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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (26686)	1/15/2005 2:49:47 PM
From: Orcastraiter	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90947

Sure that post was absurd. As absurd as the post it responded to. A bit of bizzare theater as intended. I suppose after sodomy insane already murdered 100,000's of his own people with chemical agents, yes a WMD, and additionally buried 10,000's more of his own people in mass graves, and then played all kinds of cat and mouse games with the weapons inspectors for 12 years, you still are unable to "know" when someone is going to do that again? Sodomy Insane? Is this some sort of twist on the abuses at Abu Gharaib? Somehow you seem to know with all certainty how many people Saddam killed. And Saddam was a bad man. We used that bad man to keep a war with Iran flaming for a decade. How many people were killed in that party? We seem to know with certainty how many people died at Saddam's hand. But for some reason when it comes to the innocents killed in our war with Saddam...well..."We don't do body counts". While you're hung up in the sandbox world of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, many of us are trying to transcend the old way of retribution for a new way. Especially when that retribution will include the loss of 100,000's of lives. That new way was derailed when Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq. I do think that our policy of the past 12 to 20 years in Iraq was seriously flawed. Now this new chapter that Bush is writing is the worst yet to come. The containment policy of the post GW1 era, while proving to be effective in curtailing Saddam was an idiotic policy. Far more should have been done to improve the lives of the people of Iraq. The world backburnered Iraq, when it should have been kept in focus. Using the tragic events of 9-11 to justify a revisit to Iraq policy is truly insane. We had a duty to extinguish the true perps of 9-11, and we turned away from that vital mission to revisit another old problem...Iraq. Intelligence reports said that Saddam probably had WMD. Biological and Chemical weapons. Operative word here is probably. In other words, no one really knew what Saddam had. That fact is now painfully obvious as we discover that Saddam was not in possesion of WMD. Saddam was playing two games. One with the UN and one with the other unruly neighbors in the Middle East. He had to keep his neighbors guessing as to wether he had WMD. It was a security issue for Saddam. At the same time he had to convince the UN that he had no WMD. That duplicity was very likely the cause for the intelligence guess that he had WMD. There was no hard evidence that Saddam had any WMD. In my mind, one needs to have fairly conclusive evidence of WMD, of plans to use WMD and clear intent to use WMD before one launches a major military invasion. We had the upper hand in this situation in Iraq. We had the hammer poised if needed. We had the inspectors back in the country. we had an historic opportunity to work from within to create a far better situation in Iraq than exists in the aftermath of the invasion. Have I ever advocated that we ignore Saddam? No I have not. But I find the invasion, the killing of 100,000's of Iraqis and throwing the country into chaos to be entirely counter productive to that which we ultimately all want in the middle east...peace. I'm not a Johnny come lately to this point of view. I stated right from the get go here on SI that the invasion was a mistake. The latest CIA report is saying that Iraq has a growing insurgency. That Iraq has become a training ground for terrorists. Not Al Qaeda, but a new brand of terrorist...an Iraqi insurgent terrorist. Now if we are bringing freedom to them...why are they willing to die to keep from being freed by us? That is one heck of an important question to ponder. Possibly the imbalance between the Sunni population and the Shia population is at the core of the problem. The Shia will likely control the country after the upcoming election...when ever that might be...and this makes for a difficult problem for the previously autonomous Sunni. Powell's pottery barn rule is becoming ever more prophetic when we look at the complexity of the Iraq problem. It's way more complicated than diagraming armor movements on a map of Iraq. Sure we rolled into Bahgdad with little resistance. Saddam's army was disorganized and completely incapable of mounting a defense to a column of US armor supported by Apache's and bombing raids. Was there ever any doubt that we would make a picnic of it? Cakewalk is the word the Pentagon used to describe the assault. We didn't even need the northern route to engage the plan. But now we face a guerilla war. This kind of war is much more difficult to combat with a column of armor. One needs to asses something deeper than military capability. One needs to know what is in the hearts and minds of the Iraqis themselves. The guerilla war will continue as long as the desires of the Iraqis are not being met by the current occupation. If the vision of the occupier is not congruent with the vision of the occupied you will have a recipie for conflict. That is exactly what we have in Iraq today. And instead of a workable situation where the economy is thriving, and people have jobs and hope, we have the floor strewn with pottery chards. Orca