I supported it all the way up till they announce they were letting them write their own constitution and electing their government so soon. That was when I knew it was doomed to at worst outright collapse and at best years of insider fighting.
Where do you pull these numbers from? How far deep into your large intestine? http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/14/us-iraq-war-anniversary-idUSBRE92D0PG20130314 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War Cost: 1.7 trillion over an 11 year period Deaths 4,400. Cost of gov't entitlements in 2010 alone: $2.2 trillion http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2012/12/19/the-shocking-truth-on-entitlements Where was the outrage? Out thats right, you spew forth nothing but fauxrage. As long as its on gov't handouts to liberal voters, there is nothing but crickets.
ISIS rose out of the Syrian conflict and then took advantage of a weak government in Baghdad. One that had alienated most of its Sunni population. Iraq was ripe for ISIS. Now Putin and Assad, both tried to warn us about ISIS but we pushed the ignore button.
And if Saddam were still in power in Iraq, there wouldn't be a weak government in Baghdad, and ISIS wouldn't have stood a chance anywhere except in Syria... the minute they tried to take their act on the road and head east, Saddam would have squashed them like bugs. Invading Iraq was a boneheaded move and the after effects of that move will echo through our lives for decades to come.
The problem is everyone looks back on it with 20/20 hindsight. Back in 2003 75% of all Americans were in favor of it, 23% against. The Iraq Resolution passed the House by a 297-133 margin and in the senate 77-23. It pass with roughly the same percentage that most Americans were for it at the time.
I can take personal satisfaction in knowing that I was right and the majority were wrong. I can also take some small measure of satisfaction knowing that republicans in congress overwhelmingly supported the resolution while a majority of elected democrats in congress voted against it. I can also be forever disgusted by how Dubya misled us into that war. He garnered public opinion by him and and his team repeating falsehoods over and over again until they became apparent truths to the sheeple... and those lies frightened the sheeple into seeing an invasion of Iraq as a way of lessening their risk, when the risk they faced was never from Iraq in the first place. Dubya lied about the absolute certainty of Saddam's stockpiles of WMD's which was bad enough, but what made that lie so much more powerful was the concurrent lie that Saddam and Al Qaeda had some sort of operational alliance. The Muhammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in the weeks leading up to 9/11" lie allowed Team Bush to suggest that Saddam might be giving some of those absolutely certain WMD's to the very people who flew planes into our skyscrapers... and he could be doing it RIGHT THIS MINUTE!!! AAAAARRRGGGHHH! BE AFWAID! BE VEWY VEWY AFWAID!!!! And, while you're at it, put pressure on your congressmen and senators to allow us to invade. Any member of congress who doesn't support invading Iraq is actually a traitorous arab lover. And that all worked. And 75% of Americans were cowed and frightened into believing that bull feces. Were YOU one of them? I was not. Not for one minute. And, to put it in a little context, as a retired naval officer who had spent a tour of duty on the ground in the middle east, I volunteered to go back on active duty on 9/13/01, but was told I was too old to serve. I was fully supportive of Bush in the days after 9/11. I was all for invading Afghanistan and finding and killing the people who had attacked us. Iraq should not have been our primary target. AQ should have been. I felt that then, and knew I was right... and history has proven me so.
Absolutely. Otherwise Israel might have defended herself from the threat of Iraqi WMD's by attacking Saddam and triggering a much more destructive regional war involving multiple Middle East countries. [video=youtube_share;SBLhU-4WsMI]http://youtu.be/SBLhU-4WsMI[/video] George W. Bush prevented that. You should thank God for GWB!
Yes, and Bush I sent him packing back to Iraq. Good for him. We didn't follow him, depose him, then start a decade long trillion dollar plus nation building project, no, that happened under Junior Bush. Invading Iraq cost way more than it was worth in blood and treasure. Now, the world has one less dictator, but Iraq is still a mess. The only thing that has been gained is an excuse to blame the mess on Democrats. Not worth it, no way.
Well no, in particular the right leaning Italian government [leaded by Berlusconi, who became a personal friend of President Bush in the following years] tried and persuade Bush administration not to invade that country [we went to Iraq after the conclusion of the first phase, as forces of territorial control, in the south]. And I remember Mrs Rice said, in an interview to an Italian TV, that at the White House there was who wanted to invade Iraq even before than Afghanistan [!]. The point is that the emotional involvement of 9/11 requested a significant action, something with a comparable emotive charge. Listen: "let's defeat Talibans in Afghanistan!" "let's defeat Saddam Hussein!" Which sentence had the most emotive charge? It's what political science calls "instinctive popular satisfaction". It's more "satisfactory" to defeat Saddam invading Iraq than to defeat these unknown "Talibans" invading Afghanistan.
That is like asking a man who built a sturdy house, only to have some numskull burn it down---was it worth it? Geeze...you guys are something.... Vote an idiot in and the house burns down. That is what we get and deserve. Enjoy.
No, I was not one of them in favor of invading Iraq. There is something about a pre-emptive war that goes against my grain. Yes in the House the majority of democrats voted against it 236-82 but in the senate, the majority of Democrats voted for it 29-21. So that is a mix bag to say the least. I was all for Afghanistan but I really didn't like the nation building aspect. They fought a real smart war in the beginning, a few SF and paramilitary on the ground, our air power and the Afghani do all the fighting on the ground. That brought memories of what we did back in Laos. But the nation building sucked. For me it was nothing more than us forcing democracy or our form of government upon them.
Let's see. The Dub who had contrived it with overwhelming Republican support and tepid Democratic support in Congress finally admitted that his highly-touted pretext, the wmds that he said were the main reason for attacking Iraq, did not exist. The nation-building fiasco that killed tens of thousands of innocents cost the US taxpayer a couple of trillion. The military aggression effectively eliminated the counterbalance to Iran in its quest for regional suzerainty. It unleashed sectarian forces against one another and left a legacy of bloody mayhem that had begun even before Dub and the corrupt Maliki had signed the SOFA that required US forces to get the hell out. Knowing what we know now? . "You bet your bippy bombing Pearl Harbor was a brilliant move!"
You didn't watch the video, I take it. FBI agent and Saddam's interrogator George Piro (here on CBS 60 Minutes) said Saddam admitted to BLUFFING that he had WMD's in a speech given prior to the invasion. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/interrogator-shares-saddams-confessions/ "A rifle for a rifle, a stick for a stick, a stone for a stone,'" Piro recalls. But the idea was to prevent the hated Iranians fom crossing their mutual border and attacking Iraq. And you know what? The Iranians must have believed that blufff because they did not attack across their mutual border. So, when GWB and the rest of the Free World was unable to nail down the yea or nay of whether saddam had WMD's they looked at all their intelligence and couldn't VERIFY their existence nor could they confirm their NON-EXISTENCE the Intelligence people looked at other clues which might suggest the true state of things. One clue was the speech. Another clue was the fact that the Iranians seemed to believe Saddam had WMD's and that is why they stayed put on their side of the border even after their deadly 10 year war which killed more than 1,000,000 on both sides. And what in the world would you imagine Israel would have been thinking in ths situation??? They were also Saddam's mortal enemies, (recall the many, many Iraqi SCUD missile attacks on Israel during the first Gulf War?) and the Israelis had more than enough reason to believe Iraq would use those WMD's against Israel if given a chance. When you have an enemy point a gunsight at you what would YOU do? Israel has never been a country to take its safety for granted. The size of the state of New Jersey and surrounded by hostile Arab Muslim neighbors, five of which had tried to destroy Israel a couple of times before, INCLUDING IRAQ in the 1967 Six Day War, Israel had no illusions about what might happen if just ONE low yield nuclear weapon was exploded inside or high above Tel Aviv or any part of Israel. They faced an existential threat. And the Jews' cry of "Never Again" must have been ever present in their leader's minds. In this situation there would have been no other alternative but to attack Iraq BEFORE the Butcher of Baghdad could wipe Israel off the map...literally! But what would have happened if Israel, without first actually being attacked by Saddam's forces with WMD's beforehand, had launched a preventative raid to search out and destroy these WMD's before they could be used on the "so called, "Zionist entity"? Don't you think those FIVE Arab enemies surrounding Israel would have responded in some way? Sure, any reasonable and knowledgable person would assume so. So the crisis facing GWB must have been how to prevent Israel from feeling like THEY, themselves, had to prevent Saddam's possible WMD first strike on Israel WITHOUT triggering all of Israel's deadly enemies from going to war on a much larger scale than the war in Iraq? Would a regional war get out of hand and prompt a nuclear exchange? Would Saddam or another regional power sink a couple of oil tankers in the narrow Straits of Hormuz (the gateway channel for oil tankers to reach the rest of the world) to bring about the End Times which many devout Shiite Iranians dream of with anticipation or intentionally escalate the tensions in some way? The repercussions could have been widespread (reaching YOU wherever you are) and calamitous. GWB did the only thing he could have done to prevent that worst case scenario. He gave Saddam a warning to vacate Iraq with his family and entorage and his ill-gotten riches and he gave him enough time to find asylum in some agreeable nation. Saddam neither came clean about the WMD's nor did he seek asylum. Then GWB did the only thing he could have done to save the world from what EASILY could have been a much more dire sitaution than even the Iraq War destruction and costs in dollars and lives on all sides. Itr wasn't the ideal course of action but it was the best of several really (*)(*)(*)(*)ty options. And the fact that we are all here and healthy to (*)(*)(*)(*)(*) about it is all the great man has in the way of thanks from some of you ignorant ingrates. Well, I for one, understand what might have been if President bush had not made the courageous and far sighted decision to fight a smaller, more limited war than to allow a conflagration which might have ended life on Earth. We ALL owe GWB a huge debt of gratitude and our undying thanks. Tonight say a prayer for this great American President. EDIT: And for those who are allergic to the news and factual information here's a recent discovery which blows your whole narrative out of the water. THERE WERE WMD'S after all!!!
Absolutely, Saddams Iraq did not get away with supporting the Islamists path of Jihad and proper action of 9/11, the Islamists are going to get far more misery for supporting the Obamanation regime change, and the Obamanations entire Party is exposed once again for what it really was with regard to the Vietnam war, traitors; the Obamanation rejects all efforts to denigrate the beliefs of the Prince of Darkness. It is a hell YOUR kind made.
my statement remains absolutely correct. The republicans in congress overwhelmingly voted in favor of the resolution. A majority of the democrats elected to our national legislature (senate and house) voted against the use of force resolution. I am not a dove by any stretch of the imagination. I am, however, dead set against spilling American blood for the wrong reasons. We had a very limited, well defined reason to be in Afghanistan 13 years ago. We have no reason to be there now. We had no reason to be in Iraq. I said that then and everyone - most of whom didn't even know the difference between a shi'ite and a sunni - called me a coward and a traitor for opposing that war. I stated, more than a decade ago, that our ridiculous assertion that we could plant Jeffersonian democracy on the banks of the Euphrates and it would just blossom with the spring rains was idiotic. I said then, that sectarian loyalty ALWAYS trumps loyalty to the concept of "country" in the middle east, that sunnis and shi'ites had hated one another for more than a thousand years, and that whenever we decided to pull our troops out, regardless of how stable the situation might appear at that moment, that Iraq would devolve back into sectarian violence and all our sacrifices would have been for naught. I don't care if we stayed there for all eight years of the Obama presidency and all eight years of Hillary's presidency after that... as soon as we DID leave, it would start crumbling. I was right. All these freakin' neocons here on internet message boards and in the Bush administration were wrong. I sleep better at night knowing that.
Which is better in your opinion: A region wide war covering all of the Middle East? Or a war limited to the country of Iraq? Bush chose the lesser of two evils. He chose correctly.
And for those who might actually be ignorant of the overarching goals of Al Qaeda in particular, and of Islamic extremists - the current iteration being ISIS - in general, you need to know that attacking America "because of our freedoms" was not and is not high on their bucket lists. First and foremost, they seek to overthrow all the secular nation states that presently occupy the territory once called the caliphate. That area today includes all of the middle east, most of southwest Asia, northern Africa and Spain. That area includes the nation of Iraq among others. Saddam was well aware of that fact. The goal of Al Qaeda was the elimination of the secular, baathist, pan arab, sweet deal that Saddam had worked out for himself and his cronies in Iraq. Why in the world would anyone who had that nice a gig, give the people who wanted more than anything to destroy his sweet gig the tools to do it? If your worst enemy comes to you and wants to borrow your gun collection, but promises to use it on other people instead of you - even if he promises to use them on people you both jointly hate - are you going to give him your arsenal and just hope that he keeps his word? The fact that BushCo. was able to sell that happy horse feces to the American people is as much an indication of the abject ignorance of the American people as it is of the opportunistic, self serving perfidy of the Bushies. Shame of George Bush... shame on a nation of stupid people who bought his snake oil.
There is no reason to suggest that the middle east would have melted into region wide conflict in the absence of OUR invading Iraq and upsetting the balance of power in the region. What are YOU smoking?
