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Originally Posted by qwertitus Since I live in the great state of "AHEM" New Jersey I have never heard anyone say anything good about the war in Iraq (or the current government for that matter) but besides that the war was to something that needed to be done. |
That's unfortunately a justification for anything any government should choose to do, while claiming to its people that it's (as always) for The Right Reasons. Sell chemical weapons to Hussein in the 1980s, so he could use them as our client state against Iran? Yes, the US did it, because it had to be done. (And Rumsfeld was the intermediary for the Reagan administration who did it.) Just juggle the pieces, put the black hat and moustache on the villain of the moment--whatever your government says it is--and you have instant justification.
All arguments are bad for the Iraqi invasion, but this is the weakest of the lot. It's only trotted out by politicians who know pushing the emotional button marked Patriotism will let them win support without resorting to facts and logic.
Iraq, Iran, North Korea (the so-called "axis of evil") all needed to be disarmed as well as many other many other countries in the world.
But they weren't, were they? Only the regime that had no weapons and precious little army was attacked, and it had plenty of oil reserves, too. I wonder why Hussein, a paper tiger, was chosen over Mugabe in Zimbabwe, whose campaign of terror against his own people has involved false famines reminiscent of Stalin's on the Ukraine, in 1932? And who appointed the Bush administration to act as moral arbiter and invading army against the rest of the world?
Nobody, and this is another emotional argument Bush and his cronies used to justify the Iraqi invasion. They knew better. Read the PNAC Manifesto issued shortly before Bush took power. Most of the highest level members of his gang were signatories to that document (it's online), and if you read it carefully, you'll find some interesting stuff. Such as the necessity for the US to gain control of all major fossil fuel supplies in the 21st century, to prevent them from falling into the hands of ubiquitous "enemies."
I don't think you could honestly say that if Bush waited a few more months the U.N. would have put enough pressure upon Iraq that it would disarm.
But Iraq already had. The fact that Hussein hated the presence of the UN inspection teams and acted as gracelessly as possible doesn't change for a second the fact that he had disarmed, and that even the equipment which could be used to create WMD had long since been destroyed. With the greatest effort to prove otherwise, using all the resources at its disposal for several years, the Bush team has had to admit defeat this point. And it's not as if you can completely remove every trace of these weapons in a month or so. They simply didn't exist.
One the major problem that most people have with Bush is that he has been trying to dodge all the things that went wrong with Iraq. He went from partners with Al-quadi (Did I spell that right?) to weapons of mass distruction to my favorite excuse ever: spreading freedom. If Bush just had come out and said what he did right in that article I think the media would have appreciated his honesty. Then the CIA would've been in the hot seat instead of Bush. You can't blame Bush soley for faulty intelligence that half the world had at that time.
Actually, the rest of the world didn't believe it. Where did you hear that? Only Bush and Blair did, with the host of ideologues who wanted a reason for the war. Former CIA Head of Counter-Intelligence, Vincent Cannistraro, said none of the CIA analysts thought the intelligence was good. And when a key member of Bush's administration team, US Ambassador Joseph Wilson, stated that the information regarding the sale of WMD to Iraq was false, Cheney countered by having the wife of that particular aid "outed" in her sensitive CIA position overseas. Didn't you hear about that? Or that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which had been involved in verifying the authenticity of documents, was told by the adminstration not to publish its findings that they were fraudulent?
Besides, you certainly can blame Bush, not for bad intelligence, but for following it. When millions of lives are at stake, it is up to the group with all the power to check, re-check, and triple-check information, to make certain acting on it won't be horribly wrong. Instead, Bush has been quoted by insiders as saying that they at last had a smoking gun to go over Hussein. He wanted this, and all effort to find out the facts went out the window. It was only one report, where many others (including reputable US field agents, and the report from an insider panel led by Bush's handpicked expert, David Kay) denied any involvement by Hussein in arms trafficking or WMDs. Now, countless lives have been lost because Bush wanted to take over Iraq.
...and you haven't even begun to see the economic rebound from this. Why do you think the feds couldn't fund the disaster relief in New Orleans earlier this year from the budget? (They had to borrow from "international lenders.") In 1999, the money was there, many times over. The Bush administration has simply dismantled the social safety net used to help its citizens to a pre-1960s level, and used the excuse that they had to pay for the war. There's nothing left, and the budget is still leaking like a sieve: from having shown several surpluses for the first time since the early 1980s in the late 1990s, we now have the largest deficit ever known to our government--or any other. Desparate efforts to steal social security benefits away from the so-called "baby boomer" generation to repair some of this have failed. It's a giant disaster just waiting in the wings.
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