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Iraq War a Mistake

ponderingturtle said:
I was making a joke about multiple meanings of the word intelligence and how surrounding yourself with yes men is not something that shows a person is terribly intelligent.
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Not a wasted effort, there appears to be a number of people in this discussion that needed a review of the facts.
 
16.5 said:
Certainly not what you think we are talking about.

We are responding to SG's partisan belief that Bush et al conjured up all the evidence and that the Democrats were their patsies. I (and others) have endeavored to show her the errors of her ways (example, the fact that Bush relied on Clinton era intelligence supporting Operation Desert Fox), only to be met with "OMG."
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Care to address the facts I cited above instead of tap-dancing to your tu quoque tune?

You can go to those links, especially the Wiki citations where right wingers have inserted all sorts of excuses and distortions of the actual events.
 
Monketey Ghost said:
Don't get me wrong, I thought the war was a bad mistake and didn't believe the WMD's would ever be found.
In fact I thought I was a sage when it all went so badly. But how hard is it to predict a poorly planned occupation of a country held together by a brutal dictator and subsequent power vacuum would lead to chaos?

... Looking at you, Dubya...
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They might have been able to make the occupation work. But that would have required a sober assessment of what happens after an invasion. They also would have needed to plan for at least a limited insurgency.

Doing so would have required them to listen to General Shinseki about how many troops they needed. They also could have followed up on what General Petraeus had been doing in the early stages of the occupation. Petraeus division was in charge of Mosul and had started to work on getting the economy there going right away. But as soon as his troops rotated out that effort stopped. Unemployed people with nothing to do quickly become a problem.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Care to address the facts I cited above instead of tap-dancing to your tu quoque tune?
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"OMG"!

If the contention is that the Republican conjured up the evidence for the attack, it is not a tu quoque to point out that they relied on Clinton era intelligence (for example the same evidence that Clinton relied on to attack Iraq in 1998).

here was your response:

"Operation desert fox Intel"? Really? That's the security blanket you are clinging to?"

And you expect me to take you seriously?

As you so eloquently put it: OMG.
 
Fast Eddie B said:
"Shut Up And Sing" is an interesting snapshot of what happened when the Dixie Chicks began to question our involvement in the war.
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The Dixie Chicks had two things to offer the world: Pop country music, and opinions about the Iraq war. Turns out, people were getting enough opinions about the Iraq war from other sources, and turned to the Dixie Chicks for something else. Dispensing with that implicit understanding turned out to be a terrible business decision.
 
Bikewer said:
I don't know how many hours of analysis of the whole Iraq thing I listened to on various NPR programs, as well as interviews with Bush-administration defectors.

Still seems to me that the underlying motivation was the so-called "Neo-Con agenda" with the "taking down a dangerous dictator" as the pretext. (and of course, the conflation of that dictator with 9/11)

That was the notion that Iraq was ready and waiting to be freed of Saddam, and since they were essentially a "secular" country, there would be a brief spate of dancing in the streets...Followed by the rapid formation of a nice, US-friendly democracy which would be a shining example of same to the whole region. (and presumably, over years, that democratic model would be exported to other problematic countries)

That sounds great..... Alas that no one paid any attention whatever to the warnings from people who did in fact know better. I recall listening to an interview with Madelaine Albright pre-invasion. She rather neatly ticked off the problems that we would encounter.
Iraq was only "secular" in that Saddam had suppressed the warring religious factions, much as the Soviets had suppressed the factions in the Balkans.
Iraq had no sense of nationality; it was an artificially-constructed nation incorporating a number of different religious and tribal powers that all hated each other.

It's not that this information was not available; it was merely ignored, or in some cases shouted down. Same with the "intelligence". The administration was warned that some of their "sources" were self-serving individuals with an eye on taking power in a post-Saddam Iraq.... Again, largely ignored.

A great deal is now being accepted under the general category of "faulty intelligence", but from all the stuff I listened to it was much more...."We are going to war, find us some excuses."
I seem to recall that Bush made war-intention statements shortly after being elected.
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Excellent post.
 
I sure am glad that no one who claims that the pre-war intelligence used to justify the Iraq War was a valid reason for starting the Iraq War is no longer in any sort of postion of serious responsibility (such as those numerous stupid, idiotic, liars who used to work in the Bush Adminstration).

To wit, the following is from the 2005 report entitled Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction

Quote:

...

We conclude that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its
pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This was a major
intelligence failure. Its principal causes were the Intelligence Community's inability to
collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what
information it could gather, and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was
based on assumptions, rather than good evidence. On a matter of this importance, we
simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude.

...
 
Crossbow said:
I sure am glad that no one who claims that the pre-war intelligence used to justify the Iraq War was a valid reason for starting the Iraq War is no longer in any sort of postion of serious responsibility (such as those numerous stupid, idiotic, liars who used to work in the Bush Adminstration).
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But how many of them will Jeb hire?
 
16.5 said:
"OMG"!

If the contention is that the Republican conjured up the evidence for the attack, it is not a tu quoque to point out that they relied on Clinton era intelligence (for example the same evidence that Clinton relied on to attack Iraq in 1998).

here was your response:

"Operation desert fox Intel"? Really? That's the security blanket you are clinging to?"

And you expect me to take you seriously?

As you so eloquently put it: OMG.
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The contention is that GW, Cheney and their cohorts manufactured a reason to invade Iraq. The planning started post election pre-Bush taking office (according to Richard Clarke who knew about the contingency plan). 911 created the opportunity, but they had to tie Iraq to the attack. I cited the evidence of manufactured intel.

Whatever else you are on about had nothing to do with the manufactured intel, orchestrated leaks to the press, and campaign to convince the public war was necessary.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Whatever else you are on about had nothing to do with the manufactured intel, orchestrated leaks to the press, and campaign to convince the public war was necessary.
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Yeah, that was kind of my point, they also relied on Clinton era intelligence, which you hand waved away as a "security blanket" (whatever the **** that means) for some utterly bizarre reason.
 
16.5 said:
Yeah, that was kind of my point, they also relied on Clinton era intelligence, which you hand waved away as a "security blanket" (whatever the **** that means) for some utterly bizarre reason.
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You really struggle with reading comprehension. "Security blanket" was how she used to describe your attempt to blame Clinton.
 
It will forever bother me as one of those decisions of W's (hell, any Presidency) where a good half of the country was saying "Nooo, no, bad idea, this is going to be disastrous and expensive, with consequences we can't really predict aside from the broad outlines."
And they did it anyways.
Like I said, I felt like a genius analyst after that for a while, but it was so clearly going to be a mess even if everything foreseeable went smoothly.
The idea that we'd be "greeted as liberators" seemed so far fetched that I laughed upon hearing it.
"We have no plan to leave and the liberators are at the same moment an occupying power. Wonder how long the good will is gonna last... *looks at watch* ... Okay, it's over."
 
16.5 said:
LOLZ! No not really, I was just agreeing with him that he has no idea what is going on.

Pretty simple stuff "really."
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Ah, yes, I mistook one dodge for another.

Quite honestly I don't know why some people subscribe to this forum if all they're going to do is not actually discuss.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Dude, you joined this forum in 2013. Why don't you go back to our discussions of this topic 10 years ago and see what I posted before you claim to know what I said back then.

As for Blix, you don't know what you are talking about. He criticized the Bush lies about Iraqi WMDs from the very beginning.
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Sure he did, after the invasion. A lot of good that does anyone.

I just quoted Hans Blix giving a speech before the UN Security Council 12 days before the invasion stating that Iraq was not meeting their obligations under UN Resolution 1441.

One month before the invasion Hans Blix said this about Iraq not cooperating with the inspectors and their agreement required by 1441:
"This is perhaps the most important problem we are facing. Although I can understand that it may not be easy for Iraq in all cases to provide the evidence needed, it is not the task of the inspectors to find it."
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You can post as many links as you want to Hans Blix saying what he thinks after the invasion, what matters is what he said before the invasion.

The UN pulled their inspectors out in 1998 because Iraq was not complying with the cease-fire. Four years later they were allowed back in and Hussein continued to fail to comply with the resolution. At least according to Blix prior to the invasion.
 
Belz... said:
Ah, yes, I mistook one dodge for another.

Quite honestly I don't know why some people subscribe to this forum if all they're going to do is not actually discuss.
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If I may interject, ...

I can think of a few reasons why such people subscribe to this fourm, but I will decline to publicly list these reasons.
 
16.5 said:
Yeah, that was kind of my point, they also relied on Clinton era intelligence, which you hand waved away as a "security blanket" (whatever the **** that means) for some utterly bizarre reason.
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1.) The intelligence did not justify an invasion. Which is why Clinton didn't invade and why Bush was an idiot for invading. End of story.

2.) It is therefore irrational to justify invasion based on Clinton era intelligence.

3.) You cannot rebut the facts. Empty rhetoric in 3, 2, 1....
 
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