Seven Simple Questions For Those Who Supported The War.

I don't believe anyone has uncovered anything close to a Tonkin-esque lie. The leftists and peacemongers have picked apart every statement by every leader in this administration in hopes of finding one. All they've found is unanswered questions and murky intelligence issues, which everyone knew made up the premise of this entire war anyway, including all the legislators on Capitol Hill who voted to engage in this conflict.

By the way, I'm mad as hell at President Bush for failing to do anything to cut the absurd spending levels in his government. It's complete insanity. I have issues with his failure to speak out on the Supreme Court's absolutely abhorrent decisions this summer. So I'm by no means a Bush apologist.

 

peacemongers?

Hey! I like that! I'm a peacemonger!

 

MacBeth, it seems to me that the majority of your seven questions are based on the semantics Bush used to justify his war in Iraq. The problem is, people like me who you are debating with don't think (and in my case, never have thought) that WMD's were the reason we were going into Iraq. WMD's certainly provided the best rallying call to get public and maybe even world support (even though that clearly failed) for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. I believe 1000 percent that the reason for the U.S. occupation of Iraq is Iraq's geographic location in the middle east combined with two points: (1) That Iraq was lead by one of the most recognized of the world's vicious tyrants that even the most harsh critics of Bush's war would not miss, and (2) Saudi Arabia, historically the U.S.'s strongest Arab ally in the region, had just asked for the U.S. to remove their troops from their soil. Qatar is nice, but is far too small and unstable of a country to be viewed as a permanent location for a U.S. military base in the region. Furthermore, a base in Qatar means you have to fly over many middle eastern countries which may no longer allow U.S. planes to do that in order to get to countries like Syria, Lebanon, etc without a fleet of aircraft carriers.
Furthermore, the Iraqi people present one of the most educated people found in the region. In addition to Iraq's strategic geographic location, their people represent a possibility (how possible is up for debate) that a democracy could flourish in the region and if the U.S. could maintain good relations with such a country in the middle east, it could be another chip on the U.S.'s side when dealing with the region. Some will argue what business does the U.S. have changing parts of the world that they do not govern? My answer would be historically none, but history changed on September 11th, 2001. The old rules no longer apply and since terrorism is born out of problems in middle eastern culture, the best means of stopping that terrorism short of genocide is to try and somehow change that culture. One way to change that culture is to create a democratic example like Iraq. If, and many would argue, when that fails, at least you have a large military base in Iraq.
Finally, the U.S. offensive against Iraq dispelled a myth that had emboldened middle easterners harboring ill will against the west over the past decade. Word on the Arab street I can tell you firsthand was that the U.S. was a nation of cowards, too afraid of seeing their own blood. Basically that the U.S. was too weak a country to ever fight a ground war against a foreign army. There were many in the middle east prior to a couple of months ago that really genuinely believed that Saddam Hussein's armies would emerge victorious in a ground war against them due to the weaker American enemy. That line of thinking probably contributed to emboldening terrorists to strike out against American interests. That myth has now been dispelled and the doubters of the Arab world has once again seen that no army in their region stands a chance against the American military machine.
My point is, your 7 questions were loaded based on your personal view of the current situation. I do not believe that the WMD argument was the real reason we went into Iraq. I don't think history will either.

 

Hey Giddy, I know you may not be able to read this because of house guests, but I'm replying anyway.

the ME may be a key region, but Charles Taylor of Liberia had more Ties to Al Qaeda than Saddam did. It's just strange that establishing a base wasn't one of the reasons given if that's a reason why it was necessary.

 

Well first of all of the 60 nations listed by the Bush ADministrations own highlighted map 1 week after 9/11, Iraq wasn't one of them. Iraq was not a haven for terrorists compared to other nations in the region or in Africa. With Hussein out of power, the nonexistent terrorist training facilities still aren't there, but we do know that Al Qaeda is still active in Afghanistan and wasn't really active in Iraq and yet we pulled resources from Afghanistan to devote to Iraq. It doesn't make too much sense.

 

Was there ever any doubt that we would have to stay behind in Iraq for a good while?

 

I don't know the answer. In my mind I believed we would, but the Bush administration still isn't saying how long we will be there, nor are they including in Iraqi costs in their budget proposals. Instead they opt to just present suplemental request after suplemental request. Prior to the war people tried to get them to say how long we would be in Iraq over and over again and the administration never did.

Also in making a case for the war, leaving things up to assumptions seems like poor leadership.

 

This is just flat out wrong. You know that is not the way a representative democracy works. We elect leaders to make decisions, sadly based mostly on soundbites and negative advertising. They are not supposed to take polls and determine how the public feels about any particular action. It is the discretion of the president to use the military to defend national security for up to 90 days without even the authorization of congress. It is up to congress to declare war. There is no provision that the people must be given all (or even any) of the reasons for war. If the majority in congress feels that they were duped into war and would reverse that decision now, that would be one thing. That has not happened (to my knowledge).

 

Remember World War II, we needed pearl harbor to convince the American people to fight Hitler. I don't know how relevent this is, but maybe the American people aren't as easy to be convinced into a war as you think. I mean, if Hitler causing chaos in Europe couldn't do it, how could anything Saddam be doing top that. As much as people hate the fact that they got lied to, if Bush truly had a strong case for going to war, he did what was neccessary to convince the American people. We will just have to see...

 

They are supposed to reflect the desires of the people insofar as the people determine who the representatives are and who gets to stay a representative once they leave office. They were never meant to poll the people on every issue and do what the results say (ie the Clinton approach). We elect leaders, ostensibly, to do what THEY think is in the best interest of their constituency. In actuality, our leaders our elected for much sadder reasons and their function is to get reelected. If you think that all the congressmen authorized the president to invade Iraq only based on WMD, then 1) they should all be railing against the President now (are they?) and 2) you are assuming you know what hundreds of very different people were thinking (I could not tell you why various congresspeople voted for war). Is it possible that the (republican majority) congress thought about a lot of the same issues that have been raised on this board when making a decision on going to war? We will see how much the average American really opposes the war when elections roll around. I do not predict huge turnover in congress.

 

Regarding question six:

If, as stated, the war was about the imminent threat of Iraqi WMD, including 'reconstituted nukes', and/or 'nuclear weapons programs weeks away from yielding active weapons', and 'hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical gas'...at what point in the process of non-discovery will war supporters admit that the war was not justified as advertised?

perhaps this article pulled from the TCS: Defense website might shed some light on the subject.

Germs of Truth
By Russell Seitz 05/08/2003



The favorite subject of those who opposed the war in Iraq is the coalition's failure to find the 4,000 barrels of chemical and biological warfare agents that President Bush invoked in justifying it. However, they tend to ignore the less convenient facts of the matter. There is a world of hurt in 500 tons of such malignant stuff, but in such a modest volume - roughly a twenty-five foot cube - the trucks carrying it can disappear into a fair sized traffic jam.

War gases and most of the chemicals that go into them are flammable. Indeed, America is disposing of the nerve gas once present in its arsenals by incineration. Biological agents are even more heat sensitive. When heated past 700 Fahrenheit, they become hard to tell from burnt toast. 500 tons is a drop in the bucket compared to the volume of burning oil that went up in smoke during the war. What proved useless as an aircraft deterrent may still have exemplified the principle of a dual use technology: Oil trench fires make dandy funeral pyres for immolating the evidence of non-nuclear ambition.

If the corpus delecti has already become part of the smog inventory over the Indian Ocean, score one for Saddam. The administration will feel the heat for as long as it takes to dig up Iraq's national stockpile of sand. The truth will out, but even with help from liberated scientists, this could be a big dig. The Democrats and diplomats demanding to know the fate of Iraq's slippery arsenal just don't want to hear how many suburbs of Ur of the Chaldees have eluded archaeological recovery for the last million days. Somebody may turn up a plague infested carcass chucked into Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 before the modern skunk juice comes to light. A lot of the chemical munitions that went unused in World War II are still rotting on the bottom of the Baltic.

To understand the hunt for contraband weapons today, consider what followed the last Gulf War. In its aftermath the problem was less finding the evidence than recognizing it for what it was - no single inspector was familiar with the bewildering variety of good, bad, and ugly technology that Saddam's technicians had acquired. This led to vast confusion and a feeding frenzy among policy analysts.

Many feared the worst. Along with a nuclear weapons program, UN inspectors found an arsenal of chemical weapons and dual use materials. A lot of it could be equally well applied to the growth and culture of lethal organisms or toxins, or the production of life saving antibiotics. There are even some biological culture medium ingredients that could be harmlessly employed to augment the formula of baby milk.

Looking over what others and I wrote in those heady days, one finds some themes that are being repeated. And others that are in danger of being forgotten, if not deliberately repressed.

Iraq, like Pakistan, had sent its best and brightest west to get PhD's in nuclear science and chemical engineering. These young people showed a lot of initiative in reviving ways and means of enriching uranium that had largely been forgotten by the existing nuclear powers. Between 1992 and 2002, these people didn't go away - they grew older and more knowledgeable.

The inspectors who arrived in 1992 found gadgets for uranium enrichment on an industrial scale. Analysts' jaws dropped as they realized that some Iraqi expertise stemmed from efforts to publicize proliferation risks in order to stem them. That these technologies were now obsolete did not mean that they did not work. Publishing the blueprints of old Manhattan Project facilities proved to be a handy shortcut on the road to nuclear ubiquity.

Following the Iraqis into the pre-history of atomic weapons, we found another risk: neptunium. This third nuclear fuel languished in obscurity for decades, but tens of tons of it, like plutonium, were produced in the course of generating nuclear power. But while plutonium from spent fuel is carefully safeguarded as weapons material, the neptunium's weapons potential went unrealized. It collected in repositories whose main line of defense was that their contents were too hot to handle.

But such radioactivity fades away in a matter of decades: people live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, too. By the time of the Gulf War, some vintage neptunium had cooled down a thousand fold, and become fit for weapons use. But this problem went undiscovered by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and its director Hans Blix.

No IAEA safeguards existed in 1990, when an examination of the physics revealed the problem. The response to the publication of the facts was immediate - a fusillade of denial. Letters and articles appeared saying neptunium posed no threat at all. I found this baffling, but lacking additional data I assumed that my numbers were outclassed by classified ones.

In fact, the numbers were correct - the denials were a disinformation operation designed to buy time for the IAEA to rectify its failure of oversight, and the Department of Energy to circle its wagons around undefended tons of weapons grade neptunium. Last fall the DOE brought the first neptunium fueled nuclear reactor to criticality: an unsuspected
nuclear weapons material had become a source of nuclear energy.

Another irony may be playing out today in Iraq. Just as we lost track of a major nuclear proliferation hazard for decades, we tend to forget the symmetry of dual use technologies and materials. Chemicals with innocent or even life-saving uses may become feed stocks for nerve gas manufacture or biological warfare. But some times a cigar is a cigar.

A few weeks ago, troops clad cap a pied in sweltering CBW protective gear probed containers in the Iraqi desert for nerve gas. The false alarms produced by empty insecticide drums were not surprising, because organophosphate nerve gases are an offshoot of organophosphate insecticide research. This raises a question doves dislike: were Iraq's dual-use chemicals disposed of the old-fashioned way, by using them to manufacture mundane agrochemicals?

Iraq possesses a full-blown phosphate fertilizer industry (like America's, it produces uranium as a by-product) and all it needs to refine petroleum and manufacture organic chemicals. Some chemicals can be incorporated into organophosphate nerve gases and insecticides alike: little wonder chemical warfare test kits often give false positives.

Just as the transformation of neptunium into nuclear reactor fuel does not reduce the risk of the element's weaponization, the disappearance of nerve gas precursors into benign chemical factories can equally signify innocence. Or cunning.

Dual use chemicals have innocent uses by definition, but profitable use is another matter. That's why cheaper or better single use chemicals dominate the chemical economy. The suave Iraqi CBW general who claims its weapons exist no more can't recall just why all those dual use chemicals were acquired or what became of them. The burning question of the day is less where they are, than why Iraq sometimes bought both cheap and excellent single use compounds and mediocre and expensive ones as well?

A germ of truth is the best bodyguard a big lie can have.

 

The answer to what hundreds of very different people were thinking is in your own post: "Our leaders are elected for much sadder reasons and their function is to get reelected." Bush's people not only manipulated evidence -- they manipulated the debate by demonizing dissent, as they've done all along.

I don't predict a huge turnover in Congress either, but the war won't be the only or even probably the top issue in the next elections. Look for the turnover at the White House.

 

I don't think the American people are qualified to make decisions on foreign issues. Democracy works against the U.S. in a situation like the war on terror and I think the president is doing what's best for the United States whether constituents like yourself want to support him or not.

As for you saying the administration needed to tell you everything before going to war, I ask you what he should have said if I'm right about his real reasons for going to war? Maybe something like this:

"My fellow Americans, we were attacked on 9/11/01 by a people who represent a large minority in the middle east. This large minority has developed an intolerant hatred of the western way of life through years of propaganda put before them at their local mosques and in their local newspapers. That was fine before 9/11, but now there twisted way of thinking has lead them to invade our country, targeting our government's most prominent buildings in the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon. While these people are not lead by any known government in the world, we can simply no longer sit back and allow these factions to run wild and free. Even if we killed every single one of them, more would be grown in their place by the strict religious communities that are a fertile ground for producing such people. I therefore propose that we try and change their society so that they see things with a more modern, understanding view. Since the governments of the middle east seem unwilling to deal with the problem themselves, we aim to change their values by pushing western ideas on their culture. I propose that we invade Iraq and try to turn it into a democratic example for the middle east. With the help of our great soldiers and the American people, we'll have them singing "God Bless America" soon."

I mean really, how the hell is the president of the United States supposed to take that case to the world and the people. I think the president was in a Catch 22. He knew we could not allow middle eastern terrorist groups to continue to grow and regrow more anti-western sentiment in the middle east. He knew the governments of the middle east didn't want to address the problem as doing so would alienate large factions of their societies (and some governments flat out supported the terrorism). He knew sitting back and waiting for the next attack on US soil was not an option. Changing the society was his only option and such a bold idea would be torn apart by the American media which isn't strong enough to make a tough decision like this. So he went with the WMD argument, also a reason to invade Iraq, but not the primary one.

 

Good question, Macbeth. Question No. 8. Mr. Bush your own 911 report, which you suppressed until after the Iraq War, showed that if any country was responsible for 911, it was the Saudis and not Iraq. Yet you decided to continually state outright and or imply that Iraq was behind 911. How do you justify creating this false impression for the American people and employing it as a reason for the war against Iraq?

 

See my post just above yours.

 

Actually Macbeth, my whole point was the possibility that Pearl Harbor might have been a lie. We aren't 100% sure that Bush lied about WMD, just like we aren't 100% sure that FDR didn't already know the Pearl Harbor attack was coming and just chose to ignore it. But nevertheless, both are possible.

Your views on how democracy works is definitely accurate in theory, but it is simply too hard to accomplish in reality. Hypothetically, lets say our government decide that they needed to invade Iraq because it is the strategic first step to neutralizing terrorist in the Middle east (which may or maynot be true). Do you think it is possible to lay out all the future military plans and strategies to the public to try an convince them this is the logical first step? As the people, you have to have some faith in the representatives you elect to make the correct decision when the time comes.

 

Well if they know that the chem weapons and mobil labs can disappear into traffic jams, how were they so sure on MArch 30th where they were? That was when Donald Rumsfeld claimed that he knew where the WMD were and that they had been distributed near Tikrit and outside of the capitol. He even pointed to the positioins on the map.

The article also talks about dual uses for chemical agents. That's not what the administration said that the Iraqis had. They were talking about a weapons program, and weapons grade materials with actual Weapons of Mass destruction, not some chemicals that would recquire a 'harmful if swallowed' label.