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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (117687)	10/25/2003 7:21:31 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Yes certainly 9/11 was a godsend opportunity for them and they milked it for all they could. But for those of us with memory retention of more than 6 months, it was not cool and articulate logic that led to war but a rushed process of striking it while the iron was hot. This is why we "rushed" into war a full 18 months after 9/11? after wasting half a year in the UNSC. Something very peculiar has happened to timescales. More that a year of public campaigning & argument over going to war, endless debates & resolutions, marches in the street, arguments everywhere - that's remembered as a "rush to war". However, two weeks into the war were enough for the NYT to confidently predict a "quagmire" seeing as how Baghdad hadn't fallen yet (it took three weeks). And of course, the fact that all resistance isn't done after 7 months is more fuel for the its-just-like-Vietnam quagmire fire. Why was that a "rush to war" but this isn't a "rush to judgment"? You may not have liked the quality of the arguments. I will admit, the administration arguments were somewhat dumbed down. This often happens in politics, and generally with the Bushes, père et fils. But the Bush arguments were veritable PhD theses compared to the opposition arguments - "no blood for oil" - utterly stupid arguments that ignored basically all facts on the ground concerning both the oil markets and Saddam, and offered no alternative solutions whatsoever. There was a public debate. The anti-war side lost. And not because the Bush side used diabolically clever deceptions, as they'd now like to convice us; because the anti-war arguments were patently less convincing to most Americans than the Bush arguments. Assuming the admin was not just after excuses to invade Iraq, just how much evidence did they and Bush need to decide to re-examine the facts? I assume that they had seen all the evidence they needed to convince them that Saddam himself was a threat - most of it was out in the open after all - and the WMD, which every intelligence service believed in (why not? he had used it before & he was losing $200 billion in oil revenue to not give it up), was chosen as the chief marketing angle. There were others available - Saddam's violation of UN resolutions, the failure of containment, the non-cooperation of the UN in containment, Saddam's support for terrorists, human rights - but these were seen as more difficult and costly arguments to make.