Posted on 11/05/2022 3:15:31 PM PDT by NeverCheney
Post 9/11 policy should have been aimed at Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan that created the Taliban to give Al-Qaeda sanctuary.
The Pakistanis had nukes so they weren’t really dealt with in the end.
Now the Taliban are back in power.
Energy switched to Iraq and this WMD argument Peter Hitchens ex-Marxist now Christian has said the WMD claim in Iraq never was proven.
I read stuff planted about the Iraq WMD getting moved to Syria in 2006.
In the end Al-Qaeda the organization America’s enemy bin Laden taken out by Obama a year before his re-election.
But the followers of Al Qaeda recruited by the Neocon Cheney Crowd to fight wars in Libya and Syria.
In Syria all the false flag drama about chemical weapons use by Assad with Russia and Iran drug in as co-conspirators.
In recent months it has been reported that a Canadian intel operative smuggled people into Syria to join Islamic State.
Canadian intel is a subsidiary of our own CIA.
None of that had anything to do with Iraq. Give it up, Dubya.
With all due respect ....
Your opinion does not matter. My opinion does not matter. The question at hand is the blood libel that Bush and Cheney lied us into the war. That is a malignant lie. Bush and Cheney believed what they were saying. So did virtually everyone else.
The lie was planted by the democrats — most of whom, at least those in Congress, had supported the invasion — when they saw an opportunity to turn flip sides and politicize the decision to invade. To do this, they had to completely falsify history.
Their problem, of course, was that the intelligence assessment didn’t change when GWB became president. Throughout the Clinton years, the IC had continued to stand beside its “slam dunk” assurance that Saddam had WMDs. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, Bill Cohen, Madeleine Albright, the House leadership, and dems on down the line vociferously agreed that Saddam had WMDs. And they of course supported BillyJeff’s two bombing campaigns against Saddam — including the wag the dog bombings ordered as the House was about to vote on impeachment — because we all knew Saddam had WMDs, which is why he was blocking the inspectors (in violation of the terms of the cease fire after the first Gulf war).
Did Saddam have WMDs? No question. Case closed. And the media agreed.
U.S. troops didn’t suit up in chemical warfare suits for the fun of it. We assessed that there was a high probability that Saddam would use WMDs against the invasion. We planned for that. And we fully expected to find operational stockpiles when we occupied the country.
When that didn’t happen, the democrats decided to launch the big lie campaign. This could only be done by memory holing everything they themselves said had for years about Saddam’s capabilities. Since the media is as corrupt as they are, the media supported the lie. “Bush lied. People died.” But Bush was not lying. He was operating on a universally accepted intelligence assessment in a post 9/11 threat environment.
That doesn’t mean the intelligence was correct. But it was the consensus view.
I suppose it’s also useful to remember that right up to the end, Saddam was offered the chance to come clean, stop his obstruction of the inspectors, and let the teams in. He refused. The UN authorized military action to enforce the terms of the ceasefire. Congress authorized military action, with most of the democrats (including Hillary Clinton) in support. The demand that Saddam allow the resumption of inspections became an ultimatum — with an explicit deadline date, after which military operations could commence at any time of our choosing — as massive force was deployed to the region. Saddam chose war. He presumably assumed Bush was bluffing.
You perhaps recall the prescient warning to Saddam from one of his sons. (I don’t remember which one.) I don’t know how the recording was made. My guess would be that it was an intercepted phone conversation. Saddam’s son was warning his father, and I paraphrase, “Father, don’t make a mistake here. Bush isn’t Clinton. This time the Americans mean what they say.” But Saddam wouldn’t listen.
FWIW, the two Gulf Wars stand out as the only major American wars since Korea authorized in advance by Congress, unless we count Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (which is a much clearer case of “LBJ lied. People died.) But let that pass.
20/20 hindsight is fine. By all means, we should critically review the decision making process and own up to mistakes. But it is not legitimate to turn 20/20 hindsight into a falsification of history by reading later understandings back into the decision making process at an earlier time.
I am sorry to burden you by outlining the historical record. If you prefer the short version, the democrat talking points are malignant lies. You should disregard anyone who repeats them.
I understand that we now live in an age of the seven second soundbite and bumper sticker sloganeering in place of political debate. The truth doesn’t stand much chance in that environment.
Ok Cindy Sheehan.
You I’m sure never understood why we fought Germany in WWII. Pearl Harbor had nothing to do with Germany.
“ i hear there is a CIA list good dicators and bad dictators. Some baddies used to be goodies and some goodies are now baddies”
We all used to support Rinos. Some here still do.
“ We should have won the damn war and gone home.”
Exactly.
We won it in days. Sewing up. It’s not hard to understand.
MTG is correct and it hit Liz in the face...
There’s no proof of that.
Not enough for the war. They weren’t active weapons.
It may have been stupid and disastrous but getting rid of Saddam was also hugely satisfying.
Anyone who starts with the “you lied us into the war” blood libel should be shunned. MTG here disqualifies herself from being taken seriously.
I have no interest here in debating the myriad issues about our handling/mishandling of the Iraq intervention over so many years. There are many criticisms to be made and hard judgment calls to be debated. 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing. But “lied us into war.” No.
The intelligence community, the national security team in the Bush administration, and the bipartisan leadership, foreign affairs, intelligence, and armed services committees in Congress all unanimously believed that Saddam had, if not operational nukes, at least the requisites of a fast restart of his program, as well as plenty of materials sufficient for a dirty bomb. And chemical weapons. Which could be in the hands of terrorist groups at any time.
Why did they all believe this? Because they were all getting exactly the same assessment from the intelligence community, which said the assessment was a “slam dunk.”
Virtually every other major country with serious intelligence capabilities in the region, as well as all the relevant regional powers, thought the same thing. Whatever his true capabilities may have been, Saddam himself was working hard to convince the world of the worst. He succeeded. But he miscalculated. Bill Clinton was no longer in charge. Saddam didn’t realize that this new president might actually take action.
George Bush and Dick Cheney said NOTHING about Saddam and weapons of mass destruction that Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and the entire senior national security figures of the Clinton era hadn’t been saying for years. The Clinton era national security people had all gotten the same briefings.
A acquaintance of mine was very highly situated on the White House national security team. He never breathed a word about his work, as was proper. But I do know that for six months after 9/11, his days started at 4:00 a.m. because he had to prepare for the 6:00 a.m. situation reports when the principals got their more leisurely start on the day. The only thing he ever said was that people at that level were waking and checking in each morning, wondering if we had lost a city overnight.
Saddam was one of the principals of the global terrorist network. The bad guys operated in the shadows for operational surprise and the camouflage responsibilities, but collectively, they crossed the Rubicon on 9/11. And the universal assessment was that Saddam had at least the capability for dirty bombs, and maybe more, as well as chemical weapons.
The democrats who had spent the Clinton years attesting to Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction did a complete 180 turn, popped everything they themselves for years down the memory hole, and began a high intensity big lie campaign directed at GWB. They did this almost in unison. One would almost think they were in collusion on the big lie. The liberal media played along. One would almost think the media was corrupt and evil. This was probably the greatest act of — well, I’ll call it treason — in American history. It fully equals and probably exceeds the soft coup instigated against Donald Trump.
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Thank you. I remember it was a very scary time.
so much words
...that I didn’t read beyond quickly seeing the length of your reply. No reply offered, except to point to my tagline below,
...my time is too valuable
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No it’s not. You ought to read it. If you can’t read sphinx’s excellent, educated post, I feel sorry for you.
Amen.
Not enough for the war. They weren’t active weapons.
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As sphinx has explained, we didn’t know the weapons weren’t active, all the responsible nations believed the weapons were active.
We had no photos of them, and the Administration never said that he had them after we invaded and didn’t find any.
(Iran didn't use chemical weapons in response. For its part, Iran used human wave attacks of children to clear minefields. I know a now middle-aged immigrant from Iran whose mother fled with him to the U.S. at that time because he was about to be honored by being drafted into martyrdom. I'm not sure of his age, but he might have been about ten. His father thought a holy warrior and martyr in the family would be a great thing. He stayed in Iran. The mother thought differently. The upside is that this fellow was permanently cured of Islam.)
The question was never whether Saddam had had weapons of mass destruction. The questions were whether the inspectors had found them all, and whether Saddam had retained a clandestine manufacturing capability or, at a minimum, had everything he need for a rapid restart so that he could be back in the business in days or weeks.
Saddam had spent the eight years of the Clinton administration lying about basically everything, obstructing the inspectors and eventually throwing them out of the country.
The entire world had perfectly good reason to believe Saddam was maintaining a WMD capability. All of which the democrats want people to forget so that they can maintain a blood libel against George Bush and Dick Cheney.
Hell needs deeper circles and hotter fires.
I wondered what Iraq had to do with 9-11, but I was a good little Republican and supported President Bush and his puppet masters back then, thinking that they knew more about the state of affairs than I did.
What a difference 20 years makes. The truth eventually comes out. I'm surprised old Dick is still around to see the consequences of his decisions. Don't know how he can sleep at night.
Even if you are correct, it's important to note that WE DIDN'T.
In fact, the U.S. invaded one of the Islamic dumps over there whose defining characteristic was that it was largely secularized and was NOT run by radical Islamic mutants.
Meanwhile ... the U.S. never invaded countries with the most radical Islamic cultures and leadership (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, for example).
Weren't these the same @ssholes who all believed that Trump was a Russian operative?
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