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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (2811)	2/19/2004 7:44:27 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

You haven't made a sufficient argument to support that charge. Yes, I have. The public data is what they allowed us to see. The public data does not include the data that was cautious about whether Iraq had WMD or not. They purposely ignored that data when they made the case for war to the American public. OK. I took "ignored that data" to mean they totally ignored it, not that they didn't present it to the public. So you are saying that you consider it to be a "serious lapse of judgment" that they didn't present all the data to the public when they where trying to get support for the war? I'm not sure I would agree with that, and even if it was a lapse of judgment it would be a lapse of judgment in picking political tactics not a lapse of judgment directly about the war. Tim, do you think all the people complaining are partisan ssholes? If so, then you are in for a rude awakening.* I never called them assholes. I do think that most of the people complaining that Bush lied are highly partisan and where already against Bush. "The support from the US in 1980 wasn't very significant compared the scale of the war as a whole." What does that matter? G. Washington's lie was not that big but the tree was still down on the ground. The damage was done! What damage was done by our minimal support of Saddam in 1980 rather then waiting until Iraq was under more threat by Iran. In any case the fact that we provided some support for Saddam is even more reason to take him down when he becomes a problem. If we were responsible for him in anyway then it would be our responsibility to deal with the problem. But really he was in power without US support and his military was mostly equipped with Soviet weapons, most of the rest where French and American weapons were not even the majority left over after the top two. The only points where a US decision could have been said to keep Saddam in power are 1 - During the Iran Iraq war if our support kept Iraq from being overrun, and 2 - After the 1st gulf war. But the first is rather dubious as our support was not great and in any case Saddam in power at the time was probably better then Iranian clerics in power of Iraq. And in the 2nd case we didn't keep him in power we just didn't invade to get rid of him. I'm sorry...in my book, two wrongs do not make a right. Look at how our support of Stalin kicked us in the face after WW II. Overall I would still say that supporting Stalin was worth it. Even if we didn't send Stalin any supplies or weapons we would have been supporting him by fighting the Nazis and I don't think that it would have been a good idea to not fight the Nazis. Once we were in the fight it was better for us to help arm the Soviets and have them do a lot of the dieing for us, instead of having to have a lot more Americans die in WWII. There was less need to support Saddam then Stalin but the support for Saddam was much less. It was mostly a matter of trying to work with someone who had power in the area rather then make him an enemy or have fundamentalist Shia leaders take control in Iraq. If our support was unnecessary against Iran then I would rather that we did send the support, but at the time it was thought it might be needed and even now we can't be 100% sure that it wasn't. Tim