i am not an advocate of withdrawl just quite yet, but I am an advocate of "changing the course". it's so obvious that "staying the course" is going to make things worse and worse....
Have any of you ever spoken to the people who lived in this country? Or in Iran or Russia? or any of the other places you love to quote or bash America for? I have and the overwhelming consensus is that life pretty much sucked there under the oppressive regimes. I have a good friend from Iran who still has family there and as a result travels there several times a year for visits. According to him the Shaw is a crazy SOB who abuses his power and rules the people by fear. Because if you are just getting your info from blog spots written by the ilk of Glenn Greenwald then you are not looking at things objectively but rather emotionally and narrowly. Rule #1: Never trust polls that you are not able to see how the data was gathered / compiled. Rule #2: Don't let yourself be sucked into the ramblings of people who cite these polls as fact to back up their political agendas. (and yes that goes both sides liberal / republicans)
I'll be damned if we didn't have a 'Iraq Body Count" thread here at one time. Guess it got scrubbed with all of the other wonderful Iraq war threads. Report Shows US Invasion, Occupation of Iraq Left 1 Million Dead Joachim Guilliard, the author of the Iraq portion of the study, told Truthout that the new study relied heavily on extrapolations from a previous study published in the prestigious Lancet medical journal, which put Iraq's numbers at 655,000, but the study was published in 2006 and is now dramatically out of date. The report, produced as a collaborative effort between Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, shows that at least 1.3 million lives were lost in the three countries it surveyed, from the onset of wars following September 11, 2001. The report notes, however, that its numbers are a conservative estimate, and that the total number of people killed in the three countries "could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely." the report
Does this death toll call into question Hillary Clinton's judgment? She did vote in favor of the Iraq war.
The main legacy of the catastrophic disaster known as the Bush (43) administration. Ashamed to admit it but I voted for the guy.
Invading a country for a wrong reason is something ,could be justified somehow But later intentionally dismentalting a country and handling it to Iran is something else
its b.c we read about it online and see on TV. any iraq veteran will not be flippant about this stuff. were dehumanized so we can make jokes and our monkey sphere makes us less sorry about iraqis being dead. 3000 americans died and look what we did to ourselves. how would we feel about 30k americans dying? or 300k? also rmr that iraq lost about 3% of its population which would be like 10 million americans dying? how would we feel then. people deny the holocaust happened and that was like millions of ppl. on the bright side it shows humans can move past terrible things and make a joke out of it.
I don't know Trader_Jorge. Are you ashamed or embarrassed you were such an advocate and cheerleader for this criminal war?
Those who read the liberal/left press knew blow by blow how we were being misled. So not everyone was fooled. We thrashed it out day by day on this forum.
So then you would say yes, Hilary Clinton should be blamed for voting for the Iraq War. As to the misleading by Bush, Senate members saw much of the same intelligence. I can admit to being a fool for buying into what I was sold, but I only had access to what was filtered through the media. I wasn't a big online researcher at the time so I didn't really know about alternative news sources. A senator has no such excuse.
Keep in mind there's also a difference between the decision to go to war and the execution of that war. It's still (and always will be) unclear how the war would have gone had there been a larger attempt to get international support - especially within the Arab world - or to not demilitarize the Baath party, not put in puppet US leaders, etc. No doubt the intelligence was flawed and there was a rush to war - and Hillary was on the wrong side of that no matter how you look at it. But outside of WMDs, the end result as far as the chaos in the country was potentially as much a part of the execution as the decision itself.
Exactly. We missed our chance in '92. Everything subsequent that is used as rationale was dated - and ignores the sanctions Iraq was under in the interim that decimated the populace under the premise that internal unrest would unseat Saddam Hussein from within, in essence. It only served to entrench Hussein, who got even worse as a dictator and richer still at the expense of his people, who he was able to propagandize the U.S. into the "villians" responsible for their suffering. Cliff Notes version. To think that the Defense and State Departments of the Bush Administration had not grasped this at the time is mind-boggling. And to repeat a sentiment at the time more than 10 years old and certainly not accurate just leaves this whole mess even sorrier, the further we try to move away from and past it. Kind of puts what's attempting to happen with regards to Iran lately in a whole 'nother light.....
Not Obama. Just sayin'. I didn't care for it at the time either. Yes. There was a lot of other stuff going on with that vote, and I don't think you can conclude she thought it was a good idea just because she voted for it. But, that was a moment in history where this country could have used some genuine leadership and she didn't provide it. Though I think it's interesting that none of the other obvious candidates for President were in any position to have their votes or opinions on the Iraq War in 2002 recorded. In 2002, Rubio was a state rep, Rand Paul was an ophthalmologist, Ted Cruz worked for the DOJ, and Christie was a US Attorney. Only Jeb Bush was in a position of any renown.
You are completely off on this comment. Most people supported the troops, but there were many of us who disagreed with the invasion.
