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So you are bragging that Clinton signed a piece of hollow legislation he never meant to follow through on?
Nope.
That's you doing the talking.
Quote:
However heres something interesting about that law you may have missed. It wasnt just a for the heck of it thing. You know how there were these bullshyte news exposes reporting cheney over at the cia "stovepiping" fake intel, to make it look look like they were responsible for making it up? Well most of that centered around the dubious claims of a guy nicknamed curveball. Only we couldnt have fabricated his testimony because he was never in our hands he was questioned by the germans. More relevant he was groomed and put up to his story by Chalabi. Now where it gets real interesting is read the parts of that law where it gives Chalabi some $5 million, basically a blank check, to come up with:
On May 1, 1998, President Clinton signed Public Law
105-174, which made $5,000,000 available for assistance to the
Iraqi democratic opposition for such activities as organization,
training, communication and dissemination of information,
developing and implementing agreements among opposition groups,
compiling information to support the indictment of Iraqi
officials for war crimes, and for related purposes.
So Clintons law paid for the shoddy intel that was handed tto Bush that he used to make his decision to go to war. If you look at the wording it isnt even clear that it was concerned the info was true.
You clearly missed the part that it was a GOP bill that he signed.
They believe it because the mass media was 100% behind it at the time, and none of the architects of the war (and none of the media that supported the war) have come out and admitted that they lied to justify the war to the people who still believe the war "was right".
In fairness, the NYT published a mea culpa - obviously by then the damage was done. But they mad, y'know - a gesture.
Well most of that centered around the dubious claims of a guy nicknamed curveball. Only we couldnt have fabricated his testimony because he was never in our hands he was questioned by the germans.
Germans who tried like hell to get the CIA to listen to their concerns about Curveball being unreliable. But nooo - the wild ramblings about mobile WMD labs (remember those?) fit perfectly within the propaganda framework established by Rumswell <spat> and Murdoch <spat>.
Some folks concluded that the intelligence was wrong based on the fact that WMDs were never found. Think about that for a minute. Iraq is 168,754 square miles of sand. Do you have even the slightest notion of what it would take to search 170,000 square miles of sand? The intelligence that Iraq had WMDs may very well have been wrong - but not because WMDs were never found. I wasn't a fan of the Iraq war from day one. I'm not a fan of any war, actually. What I am a fan of is logic - which is no where to be found in the line of thinking that claims the intelligence was bad because no WMDs were found.
Come on, now. WMDs do not exist in a vacuum. If you have, say, nerve gas in your inventory, you have to have a doctrine as well. What command level can authorize their use? (Remember, there's likely a political cost.) What units will hold them, what units will move them to the units who are actually going to fire them? Do they travel with the division supply element? The brigade? You'll need meteorology data, do you have the necessary experts with the decisionmakers?
Have you trained your artillery officers on how to get the most effect of this specific weapon? How to best use it for offense? Defense? If not, better get cracking, because this isn't the sort of weaponry you learn to use as you go along.
Armies have reams of regulations and paperwork for this sort of thing. Staff officers establish careers on integrating new weapons systems into doctrine. And we found - eff-all.
I don't believe it was right, and I was against it when it was just in the talk-about stage. I was even against the Gulf War. Hussein was a monster, and he did violate the terms of the Gulf War cease-fire, but just because we can do a thing doesn't mean we must do that thing. Same with Quaddafi in Libya; removing him created a vacuum that was filled with all sorts of chaos and led to the disastrous demographic change in Europe.
"with 5.3 million members.It operates under the leadership of John Hagee as founder and Chairman"
It gets confusing, this, and they do state clearly that one of their views is to say "without Jews we wouldn't have Christianity" - but the other relates to the Rapture.
Having head Hagee interviewed I can confirm that the Rapture Bit is a big deal with him....
I have a question for conservatives here. I know you consider yourselves free thinkers, and believe that liberals are not. You see yourselves as objective viewers of fact, putting information above emotion. But I read this statistic today: 61% of Republicans believe starting the Iraq War was the right decision. That's compared to 27% of Democrats.
This is after finding out that the intelligence about WMD was wrong, after Trump campaigned against the Iraq War, and after GWB, Colin Powell, and John McCain have said that it was a mistake.
How is it that self identified Republicans are so utterly susceptible to propaganda that 17 years after "Freedom Fries" and "With us or against us" and "Mission Accomplished" almost 2/3 of you still believe the war was the right thing to do?
Why do "free thinkers" support a war just because politicians wave a flag and use the buzzword "freedom", and continue to support the war 15 years later?
The mistake lay in not so much 'starting' the war, but in the handling of the occupation. The Bush admin did not even have much of a plan for the occupation, which they called 'phase IV.' They didn't know anything about Iraqi internals. The CIA had no human sources inside Iraq.
According to Colin Powell's confidante Richard Armitage, the two did not oppose going to Iraq. They just opposed the timing of it. They wanted to wait until after the 2004 election.
The mistake lay in not so much 'starting' the war, but in the handling of the occupation. The Bush admin did not even have much of a plan for the occupation, which they called 'phase IV.' They didn't know anything about Iraqi internals. The CIA had no human sources inside Iraq.
According to Colin Powell's confidante Richard Armitage, the two did not oppose going to Iraq. They just opposed the timing of it. They wanted to wait until after the 2004 election.
You assume we would want to win the war give the iraqis their country and vacate in short order.
IMO that was not the case at all and the insurgency was allowed to happen for a number of reasons.
Do you have any idea how many foreign fighters poured into the country to kill americans? We didnt publicly tally that figure but halfway into it a general mentioned around 75k.
We only had to get the right 19 to make it worth it.
Saddam being removed caused a lot of problems. He hated/feared the Taliban, so he kept them down. With him gone, they proliferated like crazy. As awful as he was, he was the balance.
Muammar Qaddafi hated al Qaeda and Islamic radicals and kept them in check as well, Obama didn't learn from the folly in Iraq, he invaded Libya, and further destroyed the balance as well.
I think the OP misses the boat on this entire subject. Most all Conservatives were opposed to what we did in Libya, precisely because of how our intel agencies got it all wrong in Iraq. Then again, the entire left seems to not have learned anything from Iraq, since they suddenly love Clapper, Brennen and Comey, who were the leaders of the intel agencies.
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