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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (141127)	7/21/2004 1:24:33 PM
From: Dr. Id	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Meantime the Iraqis would have continued to fill mass graves, and Saddam would have continued to train terrorists at Salman Pak, and who knows what else he would have feeled emboldened to do after his great "victory"? The Great Arab Leader, The Great Arab Defier of the Great Satan, I can just see him parading in triumph at the Arab League. Any question of serious reforms in the Arab world would have been off the table for another generation. You sure live in a scary fantasy world. I would be scared too if there were facts to match. Your best rationalization of no WMD's (how were the Iraqi doing "pretend cooperation" when they had gotten rid of all of their WMD's? Isn't that "real cooperation"?) is that Saddam was a WMD. That is rich! So if we see GWB as a WMD (which he has proven to be much more than Saddam) he can be preemptively "taken out"? I await your response from your planet. :)

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (141127)	7/21/2004 3:15:45 PM
From: jlallen	Respond to of 281500

Hurried? After 12 years and numerous UNSCRs....the very idea is preposterous... JLA

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (141127)	7/27/2004 12:17:43 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Nadine, will you ever get to the place where so many things are "givens" that you don't need to justify them at all? For instance you say: "No, he "hurried" if that was the word because his enemies were trying to drag him down in the UNSC quicksand, and time was on their side, not his....You're making a simple thing too complex. First the decision was made that Saddam was too dangerous to leave alone while sanctions collapsed. That is, the upfront decision was made that the war was worth doing. Everything else follows. It's actually the "upfront decision" that the war was worth doing that defies logic. My point was that at best Bush could have determined that the war MIGHT be worth doing, but that he'd know a lot more after a decent interval for inspections. My point was that he didn't WANT to know more and that's why he hurried. More information might have revealed what the early inspections had already shown; that the intelligence he was exaggerating to get support for the war was, itself, terribly flawed. That would, of course, have given fuel to those you refer to as "his enemies." You must acknowledge, however, that regardless of how you choose to characterize those who disagreed, if they were right, then they were right. My point was, and is, that we shouldn't send someone's loved ones to die and kill based on a rush to war founded upon panicky and false premises. Or do you think that's OK? It appears you may think that's an OK thing since you don't blink when you say that wmds were simply "a question of how you sell it." Of course if you believe in big brother government where we're children that need to be lied to "for our own good," then why have a free press, why have a democracy and why have free choice as the cornerstone of our system of government. Our founding fathers could have used your help in forming a "more perfect union." As for the "14 months," that's the time it took to get our troops in place with all the logistics to support the invasion of Iraq. Check it out, it has nothing to do with Bush being patient. As for your point that: (Do you realize what shape that army would be in after sitting the whole summer in 130 degree tents in Kuwait doing nothing? I know they're pros, but why don't you try it for just a few days and see how your morale holds up,) you might be interested to know that I have some experience with that sort of thing. And I can tell you that sitting in 114 degree heat in the shade of a tent with nothing but busy work is a bitch. It's a better bitch, however, than having people trying to kill you every step you take in that same heat with body armor on. It's been my experience that people who think the "troops" have better "morale" when they're fighting are people who've never faced sudden and painful death and seen their fellow troops bleed out their lives. But don't let me upset your concern for "troop morale" based on your "John Wayne" view of war. One thing we both agree upon; if Bush had waited he'd have likely lost the ability to invade and occupy Iraq. Wouldn't that have been awful. Saddam would have been forced to kill many of the same radical Islamic people we're killing; but of course not nearly as many. The terrorists wouldn't be thriving in the rubble of Iraq and, in fact, many of them might have lived out their lives without even realizing they were terrorists. We'd have spent a lot more resources to make a more secure, stable and Bin Ladin free Afghanistan and the world would have respected our restraint and trusted our military power. And those American lives we've lost and those innocents we've killed in Iraq would be getting up and brushing their teeth, hugging their loved ones and planning the rest of their lives. The 200 BILLION we've spent would be spent elsewhere or left out of the debt we'll pay in the future. And Saddam would have remained an empty, third rate, gang leader and continued to be a local problem that the Iraqi people would have had the responsibility of ridding themselves of. Oh, the terror of that alternative reality.