The ONLY reason that SAddam even let the inspectors back in was because of the presence of the big US military on his front porch. Does your friend expect the US taxpayer to foot the bill for keeping that size force around Iraq, and less available for other possible deployments if needed for three years?? Not to mention about the psychological effect on the troops of that sort of silliness.
I don't and never will understand libs.
Prairie
I honestly don't know what my friend thinks/expects. I don't know how two people can hear Bush, Rumsfeld, Myers, Franks, Brooks, etc. say, time after time, that the Iraqi people will be creating their own government... and one person (me) believes them, and the other person believes it's all a scam to get an American Annex in the middle east.
Just one example that every Liberal in the world brings up about the huge conspiracy thing: The Halliburton contract to put out the oil well fires. Well, as I've mentioned here before, I'm a Geologist. Others on here can tell you this same thing: Putting out an oil well fire is a HIGHLY SPECIALIZED ORDEAL, and there probably aren't more than a handful of companies in the WORLD that can do it. So my perspective on that is "so what if Cheney has ties to Halliburton!" I don't know if Halliburton is the BEST, or the CHEAPEST, or the ONLY one with the necessary resources to handle a potential 1000+ wellhead fires, but I would stake my life on it that there aren't very darn many companies that could handle a project of that magnitude. And it would be unfair to the Iraqi people to EXclude Halliburton from the project simply because of Cheney's connection.
so then my friend brings up the issue of running the port at Umm Qsar... "Is running a port a highly specialized skill? The Iraqis want to go back to work and operate the port, but we have told them no..." Sheesh... how about we make sure it's safe first? How about we know who the bad guys are and who the good guys are before we let them take over something as VITAL as the ports?
From what I can tell, the root of all of his beefs stems from reading the documents on the Project for the New American Century (
http://www.newamericancentury.org/ ). And for that, I definitely don't have a rebuttal.