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Mission Accomplished - but now we are told it's some Mexican somewhere......
"Afghan Opium Production 40 Times Higher Since US-NATO Invasion
About 90 percent of the world’s illegal opium is estimated to come from Afghanistan."
Amazing. Of course, dumbing down the populace with opiates galore is a good thing in many ways...for those who don't like "activists". I'm fairly certain that Opiate Addicts aren't as likely to attend protests or get politically involved.
OP, as I'm sure some have pointed out, believing that the decision to invade Iraq was the right one is not the same as believing that Iraq had WMDs. We can acknowledge that Iraq no longer had WMDs when we invaded, but people can still support the decision to invade for other reasons. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive.
No they aren’t mutually exclusive at all....especially because ANY and ALL reasons for invading Iraq were equally stupid.
You are one of perhaps 10% - maybe less. That still is a lot of people, but not enough to be heard. AND, I can promise you this. If you were a conservative in any sort of power position in DC you would have either been fired or had to change your views....at least on the outside.
There are always lots of exceptions to the rule. Glad to hear you are one. But, unfortunately, unless a majority of conservatives were against it...including their elected officials, it was going to happen.
There are no fewer dead or injured people because some conservatives didn't believe. There are no Trillions in savings due to the same. But at least you can sleep at night.
You overestimate how many conservatives were pro war and underestimate how many liberals were in favor of it. For example the entire liberal media was cheerleading it.
You seem to think conservatives were all pro-George W Bush and approved of everything he did. No, most true conservatives were not big fans of Bush. I sure wasn't. He was far too fiscally liberal for me and I 100% opposed his neocon foreign policy. I wasn't the only one.
Hindsight is 20/20, and the International, and U.S. Intelligence Community believed Iraq had WMD's, so did the Democrats here.
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.
I love that "Most all" stuff.....when TODAY.....GWB Popularity.....
"When it comes to Republicans, his marks are virtually the same as they were immediately after he left office. His favorability climbed from 76% among Republicans a month after he left office to 88% in a 2015 poll from CNN/ORC -- but it's fallen back down to 76% in the Trump era."
So, AFTER the Great Recession, the Trillions spent and not paid for, nothing done about health care AND the wars which were still ongoing, 76% of REPUBLICANS/CONSEVATIVES still loved the guy...and still do today.......
Sorry to bring facts into the picture. However, I will give you one slight piece of "evidence" that "some" or "a small minority" of Republicans/Conservatives learned something from those disasters.
Even though GWB approval of 76% remains the same, those of the remainder who disapprove did rise...in other words, some went to neutral to disapprove among that other 24%.
In order to maintain some credibility, you'd have to say "some conservative, although a small minority, may have learned a lesson".
You'd also have to say that the VAST MAJORITY of Republicans approve of GWB then...and now.
You are looking at this with hindsight. You need to remember that at the time, everyone believed everything that our intel people told them, about Saddam's WMDs. It was not as if just GWB and "Conservatives" believed them, everyone did. We were supposed to have learned a lesson from that. The lesson was, that sometimes our intel community can be trying to push their own agenda, or simply exaggerating remote possibilities as if they were more probable.
So no, when GWB left office, people were not faulting him for something all of Congress was fooled by as well.
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.
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.
You are looking at this with hindsight. You need to remember that at the time, everyone believed everything that our intel people told them, about Saddam's WMDs.
Everyone watching Fox, perhaps.
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.
Last edited by Dane_in_LA; 06-17-2019 at 05:03 PM..
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?......................../
I am not a Republican.....but if you don't understand the reason for invading Iraq, you don't understand geo-politics, the Ellites, or world history.
PS....WMD were a "public" issue" and the intelligence got it wrong. BUT....and I really don't understand WHY the Hussain never got this.
First: Iraq has/had the second largest oil reserves in the world. Western civilization is totally dependent on oil. So the US, Europe, Japan, among others had an intense interest in keeping the oil reserves in friendly hands. TODAY, with fracking this would not have been an issue for the US.
Second: Eventually, the Muslin countries have to join the modern world and accept human diversity and other religions. Along with Turkey, Iraq was the ONLY Middle East country that was a secular, not a "Islamic " country. Defintiely, that trend needed to be encouraged. Bush2 probably felt we could help that process along better than Hussain....he blew it.
Third: Take a look at a map. Notice the position of Iraq in the Middle East. A large country with defensible borders. Perfect country for western military bases...those days that meant American. Those bases were necessary to defend the oil supply for western nations.
It is a different world than it was when the Iraq war started.
It was a mistake, but you can understand that Bush2 had no clue on the impact of fracking on oil supplies, was concerned about making Islam a tolerant religion, and the need for American bases in the Middle East.
The real question is why Saddam Husssain did not understand the above!!!
I had a college professor that made a point that you HAVE to judge decisions in the context of their times. Granted, it was a Forest Policy class, but the difference between But there is really no difference between changes in Forest policy over the years and international relations.
Hindsight is always20/20 but it never helps you understand how to avoid the future problems.
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