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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (77131)	6/14/2006 8:22:38 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

But I have a real problem with the FACT of his failure to exhaust all other avenues before taking us into an ill-conceived and dishonestly justified war. Let me employ what the lawyers call "the reasonable man defense". Was there in existence, any course of action short of war, which could have removed Saddam & sons from the rule of Iraq and put in a less aggressive, more rational, less likely to supply terrorists government? Would our hypothetical rational man really believe that there was some solution that would oust Saddam but not require war? I say no. I maintain that after 12 years of useless UN resolutions, failing sanctions, billions in bribes, fruitless inspections that only got reinstated because of an American army sitting in Kuwait, our reasonable man would conclude that as far as the US vs Saddam, things were coming to a crisis where the US must either oust him forcibly or acquiesce to his continued rule. And indeed, most of those opposing Saddam were quite frank about acquiescence - claiming he was 'in a box' so it was okay. This being the case, what does the demand that Bush "exhaust all other avenues" before going to war really mean? Another year, two years of Hans Blix running around in Iraq, finding nothing, with an American army sitting on its keester in Kuwait, looking like helpless fools? After which, nothing to do but withdraw with our tail between our legs and go home. So I read this "exhaust all other avenues" demand = leave Saddam alone, let sanctions collapse, let him resume his position as the most powerful Arab leader. Certainly, beyond any doubt, when France and Russia made the demand, that's EXACTLY what they meant. They would each have reaped BILLIONS the day the sanctions collapsed. But then Bush went that extra mile. He said, "Year after year, Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction. But why? The only possible explanation, the only possible use he could have for those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate, or attack." We now know that any evidence to support such a statement was subject to a great deal of doubt, even at that time. It was by no means the certainty that paragraph makes it out to be. We also know now that it turned out to have been flat-out wrong. Lying, I call it. Very careful, very crafty lying Our intelligence was bad on Iraq - but so was everybody else's. The intelligence services of France, Germany and Britain said the same, but all knew that Saddam ran a police state and the information was sketchy. If we had had a mole in Saddam's inner circle (we didn't, not even close) what would that mole have reported? That Saddam still had WMDs. His own generals believed it! Saddam cost himself 100s of billions of dollars in sanctions to keep up either WMDs or the pretence of WMDs. We still don't know which because we don't what he shipped to Syria in the long 14 month runup to the war. There are several pretty credible sources, including an Iraqi general, saying he shipped his WMD program stuff to Syria under the guise of humanitarian aid. I have an extremely simple reason for knowing that Bush was not deliberately lying. Look how the WMD issue has blown up in his face! If GW Bush was Machiavelli, set on saying ANYTHING to get him the war that he wanted, would he stress an issue that would backfire so badly the second he got into Iraq? Surely he wouldn't be that stupid. Surely he would pick some deep mysterious Gulf of Tonkin-like cause that couldn't be disproved until much later. Saddam's numerous contacts with Al Qaeda would have been much better material.