Well, I agree with posters about five entries back, so ignore that first sentance. Apologies for bad spelling and missing characters, as well. I was trying to hold a conversation while typing it…multitasking is not my forte, as my posts generally reveal.
Politically, its seems a bit odd to try to share the blame while simultaneously denying that there is anything to be blamed about.
I’m a little surprised to hear that so many of you and your friends were quite sure that there were no WMD, particularly say, at the time that Congress voted in October of 2002 (as opposed to March 2003 after the inspectors had been in for several months). I would say that the general feeling on this board amongst those of us against the war is that it was quite possible, if not likely, that some WMD (chemical or biological) would be found. We were skeptical that they would amount to that much though and just didn’t feel the case was made that this constituted an imminent threat…And, in fact, felt that the threat of such weapons getting into terrorist hands would probably be greater rather than lesser if we invaded. (If we knew how badly the potential weapons sites were going to be secured, I would have changed “probably” to “almost surely”!)
Well, I disagree that there is no other practical interpretation. AZCowboy has given one and it has the advantage of actually coinciding with what people like Clinton and Kerry actually said at the time. Now, there are aspects of it what they did that I don’t like personally: I think they put too much faith on Bush acting in good faith and they overstated the seriousness of the threat we potentially faced from Saddam even if he did have some WMD. And, there was probably some political aspects that worked into this. (There were, of course, strong political aspects with the whole timing of the resolution itself right before the midterm elections.)
But, I fundamentally disagree that you are voting “to go to war” when you are voting for a resolution that authorizes the use of force as a last resort, particularly when it has been emphasized by the President that this is needed in order to give him the strongest hand to negotiate and is the best chance to prevent war.
It simply lets the president off too easy when he can claim that the resolution is about keeping the peace and then can later claim that it was a vote for war. He can’t have it both ways.
I agree 100%
It’s the honest truth, all the same. It could be that many of my colleagues are foreign-born-and-raised, and don’t find the idea of US Imperialism (or geopolitics, or whatever you want to call it) all that bizarre or even unexpected. Since I take nothing that politicians say for granted, I was myself always asking “Why are they really doing this?” My boss and I woulds have fun discussions over lunch trying to figure it out: Why does Bush want to invade Iraq? What is it he’s not telling us?" It honestly never occurred to us that he was being wholly truthful, so the only thing to debate was how much he was distorting, and what the rationale for distortion might be. We kept coming back to the same conclusions: Oil. Actually, he immediately figured it was simply oil, and I balked at that initially, supposing that was such a pathetically obvious reason Bush would have to have super-king-sized balls to actually go for it. I came around, eventually, since there was no other plausible reason.