they asked for more time....it had been roughly 10 years, B-Bob. 10 years of UN mandates calling for disarmament. and he snubbed his nose at those, just like he did the no-fly zones, where he repeatedly had iraqi aircraft engage US and UK forces.
Um, please read the rest of my post, MM. You are a lucid writer and you have carefully considered the issue, but somehow hearing the same argument just one more time has not changed my own carefully considered view of the situation. On to all the good news, please.
sorry about that...you're right...i was saying this was old and tired months ago. of course, there's 5 new threads about it everyday.
T_J, just a couple points to clarify your lies. - no one is questioning the motivations of our servicemen and women. you continue to spread this lie over and over hoping that it will stick. People are questioning the leadership, not the servicemen. This is a favorite propaganda tatic of the crazy-neo-cons like you, equate critisim of the administration with being against the troops and being unpatriotic. It is a bold-faced lie. - The War on Terror has little to do with our operations in Iraq. For more than a year, Bush has framed Iraq as part of the "war on terror." And for more than a year, he has produced no evidence for that claim. No evidence of a link between Iraq and 9/11. No evidence of an affinity between Saddam Hussein's secular tyranny and the fundamentalists of al-Qaida. No evidence of a terrorist presence in Iraq greater than in other Arab or Muslim countries. No evidence that Iraq offered weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. - You really need to stop being a puppet of the administration. Your shifting stance is an exact clone of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz shifting justifications for the war. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...ode=&contentId=A62681-2003Sep11¬Found=true - You now claim that we aren't looking for WMD and we don't need to find any to justify the war? This goes against EVERYTHING Bush&Co. said before the war 8 March, 2003. George Bush: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." 5 February, 2003. Colin Powell: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan." 5 February, 2003. Colin Powell: "One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file ... is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents ... The trucks and train-cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection ... in a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War." These statements and others totally disarms your argument. Disarm. that is the word used by Bush over and over in his pleas for war. If we don't have to find anything, what were we disarming?
This might be the best post in this thread. Having only recently ventured into the Debate and Discussion forum, I'm learning that it is a place for people who enjoy angrily responding to people they don't agree with. A debate is impossible because the most popular topics circulate around the war in Iraq, a subject most people who follow current events have formed strong opinions on long ago. So instead of debate and discussion, we're getting angry, knee jerk reaction posts in answer to some other post that the poster disagrees with. Even when someone is making a good point, it falls on deaf ears because many posters won't even acknowledge that the poster made a good point since doing so would hurt their own argument and point of view. So basically it seems like a waste of time to post in this forum unless you're looking for a place to vent.
B-Bob's post, addresses this I believe. The burdon was on Saddam. Saddam gave a lengthy tome which wasn't deemed to be sufficient. The inspectors went in, and were working. They said that progress was made, asked for more time. They were cut off, and the war happened.
... and it wasn't supposed to be a Scavenger Hunt. Show us the stuff and don't intimidate your scientists ahead of our visits.
So, the war's back to being about WMD? Or is it 9/11? Or is it just our good hearts that wanted the Iraqis free?
why must it be about only one thing? Disarm Iraq, depsoe Saddam, free a nation, instill democracy in the heart of middle east, change the destructive dynamic of 50 years of Arab/Israeli relations-it's all good, unless you're Howard Dean!
Me too, just as I'm happy about the Iraqi people being free from the horrible rule of Saddam. It's just that this argument rings hollow to me based on our inaction in places like Rwanda, not to mention the opposition by many conservatives to our action in Kosovo. Fact of the matter is that the real bases for the war have been proved tenuous up to this point. Now, waiting for those to say I'm estatic about Saddam being caught. Luckily, most've them are on my ignore list.
Yes, over the course of that time, different things were done. It wasn't as if we just waited for 10 years. The processs was still going on until some people felt the need to go to war. Apparently the only part of the process that needed to be resolved in the end was the verification that he didn't have WMD's.
Ask your President. Pre-war, it was all about WMD and their threat to the USA. Since then, it's been an ever changing story. Many Americans are asking "why", and it is a perfectly legitimate question.
Is it criminal that it took an attack on our own soil to rattle our perspective? Also, Clinton had 8 years to do something. Bush is presiding over an unprecedented attack on our soil. He waited at least four months for the UN to get their stuff together. They couldn't or didn't. I'm tempted but I won't insult you back...
Well, if you need that itch scratched, you can view basso's new thread in which a "democrat" questions the patriotism of the entire democratic party and declares that any sane and decent human being will vote for GWB. It's a real hoot. I didn't actually finish it because the first half of the article was so effective that it convinced me to never again read anything (other than press releases from the white house). It convinced me to stop thinking for myself from now on. Feels nice, actually. ... Let's see here... wow, daytime TV doesn't look so bad after all.
You sir, have officially surpassed Feynman as the funniest physicist I have never met. Of course, that was a low bar as I didn't think his book was all that funny, but still... My 2 cents on the issue, or whatever the issue was that this thread was careening itself into five minutes ago in a Heisenbergian sense: It's all well and good to sit around and pat ourselves on the back about having done the morally correct thing and liberating people. No doubt, that is what happened. However, since the "but-for" cause of our action wasn't any moral realization; rather it was strategic action that was undertaken in the cause of what was perceived by GWB and co. to be the national interest. We may have done the morally right thing, but not because it was morally right, but because Saddam had outlived his usefulness. It was fine of him to kill and murder back in the day when we were worried about Iran and the Soviets, so we let him do it. Then, the tables turned and he became a problem, so he became expendable, and was perceived as a threat. Now, it turns out that the threat wasn't as big a threat as we had thought, so the moral justifications come into play (spare me the fact that GWB mentioned human rights for 1 or 2 paragraphs in the State of the Union, he covered his bases, but everybody knows that that wasn't the hook going in-- for him or for us.) Now, the moral justification is undoubtedly a good one. And its great to look back and speculate, but it is of limited import to us on a going forward basis. We obviously haven't declared a new paradigm where all morally corrupt, repressive regimes had better watch out, or we will come get them. Rather, we continue to act in the same self-interested way: We turn a blind eye to murderous thug Islam Karimov, dictator of Uzbekistan, as long as he lets us use his airbases and says the right things about islamic terror (exactly what we did with Hussein in the 80's); Mugabe is no strategic threat at all, so we issue some proclamations and let him go on killing and raping and doing whatever he does. Even in the middle east, despite making a few rumblings for democracy, we let the Mafiosos who run the house of Saud, and their Islamist henchman and "president for life" Mubarak have free rein as long as they do and say the right things. The moral justification is fine to discuss in a post hoc sense, as long as its taken for what it is: post hoc, so it shouldn't be used to justify ex ante behavior.
