Posted on 02/14/2016 12:44:24 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Long story short, I’m still awaiting the “intelligent” analysis of why Trump sucks.
“Money and Oil. Duh.”
OK, you claim that a POTUS somehow lied to the American people for over a year, was such a brilliant deceiver to have convinced the US military, the Congress, the Senate, the UN and a bunch of other countries for his master plan of invading Iraq and his motivation was “money and oil”.
Say that to yourself a few times and you may begin to realize how profoundly stupid that is. ESPECIALLY SINCE WE NEVER TOOK ANY FREAKING OIL. Go back to DU.
LOL. You’re just a clueless fing tool.
It is funny, considering that Dubya organized the Iraq Survey Group and that he publicly agrees with their findings. I’d like to see how the true believers explain that away.
Trump has been criticizing the Iraq War for the very fact that it cost us a huge amount of money and we didn't take any oil in order to pay for it. No one has contradicted that claim so far.
The most likely rationale for invading Iraq can be found in a letter that the Project for a New American Century sent to Clinton in 1998. A lot of people associated with PNAC went on to staff Dubya's administration.
January 26, 1998
The Honorable William J. Clinton
President of the United States Washington, DC
Dear Mr. President:
We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.
The policy of "containment" of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq's chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam's secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.
Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.
Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.
We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.
We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.
Sincerely,
Elliott Abrams Richard L. Armitage William J. Bennett
Jeffrey Bergner John Bolton Paula Dobriansky
Francis Fukuyama Robert Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad
William Kristol Richard Perle Peter W. Rodman
Donald Rumsfeld William Schneider, Jr. Vin Weber
Paul Wolfowitz R. James Woolsey Robert B. Zoellick
Archived from: http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
I’m on an iphone in an airport and am not able to respond to that adequately. Just went through the TSA checkpoint and was reminded of how much GWB grew our govt. money and oil. real estate even.
That sounds like a well reasoned argument for removing Saddam from power. It sounds absolutely nothing like a reason to lie about anything. Want to take another shot at that?
Yeah, it would be real great if you ignored the risk of a western power conquering and and occupying an Islamic country. Which is exactly what the democracy for all zealots advising Bush did. Religion was of little interest to them so they discounted the trouble that Islam could create for an occupying power.
GHW Bush in contrast to his son was a foreign policy realist and didn’t try to occupy Iraq. Iraq couldn’t even defeat Iran in a 10 year war. Defenseless Kuwait was their sole conquest, and after the beating the US administered to them for that Iraq wasn’t a threat to their neighbors.
Samuel Huntington had been warning about the clash of civilizations since 1992 but Dubya’s eggheads wanted to believe the goofy End of History ideas of Francis Fukuyama instead. Well at least we got to see who got that debate right. Some people correctly predicted what would happen. Some had to learn the hard way. And others have managed to learn nothing.
Well Dubya definitely grew the government. And the real estate bubble grew large under his watch. But he didn’t get any oil or money out of Iraq.
Stop It, Liberals: Bush Didn't Lie About Iraq Having WMDs1.) Read the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's W.M.D programs. "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade," the report reads. The report goes on to say it has "high confidence" that "Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles" and "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grad fissile material."
2.) Read Bob Woodard's account of then-CIA director's George Tenet's briefing of the George W. Bush on the eve of the Iraq war. According to the Washington Post journalist, Tenet told Bush that it was a "slam dunk case" that Iraq had W.M.D.s. Tenet later said he was taken out of context, but that doesn't seem to be the case and, in any event, Tenet doesn't deny he was fundamentally confident that Iraq possessed W.M.D.s.
3.) General Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq in 2003, writes in his book that he was not only told by Egyptian and Jordanian leaders that Iraq possessed W.M.D.s, he was also told that Saddam would use them against invading American troops. 4.) Former CIA agent Kenneth Pollock has noted that the world's most vaunted intelligence agencies, including some of those who opposed the war in Iraq, all believed Saddam Hussein possessed W.M.D.s. These include the intelligence agencies of Germany, Israel, Russia, Britain, China and France.
5.) As President Obama contemplated whether to authorize the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, he was told by CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell that the evidence indicating that Iraq had W.M.D.s before the Iraq war was "much stronger" than the evidence that bin Laden was living in the Abbottabad compound. "And I’m telling you, the case for W.M.D. wasn’t just stronger—it was much stronger," he told the president.
The fakery around the Iraq war was absorbed most thoroughly by New Yorkers. Trump may be assuring himself of all of NY’s electoral votes.
I love how so many people here fantasize about Trump winning states like New York. I doubt that he’ll carry must have states like Ohio, Florida or Iowa.
Why rule out the “must-have” state like Florida? There must be enough angry seniors who will not consider Rubio.
All very interesting and I agree with some of it. However I still don’t find anywhere in the post a valid motivation for GW to lie in order to start a war. Lots more than “oil and money, duh” but no justification of your opinion at all. He did not benefit from it politically, economically or personally.
“LOL. You’re just a clueless fing tool.”
That’s a particularly bad way to justify your position. Sounds just like DU.
” However I still don’t find anywhere in the post a valid motivation for GW to lie in order to start a war.”
I don’t accuse Dubya of lying. If there was lying going on it was his advisers cherry picking the intel before passing it on to Bush, emphasizing only the case for WMDs and none of the evidence against it. What Bush was guilty of was poor judgment. He surrounded himself with a bunch of democracy project utopians who believed that the Middle East could be remade into western liberal democracies, ala Francis Fukuyama, and Iraq was to be their test case. Nation building on steroids. Some of Bush’s civilian appointees to the Pentagon likely were the problem.
And at the same time we had inspectors on the ground in Iraq who insisted that Saddam’s WMD programs had not been rebuilt after the first Gulf War. And that turned out to be accurate, while the case for going to war was unverified rumor.
What WMD programs? I thought Bush lied about their existence?
WMD: PRE- AND POST-INVASION INTELLIGENCEIn fact, however, George Tenet, George W. Bush's CIA director, assured the President that the case for Saddam possessing WMD was "a slam dunk." In this assessment, Tenet had the backing of all fifteen agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States.
The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel, and France all agreed with this judgment. Even Hans Blix-who headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he dispose of the WMD he was known to have had in the past-lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:
"Unverified rumors?" Say something else stupid.
Well you could try reading the report of Bush’s Iraq Survey Group and then you’d know what was found.
Before Gulf War I Saddam had scientists working on a nuclear program. There were rumors that he was working on a biological weapons program. It was widely known that he had a chemical weapons program because he had used them on Kurds and Iranians.
So that’s what the Iraq Survey Group looked for. The weapons themselves and the factories and laboratories that manufactured them.
What they found was that the nuclear program had halted at the First Gulf War. There were no weapons or labs. They didn’t find any biological weapons or a lab to make them either. They did find chemical artillery shells, but they were degraded shells produced before Gulf War I. There was no production line still making them. So there’s your WMDs if you want them. Old chemical artillery rounds.
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