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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: redfish who wrote (6783)	2/10/2004 1:32:59 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20773

There are certainly legitimate reasons for us to go to war other than to protect the lives of U.S. citizens. I agree. That wasn't what I read your first post as saying, but agree with this formulation. But it is hard to see how liberating a bunch of savages in Iraq will provide us with much of a benefit. Disregarding hindsight, which wasn't available at the time, as is usually the case with hindsight, we have to ask whether there was a legitimate reason to go to war a year ago. Whether Saddam actually had WMD is irrelevant, frankly; what's relevant is whether the administration legitiamtely believed that he did. We knew full well that he had had them within the previous decade, and had used them several times. We knew that he had actual weapons and precursors, and we knew that he had failed to show that he had destroyed them. We knew from intercepts that he was engaged in an active program of impeding the work of the UN inspection teams. It was a legitmate conclusion -- remembering that when dealing with danger one should always err on the side of overestimating rather than underestimating a threat -- that he was still actively pursuing a WMD program. Clinton believed it, Bush believed it, Blair believed it, the UN in fact believed it. With regard to international threats, by the time you wait for certainty it is almost always too late. So we went with the best estimate available at the time. It's easy to second guess that. And of course we need to figure out why we were wrong and try to improve things in future. But neither of those things changes the reasonable belief at the time. Further, we knew that his stated strategy was to control the entire Middle East, as he showed by his invasions of Iran and Kuwait and by maintaining a much larger military than he needed for national defense. Destabilization in that region would definitely have been a major threat to our economic interests. Let's assume that we had been right, but Bush had decided not to act on the intelligence he had. Let's assume that Saddam and his military did have major and increasing stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and the systems to deliver them. And let's assume that, egomanical fool that he was, he one day unleashed them on the US troops in Kuwait and Saudia Arabia and on Israel, killing tens or hundereds of thousands of our troops and local citizens and starting a pandemic of smallpox and other horrible diseases. Then, IMO, you, and tsi, and X, and everybody else here would have been screaming for Bush's blood asking why, when we had intelligence that showed he had all this stuff and the willingness to use it, Bush hadn't done something about it before it was too late. Leaders are paid to make hard decisions. And let's not forget that the large magority of those in Congress agreed with the decision to go to war. It's easy to be a Monday Morning quarterback. But if you judge things basaed on the known and believed facts at the time, I don't think the decision was necessarily the wrong decision. And let's keep in mind that Saddam could have averted the war at any time by opening up to real, open inspections, by providing the records showing that he had destroyed the weapons he had clearly previously owned AND USED. His continued refusal to do so in the face of a US invasion seems to me legitimately to justify the assumption that he still had those weapons; otherwise, why not prove he didn't? It made sense to Congress. It made sense to the large majority of Americans. That our information may have turned out to be wrong doesn't mean that the decision to act on the basis of the best available information was wrong.

To: redfish who wrote (6783)	2/10/2004 9:12:38 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

It is beneficial to America that the entire Persian Gulf (which has 2/3 of the oil reserves) not be controlled by one power mad dictator. Saddam had a long term goal of annexing his neighbors oil reserves. Which is why he invaded and announced the annexation of Iran's Khuzistan province, why he did the same to Kuwait, why he put troops on the Saudi border after taking Kuwait, and why he had earlier proposed a joint invasion of Saudi Arabia to the leaders of Egypt and Jordan. Now we could either station troops on Iraq's border for the rest of his life and presumably his son's lives or remove him from power. TMO