly determined that both the defector’s reports and the CIA guesses from satellite photos were wrong. Every site identified as a possible WMD facility or stockpile was searched, and not only were they not what was claimed, in many cases it was obvious that they had been unused for years, or never suitable for that purpose (e.g., an alleged chemical weapons factory that didn’t even have running water).

The UN inspections continued. They used helicopters to travel to remote sites with no warning to the Iraqis, so there was no time to hide stuff. They used ground-penetrating radar to search for hidden basements and false walls, so there was no place to hide stuff. And by January 2003, it was clear to everyone that the dangers had been grossly exaggerated.

No problem so far. I don’t blame the Bush admin for believing the worst-case CIA guesses about their satellite photos, or the claims of Chalabi’s paid defectors, before the UN inspectors went in. In the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, you have to be ready for the worst.

But now we had hard, conclusive evidence that the CIA had been wrong, and the paid defectors had been lying. It was no longer reasonable to believe those worst-case scenarios.

The inspections continued, even in the formerly sacrosanct Presidential compounds. And on March 7, 2003, Hans Blix reported to the UN Security Council that the only questions remaining were ones of accounting, i.e. the destruction of obsolescent stockpiles was not properly documented. He said that the Iraqi government was cooperating proactively, even to the point of destroying some conventional missiles that flew a few miles farther than the UN-mandated maximum of ~100 miles (Iraq is ~8000 miles from the US), that it should take no more than a few months to clear up the remaining discrepancies, and that as long as the inspectors were there, the world would have plenty of warning if Saddam attempted to resume the manufacture of WMDs.

Security Council 7 March 2003

No inspection can be perfect in a country that size; in March, 2003, it was reasonable to believe that the UN inspectors had missed something, although years of further searching by a huge US team after it had occupied Iraq showed that Blix hadn’t missed anything significant in the five months his team ran the inspections.

So while it was still reasonable to believe there might be a stray mustard gas shell here or there, it was no longer reasonable to believe that Iraqi WMDs constituted a serious threat to the region, let alone the US.

Bush didn’t care. He wanted to invade, but the October 2002 vote authorizing invasion had a provision that for some reason is rarely mentioned today. Blix had just certified to the UN that the inspections had turned up no evidence of WMD facilities or stockpiles, and that Iraq was actively cooperating with the inspectors in resolving the remaining discrepancies. But the 2002 bill required that in order to use military force, Bush had to write and sign a formal declaration to Congress that all other measures had failed, and that nothing short of military force could remove the threat Iraq posed to the US.

No problem for Bush – he simply lied, and signed a letter to Congress stating exactly that — eleven days after Blix’s report proved that he was lying.

Presidential Letter

May he burn in hell forever.

This forum is about destroying ignorance. Your excellent explanations on this matter should do the trick at least here. Perhaps someday it will.

[LC_Strawhouse]

Don’t forget that ordinary Joes and Janes were baying for blood too and pretty much sent Bush an engraved invitation to do what he wanted. It was part of the culture in the air that decade; everyone was pissed at the French, suddenly discovered NASCAR/country music/“evangelicalism” and put pro-war stickers on their cars (even if they now pretend it never happened!) Case in point, even the South Park guys were gleefully pro-Bush and ripped into people like Susan Sarandon for being pacifist.

[Bozuit]

@LC_Strawhouse

Case in point, even the South Park guys were gleefully pro-Bush and ripped into people like Susan Sarandon for being pacifist.

Christopher Hitchens was pretty damn convinced, too.

[tomndebb]

@Chefguy

. . . You can’t train people whose natural instinct is to run from danger, to stand and fight. For the Middle East, it’s been shown time and time again through history that they don’t have the stomach for battle unless there is little or no resistance. The Israelis proved that beyond a doubt when they defeated three armies in six days in 1967. We never learn a damn thing from history.

@Chefguy

I understand your feeling. If it hadn’t been borne out time after time, it wouldn’t be my observation. If the primary means of fighting an enemy is to carry out terrorist attacks against the innocent, it speaks volumes as to their bravery. These guys make the French (or Italians or whoever is being bashed at the moment) look like ferocious warriors.

@Chefguy

Is it? I think I’m just saying that they aren’t warriors. Something in their culture prompts flight rather than fight. I’m not saying that it’s not the best thing to do in the interests of self preservation, but self preservation seems to be the prime mover in that culture.

I have no idea where you got this weird notion, but it fails on evidence.

The Iran-Iraq war lasted almost eight years in situations that often resembled those of WWI–the war that Europe looks to as the great useless bloodletting.

The notion that people of “that region” will not stand and fight is silly. The reasons for the current crumbling military have more to do with poor training, corruption interfering with support, and divided loyalties between Sunni and Shia than it does with any “instinct” for flight.
(And you do realize that the insurgents who recently overwhelmed Iraqi army units are actually the same people, fighting in the open and not in terrorist attacks, right?)

[NotfooledbyW]

@LC_Strawhouse

Don’t forget that ordinary Joes and Janes were baying for blood too and pretty much sent Bush an engraved invitation to do what he wanted.

Not really. Several reputable polling firms within a month of the launch of the invasion reveal that nearly six of ten Americans were in favor of giving the UN inspectors more time to finish their investigation and work. Bush refused to give the inspectors the reasonable amount of time they needed and decided to bomb and invade Iraq instead.

[Nema98]

You summed it up pretty well, answered your own question.

[tagos]

@aldiboronti

Not reasonable? Thousands of people died when Saddam used chemical weapons against them during the Kurdish uprising in 1988. He certainly had them then and you don’t think a reasonable person might have concluded there were more where those came from? If so then we have very different concepts as to what constitutes reasonable belief.

Sarin has a shelf life of months. You should know that.

As everyone know at the time. For Saddam to have had WMD’s he would have had to have been manufacturing it. There was, as you full well know, not just no evidence that he did but an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that he didn’t.

That’s why bush et al had to set up their own ‘intelligence’ operation to tell them what they wanted to hear and that’s why Blair made up a cut and paste pack of lies in the dodgy dossier.

But all this is well known and understood.

[RickJay]

@Bozuit

Christopher Hitchens was pretty damn convinced, too.

Christopher Hitchens, outstanding literary critic. Terrible foreign affairs expert. But in fairness, Hitchens never hinged his position on the chemical weapons story. His position was always that evil dictators had no right to stay in power, Peace of Westphalia be damned.

Everyone who was paying attention knew in March 2003 Iraq had either no WMD or essentially none.

[filmstar-en]

The point to the US invading Iraq was to provide the excuse for the cabal of neo-cons around Bush to get their hands on the money in the US cookie jar set aside for avenging 9/11 even though Saddam had nothing to do with it and posed no threat.

War opens up huge treasure chest of business opportunities for those in the right position to benefit. Saddam was an easy target and the neo-cons solution was send in less troops than were necessary to secure to country afterwards, resulting in a chaotic post war security crisis which gave scope for ‘military contractors’ to make up the numbers and get the pay check.

This was a case of one group of Americans (the neo-cons) grabbing $1 Trillion from another group of Americans (the US public) after the country was reeling from the shock of 9/11. A radical faction close to the President saw their opportunity for an open chequebook and milked it dry.

Saddam was just a convenient fall guy.

The US now has spent vast amounts of money on Iraq and has little to show for it except a hugely expanded NSA that seems to be directed at mining the Internet for information on just about everyone.

It is worth remembering the first Gulf war was effectively bankrolled by the Kuwaitis, who were quite keen to get their country back from Iraq.

But that was a different President Bush. A wiser man, for sure.

[VarlosZ]

@RickJay

Everyone who was paying attention knew in March 2003 Iraq had either no WMD or essentially none.

I’m not so sure that’s true – at least, not for Americans.

People are basing their case that Bush & co. lied about WMDs on the premise that *the administration *would have had faith in and been convinced by the UN weapons inspectors, and Hans Blix in particular. These are people who disdain the UN, and hold as a matter of faith that it’s a completely ineffectual organization that, when it’s not stepping on its own dick, is actively bending over backward to cover for various anti-American factions in the world. No one in that administration – and probably very few ordinary citizens who voted Republican in 2000 – would have put any stock in the UN inspectors’ Not Guilty verdict, let alone Iraq’s protestations of innocence. And, hell, even leaving aside the peculiarities of neocon thought, it’s unlikely that *any *President would take the word of a UN search committee over his own intelligence chiefs, who apparently were certain that Iraq had some WMDs.

Furthermore, there’s a certain amount of 20/20 hindsight going on here. For all the insistence that it was obvious back in 2003 that Iraq had no WMDs, I’m not sure I recall ever hearing that opinion voiced by non-fringe outlets (only speaking for U.S. sources here; I don’t know what the accepted wisdom during those last months was in the rest of the world). I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but to the best of my recollection even the mainstream anti-war folks conceded that Sadaam may have or likely has a WMD stockpile. The typical argument was that such an arsenal wasn’t a realistic danger to the US and didn’t justify all the horror that would come with an invasion, and anyway we should continue with the inspections.

Finally, the specific argument that the Bush administration knew there were no WMDs and lied about it in order to get their war is almost ridiculous on its face. It requires the people in charge to be not just monstrously, cartoonishly evil, but also extraordinarily stupid. What the hell is this plan you think you’ve sniffed out? We’re going to base the whole war on a claim that is patently and demonstrably false, so that within a year of the start of invasion half the world will think we’re incompetent and the other half will think we’re war criminals? I think it’s overwhelmingly likely that the architects of the war fully expected to find a meaningful cache of WMDs in Iraq.
The administration’s actual lie was in presenting the WMD issue as their true motivation. That’s the rationale they thought they could most easily sell to the public, so that’s the case they made, even though for them it was, at most, a secondary consideration. Their actual sin was in being utterly callous to the massive human suffering they were about to unleash on the people of Iraq, and utterly hubristic in their casual, assured confidence that they could manage the aftermath and knew what they were doing.

Those things are bad enough. We don’t have to invent histories in which Oliver Stone villains are meeting in shadowy back rooms and hatching a plot to kill hundreds of thousands of people on a known (and for some reason easily provable) falsehood in an unnecessarily convoluted scheme to add a couple extra billion to Halliburton’s bottom line.

[TonySinclair]

@VarlosZ

Furthermore, there’s a certain amount of 20/20 hindsight going on here. For all the insistence that it was obvious back in 2003 that Iraq had no WMDs…

Finally, the specific argument that the Bush administration knew there were no WMDs and lied about it in order to get their war is almost ridiculous on its face…

Nice straw man. Nobody claimed it was obvious there were no WMDs in Iraq, then or now. I wouldn’t be amazed if some turned up, even today. But it was obvious by January 2003 that Bush was grossly exaggerating the danger, and it was obvious before we invaded that the justification for invasion, namely that nothing short of war could protect the US from the threat of Iraq, was false.

In the letter to Congress that Bush was required to write before invading, his claim was not that there might be a WMD cache somewhere in Iraq, his claim was that the inspections had failed, and that nothing short of invasion could protect the US. And that was patently false.

[NotfooledbyW]

@VarlosZ

I’m not so sure that’s true – at least, not for Americans.

People are basing their case that Bush & co. lied about WMDs on the premise that *the administration *would have had faith in and been convinced by the UN weapons inspectors, and Hans Blix in particular. These are people who disdain the UN, and hold as a matter of faith that it’s a completely ineffectual organization that, when it’s not stepping on its own dick, is actively bending over backward to cover for various anti-American factions in the world. No one in that administration – and probably very few ordinary citizens who voted Republican in 2000 – would have put any stock in the UN inspectors’ Not Guilty verdict, let alone Iraq’s protestations of innocence. And, hell, even leaving aside the peculiarities of neocon thought, it’s unlikely that *any *President would take the word of a UN search committee over his own intelligence chiefs, who apparently were certain that Iraq had some WMDs.

Furthermore, there’s a certain amount of 20/20 hindsight going on here. For all the insistence that it was obvious back in 2003 that Iraq had no WMDs, I’m not sure I recall ever hearing that opinion voiced by non-fringe outlets (only speaking for U.S. sources here; I don’t know what the accepted wisdom during those last months was in the rest of the world). I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but to the best of my recollection even the mainstream anti-war folks conceded that Sadaam may have or likely has a WMD stockpile. The typical argument was that such an arsenal wasn’t a realistic danger to the US and didn’t justify all the horror that would come with an invasion, and anyway we should continue with the inspections.

Finally, the specific argument that the Bush administration knew there were no WMDs and lied about it in order to get their war is almost ridiculous on its face. It requires the people in charge to be not just monstrously, cartoonishly evil, but also extraordinarily stupid. What the hell is this plan you think you’ve sniffed out? We’re going to base the whole war on a claim that is patently and demonstrably false, so that within a year of the start of invasion half the world will think we’re incompetent and the other half will think we’re war criminals? I think it’s overwhelmingly likely that the architects of the war fully expected to find a meaningful cache of WMDs in Iraq.
The administration’s actual lie was in presenting the WMD issue as their true motivation. That’s the rationale they thought they could most easily sell to the public, so that’s the case they made, even though for them it was, at most, a secondary consideration. Their actual sin was in being utterly callous to the massive human suffering they were about to unleash on the people of Iraq, and utterly hubristic in their casual, assured confidence that they could manage the aftermath and knew what they were doing.

Those things are bad enough. We don’t have to invent histories in which Oliver Stone villains are meeting in shadowy back rooms and hatching a plot to kill hundreds of thousands of people on a known (and for some reason easily provable) falsehood in an unnecessarily convoluted scheme to add a couple extra billion to Halliburton’s bottom line.

It is simple to verify with certainty that Bush lied on March 17 2003 when he stated to the nation and the world that he had intelligence that Iraq was concealing the most lethal weapons ever devised from UN inspectors at that moment in time.

He can be doing nothing but lying when he said that.

He revealed the fact that he and Blair did not have any such intelligence ten days earlier on March 7/8 when they presented a draft resolution to the UNSC that was an admission that the proponents for war did not have any intelligence that left no doubt that Iraq was concealing weapons from inspectors.

The draft resolution proposed that Saddam Hussein could remain in power ‘if’ the UNSC could declare that Iraq was fully disarmed in ten days.

Think about the significance of that development and offer.

If Bush had evidence on March 7 that Iraq was hiding something from UN inspectors he was required by UN Resolution to provide all relevant intelligence to the UNSC. At that point the inspectors would have ten days to check it out. If Blix found what Bush claimed ten days later to be true, then Bush may have been able to get a majority to vote for war and then France maybe Russia vetoes it, but Bush at least starts war with the evidence made public.

If you still want to believe Bush did not lie with ‘leaves no doubt’ claim
Then you have to believe Bush acquired his intelligence after March 7, then you have to believe he got some last hour intelligence but could not be bothered to have it vetted by the inspectors.

If you wish to believe in that then Bush is certainly lying to this day that he did not want war, he wanted to disarm Iraq peacefully buy Saddam Hussein refused to let the inspectors in.

I know Bush lied. There is no doubt and no assist from Oliver Stone is required.

[carnivorousplant]

@VarlosZ

Finally, the specific argument that the Bush administration knew there were no WMDs and lied about it in order to get their war is almost ridiculous on its face. It requires the people in charge to be not just monstrously, cartoonishly evil, but also extraordinarily stupid. What the hell is this plan you think you’ve sniffed out?
…
The administration’s actual lie was in presenting the WMD issue as their true motivation. That’s the rationale they thought they could most easily sell to the public, so that’s the case they made, even though for them it was, at most, a secondary consideration. Their actual sin was in being utterly callous to the massive human suffering they were about to unleash on the people of Iraq, and utterly hubristic in their casual, assured confidence that they could manage the aftermath and knew what they were doing.

I believe Cheney talked Bush into it. Cheney wanted to make money for Halliburton, Bush wanted to prove himself as good as his father.

[Monty]

@Der_Trihs

It was an attempt to enrich Bush & Cheney’s buddies, to take control of Iraq’s oil, to kill brown people and Muslims, to set up an anarchocapitalist free market utopia, to install a puppet regime, to create a base for the future conquest of the rest of the region, to eliminate a bastion of secularism, to test the neocon’s military theories, and to show up Daddy.

Do you ever know what you sound like when you toss out this tripe?