I would not want to sidetrack the thread on that point. My point is that the evidence is unclearbut, in any case, it is a lousy excuse for what is happening now. Lousy and pathetic. It just shows there is no good excuse if you have to resort to this one.
I think it’s a cocktail of the following (Mind you I don’t agree with the reasoning of all of them):
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Getting a new base in the ME so that we could remove our troops from SA.
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Establish a democratic nation in the ME to provide a model for others, have a friendly nation in the ME, have a base in the ME for ops into Iran and Syria, and have an alternative to SA oil.
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Give middle eastern jihadists hard local targets rather than US civilians. Draw them into a battle.
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Show our willingness to use force. We were perceived as pussies and Bush didn’t like that.
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Gain respect through fear.
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Kill the guy who tried to kill Bush’s daddy.
The stuff about WMD’s and humanitarianism was considered to be icing on the cake and plausible justification.
See, this is one of the reasons I don’t come into GD as often as I would like.
On one side, we’ve got folks trying to posit reasons for why the war was started. And on the other, we’ve got folks positing reasons why the war was bad, or downright illegal.
No problem.
The problem lies in the fact that many times, for example, in this thread, nobody on one side is willing to admit that Saddam was bad, and that his removal from power was a good thing. There are some immediate issues, but let us not forget that it took 40+ years for us to stop administering part of Germany after WWII.
Americans seem to have lost the idea of taking a long term look at things.
Re: Iraq attempt on GHB
My post is your cite.
The issue isn’t whether or not Saddam was bad or whether his removal from power was good, it’s whether or not these were the motivating factors in the war. Hell, I was/am for the war but I don’t think that Saddam being a sadistic dictator or WMDs were the real reason for war, just the proffered causus belli
I haven’t noticed anyone refusing to say that Saddam was evil. Have a cite?
Whether removing him is a net benefit to Iraq or not remains to be seen. If we bug out, and there is a civil war resulting in the slaughter of even more people than he killed, it might not be so hot, eh?
The real problem I have with your argument is why Bush didn’t use it. That Saddan was bad, and that he killed a lot of people was documented much better than the presence of WMDs. We could have had a debate as to whether it is the policy of the US to remove vile dictators. If it turned out that this is what the country supports, we’d have gone in for honest reasons.
But I suspect he knew very well he would not get support for that, so he pulled a bait and switch on us.
Peak oil. That’s the reason we’re there. Remember, Bushco is the oil industry. Not associated with the oil industry – IS the oil industry.
Cite: Peak Oil
We’ve had “10 years left of oil” since 1910. Every year proven reserves increases. Peak Oil is bunk.
As to the side issue of the attempted assassination of GB the First: the best reference to this would be an article by Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker magazine. Since this is a side issue, I’m not willing to track it down, my google skills are no better than yours.
However, to summarize: Mr. Hersh’s contention, and I find it plausible, is that the only real proof we have that such a plot was initiated and carried forward by Saddam was the sworn word of Kuwaiti Intelligence, who clearly have a “dog in the fight”.
If there is any one reason to doubt it beyond that, it is simply that Saddam could not possibly have expected to get away with it. Even had he pulled it off, he would surely have been blamed, regardless of evidence or the lack thereof. Frankly, I would be inclined to bet that if Saddam did, in fact, know of a plot to assassinate GW I he would have ratted it out, he had absolutly nothing to gain but a world of grief. Saddam was evil, not stupid, you confuse those characteristics at your peril.
The assassination attempt has entered the mythology of Iraq, and will not removed short of a massive program of pre-frontal lobotomy.
As Mark Twain remarked “Truth is mighty, and will always prevail. And there is nothing wrong with that, except that it just ain’t so.”
Yeah…the supply is infinite! :rolleyes:
And, note that even if one believes that the ends justify the means (which I think is sort of hard to defend if you believe in a free and open democracy…Why don’t we just make Bush dictator then?!?), another problem is that bad means tend to corrupt the ends. So, the fact that the way we went about this was so underhanded has angered much of the world at us (including many of our allies), has given other nations a ready-made pretext to invade countries that they find threatening, has recruited more terrorists to the cause, and has made our goals and mission in Iraq so confused that it is very challenging to mold the post-war Iraq into a place that will really be a Middle East model for democracy, human rights, etc.
Did I say that? Is that your defense of Peak Oil?
Fortunately, you don’t have to as AZCowboy already did above:
Scorecard time:
-no urgent threat of WMDs after all, or even any so far
-no links to 9/11 or any terrorism on American soil since 1993 when Clinton apparently bombed the inclination out of them
-we did exactly what Al Qaeda predicted, hoped, promised we’d do, which was occupy an oil rich Middle Eastern nation, expose our troops to harrasment and murder, provide a platform for propaganda beyond what they’d ever had before to confront hte Americans directly in an ongoing way, inflaming radicals and helping pro-Al Qaeda groups spring up around the world
-While Saddam is thankfully gone, we did it in such a way that we depleted our moral and financial capital, went in without regard for any of the plans experts had devised to make the occupation go smoothly and the country get back up and running quickly
-We undeniably pulled tons of people off the job of hunting Al Qaeda to take down Iraq, undeniably have and will spend more money on Iraq than we’ve spent on the defense of our own homeland, undeniably have hurt the war on terror elsewhere
-Iraq looks inevitably set to be just another chaotic, Islamic state, no matter what we do: yet another breeding ground for radical Islam where before we had a pretty much neutralized and contained secular state
So, in summation, was Iraq worth it for the war on terrorism? Clearly, it was a big misstep. Where once there was only a quelled Saddam, now there are enemies crawling all over it: some old egging them on, but mostly new ones we didn’t have to worry about before. You can say anything about these people you want: they are indeed thugs. But that’s exactly the point: we rushed to bicker with new thugs where before they had nothing much to do with us, and where before we were focused on the actual threats of anti-American terror. THOSE people are laughing in glee at the fact that we’re running around Iraq making pronouncements about how all these thugs are enemies of freedom, wasting time we could have spent dealing with existing thugs instead of inspiring countless more.
Al Qaeda sees this fight as one that will take a century of manuevering. They are patient, strategic, and more an ideology than any central person that we can hit and kill. And so far, with Iraq, we’ve fallen right into their hands.
Apos That post has nothing to do with the topic. It isn’t a thread about whether the war is/was justified, it’s a thread asking about the motivations of the Bush administration.
Well, what you seemed to say is that people have been saying we’d reach the peak (or run out or whatever) for a long time and it hasn’t happened so therefore you conclude that the arguments regarding peak oil are bunk.
Now, I’ll admit that I haven’t followed the zillions of the threads on peak oil that have been around over the last several months (mainly because I believe [although there is no evidence this Administration does] that we may have to wean ourselves of oil for environmental reasons before its running out becomes a big issue). But, I hardly find it a compelling argument that because people have been talking about running out of oil for a while and it hasn’t happened yet, there is no reason to believe we are going to reach the peak anytime soon. This argument only seems trustworthy if you believe that the amount of oil is infinite…Or if you have compelling arguments of why the finite amount that exists is such that we aren’t yet near peak production. (And your interpretation about what has happened in the past in regards to such claims hardly qualifies as a compelling argument to this effect in my book.)
So, in other words, I truly don’t really have a “horse” in the “Peak Oil” race but you clearly do and your arguments for your claim put forward so far are weak to the point of being basically non-existent.
At any rate, this is all pretty much of a hijack. Because we know, e.g., from their desires to get their hands on ANWR, that this Administration is quite obsessed with the idea of getting cheap dependable oil resources whether or not we are reaching peak oil.
From the transcript:
“And I think, given our exceedingly hostile relationship with Iraq at the time – this is, after all, a place that tried to assassinate an American president, was still shooting at our planes in the no-fly zone – it was a reasonable question to ask whether, indeed, Iraq might have been behind this.” (bolding mine)
I don’t think so. The USA unilaterally extended them some years after the war. It’s this extension which wasn’t recognized by other countries, except the UK.
Is there a good reason why you thought that I wanted a cite for what your thoughts are?
:rolleyes:
I’d read about this stuff, but there’s also talk about some missiles being fired at a US jet that had GHWB on it.
came across this a couple of months ago, doesn’t cover the entire landscape but what it does see it colours well, imo - albeit 15 months beyond being actual ‘news’
Extract from The Nation article 'The New ‘Great Game’
by LUTZ KLEVEMAN Feb 2004
"With potential oil production of up to 4.7 million barrels per day by 2010, the Caspian region has become crucial to the US policy of “diversifying energy supply.” The other major supplier is the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea, where both the Clinton and the Bush administrations have vigorously developed US oil interests and strengthened ties with corrupt West African regimes. The strategy of supply diversification, originally designed after the 1973 oil shock, is designed to wean America off its dependence on the Arab-dominated OPEC cartel, which has been using its near-monopoly position as pawn and leverage against industrialized countries. As global oil consumption keeps surging and many oil wells outside the Middle East are nearing depletion, OPEC is in the long run going to expand its share of the world market even further. At the same time, the United States will have to import more than two-thirds of its total energy needs by 2020, mostly from the volatile Middle East.
Many people in Washington are particularly uncomfortable with the growing power of Saudi Arabia, whose terror ties have been exposed since the September 11 terror attacks. As the recent bombings in Riyadh have shown, there is a growing risk that radical Islamist groups will topple the corrupt Saud dynasty, only to then stop the flow of oil to “infidels.” The consequences of 8 million barrels of oil–10 percent of global production–disappearing from the world markets overnight would be disastrous. Even without any such anti-Western revolution, the Saudi petrol is already, as it were, ideologically contaminated. To stave off political turmoil, the regime in Riyadh funds the radical Islamic Wahhabi sect, many of whose preachers call for terror against Americans around the world. "
Full article - not recommended for those with short attention spans
While the year we reach “peak oil” can be debated, that such a peak exists is not disputed. The US domestic peak was crossed in the 70s. Over the next couple of decades, our dependence on foriegn supplies significantly increases. The military might of the US relies on oil, and in a related manner, so does our power and influence.
A quick study of our global reserves will quickly lead you to the ME, particulary the Gulf Region, where two thirds of the reserves call home.
There is a reason we consider the Saudi Royal Family friends. If they fell from power, we wouldn’t like the replacement. But more important, they wouldn’t like us.
Before 43 took office, the threat of fundamentalists destabilizing the government in Saudi Arabia was real and recognized. And that thought leads to some ugly scenarios. SA is off limits. Imagine a live CNN broadcast of US soldiers liberating Mecca. Trust me, it ain’t pretty.
The neocons’ fear of Islamic fundamentalism interfering with the free flow of oil is well documented from the last decade through PNAC. Many of the PNAC principles now run foreign policy in the White House (excepting Dr. Rice, or course).
Imagine the anger and raw human desire for revenge Bush must have felt on 9-11. Imagine the incredulity in the White House when they learned shortly thereafter that most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. What would you have done?
Oh, and thanks, leander. I’m…speechless. I’m not sure how I missed it the first time (watching the replay), and spelling really counts when using the find function! I thought the whole shebang was put to rest more than a decade ago…
And on preview, I see London_Calling beat me to the punch.