Posted on 07/22/2024 11:50:51 AM PDT by RandFan
He just said something courageous for a GOP elected official during his rally in Ohio.
He straight up said that he was wrong in 2003 about Iraq and that it ended up costing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
I admire him even more now!
If you're worried about JD or this lie he's Establishment then you don't need to be concerned after hearing that.
This is not the party of Bush any more.
It's very clear to me.
Look, I voted for Bush-Cheney twice. But the Iraq war was a neocon con. Saddam was a horrible bastard, but there are a lot of horrible bastard running countries around the world. We can’t police the whole world. Saddam had no involvement in 9/11. To opportunistically use the country’s justified anger about 9/11 as the basis for pursuing neocon dreams of taking out Saddam in the name of “nation building” was insanity. The toll in blood and treasure was mind-boggling. The Bushes can shove it.
We all were snookered. Many were kicked off if they were negative about the Iraq war and called a traitor.
An f’ing adult. No excuse.
Like I said, I don’t go in for revisionist crap.
So your opinions on events haven't changed at all in 20 years?
No, we weren't.
The NY Slimes ran with the story in 2014, detailing the injuries to US servicemen who chanced across Saddam's caches of mustard agent and sarin. The Slimes later published the US intelligence report on the events, released under FOIA. It's even been noted on Wikipedia that "... the total number of munitions discovered since 2003 had climbed to 4,990 ...."
The Daily Beast later reported that Bush administration insiders claimed that it was Carl Rove's idea to cover up having found the weapons.
Apparently they were willing to take the hit politically because they saw that as a better option than instigating the largest Islamo-Fascists scavenger hunt in history because the news, if published, would attract terrorist types from all over the planet who lusted after chemical or biological weapons, hoping to find whatever left-overs that Coalition search teams had missed.
And BTW, the war was never about whether Iraq had X, Y or Z, it was about the strong suspicion that Saddam probably had X, Y or Z. He definitely once had had and used used them in the past -- both chemical and biological weapons -- against his own subjects (the Kurds). Iraq even had admitted they once were manufacturing anthrax and botulism. Armed with the certain knowledge they had the capability to produce more of the same, and the equally certain knowledge that Saddam could not be trusted to play nice with them, the world community took the prudent course of insisting that Saddam allow international inspectors free and easy access to anywhere and anything they deemed necessary in order to allay the world's fears that he might still be manufacturing unconventional weapons, whether nuclear, biological, or chemical.
The proximal cause of the war was Saddam's refusal to allow the inspections, his flaunting of the will of the International community, not the suspicion that he did have them.
The plan for war was never the problem. The problem was that Dubya only had one plan for restoring the peace. There was no back-up plan, so when the primary plan failed, Dubya was caught with his fly open and America's lack of forsight was exposed.
* WMD is a disinformation term coined by the Soviets Pre-WWII. The non-pejorative and correct military terminology is either "unconventional" or NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) weapons.
The most bizarre thing - when Bush took out Saddam Hussein, he turned most of Iraq into a province of Iran, making Iran that much stronger, and creating a "Shiite Crescent" of Iranian control, from western Afghanistan to Lebanon, and turning Hezbollah into the main power in Lebanon
And to counter that, the neocons were then required to overthrow Assad (and create a huge migrant crisis in Europe), which also failed. So then we must keep bases in Eastern Syria. And here we are, 20 years later, talking about war with Iran.
These people go from one disastrous folly to another.
There was intelligence to support the presence of biological weapons.
I was in the first Gulf War. The engineer battalion I was with got tasked to blow up Iraqi ammunition. This was near the Kuwait Airport. Around our perimeter were 4 NBC detectors. One day after imploding a bunker, all 4 alarms went off simotanuously testing positive for Mustard Gas. No one got sick. But we were told to have it annotated in our after operations physical.
Upon returning to Ft Hood, and being screened by a high ranking medical officer, I reported this. His response: “It’s the stance of the United States that NO biological or chemical agents were in the theater of operations.” I demanded it get entered. And he did. “SM (service member) states that he was exposed to mustard gas when there were none”
So yes, your statement is true. I know these were different eras; however, the story was the same for both wars and the cover ups never changed.
Of course but I don’t use age as an excuse. It’s not mature especially for a VP candidate.
Understand. Typically we don’t on here either but the VP candidate brought it up.
The war was fine, lightning fast, and brilliantly executed. Debaathification, disbanding their military and government, imprisoning senior civilian and military leadership, and attempting to impose democracy through long term occupation, was disastrous. Instead of leaving the Iraqi military/government intact and allowing them to maintain order and crush any Islamist uprising, we drove them to join the insurgency.
It was worth it. We killed the bad guys and upset their support rather than letting terrorists come here. The changed Iraq changed so much that they provided support to Israel when Iran fired missiles a few weeks back.
It wasn’t all about WMD - but Bush didn’t “LIE” about those. We thought he had them and so did other countries. They DID have WMDs too - not nukes, although they were working to get those.
Exactly!
The powers that be convinced themselves Iraqis were 1945 Germans!
Were we really? Or was it the MSM who typically lied to us and covered up what really took place?
Pentagon announces 500 tons of Uranium shipped from Iraq to Canada
500 tons of uranium shipped from Iraq, Pentagon says
Syria's Chemical Weapons Came From Saddam's Iraq
Eason Jordan on CNN’s Iraq The News We Kept To Ourselves
W and Cheney should be in federal prison for the Iraq War and I was a big supporter of it
Everyone that was on the right mostly backed that war.
I was wrong about it too.
That reminds me, there was a great convoy of trucks seen in satellite imagery leaving Iraq for Syria just days before the 2003 invasion (afterwards, one of Saddam's henchmen claimed there were even more 747s hauling crap out of the country). It was nothing of interest at the time but when the bulk of what they thought Saddam had wasn't where they thought they'd find it, they investigated the operator and destination of those trucks. I forget the name (and lost the reference I'd been keeping) but it was an Arab family who were notorious smugglers, particularly running hashish out of the Beqaa valley.
Let’s just be real honest here.
The anti Iraq stance folks are taking here is identical to Obama Biden 2009 withdraw from Iraq.
That directly created ISIS. So congrats on that. Same stupid as Afghan withdrawal.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.