Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

Welcome back, Lance.

You know that fear you’d have if Kerry were elected? That my friend would be very reassuring. Seems blind unquestioning faith that everyone Republican is “goody two shoes” to be trusted no matter what is an illness on the right, which many of our founding fathers warned us against. A little more fear and skepticism on the right would be good, because while we are focused on threats external, we are fools to forget the potential threats internal like the national debt going from 7.4 Trillion to more than 10 Trillion under another 4 years of Bush and the spend and borrow Republican Congress.

Our futures are being robbed, and no one on the right seems to be watching, let alone screaming their bloody heads off.

That same study released the fact that John Kerry would continue with the massive expansion of government at a rate only slightly diminished by the fact that he would tax the rich more heavily.

This isn’t an election for fiscal conservatives. I’ll be the first to admit that and I am always skeptical of Bush (first triggered by his signing of CFR after he said he wouldn’t) but Kerry is one of the worst candidates Democrats could have picked to get a temporary swing voter (someone disenchanted with Bush) to go to his side.

Lance, I could not agree more. If swing voters were the pitches the D Party was swinging for, they struck out. If fiscal conservatives were the pitches the R Party was swinging for, they may find out on Nov. 2, they too struck out. That is probably why we are going to see the polls within the margin of error on November 1.

I say hit a double play and vote for Nader or Badnarik :-D

I read a very interesting article at The Weekly Standard website, written by Lieutenant Colonel Powl Smith, the former chief of counterterrorism plans at U.S. European Command and currently in Baghdad with Multi-National Forces-Iraq.

He writes that comparaing Iraq to Vietnam is incorrect. If we want to draw historical parallels, then we should compare the global war on terror to World War II, and Iraq to Guadalcanal.

His article goes into much more detail of course and it can be found at the above link. I think it’s worth a look, even by those who are inclined to disagree with his premise.

I would love to say exactly what I think of the distinguished Senator Pelosi but instead I will just say this…

Whoever found her and ushered her in, first to the Democratic Party and on into the Senate, made a very good call when it came to defending and promoting the Democratic party.

Dawn, Pelosi is not a Senator. She is a Representative.

Lance, I don’t understand your post. It seems like you’re saying that the “reality” is that things are going extremely difficultly in Iraq, and that neither the US nor any new coalition partners are going to be able to stop the insurgencies. But then you claim that Bush is facing reality. I don’t get it: Bush is the one whose team has been saying all along that the insurgencies are small, insignificant, decreasing in size, lacking in public support, loyal to Saddam, etc, etc, in an almost unbroken string of assessments that have little resemblance to “reality”. You paint Allawi’s assessment as not being reality, yet Allawi’s assessment of the fight against the insurgency is pretty similar to Bush’s, at least when they stand next to each other. When Bush and Allawi are separated, Allawi’s assessment has more in common with Rumsfeld’s comments the other day about how the elections are unlikely to be very complete. But Bush, the man at the top, is always rosy. The only times he’s ever acknowledged difficulties in Iraq have occurred on the day after an embarassing internal memo or report has been leaked to the public, or after a strong argument has been made by his opponent. He’s never pro-actively acknowledged problems - only after they have been revealed.

The reality in Iraq is that things are going badly. Kerry’s plan begins with that assumption, and seeks to make it better, while Bush’s plan begins with only a vague hope that someday the reality will resemble the hopeful, positive picture he wants the American voter to see.

I’m curious, Lance. What do you make of Novak’s recent report that the Administration is planning to hold perfunctory elections and then to pull our troops out immediately thereafter, in early 2005? Is this what you mean by “facing reality”?

I don’t approve of that sort of cut-and-run plan, but I do concede that it is a more practical plan than the current Bush plan, which places more emphasis on fantasy and faith than on reality and fact.

-Cf

I stand corrected Christopher. I did go to the link to read the latest news on what she said.
Again. I wasn’t paying attention. My apologies.
That doesn’t change my opininion that the Democrats have a good one there. She does love her party.

Looks like I need to hire a secretary too!

Lance-
As a Democrat, I can tell you this: we would have accepted so high of a casualty rate had the threat we were told existed there been real. We’re neither fools nor traitors, despite what the more partisan conservatives allege, and we went along with the president when it seemed his case was good and the cause just.

I mean, it took months for the death toll to become a liability. What really started eroding Democrat support for the president, was the combination of the implosion of the case for war, and the glaring absence of the stockpiles and infrastructure that Bush’s people had so vividly warned of. Bush set exceptional expectations for what we were to find there, and when we found nothing of the sort, we were of course let down, and very angry. The death toll is like salt in the wound.

Bush uses the fear that 9/11 inspired as a means to ensure his political survival. He cites Iraq as a battle in the war on terror, claiming that if we fight terrorists over there, they aren’t coming here. In other words, vote for me, and the bad men won’t get you.

It’s nonsense. Just what is preventing al-Quaeda from sending people our way? Nothing. cells remain in our cities, and they remain capable, as Madrid and Java have demonstrated, of inflicting harm on our society. Al Quaeda is known for it’s patience, it’s precision, and it’s ability to blend it’s agents into our system. Bush is encouraging the most dangerous kind of complacency for his own political advantage by claiming Iraq as a terrorist magnet that will somehow divert terrorists from our shores. Most of the people fighting and dying are Iraqis or people from surrounding countries. The terrorist would probably like to exploit Iraq as a wedge and a quagmire for us, but I doubt these people would destroy their organization in a hopeless, desperate war. These people are fanatics, not idiots.

Bush does not want to admit that there may be grassroots support for the insurgency. His ideology blinds him to the notion that the insurgency represents for some an independence movement. History tell us that what’s most important in a battle is not necessarily numbers or technology, but will. Not ours, necessarily, but that of our opponent. That’s where Bush fails to understand the situation. He thinks what we need is unconditional support of his war. What we actually need to do is take from these people whatever reason they have to stage this insurgency, to sap their legitimacy. As conditions improve, the war will gain support, or at least stop hemorrhaging it here at home.

NOTOTH-
I think the analogies are highly flawed. Different modes of warfare, different kinds of battlegrounds, different approaches taken by our enemies when they struck us.

The analogy not only implies an approach it explicitly states it: we must treat this like a war of attrition, fought in broad, classical strokes.

With no draft, 90 percent of the war fought by us alone, little cultural commonality with those we seek to take over and occupy, and the heavy use of guerilla and espionage style tactics with our enemy, such grandiose comparison are little more than cover for a war in Iraq that shouldn’t have been fought, and which has cost more lives than it ever had to.

I believe the war in Iraq was necessary. I have written much on that and won’t bore you all with them again. The point that is relevant here is that we are in Iraq and what do we do about it.

I listen to John Kerry. He says he will get the allies to help. There is no reason to believe he can do better than Bush and Bush is already working on this problem. Kerry says he will improve our intelligence gathering. Nothing in Kerry’s career indicates he has the ability to do this. Quite the contrary. Kerry says we will be able to lead the war better. Majorities of veterans support GW Bush. Many veterans and active military actually hate John Kerry for his anti war rhetoric. How does he intend to do better?

Faith is the substance of that hoped for, the evidence of that unseen. Kerry is asking us to take it on faith that he can do all these things. Nothing in his twenty-year record in politics would back this up.

John Kerry was NOT known as a leader in the Senate. We don’t even have to charge with flip-flopping. We need only ask, “In his two decades in the Senate, what distinguished him from the other 99 guys?”

Senators do not run large organizations and John Kerry did not have a career in business. His only executive experience came as the lieutenant governor to Michael Dukakis. That means that the young guy who manages your local Wal-Mart has more management experience than John Kerry. Kerry’s military service was heroic, but he never commanded anything bigger than a swiftboat. We are not talking Washington or Eisenhower here.

John Kerry has achieved a lot in his life and has a lot to be proud of. But in all the years of his political experience and with all the chances he has had to shine, he has never shown himself to be anything more than the junior Senator from Massachusetts. This is no small achievement, but it is not enough to take him on faith.

Jack-

There is no reason to believe he can do better than Bush and Bush is already working on this problem.

Saying that and meaning that have to be two different things. I have heard more diplomatic mixed signals and outright gaffes from this administration than from any other. Kerry would have to do pretty bad to do worse than Bush.

As for intelligence, I won’t go trumpeting my candidate’s strength, but again, his record is pretty difficult to beat. When’s the last time you saw such a string of intelligence failures in one administration?

As for the military, I’d like to know what survey you source for the statement that most veterans support Bush. If you’re right I’ll concede the point, but as I understand it, the grunts coming back from Iraq loathe him. Now whether people dislike Kerry for what he’s saying now or thirty years ago, the question is whether Bush has done right by those people. He hasn’t. He sent them in unequiped, then roasts Kerry for not voting for a bill financing that equipment by further debt. You have an actual commanding officer from Fallujah saying that Bush’s people, for what seems like the hundredth time in this war have messed with military strategy for political purposes.

Plenty in Kerry’s record indicates he can take on terrorists, that he can deal with military strategy. You just don’t choose to acknowledge it. It’s easier to say, oh, Kerry’s done nothing, than to research and find out he was a leading figure in taking down BCCI, which was financing terrorism.

Senators do not run large organizations and John Kerry did not have a career in business.

If you knew anything about the Texas Governorship, or Bush’s “career” in business, you would not consider those things an asset. To gain his fortune, Bush had to take part in what was essentially a taxpayer subsidized landgrab in Arlington, where some people were even kicked of their land so Bush’s people could buy up the property. As for the Governorship, Texas is a weak executive state. governors have to get constitutional amendments to the state constitution to wipe their noses

Kerry’s military service was heroic, but he never commanded anything bigger than a swiftboat. We are not talking Washington or Eisenhower here.

Yeah. Did you see the article the other day about Bush’s experience as a four star general? No matter what some fake (but well informed) documents say about Bush’s experience, it’s clear from the record alone that Bush fell short of even Air National Guard standards.

You may be on the fence on Kerry’s leadership abilities, but I feel I can be quite clear on Bush’s lack of leadership and be sure that the facts are on my side.

Iraq is NOT Vietnam. We can leave Vietnam. We CANNOT leave Iraq. What do you think will happen to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan, Turkey and even Israel if Iraq collapses? This is not some backwater, nowhere country where we can just ignore. There is a reason Iraq was a must-have when you go conquering in the old days. It is a vital commerce and trade region for the Middle East. Now we have the added fun of Iraq being a Religious Capital for the Shia. How long do you think Allawi will live without his 130,000 man bodyguard? Leaving Iraq is the single most IRRESPONSIBLE thing America can do!!!
Aldous.

We CANNOT leave Iraq.

Then you should vote for Kerry. Bush looks set to cut and run as soon as the Iraqi partial elections are held in January.

Kerry says he will stay the course and only pull out US troops if NATO troops replace them.

I listen to John Kerry. He says he will get the allies to help. There is no reason to believe he can do better than Bush and Bush is already working on this problem.

Over on the other side I wrote about the two main reasons Kerry will do better at getting allies involved. It’s a good article, you should read it.

In brief, Bush isn’t serious about getting more allied troops into Iraq, and none of our “old” European allies are eager to help Bush out,

“Most people want to help Iraq but not in a way that rewards Bush,” says a senior EU diplomat.

I wonder how Bush will spin his Iraqi Withdrawal? Maybe have Allawi arrest every journalist while the US Army is evacuating a burning Baghdad?

Aldous.

Stephen

I voted against Bush in 2000. Once reason was that he did not have enough experience. I know that the Texas governor job is essentially part time. BUT now he has shown his abilities. I believe he has done a good job working a tough problem and there is nothing in Kerry’s biography that makes me think he can do better.

American Pundit
The Europeans (here you mean the French and the Germans, not “The Europeans”), are blowing smoke. Do you really think that German and French leaders are so petty that they would do things to jeopardize their countries because they don’t like the current American leader? They are following their own political and what they perceive as their nations’ interested. This won’t change with the elections and it didn’t start with George Bush’s policy in Iraq. Thousands of Europeans protested U.S. policies under every president since Roosevelt. Many in France and Germany protested Kosovo, even though we were doing Europe a favor and there were no us interests there apart from keeping the European-American alliance together. The German SPD party played the American card (much like Dems play the race card) in the fall elections of 2002 – BEFORE IRAQ. (The German foreign minister Joschka Fischer was a student radical who led anti-American demonstrations in the 1960s)

What about the “good war” in Afghanistan – from news reports From contemporary news reports: Hundreds of thousands of people from the Middle East to Africa to Europe took part in major demonstrations against the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan the weekend of Oct. 12-13. Two of the larger protests took place in the heart of major NATO powers—in London and Berlin.

French foreign minister Hubert Verdine coins the term hyperpuissance to describe the American hyperpower in 1999 – BEFORE BUSH WAS EVEN THE CANDIDATE.

This ally trouble did not start or end with Bush

On the other side of the EUROPEAN divide – consider this. In January 2003 Jose María Aznar, Jose-Manuel Durão Barroso, Silvio Berlusconi, Tony Blair, Vaclav Havel, Peter Medgyessy, Leszek Miller and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, al European leaders, very publicallly supported Bush. The French and Germans criticized them a lot. With the exception of Azar’s Spain, these countries are still with us. In many ways this whole thing is a “domestic” EU issue. Kerry can’t change this.

Jack-
Bush talks about leadership the way China talks about being a People’s Republic.

He’ll take the lead on getting the credit, staging whole conventions to showcase him as the American Avenger of Terrorism, who’ll set up an Aircraft Carrier landing, walk out in a flight suit and make a speech about his successful invasion, when we don’t even have full control of the country. He declares Afghanistan a victory, despite losing the man who led the attack on us, and most of his organization. Then, with that war unfinished, he starts one in the most unlikely of places with the least credible of evidence to support our efforts there.

Don’t equivocate with me on this- the point of the war was to disarm Saddam Hussein and eliminate the al-Qaeda terrorist threat that the Bush administration alleged was there. That was the reason for war that we didn’t have before, and that no previous president had before that point to justify a ground invasion.

Whatever revisionism the GOP has done in the meantime cannot erase that fact. We didn’t go there because Saddam was a bad man, we went there with broad bipartisan support because believed he was a clear and present danger to our country. Without the WMDs or the cooperation with al-Qaeda, there was no threat in the American mind to justify such action in Iraq. We have not found the evidence to indicate that either part of the threat truly exists. If these two threats didn’t exist, a reasonable examination of the evidence, or a reasonable search for new evidence would draw a much less bellicose picture. The key here was that Iraq was a large issue for the Bush administration long before they had any case for invasion. How long?

Page 5-8 in Plan of Attack has the Bush administration asking for a detailed plan of invasion for Iraq just before Thanksgiving 2001 One should get a look at Frank’s colorful language to see his astonishment at that. According to Paul O’Neill, an invasion and how to pull it off (not whether it should be pulled off) were the first things on the Bush Foreign policy agenda. Page 9 of Plan of Attack has Cheney telling outgoing Defense Secretary Bill Cohen that “Topic A” would be Iraq, instead of some general overview of the world. That was early January 2001.

Tell me something, what kind of leadership is it that makes up its mind before the facts are clear? That goes to war unprepared, unaware of wheter the cause for war is real?

That’s not leadership to me. Neither is taking the tensions between us and the European powers and aggravating those differences at a time when their support could have meant a lot to our efforts. If we had gotten the UN, you know, we could have gotten the Saudis and other Arab nations on our side, not just sitting on the sidelines, but taking an active role in helping us. Instead, we get a few Persian Gulf States and Kuwait. That made a huge strategic difference, especially in terms of logistical and diplomatic support. Wouldn’t it have been nice to invade Iraq from the North and the South at the same time, to have had French or German soldiers helping us? I don’t know.

It just seems to me that any standard of leadership that doesn’t take into account the quality of the decisions is no standard worth using.

What did Bush have going for him when he won in 2000? The answer is, not much. The only experience he had at government was his few years as govenor of Texas which hardly defines an individual as a great leader. What I do not understand is that even after all this experience in office, after 9/11, and after this lie of a war called Iraq (which is totally seperate from the war on terror) he still does not act like he has a clue. WAKE UP MR. BUSH! We need a new direction. I voted for Bush in 2000 but he has dissapointed me so much that I hope when he loses he will finally realize what agregious errors he made. By By Bush!

I voted against Bush in 2000. Once reason was that he did not have enough experience. I know that the Texas governor job is essentially part time. BUT now he has shown his abilities. I believe he has done a good job working a tough problem and there is nothing in Kerry’s biography that makes me think he can do better.

Ok, this is one where I completely disagree. I was ambivalent about Bush in 2000 due to his inexperience. Now that he’s show us his “abilities”, I’m dead set against his re-election.

I’m curious. Bush supporters like to say he’s strong, direct, in a tough job, etc - but if you look at it all the “abilities” are pretty darn vague. They don’t tend to talk much about his track record, in terms of accomplishments. Is there anything in his track record over the last 4 years - lets say for now, in foreign affairs - that you think is particularly indicative of his “abilities” as a leader? Some particular action that shows excellent judgement, and led to a result he’s particularly proud of? Something that is clear the history books will say was a good thing - not something that we can cross our fingers will turn out ok, eventually?

Some examples of the sort of thing I’m looking for: Clinton reducing the deficit, or Bush 41 and taking back Kuwait.

The claim that the EU supports Bush is a complete fantasy. Aznar went against 90% of Spain’s population by going into Iraq. Aznar then lied about the Madrid Bombings and thus was thrown out. In fact, every EU leader who publicly supports Bush is out of office or about to be. Blair is a prime example of this. Labor is embarrassed being around him. Did Bush say anything about the Trouble his “Coalition” is getting at home?

Aldous.

William and Stephen
I have written long and boring descriptions of the criteria that probably went into the decision to go to war in Iraq. You can read the whole thing in other parts of this blog. To sum up: Saddam attacked four or his neighbors, had possessed and used WMD, was a destabilizing influence in a key region and had vowed on many occasions to get revenge on the U.S. He was shooting at U.S. and British planes almost every day, had violated the cease fire that ended the first Gulf war and was ignoring 17 UN resolutions to quit it. Saddam Hussein had known contacts with terrorists and his security forces had contacts with Al Qaeda (Reports, ranging from those of the September 11 Commission to the Senate Intelligence Committee, have detailed a relationship between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda. In July, the co-chairman of the September 11 Commission, Governor Thomas Kean, stated, “there was no question in our minds that there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.”) No provable link with the particular operation on 9/11 does not fundamentally change the analysis. Everybody (the Russians, the Saudis, the Brits, the Jordanians, even the French and probably Saddam himself) believed Iraq possessed WMD. He had undeniably used it in the recent past. President Clinton in 1998 declared regime change in Iraq as an American goal. With all these factors on the table, I think it was GW Bush’s duty to go to remove Saddam. Subsequently available information does not change the correctness of the decision based on information available at the time.

Aldous
The only European leader to have directly suffered from his support of Bush appears to be Aznar. Unfortunately the terrorist successfully changed the Spanish elections by bombing trains. Before the 3/11 attacks in Madrid, Aznar had a comfortable lead. In elections over the last year, Chirac and Schroeder have also suffered with their electorates. I don’t believe it is backlash from NOT supporting Bush. It is because of domestic politics. If /when governments change in the UK, Denmark, Netherlands, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Ukraine etc, it will be for similar domestic reasons. Few voters make decisions based on foreign policy considerations.

Even in the U.S., in the middle of a war, domestic considerations trump foreign affairs for many voters and if the economy was doing poorly, you can believe that John Kerry would be hammering that instead of Iraq – and he would be wise to do so.

Jack,

I assume that you voted for Bill Clinton in 1996. With all of that executive experience he had, you wouldn’t possibly want to take a chance on someone like Dole spent most of his adult life in Congress. Would you?

Woody

Yes. Clinton was an excellent president, especially in his middle years 1994-8. His major problem (having to do with your namesake and keeping it where it belonged) didn’t bother me much and kept the late night commedians in business.

Everybody (the Russians, the Saudis, the Brits, the Jordanians, even the French and probably Saddam himself) believed Iraq possessed WMD.

…up until Feb.-March 2003 when inspectors concluded that Saddam probably didn’t have any - hence the sudden determined foot dragging by countries that had previously voted unanimously on 1441, knowing full well they’d probably be going to war.

As late as January 2003, France was working with the Pentagon to integrate an armored division, a carrier group, and hundreds of planes into the attack. Once the evidence pointed to a lack of WMDs, no one saw any reason to invade immediately - even Bush swears up n down that Saddam was not an “imminent threat”.

The only European leader to have directly suffered from his support of Bush appears to be Aznar.

According to recent polls, Bush’s biggest supporters, Howard and Blair, are looking at defeat. Howard in October - despite an incredibly strong (real-world strong, not Bush-world strong) Australian economy. And Blair next year. His party has already fallen to third place in the polls.

And Polish President Kwasniewski, previously one of Bush’s big supporters, had to disavow Bush to stay in power,

They deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that’s true. We were taken for a ride.

jack, in a sense you’re right about European politics. Alot of the rhetoric that comes out has domestic causes.

The fact is, the majority of the population of every European country opposed invading Iraq without UN support. In fact Most Americans thought that was a bad idea (2:1 - BTW, that’s a lot of Democrats who favored a UN-backed invasion if you look at it the other way).

Now, the leaders who supported Bush are going to either disown him or deal with an angry electorate.

Stephen:

When discussing Kerry’s ability to improve intelligence gathering in the US, you said, “As for intelligence, I won’t go trumpeting my candidate’s strength, but again, his record is pretty difficult to beat.”

His record on intelligence is having missed 76% of the meetings of the Senate Intelligence Committee over an 8 year period….just coincidentally ending just before 911. We dont know how many other SIC meetings Kerry missed, because he has refused to authorize the release of those attendance records.

What positive things can you say about his record of improving the intelligence gathering capability of our country? I’m interested in what you think he has accomplished in this regard.

You are right…his record IS hard to beat.

joe, what was discussed at those meetings? Was it significant? Did Kerry send a representative?

Most meetings I’ve attended at work were pointless, and the only decision made was the decision to meet again next Monday.

Unless you present some catastrophic event directly caused by Kerry’s physical absence from some meetings, it’s not even on par with saying 9/11 happened because Bush spent all his time on vacation.

Check Kerry’s voting record. He’s pretty gung-ho on defense, intelligence, and fiscal responsibility.

American Pundit and others

Many Americans are trying to take more of foreign opinion about Iraq than the lesson has to teach. You mention Polish president Kwasniewski “had to disavow Bush to stay in power”. Kwasniewski’s term lasts until next year. This is his second term and he cannot run again. He is in no trouble for supporting Bush. The biggest anti-American issue in Poland is our visa policy, which is mostly out of Bush’s hands. I say again, politicians have problems because of domestic concerns. Ordinary people in most countries are just not as interested in us as we think.

In the August SOFRES political barometer, French President Chirac receives a 36 percent approval rating and Prime Minister Raffarin 26 percent. You can’t get much worse than that, yet I don’t hear people blaming France’s lack of support for the U.S. If France was on Bush’s side, I expect the plummeting numbers would be attributed to his support.

jack. You have several errors in your argument. When the terrorists bombed Madrid, Aznar tried to blame ETA for the attack. Aznar KNEW it was Al Queda. Aznar lied to the Spanish people because he wanted to be re-elected. The Spaniards found out the deception 3 days before election and overwhelmingly kicked Aznar’s butt. The Spaniards DID NOT give in to the terrorists no matter how much Republicans like to spin it.
Tony Blair is in deep trouble for being a liar in England. Despite having a strong economy, Blair is under threat of being replaced as leader of Labor.
You really should talk to some Europeans, jack. There are many European Chatrooms you know. They can give you more data than the RNC handouts.

Aldous.

Aldous

I lived in Europe for 12 of the last 20 years and have visited too many times to count. I will be in Geneva next week and I will check again. This is not the first time Euro opinion has taken a turn like this and it won’t be the last. I have learned to listen to what people say, but watch what they do. The Germans even have a saying about that, “Talk on the left, but live on the right.”

Consider how our public affairs looks to European audiences. Most of the people in the Euro chat rooms are probably convinced that GW Bush is very unpopular with Americans and that he will lose the election by about ten points. (Ask them). That is the message they get from their own and the mainstream U.S. press. (They also were convinced that Walter Mondale would trounce Ronald Reagan and the Michael Dukakis would beat Bush one) They will be surprised by the result of the election.

Comment deleted. This visitor was previously banned from WB.

-WatchBlog Manager-

Ordinary people in most countries are just not as interested in us as we think.

Haha! jack, I’ve been living and traveling in SE Asia and Australia for the last year and a half. I’m constantly amazed by how closely people in other countries follow US politics.

Perhaps it’s a recent development. :)

It took the New York Times exactly 2 weeks into the invasion to trot out their favorite word to describe any war…….. quagmire. How many times do you hear it in these threads? You would think they would start to feel a little stupid using it all the time to describe any war. It’s sort of like always describing a heart attack as “massive”.

Perhaps they were listening to Colin Powell’s statement,”you break it, you bought it”. Or maybe they were listening to George H.W. Bush when he didn’t invade Bhagdad.

Jack-
I’ve been through tons of material on 9/11 and the Iraq war. Let me quote you some of it.

At the State Department, Armitage[Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage] recieved a call from the White House communications offices saying that they had compiled a 33 page document called “Apparatus of Lies ” on Saddam’s propaganda.

This is a document meant to counter the anti-war people overseas, the passage says.

Armitage read through the document and thought, what bulls***! It was mostly old stores about Saddam’s lies steming from the Gulf War period, with no clear rationale about why the administration might go to war in 2003. If the United states were to go to war with every regime that told lies, there would be nothing but war.

Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward, page 286

Armitage, by the way is no sissy when it comes to these things. He was one of the last people out of Vietnam. As in people scrambling to get on the last helicopter sort of last people. His ticket out was the flotilla of boats that headed for the Phillipines carrying 20,000 Vietnamese refugees.

He eventually gave the speech the administration wanted him to give and talked about the document.

He said offhandedly that a document called “Apparatus of Lies” was available in the back of the room. “I commend it to you to the extent that the past is prologue.”

Plan of Attack age 237.

The backhanded recommendation there is indicative of one major problem with your case: Nothing said that the threat existed now. Nothing said there was a threat to vanquish. The evidence for Saddam’s WMDs was mostly just the presumption they still existed.

A later version of this report, padded to sixty pages reached Powell, who “found much of intelligence murky”. the passage continues:

For Powell work and life were contact sports. He liked to get his hands on whatever the issue or the people might be. There was no way to interrogate a satellite photo- Hey, what does that dot really mean? What’s in that truck?- Or penetrate fully the menaing of translated word in an intercept.

The more Powell dug, the more he realized that the human sources were few and far between on Iraq’s WMD. It was not a pretty picture

Plan of attack Page 298.

In all fairness, the page continues and says that Powell agrees that Saddam had WMDs, saying that he agreed with Cheney that there was no other way to explain why a rational leader would give up all the money subject himself to the UN sanctions for so long. But in qualification, it must be added that the next paragraph has an analyst that says that in supposing Saddam a rational man, who would only stall to protect weapons that were actually there, they presupposed a lot of rationality from a man who had a habit of irrational behavior.

You know that in hundreds of missile firings at jets, not one of our aircraft was shot down?

I read the reports on 9/11 and Iraq. You know that the 9/11 committee said that while they might have talked, they did not actively cooperate, so far as the intelligence indicated.

The congressional report on Iraq says similar things concerning al-Qaeda. That there was no provable link must change the analysis, because keeping things close to the facts is the essence of good intelligence.

As for regime change, let me remind you that the options open for that were not limited to an invasion of Iraq. That’s a path Bush choose, not that we were forced onto.

As for Aznar, the guy took a page from Bush’s strategy on Iraq and tried to implicate the Basque Seperatist ETA group in the Madrid Bombings, maintaining this even as evidence showed it clearly wasn’t them. That’s what got them thwacked.

And that will be why Bush may very well end up an Ex-President this November. People don’t like to be played for fools. They will accept a candidate who goes against their views on certain issues, but not one who completely hoodwinks them for political reasons.

So the president is a liar and he is backed up by hundreds of other career and politically appointed people who also are lying to the American people. Bill Clinton appointed some like Tenet. Tenet lied when he said the case against Saddam was a slam dunk. Bush persuaded Tony Blair to lie for him. Since Blair’s intelligence is as good as Bush’s, he can’t have been deceived. And the British intelligence services – they are all liars. The Saudis, Jordanians and Russians warned us about Saddam. They are lying too. Tommy Franks made all the troops train and carry uncomfotable chemical gear to enhance Bush’s lies. Everybody is lying except John Kerry, who had been deceived into strongly supporting the war (before he opposed it/supported/opposed again) despite his many years on the Senate intelligence committee. The question is - why did everybody lie?

If they were after cheap oil, all you have to do is let Saddam sell all he wants.

If they were after expensive oil, you can just allow or create chaos in the Middle East or even some places like Nigeria or Venezuela. You don’t need to fight a full scale war.

If you want to take the Iraqi oil, you should go back to grade school and study your sums. Iraq produces $20 billion in a good year. If the war cost $200 billion (as John Kerry says) … well do the math. Presumably the rich guys manipulating the affair didn’t get rich by not being able to count.

If you want to give contracts to Halliburton, you can let them build roads in W. Virginia. There enough pork to feed all the contractors.

There is no reason to concoct such a venture. Oh yeah, the Freudian explanation – Bush wants to impress his father. He was so obsessed with this goal that he gave up an almost sure reelection (which probably would have impressed the senior Bush) to risk it all on Iraq. That could be one man’s motivation, but then all the lifelong civil servants in the U.S. and several foreign countries have to go along with this fevered dream. Experienced leaders like Blair and Aznar have to risk their political lives and and the real lives of thier soldiers. How much do they love George Bush that they are willing to do all this?

With the information we know now it is clear we should have approached Iraq differently, but getting rid of Saddam was still a very good thing. With the information we had back then the decision was fully justified. That remains my opinion. We will soon see how many Americans agree.

Iraq might cost President Bush his office. We will all know in a couple of week. I think he will win by 3-5%, but I could be wrong. No matter who wins the election and why we got into Iraq, our guys are there now and they can’t just leave. Whoever is president will have to deal with that reality, and reasonable support from the American people will help ensure a better outcome. So after the election, let’s for at least a little while be Americans instead of not Democrats or Republicans. We can’t change the past (and the causes of the Iraq conflict are in the past and the elections soon will be), but we can let the past ruin the future. I promise to do this for a President Kerry. I hope you can do it for a President Bush.

Jack, your opinion that the invasion of Iraq made sense to many including Blair, is defensible.

My take is this, however. A Dr. can take an X-ray and determine from it that there is a shadow on the x-ray that portends a tumor. He has evidence. However, if he were to then and there make the decision to operate and upon opening the patient’s skull find no tumor, that Dr. would be found negligent and should lose his license. Why?

Because in his trial, the plaintiffs would ask if he had ruled out a thumb smudge on the x-ray. They would have asked why he did not confirm the x-ray with a CAT scan? They would ask why a needle was not first inserted and tissue extracted from the site for a biopsy before opening the skull.

You see, in my view, while Bush can claim some intelligence indicated a threat, Bush did not do his homework to get verification and defensible justification for the most serious surgery a nation can undertake, war.

Not to mention the fact that inspectors were poking around in Iraq for months before the invasion and found nothing.

Dissent is everywhere! Although you wouldn’t realize it by consuming “public” media.

Indy artists are stating the obvious.

For example,
http://www.cdbaby.com/shaffer2

The myth of “public” media is crumbling.