That's funny. I seem to remember Colin Powell, before the war, addressing the UN, saying that they knew exactly where the weapons were. Kinda like a scene out of Alices Restaurant: "And they was using up all kinds of cop equipment that they had hanging around the police officer's station. They was taking plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smelling prints, and they took twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us. Took pictures of the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that's not to mention the aerial photography."
Has it occurred to you that 12 years of sanctions may have hindered Saddam's ability to develop "weapons of mass destruction", or do you think he may have held on to some of the "weapons of mass destruction" that the Reagan Administration sold him in the early 1980s?
Exactly. This is why I have not voted for a Democrat for President in over a decade. It is also why I will almost certainly vote for Kerry this year.
I will always vote for the candidate whose ideas most closely aligns with mine. A. If you want to raise my taxes fine but raise everyones taxes, don't take money from me and give it to someone else in a selected group. B. I want a strong military. That doesn't mean we have to spend $X more in funding but tell me what your plans are (what size of military, what the spending will be on, etc) C. I want a strong economy (tell me what you will do to make it better). As you can tell based on what I want I usually vote Repbublican due to my views on taxation and a strong military. On local officials I am all over the board since I typically know alot of the local and some of the state officials, and because I have a policy to never vote for judges trying to get re-elected (the incumbents who get re-elected tend to not change and get too comfortable). I'm not adverse to voting for Kerry (or any Democrat) but their views need to align closer with mine thant the person they are running against.
I don't think anyone has addressed this more than Houston's own Ron Paul. I've posted this before but it begs to be read. I'd paste it, but its pretty long. http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2003/cr071003.htm Theres a great quote in there where he says that today (and I'm paraphrasing from memory) we have the worst of both worlds, democrats who no longer care about social justice and republicans who no longer care about fiscal responsibility. I'd love to see the greens and libertarians get lots of protest votes and bring about more serious debate, especially on civil liberties issues, but voters are too complacent and uninformed, IMHO to turn their backs on the elephants and donkeys who have screwed them over with their short-sighted ideas and abandonment of principle.
Don't take this personally, but Ron Paul is an idiot and a terrible congressman. Just my opinion. Carry on.
I saw Arlo tour for that LP. He's great. Another quote: So we took the half-a-ton of garbage, put it in the back of a red VW microbus, took shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, and headen on toward the city dump. Well, we got there and there was a big sign and a chain across the dump sayin', "THIS DUMP IS CLOSED ON THANKSGIVING," and we'd never heard of a dump closed on Thanksgiving before, and with tears in our eyes, we drove off into the sunset lookin' for another place to put the garbage.
I'd still read his speech. He talks about the origins of the neo-con movement, Leo Strauss, co-opting Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, etc. Coming away from it, I felt it painted a picture of a revival of sorts of the Strauss vs. Marcuse intellectual war/ world view, which I personally find frightening. Ron Paul's views might be eccentric, but he's nevertheless a renegade in his own party and an independent thinker, and no friend to the religious right or the neo-cons.
My favorite was: And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL." And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."
Originally posted by andymoon So now y'all are going to try to use the WMD argument to implicate Syria?!? <b>Weren't many/most of the Fedayen streaming in from Syria? Is Syria really our friend?</b> Of course, the chemical and biological agents (since it has been proven that the nuclear claims were total fabrications) will not even be viable after a fairly short time. BTW, if Saddam DID hide his WMDs better than he hid himself, why haven't those that know about them come forward, now that Saddam is safely in custody? <b>I don't know about "total" fabrications. Didn't Saddam's own scientists admist to lying to Saddam about how far along the nuclear program was? Was our intel supposed to ferret out that internal deception? If Saddam could have survived being buried alive in the sand, he should have chosen that over a spider hole</b> Please explain again how you analyze information. <b>I try not to leap to conclusions. I try to anticipate the political agenda. I try to trust our leadership in grave matters. I don't believe for a minute that President Bush went after Saddam Hussein because he tried to kill his Dad. That is stupid beyond belief!</b>
http://www.geocities.com/iraqinfo/index.html?page=/iraqinfo/sanctions/sarticles3/imaginary.html The Imaginary Expulsions Journalists rewrite history of Iraqi weapons inspections By Hussein Ibish Time heals wounds, and can blur inconvenient facts. A plethora of anniversary reports in the U.S. media "reminded" the public that it had been one year since Iraqi President Saddam Hussein expelled U.N. weapons inspectors, leading to the December 1998 "Desert Fox" bombing campaign against Iraq. But Saddam Hussein's oft-invoked expulsion of the arms inspectors never took place. It was Richard Butler, head of the U.N. weapons inspection program known as UNSCOM, who voluntarily withdrew the inspectors from Iraq, giving President Bill Clinton a rationale for launching military strikes on Iraq. Butler claimed in a report to the U.N. on December 15 that obstruction from the Iraqi regime had made it impossible for his inspectors to effectively carry out their work. But as Barton Gellmann of the Washington Post (12/16/98) reported, "Clinton administration officials played a direct role in shaping Butler's text ...at secure facilities in the U.S. mission to the United Nations." In fact, Butler's report admitted that "the majority of the inspections of facilities and sites under the continuing monitoring system were carried out with Iraq's cooperation," but still concluded that the "commission is not able to conduct the substantive disarmament work mandated to it." With this confused explanation, Butler ordered all his weapons inspectors out of Iraq on December 15, and the next day the United States began airstrikes. The bombing ended on December 19, the day the House voted to impeach the president. But a year later this history seems to have disappeared down a memory hole. The Washington Post has misreported these facts--claiming that Iraq expelled the inspectors--at least four times in 1999, twice in major news stories (8/30/99, 11/16/99) and twice in opinion pieces by Fred Hiatt (1/10/99, 7/25/99), who's now the Post's editorial page editor. In spite of the Post having to print three letters during the year correcting the record (1/16/99, 9/16/99, 11/25/99), it continues to make the same mistake. The New York Times has also repeatedly reported that "Baghdad expelled the inspectors." (1/8/99; see also 4/16/99, 8/20/99, 10/28/99, 11/18/99, 12/17/99, 2/1/00). The latest time the paper made the error, on February 1, it ran a correction the next day, but none of the other instances have been corrected. Numerous U.S. papers have made the same error, including USA Today (12/9/99), the Chicago Tribune (12/18/99), Boston Globe (10/21/99), Washington Times (11/5/99) and Buffalo News (12/4/99). Television has hardly performed better: When Tim Russert, host of NBC's Meet the Press (12/19/99) interviewed Democratic rivals Al Gore and Bill Bradley on foreign policy, he began with this claim: "One year ago Saddam Hussein threw out all the inspectors who could find his chemical or nuclear capability--one year." CNN (12/2/99) quoted Butler as describing how his team had been "thrown out" of Iraq. Magazines ranging from the scholarly Foreign Affairs (11-12/99) to Newsweek (8/30/99) made the same erroneous claim. Newsweek added the wrinkle that "last year ... Moscow, Paris and Beijing virtually allied with Saddam Hussein to cast U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq." (In fact, all three had denounced Butler's decision to withdraw the inspectors--Agence France Presse, 12/16/98.) Perhaps more than any other source, AP spread the charge that Iraq expelled the inspectors to news organizations and the public far and wide. AP reported that "nearly a year [has passed] after President Saddam Hussein ordered an end to the program," (11/16/99) and referred to "Saddam Hussein's expulsion of U.N. weapons inspectors." (12/2/99) This fit of misreportage results from the fact that the actual course of events does not fit the moral economy of the standard U.S. media worldview. Saddam Hussein and Iraqis are presumed to be wholly at fault for tensions with the West; therefore if weapons inspectors left Iraq, they must have been expelled by Saddam. Facts that do not conform to these deeply held beliefs simply fade away for many American journalists and editors. And, of course, anniversary reports in major American media rarely if ever recalled the revelations that the U.S. had been using UNSCOM as a cover for hostile espionage operations aimed at overthrowing the Iraqi government (New Yorker, 4/5/99)--even though the subsequent history of UNSCOM's collapse is unintelligible without this crucial fact. To be sure, many reports have gotten the basic facts right. AP itself reported that "the year-long crisis with Iraq began when U.N. weapons inspectors departed a day before U.S. and British warplanes launched airstrikes to punish Baghdad for its failure to cooperate fully with their inspections." (AP Worldstream, 12/18/99) The New York Times has played it safe by saying that Iraq "thwarted" rather than expelled UNSCOM (8/15/99). The Minneapolis Star Tribune (11/28/99) correctly reported that "last December, chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler withdrew his team on grounds that lack of Iraqi cooperation made it impossible for UNSCOM to complete its work. The United States and Britain followed up with a brief bombing campaign." But with so many different reporters and news outlets getting the facts completely wrong, independently of one another and in the same fashion, it is hard to deny that history has to a disturbing extent been rewritten. END OF NEWS STORY I'm trying to find out more about the tenor of inspections from 90-91 on.
The Fedeyan are Iraqi paramilitary groups set up by Saddam. They didn't come from Syria but are native Iraqi forces. The intel was murky at best and considering and should've been treated more skeptically considering how serious an undertaking war is. Perhaps if the Admin. had taken more time to vette the intel we wouldn't be in the mess we are now. So GW Bush was just kidding when he said "He went after my daddy." as a reason to invade Iraq.
I have felt that this is where the fault line was: between those who are conservative because of their religious concerns and those who are conservative because of their economic concerns. The neocons, I would put in the latter category.
Originally posted by Sishir Chang The Fedeyan are Iraqi paramilitary groups set up by Saddam. They didn't come from Syria but are native Iraqi forces. <b>I don't believe that is correct. The Fedeyan are extra-Iraqi soldiers of fortune.</b> The intel was murky at best and considering and should've been treated more skeptically considering how serious an undertaking war is. Perhaps if the Admin. had taken more time to vette the intel we wouldn't be in the mess we are now. <b>Most intel is murky, I imagine. War abroad is serious, but terrorism in our homeland is even more serious.</b> So GW Bush was just kidding when he said "He went after my daddy." as a reason to invade Iraq. <b>An off-the-cuff remark does not an argument make. Did he ever indicate that as a reason in any of his public policy speeches about the possibility of toppling Saddam. I've checked and I can't find one.</b>
From Robert Novak Unaccountable but messianic WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas is an old-fashioned conservative and a loyal Republican who happens to be the current chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That's why his Landon Lecture last week at his alma mater, Kansas State University, is a remarkable document. While benefiting from the most highly classified information, he is expressing the concerns of ordinary conservatives and Republicans. The lecture paid sincere tribute to George W. Bush for the "courage to act" after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and in this election year Roberts is not sniping at the Republican president. Nevertheless, the former Marine officer from Dodge City, Kansas, is blunt in addressing two overriding problems in the war on terror: lack of accountability in the intelligence community and a messianic desire to recast the world in the American image. These are precisely the concerns I have heard all over the country from people who call themselves Republicans and are distraught about the U.S. adventure in Iraq. They ask questions. Who is responsible for the false forecast of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that was the immediate cause for war? Are we really intent on planting democracy throughout the Arab world? These skeptics are not about to vote for John Kerry for president, but they are very unhappy. Roberts, unlike the previous Republican Intelligence chairman (Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama), is not calling for CIA Director George Tenet's dismissal. But he showed in his Kansas State lecture that he is concerned about the lack of accountability on two major counts: "Almost three years after 9/11, no one in the intelligence community has been disciplined, let alone fired. Almost two years since the publication of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that declared Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was reconstituting his nuclear program, no one has been disciplined or fired." While not mentioning Tenet by name, Roberts nailed the director of Central Intelligence with this telling comment: "Rarely is any intelligence case a 'slam dunk.'" In Bob Woodward's new book "Plan of Attack," Tenet is quoted declaring weapons evidence in Iraq to be a "slam dunk." These are not complaints of a backbencher but the considered statements of a committee chairman whose long committee inquiry is due for completion this week. Roberts's broader criticism goes beyond intelligence failure to the U.S. mission planting the seeds of democracy on Arab soil. "In fighting the global war against terrorism," he said, "we need to restrain what are growing U.S. messianic instincts -- a sort of global social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy -- by force, if necessary." While stressing U.S. willingness "to use force unilaterally if necessary," he called it "time for some hard-headed assessment of American interests." Roberts has the sense of history that the Bush policymakers seem to lack. Dating back to his days as a Marine officer, he has studied the misadventures of Winston Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia in dealing with the same people who are proving so troublesome for the Americans more than 80 years later. As a loyal Republican and strong Bush supporter, Roberts is torn. His president is under incessant assault from Democrats seeking to leverage the public discontent with Iraq into a general election victory, and for this reason, Roberts comes to Bush's defense. In his Landon Lecture, he suggested "we may transform the world for the better" in fighting the war against terrorism. But Bush can be faulted for lack of interest in accountability and for succumbing to messianic pretensions of spreading democracy, even though Roberts does not single out the president. The questions remain whether any official ever will pay for the intelligence failures and whether the difficulty of nation building in Iraq is a lesson learned. Roberts is not alone among Republicans. The GOP's top two members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- Richard Lugar of Indiana and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska -- have their own misgivings. These Midwestern Republicans know their constituents are concerned about what has sent the nation into Iraq and what comes next. But how does George W. Bush adjust to these realities while fighting a shooting war and campaigning for re-election?
Hmmm. I must have missed that particular quote. Anyway, there was a thread a while back that asked if you vote for your candidate or against the other candidate. Most people went with the "lesser of the two evils" approach if I remember correctly. If that is indeed the case, then I don't think any of these so called disgruntled Republicans will vote for Kerry. Likewise, I don't think any Democrats will be changing their votes even if Kerry isn't exactly lighting their fire. Face it. This election is going to go down to the wire.
http://www.republicansforkerry.org/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/republicansforkerry04/ http://democrats.bushblog.us/ http://www.georgewbush.com/News/Read.aspx?ID=2355
