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I've had a slight change of heart on Iraq. If Bush and his henchmen thought that the invasion was necessary to keep America safe, then I can live with that. At the end of the day though, I believe that only Bush had good intentions. I can't say the same for the group comprising Cheney on down to the rest of the neocon cabal.
I admit that I did not read all the replies. To me the problem was not whether or not the WMD statements were lies. These same claims were made for years by politicians of both parties before Bush made them.
The problem for me is taking a decade of war to address what was addressed in a very short time. Saddam was disposed of quickly. We still wasted trillions of dollars, got many of our kids killed and for what?
I've had a slight change of heart on Iraq. If Bush and his henchmen thought that the invasion was necessary to keep America safe, then I can live with that. At the end of the day though, I believe that only Bush had good intentions. I can't say the same for the group comprising Cheney on down to the rest of the neocon cabal.
You seem to be forgetting that Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 and Clinton Admin and UNSCOM intel was used to decide the invasion was necessary. It had nothing to do with Cheney or any imaginary neocon cabal.
Biden himself confirmed this in 2007:
Quote:
MR. RUSSERT: I want to go back to 2002, because it’s important as to what people were saying then and what the American people were hearing. Here’s Joe Biden about Saddam Hussein: “He’s a long term threat and a short term threat to our national security.”
“We have no choice but to eliminate the threat. This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world.”
“He must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power.” You were emphatic about that.
SEN. BIDEN: That’s right, and I was correct about that. He must be, in fact—and remember the weapons we were talking about. I also said on your show, that’s part of what I said, but not all of what I meant. What I also said on your show at the time was that I did not think he had weaponized his material, but he did have. When, when the inspectors left after Saddam kicked them out, there was a cataloguing at the United Nations saying he had X tons of, X amount of, and they listed the various materials he had. The big issue, remember, on this show we talked about, was whether he had weaponized them. Remember you asked me about those flights that were taking place in southern Iraq, where—were they spraying anthrax? And, you know, what would happen? And, you know, so on and so forth. And I pointed out to you that they had not developed that capacity at all. But he did have these stockpiles everywhere.
MR. RUSSERT: Where are they?
SEN. BIDEN: Well, the point is, it turned out they didn’t, but everyone in the world thought he had them. The weapons inspectors said he had them. He catalogued—they catalogued them. *This was not some, some Cheney, you know, pipe dream. This was, in fact, catalogued.*
I've had a slight change of heart on Iraq. If Bush and his henchmen thought that the invasion was necessary to keep America safe, then I can live with that. At the end of the day though, I believe that only Bush had good intentions. I can't say the same for the group comprising Cheney on down to the rest of the neocon cabal.
We almost never agree till now. This is the most honest post of yours in awhile. Thank you for looking at this without partisan glasses on. Bush took alot of heat, but along with his dad, reagan and even clinton wanted what was best for the USA. I am not so sure about our current commander in chief. It is why alot hate Obama, and has nothing to do with his left leaning views or the color of his skin. Heck i didnt like clinton but at least i thought he cared about all americans not just libs. I could live with that. Bushes mistake was filling his cabnet with the old hawks instead of going young and fresh. There was a agenda that was different than bushes compassionate conservatism that he cared about.
A good op-ed by a Yale prof who also does a column for Bloomberg News. He confirms what any reasonably intelligent person not suffering from a derangement syndrome should already know: there were no "lies about WMD" from the Bush admin. He cites a book by Brit journalist Gordon Corera for his evidence:
As I have posted before, even Saddam's own senior officers believed it. It was all a consequence of Saddam's 'deterrence by doubt' strategy which was mainly intended to cow the Iranians. Saddam confirmed this in interrogations after being captured.
I believe that the "Bush lied, thousands died" meme will be remembered by historians as one of the biggest idiocies of US politics ever. Maybe even more worrisome that the meme itself was the fact that it was so widely embraced by so many Americans. There is doubtlessl a large percentage of the population, maybe even a majority, who still believe it. If a large number of people in a democratically-run nation can be persuaded of a stupid and easily disproven proposition, that nation is in trouble.
Ok. op-ed = opinion.
But, it is known that Saddam killed Kurds with chemical weapons.
Quote:
The Halabja poison gas attack (Kurdish: کیمیابارانی ھەڵەبجە Kîmyabarana Helebce), also known as Halabja massacre or Bloody Friday, was a genocidal massacre against the Kurdish people that took place on March 16, 1988, during the closing days of the Iran–Iraq War, when chemical weapons were used by the Iraqi government forces in the Kurdish town of Halabja in Southern Kurdistan.
The attack killed between 3,200 and 5,000 people, and injured around 7,000 to 10,000 more, most of them civilians; thousands more died of complications, diseases, and birth defects in the years after the attack. The incident, which has been officially defined as an act of genocide against the Kurdish people in Iraq, was and still remains the largest chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian-populated area in history.
They knew he did not have them or at minimum they knew that it was very unlikely but it was a lie of convenience. A way to keep Saddam from doing the thing they really did not want done that is to take the oil of Iraq off the dollar and on the euro. It was a war of oil nothing more.
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