That’s because Clinton wasn’t president after 9/11, doofus. But isn’t it a shame that, had President Bush’s team not ignored Richard Clarke, we wouldn’t have had 9/11 and therefore wouldn’t be fighting a war in Iraq? (See? Straw men work both ways. Isn’t that fun?)
Except he hasn’t. He totally dismantled the team put together by President Clinton and VP Gore in order to fight terrorism in general and al Qaida specifically. He made up his own facts to bring about a war he wanted and ever since, has ignored al Qaida except as a shiny thing to dangle in front of everyone’s eyes. bin Laden is still at large, al Qaida continues its activities, and we have more terrorist activity in Iraq than when we got there. Yup. Mission accomplished.
I’m not here to win or lose, I’m just here to talk about things. Honestly there’s no point in me continually making the same argument over and over. I’ve said my piece and basically I don’t find any of your arguments particularly valid or compelling, at a certain point I just need to stop replying because you’re going to throw a million different variants of the same BS at me until I die of attrition. I don’t play that game. I don’t feel there is any shame in bowing out of a thread on my own terms.
You can feel what you want.
But this isn’t my life, it’s just a message board. I’m not losing sleep over you thinking you’ve “won.”
Does this mean we don’t get any support from this statement you made in post #162?
The converse of that is that you accept that Iraq was a threat to us. This is the kind of assertion that I tend to think of as demanding evidence-based support. But if you’re honorably bowing out of the thread, I guess we’ll have to be faster on the draw with a request for a cite the next time you make it.
Not to nit-pick with you, Finn, but he definitely had sand. Vast stockpiles of sand. We even knew where it was, somewhere “west, south, north and east of Baghdad”. Lots of it.
MartinHyde, apparently your beliefs on Realism are slightly…skewed, and don’t particularly match up to what a true realist would believe. If you take the writings from the Realist trinity of Thucydides, Morgenthau, and Machiavelli as canon, Bush royally screwed the pooch.
Scylla, could you explain what you mean by that, and provide a cite? Because if you mean that Bush’s 35% approval rating is higher than the lowest approval rating for any recent president, that doesn’t seem to be true at all, AFAICT.
Kimstu beat me to it, but I second, or third, the call for a cite from you, Scylla. A little searching finds secondary sources and claims to suggest that Clinton’s lowest approval rating was as low as 37% or 36%, but I couldn’t find any original source (or even secondary source that was particularly credible) to support this.
The sources I was able to find do suggest that such a trough was never even remotely approached in his second term.
Further, it seems that conservatives are doing quite a bit to lie and try to spin about Bush’s anvil-like approval ratings (see Media Matters for an example).
Oh no! A survey that included a sample with only 23.8% Republicans shows that Bush has a 35% approval rating! It’s the end of the world! Bush must REALLY be teh suxxorrs!!!11!
Actually, this page puts the president’s average recent approval rating at a little over 40%. CBS comes in with 35%, the lowest (not surprising thanks to the diminished Republican sample.)
Don’t get me wrong. I’m less than impressed with an average approval rating of 40%. I just think it’s unfair for CBS to use a less than representative sample of Republicans.
Well, if you are happy with Bush, I gotta say, I think we’ll just have to accept the fact that we’ll never get your vote. I desperately hope, anyway, that we never put up a candidate that would get your vote.
Twin], I apologize for my flip response earlier. It is unfortunate that the sample was so unrepresentative. Not to excuse this, but it was difficult to look at so many polls coming out in the past few years that were unrepresentative in the other direction. It is wrong in either case.
I gotta jump on this one. You didn’t read (or hear?) that specific quote when it happened. I guess you didn’t bother checking after the fact either. Have you ever read or checked anything? At any rate, why does it matter what you believe or disbelieve, since you’ve already said it’s OK for him to lie?
Gee. That sure doesn’t sound like the original “we’re gonna get ya, there’s nowhere to hide” rhetoric, does it?
Richard Clarke, Bush’s former counterterrorism chief, testified before the 9/11 commission and said that “by invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism.”
Bush I National Security Advisor Scowcroft Warned Iraq War Would Be Diversion From War On Terror. President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft: “But the central point is that any campaign against Iraq, whatever the strategy, cost and risks, is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism. Worse, there is a virtual consensus in the world against an attack on Iraq at this time. So long as that sentiment persists, it would require the U.S. to pursue a virtual go-it-alone strategy against Iraq, making any military operations correspondingly more difficult and expensive. The most serious cost, however, would be to the war on terrorism.
Dr. Rice in her public testimony discussing the role of Iraq in the war on terrorism stated “given that this was a global war on terror, should we look not just at Afghanistan but should we look at doing something against Iraq”
The Administration has not produced one shred of evidence that Iraq had an operational relationship with Al Qaeda, or that Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks on America.
In fact, a U.S. Army War College report said that the war in Iraq has been a diversion that has drained key resources from the more imminent War on Terror. USA Today reported that “in 2002, troops from the 5th Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq.” Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) confirmed this, noting in February of 2002; a senior military commander told him “We are moving military and intelligence personnel and resources out of Afghanistan to get ready for a future war in Iraq.”
According to Bush - Concerns about abuse at Guantanamo are based on allegations made by “people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble [sic].” President Bush (05/31/05)
According to the FBI - Reports of abuse are not based on allegations by detainees but “accounts by agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The FBI agents wrote in memorandum that “they had seen female interrogators forcibly squeeze male prisoners’ genitals, and that they had witnessed other detainees stripped and shackled low to the floor for many hours.” Nevertheless, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said military interrogators know “that any detainees [should] be treated in a humane way, and they have been.”
But you know what? I know none of this makes a bit of difference to you, so just fuck off.
