Democrats & Liberals: Archives

I agree—Bush should stop trying to convince people who won’t recongnize the truth when it’s staring them in the face (and who don’t care what the truth is anyway).

Stephen,

What danger to the US was Afghanistan before 9/11? A country you apparently supported invading. What kind of long range ballistic missiles or transatlantic troop carriers did the Taliban have?

In the same sense of evaluation of Iraq, what real threat was Afghanistan that required an invasion and occupation?

Instead, we have an an occupation we are obligated to win, and American soldiers dying to protect a people who resent our presence. Who knows what kinds of things we coulde have done to truly protect our country, rather than weaken our military by wasting it’s resources on an unnecessary, badly justified war?

Even assuming that you are correct about the following:

The ultimate test of the truth of what Bush alleged. the invasion itself turned up no WMD stockpiles or terrorist camps, beside Ansar al Islam. We only just found chemical weapons at all, and they’re fairly old. The infrastructure for WMDs was not rebuilt, much less the nuclear infrastructure. So where was the threat?

The same is true of Afghanistan. There were never WMD there. Never any real military threat to the US. The test of whether Iraq was an imminent threat can be applied to Afghanistan with the same result.

There was a time not long ago when the conventional wisdom skewed heavily toward a Saddam-al Qaeda links. In 1998 and early 1999, the Iraq-al Qaeda connection was widely reported in the American and international media. Former intelligence officers and government officials speculated about the relationship and its dangerous implications for the world. The information in the news reports came from foreign and domestic intelligence services. It was featured in mainstream media outlets including international wire services, prominent newsweeklies, and network radio and television broadcasts.

Newsweek magazine ran an article in its January 11, 1999, issue headed “Saddam + Bin Laden?” “Here’s what is known so far,” it read:

“Saddam Hussein, who has a long record of supporting terrorism, is trying to rebuild his intelligence network overseas — assets that would allow him to establish a terrorism network. U.S. sources say he is reaching out to Islamic terrorists, including some who may be linked to Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi exile accused of masterminding the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa last summer.”

….NPR reporter Mike Shuster interviewed Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, and offered this report:

“Iraq’s contacts with bin Laden go back some years, to at least 1994, when, according to one U.S. government source, Hijazi met him when bin Laden lived in Sudan. According to Cannistraro, Iraq invited bin Laden to live in Baghdad to be nearer to potential targets of terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait….Some experts believe bin Laden might be tempted to live in Iraq because of his reported desire to obtain chemical or biological weapons. CIA Director George Tenet referred to that in recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee when he said bin Laden was planning additional attacks on American targets.”

By mid-February 1999, journalists did not even feel the need to qualify these claims of an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. An Associated Press dispatch that ran in the Washington Post ended this way: “The Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against Western powers.”

Where did journalists get the idea that Saddam and bin Laden might be coordinating efforts? Among other places, from high-ranking Clinton administration officials.

In the spring of 1998 — well before the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa — the Clinton administration indicted Osama bin Laden. The indictment, unsealed a few months later, prominently cited al Qaeda’s agreement to collaborate with Iraq on weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton Justice Department had been concerned about negative public reaction to its potentially capturing bin Laden without “a vehicle for extradition,” official paperwork charging him with a crime. It was “not an afterthought” to include the al Qaeda-Iraq connection in the indictment, says an official familiar with the deliberations. “It couldn’t have gotten into the indictment unless someone was willing to testify to it under oath.” The Clinton administration’s indictment read unequivocally:

“Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.”
-mediaresearch.org

If they were so close and chummy, why didn’t Bin Laden take the bait? Why didn’t we find massive terrorist camps. Why have we seen so few actual Iraq terrorist attacks in the first place?

We cannot prevent dictators from dreaming up plans, making proposals or the like. If Saddam had carried these things out, yes, I’d support your assertions. Problem is he didn’t. Problem is, beyond a little bit of Israel-baiting, Saddam was just not that good of a terrorist supporter, not in comparison to Iran and Syria. I’d say, given a set of threats, the worst threats take precedence over the weakest, the imminent threats over the distant, the deadliest threats over the less lethal. Iraq, to me, is something we could have gotten around to, rather than something we need to take care of now. I feel the evidence supports that, in terms of the condition of Saddam’s WMD infrastructure. Even if he were willing to provide the weapons to terrorists, he didn’t have the means to mass produce them, and a year of inspections has essentially backed up that assertion.

You can argue your personal opinion of Saddam’s danger to us, or you can argue the facts. Saddam may have wanted to be threat, but he was no different than the pinned wrestler who wanted to be the winner in a match. We had him pinned. We had him contained. We should have been more careful about how we ended the last Gulf War, but overall, this was not the time to clean up the loose end that Saddam represented.

Eric:

I’m not sure what to think of all of this, frankly. On the one hand, I have to wonder, if all of this information has been available since 1998 in the media then why has it taken till now to come to light? This is not the first argument here on the subject of links between iraq and al qaeda, if the links exist and are that easy to find why hasn’t anyone found them through googling before and countered those assertions prior to this? Why has the present administration not vehemently cited these articles and the intelligence upon which the quotes from government officials in the articles were originally based?

On the other hand, the most damning piece of evidence that I am presently aware of (since doing a bit of research after reading your quotes) is, if correct, actually sufficient to make me believe that attacking Iraq may not have been without merit, even if I still believe it was carried out in a foolish manner. That piece of evidence is an article from 1999 in The Herald, a Scottish newspaper, entitled “Iraq tempts bin Laden to attack West”. Purportedly, the text of the article talks about Saddam offering sanctuary to bin Laden if his organization managed to pull off a series of high profile attacks on the West. Unfortunately, the actual archives are pay-to-read (and I’m broke) so I am unable to verify that at this time. If that is the text of the article, and if the allegation is correct, I would find that a significant and valid reason to make war on iraq and Saddam Hussein in particular after an al Qaeda attack like September 11th, and I have to wonder why it too was not cited as a reason for our actions in Iraq by this administration.

All in all, I see this information as raising a lot of questions… both about the common wisdom that iraq and al Qaeda are not linked, and about why more people in favor of the war, including the Bush administration, are not citing these historic links if they have been matters of public record for so long. At this time, I really don’t know what to think about it all.

> In the same sense of evaluation of Iraq, what
> real threat was Afghanistan that required an
> invasion and occupation?

Again, it’s a cost/benefit thing. For very little cost (financially maybe at most 5% of the cost of Iraq, and zero cost in terms of our international reputation) we were able to show the world that whosoever strikes the USA will be wiped out. That’s why I supported the Afghanistan action. Is that so complicated?

Also, our action in Afghanistan was hardly an “invasion” insofar as most of the fighting was (and continues to be) fought by the same warlords who were fighting each other before. Coalition action in Afghanistan doesn’t have nearly the same difficulty level or ridiculously grandiose goals (plunging a well-armed industrialized nation of tens of millions into anarchy and then bringing it back out again and building a new democracy). Comparing Iraq to Afghanistan is comparing apples to oranges.

-Cf

CF,

Again, it’s a cost/benefit thing. For very little cost (financially maybe at most 5% of the cost of Iraq, and zero cost in terms of our international reputation) we were able to show the world that whosoever strikes the USA will be wiped out. That’s why I supported the Afghanistan action. Is that so complicated?

Yes, it is a little complicated. Let me see, our credo should be to wait until someone strikes us so that we can wipe them out? I’m sure Kerry will start using that in his campaign literature real soon.

Bush said that he wanted to prevent that from happening. So rather than ‘wiping out’ Iraq, we wiped out the Baathist regime and are attempting to help the Iraqi’s create a stable government that won’t be a threat as Saddam surely was.

Iran, North Korea, and Syria are next in line. We may have to do different things for each of those countries but the goal will be the same. As Stephen is fond of saying using diplomacy etc. The circumstances may not allow or dictate invasion, but we must make sure that we are in the business of fostering and creating democracies where none exist, and being firm and willing to use military might to destroy these regimes. It may just be bombing, as Clinton did in Iraq previously. It may mean a full and extended psyops campaign to crumble these dictatorships.

The alternative, which I hear over and over from the left, is that we have no right to dictate the form of government of any nation. This is at best a defensive position. We need to be proactive.

Also, our action in Afghanistan was hardly an “invasion” insofar as most of the fighting was (and continues to be) fought by the same warlords who were fighting each other before. Coalition action in Afghanistan doesn’t have nearly the same difficulty level or ridiculously grandiose goals (plunging a well-armed industrialized nation of tens of millions into anarchy and then bringing it back out again and building a new democracy). Comparing Iraq to Afghanistan is comparing apples to oranges.

We have around 20,000 troops in Afghanistan. That’s more than enough to fight the Taliban who were even less of a military threat than the Iraqi army was. The Taliban had no missiles, very few antiquated tanks, and their transport vehicle of choice was a Toyota’s small bed pickup. We are talking about a rat-tag bunch of irregulars, not an army in any modern sense.

Afghanistan is a failed state which was so weak that a group like the Taliban could take power in the first place. The goal cannot be merely to ‘wipe them out’. We must change the conditions there like we did in Germany and Japan. Saddam was a fascist. Something liberals say they are against, but I guess that’s just a code word for Republican these days.

There’s something here that I think speaks more about the party affiliation than anything else. The argument about Kosovo being a ‘brilliant military success’, even though there are still troops there when Clinton said we’d be out in 6 months. I don’t hear the same arguments being bandied about by liberals about the civilian casualties and cost.

What if our strategy in WWII, ie. Germany, was just to destroy their economy and war making power but leave Hitler in charge, because we weren’t willing to bear the cost of invading and occupying their country?

I can’t believe you’ve compared Saddam to Hitler again.

-Cf

Stephen,

Just as I share your frustration with the abhorrent behavior of this administration, I’m even more angered by the large segment of this country that continues to believe these lies (and, even those who continue to defend the administration, as Martin’s comment reflects.)

I will actually praise the news media for drawing the stark contrasts between what Bush/Cheney contend, versus what the 9/11 Commission, the CIA, the FBI and our Intelligence community, have proven.

And more importantly, the nuances of the administrations’s assertions which seek to distort proven intel of contact between Al Queda and Iraq, into the desperate inference that there was collaboration (still to be proven), yet it falls short of causing 9/11.

What news I’ve seen and read, the media lays this information out, in detail, stopping short of calling the administration out right liars.

Bush’s falling credibility continues to serve as the microscope utilized by increasing numbers of American voters, as each contradictory revelation surfaces.

Thank goodness it is still June.

Eric, I don’t mind us being proactive when we are doing psyops or diplomacy, or some other means of foreign policy, but I think pre-emptive war in general is to risky to be a main foreign policy doctrine. I think we can be equally terrifying whether we strike first or strike second.

If we have knowledge of an actual threat, and we’re pretty sure about it, we should go in and get some bang for our buck. But if there is no imminent threat, then our mistakes become even more problematic. We can be somwhat wrong about the capabilities of an enemy who has already attacked us, or at the very least done the deed we can justify a war in response to. I mean, if we had caught terrorists, and the trail of evidence lead back to Iraq, a pre-emptive war would have been wise. But if what we are talking about is the next best guess of who will be dangerous in five years, then I don’t want any part of that policy, because that is one that will ultimately make the decision to go to war cheap, even while we hold American lives dear, and it is also a policy that will turn too many against us, for too little profit, morally or politically.

I would much rather not have my country’s well being at the mercy of my leader’s phobias and paranoid delusions. I want a causus belli that places the burden of proof, and the fault for the war on the heads of our enemies. Let them dig their own graves, and pull the stupid crap. let us be the wise, the restrained, and the injured party. Let us be the good guys.

The number one thing we have to worry about right now is an Al Qaeda “style” nuclear attack. It is inevitable. Hoping these states aren’t loose with their nukes is too much latitude. I don’t mean Al Qaeda itself. What Al Qaeda can do, any one of these rogue nations can do. How will we know which one it is? How will we know with absolute certainty before hand?

North Korea with nukes. Pakistan with nukes. Iran with nukes. India with nukes. It is inevitable that within ten to fifteen years there will be a nuclear explosion in a major US city. We are that close.

If you actually believe that Saddam Fedayeen were not capable of this you are deluding yourself or waiting for a democratic administration to reaffirm it.

Eric, I remember a common tactic used by the American army during the invasion would be to hurl incredibly humiliating insults at the Fedayeen, and pick them off as they madly rushed in to avenge their wounded pried. The Fedayeen were paramilitary thugs, brownshirts picked for their loyalty to Saddam.

The Muhabarat were a joke. They people who tried to blow up the elder Bush got stopped because they got into a traffic accident.

Saddam was an expert at self preservation. That, as you already know, is not the ultimate priority of the members of Al Quaeda. Saddam had ground to hold, a capital and regime to lose, and an Army whose loyalties depended on their sense of his power.

Al Quaeda just needs money, willing fanatics, and knowledge of the flaws in our security. They did not need a cohesive homeland to carry out their last two attacks, or to spawn all kinds of independent splinter movements.

Yes, the possibility of them getting their hands on a nuke was grave and in need of investigation. But for all you guys want to concentrate on future sources of nukes, you guys forget that there are present sources we can already focus on, if we keep ourselves alert. Pakistan is one source. Old mother Russia another. We don’t need to have our heads in the mushroom clouds about present owners of WMDs while we pursue potential or past possessors of these weapons. We don’t need to be turning our back on real threats to enter into the NeoCon’s pet power-plays.

Stephen, according to the standard of evidence now demanded by the left, neither Russia, Pakistan, North Korea are any threat or even remotely connected to any threat whatsoever. The fact that they say they have weapons of mass destruction and all the intelligence agencies of the world agree means nothing. After all, unlike Iraq, they’ve never actually used such weapons. Have you, Hans Blix or Michael Moore actually ever stood over one of their missle silos with a Geiger Counter?

Until a mushroom cloud is actually rising over Manahattan, any other position is an automatic neo-con lie related somehow—in the feverish imaginations of conspiracy theorists—to the capitalist ambitions of Haliburton and Wal-Mart.
This is just good sound leftist thinking.

I don’t pretend to understand such logic. After all, I’m a Republican. Perhaps you can explain it.

Martin, Russia and Pakistan have both exploded nuclear weapons. We’ve seen the explosions and they were definitely nuclear explosions. Your hyperbole is a little over the top.

-Cf

Seems like we saw gassed Kurdish villages littered with corpses, too. Are we to believe our own lying eyes or Al Gore and Howard Dean?

And what if (playing Michael Moore now), those so-called nuclear explosions were reported on FOX news? Wouldn’t that make them lies? You could fake a nuclear explosion for a satellite picture with a whole lot of TNT. Seems like somebody—defense contractors with ties to the Bush family?—are playing on our fears to provoke a neocon war with Pakistan and Russia.

Martin, read a bit more carefully.

It seems like your standard response to any criticism is to allege a psychotic breakdown in your opponent, which tragically leaves him or her disconnected from reality.

You offer these supposed standards of evidence for the left that are so absolutist as to be plainly absurd to the liberals and the leftists reading your comments. Look, for my part, all I want from my country’s intelligence community and my commander in chief is accurate, reliable intelligence that a reasonable person can make reasonable decisions on, and nine times out of ten not be in serious error for that.

Instead, what my president did was convince us to go to war on evidence that was not reliable in the least. If we were at least partially right, and the stockpiles were smaller than what we expected, and the terrorist/Iraqi collaboration was only barely civil, but still there, I would’ve been a little dissappointed, but not angry.

But this? No stockpiles of WMDs worth writing home about, one terrorist camp in a part of Iraq autonomous from Baghdad- For heaven’s sake, we had the right to expect at least some good guesses about Saddam’s armament and links to terrorism, especially if this was going to be advertised as part of the war on terror.

The truth was out there to be found, and Bush should have been willing to go all out to find out what it was, and not merely assume that he knew. He should not have simply sat around and dreamed up reasons for what he wanted to do, he should not have asked people to jazz-up a story with unchecked, unqualified information. He should have made it his mission, before he launched us into pre-emptive war to definitively assess the real threat from Iraq.

If Saddam turned out to be threat your people said he was, I would have withdrawn no support whatsoever from the war. Unfortunately, it seems, Bush has tied up a great amout of our resources for fight terror in a war that few people believe anymore will actually lessen the problem of terrorism. For that, he has earned my antagonism.

I agree with original post. Will go one step further, this is a war Bush wanted for his own personal agenda. Be it, for the oil or revenge. I do not understand the lack of outrage from the american people about the sheer number of scandals that have erupted. Had this been Clinton we would have had an ousted president. Enron connections, family drinking problems, the election itself, 9/11 and it unanswered questions, Iraq, his connections with bid laden, economy, the list goes on and on.

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