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Sure he could have, the left is real good at looking the other way. How else could Iran get this far? Bush didn't take out the other leaders either. Yet Obama opened the door when he pulled us out of Iraq announced we were retreating!
Iraq was not ours to stay forever. Nor do I want it.
We've all seen the bumper stickers: "Bush lied, thousands died." And the cartoons of Bush with a Pinocchio nose w/ "WMD" tattooed along its length. This meme will be regarded by historians as one of the biggest idiocies of history. There is so much evidence against it that only the self-deluded and the willfully ignorant can continue to believe.
Most experts, and even Saddam's own senior officers, believed in early 2003 that Saddam still had WMD. This was by Saddam's design, and mainly intended as a stratagem to keep the Iranians in check. There is this curious recollection from a senior officer about the early days of the American invasion:
Once and for all, the only 'lies about WMD' came from Saddam himself. There was no lie about WMD from Bush, Cheney, Rice, the Bilderbergers, or anyone else. None.
Once and for all--the "Bush Lies" didn't come from his ignorance of the WMDs--he glommed onto that as a reason to invade along with lies about 9/11. Bush and Cheney lied about that as their motivation for the war. The Iraq war was planned from Day One of the Bush admin. It was about oil, power and revenge. They jumped on 9/11 and then threw in WMDs. Lies, lies and more lies. Lots of them.
11/15/1999, Dick Cheney, CEO of Halliburton (later, Vice President) “Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow.” (at the London Institute of Petroleum)
03/27/2003, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary
“There’s a lot of money to pay for this … the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years…We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”
10/29/2001, Michael Leeden, American Enterprise Institute “Just wage a total war against these tyrants; I think we will do very well and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”
11/15/2002, Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
“Five days or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last longer.”
02/08/2003, George W. Bush, President
“We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network headed by a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner. This network runs a poison and explosive training camp in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad.”
05/09/2003, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary (phone interview with Vanity Fair)
“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but — hold on one second… [Interrupted by DOD attorney].”
09/14/2003, Dick Cheney, Vice President
“If we’re successful in Iraq … we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.“
09/17/2003, George W. Bush, President
Q: Mr. President, Dr. Rice and Secretary Rumsfeld both said yesterday that they have seen no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with September 11th. THE PRESIDENT: “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th.”
9/9/2008, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve through 2005. (from The Age of Turbulence, p.463)
“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Looks like the righties are sadly turning to other righty academians to pretend Bush was a paragon of honesty about going to war. They won't even take blame for ISIS. Anyone who's not a simpleton realizes going and starting a needless conflict in the most volatile region in the world is going to really mess things up for some time. WMD or not, Iraq was no threat to us.
Basically, you are arguing "He was wrong, thats not the same as lying", and you would be right, but he was wrong because he was lied to.
Correct, but whether or not this man believed the liars whispering in his ear is arguable enough. I say that he had to have known they were lying and even though he was an exceptionally dumb President, he was not that dumb.
I don't believe for a second that Bush actually believed Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, which would prove culpability if this was established. His one saving grace is his ignorance.
Ultimately, that's what the neoconservatives who lied us into that debacle would like for this country to do, along with the mainstream media, which acted as willing cheerleaders for the invasion.
A far better approach is to examine in greater detail the machinations that led to war, have a national discussion on the matter, and insure that this does not repeat itself when another cabal of chickenhawks occupies the White House.
No, they are the same thing when you are the president, either Bush acted based on a lie told to him or he lied to get others to side with him for an invasion. Either way, we invaded Iraq based on a lie. That is something you cannot change about history, Bush lied or was dumb enough to believe the lie to push on the American people. You pick which one it is, but both are bad.
Funny how you don't hold Obama to the same standard. He outright lies all the time and is given a pass on it. You don't even care about how many troops he got killed in Afghanistan - and still hasn't accomplished anything there but 'Bush lied' is still your theme.
And if the turmoil in Iraq is enough to keep a US military presence in the Gulf, then he didn't screw up, right?
Invading Iraq was always part of the Plan.
Didn't matter who you elected.
Just like I keep saying, when it comes time to invade Iran, you will.
You can dig up Mother Teresa's bones and stick them in the oval office and when it comes time to invade Iran, she will give the order.
Heck, you can even elect Ayatollah's Khomeini's dead bones as president and he'd give the order when the time came.
You're only other choice is to turn on Pakistan and back Baluchistan's independence.
Saddam used US chemical weapons. And French. And Czech. And probably North Korean.
US military advisors were on the ground in Iraq, when they were used.
A lot of Americans got ate up by our own chemical warheads in Iraq.
I only inhaled 75 burning Iraqi oil wells and 5 tons of nerve agent. Others fared far worse. Lots of Gulf Vets have nodules on their lungs from it. Remains to be seen if it will be cancerous or not.
But, hey, we saved the US Economy, and that's worth dying for.
Troops today got it better: I lost both my legs to an IED for the US Economy and all I got was this lousy lapel pin.
Amused....
Mircea
I have to agree with most of what you wrote. I was lucky enough to not have to go to Desert Storm, my battalion had just arrived at Ft. Hood for a 6 month training mission about the time the war kicked off, and giant Ft. Hood became a ghost town (we had the place to ourselves)
Forgotten amongst the parades and the new found patriotism that Bush the Second tried to recreate in Iraq is a lot of veterans of that conflict were exposed to chemical agents, be they Scud missiles with who knows what in them or the burning oil wells leaving an apocalyptic scene that troops had to live, and breathe, in.
Transcript: President Clinton explains Iraq strike
12/16/1998
CLINTON: Good evening.
Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors.
Their purpose is to protect the national interest of the United States, and indeed the interests of people throughout the Middle East and around the world.
Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons.
I want to explain why I have decided, with the unanimous recommendation of my national security team, to use force in Iraq; why we have acted now; and what we aim to accomplish.
Six weeks ago, Saddam Hussein announced that he would no longer cooperate with the United Nations weapons inspectors called UNSCOM. They are highly professional experts from dozens of countries. Their job is to oversee the elimination of Iraq's capability to retain, create and use weapons of mass destruction, and to verify that Iraq does not attempt to rebuild that capability.
The inspectors undertook this mission first 7.5 years ago at the end of the Gulf War when Iraq agreed to declare and destroy its arsenal as a condition of the ceasefire.
The international community had good reason to set this requirement. Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: He has used them. Not once, but repeatedly. Unleashing chemical weapons against Iranian troops during a decade-long war. Not only against soldiers, but against civilians, firing Scud missiles at the citizens of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Iran. And not only against a foreign enemy, but even against his own people, gassing Kurdish civilians in Northern Iraq.
The international community had little doubt then, and I have no doubt today, that left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.
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