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Lesson #1. Do not follow dorothy into the rabbit hole, for you can never know the repurcusions of your actions until it's too late and ends up being a bitter pill to swallow. ie America what it is today!!
I at times am prone to make a mistake...this being a human nature.
On the other hand have learned many times on what to do and what NOT to do based upon some other persons mistakes.
Do think that Washington would have learned that system based upon the Russian period in Afghanistan and their quick retreat after much resistence. NO ONE wants to be occupied.
Top that off what makes Washington think that the people in Iraq or Afghaniston wish for a Democratic form of Government such as in the US.
Both places have been in the stone age or close to it for a very long time...they have had centuries to improve their life structure.
Because Iraq/Saddam had a history of aquisition of advanced weapons systems, and with the then-newly-demonstrated ability of Islamic terror networks to deliver attacks on our soil, we were faced with an 'accident waiting to happen.'
Afghanistan is happening to simply feed the military industrial complex. Contractors and their shareholders have gotten filthy rich on the taxpayer dime for a decade, it is not about trying to bring "Democracy" to Afghanistan, as soon as we leave collaborators will be running for their lives or joining the Taliban. American soldiers are sent there as cannon fodder, the mission they have is to simply patrol and insure that the appearance of "assistance" is given so that defense contractors and their cronies can keep getting rich supplying them with the tools of war.
They are fighting, and dying, for all the wrong reasons. Iraq and Afghanistan exemplify all that is wrong and evil about war. Inventing reasons to invade and occupy other countries makes a tiny few very rich, and makes the majority of everyone else involved scarred for life from the experience.
I think the most important lesson of that whole debacle is to always doubt your government, and assume that any rationale for war is a flat-out lie unless proven otherwise. So for instance, is Iran building nuclear weapons? If the US government says "yes," our first impulse should be to assume "no," until actual proof is provided.
The only thing to be learnt from history is that nobody learns from history."
- William Golding, Close Quarters (1987)
. . .
It would take a great philosopher to know all the causes of the Iraq war, suffice it to say that President George W. Bush accused Iraq of having weapons of mass destruction - some of which were sold to Iraq by George H.W. Bush when he was President - that Saddam Hussein denied having and the United Nations weapons inspectors could not find, but that President Bush insisted Iraq had, or was in the process of acquiring for imminent use against the United States; and that when this was shown to be based on false intelligence, the invasion and occupation was then justified as a war against terrorism, to liberate Iraq from a oppressive regime, and spread democracy throughout the Middle East; for which thousands of American soldiers were killed and wounded, and untold numbers of Iraqi citizens lost their lives, were maimed, imprisoned, tortured, humiliated, and made to be enemies of the United States and its allies, and fermenting civil war.
Now that we are out of it, we can look back upon the whole scene with historic smugness. What are the lessons learned? What, in the final analysis, was accomplished? Did we win the war? Or was it a phony victory to be whitewashed by politicians? "Peace with honor" was the best face that Kissinger and Nixon could put on our inglorious exit from the Vietnam quagmire. In The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli maintained that a state that is hard won in war is easily ruled as the enemy has been destroyed; where as a state that easily won is not easily held because the enemy still remains everywhere about the occupier. Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz - the architects of the war in Iraq - both profess to have studied Machiavelli. Apparently, they didn’t learn their lessons well; and our leaders would have done well to have had better advisors.
WHAT part of AUTHORIZE are you having trouble understanding DOES NOT mean MANDATE?
As I've said, he's said HE made the go decision, WHAT part of HE means Congress?
I think we are saying some of the same things.
He had authority, and he acted on it. He was NOT mandated.
Again I am pointing out that it was NOT a repub action alone as claimed by the first poster I was answering. It was bi-partisan. Isn't that what the left is always shouting for our politicians to do?
Amazingly, the Bush Administration still has a bevy of loyal cheerleaders, attempting to deflect blame onto other politicians as well as portraying the neocons as being misled or uninformed about the "evidence" that Saddam had WMD's.
One wonders what world these people live in with the volumes of evidence and first hand accounts that have surfaced since the illegal invasion of an innocent nation, but one really only has to look at two things:
1) The neocons stated desire to invade Iraq and depose Hussein which began, PUBLICLY, in 1998 with a letter to Pres. Clinton with this desired goal clearly outlined by what would become the Bush Admin. (I'd also point to the neocons blaming Hussein for 9/11 on the SAME DAY as the attacks, showing the groundwork was laid well before the attacks of 9/11)
2) The close ties to the oil industry and Halliburton by both the Cheney and Bush families, as well as a consortium of defense contractors and other groups like The Carlyle Group - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
One can guess that their cheerleaders are either oblivious to this, choose to ignore it, or have consumed so much propaganda that they really believe what they are saying.
I believe it is the latter
Why do YOU keep deflecting the blame from the dems? I notice you haven't addressed my post about the DEM controlled Senate who GAVE the authority.
And let's not forget the it was Clinton who signed for regime change in IRAQ.
You just can't stand that your dems acted in a way that you don't agree with and want to put ALL the blame on the repubs so you try to ignore it.
It ain't gonna work.
As was said in a Few Good Men, "The truth! You can't handle the truth".
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