Yet you rationalize it by declaring it a win for the US.
That is not what you were saying. That is what you are saying now. The fall of Saigon has nothing to do with this conversation. It is insensitive in the extreme for you to attempt to diminish the absolute tragedy of Iraq by comparing it to a completely unrelated event. Stop deflecting.
Curtis, you’re smarter than this.
We bombed them with near-nondiscrimination. We raided homes and arrested sons, fathers, and husbands with little, and sometimes no, evidence of any crime committed. We strolled through neighborhoods we’d previously bombed and shot up, and interrogated people who’d lost everything, at the point of a gun, dismissing their pleas, dismissing their tears, dismissing their wrenching hopelessness. We shot Iraqi citizens dead simply for being too close to our vehicles, or driving too slowly, or simply for target practice. We raped women and, in at least one case, a girl as young as 14, that is after we killed the girl’s parents and six year-old brother by shooting them in the head and then burning their bodies. We committed these and many other deplorable acts resulting in the stripping away of any dignity the Iraqi people previously possessed, until they were left hollow and bereft of anything resembling humanity except for the building embers of resentment and hatred that our presence and actions had ignited within them.
Of course we did, to the sacred, American religion of democracy.
Why do you continue to attempt to justify that which you repeatedly state you would not have supported? The wholly incidental benefit the Kurds and Shia received do absolutely nothing to diminish our illegal and immoral acts. Do you not understand that it was not our responsibility, our place, nor our right to invade a sovereign nation, and worse, under false pretenses?
One massacre by American forces is one too many.
One displacement caused by American forces is one too many.
One gang rape by American forces is one too many.
One American justifying the commission of evil upon the innocent is one too many.
And if Young Curtis had been of military age during our Southeastern Asia adventure, he would have been vocally for the war. But, alas, his allergies or his asthma or his Asperger’s would have prevented him from serving.
That’s exactly how it turned out, except that those atrocities were not committed by the occupying troops, but by some sectors of the occupied population against others. At least Hussein (like Tito in Yugoslavia) was able to keep them off each other’s throats.
I’m with Chronos on this. I hate Bush with the fire of a thousand suns but he didn’t exactly invite the terrorists to come and fly planes into our buildings. He didn’t consider it a credible threat and IIRC we never uncovered any specific evidence of a plot before the fact that we could have foiled.
Yeah, that doesn’t bother me all that much depending on the circumstances.
True but…
And if this didn’t convince us that 9/11 wasn’t what was driving bush’s decisions then nothing would.
I’m a big fan of lobbing missiles and using predator drones. I think we used them to great effect in Libya and look forward to using the tactic all across the globe where simple artillery and air support can get rid of bad guys.
What deadlock? What WMDs? We would never have gotten intl (read NATO support).
BTW, WTF does OBL have to do with Iraq?
Quoted for truth.
Back on the trail? He did more than that didn’t he?
It was a crisis taht Bush manufactured to create a pretext for invasion. Frankly he not only fabricated the WMDs, he fabricated a link between Iraq and OBL to make those WMDs a credible threat to the USA. Al qaeda was going to be Saddam Hussein’s delivery system for those WMDs.
But you seem to think it was a good idea at the time.
[quote=“Qin_Shi_Huangdi, post:53, topic:605578”]
I’m not defending the decision to invade Iraq. What I am saying is that the war while bad for the GOP and the country is not on the same level of disaster as Saigon falling. However let me do since you made this post make a few points.
Sure sounds like youa re defending the decision to invade iraq.
[quote]
Is that why there were jubilant crowds as the US troops entered Baghdad and the crowds toppled the statues of Saddam Hussein? How did we exactly strip them of their dignity and humanity? Did we try to destroy their culture or force them to convert?
All contrived, carefully cropped photo ops.
It is true that 50 years from now we may have a prosperous stable democratic Iraq that comes oputn of our invasion there. We may also have a prosperous stable democratic Libya, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, etc. as a result of the organic internally driven democratic movements. I think that as long as we can prevent nuclearization of non-democratic countries, all countries will people will eventually overthrow despotic regimes in favor of more democratic ones.
But you do now?
Not exactly. The invasion occurred based on the link that was created by the administration between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. It was magnified by non existent WMDs that Saddam Hussein was going to give to Osama Bin laden to use against us.
What did he do taht was right?
Great prosperity? What metric are you using to gauge this?
Bad shit happens in every war. There are very few wars that leave the women unraped, innocent people killed and populations displaced.
I think you can justify at leasst displacement in a just war and I think htat innnocent death is an unavoidable side effect of any war. I would propose that giving a bunch of teenage boys guns amongst a disarmed population is an invitation to rape that must be dealt with by a firing squad unless we are ready to abandon the concept of war altogether (which we will never do unless every other nation does the same, which will never happen).
If you’re asking me, not much. Read my first post in this thread.
The topic is about Republican candidates distancing themselves from George W. Bush. My point is that they’re not and they don’t have to; not in any real sense. The applause lines and talking points are the same now as they were then, just coming out of different mouths. As Qin is demonstrating, the true believers will still defend Bush on the specifics, and still cheer for someone just like him. The years 2001-2009 happened, but they have not learned anything from them.
The Republican nominee should run the exact same campaign that Bush did. The only thing about Bush that’s discredited is his name.
This is a falsehood and always has been. The “everybody” part, I mean. Plenty of reasons to question the “intelligence” in the months leading up to the war came to light, and plenty of people did question it, including the actual UN weapons inspectors actually in Iraq.
Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector, said there were no WMDs in the months before the war, and that Iraq was being cooperative. Scott Ritter, former chief weapons inspector, reversed his earlier position and said the following, in June, 1999: “When you ask the question, ‘Does Iraq possess militarily viable biological or chemical weapons?’ the answer is no! It is a resounding NO. Can Iraq produce today chemical weapons on a meaningful scale? No! Can Iraq produce biological weapons on a meaningful scale? No! Ballistic missiles? No! It is ‘no’ across the board. So from a qualitative standpoint, Iraq has been disarmed. Iraq today possesses no meaningful weapons of mass destruction capability.”
Cite. Read the “Between inspections: 1998-2002” section in particular.
There were voices stating that Iraq had no WMDs. Some of us heard them.
Your use of the word “strong” abuses the accepted definition.
A bit more is discredited. His support of the bailout which saved the economy, for instance. Sure they screwed it up by not attaching strings, but what he did was a lot better than what the mainstream Republicans wanted. His very reasonable immigration plan is also something the Republican base rejects. But mostly I agree with you.
Actually no. At the time of the invasion, the majority of the American people wanted only a war with international (UN) support. Which Bush didn’t have, since all the major powers except England knew there were no WMDs.
Remember, intelligence in 2001 has no bearing on the correctness of the decision - only intelligence at the time of the invasion. The UN inspectors got to see everything including the places where US intelligence placed WMDs. Listening to the reports of Hans Blix at the time made it very clear to me there were no WMDs. If Bush had proof, or even pictures, they could have shown them to the SC members and the vote on the invasion would have come out differently. Bush and company got more and more rabid as the evidence drained away.
He got elected President twice. I think that’s the point Robot Arm is making. To some people it’s not about telling the truth or serving the greater good or doing a good job. It’s about winning the election and Bush had the formula for that. And if it still works, the Republicans can plug a new candidate into the same formula and use it to get somebody else elected.
That argument still has to account for the fact that Obama won in 2008, though. A large part of Obama’s campaign consisted of “Bush’s policies were terrible; I’m going to change them”, and the majority of the country agreed with him.
As for “everyone knew” that Iraq had WMDs, that’s just not true. Either Bush or someone working for him was working overtime to fabricate that evidence, and surely the fabricators knew that it was fake. And their boss and boss’s boss, up to the President, damn well should have known.
I thought the right-wing spin nowadays was that the war in Iraq was never about WMDs, it was about bringing democracy to Iraq, and was justified because Saddam Hussein was a bad man who did bad things.
Will a large part of Gingrich’s campaign or Romney’s campaign consist of “Obama’s policies are terrible; I’m going to change them”? How will that work for them?
Absolutely true. There’s a huge disconnect with reality among conservatives over the 2008 election. They somehow just can’t believe that Obama was elected. It must all be some kind of mistake. All they need to do is have another election and give people a chance to vote for a President they want, ie a conservative.
It was the same in the Clinton years, all of them. For a Dem actually to take the WH after the Reagan Revolution seemed to many RWs an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration, it couldn’t be real.
Sorry I’m responding to this late, also I’m a bit tired so they might be rather incoherent…
No I’m stripping it of exaggerations and seeing it for what it is. If someone was here talking about how Iraq was a wise decision I’d be criticizing him too.
Someone was comparing Iraq to Vietnam which prompted my response here.
I’m not as seen above. Iraq was bad but its not as bad as Vietnam.
All these were detestable and horrible crimes and the military should punish them severely. But it was not the policy of the US government unlike say the Japanese at Nanjing or the Nazis in the Eastern Front to rape women or slaughter civilians.
That ignores the tremendous amount of aid the US has given to Iraq. Not to mention most Iraqis have been more pragmatic than that.
I’m showing both sides of the coin that is all. While the Iraq War was bad it wasn’t some maniacal war of conquest.
It does not but it does disprove the statement that the Iraqis overwhelmingly hate America.
I agree.
See above. Although the Iraq War was a disaster many of these statements are inaccurate or a tad bit exaggerated.
Nothing. I never said anyting to the contrary.
Well I was six then so I can’t say what I thought.
No being objective and showing the good and bad of it.
So nobody was glad Saddam was gone.
Appoint good Supreme Court justices, give aid to combat AIDS in Africa, build up trade relationships with other countries, cleaned up his own mess in Iraq, attempted immigration reform…
General metres of stock market numbers, unemployment rates, and economic growth rates.
I strongly disagree on that. Roberts and Alito are bad Justices who were appointed to the Supreme Court to advance conservative interests by judicial activism. And Bush’s attempted appointment of Harriet Miers was a major fumble for his administration.
Agree. I’ll give Bush credit for having a strong African policy. He did better than most Presidents here.
And he did poorly here and in any other area that involved foreign relations.
How so? We were still highly involved in Iraq when he left office.
And failed badly mostly due to the anti-immigrant hysteria fomented by his own party.