What's the conservative view on Iraq?

Great Debates
41

Many of your quotes are from 1998, and the only one from later than 2002 is from someone who was no longer in the government, and is based on information from 1998. So they are worthless. All the quotes from 2002 are based on the same phony lies from Curveball, and the same wrong guesses from the CIA.

Read my earlier post. I don’t blame anyone for assuming that Saddam had WMDs before 2003, although Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and others lied about his ties to al Qaeda, and spoke about WMDs as if their presence in Iraq was a fact, rather than their best guess.

But after the UN inspectors went back into Iraq in November of 2002, they quickly established that the CIA was wrong, and that “Curveball” and his pals were liars. By March 7, 2003, when Hans Blix gave the report I cited to the UN Security Council, it was absolutely clear that Iraq posed no threat to the US.

And that is why Bush reneged on his promise to go back to the UN for a resolution to invade. Earlier, he had boasted that they had a saying in Texas about making people show their cards, and he vowed that he would go to the UN and force the countries opposing the invasion to do so publicly, as if the shame of it would prevent them from doing it. But after the UN inspectors had gone through every alleged WMD facility and found nothing but rust and cobwebs, the other countries were happy to oppose the invasion, and Bush knew he would lose. So he flat, fucking LIED, in writing, to Congress and said that in his solemn determination, nothing short of war would protect the US from Saddam’s pickup truck army. And now a million or so people are dead, and Iran has no counterweight in the region.

May Bush and Cheney burn in hell.

42

Ah, remember how when the CIA came out and told us Bush’s claims weren’t true?

We did a thread about that, but largely this tidbit got forgotten…

The defense ,at that time, was rather that Bush knew more than the CIA.

43

But, the “support for international terrorism” was also bullshit. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had a presence, but it was confined to Iraqi Kurdistan, the one part of the country which Hussein (thanks to U.S. and British efforts) did not control. (After the U.S. overthrew Hussein’s regime, Al-Qaeda in Iraq got out of that box.)

44

The intelligence from 1998 had not changed by 2002 and most of the people quoted felt that in the ensuing years things had gotten worse. It was not an absolute certainty that the CIA and the rest of the civilized world’s intelligence agencies were wrong. Blix had his opinions and the intelligence agencies had another opinion. Even Blix was not sure “We [the U.N.] had strong suspicions that some anthrax was still hidden, but we did not find the evidence to assert its existence.” Hans Blix 2004.
The reason Bush wanted another UN resolution was to appease Tony Blair, when it became apparent that the UN just wanted to issue resolutions and do nothing that effort was abandoned. The statement to congress before the war reflected the best intelligence the American government had at the time. I know the name George Bush cause some to people to lapse into irrational hatred but the truth is he was not superhuman and could only rely on the intelligence he possesed at the time. That evidence was a WMD program was ongoing. It is irrational to expect the president to know more about Iraqi weaponry than the generals in the Iraqi army who all thought there were stockpiles of WMD.

45

It is usually considered good form to read a thread before linking to it. That thread was about Iraq, Al Queda connections, not WMD. Try to keep up.

46

That article has absolutely nothing to do with Iraq and WMDs. And I’m still surprised how many people are still babbling this bullshit about Bush lying about WMDs. I guess the fact that Saddam had already used WMDs to massacre thousands of Kurds in Halabja is inconvenient and therefore to be ignored. And I also guess the fact that world leaders had been condemning Saddam for WMDs long before Bush is also inconvenient and therefore to be ignored.

Oh, and the fact that we did find WMDs in Iraq is also inconvenient and to be ignored.

Ya gotta love the hate-Bush-at-all-times-at-all-costs crowd. They are the modern day equivalent of the carnival sideshow and we don’t even have to buy a ticket to laugh at them.

47

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Unfortunately, there are more international terrorist organizations than Al-Queda. Iraq was known to be supporting a Kurdish terror group that targeted Turkey, as well as various Palestinian terror organizations such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Palestinian Liberation and the Arab Liberation Front . Iraq also hosted the international terrorists Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and Abdul Rahmin Yasin.
There was also sketchy intelligence before the war that Al Queda figures Abu Musad Zarquawi, and Ahmad Hikmat Shakir had left Afghanistan and were hiding in Iraq.
Iraq had been on the list of state sponsor of terrorism since 1979.

48

Oh for fucks sake, they on occasion found an artillery shell or three which had been misplaced or lost and whose effectivess had long since vanished, and that is WMD in Iraq. It’s telling that since 2003, Bushm Blair, Rice and Rumsfeld have each published memoairs and each have admitted that no WMDs were found. Even they were not stupid enough to cite the occasional artillery shell as an example of WMD, which they would have done if there had been even the rumor of a chance of making that argument stick.:rolleyes:

49

But you’re missing the important issue. It’s not a question of whether Iraq ever had WMD programs. Nobody’s denying Saddam had them before 1991 (as evidenced by the Halabja attacks in 1988). The issue in 2003 was whether Iraq had current WMD programs. The article you linked to talks about “Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained” not any current production.

Attacking Iraq in 2003 because of WMD’s was the equivalent of attacking Germany in 1957 because of Auschwitz.

50

That’s because neo-cons’ foreign policy is borrowed from liberalism.

Nevermind modern neoconservatives’ mugging reality themselves in regards to WMD, Lincoln, etc.

Anyway, you can’t call the Iraq War a conservative adventure just because Republicans decided to borrow from leftism.

51

Yes, it was. I’ll ignore your assertion that no civilized country disagreed with the CIA, but by March 2003, it was absolutely certain that the CIA was wrong, because every site they had identified as a WMD facility had been thoroughly checked. None of them contained any evidence of WMD activity.

That didn’t prove that Iraq was completely WMD free, because no intelligent person, let alone a scientist like Blix, would ever say that it was impossible to hide a vial of anthrax in a country the size of Iraq.

But we didn’t invade Iraq over a vial of anthrax, or a bottle of bleach that could be thrown in someone’s eyes, or some rusty mustard gas shells that were long past their expiration date. Bush gave speech after speech about Iran’s nuclear threat, and how the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud. And by the time he invaded, it was absolutely clear that there was no such threat.

My hatred of Bush is completely rational. I never admired him, but I didn’t hate him before he deliberately lied us into a miserable war that caused millions to suffer and/or die, and bankrupted the country.

And if he didn’t know he was wrong, it’s his own fault, because I and millions of other Americans knew he was wrong. I very clearly remember watching his State of the Union address in 2003 with my jaw dropping, because almost everything Bush said that evening — uranium from Africa, aluminum tubes for centrifuges, etc. — had been refuted a couple of hours earlier that same day. Chief UN nuclear weapons inspector Mohammed ElBaradei gave a progress report on the WMD inspections on that day’s PBS Newshour, and said that they had checked out the African uranium and the aluminum tubes, and had concluded they were false reports.

So I’m sitting in my underwear in Oregon knowing this stuff, and you’re telling me that the President of the US was unaware of it?

And that was in January 2003. By March, when Bush invaded, the inspectors had been in Iraq another seven weeks, and by then there was NO DOUBT that all of Bush’s hype was false. He knew it was false, and he kept pushing it anyway, and he lied to Congress about it, in writing.

May he burn in hell.

52

It is also considered good form to read the actual thread you are posting in, my dear puddleglum.

53

Almost everyone, even the anti-war people, thought there were WMDs. Remember that the public opinion at the time of the invasion was overwhelmingly in favor. Even the Clinton administration thought the WMDs were there.

Now, of course, Bush went to war over it and they weren’t there. So that’s on him. However, it’s 20-20 hindsight to claim that people should have had reason to think there weren’t WMDs.

Another thing people got wrong was what to be feared in Iraq. Most anti-war people mainly argued that it wouldn’t be worth it and that taking Baghdad would be too costly. No one foresaw the insurgency and how costly it would be to us.

54

No they didn’t. Not even the people behind the war believed that; our soldiers ignored armories and supposed WMD sites to secure what was really important to us; the Iraqi Oil Ministry. Anyone who wasn’t a fool knew from the start that Bush and friends were lying.

55

Yes, true. Most people thought he might still have an odd box of shells. Maybe even a hidden lab.

So what?

All countries have, it’s not a reason to go to war over!

This is of course where the fabricated connection to Al Qaida comes in.
Are you paying attention puddleglum?

It was used to spread the fear the Saddam might at *some point in the future * decide to hand over stuff to [scare quote]terrorists!!![/scare quote]

You do indeed have a very efficient propaganda machine.

Yes, yes we did!

Do the words “quagmire” and “second Vietnam” jog your memory?

56

Horseshit. I don’t blame people for believing the CIA when we had nothing else to go on, but once the UN inspectors were back in Iraq, their information was infinitely better. Read the report they wrote two weeks before Bush invaded, which I cited in my first post.

Except for those few people who had heard of Palestine. Or even Vietnam. Or who had seen The Princess Bride.

57

And you can’t call it a liberal adventure just because you don’t like it. And you missed the point Kristol was making when he said “a liberal who has been mugged by reality” - he was saying that reality had converted him from being a liberal to being a conservative.

The fact is the neo-conservatives identified themselves as conservatives. And they were part of the conservative establishment. So they may not agree with your definition of what conservatism should be but you can’t just wish them away.

58

Sure, no argument. As I’ve said, I believed there were WMD programs in Iraq.

But do you think I was basing my belief on evidence I had personally gathered or that I had agents in Iraq collecting intelligence for me? No, I based my belief on the fact that I trusted the President of the United States when he said that his agents had found evidence for him.

59

Well, thank goodness the government of Canada at the time refused to join the “coalition” to invade Iraq. I’m pretty confident that Prime Minister Jean Chrétien did not believe that Sadaam had the capability to deliver any WMD’s across the ocean, nor did he believe that Sadaam had significant contacts in the terrorist world. In other words, he did not believe the Bush administration’s propaganda, nor their claims that they knew “secret stuff” that they could not share with anyone, including their allies.

“No one foresaw the insurgency and how costly it would be”

Are you shitting us? Is this performance art? Even I foresaw that there would be an insurgency. Even I knew the initial cost estimate was a fairy tale. What I did not forsee was that the US would screw up the invasion and subsequent occupation as badly as they did. That took real skill.

60

I think Bolling’s statement translates to “we were wrong about going to war but I’m not going to accept that we were wrong” more then anything.