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Clinton bombed Iraq and other places in the Mid East, numerous times. Go back and listen to Clinton's speeches, they were either exactly the same as GWB or in a few examples, they were even more bombastic. Clinton didn't have the benefit of 9/11, to push his justifications over the top. So don't act as if the only people wanting to take action against Saddam was Cheney Rumsfeld.
Core members of the [Project for the New American Century] PNAC including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Zoellick, and John Bolton were among the signatories of an open letter initiated by the PNAC to President Bill Clinton calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein.
Portraying Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States, its Middle East allies, and oil resources in the region, and emphasizing the potential danger of any weapons of mass destruction under Iraq's control, the letter asserted that the United States could "no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections."
Stating that American policy "cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council," the letter's signatories asserted that "the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf."
Clinton bombed Iraq and other places in the Mid East, numerous times. Go back and listen to Clinton's speeches, they were either exactly the same as GWB or in a few examples, they were even more bombastic. Clinton didn't have the benefit of 9/11, to push his justifications over the top. So don't act as if the only people wanting to take action against Saddam was Cheney Rumsfeld.
Yes, Clinton did occasional bombing. If drones had been as capable back then, it would have been a drone war as it became in Afghanistan. That is a hell of a lot different from putting American troops on the ground in a full-scale invasion and occupation. It is disingenuous to pretend that there is no difference.
I was there as the debate was happening. Lots of people were extremely skeptical about the information being brought forth. Of course, Fox News had the biggest war hard-on and breathlessly reported that this time, for sure, now with 100% accuracy, this time the giant WMD cache had been uncovered and all the Saddam-loving terrorist cuddlers had been definitively proven wrong. Utter BS every time, but the viewers loved it.
It was amazing and frustrating to me at the time to see how clearly the Pentagon was dragging its feet to avoid that war--as much as the generals dared resist the SECDEF.
The Army Chief of Staff actually disputed the SECDEF in public on the issue of how many troops an invasion would take. Rumsfeld claimed only 70,000 troops as a quick and cheap in-and-out operation. The Army CoS stubbornly insisted that it would take 250,000 troops as a full-scale invasion.
They disputed in public, with result of Rumsfeld firing the CoS. The Commandant of the Marine Corps also stuck to the 250,000 troop requirement, but he retired before he was fired.
The Defense Intelligence Agency disputed Rumsfeld's claim of new stockpiles of WMD in leaks to the press. Rumsfeld then created his own hand-picked group of analysts to "find what the others missed"--and simply circumvented the real intelligence analysts in the Pentagon.
In 2003, the Director of the DIA, Admiral Lowell Jacoby (a brilliant man I'd worked for in the early 90s) was asked directly in a Senate hearing, "Admiral, what evidence did you have of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?"
Admiral Jacoby answered directly: "Senator, we had no reliable evidence."
The Pentagon dragged its feet on that war as much as they could...and nobody noticed. The intelligence community had no reliable evidence, and nobody cared.
I was there as the debate was happening. Lots of people were extremely skeptical about the information being brought forth. Of course, Fox News had the biggest war hard-on and breathlessly reported that this time, for sure, now with 100% accuracy, this time the giant WMD cache had been uncovered and all the Saddam-loving terrorist cuddlers had been definitively proven wrong. Utter BS every time, but the viewers loved it.
If, as you suggest, only Fox news and the Bush administration were pushing the wmd narrative....
Why did the UN have teams of inspectors looking for them? Why were they reading lists of wmd that were unaccounted for?
The intelligence was twisted. The nation didn't get what the real analysts believed, the nation got what Rumsfelt and Cheney wanted the nation to believe in order to start the war they'd even written Clinton to start.
Interesting.... how was that cheney and rumsfelds intel when the NIE was compiled by Clintons DCI and comprised almost completely of intelligence collected when Clinton was president?
Interesting.... how was that cheney and rumsfelds intel when the NIE was compiled by Clintons DCI and comprised almost completely of intelligence collected when Clinton was president?
Clinton's National Intelligence Estimate did not claim there were ready stockpiles of new WMD in place in Iraq.
Notice: There is a vast difference between claiming that Iraq had a WMD "program" and having ready stockpiles of new WMD in place.
Libya had had a "program" for decades--with nothing to show for it. Lots of countries had and have "programs." A "program" might consist of as little as laboratory tinkering at a university.
Iraq's program had only been effective in the 80s because of outside assistance (including from the US). After the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein certainly did not execute everyone who had been on his WMD effort up until then. Nor did he burn all the documentation.
He did dismantle the weapons--but there was nothing he could do with the chemical components. There was no way to safely destroy those weapons at the time. The US didn't even have a method at that time of disposing of weapons such as sarin. Burying them was the only available approach--which is what Iraq did.
And we knew--at the close of the Gulf War--where they had been buried. I personally knew where they had been buried. And let's understand that buried chemical weapons components are not like rifles swaddled in Cosmoline--they go bad over time and become unreliable and dangerous.
So Saddam maintained a "program." The technicians were still alive, documentation was still available. If he hadn't been watched and inspected, no doubt he'd have tried reconstructing operational weapons.
But he was watched and inspected. Constantly. The US reconnaissance capability had been scaled to monitor the entire freaking Soviet Union, covering nine time zones. By that time, the Soviet Union wasn't a problem anymore, and for a full decade Iraq had been intelligence issue number one.
Covering Iraq 24/7 was not a problem for an apparatus that had been scaled to monitor the Soviet Union. We could watch them day and night, during rain and during sandstorms. The ability to analyze non-visual data increased enormously during the 90s. We could see underground a little, and even see into the past a little.
Take the ability of astronomical science to determine chemical compounds on distant planets and point that capability back toward earth. The synthetic outwaste of chemical weapons production and manipulation is impossible to conceal. Technology can always discover technology.
And Iraq was not a closed country--when we saw something interesting by other means, we could send in Special Forces to take air, soil, and water samples for verification.
And yet, with all that, "frisking" Iraq for nearly ten years, the Director of the DIA reported to Congress in 2003, "Senator, we had no reliable evidence."
Did they have a "program?" Yes. Did they have a ready stock pile of weapons? No.
But Rumsfeld and Cheney asserted that very thing.
"We know where they are!" Rumsfeld said.
"They can put them into operation within twenty minutes!" Cheney said.
Those were lies, and the real intelligence analysts weren't saying that at all.
Last edited by Ralph_Kirk; 06-18-2019 at 10:53 AM..
Because A consumer generation is five years.
An extended generation is ten years ( including the extension of that 20 years )
People forget.
People grow old and retire..
2001 is like people of my fathers generation who only cared about taxes from the early 1990's.
2008 is basically Bushes entire run and when Obama was elected all we could think is N-word was elected.
Obama entire run was basically. "My prez is black".
Racist coming out of the woodwork during the 2012 election and all we had was Hillary in the end instead of Sanders.
This outcry is basically how unpopular the hip-hop, yo-yo-yo, My N-word, has become. Being black is old. Gangster-Rap is old. Even fight the power and all of that stuff from the 1970's is forgotten. All people could remember is "are you blood or are you crips" from the late 1990's music mentality.
Okay you go out partying that is okay.
You want to raise children in a house with a mortgage that is not cool.
Bottom-line is that people forget about how many lies and lives was lost and it amounted to nothing.
Iraq & Afghanistan = Vietnam & Korea at the current mindset. Nobody can remember. All they remember are the arcade games and posters of military guys look awesome. In this case Myspace photos or stuff from P2P downloading, or Orgish.com........... That is how stupid people are.
Your average DT voter is ex-military located in the midwest and is most likely apart of supremacy groups. If not wishes for that mentality.
Nobody cares or remember peace. Little kids are now big enough to be police officers and they think that "those people in the middle-east are crazy, does it matter if they get killed". Then they go home to there mindless girl-friends and mindless wife and there children born out of wedlock thinking bs.
All these old people ( our parents hitting 60 ) are basically cowards AKA squares who all went to college and took jobs and took verbal abuse to physical abuse in white collared jobs and think they are blue collared workers. All of them throwing there kids to the dogs and still pretending they are religious. They are still in the mindset of "Read my lips, no new taxes"
Well, they are mutually idiotic. So there is that.
Bombing Brown People is definitely something we seem to do, but that doesn't mean the reasons have any validity to them....and being as we are talking about many TRILLIONS of dollars, this is quite a serious issue.
Whether it was:
National Security
We'll take the Oil (Trump doctrine)
A Crusade (Bush Doctrine)
We're mad because the Saudis did 9/11, but we have to take it out on someone else.
War Makes Good Money
War makes for lots of Military upgrades of rank and place in history
or one of MANY other excuses, the bottom line is the same. If we use the same "reasoning" for other aggressive actions, we are going to be 40 Trillion in debt and have a lot of affected populace and destabilize the world even more.
Getting back to the OP, the fact that so many Republicans supported the war and still do shows that the lesson is not learned. When a lesson is not learned it is often repeated.
What "lesson learned"?
Since the war was always sold as a preventative measure, to declare it was a mistake is complete folly. What makes you think Saddam wasnt going to attack our allies within a few years after sanctions ended? How many more of his suicide bombings were the Israelis going to endure until they pounded the Palestinians to the point where it caused a war between them and all the Arab countries?
All we have to do is accept history as it happened. You anti war people have to prove your alternate path of history fantasy really would be better and thats impossible.
If, as you suggest, only Fox news and the Bush administration were pushing the wmd narrative....
Why did the UN have teams of inspectors looking for them?
Oh, that's some fine inductive reasoning. "Why did the police search the car if there wasn't any contraband?"
The UN was allowed back in in attempt to stave off war. Of course, what they found was nothing except massive evidence that the stories being peddled by the GWB administration were as much wild-eyed conspiracy.
Quote:
Why were they reading lists of wmd that were unaccounted for?
Because some materials still weren't accounted for in 1998 when Iraq expelled the inspector teams for being loaded up with foreign intelligence agents - which, btw. they were.
But looking for some materials that hadn't been counted in 1998 was not the casus belli. We were told that war was a reaction to an immediate threat, that the "smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud over one of our cities". It got kinda desperate - mobile weapons labs, those very frightening aluminum tubes, we had to act now!
The one thing the Iraq war did do was prove that the UN was really quite effective in dismantling the Iraqi WMD programs and that the IAEA know their stuff. From 1991-1998, the UN dismantled and destroyed the Iraqi WMD program, but as no missiles were fired, it didnt register with the US newsviewer.
What makes you think Saddam wasnt going to attack our allies within a few years after sanctions ended? How many more of his suicide bombings were the Israelis going to endure until they pounded the Palestinians to the point where it caused a war between them and all the Arab countries?
Quote:
You anti war people have to prove your alternate path of history...
You - just used an alternate history as an argument. Come on, at least try.
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