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If that is the true reason for the Iraq invasion, we deserved 9/11, because Americans are too disgustingly stupid to be allowed to inhabit the planet, and the sooner we're annihilated the better.
Are you pissed off that some of us knew from the beginning that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were not the same person, while you probably had to google it?
NO I am annoyed because everybody and their brother supposedly knew facts that The CIA didn't, former President Bill Clinton didn't, MI6 didn't as well as a host of other nations.
Your first point. Blame the media. Blame the muslims who targeted civilians. Blame the muslims celebrating in our own streets. Blame DC for whipping the masses into a frenzy.
So while you're predicting future events. How about those power ball numbers. You wouldn't be the man behind the curtain would you?
Did I think Saddam had WMD's? I thought there might be a good chance that he did, but didn't care. He seemed content to use them on his own people and his neighbors. We are not a neighbor. Not our problem.
Now please show me where I ever claimed that Saddam and Bin Laden were the same person. Please provide a link where I even hinted at such a possibility. Or did that come from your crystal ball as well?
GWB didn't have the power. He alone is not to blame. Blame rest squarely on the shoulders of every elected rep including GWB who were in favor of the war. Hillary doesn't get a free pass, had she voted no she would get a pass. An Authors opinion doesn't mean it is a fact.
Well... that's being generous. At the time, it was seen as an invasion vote by most people as well as most of the media. There were regular reports of aircraft carriers and soldiers being pre-positioned in the gulf, and so on.
That's probably why - for all its support - 156 members of congress still voted against it...
Correct. Americans had war fever and weren't going to be sated with simple diplomacy.
It was only a few years after 9/11, the memories were still fresh, and Americans wanted BLOOD. Frankly they would've believed that Canada did it if Bush had told them so. No one was listening to reason.
And if you showed any skepticism at the time, people (especial conservatives) dismissed you as an unpatriotic loon.
I had several arguments that got very close to fistfights.
I'm not sure if we had people working in the intel community who were corrupting the intel by including conjecture as facts on their own as away to impress the executive branch, or if the Clinton admin colluded with the intel community to do this. So when Bush retained those same people, the intel continued to be corrupted and exaggerated.
If the senate was being fed corrupted intel, and instead of proving proper oversight they just accepted it as fact, then they may have acted both out of ignorance and negligence. I say may have, because I'm not even sure how the chairman of the senate intel committee can determine if he/she is being fed bad intel. You'd think there would be methods to ferret this out, other then having trusted confidants in the community who can offer different levels of verification of data, I don't know what else they could do.
It's hard to know precisely. It was reported that Saddam's own generals thought he had them. We know that he did have them at one point because he used them. We also know that he kicked the inspectors out many times. We did find facilites. Given those points, it's very easy to see where the intel would conclude that he had them. This is strictly hearsay that I was given by someone involved in intel that their understanding is that Saddam wanted the world, including his own generals, to believe he had them and would use them and that he also believed that France and others he was dealing with would stop the US from invading.
I still think that there was a reasonably good case for the Iraq war. Almost everyone at the time, including Saddam's own senior officers, believed that he still had WMD. Even Hans Blix has said that he had his suspicions:
The problem with the Iraq invasion was not the decision to go, but the poor execution, especially when it came to the occupation. Honestly, you can't really hold Hillary accountable for that.
Where Hillary Clinton should be held accountable is the bungled handling of the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, when she was Secretary of State. Remember that things were looking up in Iraq just prior to the 2008 election. After 2009 things gradually got worse, and it is now perhaps a lost cause.
It was ALWAYS a lost cause, and there was never a good case for war.
They made it all up outta thin air. A complete farce.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Martha Anne
I really don't find it to be "temporary stupidity". This decision was of catastrophic consequences. I would NEVER ever ever have supported the invasion nor would many millions of Americans. We knew Bush was making up a sham reason to invade. To miss this is really bad. For HER to miss it is inexcusable.
The vote in Congress was never a mandate to invade Iraq, it was a vote to fund any possible action. The POTUS and no one else made the final go/no go decision.
NO I am annoyed because everybody and their brother supposedly knew facts that The CIA didn't, former President Bill Clinton didn't, MI6 didn't as well as a host of other nations.
Your first point. Blame the media. Blame the muslims who targeted civilians. Blame the muslims celebrating in our own streets. Blame DC for whipping the masses into a frenzy.
So while you're predicting future events. How about those power ball numbers. You wouldn't be the man behind the curtain would you?
Did I think Saddam had WMD's? I thought there might be a good chance that he did, but didn't care. He seemed content to use them on his own people and his neighbors. We are not a neighbor. Not our problem.
All right, that is precisely my view as well--the entire WMD angle was a pretext. I thought so at the time, and I said so at the time. It didn't take a crystal ball to figure it out, just a bit of sales resistance in the patriotism department, and a rudimentary knowledge of the Middle East.
Quote:
Now please show me where I ever claimed that Saddam and Bin Laden were the same person. Please provide a link where I even hinted at such a possibility. Or did that come from your crystal ball as well?
You said yourself that the support for war relied, among other things, on the successful conflation of Iraq and 9/11. People capable of being hoodwinked thus don't even deserve to live on a planet with intelligent beings, yet you appear to find that a persuasive reason to excuse the worthless, despicable country.
It's hard to know precisely. It was reported that Saddam's own generals thought he had them. We know that he did have them at one point because he used them. We also know that he kicked the inspectors out many times. We did find facilites. Given those points, it's very easy to see where the intel would conclude that he had them. This is strictly hearsay that I was given by someone involved in intel that their understanding is that Saddam wanted the world, including his own generals, to believe he had them and would use them and that he also believed that France and others he was dealing with would stop the US from invading.
Again, we made it all up. Here's one example....
One of the main sources for information (some say THE main source) was this Curveball guy.
Turns out that Curveball was not only a German intelligence asset, but the Germans didn't even allow us to interview him directly. We had to get info from him through a functionary.
And here's the kicker: the Germans told us NOT to trust him because they found him to be unreliable. The CIA and the Bush Administration ignored their warning and used the Intel as the gospel anyway. That's because Curveball's take on the matter didn't need to be massaged...it fit perfectly with the aims of the administration.
We gave priority to Israel's reports on Iraqi WMD, although more than a few of our Intel officers had extremely high levels of skepticism and surmised that Israel inflated the threat That was communicated to Tenet on a bunch of occasions, but ignored by idiots like Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and right on up to Cheney himself.
I've read a few books that point out that even Rice and certainly Powell were also highly skeptical, but went along after some prodding.
I'm sorry, but there were plenty of voices back then that made the right call. It's just not true that everybody believed Iraq had WMD.
What perplexes me the most is that Americans trusted the CIA. Our intelligence service is one of the worst in the world. The CIA is a joke. I thought everyone knew that. Folks only need to read a few books to figure it out. Throughout its history, they've rarely gotten ANYTHING correct.
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