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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (174133)	11/4/2005 12:20:40 AM
From: mistermj	Respond to of 281500

Great post Hawkmoon. History and facts are on your side.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (174133)	11/4/2005 8:45:33 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The Democrats have even more ownership of this war because they signed a law that called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. And Bush was obligated to do what was necessary to enforce that Act.. Fascinating. Now the war is the Democrats' war. Poor Republicans, they were just living up the sworn obligations that Democrats left them with. Good grief, does the buck only stop at the Republicans door when a policy results in a success? Is failure and stupidity ALWAYS the fault of someone else?! What is in the water you're drinking over there, Hawk? On one point we agree, though--Tenet does indeed deserve a lot of blame, for which he received the Medal of Honor. "Brownie, you're doin' a hellava job." Bush got all of his legal ducks in a row before we came into Iraq, regardless of whether the decision was morally right or not.... lol, your "ducks" are priceless He asked for, and received, authorization from a democratic Senate majority to use force in Iraq. The Senate was spineless and stupid. Byrd argued--correctly--that they should have included a rider saying that Bush had to come back to them before going to war. I'm sure plenty of them, including Republicans, now wish they had passed his amendment. He had UN legal authorization to "use all means necessary" to bring Iraq into compliance with its disarmament obligations under UNSC 687, signed in 1991. In the end, he didn't go back to UN for authorization because he knew he didn't have the votes. He could have forced a vote and made France & Russia use their veto, but he knew that their veto wouldn't have been necessary. Bush should read--or his advisors should read and paid attention to it, I know it is too much to ask him to read something--Federalist 63, where Madison notes that it is crucial for governments to pay attention to international opinion as a check on the delusions that one country or group can so easily fall into. He waited the full 90 days that UNSC 1441 called, as well as for the UN inspectors report that listed almost 200 pages of information on Iraq's CONTINUING non-compliance.. Neither the inspectors themselves nor most of the UN believed that they had exhausted their search when Bush said to them, get out, enough. And of course, it turned out that there was nothing to be found, so they could have searched for as long as Diogenes for all it mattered. If you start with an unshakeable premise that Saddam had the WMDs, then you can twist anything into "proof" that he had them, even the words of known scoundrels and liars who have a vested interest in military intervention. And as for your "argument" (actually, assertion) that Bush was "just" relying on facts that the Clinton administration left him--this is amazing nonsense. He, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Tenet, just cherrypicked their "evidence," with their only critical attention being to discard anything that disagreed with their cherished goal and seeing what they wanted to see in anything that appeared to bolster it. Rorshach would have loved it--"What do you see in this picture?" "Hmmm, I think it looks like a WMD lab. Ohmygod, we'd better do something about that before they attack us, I gotta go, bye Mr. Rorschach!"

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (174133)	11/7/2005 2:27:54 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Hawkmoon; Re: "It would be one thing if they were criticizing Bush and the Military's policies on how we're CURRENTLY fighting against this insurgency. But they haven't done that.. All they do is try to go back two or three years to try and absolve themselves from any responsibility for being here in the first place, despite the fact they it was their President Clinton and his CIA director that accumulated the intelligence that Bush relied upon." Long before Bush 43 was elected I was arguing that we should not continue our actions against Iraq. I argued that Iraq would likely slowly follow the trend of other dictatorships (such as Franco's Spain, the USSR or China) and slowly become more democratic over the years, and that we had those years available to wait. But no, on the basis of WMDs that turned out to have already been destroyed, the Republicans, with the assistance of the Democrats, got us involved in an unwinnable war in Iraq. I'm not blaming the Republicans for this. Like you've said, the Democrats advocated a similar policy. The fact is that the Republicans are going to get blamed because it was a Republican president who finally pulled the damned trigger. Re: "But they haven't done that.. All they do is try to go back two or three years to try and absolve themselves from any responsibility for being here in the first place, despite the fact they it was their President Clinton and his CIA director that accumulated the intelligence that Bush relied upon." What do you expect them to do? It's obvious to anyone with half a brain that the Iraq war is the biggest foreign policy mistake of the post Vietnam world. Hey, if Iraq were such a good idea, the Democrats would be trying to take credit for it. The fact that they are not should be a clue to you. Like I've said before, just because the Democrats think of it doesn't mean it's automatically a great idea. -- Carl P.S. It should now be a little more obvious why it is that France didn't want to get involved in an invasion of Iraq. If they'd have gone in, they'd have had these problems that much earlier and that much worse. As it is, the big bombs blew up in Spain and UK.