so, to this we've come. desperate to discredit or minimize any possible accomplishment by the Bush administration the left has adopted the morally repugnant view that Saddam was "forthcoming" during his 12 years of defying UN resolutions (I'm sure the Kurds, Shias, and Marsh Arabs he slaughtered would beg to differ, if they were only alive), that the UN sanctions themselves were somehow responsible for Saddam's butchery, and that genocide is impossible to distinguish from typical Isalmic burial practice. I'll see giddy's "Vomit" and raise him a "Sickening," "Reprehensible" and "Morally Bankrupt." Teddy Kennedy, meet your constituency.
First of all, this comes from an independant, not "the left" as you claim. Second, how can you claim that he was not forthcoming, given the facts? (remember that the facts include all of the bad "intelligence" that convinced everyone that Saddam had WMDs) Third, he did his murdering of the "Kurds, Shias, and Marsh Arabs" BEFORE '91, when we still supported and armed him, not during the 12 years you mention. Your inability to face facts is the telling tale here.
Isn't that really just about the difference between automatic and manual transmission? I call myself a moderate because neither party really satisfies me, but I am forced to choose so I almost always choose Republican although not automatically.
Go back and read the 2003 SOTU. I think you'll be surprised. Very little of it deals with nuclear WMDs. BTW, I understood that we didn't go all the way to Baghdad in 1991 because we had made a promise to the Saudis NOT TO . Why do I get the feeling that GWB is making up for a lot or the mistakes of previous US foreign policy both his father's (acknowledged even by his critics) and Clinton's yet still only gets roundly criticized?
The other issue of this WMD issue (nuclear in particular) that has gone unexamined is this: weren't Saddam's own scientists admittedly lying to him that a program was farther along than was actually true... in order to protect their own hides. How was anyone's intel supposed to see through that?
Even though I opposed the invasion I was willing to concede that the removal of Saddam and an installation of a democratic government a good thing. After this week I'm not so sure about that either. Many of the Shiites who are supposed to be so greatful about us removing Saddam are shooting us now. Sanctions and murders by Saddam's regime may have ended once we stepped in but now we're the ones killing Iraqis. Estimates out of Fallujah have said around 600 Iraqis killed just last week. It might be comforting to say that this is totally different those killed in '88 and '91 were killed because they were fighting against a dictatorial regime while those killed now are fighting against us. I'm having a hard time feeling good about that. I fear that years from now people may be digging up mass graves filled with Iraqis killed by us.
OK, let's gear up and go after these guys... I would put Sudan at the top of the list... _______________ Brazil: Recently, hundreds of Awá have been murdered and evicted from their traditional lands by ranchers. They are a nomadic tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Northern Amazon. A judge will shortly decide whether a critical area of land, currently occupied by ranchers, will be returned to them. Peru: Three reserves are set aside for Indians in south-east Peru. Loggers are moving in, presenting the risk of violent clashes and the spreading of diseases to the tribal people which, to them, are often fatal. Botswana: The Gana and Gwi 'Bushmen' tribes have been brutally evicted. Many believe this action was taken because of the discovery of diamonds on their land. Ivory Coast: Following the elections in late 2000, government security forces "began targeting civilians solely and explicitly on the basis of their religion, ethnic group, or national origin. The overwhelming majority of victims come from the largely Muslim north of the country, or are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants..." A military uprising continued the slaughter in 2002. Indonesia/East Timor: A Roman Catholic country. About 20% of the population died by murder, starvation or disease after they were forcibly annexed by Indonesia (mainly Muslim). After voting for independence, many Christians were exterminated or exiled by the Indonesian army and army-funded militias in a carefully planned program of genocide and religious cleansing. Kashmir: A chronically unstable region of the world, claimed by both Pakistan and India. The availability of nuclear weapons and the eagerness to use them are destabilizing the region further. Thirty to sixty thousand people have died since 1989. South Africa: Hundreds of persons, suspected and accused of black magic, are murdered each year. Sudan: Complex ethnic, racial, religious conflict which victimizes both Animists and Christians in the South of the country. Slavery and near slavery practiced. There are allegations of crucifixion of Christians... More than two million Christians and animists in southern Sudan have been systematically murdered, raped, brutalized, sold into slavery and banished from their homes by forces loyal to the government of Sudan. This 18-year old genocidal campaign was spawned by the determination of the Islamic supremacists in Khartoum to liquidate what they call dhimmis (or infidels). In recent years, however, the original justification for this bloodletting has been powerfully reinforced -- and its execution underwritten -- by an insidious economic development: The Christians and animists happen to live in areas rich with oil deposits. As a result, foreign oil companies (U.S. entities are barred from doing business in Sudan) have a shared interest with the Sudanese government in getting access to such areas so as to explore and exploit their reserves. The Khartoum regime clears promising locations of the local population -- either by killing them outright, enslaving them or terrifying them into fleeing. In return, oil concerns like Talisman Energy of Canada and China National Petroleum Company provide cash flow to an otherwise impoverished government, which has stated publicly that these oil-generated proceeds are enabling it to wage war in southern Sudan." Tibet: Country was annexed by Chinese Communists in late 1950's. Brutal suppression of religion continues. Uganda: Christian rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army are conducting a civil war in the north of Uganda. Their goal is a Christian theocracy whose laws are based on the Ten Commandments. They abduct about 2,000 children a year who are enslaved and/or raped. And these are just a few... and I could post some photos to show how horrorific some of these are. In my opinion, the only good thing that has come out of the Iraq debacle is that Saddam is no more. Regardless, I don't think it was in the national interest of the United States to invade Iraq and it certainly wasn't in the national interest to do it with overly-optimistic assumptions and a complete lack of post-invasion strategy while ticking off the entire world and having a bunch of Muslim youngsters come to think about us as the evil satan or some such. The way to avenge those 400,000 or more folks would be to sprerad the ideas of Democracy and free markets, to stand on the ideas that made the 20th Century our century and not to resort to back-asswards thinking like the Bushies have done.
As I have for the past decade. I have not voted for a Democrat for president in over a decade, a streak that will probably end in November. BTW, to someone who doesn't know you personally, it certainly appears that you do choose the GOP as if you were an automatic transmission, but maybe I am wrong.
No, but the biggest claims of WMDs were of the chemical and biological types, which would have provided justification for the war if they had been found, but since that is not the case, then someone made HUGE errors evaluating "intelligence" regarding WMDs. The only way we could use the "mass graves" and "genocide" as justification to occupy Iraq is if we had done it in '91. Saddam did all these horrible things in the '80s. That is my point regarding Saddam's killings and it still has not been rebutted. He is being criticized for using bad "intelligence" to start a preemptive war that has distracted us from moving forward on the war on terror. He is being criticized for invading a country against world opinion without exploring all of the diplomatic options first. He is being criticized for many good reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with his father's or Clinton's presidencies or foreign policy.
Well following the Iraq example fifteen years from now the President will have a busy time invading those countries.
First of all Bush did list a lot of bad things about Saddam in that SOTU. However, those were illustrations of how bad of a man Saddam was, and why it was dangerous to let him have WMD's. Bush gave only one reason for going to or Saddam avoiding war. That was WMD's But again if we buy into the revisionist view that Bush invaded in part because of Saddam being a bad ruler, that was only part of the reason. The WMD's part was still wrong, and war should be a last resort. War is not a time to figure that 2 out of 3 reasons is good enough. It had better be 3 out of 3, and they better be valid beyond reasonable doubt.
Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor What else do you need? 9/11 was the perfect justification for the action in Afghanistan, an action that I support fully. I just wish that we had put the necessary forces and resources in place to find bin Laden, complete the ousting of the Taliban, and rebuild the country. The action in Iraq had NOTHING to do with 9/11.
How delightful, and ironic, to see the left arguing against humanitarian interventions on the grounds that if you can't intervene everywhere you should never intervene anywhere. why wasn't that logic on display in Bosnia and Kosovo? yet another indication of how the left has abandoned core principles because of its blind hatred of George Bush.
Again, I am not of "the left," but you have still not attempted to rebut MY argument, you know, the one where I mention that the human rights violations happened BEFORE GWI, while we were still supporting Saddam. Iraq was the wrong action to take, most especially in the war on terror. Today in Iraq, we are creating the bin Ladens that will attack this country over the next 20-40 years. Besides, if you WERE going to attack someone on "humanitarian" grounds, there is no way that it would be Saddam, as his transgressions were a decade and a half old when we invaded last year. The right keeps insisting that this action in Iraq was justified and it is yet another indication of how the right has abandoned its core principles (against "nation building") because it is blindly following GWB and his regime.
We were attacked in WW2. We didn't start that war. We weren't attacked by Iraq and we did start the war. Furthermore the administration at that time didn't list other reasons for going to war. What they listed turned out to be true and we went to war. This administration did list other reasons besides humanitarian reasons, and those reasons turned out to be wrong. If you are going to start a war you should be correct on all accounts.
I could be wrong but... I don't think people are saying humanitarian reasons aren't worth going to war over, but they are saying those weren't Bush's reasons for going to war.
Bait and switch is illegal in retail sales and it should be illegal in this case as well. They touted WMDs over and over and over again and now that their "intelligence" has proven to be bad, they are switching their reasoning to "humanitarian concerns." Execrable.
President Bush's Case for Iraq War Speech 10/7/02 Speech from Cincinnati Ohio.. Detailing Bush's case for the Iraq war, updated with the latest intel that we know now... A very informative look back..
