“Constant patrolling the no-fly zones and being shot at…”
Yeah. Heard about that. Took some, what?..700 shots and didn’t hit once? Rather odd, don’t you think? Someone on these very boards suggested it was because he didn’t turn on his radar, because we’d clobber his radar. I find that plausible, how about you? Because without radar locking, he might as well have been trying to bring them down with a BB gun.
“…The inspection circle jerk…” Was working. He didn’t have anything. You seem to have trouble absorbing that.
“…Basing US forces in Saudi – al Qaeda uses that as a pretext for being heinous murdering pigs…”
Entirely true! Completely irrefutable. Boy, you got us that time. But you neglected to make the connection between Osama and Saddam. That’s OK, nobody else could either. God knows they tried. (Is this all new information to you?)
“…4) Iraq bisects Iran and Syria…”
Can’t fault you on geography. Might even be relevent, I suppose, if two of the three weren’t mortal enemies. They had this war? You heard about that, right? Isreal bisects Jordan and Egypt, so they’re all co-conspirators?
“…Now mention Guatemala…” OK, Guatemala. And if they ever forgive us, we still won’t deserve it.
Can anybody else finish off this steaming load? I gotta go.
The same reason that I (and others) voted for him in 2000, the OTHER choice was worse! I’m gonna vote because that’s my right and responsibility BUT when you gots only two choices and one sucks bigger than the other…
The DEMs got a better choice in 2004? Don’t make me laugh!
The Bush bashers never seem to be able to answer that one question…
How’d things be if Gore had won? Answer: a heck of a lot worse!
(now some liberal-self-appointed-guardian-of-the-truth will ask for a cite)
And, Unless Paul Harvey lied to me (and he has many times before) some of the politicians that negotiated the annexation after the war were removed from office: something to do by overstepping their mandates.
cedric45:
My first impression was that Gore would have gotten a bigger coalition geared against the war on terror, Also that there would NOT have been a partisan OSP that told the administration just what it wanted to hear:
Being that Gore would have been in check by the Republican congress: yes, things would have been better.
I can certainly understand your frustration. I would never put up with it myself, so I don’t blame you for leaving. lokij:
No, what you wrote was:
So, your position is more than just a take on current “political realities”… it is also a value judgement. And your judgement appears to be that is okay for our leaders to lie to us, because we’re incapable of making rational decisions for our own good, or to bite the bullet and make “painful sacrifices,” and so on.
I agree with you that politics in America mostly works as you describe it; the government employs “emotionally potent simplifications” – like “WMD,” or “terrorist” – so as to create “necessary illusions” within the domestic population – like “America stands for freedom!” – which, in turn, is basically how they manage to implement their policies (especially their foreign policies). It’s just that I find such a system reprehensible, and could never support an administration which employs those techniques so shamelessly. You and Scylla, on the other hand, seem to think that the system is okay. Judging from you last response, you would even have me believe that this is “democracy” in action.
Probably never, at least not as you describe it, but does this justify in your mind the fact that Bush lied to you to mislead your country into an unnecessary war? Whatever else might have been the case, Clinton didn’t try to justify bombing Serbia with outright lies, or claim that Milosvic possessed “WMDs” and was an imminent threat to the US.
You know, I kinda resent these sorts of arguments. They boil down to little more than a subtle ad hominem: an accusation that I’m angry about the policies of the Bush administration solely because I’m partisan. That’s not true. I would be just as angry if these same policies had been pursued by a Democrat. For example, I condemn Clinton’s completely unprovoked attack on Niger, which was also a violation of the UN Charter. Elvis and I have even bumped heads over that issue.
You cannot take the fully justifiable outrage many of us feel towards the Bush administration and reduce it to partisan bias. That’s a cheap and easy rhetorical dodge that does disservice to the very real grievances many of us feel.
It’s obvious to anyone that the 9-11 attacks were in the planning stages during the Clinton adminstration. You can’t put together an operation that big by the weekend. Certainly this came about because Clinton’s ineffectiveness at doing anything emboldened the terror mongers. “Hey, nothing happened after we killed those sailors in Yemen, let’s go for a bunch of civilians on their own soil!” Where was Clinton’s intellegence service?
Your assertion that Bush is to blame for 9-11 is totally without merit OR morality.
No… my opinion was that politicians lie to us, sometimes to get us to do necessary but unpopular things and sometimes for trivial or self serving reasons… that is reality and really past the point of being ok or not ok. Given the realities it’s understandable A. why lies happen and B. why lies get largely ignored. I then added my personal opinion that I felt we were right to go into Iraq… lie or no, that I approve doesn’t excuse the lie… but I’m not going to waste my time getting indignant about it either. I could, like you I suppose, get puffed up with righteous indignation every time the government panders to the lowest common denominator and sells lies and slogans to garner public support after making their decisions… but I just don’t have the energy I guess. Things have been this way for a very very long time and I don’t see them changing so the best thing I can do IMO is stay informed… look for the underlying truth and make my decisions from there come voting day. I don’t believe Bush led us to an ‘unnecessary war’ (though I think we probably disagree on what necessary is), that is YOUR judgment and as I said I think it’s a conclusion that an intelligent person could well come to. I said I believed the war was in our interests, that is MY judgment, that Bush sold it to the public with lies doesn’t detract from my belief that it was for the best. I wish our president hadn’t lied… but that doesn’t change anything really.
I was speaking in generalities, fine… some of you are justifiably outraged at our president’s lies… good for you. I wonder if you’ve ever voted for an incumbent. ;> But do forgive me if I see that there are SOME out there who were screeching about this presidency from day one and haven’t stopped since, so I have very little reason to believe righteous outrage about his lies regarding Iraq are their motivation. There were conservatives who were wailing and gnashing teeth from the moment Clinton took his oath and I wasn’t inclined to think they were being impartial when Waco, Monica, Whitewater, Haiti, Bosnia happened either.
Drivel.
So, all of these were possible options which mean that the war of aggression wasn’t necessary:
Option One: “Go back to supporting Saddam” – You fight a war against the guy and spend ten years trying to squeeze him out of power because your once reliable lap dog lost the plot and became unstable and now you want to play footsie again. A somewhat bizarre and not entirely reliable tactic, I suggest.
Option Two: “Continue to prop up the House of Saud” – well spotted! Trouble is many of the locals have a different view and no one knows how long they can be held off at the Pass. Which is why US.plc needed a Plan B urgently. And it’s also why Bush declared the intention to leave Saudi ASAP within two weeks of Saddam’s demise. It ain’t healthy for the US to remain there, even if it could.
Option Three: “Subsidized the hell out of our own oil industry” – If you were to even glimpse the summary of the Cheney Plan you’d understand that the US cannot meet need from within. Indeed, by 2020 two thirds of US oil will come from overseas. Hence the need, according to Cheney, to diversify now.
It was about oil, it continues to be about oil and the free flow of oil will always be the life blood of this capitalist empire and its trading partners.
“With the American public fixated on the threat of terrorism, however, the Administration is understandably reluctant to portray its foreign policy as related primarily to the protection of oil supplies. Thus the third reason for the merger of the war against terrorism and struggle for oil: to provide the White House with a convenient rationale for extending U.S. military involvement into areas that are of concern to Washington primarily because of their role in supplying energy to the United States.” - succinctly put!
Other posters have pointed this out, but allow me to join the chorus: minty, this is one of the stupidist things I’ve ever seen you post on these message boards. Osama didn’t start planning 9-11 on inauguration day, and it’s just a matter of chance that it didn’t happen on Clinton’s watch.
Seriously. What Clinton policy would have prevented 9-11? How and when did Bush alter that policy to make us more vulnerable?
London_Calling: Please. If liberating Iraq was about nothing but (or at least primarily about) oil, the US could have simply called for the lifting of sanctions. Indeed, given that there was plenty of support on the left and in the UN for precisely that – have you forgotten the constant bleating that the sanctions were starving Iraqi children? – such a move would have been painted as multilateral, nonpartisan and humanitarian. And it would have been a lot cheaper than going to war.
Who needs the oil dollars more, us or Saddam? I’d have to say Saddam. Saddam is what you call a “motivated seller.” And oil is a global commodity, so even if Saddam refused to sell to the US, he would be selling to other countries, which would increase the amount of oil available to the US from other sources.
Again: bullshit. Do tell us what Clinton policy would have prevented 9-11. Don’t give me self-serving commentary made after the fact about what Clinton would have liked to have done – TELL ME WHAT HE DID.
Diogenes the CynicI will add this to your post: They didn’t carry it out until a halfwit that had a death wish for Saddam was there, :sigh: everything would have been easier if Orrin Hatch had not spilled the beans!
So, we got Osama’s base in Afghanistan, IMO It was Osama’s wish that the US get Saddam, I still maintain we just did his bidding, he just did not count that we could figure out so soon that he (Osama) was the culprit in 9/11. Still, Osama did read Bush perfectly: the preplanned target of him was going to get it in the end.
