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To: My2Cents
No, he IGNORED the case for war with Iraq

Well to be fair, you have to admit it's a bit hard to know exactly what the case is/was as it has changed several times since May and none of the original arguments have yet to be completely proven (WMDs, ties to 9/11, Al Qaeda). Or have been outright refuted by the same administration that used them to whip up their supporters for war

11 posted on 09/24/2003 11:02:28 AM PDT by billbears (Deo Vindice)
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To: billbears
With all due respect, the reasons were clear. Here's what Bush told the UN last year:

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material. (Remember, all parties -- the UN, other nations -- all concluded that Iraq had an active WMD program. The lack of weapons is a curiosity of the first order, but this objective was not disputed by anyone a year ago.)

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it, as all states are required to do by U.N. Security Council resolutions. (Iraq was funding Palestinian terrorism against Israel; in fact, one of the guys blown to bits in Baghdad on the decapitation strike aimed at Saddam the first night of the Iraq war was a top Palestinian terror master. The links to terrorism are pretty well known. Read Michael Ledeen's book WAR AGAINST THE TERROR MASTERS as one example; Yosef Bodansky's THE HIGH COST OF PEACE as another.)

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shi'a, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans, and others, again as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will release or account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown. It will return the remains of any who are deceased, return stolen property, accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait, and fully cooperate with international efforts to resolve these issues, as required by Security Council resolutions.

If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It will accept U.N. administration of funds from that program, to ensure that the money is used fairly and promptly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

...These reasons for war against Saddam were clear. The Democrats hate the idea of a Republican prosecuting a successful war, so they and their surrogates in the media, conveniently ignore them.

21 posted on 09/24/2003 11:17:43 AM PDT by My2Cents (Well...there you go again.)
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To: billbears
Well to be fair, you have to admit it's a bit hard to know exactly what the case is/was as it has changed several times since May and none of the original arguments have yet to be completely proven (WMDs, ties to 9/11, Al Qaeda). Or have been outright refuted by the same administration that used them to whip up their supporters for war

This is the kind of B.S. you've posted before, like saying Bush said Iraq was an imminent threat to us when in fact he didn't. No claim the Bush admin. made has been refuted by them (or anyone else). The Bush administration never gave 9/11, or at least the claim that Iraq was involved in it, as a reason. The ties to terrorism and WMD's were both reasons given. The Al Qaeda tie is irrefutable. Also, the assertion was always one of connections with terrorism, of which Al Qaeda was just one element. About the only thing that can be said is that they are no longer talking much about WMD's, but they have not said that was not a reason.

it has been known for years that Saddam armed and financed Ansar al Islam, a force of some six to seven hundred extremists that operated a terror camp in northern Iraq’s no-fly zone, controlling a string of villages along the Iranian border of the Kurdish self-rule area. It has long been known that senior Ansar members trained at a camp in Afghanistan that specialized in the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons, such as ricin. And it is hardly a secret that a very senior al Qaeda leader named Abu Mussab al Zarqawi fled Afghanistan after the Taliban was defeated, and had his injured leg treated in a Baghdad hospital – surely with the knowledge of the Iraqi dictator and his secret police – after which he was sent to create a poison laboratory in the Ansar terrorist cell. The Ansar camp, incidentally, was targeted and annihilated by American warplanes a few weeks ago.

Critics of the Bush policy similarly elected to ignore his October 2002 assertion that Iraq’s terror connection was evidenced by Saddam’s longstanding protection of Abu Abbas, the leader of a terrorist group that in 1985 hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship and murdered an elderly, wheelchair-bound American passenger named Leon Klinghoffer. This was the same Abu Abbas who in recent years, according to FBI counter-terrorism analyst Mathew Levitt, "was the conduit for Saddam Hussein’s financing of the [Palestinian] suicide bombers"; the same Abu Abbas whom three captured Palestinian terrorists recently admitted they had met in December 2000, at which time they were in Iraq for training in the use of weapons and explosives. Earlier this month, US commandoes tracked down and arrested Abbas in Iraq, where he had indeed been living for most of the past seventeen years – just as President Bush told us.

And now, within the past few days, the London Telegraph has reported the monumentally important discovery of top-secret documents in the bombed-out Baghdad headquarters of Iraq’s intelligence service, documents that provide "evidence of a direct link between Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist network and Saddam Hussein’s regime." The newly unearthed papers show that in March 1998, "an al Qaeda envoy was invited clandestinely to Baghdad . . . to establish a relationship between Baghdad and al Qaeda based on their mutual hatred of America and Saudi Arabia." According to the Telegraph report, "[t]he meeting apparently went so well that it was extended by a week and ended with arrangements being discussed for bin Laden to visit Baghdad." Notably, this envoy’s visit took place less than five months before bin Laden’s group bombed two US embassies in Africa.

Iraq's al-Qaeda Connection

47 posted on 09/24/2003 3:23:10 PM PDT by lasereye
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