I was also posting actively in the timeframe leading up to the invasion. I never bought the argument that Iraq represented an imminent threat. But I wasn’t so sure about the WMD arguments.
Why? Only because Bush and his administration stated such so confidently. I was truly naive enough to believe they wouldn’t lie through their teeth (and cynical enough to suggest that if they didn’t find any, they would plant some, because I sincerely didn’t think they would take the chance of getting caught with their pants down).
To answer the OP directly, I don’t think there was any chance in hell that the US would have proceeded with the Iraq invasion if the public was informed of the evidence used to support the justification for war. But when the administration tells us otherwise, and tells us that they can’t tell us how they know without compromising US interests, what are we to do?
First, rely on the media, which failed miserably. Second, rely on the American public to throw the bums out. The potential for failure here still remains.
This was about where I was. Actually, I wasn’t naive about BushCo lying in the sense that I didn’t think they would actually do it if they could get away with it, since they had already demonstrated over and over a willingness to do this. (I pointed this out profusely in the threads and was even taken to task at least once, I believe, for being willing to believe Saddam Hussein over our president. My response was that neither had an ounce of credibility and thus I didn’t believe either one of them and all that we had to go on was the actual evidence.)
However, because I thought it would be hard for BushCo to get away with lying, I figured they were only exaggerating. I.e., my best guess was that we were going to find enough WMDs so that they could say See!" but not enough to explain why Saddam was any sort of real threat to us…and certainly not an imminent one. (My best guess is that this is what they thought too…I.e., they really believed they would find some WMD so that they could justify the whole thing that way. I would almost believe that they had somehow convinced themselves that these WMD were a real threat except that this simply doesn’t fit with the fact that they apparently did so little to secure potential WMD sites…and sites known to contain nuclear materials because the IAEA had tagged those materials. For me, this is the single biggest piece of evidence suggesting that they knew that they were deceiving. Or, they were just incompetent beyond my wildest imaginations of how incompetent anyone can be. Nobody defending BushCo either here nor anywhere else has been able to even to begin to explain this to me.)
Oh, I never thought they believed them to be a real threat. I was convinced that Bush felt like he needed a strong military victory in response to 9-11 (before this upcoming election), and Afghanistan wasn’t smelling victorious enough. In the meantime, Bush, somehow, swallowed the neocon foriegn policy and adopted its PNAC manifesto. And I suspect they had little doubt that they could turn up some WMD in the process.
Oh ghod, how I utterly hate and dispise this philosophy. Y’know, it’s easier to just walk out of the store with the magazine tucked under your shirt then to wait in a long line at the checkout counter, but it sure as hell isn’t right. This trite phrase presupposes that one is guaranteed both the forgiveness and the permission if one does something questionable.
Czarcasm, I hope you didn’t take my use of that questionable phrase as MY opinion of justification the war. I was merely used it to emphasise a possible line of ‘reasoning’ I see the Bush Administration could easily have convinced themselves of.
This approach could almost certainly have been a consideration - of the ‘Plan F’ variety - even IF people don’t support us, even IF we are not viewed as liberators, even IF we get bogged down in certain areas, even IF we have daily causalities, even IF we find no weapons of mass destruction, even IF we can’t organise fair elections, at LEAST we can always fall back on the “Saddam was evil”. Oh, and then talk about domestic issues - jobs, economy, health etc… That’ll distract enough to allow the condemnations over the war to just fall silently away. It is always easier to find and sell justifiaction for actions after the fact. What’s done is done, and all that. It’s a sucker punch, but it works.
There was a clip of Bush on the news this morning, where he was ranting against Kerry for callin him out on the issue of the justification for going to war. I don’t remember what he said, but I shouted, “Liar!” at the TV. Did anyone see the clip, and can you tell me what Bush said?
Um… Well, the 9/11 report says there’s no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. There is no evidence of WMDs since 1991. Iraq was not an immediate threat to the U.S. The CIA reported a year ago that Saddam was not likely to be a thread unless he’s provoked.
But it IS always easier to gair forgivenes than permission. When you ask someone for permission to do something, the safe and easy thing for them to do is say “No” even if granting permission offers little or nothing in the way of difficulties or loss for the grantor. If presented with it as a fait accompli, most people will say “No big deal.”
This is the sense in which “it is always easier to get forgiveness than permission,” which generally applies to small things. I wouldn’t call starting a war a “small thing” so I don’t think the saying applies in this case. But I do think the Bush admin is stupid enough to fall for something along those lines.
I knew that it wasn’t your opinion, it’s just that I hate that phrase so much. I, too, can see where the Bush administration is mistaking “easy” for “right”. If all goes as it should, this mistake is going to bite them in the ass.
Right war, wrong time. The right time was in 1991. We should have finished the job when Iraqis were prepared to greet us as liberators and not oil-hungry occupiers. Even tho the international community would not have backed us, human lives are more important than international respect.
I would have been in favor of GWII for the same reasons as pushing forward in GWI (and really, we didnt accomplish much in that war other than showing the world we had a bigger penis than Saddam.) But even at the time of the invasion in GWII it was obvious to me that we didnt have enough troops to “win the peace”… we barely had enough troops to cover our flanks in an assault on open terrain, let alone police a heavily urbanized area.