A stroll down memory lane

Captain Elephant

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I'm still not sure what's meant by the video. Dems were wrong, as were the Republicans. The blame is placed on those who pulled the trigger using wrong intelligence.

The problem I have with the entire situation is the rationale for the U.S. et al get to get bogged down in a different country than the one initially targeted for harboring a terrorist. Not only have they not accomplished the first mission, but the second seems a long way from completion as well.
 

Bbucko

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I'm still not sure what's meant by the video. Dems were wrong, as were the Republicans. The blame is placed on those who pulled the trigger using wrong intelligence.

The problem I have with the entire situation is the rationale for the U.S. et al get to get bogged down in a different country than the one initially targeted for harboring a terrorist. Not only have they not accomplished the first mission, but the second seems a long way from completion as well.

This is essentially what I thought.

Is the point of the OP that everybody was wrong, or that everyone was right and the stockpiles went "missing"?
 

visualalert

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This is essentially what I thought.

Is the point of the OP that everybody was wrong, or that everyone was right and the stockpiles went "missing"?

That's a pretty transparent "when did you stop beating your wife?" formulation. The point is, very obviously, neither of those. The point is that the people screaming the loudest now about how bad an idea "Bush's war" is were beating the drums for intervention in Iraq well before he even started his run for prez in the late 90s, and that they continued to support it well into the mid-2000s.

The purpose of the post is to resurrect data that has been flushed down the memory hole. Also to encourage people to think about why positions that seemed perfectly reasonable and prudent to them when a Democrat was president are now viewed as not just unreasonable and misguided, but even evil and conspiratorial.
 

Deno

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how easy we forget the mass graves, the chemical weapons used on his own people. The harsh condition and brutal justice handed down by his fellow tyrants. We forget how he invaded Kuwait and how many innocent people in that country lost there lives. Twelve years of waiting for Saddam to abide by the UN resolution. We say he had no WMD but we know he did he used them on the Kurds. If Saddam and his army was not dismantled he would have just went back into Kuwait or Iran or some other country and try to steal there oil. We forget the crime of setting all those oil fields on fire and the impact that had against the people there. We forget all the loyal soldiers that lost there lives or came home broken mentally and physically. You can drag the US down you can question our leaders motives but you'll never convince me we did the wrong thing by removing him from power.
 

dreamer20

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The point is that the people screaming the loudest now about how bad an idea "Bush's war" is were beating the drums for intervention in Iraq well before he even started his run for prez in the late 90s, and that they continued to support it well into the mid-2000s.

The purpose of the post is to resurrect data that has been flushed down the memory hole. Also to encourage people to think about why positions that seemed perfectly reasonable and prudent to them when a Democrat was president are now viewed as not just unreasonable and misguided, but even evil and conspiratorial.

These were the reasonable positions prior to the Iraq War foreign policy blunder of George W. Bush:

Post Operation Desert Storm in the 1990's Dick Cheney and George Bush Sr. were against going into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein as even a successful war against Iraq would require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. An invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support would only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world. The removal of Saddam Hussein's government would cause numerous casualties and ,as Cheney predicted, that volatile region would split into 3 warring factions and cause "a quagmire".

YouTube - Cheney '94: Invading Baghdad Would Create Quagmire C-SPAN

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

In the OP's video, circa 1998, Madeleine Albright mentioned standing firm against the threat of Saddam Hussein. This was done not via an Iraq war, but by a policy of containment in concert with the international community.

Clinton Administration intelligence showed Saddam was not making nuclear weapons. There may have been some chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, but not the means to effectively deploy them beyond its borders. Saddam posed no imminent and direct threat to the United States
, or to his neighbors, Iraq was under economic sanctions, the Iraqi economy was in shambles, the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, barred from purchasing heavy weapons and surrounded by superior forces; even the greater part of its airspace was outside of its control.



In 2001 U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said that his administration would keep the aforementioned policies in place as " Our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq."

By early 2002 President Bush decided to abandon them and prepared to invade.

In making the case for the war the Bush administration raised the possibility that Saddam Hussein might team up with Al Qaeda, and that he could provide terrorists with formidable weapons. They spoke of the "gathering danger" posed by the Iraqi regime. Even Condoleezza Rice conjured up the image of a mushroom cloud, as a warning that failure to react would lead to nuclear annihilation. In Feb. 2003 Secretary Powell gave an impressive, dramatic show-and-tell presentation before the UN Security Council. With the director ot the CIA, George Tenet, at his side , Powell offered a litany of allegations , including the startling assertion that Iraq possessed a fleet of mobile biological weapons. It was powerful testimony but unbeknownst to Powell, the juicier tidbits-including the mobile labs- were lies. Iraqi exiles, most notably an informant by the name of Curveball, had manufactured the fictions with the expressed purpose of prodding America into war.


http://www.lpsg.org/1497018-post379.html


It is clear in retrospect that the Iraqi regime posed no threat to the American people or their allies. There was no evidence of them being in league with Al Qaeda. There was no justification for the Bush Administration , which had won a diplomatic victory by pressing for the return of the UN weapons inspectors to Iraq, to undo that victory by forcing a premature end to those inspections. In the summer of 2002 Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and the facts were tailored to fit the policy.

In a Sept. 2005 interview with Barbara Walters Powell told her he had made a diligent effort to ensure that the information conveyed to the U.N. was accurate. He eventually learned a number of persons in the intelligence community knew at the time which sources were unreliable, but they didn't speak up. That devastated him.


USATODAY.com - Powell calls pre-Iraq U.N. speech a 'blot' on his record



 
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