And Brutus reaches a new low! Congratulations, lad, we knew you could do it!
Scylla, will you just say in clear, concise English that the WMDs don’t exist and the President lied? Please?
Apparently what was good enough for both elucidator and minty on Page 3 isn’t good enough anymore. So just do it and end it, for Christ’s sake.
Don’t bother. Man lies so much, he’s gonna have to hire someone to call his dog.
Funny, I could swear Bush said once Saddam was not important to capture to declare victory.
Speaking of that, I do have the feeling that once and if we get Saddam, people who were afraid of Saddam coming back into power, will then become more active into getting the US out of Iraq.
Paradoxically, I think removing that fear factor would embolden the Iraqis that are on the sidelines, to then forcibly ask to be truly independent of any foreign power.
All that does not exclude the point that I would like to see the bastard dead.
In other words Brutus, your point is yet another incarnation of the “the excluded middle” fallacy. For awhile I saw you like the Brutus of history, but now I am more convinced you are more like Popeye’s punching bag.
elucidator: told you…
yeah, yeah, you were right, I was wrong. Big friggin’ deal, these days, even lawyers are smarter than me!
ouchie
[1] Is apparently not in dispute. Of course, you’d have to be a complete imbecile to dispute it, but really, it’s not on the table w/r/t The Usual Weasel. He apparently concedes that the vaunted Weapons of Mass Destruction and/or their Programs of Doom did not, as a factual matter, exist.
[2] Is where The Usual Weasel shows his true colors. For while he purported to concede the administration’s lies back on page 3–only after I challenged him to drop the weasely “negligence” bullshit–he immediately reverted to discussing the situation as if Bush had merely been mistaken about his conclusions.
Seriously, Airman, there is a world of difference between being negligent–even recklessly negligent–and being a reprehensible piece of shit intentional liar.
But you do realise (talking to wring, ‘luci, pantom, etc.) the position you adopt means you implicitly accept the empire has peaked and from here on in, you are economically vulnerable; the US cannot walk away from Iraq and continue to control its own destiny, nor can it guarantee (to Wall St, etc) that the wheels of worldwide capitalism will continue to run unfettered - as they need to do for the US in this global market ?
That is the price the US pays for not controlling sufficient of the worlds flow of oil to the world. That is the reason for the war of aggression against Iraq.
And that’s a whole different price that future generations may not be pleased to pay on behalf of the sons who didn’t go overseas now.
What is your alternative proposal to the current plan, and how do we get there?
Ok, I’m willing to say that I think Bush deliberately lied when he used WMD as a primary reason to go to war. I’m sure he used that lie to convince a reluctant population to go to war with Iraq. The possibility that Saddam was harboring WMD or developing new ones was not only plausible but logical or even likely given his past and the circumstances… it was an easy lie to sell. I even believe it was on the administrations agenda before 9-11 (and I mean in more than some vague contingency basis)… but I personally think they were initially going to wait till AFTER Bush’s re-election to go for it… 9-11 just provided an earlier, better opportunity.
I also think he was right to do it. :> Saddam’s regime was a time bomb waiting to go off… if we waited for the guy to croak we’d have been looking at vicious civil war from the sidelines, with a potentially split Iraq in which case Iran and or Turkey steps in and things get out of hand. He was a human rights nightmare, a festering security wound that kept lobbing missiles at our planes, a proven belligerent power, a rallying point for radical terrorists (he was playing the Allah card more and more the more desperate he got) as the sanctions we supported were mentioned as justification for attacks more than once PLUS he is sitting on the 2nd largest oil reserves in the world OH and BTW the number 1 reserves are in a country that supplied most of the 9-11 bombers which we need to get the hell OUT of to avoid pissing off more potential terrorists. We can’t do dick about the shithole that is Saudi Arabia without shifting our eggs to another basket.
I think there were AMPLE good reasons to go to war in Iraq all in the US’s interests (whether or not we’re doing WELL over there is another debate altogether) but in this day and age of 10 second (or less) sound bites and shoddy media (plus a woefully ignorant electorate) you can’t sell a complicated and radical change of strategy to preserve US interests in the Mid-east and get anything accomplished. When something BIG needs to be done that will be painful or even unpopular…well sometimes a spoonful of sugar (or soothing lies) makes the medicine go down.
We’re making the world safe for Democracy!
Remember the Maine! We bombed a chemical weapons lab in Sudan! We were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin!
This is nothing new people.
I certainly believe that anybody with half a brain that was willing or cared to look into the matter recognized that the war was neither about grabbing the oil or stopping WMD and would draw their own conclusions. I believe that intelligent people could look at the deeper underlying evidence and believe that the status quo was less risky and the way to go… that containing Saddam and avoiding war was far more preferable. I personally disagree… I think the short term risks for war are indeed FAR worse by going to war… and I mean short term as in 3-5 years… but the long term risks of maintaining the status quo with Iraq would have been worse than the pain involved in going to war. Maybe it was sold with a lie… as I said that doesn’t make it unique… but I think there is more potential for good with this lie than in some others in the past.
Oh, you mean inaction like the use of Predator UAVs to track and find Osama bin Laden, a program begun by Clinton an which produced three probable sightings in the year 00, which were discontinued by the Bush administration until one week prior to the attacks of 9/11.
Well, Clinton’s folks busted the folks behind the first WTC bombing attack, thwarted a dozen terrorist plots, tripled the FBI’s antiterrorism budget, and gave authorization to assassinate Osama bin Laden, so it’s not like he wasn’t doing anything from 1992-2000.
As for the 9/11 attacks, when the Clintonites were leaving the White House and were transferring things to the Bush team, they already had a plan to take the fight to al Qaeda ready to roll. But since Clinton didn’t want to start a war just before he left office, he opted instead to have his folks warn Bush’s Cabinet on the terrorism threat and let them handle it.
Unfortunately for Bill Clinton (and Sandy Berger, and Richard Clark, and every other American out there), the Bush folks sat on their asses for nine months and did nothing about the problem:
Summary: Clinton went after al Qaeda like a man obsessed, but made the big mistake of assuming George W. Bush would be competent enough to continue the fight when the mantle was passed to him.
This thread poses some interesting questions:
How can you argue with people who’ve been convinced that it’s okay to be lied to?
What kind of people will, when deceived, defend the person who lied to them, and make up justifications for being lied to?
What are we to make of someone who, though thoroughly manipulated, sets themselves up for more manipulation willingly?
And what kind of people would willingly accept, and even support, a deception that costs thousands of lives?
I don’t recall ever saying on the board that Saddam had WMD, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I did. I do have to admit that I found the evidence that was initially presented as being kind of sketchy, but I was in the “Saddam is a scumbag and therefore must have WMD”. Well, looks like I was wrong.
You can also find me rallying behind the “Bush administration seems to be fucking up fixing Iraq” flag. I haven’t lost hope, but I sometimes I wonder if they’re trying to fuck it up.
I hope the Dems come up with somebody good for next year, 'cause I really don’t want to vote for Bush.
Airman:
Well, just to begin with, Scylla’s far from “helpless,” I’d say…
Anyway, speaking for myself (and hopefully for some of the others participating in this thread), my frustration with Scylla lies in the fact that, as far as I can tell, his admission is totally meaningless. It’s meaningless because it leads to no consequences whatsoever.
I was also a participant in these threads where Scylla set a Thanksgiving deadline (today, by the way!) for the US to find “WMDs” in Iraq. Personally, I could find no reason to extend such a grace period myself: the administration claimed secret and certain knowledge of the existence of these weapons prior to the war, so it seemed reasonable to me that they would be able to produce evidence supporting their claims immediately after the invasion. But I was willing to extend Scylla the courtesy, if you will, of a few months. I admit that I was afraid that in the interim US forces might locate something – a small, forgotten stockpile of VX, etc. – that they could then employ as retroactive justification for the invasion. So at this late date, when we see that haven’t been able to produce anything – anything at all! – we realize the extent to which they have really, really lied in order to force this war upon the American public. They were just making things up out of thin air.
But anyway, I think the expectation developed among many of us that when Scylla was finally ready to “recant,” as it were – to rethink his position, and concede that he had been lied to –his recantation would imply more than just an admission that he was wrong. It seems reasonable to expect that such an admission would in some way also influence Scylla’s general attitude to the administration, for example. Privately, I guess, I thought Scylla might decide, as a result of his change of heart, to vote for Bush’s opponent in the next elections, for example. Seemed reasonable, since no matter how much you agree with a President’s politics, if you can’t trust him, then he ain’t worth spit.
What never occurred to me, at least at first, was the possibility that Scylla would say something like, “Yeah, he lied. But I still think the war was justified, and I’m still voting for him next election.” I honestly can’t get my head around that sort of mentality.
Sure, Scylla argues that it might be a case “negligence;” that Bush made the mistake of assuming his conclusions were right first and then finding evidential support for those conclusions second – a classic, all too human failing. Scylla concedes that he’s made similar mistakes, and yet he still possesses a modicum of integrity – so why couldn’t the same be said of Bush? But this argument ignores the import of the administration’s decision, IMO. When Scylla made such mistakes, they dealt with printers and which sort of workstations a certain company should invest in. Bush, on the other hand, made this “mistake” in the process of leading the US to war, which is to my mind a completely different ball of wax. There is no room for negligence or lying in such a decision; it must be held to a higher standard. In addition, contrary evidence was readily available; I was able to see it, sitting here in front of my computer, all alone above the arctic circle in this godforsaken little corner of the globe. And yet Bush, surrounded by staffs of experts who have dedicated their lives to unearthing and analyzing intelligence information, wasn’t aware that he was making up as he went along?
Scylla, if this admission is to actually mean anything other than rhetoric, it should have some sort of real life consequence. Otherwise you might as well stick to your guns and insist that Bush told the truth, for all the difference it makes. If it doesn’t change your vote, then at least take your tax rebate and donate to the Democratic party, as a means of punishing the administration for lying. I don’t know, something.
Supporting Bush is easy for you (I assume); you risk nothing, personally, at least in the short term. Visit the home of a family who has lost a soldier in this war and get a feel for the consequences this lie has had on the lives of people who were never, ever, threatened by Iraq, but callously led to believe they were, so that their children could be sent to suffer and die to stuff the coffers of the rich.
It occurred to me, however. From the earlier thread What are you expecting from me on Thanksgiving
I wasn’t the only one that fully expected Scylla to weasel out. Scylla’s first few posts in this thread were a bit of a surprise, but it didn’t take long to get back to the same old pattern of falling stupidly into line with whatever crap the Administration says: No WMD? The invasion was justified anyway.
Fuck you, dude.
Just this past week I went to a funeral for a guy that died over there. I met his family, and you know what? They’re PROUD of him, proud that he died doing what he wanted to do.
Have you been to any funerals? Have you spoken to any of the families? If not, shut the fuck up.
To reiterate: I supported the war from the beginning, I continue to support the war, I backed up that belief with my own ass, and I still think we did the right thing by going. What I am angry about is that the claim was made and sold that they were an imminent threat, which was patently untrue. That point has been conceded by both myself and Scylla, which is the point of this whole fucking thread, and you still want to be a piece of shit and bring other stuff into it.
You say Scylla’s statement leads to “no consequences whatever”. What do you want, for Scyllato go to jail? Oh, you meant with Bush. Fine. Impeach the guy. Come 2004, vote him out. Those are your consequences. There are no other consequences. Those are your two plans of action, and if you can’t follow through on either, shut the fuck up.
Oh, I get it. You wanted Scylla to say that Bush was entirely wrong, an asshole, and the manifestation of Satan on Earth. Well, it ain’t gonna happen. Some people actually believe that he’s doing a good job. Scylla is obviously one of them. Anyway, he stepped up and did what he was asked to do. That you wanted or expected more is your problem.
In conclusion, don’t EVER fucking think to lecture me about going to visit families and going to funerals of dead soldiers. You don’t know shit all about what you’re talking about. And when someone lives up to their word, you don’t turn be a piece of shit and grill him for other stuff just because you have an axe to grind.
Oh, and one other thing: I don’t support Bush. I’m voting Democrats in 2004, unless it’s Hillary, in which case it’s Lyndon Larouche in 2004. Yet another misjudgment on your behalf.
Airman, there are too many people out here who in their youth went in harm’s way at the direction of their country for you to wrap yourself in the flag and waive the bloody shirt. Some of us are pissed that our friends and comrades died for a lie. Why aren’t you?
Duty is one thing. The honorable performance of duty is something in which to take satisfaction if not pride.
Policy is another matter. Bad policy, policy based on fraud, policy based on advancing the interest of a narrow segment of politically placed men of influence to the detriment of the general good, policy that diverts resources from the legitimate national interests, is a thing to be attacked, debated and reversed. It seems to me that as long as the President and the men around him are running the country the present policy of adventurism and bluster and bullying, with all its fiscal and economic consequences, will not change.
In the meantime, why don’t you climb down off that high horse.
Well, of course, it’s all a matter of perspective.
We’re all sinners, as Beloved Leader has pointed out. Who among us hasn’t told a lie, a little fib. Who among us hasn’t told a lie that got a few thousand people dead? They might very well have died anyway!
And, ok, some little kid gets his arms blown off. But Iraq is about the size of California, and kids have skate boarding accidents in California every single day!
And what about Bill Clinton’s Abominable Gobbles Against Nature? What about millions and millions of pre-born sperm spent sliding down Ms. Lewinski’s throat to face horrible, agonizing death in a pool of stomach acid and cheap chablis?
And what of God’s Will? Dare I invoke Divine Providence? Well, of course! How else do you explain an overprivleged feckless tosspot raised to the highest earthly power? How else do you explain 10,000 Jews for Buchanan? Doesn’t the Bible specificly enjoin us to slay the Midianites, the Ammonites, and the Amwayites? Well, where do you think those people lived? Babylon, that’s where! And where is that? I think you know the answer to that question!
And, of course you know, the Democrats hate God and want to force Eagle Scouts into gay marriages!
How can anyone doubt that it is the will of God that we got the President we deserve?