What will the new justification be?

I remember watching George W. Bush on TV on 9/12/2001 already blaming Saddam Hussein. He and his administration clearly wanted to invade Iraq. There's no need for a new 'justification'; all the old justifications are still valid in W's eyes. He invaded Iraq for the same reason I bought my Prius - personal preference. Unfortunately, W's personal preferences affect a lot more than my own preference for my Prius.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(TonyPSchaefer @ Sep 10 2006, 10:24 AM) [snapback]317382[/snapback]</div>

Tony if the person is a lefty you all give them a pat on the back and a pass if not then you’re rather childish reaction is to try an censor their message that’s called bias Tony!

So now you’re also a "Grammar Nazi" does that give you that Far Left self-satisfying, elitist, superior to you feeling when you point that out? Tryig to drag someone down by pointing out their short-comings so that you look better? Talk about being childish. This kind of BS is so common with the leftist, here Tony don’t like my grammar or occasional misspelling?

p.s. The only thing Mod powers will do on this board it seems is censor a POV their own leftist attiudes don't agree with. So it has to be personal? How about you're a. . .

"RummyDumbScumOfALeftistCensoringBlowHole" & I hope your legs grow together. :lol: :blink: Personal enough?

 

Let's rewind the clock four or five years, and look at the situation as it stood then. Perhaps this will refresh some memories, or perhaps cause more/different debate.

The consensus of intelligence experts around the globe at the time was that Saddam had chemical and/or biological weapons. There was no credible argument to this consensus. (Sounds like the global warming issue, no?) He'd had CBWs just a few years earlier, and had used them in an attempt to wipe out the Kurdish population in northern Iraq. The preceding sentence is without dispute. He'd already invaded Kuwait a few years earlier. The UN sanctions were doing their usual fabulous job, starving the normal people while causing only minor irrirtation to the Powers that Were in Iraq. Forays against the international force that was enforcing the No-Fly Zone were becoming more frequent and more aggressive. Iraq's posturing on the diplomatic front was showing increasing signs of belligerence. Saddam had already thrown out the UN's inspectors several times. Of the despots in the region, Saddam was the most belligerent and had repeatedly shown a propensity to stir up trouble elsewhere. As a single example of the stunts he pulled, remember that he was paying $25k to the families of suicide bombers. This is not a sign of someone who wishes to play nicely in the world community.

Based on all the above, and other things I'm too lazy to go dig up again right now, the U.S. chose to remove Saddam and his associates from power in Iraq. The initial push went far, far faster than anyone dreamt it possibly could, so fast that any plans for post-aggression recovery were (at best) still in their infancy. The physical infrastructure in Iraq (power generation and distribution, water, etc.) was in far worse shape than anyone had anticipated - Saddam was too busy building palaces for himself to pay attention to power lines. The allied coalition was by no means prepared for the fragile condition of the infrastructure - fix one thing here, and it overloads ten things down the line; lather, rinse, repeat. Halliburton got a no-bid contract to go in and fix things - Halliburton was, and still is, the only corporation on the planet with the breadth and depth of resources, knowledge, experience and capability to efficiently tackle the diversity of problems being seen in Iraq. Putting the clean-up efforts out to bid would have slowed the process down by at least six months, and most of the work would have gone to Halliburton in the end, anyway. People in Baghdad proper now have electricity outages more frequently than they did when Saddam was in power, yes, but that's only because semi-reliable power is being sent to outlying areas for the first time in many years. Overall reliability of the power distribution system is coming up incrementally nationwide, the water systems are more reliable than they've been since before Saddam staged his coup.

All the Monday-morning quarterbacking being done now is nothing more than political posturing. No, we didn't find significant stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons (though we did find the equipment and documentation needed to spool up production in less than two years). It turns out that there was less of a connection than was believed between Saddam and the specific terrorist organization responsible for the vaporization of over three thousand innocent office workers here in the U.S. five years ago today. All these discoveries are ex post facto - we did what we did when we did it for reasons that were based on what experts said were the facts. We're willing to suggest multi-trillion-dollar changes to combat the global warming idea touted by "experts" today, yet how quickly we forget what was said by other "experts" just four years ago. I guess we choose which experts to believe and which to ignore, hmm?

 

Where's the "all of the above" button?

 

Yeah, and there was no rationale to invade Afghanistan sometime in the months before 9/11 was there? No real *evidence* 9/11 was imminent, well, at least no evidence idiot lefties would accept...

In the end, BUSH DID IT (thankfully), and that's that. Regardless of how it turns out, the world now knows the U.S. can and WILL land on your shores in the event of terrorism.

Thank God for Bush, and his actions in office. Even more thankful the irrational and idiotic forces (not unlike those presented within this thread), could not stop his actions.

 

I feel this is all extremely old news that does not matter anymore.

The Dark Side documentary summarizes and details all of this already about how the intelligence reports were a basically faked, forced, or extremely circumstantial because much in basis came from the new CIA Rumsfield built in the Pentagon, and then our CIA rubberstamped it even though they actually knew better, and that there was no case for Hussein + Al Qaeda. There is mention that a lot of this linkage goes to a single source named Curveball whom was already heavily discredited, as well as the Yellow Cake story, before Powell's famous speech before the U.N. repeating these discredited points.

some summary:
The CIA already had a response plan for Afghanistan while the Pentagon had nothing, but there was political infighting to allow the Pentagon to lead it, which thankfully didn't happen. However, while the CIA were very successful in Afghanistan, that previous political pressure was able to start shifting/sapping resources in a posture to attack Iraq while a case for it was hurriedly being built, which realistically then allowed Bin Laden, the guy we should've gotten, to get away. And so on and so forth.

The truth of this war just simply doesn't really matter to much of the sheep American voting public for at least the last 4 years... Only thing that really seems to matter is how it's affecting their pocket book.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(glenhead @ Sep 11 2006, 09:07 AM) [snapback]317749[/snapback]</div>

Correction: The Bush White House had bullied the CIA into signing off on false documents based on fabricated "evidence" and Tony Blair had decided to go along. There was no actual evidence that Hussein still had WMDs left over after the destruction of the first gulf war, and the U.N. inspectors (who were eventually vindicated) were reporting that their progress, though difficult, was proceding steadily, and were asking for time to complete their work. There were no "experts" outside the payrolls of the U.S. and the U.K. who said there were WMDs in Iraq. Anyone else who believed it, did so because they were being bamboozled by the outright lies and fabrications of the Bush administration, which had made up its mind to have a war in Iraq (abandoning the search for bin Laden to do so) and was willing to use any and all nefarious means to gain its objective. And the result has been chaos and quagmire, many deaths on all sides, and a global rise in hatred for the U.S., without which al Qaeda probably could not have continued to recruit its suicidal operatives.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(NuShrike @ Sep 11 2006, 01:44 PM) [snapback]317817[/snapback]</div>

Ok here we go again, using the Liberal Left Links.. What we need is unbiased links Lets say from an independent site. I really liked Karnac's post below.

One provication for the current Iraq War was the escalation of violence in the "no-fly" zone by Iraq. The "no-fly" zone was put in place as part of the cease fire deal with Iraq after the first Gulf War to protect the religious minorities in Iraq, the Kurds (who had already been gassed via WMDs) and the Shiite Muslims (who had been rounded up and killed in large numbers). After 9/11, Iraq, enboldened by the success of the terrorist attack against the US, delcared the "no-fly" zone illegal and began daily attacks on the coalition aircraft enforcing the "no-fly" zone which meant per the deal they signed that the war was back on. The UN passed more resolutions about the attacks and the inspections that were not recognized by Iraq. I believe that in the fear frenzy post 9/11 it was thought that Iraq's weapons of all types would end up in the hands of terrorists and used to attack us. That made sense since Iraq had already attacked its neighbors (Kuwait, Iran) and its own people resulting in killing at least a million (1 million in the Iran War alone).