Replies

IRAQ HAD NO STOCKPILES...SO WHAT?

So what? Over a thousand U.S. soldiers are dead and thousands more wounded for reasons that prove to be untrue, and all Neal can say about that is "So what?" According to the report all it took to keep a lid on Hussein's WMD program was UN santions. Wouldn't keeping those in place have been cheaper than the invasion?

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Saint FDR did not attack Japan, he attacked Germany.

Was Saint FDR wrong?

Heard someone say yesterday, Saddam was a WMD and we found him. I agree with you we need to articulate our reasons for war in a better way, and the (high) costs need to be justified in a better way.

See my post #10 over there: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1237707/posts

So what? Over a thousand U.S. soldiers are dead and thousands more wounded for reasons that prove to be untrue, and all Neal can say about that is "So what?" According to the report all it took to keep a lid on Hussein's WMD program was UN santions. Wouldn't keeping those in place have been cheaper than the invasion?

First of all, your premise is wrong. They died to remove a genocidal maniac who was a threat to the whole world. This report does nothing to change the perception that Saddam Hussein was a crazy man and a threat to us and the whole world! The reason Boortz says "So What" is that if we had not acted, the sanctions would have eroded or expired completely, and Hussein would re-amass the WMD's! What the report essentially concluded was that while he may not have had stockpiles when we went in, he had a plan and driving desire to re-constitute these WMD's. So if we didn't do it now, we would have to do it within a year or two. If you can't see that, then I think you are blind. We removed a mad man who would never give up on the dream to possess WMD's.

Secondly, we could not have kept the sanctions in place. They were going away. Why do you think Saddam Hussein was patiently waiting for the day when his plan to bribe all of our so-called "allies" (France, Germany, Russia) to block our invasion strategy and to get all sanctions revoked came to fruition? Or have you had your head in the sand for the past 6 months?

Over a thousand U.S. soldiers are dead and thousands more wounded for reasons that prove to be untrue,

You are speaking as if "He has stockpiles of WMD" was the only Reason for the war. That's simply not true.

According to the report all it took to keep a lid on Hussein's WMD program was UN santions.

Does the report mention how the hell "sanctions" were going to contain anthrax? If not, it ain't worth the paper it's printed on, and that conclusion is meaningless. (Do *you* know where the 2001 (Daschle) anthrax came from?)

Does the report mention that countries like Germany and Russia were cheating on the sanctions? How does that work exactly, we trust in "sanctions" even though everyone's cheating on them?

Does the report mention things like the AQ Khan nuke network, uncovered only after the war?

Does the report mention that all indications are that the political momentum was pushing toward ending the sanctions sooner rather than later? If not, it's even more worthless.

If the report mentions none of these things, it's junk. If it mentions some of these things, but STILL has a conclusion like "all we need to contain Saddam's WMD is continue sanctions" then it is self-contradictory. Another possibility is that you are summarizing that conclusion falsely.

For just how many decades, pray tell, do you think we should have kept the nation-state of Iraq under siege? Keeping in mind that this siege-state would be helping keep the Hussein Dynasty in power.

How many generations of Husseins, for how many decades, were we supposed to help keep in power over the people of Iraq?

Wouldn't keeping those in place have been cheaper than the invasion?

Depends for how long. There are two possibilities:

1. We keep the sanctions in place indefinitely, for decades. (You know, because it's "cheaper" than ousting Hussein.) Unfortunately, in this case I believe the cumulative cost of doing this far outweighs simply removing Hussein.

And what is this talk of "cost"? Is it all about money? That is very simple minded. Are you counting the *propaganda* cost incurred (for Al Qaeda types) by the fact that we were being so Mean to the Iraqi People? Remember, the Iraq sanctions killing Iraqi babies etc. (along with Troops in Saudi Arabia - ANOTHER direct byproduct of the "contain Hussein with sanctions" effort) were a primary grievance of Al Qaeda. Frankly, as part the Cost of containing Saddam I'm afraid we ALREADY have to count... 9/11 and all its aftereffects.

Still think it's "cheaper"?

2. Something happens politically (a (D) President is elected? France produces some weepy documentary about the effect of sanctions?) and the support for keeping up a "sanctions regime" (i.e. holding Iraq and its 25 million people under siege indefinitely) collapses, so they are dropped in some face-saving deal. IMHO this was bound to happen sooner rather than later. In that case your whole premise that we can "contain" Saddam with sanctions vanishes.

You tell me, which was going to happen, 1 or 2? Either way it's not worth it. And IMHO this is precisely the calcualtion Bush saw on his table.

Over a thousand U.S. soldiers are dead and thousands more wounded for reasons that prove to be untrue, and all Neal can say about that is "So what?"

The choice is between a candidate who as sitting president has not been omnicient and another who as a senator can tell you exactly what the president did wrong - and even at that, changes his position with the political wind. in that context I will take the president who can make a decision and stand by it.
The implicit position of his opposition is that nothing that happens during a Democratic administration is, by definition, bad. How would you compare the last Democratic Secretary of Defense - not former Republican Senator Cohen but Democratic Congressman Les Aspen - with former Secretary of Defense and former corporate executive Donald Rumsfeld? First time Aspen has a serious decision he wimps out and lets politics trump military judgement; his best decision as SecDef is to resign. First time Rumsfeld has a serious problem, he takes down the government of Afghanistan in a couple of months.
As to Iraq, Saddam was waging a low-level war against enforcement of the no-fly zone which protected the Kurds and some Shiites from mass murder. Salman Pak was a terrorist training facility near Baghdad, and there was another terrorist training facility in northeastern Iraq. And Saddam did an excellent immitation of someone who was evading the sanctions against WMD development. And Saddam was succeeding in his effort to buy enough international support to undermine the oil embargo.
" all it took to keep a lid on Hussein's WMD program was UN santions" - but the international support for those sanctions was eroding. And enforcement of sanctions/no-fly was what required our continued - and putatively provocative to Al Qaeda recruits - presence in Saudi Arabia.
Lack of confidence that Saddam was not developing/stockpiling WMD was a reason for the war, but not the only one. And even if it had been the only one, it is a second guess to criticize Bush for "knowing" what apparently was - even if wrong - common "knowledge" in the international intelligence community.

<'sarcasm> Obviously Pres. Bush was wrong to invade Iraq, since there were no WMDs.

So what if Saddam had used WMDs. So what if Saddam had secret programs in the mid-90's that were discovered when some people defected from Iraq and provided evidence of the programs. Even Saddam admitted he had WMDs, and failed to account for the destruction.

So what if Saddam's military routinely shot at US/Coalition planes that were monitoring Iraq and enforcing the no-fly zone. This would be the like expecting the police to take action in a neighborhood where people would shoot at the cop cars as they drove by. We really expect the police to not take action ... right??

So what if Saddam was secretly siphoning of billions of dollars from the Oil-for-Food (and bribes, and palaces and weapons) Program that was monitored by the UN (and they were also in on the scam.) So what if the program, because of fraud, was helping Saddam stay in control while allowing tens of thousands of Iraqi people to suffer and die. So what if Iraqi people were dying ... it's not like they are real people who count ... people who count like Democrats and Michael Moore. The Iraqi people flying kites, shown in the Farenheit 911 movie probably supported Michael Moore and Saddam.

So what if Saddam was giving families of suicide bombers $25,000 to spread terrorism in Isreal. And even though Claudia Rosett of the Wall Street Journal is exposing the fact that Osama bin Laden was probably broke when he left Sudan in 1997-1998 ... (after Clinton refused the offer of Sudan to turn him over to us) ... but while in Afghanistan, bin Laden was probably getting hundreds of millions of dollars from Saddam (diverted from the UN's Oil for Scam program) ... and so Saddam was funding Osama ... but heck .. who cares, since Bush lied about WMDs.

<'sarcasm off>

So what should we do ... put Saddam back into power and let him restore "order"? Tell the Iraqi people that we don't value them ... they really aren't human anyway since they never fought for their freedoms (well ... they tried, but Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of them for trying ... but hey ... who gives a damn ... Bush lied and there were no WMDs ... so let's elect Kerry ... who loves to allow socialist/communist governments to come in and fix countries up. Heck ... Kerry liked the idea of North Viet Nam taking over the management of South Viet Nam. So what if hundreds of thousands died and millions suffered ... those people don't count either ... since they probably are sub-human too.)

Am I missing something here? I think the Democrats - who worried about genocide in Africa ... are the biggest damned bigots in the world. They ignore the plight of millions of people (in Iraq) ...while a madman collets billions of petrodollars and uses the money to build arms, aid terrorists, and whether or not he actually had WMDs .. he has had them, and he would get them again if the Democrats were in control

The Democrats disgust me ... their policies are either stupid or racist .... or both!!!

Mike