I'm proud my WMD lies led to war in Iraq

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Hayabusa Rider

Admin Emeritus & Elite Member
Jan 26, 2000
50,879
4,268
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Yeah, I'm sure he is so proud that he went straight to post invasion Iraq to help with the reconstuction of "his" country... didn't he...or something...


He probably is proud of his bank account. After all look at what Wolfowitz did with Chalabi. Paid a convicted criminal to support the administrations POV. That foreign intel that the US cited as "evidence"? A lot of that was given to them by guess who? The US. This was a scripted war. Analysts who came up with a different opinion were no longer considered. When an Army War College report was made critical of how Iraq was being handled, a representative for the administration said that if it doesn't line up with the administrations vision it wouldn't be on anyone's short list.

It's incredible that it was swallowed at all, but the press was too stupid to know any better and so was the public. Considering a lot of dumb shits had a baseless opinion about Saddam being responsible for 9/11, we got what we asked for, but unfortunately you don't make war on a person, you do so on a people. Seriously, I can't imaging a dumber bunch of rocks than those who thought going into Iraq was a good idea when we had real terrorists in Afghanistan. We gutted that effort to chase fanciful dragons. What a bunch of asses.

Know what's worse? It will happen again.
 

Craig234

Lifer
May 1, 2006
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Let's revisit history a little as I recall before it's distorted.

Curveball was the *dominant* source for the US administration WMD case - and yet the CIA didn't even know him but by a codename, he was in Germany trying to get to stay, competing with a mass of other Iraqi refugees, where only one in 25 got to stay, and claims like these were how he could get to stay, so he was hugely incented to lie in addition to any 'get Saddam' motive. German intelligence considered him, and told us they did, an unreliable alcoholic.

This is where the 'backdoor' Cheney created to get raw info and 'stovepipe' it for use without any filtering by the CIA was a big cause of the mistake. It wasn't innocent.

The CIA is designed to give the President the best intelligence it can - but sometimes finds itself at odds with policy where the right info inhibits the policy. Presidents have various ways to pressure the CIA to not do their job - one of which is the fact they appoint the Director, who has been known to replace many senior people who won't say what the President wants; Nixon threatened the CIA to expose something related to the JFK assassination (not saying it was a conspiracy, it's just fact that's what he did).

Bush had the Cheney backdoor operation, the unprecedented visits by Cheney repeatedly to pressure analysts, etc.

The administration actively shut down information that undermined the WMD case. Paul Wolfowitz let the cat out of the bag in an article in which he admitted that the policy decision was war in Iraq and that WMD was simply selected as the reason to use for PR reasons as a 'bureacratic convenience' (and likely to try to argue this illegal war was 'pre-emptive' against imminent attack by Iraq under the UN charter we signed). Their trashing Joe Wilson and his wife is just one example of their shutting opposition down. That was less an act aimed at Wilson than a warning shot at anyone else who would publicize information they didn't like (Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed when the administration ignored his information).

The CIA was practically treated as an enemy by White House war advocates.

Bush ordered the UN inspectors out of Iraq and started the war rather than letting them finish - as that ran the risk of their finding the WMD pretense was false.

Indeed, the administration ran an operation aimed at discrediting the UN inspectors, to try to undermine their finding the WMD's were not there. That's not an innocent mistake.

I've posted some sympathy for the goal of removing Saddam - but the Bush administration's approach was illegal and a disaster. And as Red posted above, it's always a nice reminder to look at what Carter would have done on Saddam in a second term.

Probably not encouraged him in a war with Iran and kept him in power. Or given our nation the shame of telling the Iraqi opposition we'd back them in an uprising and then deciding to keep Saddam and allowing him to slaughter them when they did.
 
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nyker96

Diamond Member
Apr 19, 2005
5,630
2
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Yup, we had lots of bad intel that led to the honest decision to invade Iraq. Hopefully this will inspire some sympathy amongst some of the more vicious Bush haters out there. He was duped.

but it also suggested that Bush and advisers never used other sources of information to confirm something that lead to a war. How can you base your entire intel on one informant comes to matter of war? Also I read that British secret service also passed to its boss contradictory evidence to this claim, of course all that data was ignored. The entire Bush 8 years has been riddled with one mistake/incompetance to the next, this I think might be the biggest of them all.
 

OutHouse

Lifer
Jun 5, 2000
36,410
616
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Huh, what?

we had gas detector units around the emergency airfield and ours went off.


http://www.gulfwarvets.com/arison/gws.htm


Caving in to Congressional pressure, most recently imposed by the Honorable Chris Shays of Connecticut, late on the evening before Rep. Shays' September 19, 1996 hearing on the exposure of troops to chemical and biological agents, now five years after the war ended, DoD admitted that more than 5,000 troops "may" have been exposed to chemical weapons when a battalion of U.S. soldiers blew up an Iraqi ammunition depot.

One month later, at the Pentagon's October 22, 1996 Background News Briefing, this number was increased to 20,867. "That's not an exact number, of course, but that's the best approximation we have right now."

On June 26, 1997, the Pentagon increased the number to 27,000.

On July 24, 1997, the Pentagon increased the number to 98,900. "An estimated 98,900 troops were in the path of a plume of nerve gas unleashed when U.S. combat engineers blew up the Kamisiyah ammunition depot in southern Iraq in March 1991, shortly after the war. That represents almost one-seventh of all Americans who served in the war.
 

Greenman

Lifer
Oct 15, 1999
22,427
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Doesn't excuse neo doctrine of preemption. You lose all moral authority attacking someone first even a child knows this, the world knows it, people in country know it and put up more resistance to it and you can't fight it like you need to.

The hell it doesn't. When you have a rabid dog running around, you put it down, you don't wait until it attacks you. We're going to see this tested further as Iran gets closer to having working nukes. Israel can't allow that to happen, under any circumstances. They will take preemptive action, because if they don't they will get nuked.
 

CallMeJoe

Diamond Member
Jul 30, 2004
6,938
5
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The hell it doesn't. When you have a rabid dog running around, you put it down, you don't wait until it attacks you. We're going to see this tested further as Iran gets closer to having working nukes. Israel can't allow that to happen, under any circumstances. They will take preemptive action, because if they don't they will get nuked.

What do you do if it's a sick near-toothless dog that just lies in its own yard growling at your enemies?
 

JohnnyBGood

Junior Member
Feb 20, 2011
1
0
0
The hell it doesn't. When you have a rabid dog running around, you put it down, you don't wait until it attacks you. We're going to see this tested further as Iran gets closer to having working nukes. Israel can't allow that to happen, under any circumstances. They will take preemptive action, because if they don't they will get nuked.

"Reasoning" like yours by the people running Israel and the US are EXACTLY the purpose of Iran having nukes. FOR DEFENSIVE PURPOSES!

How did you come to the conclusion that Iran will nuke Israel as soon as it gets nukes???

Israel has around 300 nukes under water, on land and in the air.

Israel would use NUKES against Iran if Iran attacked with CONVENTIONAL weapons.

Israel would turn Iran into a parking lot if Iran used a nuke against Israel.

WHERE THE F**K DID YOU GET THE IDEA THAT IRAN, AN ANCIENT NATION AND LAND, WANTS TO COMMIT ***SUICIDE*** BY ***OFFENSIVELY*** ATTACKING ISRAEL?!?!

YOU ARE A F**KING FOAMING AT THE MOUTH MORON!
 

Harvey

Administrator<br>Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
35,059
73
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Israel has around 300 nukes under water, on land and in the air.

Israel would use NUKES against Iran if Iran attacked with CONVENTIONAL weapons.

Israel would turn Iran into a parking lot if Iran used a nuke against Israel.

Probably, and IF Iran used a nuke against anyone, they'd have it coming. I don't support everything Israel does. In fact, I wish they'd get their collective roshim out of their collective tuchases, dismantle the settlements and get serious about making a realistic, mutually respectful peace treaty with the Palestinians, but the good news is, Israel has a long history of NOT using nukes against anyone.

WHERE THE F**K DID YOU GET THE IDEA THAT IRAN, AN ANCIENT NATION AND LAND, WANTS TO COMMIT ***SUICIDE*** BY ***OFFENSIVELY*** ATTACKING ISRAEL?!?!

YOU ARE A F**KING FOAMING AT THE MOUTH MORON!

From that shit that loud mouth fscking foaming at the mouth moron, Ahmadinejad spews at every opportunity. Where the fsck do you get the idea that he wouldn't order that ancient, ONCE intelligent, ONCE civil, ONCE richly cultured land into a nuclear attack on Israel? :confused:

Whether Iran's military would be stupid enough to follow such an order is another question.

Does Ahmadinejad's position as Iran's leader make him the Bull Shiite? :sneaky:
 
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MooseNSquirrel

Platinum Member
Feb 26, 2009
2,587
318
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"Drumheller claims top Bush administration officials were too willing to believe Alwan's story "because that was the only piece of intelligence they had that really fit what the administration was looking at."