Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

I don’t know about anyone else, but the next time that the former head of the KGB says that somebody is up to something naughty, that’ll be good enough for me. By golly, we’ll start a preemptive war based on that evidence, yessiree Bob.

You know there is something very fishy about all this. If Putin is telling the truth, why did the President just today say he never said Iraq helpedplan or carry out the 9/11 attacks. If he had evidence Iraq was involved, god knows he would have produced it by now, but plausible deniability and insulation against perjury prevented him from making such claims. Sounds a like a deal to get Putin to say it for him - but in return for what? Hands off Chechnya?

David, the Russian intelligence said Iraq was planning (its own unspecified) attacks against the US, not 911. Still, I agree that there’s likely some mutual backscratching going on.

Eric, contacts. That means somebody met with somebody else. We’ve had contacts with Al Quaeda, for heaven’s sake. Does that make us conspirators? What we were looking to stop was a collaboration, and whatever secret evidence Cheney has, so far, the public case for that collaboration has utterly failed.

Your guys took some solid intelligence, put ten layers of speculation and trial lawyer hysteria on top of it, and presented to America a nightmare scenario that had little relation to the reality on the ground.

More or less, what you are trying to defend now is war waged on the shadow of a suspicion, a preemptive invasion, to counter the threats posed by Weapons of Mass Destruction Related Program Activities, not an active WMD producing infrastructure with nuclear capability on the horizon. You have us jumping at Saddam intentions when we have enemies out there, even amongst the so-called Axis of Evil Countries who have active programs along these lines running! Iran is working towards a Nuke, and has the facilities to do it. So does North Korea!

We do not need this kind of foreign policy myopia. We need to take care of present threats, present enemies before we go squashin old enemies and old threats that are no longer such dangers to us. Saddam bore watching and little else.

As for the Sudan, What he offered was technical assistance. True enough, he did provide experts for that. But that was before 1998. Three things happened that took that from being an imminent threat. First, Clinton, despite charges from your party and your people that he was “wagging the dog” sent a nice collection of cruises missiles after the plant in question. Your people bought into the B.S. of a plant manager who said it was a baby formula plant, a manager then under investigation for fraud or financial improprieties concerning BCCI. Your people disregarded a chemical test on that soil indicating a unique precursor chemical to VX, known as EMPTA, was present.

Clinton also initiated operation Desert Fox, destroying much of the infrastructure and stockpiles your people went looking for.

Bin Laden also left the Sudan, migrating to Afghanistan. All this holdings in the Sudan were expropriated.

So in the end, Saddam was contained, and the threat faced up to. And your people didn’t even recognize that at the time.

I think the moderate liberal voices in the media have been saying that Bush mislead the American public. It’s a safer argument because it’s abstract, hard to measure, and not as rude as calling someone a liar. There are plenty of polls since the administration started pushing to invade Iraq that showed a large percentage (like 60-some%) of Americans believed Saddam was involved in 911 and was collaborating with al Qaeda, so I think the point can be argued fairly.

I can appreciate good circumstantial evidence as much as the next guy but there is little to none of this to establish collaboration between Iraq and al Qaeda, meanwhile there is overwhelming evidence that extremely little came from the rare meetings between them. And, yes, when I heard the administration say “connections with al Qaeda,” I didn’t think they were talking about flimsy connections. A few contacts over ten years that lead to no collaboration whatsoever does not a connection make. You can call it that and probably get away with it, but it sure seems misleading.

Same with the gassing his own people bit. Bush will spare the time to paint the graphic detail of motherly corpses embracing infant corpses but there’s never enough time to explain when this happened, who supplied him with the BCW to begin with, who took Iraq off the list of terrorist states so it could supply this and more to them during the Iran-Iraq War, why we left him in power after Gulf War I, why we abandoned the Kurds after GWI, or any of the other very related issues in using humanitarianism as justification. Again, there is nothing factually wrong with his assertion, it’s just misleading.

Near the end of the cited speech, Bush begins to couch his claims with ambiguity, “plotted,” “seeking,” “could,” “could,” “if.” This is because the administration had nothing. They flaunted tenuous speculation as clear and present danger. I believe this to be misleading.

Nothing has yet come to light to make me think Bush didn’t mislead the country.

On preview: what Stephen said, too ;).

One thing many people shout about concerns someone to provide evidence that has been classified. I.e. any additional intel bushy had before the war, any intel proving beyond a doubt that Hussein was tied to 9/11, etc. By revealing this information, wouldn’t it jeopardize the information’s source(s)? Ex. Russian leader tells aide he has nukes. A day later America releases to the public their intell that Russia has nukes, and because the public most definitely will not simply accept the government’s assessment based solely upon the government’s word, the source of the information must also be revealed to provide credibility. Where does the U.S. get their information after that Russian aide is murdered?

Rawr, I have evidence that Bush still gets tipsy every morning and sloshed at night, but, in the interest of national security and foreign relations, I must not reveal it. You will just have to take my word for it, we are lead by a drunk who sobers up only for speeches and walks to the helipad.

You see the problem with secrecy? It is the stupidest political maneuver in the long run to say something is true, but, the evidence for that truth must be kept secret. It just doesn’t wash with rational minds in the long run. Only with the secularly faithful.

Rawr, your theory that sometimes governments can’t make certain facts known so that they can protect valuable information sources is certainly quite valid, but it is not applicable in the case of the Bush Administration’s intelligence about Iraq.

Back in 2002-3, during the runup to the war when the Bush Administration was trying over and over again to display evidence to justify invading Iraq (and culminating in Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN), I was constantly telling myself “That’s all they’ve got? This evidence seems pretty flimsy to me.” BUT, I was also saying to myself (in moments of generosity to the Bush Administration) “Perhaps the Administration feels that the rest of the evidence is too risky to reveal. Perhaps the more damning evidence would hurt our intelligence network”. In other words, the same problem you feared.

In short, I thought that perhaps the evidence was the tip of the iceberg. Now I know that it was scraping the bottom of the barrell.

Now I know that my generosity and my trust was unfounded.

If more evidence of an Al Qaeda-Saddam connection does exist (which Bush Administration supporters seem to be desperately hoping and grasping for) and if the Bush Administration is heroically keeping that evidence secret — even though revealing that evidence would help their chances in the November Election and releasing the evidence would certainly help America not be hated and distrusted by the whole world — then I don’t understand why they wouldn’t reveal it now. There are no Saddam regime sources to protect any more.

The fact of the matter is, and this has been roundly acknowledged and exposed in recent months, that the United States had nearly zero intelligence sources within Saddam Hussein’s regime. Those of you who support the Administration should stop embarassing yourselves (and America) by maintining this desperate hope that the Bush Administration somehow has more evidence about Saddam than what it has revealed. They do not. As Stephen wrote in the left column, it’s time to give it up.

-Cf

With regards to Al Qaeda’s contacts with Iraq: From what I’ve read, the only serious contact was back in 1994, and even that meeting was fruitless. Other than that, the evidence of “contact” they’ve described seems pretty pathetic, even if true. This evidence, like finding a canister of ricin in a roadside bomb, may prove that the Bush Administration wasn’t completely making everything up out of thin air, it does not absolve them of blatant lying to the American people (or to themselves, I don’t know which is worse).

Let’s look at it on a scale from zero to 10, with 10 representing Saddam with ICBMs and having weekly tea with Osama bin Laden and with zero being him without any contacts with Al Qaeda at all and with no WMDs at all. And lets say that a 5 is sufficient grounds for an American pre-emptive invasion.

We who oppose the Iraq invasion are not arguing that Saddam had zero contact with Al Qaeda, nor did he have zero WMD. The evidence today shows that he had about .01 contact with Al Qaeda and maybe .1 WMD. More than zero, but far from sufficient grounds for war.

So while the Bush Administration and it’s supporters can technically continue to claim innocence of the charge of lying simply because of the technicality that the WMDs and Al Qaeda contacts are not 100% non-existent, the evidence is still miles and miles away from being ajustification for war. The Administration, however, said that the evidence they had was sufficient to justify war, but the reality is that it was not. Therefore they are still lying.

-Cf

There are two seperate factual issues here:

1. Did Iraq have contacts with Al Qaeda in attempts to attack the United States? I think the answer to that question is probably no, as the 9/11 com. has recently said.

2. Did Iraq plan to attack us using terrorist tactics on its own, regardless of its contacts with Al Qaeda, agains the U.S.? I think the answer to this question is likely yes, but I do not know what their capability to do this was, or how much damage they could have caused. I think that is what Putin is saying here, he is probably right. I mean Iraq did attempt to kill a former president of ours, so there is no reason to believe they wouldnt use these same resources to try to kill U.S. citizens both abroad and at home. Make no mistake about it- Iraq was our enemy, and they want to use any tools at its disposal to hurt us and our citizens. I do not think most people would disagree with that, even if they opposed the war.

(A disclaimer as always: I supported this war for humanitarian reasons, and did not think Iraq was very dangerous to our security. As a result, which ever way both of these two questions come out, I think the war was justified… On the other hand, it has clearly been mismanaged in the reconstruction stages).

Absolutely incredible. The partisan bias here is blinding.

I wonder if you’ve thought about how much evidence we had to invade Afghanistan? Where is the incontrovertible evidence that Osama Bin Laden had anything to do with 9/11? If you apply the same standards to Afghanistan you should have had a grand jury convene first to get all the absolute evidence before going to war.

Liberal opponents of Bush have made up their minds. No amount of evidence to the contrary will sway them from the opinion set in their minds. Bush made up the threat and wanted to wage war for oil… so he lied. Bush wanted to invade Iraq before 9/11… so he lied. The war was concocted in Texas (while Bush was on vacation) for political purposes… so he lied.

Bush gets a PBD saying that Osama is planning attacks on US soil before 9/11 and this proves he let 9/11 happen. Bush gets intelligence that Saddam is planning attacks on US soil and he should disregard it as inconsequential. After all Saddam is plainly ‘contained’. Apparently unlike Afghanistan which was apparently uncontained.

The problem with the liberal arguments on these points is that there is a republican president in office. Given a democratic administration none of these points would even be thought of by the left.

The idea that after 9/11, intelligence that Saddam Hussein’s regime, who were shooting at planes, attempted to assasinate a US president, thwarted weapons inspections, refused to comply with the ceasefire, etc etc ad infinitum, was actually planning attacks on US soil *after 9/11 mind you*… that this means nothing?

I can just see the congressional hearing in an alternate history where Bush didn’t take any action. Ben Benividez holding up Russian intelligence documents outlining Iraqi plans for attacks exactly like he did with the August pbd oulining Osama’s ‘intentions’ to attack America.

Once again you prove your partisanship by insisting Bush is ALL wrong no matter what he does or what evidence there is. Any evidence to the contrary is either phony, made up, overblown, misinterpreted, or false, and any and all other evidence is proof somehow of Bush’s incompetence, evil-mindedness, warmongering, lying, deceitfulness, and or impeachfullness, take your pick.

If democrats are in office and they let threats like these just go unanswered, or answered with ‘nuance’ and diplomacy because they are inconsequential or don’t rise to your definition of ‘sufficient grounds’ for action. You can expect that more rogue regimes will begin to make plans because they will think they can get away with it. Or like the UN, democrats will issue vague threats of sanctions or warnings that “we’ll get real tough with you if you don’t play nice”.

Absolutely incredible.

Eric- while you are exactly right that the left would not be making most of these frivolous arguments if a Democrat was in power, I am pretty sure the right would have picked up on these same arguments and used them against the Democratic president…

Here’s some interesting quotes from the Clinton Justice departments indictment of Osama Bin Laden in 1998. Note that the indictment didn’t solve the terror problem. So much for the total reliance on the law enforcement approach. Heavy on law, and light on enforcement I would say.

New York — Usama bin Laden and Muhammad Atef were indicted November 4 in Manhattan federal court for the August 7 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and for conspiring to kill Americans outside the United States.

…According to the indictment, bin Laden and al Qaeda forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in Sudan and with representatives of the Government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezballah with the goal of working together against their common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.

“In addition, 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,” the indictment said.
-usinfo.state.gov

Yeah, those secular and religious folks hate each other. They’d never have contact with each other much less collaboration. I realize the opposition to this kind of information is mainly partisan, but just imagine for a moment a Democratic president in office so that you can look at this in perspective.

It also highlights why the axis of evil is not a gimmick.

Misha,

Perhaps. But in defense of Republicans, we did overwhelmingly support Clinton in Kosovo. There were some dissenters of course, but none of the intense revisionism. If a democratic president were doing the right thing in Republican eyes there wouldn’t be as much criticism.

Do you have any statistics on the Republicans supporting clinton during Kosovo? if the majority supported Clinton’s actions in Kosovo, I will step off of my comments but if my memory serves me correctly the majority opposed him. I remember this statement by no less than Tom DeLay: “While we may not support the president’s ill-advised war, we do support our troops.”

sounds very very familiar, dont you think?

I actually think Kosovo and Iraq were very similiar indeed. I think its rather humorous that people like Albright, Wes Clark, Delay ect. can change their stripes so quickly.

> we did overwhelmingly support Clinton in Kosovo

I don’t remember it that way at all.

-Cf

> I actually think Kosovo and Iraq were
> very similiar indeed.

Except that in Kosovo we had overwhelming regional and international support, clear objectives, moral clarity, political honesty, and, of course, a stunning military success and exit strategy.

-Cf

Actually, I was mistaken. A majority of Republicans didn’t support Kosovo to begin with.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The U.S. Senate voted Tuesday evening 58-41 in favor of a resolution supporting U.S. participation in NATO military operations in Kosovo, just hours after Secretary-General Javier Solana gave the go-ahead for air raids in Yugoslavia. -cnn.com

This is a very interesting bit of recent history which I am glad I was forced to revisit.

Told earlier in the day by Clinton that strikes against Serbian targets would proceed with or without congressional support, Senate leaders quickly crafted a bipartisan resolution of support — and shelved earlier plans to vote on whether to block funds for such an operation. -cnn.com

Liberals, please substitute Bush for Clinton and Iraqi for Serbian in the previous quote. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Here’s a unilateral war if I ever saw one. Yet, here are many Republican’s voicing their concerns about going off to war, being brushed off by the Clinton administration, and what do Republicans do? After realizing they had their protest vote, voted for more funds to fight it.

REP. J. C. WATTS: Margaret, I think — I think America can be involved in a humanitarian effort without being involved in a civil war. What that funding was in appropriations was the president sent up a $6 billion request, supplemental request. The President was replacing bullet for bullet, bomb for bomb. Republicans felt like we should go further. We’re $3 billion dollars short in basic military ammunition in the United States Army. We’re 18,000 sailors short in the United States Navy. We’re 700 pilots short in the United States Air Force. Even when we go into humanitarian missions, we still put our soldiers, America’s sons and daughters, in harm’s way. We feel like we should give them the resources to win. We’ve deployed our troops over the last six years over 30 times. The previous 40 years we deployed our troops 10 times. And the administration, what we’re saying is, is that we should put more into our military to give our soldiers the resources to win and not the resources to play the game. -pbs.org

I only made a cursory stab at research, but David Bonior’s complete 180 on humanitarian war is astounding.

1999-
REP. DAVID BONIOR, (D) Michigan: Well, it was extremely unfortunate, Margaret. What you have here is the American people supporting by about a two to one margin our efforts in the air campaign to stop this brutality. And this is brutality of genocidal proportions. We’re talking about a person here who is burning villages, a million homeless in Kosovo as a result of this action — women being raped as a weapon of war; sons and fathers being dragged off of convoys and shot to death. We heard something yesterday of about 100 that were killed; men and boys being tied up and burned alive. And the American people understand this. They understand oppression. They understand that very, very well. And at their core, they react to it. And that’s why there’s so much support in the country for this policy. NATO supports it. The Republicans in the Senate, 17 of them went along in a bipartisan way supporting this campaign. And last night the right wing of the Republican Party voted against it. And then this afternoon, as we saw in this film clip, they larded up the very planes they didn’t want to fly with a lot of military pork. -pbs.org

2002-

“I think many people are on the path to give the president pretty much what he wants,” said Rep. David Bonior, D-Mich., a strong critic of what he calls “this rush to war” and one of three congressmen who visited Baghdad this week. -usatoday.com

The congressional votes looked more ambivilant than heated or divisive. I guess my recollection was more of Republican acquiescence in Kosovo.

The 249 – 180 vote Wednesday on a resolution by Rep. Bill Goodling (R-PA) requiring the president to seek congressional approval before spending any funds on a ground invasion force, coupled with congressional attempts to double the amount of U.S. military spending for the conflict, sent a mixed signal, White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said.

“The House yesterday voted not to move forward, not to pull back, and tied on what we’re doing. The only thing they seem to be able to agree on is to try to double the amount of money we spend on a policy they’re not sure what they think about,” Lockhart said.

A Democratic resolution to support the air war failed on a tie vote of 213 – 213.

The House defeated two resolutions offered by Rep. Tom Campbell (R-CA) that would have forced the Congress to declare war or withdraw all military personnel. The first failed 427-2, the second failed 290-139. CNS calls to Campbell’s office for comment were not returned at press time.

The House votes will have no immediate practical effect on the conducting of the U.S.-led NATO air campaign against Yugoslav forces. The Clinton administration has said it opposes the deployment of ground forces in a hostile environment in the Balkans, but Clinton has said he supports a reassessment of this option. Clinton also recently called up 33,102 reservists to active duty and the numbers of U.S. ground troops in countries bordering Albania have been increased.

The House votes were seen as symbolic because for them to become law, they would have to be approved by the Senate and also survive a presidential veto. The Senate has voted in favor of the U.S. action in the Balkans. The votes, however, sent a message of disapproval to the White House.
-cnsnews.com

Interestingly Joe Leiberman sees the forest for the trees.

In the Rose Garden, Bush thanked congressional leaders for uniting on the draft resolution “to show unity of purpose.”

“We will not leave the future of peace and the security of America in the hands of this cruel and dangerous man,” Bush said. “Saddam must disarm, period. If, however, he chooses to do otherwise, if he persists in his defiance, the use of force may become unavoidable.”

Lieberman, a potential rival of Bush in the 2004 presidential election, said the administration had explored all options, other than military, to disarm Saddam. “They’ve not worked. The moment of truth has arrived for Saddam Hussein. This is his last chance.” -usatoday

cf-

Why didn’t Clinton go to the UN security council first?

Why did he only go to congress as an afterthought? I thought we were not for unilateralism. Or does unilateralism actually contribute to clear objectives and military success?

Here’s a unilateral war if I ever saw one.

Are we ignoring the fact that the UN and NATO backed the war in Kosovo, and five major powers (no need to cite El Salvador as one of the major supporters of the war, unlike with Iraq) sent major peacekeeping forces?

Why on earth haven’t we heard this stuff from Putin before? Or from our own Administration? Do you really think they would have sat on this information for so many years when it was exactly the type of information they needed to get the anti-iraq-war crowd off their backs? That just doesn’t feel right.

In any case, lets not call anything proof until we actually see it. I’m tired of all of this hearsay - proof would be nice for once. Or is this going to be another “trust us” story like the Padilla case where, let me remind you, a US citizen was held indefinately and without charge on suspicion of involvement of a dirty-bomb plot. It turns out, of course, that he was involved in no such thing. Way-to-go Ashcroft’s DoJ.

I didn’t bring up Kosovo to begin with, so I have no problem pointing out that analogies between Kosovo and Iraq are pretty flimsy. Kosovo was probably 1/10 as massive a military operation as Iraq - and the geopolitical risks involved were similarly small in comparison to Iraq. The scales, objectives, and contexts of the two conflicts were wildly different.

-Cf

ceejayoz,

Clinton didn’t go to the UN for a security council resolution authorizing the bombing because he knew the Russians would veto it much like the French did on Iraq. Moreover the nitwits you are marching with in lockstep also called Kosovo an illegal war.

Nato´s bombing of Kosovo last year was illegal under international law, the Labour-controlled foreign affairs select committee is expected to report today.

After an inquiry into the foreign policy implications of the Kosovo crisis, the select committee has concluded that Nato is a defensive alliance and has no powers under its treaty to conduct a humanitarian operations war without the specific authority of the United Nations.

Russia repeatedly promised to use its veto to prevent the UN backing military action. -balkanpeace.org

….

“Clinton’s Kosovo Frauds”

However, once the bombing stopped, the Clinton administration was stunned to see the Serbian army withdraw in fine order with polished buttons and good morale. A confidential postwar U.S. military investigation concluded that the damage claims had been exaggerated nearly tenfold. In reality, only 14 tanks, 18 armored personnel carriers, and 20 artillery pieces were taken out, despite the claimed dropping of more than 20,000 bombs on the Serbian military.

On the other hand, NATO did have a very high “kill-rate” for the cardboard decoy tanks that the Serbs erected all over Kosovo. At the end of the war, the Serbian military largely was unscathed, but the country’s civilian infrastructure was in ruins. NATO bombs were far more effective against women, children, hospitals, and retirement homes than against soldiers.
-fff.org

The Left, the Left, the left. You address us as if everyone of us are granola eating hippies. Not to disparage them, I’m sure they are mostly nice people. But the American left is more complicated than that.

For example, you keep on telling us how we flip flopped on Iraq, and then call us peaceniks. Problem: those charges are mutually exclusive. To flip flop, we would have to do something rather unpacificist: support a war. You guys got bipartisan support for an authorization to use force, and what’s more important, you got it from somebody who’s supposed to be a prototypical liberal. What gives? Maybe the legacy of the Vietnam War was more short-lived than you thought. Maybe todays Democrats run a party that is more like that of Truman’s and FDR’s day: Socially liberal, but willing to go to war.

Especially after 9/11. You seriously underestimate liberals on these issues. We didn’t hesitate to go after Al Quaeda. And we won’t. It was Clinton and his Liberal administration that tried to tell you guys that there was a clear and present threat from terrorists out there. Your people chose to ignore them, setting counterterrorism as a lower priority than missile defense, rogue nations, and Iraq. You barely mentioned terrorists in many of your speeches.

I think the phrase clear and present danger embodies the mistake your people make on foreign policy. Particularly, the middle term: Present. Maybe there was once cooperation between Osama and Saddam, but that was once, and Clinton answered that threat with the due force it deserved, even while your people attacked him for it. Same thing for when Saddam threatened Bush 41’s life. We sent a cruise missile and a strong diplomatic message that scared them out of the terrorism business for the rest of their regime. Maybe they had plans, maybe they had contacts, but they had Clinton’s word that the next time he would come for Saddam’s regime, not Saddam’s Intel HQ. When Saddam kicked the inspectors out, Clinton pre-emptively targeted all the places where WMDs and WMD infrastructure was located.

Judging fromt he facts on the ground, there may have once been a relationship, once been a terrorist threat from Iraq, and once been WMD stockpiles and the like, but not anymore.

Therefore, not a clear and present danger. Therefore, no real justification for an attack on Iraq. Saddam was a threat in the past, he might have been in the future, but he wasn’t now, at least not enough for us to invade.

It would be sad that many Iraqis would die while he remained in power, that they would suffer his oppression, but the problem is, people suffer elsewhere too, and we can’t always save them. It’s unfortunate, but it’s reality. Now, I’m no opponent of humanitarian missions: I supported Bosnia and Kosovo, in fact would have gone farther. I wouldn’t mind us intervening now in the Sudan, or in any number of other wretched hellholes. I wouldn’t mind this government working for the spread of democracy.

What I mind is that Bush did not base his invasion on that. He told us there was a clear and present danger coming from Iraq of WMD related terrorism. The evidence has neither supported the clarity or the comtemporary nature of the threat. This, in the midst of a time where the ringleader of the attack that actually killed Americans on our soil still roams free.

Military force can and should be used at times. I am no pacifist, no advocate of the withdrawal of troops when the chips are down. If had my way, the American soldier in Iraq would stay until the job was done. And we would take as long as it would take to establish a strong democracy, not rush things.

Where our dispute is with you, is that you got us into this mess in the first place, into a situation where we losing lives without the vindication of having done so with the evidence on our side. We feel manipulated, we feel cheated, we feel as if the president has failed to do his duty.

Bias, in the end, doesn’t matter. The facts do. Tell me: do the facts support the presentation made by Powell to the UN? Did the facts support claims of an Iraqi WMD infrastructure up and running? Do the facts support any assertion that Iraq had a nuclear program. Do the facts support a ongoing collaboration between Al Quaeda and Iraq, apart from the scientific aid given by Iraq to the Sudan? Was Iraq giving Al Quaeda financial support, logistical support, or support in the execution of their attacks on 9/11, or elsewhere? Was Bin Laden attack targets on Iraq’s behalf? Did they ever even get beyond contacts. The answers to a lot of these questions is no. You may be able to accept that low of a standard of evidence, but I’m not. I don’t want to waste the lives of our soldiers, the manpower of our armies, and the resources of our nation, government and armed forces in a war that is not confronting clear threats that actually exist in the here and the now.

From now on I think I will have to preface my posts with the following disclaimer:
Disclaimer: The following statements and opinions are my own. Unless I specifically claim to do so, I am not speaking for all liberals, nor did I get my opinions from any liberal training manuals, the Democratic party, or from political candidates I support. I request that, should you choose to respond to this post, you should please address my arguments as if they were my own — and with the assumption that I am not marching in lockstep with a larger ideology or that I am displaying partisan bias.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way:

Eric wrote:
> The idea that after 9/11, intelligence that Saddam
> Hussein’s regime, who were shooting at planes,
> attempted to assasinate a US president, thwarted
> weapons inspections, refused to comply with the
> ceasefire, etc etc ad infinitum, was actually
> planning attacks on US soil *after 9/11 mind
> you*… that this means nothing?

You keep painting the situation as a zero-sum game, where if your side is even 1% correct then my side is 100% wrong. Or, to put it in other terms, you are portraying our side as being in complete denial of the existence of anything bad about Saddam - as you put it, that the evidence against him “means nothing”.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: my opinion is that the evidence you cite exists but did not warrant an invasion. This is not an illogical argument at all, and even you can understand it. Look at Iran and North Korea. Both countries also have long laundry lists of crimes and behaviors that equal or even exceed those of Saddam Hussein. If you just go by the “degree of guiltyness” standard, as you are with Iraq, then we should invade those countries right away. But, fortunately (hopefully), we realize that the price of invading those countries will likely be greater than the benefit of punishing the violations.

In my opinion, the cost/benefit of invading Iraq was such that I thought that invasion was not worth it. The cost/benefit analysis of invading North Korea or Iran has told the Bush Administration (again, hopefully) that invading those countries would be a bad idea - i.e., not worth it. The difference in Iraq was that somehow the Administration and many of the American People used exaggerrated the benefits (we will prevent Saddam from using nukes) and underestimated the costs (Chalabi’s army will make a clean sweep and we’ll be out in six months) to conclude that invasion was worth it.

-Cf

Eric, I sincerely don’t understand your last post. You claim that ceejayoz is “marching with in lockstep” with “nitwits” who “called Kosovo an illegal war”, and then you provide two links - one to an obscure accusation from a british MP, and another to a condemnation of the war from a right-leaning think tank.

The only “nitwits” I can find who opposed the Kosovo war were Russia, many Serbians, ultra-left wing pacifists who would oppose any war, and the American Republican party.

The second article, ironically, condemns and even mocks the American-led forces’ military failings during the Kosovo operations - exactly the sort of “hypocritical” and “treasonous” (words from your side, not mine) thoughts your side continually levies on those of us who opposed the war in Iraq.

The article proceeds to eviscerate Clinton’s foreign policies and, in fact, concludes with a condemnation of the concept that America should invade countries to liberate their citizens at all (sound familiar?). I don’t understand if the article is meant to represent your point of view (thus making you a nitwit) or did you intend the article to represent the point of view of ceejayoz (which is absurd). What, exactly, was your point, Eric?

> Clinton didn’t go to the UN for a security
> council resolution authorizing the bombing
> because he knew the Russians would veto it
> much like the French did on Iraq.

First: Bush, like Clinton, never tried. Second: it wasn’t just France - Russia and China also opposed it. I’m not saying they’re right just because three nations opposed the US’s plans, I’m just pointing it out because pro-Iraq-invasion arguments almost always descend into simply blaming the French, when in fact France was only one of dozens of nations to oppose the invasion. In the case of Kosovo, Russia was pretty much the lone voice as I recall.

-Cf

So if I don’t Bush personally trustworthy, I should trust the totalitarian so-called president of Russia instead? Strange argument to find on the right column. (But then again, Bush looked in his eyes and saw that he was a good man. Now he would call Putin a VERY good man.)

I thought we weren’t supposed to let foreign leaders influence our vote. ;)

Stephen,

I can understand you’re not wanting to be associated with ‘the left’. They are wrong about so much. The history and politics of the left, or liberals if you wish, is less than stellar.

Maybe there was once cooperation between Osama and Saddam, but that was once, and Clinton answered that threat with the due force it deserved, even while your people attacked him for it. Same thing for when Saddam threatened Bush 41’s life. We sent a cruise missile and a strong diplomatic message that scared them out of the terrorism business for the rest of their regime. Maybe they had plans, maybe they had contacts, but they had Clinton’s word that the next time he would come for Saddam’s regime, not Saddam’s Intel HQ. When Saddam kicked the inspectors out, Clinton pre-emptively targeted all the places where WMDs and WMD infrastructure was located.

You actually think that took care of it? Clinton took care of it? What about Afghanistan? Clinton sent some cruise missiles in there too didn’t he?

I frankly don’t understand your logic. Bush didn’t do enough in Afghanistan because we didn’t send every last soldier there and capture Osama, but Clinton took care of a connection between Osama and Saddam, as well as WMD by bombing but leaving him in power.

You’re not making sense Stephen. If Iraq was no threat, then by the same standard Afghanistan was no threat.

Judging from he facts on the ground, there may have once been a relationship, once been a terrorist threat from Iraq, and once been WMD stockpiles and the like, but not anymore.

Again, how did we know that? Before we went in there we obviously did not know what was there. That’s the whole point. The weapons themselves are almost irrelevant. The fact that Saddam wanted them and would use them and had contacts with Osama makes the danger all too real after 9/11. And to know that after 9/11, after 3000 people had been killed by a less-than-rogue state, a fourth or fifth rate power even less capable than Iraq, this means nothing?

It would be sad that many Iraqis would die while he remained in power, that they would suffer his oppression, but the problem is, people suffer elsewhere too, and we can’t always save them. It’s unfortunate, but it’s reality. Now, I’m no opponent of humanitarian missions: I supported Bosnia and Kosovo, in fact would have gone farther. I wouldn’t mind us intervening now in the Sudan, or in any number of other wretched hellholes. I wouldn’t mind this government working for the spread of democracy.

What I mind is that Bush did not base his invasion on that.

The hell he didn’t. This is where the left comes in. This is a non sequiter. It is democrats who insisted that WMD be emphasized in the resolution of force. It is democrats who made it the condition upon which they would give their ‘bipartisan’ support for such only if it was WMD and only WMD that was the reason. You only yourselves to blame for that.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who did not join Bush in the Rose Garden but attended an earlier breakfast session, said the new Iraq resolution was “an improvement over the president’s original proposal.”

He said he preferred greater emphasis on eliminating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and something on reconstruction plans for a post-Saddam Iraq. Still, he predicted the Senate would provide “broad bipartisan support” to give the president “the authority he needs.”

…Biden dropped plans to try to have his committee consider an alternative he drafted with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., that would have put more emphasis on a U.N. role and made disarmament the only reason for confronting Iraq. -usatoday.com

I am incredulous at the left for their general acceptance of dictators and oppressive governments. I guess support and sympathy for the former svoiet union has really changed the classical liberal cause of freedom into one of appeasement to fascists and dictators.

Military force can and should be used at times. I am no pacifist, no advocate of the withdrawal of troops when the chips are down. If had my way, the American soldier in Iraq would stay until the job was done. And we would take as long as it would take to establish a strong democracy, not rush things.

Well, where the opposition to the war is going is not there Stephen. The anti-war movement has no such thing in mind. The left wing of the democratic party is more represented by Dean and Kucinich than Kerry. At least Kerry understands that he must say he will not just pull out when he is elected.

Where our dispute is with you, is that you got us into this mess in the first place, into a situation where we losing lives without the vindication of having done so with the evidence on our side. We feel manipulated, we feel cheated, we feel as if the president has failed to do his duty.

Then it’s really just sour grapes? You’re willing to destroy the mission to save it? Take down the president because the left argues there’s been deceit? First off, I don’t feel deceived, manipulated, or cheated. I was with this from the beginning. I frankly don’t believe that argument. It is a little to pat and relies solely on the left’s reinterpretation of the facts.

Everyone believed Saddam was a danger and Bush didn’t invent that just before the invasion. The connections between Saddam and Osama weren’t invented before the invasion. In fact much of the arguments you say were decieving were from the Clinton administration. The truth is if you supported the war to begin with you do not find yourself pissed off that no WMD were found.

The humanitarian reason, removal of a dictator, and the possibility of a democracy were just as much a part of the argument for war as WMD were.

CF-

From now on I think I will have to preface my posts with the following disclaimer: Disclaimer: The following statements and opinions are my own. Unless I specifically claim to do so, I am not speaking for all liberals, nor did I get my opinions from any liberal training manuals, the Democratic party, or from political candidates I support. I request that, should you choose to respond to this post, you should please address my arguments as if they were my own — and with the assumption that I am not marching in lockstep with a larger ideology or that I am displaying partisan bias.

Again, I can understand you not wanting to be associated with the arguments of the left, nevertheless when they coincide with your opinion I don’t feel wrong in pointing that out.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: my opinion is that the evidence you cite exists but did not warrant an invasion. This is not an illogical argument at all, and even you can understand it.

The argument has been that there is NO evidence Saddam and Osama ever had ANY connection to each other. We know this is not true. When this is pointed out, you say it doesn’t matter anyway. If it doesn’t matter then the fact that no connections existed didn’t matter either.

We know that Iraqi intelligence met with Al Qaeda. We know that Saddam was funding Palestinian terrorists. Funding ANY terrorists should be enough to put Saddam on a short list for removal from power. We know that he planned terrorist attacks after the gulf war was over including the assasination of President Bush. We also know that he believed himself to be a Saladin, meant to lead the Arab people in defeating the ‘crusaders’. Saddam never ceased to be a threat until we pulled him out of the hole he crawled into when our boys took Bagdhad.

Look at Iran and North Korea. Both countries also have long laundry lists of crimes and behaviors that equal or even exceed those of Saddam Hussein. If you just go by the “degree of guiltyness” standard, as you are with Iraq, then we should invade those countries right away. But, fortunately (hopefully), we realize that the price of invading those countries will likely be greater than the benefit of punishing the violations.

We are not talking about an automatic if x is true then we invade. We are talking about ten years of sanctions, a laundry list of crimes and behaviours and a cease fire agreement which gives us the right to resume military operations. The fact that we were relatively sure that Saddam didn’t have nukes makes it more viable to invade.

Another reason to find and bomb all of Iran’s nuclear facilities now before it’s too late.

Eric, I sincerely don’t understand your last post. You claim that ceejayoz is “marching with in lockstep” with “nitwits” who “called Kosovo an illegal war”, and then you provide two links - one to an obscure accusation from a british MP, and another to a condemnation of the war from a right-leaning think tank.

Sorry if you misunderstood, I was in a rush. I meant it to point out that CLinton’s actions in Kosovo were similiar and that if anything Bush did more to be multilateral in going into Iraq. You support the democrat but not the republican.

The quotes were meant to point out that the same arguments were made by the fringe left that are being made about Iraq. In Clinton’s case, democrats and liberals didn’t want to hear it. In Bush’s case it has been adopted as gospel.

First: Bush, like Clinton, never tried.

Not true. That is a gross mischaracterization. Imagine Bush going to congress just hours before starting the invasion of Iraq, asking them to approve it. Imagine Bush never even going to the UN. Maybe Clinton was smarter than Bush on this. I certainly think so.

> The argument has been that there is NO evidence
> Saddam and Osama ever had ANY connection to
> each other.

NO! How can you possibly say that? How can you say that even after the right has dredged up countless quotes from Clinton administration officials and leading Democrats saying the exact opposite over and over again for the past decade? The idea that a leader of a powerful Arab nation would not have had any contacts with Al Qaeda is preposterous. I’ll bet every Arab country in the world has had contacts with Al Qaeda, many of them even more substantive than Saddam’s. As Stephen has pointed out, our very own country has had contacts with Al Qaeda. Several Americans have even joined Al Qaeda and have met with Osama bin Laden personally.

Who has ever claimed that there was zero contact? Name someone (someone important), please.

> The quotes were meant to point out that the
> same arguments were made by the fringe left

Except that one of the two quotes was from the fringe right. I still don’t get your point, but maybe it’s just me.

> > First: Bush, like Clinton, never tried.
> Not true. That is a gross mischaracterization.

I only meant that, like Clinton, the Bush Administration never put their final war resolution in front of the UN. They pulled it at the last minute for the same reason Clinton did: it was going to fail. That’s not really a mischaracterization at all, and there’s no need to read anything into it other than the factual statement.

-Cf

I am incredulous at the left for their general acceptance of dictators and oppressive governments.

Oppressive governments, eh? Like the government of one Vladimir Putin?

I can understand you’re not wanting to be associated with ‘the left’. They are wrong about so much. The history and politics of the left, or liberals if you wish, is less than stellar.

You’re embracing that straw man so closely I can feel you itching from here. I made it very clear that I consider your picture of the left to be rather narrow, and inaccurate. If you want to console me on a renouncement I never made, please be so kind as to make yourself look like a fool doing so. It makes my job easier.

I don’t blame Bush for not attacking Afghanistan before 9/11. Nobody was seriously considering that. But Clinton, despite irrational political opposition from your party, did those things. He may have even saved us, or our allies from attack by chemical weapons. I wonder if you could tell me just how willing your party would have been to answer a call to war from Clinton, had he asked for an invasion of Iraq. Given their treatment of him after his attack on that Chemical weapons factory, I think your side would have played politics, just like they did throughout the 90s.

The weapons were never irrelevant. They were the crux of the argument for a pre-emptive war. Your spoke again, and again about the need to disarm Saddam being so necessary that we were even willing to defy the UN to do so. With you or without you, we said. Is that not so? Did that mean anything? If it did, it meant something, because you people went out of your way to portray a restored WMD infrastructure, a rogue government seeking nuclear weapons and an active, collaborative relationship with Osama Bin Laden. Go back and read what your Secretary of State spoke of. Go back and read the press quotes for what your people were saying back in 2002 and early 2003.

Besides, it wasn’t Afghanistan that hurt us, it was Al Quaeda. Afghanistan had no offensive capability to reach us with. Al Quaeda had trained agents which it infiltrated into our society. Afghanistan had infrastructure, a friendly government with nothing to lose by harboring them, and a “screw you” attitude to the west and the United States.

I am incredulous at the left for their general acceptance of dictators and oppressive governments. I guess support and sympathy for the former soviet union has really changed the classical liberal cause of freedom into one of appeasement to fascists and dictators.

Why don’t you head to Massachussetts and marry that straw man of yours? Where was the left’s acceptance of dictators when Clinton bombed Milosevic? Where was it when Clinton unleashed cruise missiles and sanctions on Turabi and Hussein? Hell, where was it when FDR and Truman defeated the fricking Axis Powers? Who was it that stared down Khruschev and made him blink during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Meanwhile, your people, under Nixon and Ford accepted any right wing dictator who would fight the communists, no matter how fugly their behavior made our reputations seem. Even now, your people are willing to make deals with the worst tyrants in the name of having a coalition of the willing.

Well, where the opposition to the war is going is not there Stephen. The anti-war movement has no such thing in mind. The left wing of the democratic party is more represented by Dean and Kucinich than Kerry. At least Kerry understands that he must say he will not just pull out when he is elected.

Oh, you think? Question: who is the nominee? If the left (meaning Democrats) Was better represented by Dean and Kucinich, who do you think would be the nominee in waiting? Kerry represents the feelings of enough liberal and moderate Democrats to give him our nomination.
‘

Then it’s really just sour grapes? You’re willing to destroy the mission to save it? Take down the president because the left argues there’s been deceit? First off, I don’t feel deceived, manipulated, or cheated. I was with this from the beginning. I frankly don’t believe that argument. It is a little to pat and relies solely on the left’s reinterpretation of the facts.

My wish to take down the president comes from I have learned, and what I have figured out for myself. Have you considered that maybe it’s the stunning ironies of what we came to confront in Iraq and what we really found that ultimately have turned people against this war?

Besides, sour grapes means we’re disparaging it because somebody else won. Only thing is, we played on your side, and were willing to continue to do so as long as we weren’t disillusioned as to the threat that your president raised the spectre of. Nobody wanted to repeat 9/11.

But if the proof you used to convince us to come along wasn’t up to snuff, we have a right to our outrage. We’re in it now, committed to a war we now can see answered no clear and present danger. There are so many things that you guys must have either known and not told us, or not known to begin with when you should have.

You know, people will not blame their representatives for crossing party lines when the facts are on the table, and the truth (or what we believe to be it) is staring us in face. They won’t blame their representatives for coming to an equitable compromise with their political enemies. But if it looks like your people did something funny, or did something poorly, then it’s our duty as the political opposition to call you on it, and our desire as a party wishing to advance our cause to win elections and gain our political offices.

You commit a fallacy alleging that we should not criticize Bush because everybody thought as he did. Bushes job is to look over the welfare of the people. He should not trust to his own infallility, or that of anybody else under his leadership. When Tenet told him that his case was a slam dunk, Bush should have gone with that feeling of doubt that he had, and told him to take a second look at the information. He shouldn’t have sent his aides data-mining for raw intelligence to bulk up a case he thought thin. The thing about raw intelligence is that it can and often is unreliable. Some sources lie, some exaggerate, some just plain don’t know what they’re looking at. That’s part of the mistake of that article that got published in the New Republic, Case Closed. They took at face value what often needs a great deal of processing to yield an accurate picture of things.

In the end, I think that’s your big problem. You guys don’t know the importance of nuance in dealing with information. As a writer, and as a student of Neuroscience and information theory, I can tell you that small pieces of information can be of huge significance, and not approaching one’s information with an open mind can lead one to miss the real patterns behind that information. Your people were so intent on confronting Saddam that you rejected information that wouldn’t fit with your desire to depose him once and for all. You invested yourself too much in certain people, trusted the wrong folks, and ultimately got too hasty and too sloppy in your planning. And now your people are paying the political price.

Who has ever claimed that there was zero contact? Name someone (someone important), please.

Someone important? Leaving open the guarantee that whatever quotes I can dig up won’t be ‘important enough’. Just look at the latest posting in the democrat column.

“Dick Cheney is still busily maintaining the non-existent link between Iraq and Al Queda that the 9/11 Commission has unequivocally said does not exist.”

…

Stephen,

I wonder if you could tell me just how willing your party would have been to answer a call to war from Clinton, had he asked for an invasion of Iraq. Given their treatment of him after his attack on that Chemical weapons factory,

Conveniently Donald Rumsfeld et al actually sent a letter to Clinton in 1998 asking him to do something very similiar.

We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. …That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.

…The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months.

…As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.

…if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.

…The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

…Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.

Sincerely,

Elliott Abrams
Richard L. Armitage
William J. Bennett
Jeffrey Bergner
John Bolton
Paula Dobriansky
Francis Fukuyama
Robert Kagan
Zalmay Khalilzad
William Kristol
Richard Perle
Peter W. Rodman
Donald Rumsfeld
William Schneider, Jr.
Vin Weber
Paul Wolfowitz
R. James Woolsey
Robert B. Zoellick
-newamericancentury.org

While I don’t disagree with you that it would be going against the tide for Clinton to do this he would have the obvious advantage of not having the rabid opposition of the left out to destroy him.

Besides, it wasn’t Afghanistan that hurt us, it was Al Quaeda. Afghanistan had no offensive capability to reach us with. Al Quaeda had trained agents which it infiltrated into our society. Afghanistan had infrastructure, a friendly government with nothing to lose by harboring them, and a “screw you” attitude to the west and the United States.

This is actually my point. Al Qaeda is not even a state. Nothing Al Qaeda could do is outside the capabilities of Iraq. Saddam fits the same criteria you ouline above. In addition we know that Saddam was willing to do exactly what Bush et al said he might do. Give weapons and support to terrorists. We know for a fact that Saddam funded suicide bombers in Israel. We know Saddam’s secret service had contacts with Al Qaeda. I submit to you that the fedayeen Saddam is a the Iraqi version or attempt to copy Al Qaeda. Zarqawi was operating in Baghdad with unofficial sanction and impunity if not express and outright support as several other major terrorist leaders were.

In the end, I think that’s your big problem. You guys don’t know the importance of nuance in dealing with information. As a writer, and as a student of Neuroscience and information theory, I can tell you that small pieces of information can be of huge significance, and not approaching one’s information with an open mind can lead one to miss the real patterns behind that information. Your people were so intent on confronting Saddam that you rejected information that wouldn’t fit with your desire to depose him once and for all.

Nuance is great for some situations. I’m not saying we don’t need ‘nuance’ ever. I’m saying it’s a poor substitute for straightforward, good old fashioned American military diplomacy.

I believe in making those assertions that I was pointing out that Afghanistan’s value to Al Quaeda was not in its offensive capabilities, but in it’s function as harbor and nexus of Al Quaeda activities.

Something Iraq never figured into. Despite the contacts, Iraq never became a nexus of cooperation, a haven for terrorists, at least not until after we invaded and occupied the country. Americans approved a military attack on Iraq in the belief that they were actively collaborating, not merely fooling around having little rinky-dink meetings and doing nothing.

As for Clinton, I would think he’d face resistance from both sides of the political spectrum, lessening his chances for waging that war signficantly. Powerful as the NeoCons are now, they were a small faction within the Republican party during Clinton’s Administration, sometimes influential, sometimes not. Letter or not, Clinton would need majorities neither party might have been willing to add up to.

As for military diplomacy, that’s a contradiction in terms. Did you know Paul Wolfowitz actually believed that if we step up to the plate and showed our willingness to confront Iraq, the European powers would just fall in on our side? I’m not kidding.

Truth is, the threat of force and the use of force are polarizing by nature. It’s not that we shouldn’t force people to choose, it’s that we benefit most when we do our best to move people to our side of the table before asking them whose side they are on now. The ham-handed way in which this administration has handled all this is most lamentable because of this expectation that without effort we would gain an accurate picture of who really can and will support us. And often it’s just small, little, seemingly insignificant details that can mean the difference between support and opposition.

Truth is, the threat of force and the use of force are polarizing by nature. It’s not that we shouldn’t force people to choose, it’s that we benefit most when we do our best to move people to our side of the table before asking them whose side they are on now.

I agree with your sentiment, but in the case of Iraq we have been doing that for twelve years. When we know what side they are on it benefits us little to be ‘nice’. Our weakness is something an enemy should not be led to believe in. They should always understand that however much they wish to make us fear them, it is in fact us they should fear.

Apparently after eight years of Clinton, the spector of Vietnam, and Somalia Osama thought we were a ‘paper tiger’.

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Matthew 10:34

Eric-

The best argument for Iraq is exactly what happened. That is, after 9/11, the policy of containment was ended in favor of a policy of confrontation. Follow the foreign policy and the events from that point and it will lead you to today. Plain and simple and sans nuance.

Yes there were wrong turns, misstatements, overstatements, and understatements. But we are where we are right now because we ended that strategy, and almost all agreed then that the policy had to change. Most everything else is just noise.

It’s not noise. I was important how we fought this war, and unfortunately it got fought in such a way that allowed more chaos to result, rather than more chaos being prevented. We also unfortunately lacked for the evidence that would have vindicated us and silenced our critics.

We need to be able to defend our actions, especially if we are going to be unilateral about engaging in them. Otherwise, we will inspire greater resistance from allies and enemies alike.

The more people trust the U.S. to do the right thing, the more freedom we have to do as we please.

George,

The best argument for Iraq is exactly what happened. That is, after 9/11, the policy of containment was ended in favor of a policy of confrontation. Follow the foreign policy and the events from that point and it will lead you to today. Plain and simple and sans nuance.

Well said.

So you like circular arguments: Iraq happened, therefore, Iraq had to happen. Begs the question: why did Iraq have to happen?

You keep on moving the goalposts on every reason. First, it was we are better and more democratic that Saddam. Now it’s we aren’t as bad as him. First, it was stockpiles of WMDs and the infrastructure to make more. Now it’s WMD related program activities, which is double speak for planning and intending to have the weapons. First, it was they had a nuclear program and had an agreement to buy Uranium from Niger. Now, even your people will admit the lack of one, and that Saddam only had an interest in such nuclear material.

Do you see a pattern developing? When you were chomping at the bit to get the war going, you had all these grandiose claims as to what Iraq was doing, what capabilities Saddam had. But when facts on the ground discredited that, you started to claim different things, then claim that those things were what you claimed all along. You guys complain about nuance, and then you tap-dance around the obvious fact that you guys were wrong about your estimation of the threat Iraq posed to us.

And why? Because a failure in Iraq of the Bush Doctrine is a retreat to you from the NeoCon dream of being able to use military force to create a new world order.

Trouble is, we don’t have the kind of Army, the kind of political system, or the stomach for full-fledged occupation of a country that would be required to ensure our success in such a strategy. As much as we can be accused of being imperialists, at heart we are small “r” republicans and small “d” democrats, and we take pride in that. We also have a volunteer army, which unlike a conscript army cannot be replenished or expanded quickly to enable us to fight the huge kinds of battles that the Neocon’s foreign policy would require.

In short, we just don’t have the will for these fights. You could have sent American soldiers in as the main force in Afghanistan, called up a draft, and had us occupy and rebuild the country, and Americans would have had the will for that. Iraq is testing American’s will to maintain the occupation, with the only positive being that we know our enemy enough to know he deserved to be out of power, and that the Iraqi people deserved better. Abu Ghraib is such a morale killer because it indicate that we’re not making things better.

When we fight a war, it’s for the best that we be able to stand as close to 100 percent behind the war we’re fighting, as we can. That support is not a given, nor is it a duty, but indeed, it is a measure of how much Americans trust that the war is the right thing, that it is being executed in a way that does more good than harm, and that ultimately its aims are at least morally neutral, if not morally supportable. And they want to know that at some point they will be able to let their breath out, and that we will return to peace.

Right now, Americans are uncertain of the war’s end. Right now, we have a vague sense of doing something right, but there seems to be little progress in surpressing the insurgency, and substantial problems in the moral execution of it, thanks to Abu Ghraib. My argument is that a better waged, better thought out war would have secured more support from Americans than the current morass. My argument is that the war itself was fought with one hand tied behind our backs because of the deficit of diplomacy and support Bush came up with, and his willingness to alienate allies. My argument is that Bush built up domestic support for this war on false pretenses, whether by negligence or by intent, and that the failure to vindicate that case has undermined our credibility, and called into question the morality of the war.

This is not a war undone by the media. This is a war that has unravelled to the extent it has because of the negligence and nonchalance that it’s planners and advocates approached it. If they had done a better job of all these things, there’d be no stopping us. If our charges had proven true, and the threat proved obvious upon our invasion, we would not be having this argument, and Kerry would not have the support he does.

If you wonder why people are willing to settle for anybody but Bush, here it is: we believe Bush has messed things up so badly, that we hardly think that any of the other candidates can do much worse. And if so, they’ll look at what happened to Bush, and get their act together. Republics work best when you make examples of the incompetent.

Stephen, please read the first sentence again.

The best argument for Iraq is exactly what happened. That is, after 9/11, the policy of containment was ended in favor of a policy of confrontation. Follow the foreign policy and the events from that point and it will lead you to today. Plain and simple and sans nuance.

…is what happened. Not: …is that it happened. It almost reads that way, but he is not saying, “Iraq happened, therefore, Iraq had to happen.”

What he is saying is that 9/11 made the policy of containment give way to the policy of confrontation. There is a time for peace and a time for war. There are actually bad guys, and it’s actually good to take them out once in awhile. There will always be bad guys, that doesn’t mean that we have to live with the ones that are here now.

No one has changed the goalposts Stephen. The fact that there are multiple reasons for removing Saddam does not negate any of them. In fact it all goes into the mix. When Bush went to the UN talking about WMD we also knew that Saddam was a tyrant, or else why would the idea of WMD in his hands be dangerous? Do we fear France’s WMD? How about Germany? No?

There is a humanitarian reason. There is a deterrence reason. There is a democracy reason. There is a terrorist connection reason. There is the reason that we were attacked and Saddam is another bully on the block who we allowed to taunt us for too long, we might as well him out out too. I frankly don’t care about your legalistic determination that unless our warrant was completely and accurately filled out we have to jail the cop for false arrest. We had enough reason and justification to go in there and free 25 million or so people from a cancer of a regime in the heart of the middle east where the jihad eminates.

And why? Because a failure in Iraq of the Bush Doctrine is a retreat to you from the NeoCon dream of being able to use military force to create a new world order.

No, a failure in Iraq is a failure for deterrence. I could give a damn about any New World Order and world hegemony. The truth is that making the world safe for democracy is not just a tired old cliche. We will help create a freer Iraq, and then we’ll leave them to govern themselves just like we left Germany and Japan, and South Korea, and for the same reasons. Because we are Americans and because we can. And I might add: no one else will.

Trouble is, we don’t have the kind of Army, the kind of political system, or the stomach for full-fledged occupation of a country that would be required to ensure our success in such a strategy.

We do have that kind of Army, we are that kind of people, and we can. We did it before and we will do it again.

As much as we can be accused of being imperialists, at heart we are small “r” republicans and small “d” democrats, and we take pride in that. We also have a volunteer army, which unlike a conscript army cannot be replenished or expanded quickly to enable us to fight the huge kinds of battles that the Neocon’s foreign policy would require.

Here you’re making some sense. Listen to what you’re saying… you’re right - we are not imperialists and this is not a war for oil or any such thing. This is not about hegemony, or empire, it’s about 9/11. It’s about changing lives and freeing the people of the middle east from a dictatorship worse than the Nazis. A dictatorship of totalitarianism that has gripped this region for decades if not centuries. And I am not just referring to Saddam.

In short, we just don’t have the will for these fights. You could have sent American soldiers in as the main force in Afghanistan, called up a draft, and had us occupy and rebuild the country, and Americans would have had the will for that. Iraq is testing American’s will to maintain the occupation, with the only positive being that we know our enemy enough to know he deserved to be out of power, and that the Iraqi people deserved better. Abu Ghraib is such a morale killer because it indicate that we’re not making things better.

In this you are wrong. It is liberals who do not have the will for these fights. Will is not something static or fixed, it is something that requires feeding and caring and morale. This is what I was talking about in terms of the anti-war crowd itself. It’s the anti-american, ‘we can’t do it’, ‘we’re not good enough’ crap.

You’re wrong about our military too. They are more than fit for the task. I am tired of hearing that we have failed in Iraq, failed in Afghanistan. We haven’t failed and we aren’t in the midst of disaster. How long has it been? A year? Talk about microwave society, WWII lasted 6 years with something like 600,000 American casualties.

That support is not a given, nor is it a duty, but indeed, it is a measure of how much Americans trust that the war is the right thing, that it is being executed in a way that does more good than harm, and that ultimately its aims are at least morally neutral, if not morally supportable. And they want to know that at some point they will be able to let their breath out, and that we will return to peace.

Are we there yet? Let’s just make sure that we don’t have the will shall we? Let’s Michael Moore-ize the country. This war is evil, this war is wrong, this war is based on false premises, this war should be over now, this war is based on a lie… Where do you think the daily barrage of this is going? and do you think it helps the morale at all? It’s not the truth at all.

If you wonder why people are willing to settle for anybody but Bush, here it is: we believe Bush has messed things up so badly, that we hardly think that any of the other candidates can do much worse. And if so, they’ll look at what happened to Bush, and get their act together. Republics work best when you make examples of the incompetent.

In the anti-war universe the war is already lost. There’s that will thing again.

I do not accept that the Iraq war was inevitable. People made decisions here, in fact, according to Paul O’Neill, people started making those decisions ten days after the president was sworn in. Not only that, but the NSC, of which O’Neill was a part, put forward a policy of disengagement from the Mideast peace process in that same meeting. It wouldn’t be long after that, that the budgets and the manpower for counterterrorism would start to be cut. Iraq was a focus to the exclusion of many other things.

The goalposts have been changed, and quite often. We were supposed to find stockpiles, not mere test tubes. We were supposed to find an infrastructure capable of making more weapons, making nukes. We found ruins. We were supposed to find active collaboration. We found contacts. Contacts.

Maybe in your mind, we’re supposed to be Superman to the Metropolis of the international community. Problem is, Bullets don’t bounce off our soldiers, our opponents aren’t comic book villains or cannon-fodder henchmen, and we don’t have a third person narrator explaining the sense of the things we do. We are setting precedents by ouractions that will most likely come back to haunt us in the decades ahead.

This isn’t about being legalistic, this is about being able to win more than just the body count. This about being able to do the things you wanted us to do to Saddam, and there not be a damn worth doing that he could do to stop us. This about gaining power not just from the end of the gun, but also from our able manipulation of other powers around our target. This about going in in such a way that the order of the world around Iraq would contribute, not take away from its strength and stability.

In short, It’s about being SWAT instead of the Keystone cops, like somebody from a John Woo film, not somebody from The Naked Gun

If we fail at this, because of the way we’ve gone in, we are not only vulnerable because of all the compromises of support your approach required, but because we have demonstrated our inability to back down such insurgents. If Bush fails to dampen down the violence following the June 30th handover, this will be a demonstration of our weakness to every petty tyrant who wants to make America think twice before using force.

As for the jihad eminating from Iraq, do your homework. the Jihadists, the Islamists hate the guts of the socialists Baathists.

We do have that kind of Army, we are that kind of people, and we can. We did it before and we will do it again.

If we are speaking of training, of course our training is excellent, but unfornunately, armies of one only work in television commericals. Otherwise we are in a desperate manpower shortage. We are having to extend tours of duties, deny retirement, and essentially rob a great number of soldiers of their well deserved rest to keep our numbers at the constant level they are at, much less put fifteen thousand more soldiers in theatre.

Whatever one’s intentions, often, one’s course of action can feedback into what one considers acceptable behavior. What I fear, is that as we follow the well-intentioned crusade to spread democracy through the Middle East, and we find ourselves be challenged, rebuffed, even reviled by the people we’re supposed to be doing this good for, that we may start to justify in our minds the political subjugation of other lands to our own.

As we encounter the trials of trying to remake one unwilling society after another, we will harden our hearts to the needs and desires of the cultures, and will begin to justify the extended occupations in the name of winning the overarching war on terror. We will become imperialists out of the requirements of reshaping uncooperative societies. Something similar happened to Republican Rome, when the Gauls sacked it. They rebounded from that, and launched genocidal campaigns through the lands of those peoples Those episodes were ultimately the end of Rome as a Republic. The NeoCon’s proposition to remake the Middle East could unmake America as a Democracy.

Of course, that is a broad historical argument, but the point remains that we will grow into the sense and sensibility of whatever means we choose to fight the all too real threat of terrorism. We had best chose the wisest and most just course of action, rather than the one that represents the one that satisfies our feelings of self-righteousness.

In this you are wrong. It is liberals who do not have the will for these fights. Will is not something static or fixed, it is something that requires feeding and caring and morale. This is what I was talking about in terms of the anti-war crowd itself. It’s the anti-american, ‘we can’t do it’, ‘we’re not good enough’ crap.

You’re wrong about our military too. They are more than fit for the task. I am tired of hearing that we have failed in Iraq, failed in Afghanistan. We haven’t failed and we aren’t in the midst of disaster. How long has it been? A year? Talk about microwave society, WWII lasted 6 years with something like 600,000 American casualties.

You miss the crux of my argument there, or rather hit it in a rather left-handed way. Will does require feeding and caring, and morale. People need to believe they are doing the right thing, and huge discrepancies between the stated causus belli, and the conditions on the ground are not the best morale booster. We don’t want to believe ourselves to be unjustified aggressors, so we justify it in terms of regime change. Unfortunately, your people are doing a lousy job of proving to the world that you are in control. If you’re not in control, and don’t seem to be taking the measures to bring it about, then many people will look at it all and question whetheryou’re actually intending to leave any real stable society behind.

In essence, we aren’t saying “We can’t do it,” or “were not good enough,” but instead that pertinent question: “Are we achieving, through Bush’s means, that which we set out to do?” It’s not anti-American, and I’m offend you think I’m that disloyal. My problem with Bush concerning this war, is that he has gotten us into a mess and he doesn’t seem to have a way of getting us out of this, save relying on the largely symbolic handover to quell the uprisings. Again and again, he’s promised us that the storm would pass, and without changing his strategy too much, we’d be able to weather it, that we would just have to wait until one thing or the other happened.

And as of yet, that hasn’t happened. I believe it’s time to stop waiting for things to get better. Action must taken now, and should have been taken long ago to address the problems of this occupation.

You compare this war to WWII. Yeah right. This war is minor in comparison, supposedly one-sided in terms of the technology. WWII was an industrial age mega-war involving millions of soldiers on each side, and bloody, mechanized, territory-holding battles across whole portions of the globe. Imagine Iraq multiplied twenty times with enemies able to fight us to a standstill in the field, and weaponry equal to, if not superior to ours.

Although I somewhat agree with your point about Microwave wars, I do think people are somewhat justified in wondering whether their Commander in Chief is really waging this war all that well, especially in the light of the constant escalation of the violence. I mean, have you asked yourself the crucial question?

If this administration has so far been right about predicting this escalation, why haven’t they been so good at putting a stop to it? Isn’t forewarned forearmed? Or has Bush just been telling us it will get worse to cover his butt when it does?

I mean, where are the victories? Where are the scenes of us putting a militia out of commision permanently, of us taking down a major leader and things actually calming down?

In short, when do you actually start winning, when do you start making a difference?

If we fail at this, because of the way we’ve gone in, we are not only vulnerable because of all the compromises of support your approach required, but because we have demonstrated our inability to back down such insurgents. If Bush fails to dampen down the violence following the June 30th handover, this will be a demonstration of our weakness to every petty tyrant who wants to make America think twice before using force.

If we fail, we fail. We won’t fail because of the way we went in. We won’t fail because the UN didn’t fully sanction the invasion. We won’t fail because we are not capable of suceeding. We will fail because we lost the will to succeed. We will fail by quitting. That is the only way we can fail.

To reply in short to your last comment, we are succeeding. We are a year into this. Sadr is defeated. Fallujah is policing it’s own. June 30th Iraqi’s will officially take control of their fate.

Belmont club has a good post up about victory in Iraq andChechnya and the comparison to how well our Marines handled a similiar situation.

I would be worried if Bush were taking charge and trying to micromanage the occupation. Like Johnson choosing bombing locations from the White House. That doesn’t appear to be the case. Bush is giving the military, the experts, the latitude to do what they think is necessary. And you have to look at what they’ve done and see how magnificently they have performed, with restraint and deliberation.

I cringe daily to hear that another soldier is dead. That another 30 civilians are dead. My wife’s uncle is Iraqi, my brother was a marine, my mother, stepfather, and cousin were in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy in WWII, and my father was in the army in Korea. I don’t want those men to die. So many men and women who are in the armed forces are exemplary in so many ways. They really are the cream of the crop. It is heartwrenching to hear of them dying. But they are there to do their job. It’s part of the deal. In some weird way it makes them who they are to be willing to put themselves in combat and risk their lives.

I’m sorry if you can’t see any of the good that has already come from the liberation of Iraq. All I can say is that in time it will be more apparent to the world, to history, what kind of work our men and women have accomplished there in Iraq.