Hayabusa Rider
Admin Emeritus & Elite Member
- Jan 26, 2000
- 50,879
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Well you know that before his speech, the aluminum tube threat was discredited and made know to the WH. When the speech was gone over, why was that left in? Perhaps you are implying he isn't a criminal, but criminally incompetent?
Faint praise.
nobodyknows
Diamond Member
- Sep 28, 2008
- 5,474
- 0
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<yawn>
Selling a war to the people by using fear of WMD's, yellow cake, and long range missles and then not producing anything but massive debt is a bad idea..... and it didn't take most of us 5 years to figure it out.
<yawn>
No, I'm sure Clinton sincerely believed Saddam was a problem. The difference was that he didn't believe that Saddam was an *imminent* threat and could sell a war to topple him to the American people.
I'm sure Clinton was painfully aware of how unpopular peacekeeping/humanitarian missions were....witness Yugoslavia/Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti.
Again, Saddam has been a vicious dictator for years/decades. We've long tried to contain Saddam, admittedly with limited results. But NOTHING has been cited as a reason for us to go to pre-emptive/preventive war with Iraq except for WMDs.
If humanitarian grounds were a basis for toppling Saddam we could've gone to any other number of troubled countries...Congo, Burma, Pakistan....but the American public would not, and should not, support war solely on humanitarian grounds. There MUST be some sort of national security or vital american interest at stake.
To be fair, I think Bush genuinely believed that Saddam was at the very least not being forthcoming about his WMD program, and that the information at best was mixed. I do believe, however, that some individuals such as Wolfowitz and Cheney were ready to seize on whatever information appeared to be damning and used it to bolster their case even if the source was dubious (ie Curveball). I also believe that the administration's fear of being accused of being caught 'asleep at the wheel' and not doing all that it could to prevent another terrorist attack drove it to focus only on the short term and not care about the big picture or the long-term consequences of their actions (ie. lock up any non-friendly individuals without bothering to determine if they were innocents just in the wrong location).
Surely you can understand the difference between the substance, tone, and suggested remedy provided by Clinton when compared to Bush. Do we really need to go down this road again?
blackangst1
Lifer
- Feb 23, 2005
- 22,902
- 2,359
- 126
The sitting senate sure did. Go back and read what they were saying prior to Bush taking office. As I've said before...had Clinton pulled the trigger, he would have gotten the same widespread support Bush did.
Here's the difference between Clinton & Bush
Clinton used war to gain popularity and avoid impeachment.
Bush used war because he felt it was the right thing for the country.
Clinton also had the dot-com bubble to keep the masses happy.
Clinton used war to gain popularity and avoid impeachment.
Bush used war because he felt it was the right thing for the country.
Clinton also had the dot-com bubble to keep the masses happy.
Please. Clinton's airstrikes in Iraq *obviously* didn't approach the definition of "War" in the same way as full scale invasion and occupation. Not even close.
Well, unless you're the kind of idiot who lumps a pat on the ass and a gang rape together under the classification of "sexual assault".
Well, unless you're the kind of idiot who lumps a pat on the ass and a gang rape together under the classification of "sexual assault".
It doesn't matter what the US reasons for the invasion was if it was also against international law.
Maybe so, but it's important to remember that our participation in Kosovo was *not* unilateral, but undertaken as a part of the Nato alliance... and that the balkans have been stuck on stupid for most of their history, the only recent respite being during Tito's rule...
ericlp
Diamond Member
- Dec 24, 2000
- 6,137
- 225
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Obviously you got it all wrong...
Difference between Clinton in bush?
No one died when Clinton Lied...
Clinton didn't tank the nation on the way out...
Bush Used the War because he thought it would be EASY and it would look good on his record for doing something about 911. That's all... Case closed. All the BS he was telling you "the real feel good stories?" Was a line a bullshit. Yep. You and PJ are just a bunch of mushrooms in a dark room getting fed BS!
WMDs, U.N. Resolutions, false intelligence data, Bush likes war, we want their oil, Hussein was a monster, etc etc, enter reason here..
The bottom line, in my opinion, is no country, group, or person was seen as an imminent threat to the U.S. until the moment those planes struck the WTC. Once that happened, reality set in that we could be attacked on a large scale by a non-domestic terrorist and every little game Saddam played with the inspection process was in the spotlight. Then the false intel data comes around and everyone gets their panties in a bunch, including respectable/reputable individuals like Colin Powell, and we pass a resolution to go into Iraq. Polls at the time showed a majority of the U.S. in support of it as well.
Would Gore have done the same? Who knows? Gore was highly critical of Bush Sr. in the 90s for not taking action against Iraq/Saddam for his past involvement with WMDs, his treatment of the Iraqi and Kurdish people, and his support of terrorists. Maybe he would have, maybe not. Either way, Bush says he regrets it and I bet most, if not all of the 374 that voted for it regret it as well.
The bottom line, in my opinion, is no country, group, or person was seen as an imminent threat to the U.S. until the moment those planes struck the WTC. Once that happened, reality set in that we could be attacked on a large scale by a non-domestic terrorist and every little game Saddam played with the inspection process was in the spotlight. Then the false intel data comes around and everyone gets their panties in a bunch, including respectable/reputable individuals like Colin Powell, and we pass a resolution to go into Iraq. Polls at the time showed a majority of the U.S. in support of it as well.
Would Gore have done the same? Who knows? Gore was highly critical of Bush Sr. in the 90s for not taking action against Iraq/Saddam for his past involvement with WMDs, his treatment of the Iraqi and Kurdish people, and his support of terrorists. Maybe he would have, maybe not. Either way, Bush says he regrets it and I bet most, if not all of the 374 that voted for it regret it as well.
Wrong. The *UN* needed o approve additional hostilities on those grounds. They did not. You conveniently leave out the 'second resolution' history, the US was unable to obtain.
In your usual inaccurate telling of the facts, you don't mention that the UN had a process for this issue - it had appointed Hans Blix to lead the inspectors and report to it, and it had decided to use his reports in monitoring whether there was non-compliance justifying further military force. Hans Blix always reported that the compliance was sufficient for him to recommend against force, and the UN did not vote for such force to be used, including the 'second resolution' the US had wanted. It did not go past UN 1441.
The fact is that Bush did what he did for his own reasons as a policy by the US *not* under the cover of the UN resolution. You may not like the facts, but oh well.
No, UNSC Resolution 1441 was made afterwards and did not allow any authorization of force through in the event of a material breach of 1441 - there would need to be further resolutions from the Security Council. Even the US and UK UN ambassadors at the time stated so, but then they turned around and claimed that there was no further action from the UNSC needed.
Furthermore, if you wish to go back to 1991, the UN resolution at the time did not authorize the actions that the US undertook by deposing Saddam Hussein.
And Iraq was not an 'imminent' threat to the US at any time. There were absurd attempts made to 'fit the facts' to the need for it to be one, such as the speculation about how it 'could' fly WMD around on cropdusters, but no credible threat. To the extent people believed there was one, they were wrong.
It was a political failur. I'll explain with an analogy in a moment.
The real issue was that everyone wants more power, some more aggressively than others, and the neocons more aggressively than most. Newly in power after a frustating period of irrelevance, they looked around not for 'what's right', but for 'how can the US be further enhanced as the world's only superpower?' Their ideology equates the US with "good" and justifies any military force used for helping the US as therefore justified.
They decided that a power like the US needs to flex its muscles to enhance its power; they decided that a war somewhere was helpful. But where? They looked at China, Syria, Iraq...
Iraq was the nice choice for a variety of reasons, but it's not quite as easy as just announcing 'we're going to war for our desire to increase our world power'.
They wrote up their views in a surprsingly candid document with their doctring that the US policy should be to prevent anyone else from ever becoming a military rival. In the document they discussed the middle east as a region it would enhance US power to politically dominate (not quite the founding fathers' defense of liberty for the middle easterners). It discussed that with the limitations of public opinion on war, it might take decades to gradually do that - unless 'another pearl harbor event' happened. Hello 9/11.
And so they rode the wave of 9/11 to warin Iraq. The problem was how the democratic processes were abused to fit the goal of war. Here's the promised analogy:
For good reasons, in custody situations, courts have protections for a parent to get custody when the other parent commits child abuse. The 'unintended consequence' of this is that parents who want custody for other reasons - they just want the kids, they want to beat their spouse in court, whatever - suddenly have this tool they can abuse, 'allegations of child abuse'. Nor surprisingly, that causes the rate of false accusations of abuse to skyrocket, because those are the rules of the game to manipulate.
Similarly, protections were put into place when the world, including the US, signed the UN charter promising not to start wars, with a few small exceptions - including 'imminent threat' from someone. Unable to get the UN to approve the use of force against Saddam, instead working on WMD inspections, the only justification the US could find for war without blatantly admitting it was violating its promise not to start wars was the 'imminent threat' exception. And so, suddenly, the massive resources of the US, from its intelligence and military agencies to the communications of senior officials, were put to the task of establishing that 'imminent threat' existed.
No rule is any better than its enforcement, its interpretation, and when you have a political will by the administration for war butting heads with the rules, you see this sort of thing.
Similarly, a normal such need is for war to be justified as defensive - 'the other guy started it', and you see in history nations go to some length to try to make that case.
As I've summarized before, you can go through a list of US wars and pretty much always find some claim of how 'they started it', however much that had to be arranged. Polk sent a few US military to sit around inside Mexican territory until the Mexican forces found them and attacked a patrol of four men. Lyndon Johnson cited the attack by North Vietnam on a US Destroyer (which happened to be escorting US-trained South Vietnamese terrorists into NVN), in international waters (it was actually in NVM waters IIUC). And so on.
I think your speculation about Gore is misguided and wrong. The Iraq war happened because an ideologically especially bent on war with Iraq for its agenda of blindly increasing US power even further got power. Gore was not a member of any such group with that sort of agenda, and no plausible case can be made that he would have targetted Iraq, only the most baseless specualtion, comparable to "well, Gore COULD buy a gun and COULD shoot someone", certainly far below the evidence needed to support your 50-50 type estimate of 'he might have, he might not'. As for your saying Bush regrets it, I haven't seen that anywhere, not that it would matter much. I've only say him say he regrets the intelligence failure, but not the war policy even if we'd known there were no WMD.
The real issue we need to deal with is how to prevent the next Bush from being able to ram through the next war - more than the simple period of time we need to wait for the recent experience to wear off. After Vietnam, new wars were pretty unthinkable, but over time and Reagan, the public support gradually warmed up, the Vietnam taboo gradually wore off. We need systemic strengthening of how to prevent bad wars. The thing is, that's not terribly easy to do. We might have thought we'd done it with the UN charter, but as the Iraq war and the claims of cropdusters as an imminent threat showed, it wasn't as effective as you might want.
ericlp
Diamond Member
- Dec 24, 2000
- 6,137
- 225
- 106
I wonder if half the righties here on this board regret it? They sure don't seem like they do.
Sad...sad...sad!
Yeah, I forgot to mention Iraq's resources that obviously was another big push to go. Tho, even Allen Greenspan admits that is why we went it didn't make much waves because the cat was already out of the bag by they time he said it and everyone already knew.
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