THEIR ABOUT TO GET CAUGHT OVER IRAQ

Here is an article from the Economist that I feel may be a good, non-partisan review of both sides of the current Iraq/Al-Q/Clarke et al debate:
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2540172

A slight digression

I want to add one other point if I may, that is not strictly on point to your debate in this thread.

I find it both fascinating and sad that ever since Sept.11, reasoned debate has been replaced by vitriol and partisan rhetoric. Equally interesting is how obviously bright people adhere so blindly to their ideology of choice, making a conscious decision to ignore proven facts that don't fit with their world view.

When it comes to epithets, name calling and dirty politics (“going negative”) it is simply ludicrous to suggest that one side does it while the other does not.

Some examples of statements that have been taken as Gospel truth by their respective camps since 9/11:

Anyone who questions the Bush administration is a "traitor" or a "Bush-hater" (Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh et al) - Utterly illogical and truly offensive. Loving your country is completely non-partisan.

All Liberals “hate America” – how do you respond to such a moronic, blanket statement? How does one even have the nerve to say it?

“Iraq was just about oil” – How can that be? Easier ways to get oil.

“GWB and his cronies are Imperialists” – A simply ridiculous assertion.

“Israel is solely to blame for everything” or, “All Palestinians are suicide bombers” – total BS.

“The media is all Liberal and all they do is lie” – to believe this, you have to be illiterate.

“You can’t believe newspaper/website "x" because they have a liberal agenda.” – Then, the final insult, the person making that assertion will quote FOX News on some issue.

“John Kerry is not a patriot/he hates America because he threw his medals over the wall and maybe he hung out with Hanoi Jane. However, GWB is a super-patriot who earned the right to strut around that aircraft carrier deck in his flight suit.” - Where do you begin?

My point is, I am truly sick of spin and lies. I am further sickened by very intelligent people blindly believing what their chosen leaders and pundits tell them and then taking a completely condescending and often vicious attitude to anyone who dares to disagree.

When I am researching some news item, I make it a point to read American, Canadian, British, Australian, Israeli, Palestinian etc. papers and websites. In this Internet age, there is no excuse for blind ignorance - unless you have consciously or sub-consciously decided to practice a form of intellectual willful blindness, which unfortunately, many seem to have done.

The reasons I am not a liberal, the reasons that I dislike leftist policies are simple. Lefties are generally pro-big government, they are slavishly pro-union, and mindlessly pro-affirmative action. In my humble opinion, I am a conservative because I favour small government, free markets, low taxes and am only interested in a meritocratic, no-quotas-allowed society.

I think that these are dark days for true conservatives. The conservative “movement” has been co-opted by extremists who have their own agendas to push and millions of people are buying it all – hook line and sinker.

You don't need spin and lies to disprove leftist theory. You need common sense and a sense of fair play.

Back to your debate.

Joe

 

Art, I am not quite sure why this comes as such a shock to you? I think it is interesting that you are trying to turn this into a Democrats vs Republican thing. The fact is both parties have been doing this sort of thing for as far back as I can remember. I am sure just as many Democrats as Republicans over the years have been guilty of dirty dealings. That is why I said I'm not sure why this comes as a shock. I think you should stop trying to defend the Democrats and get behind a party that will make some real change not just make it look good. The fact is the system the way it is needs to change. Neither of these two parties will ever put this country back where in should be. Come over to the Libertarian side and help us get rid of all the "good ole boys" from both parties!

 

Joe, I'm not trying to be difficult but you just did the very thing you are accusing everyone else of doing. case in point.

" The reasons I am not a liberal, the reasons that I dislike leftist policies are simple. Lefties are generally pro-big government, they are slavishly pro-union, and mindlessly pro-affirmative action. In my humble opinion, I am a conservative because I favour small government, free markets, low taxes and am only interested in a meritocratic, no-quotas-allowed society.

I think that these are dark days for true conservatives. The conservative “movement” has been co-opted by extremists who have their own agendas to push and millions of people are buying it all – hook line and sinker."

isn't that just, as you put it

"bright people adhere so blindly to their ideology of choice, making a conscious decision to ignore proven facts that don't fit with their world view"

The Conservatives, as you said, are just as responsible for the state of affairs as the Liberals. They have both basicaly shared power over the last 200 years or so. Why not try a fresh approach? What do we have to lose? Give the Libertarians a try, if we don't like them we can always vote them out. I am sure they can do no more harm than has already been done by the other two!

 

Then don't vote for either Dems or Repubs. Only the assention of a valid, engaged, useful third party can knock the ckips off the other two parties and get them back to work for the american people rather than the special intrests.

 

Thank you Mitch! My point exactly!

 

Charles, Mitch - I agree with you. Were I an American, I would definitely vote for an independant of some kind. Of course, I believe the vote would be almost completely symbolic. Same problem we have up here in Canada. We need to choose between the "lesser of two evils" in order to avoid vote splitting that gives even more power to the people you want out of power. It has happened a few times here (both Federally and Provincially), with disastrous results.

I'm actually going to read up on Libertarianism - sounds interesting.

As far as your two main parties (and ours of course) both of them are so beholden (is that even a word?) to their respective special interest groups that I sadly agree with whomever said that democracy has been "for sale" for a long time now.

I guess what prompted me to post was just reading here (and on all my news sites) how Richard Clarke is being either lauded or pilloried based on simple partisan politics. All that is important (to my idealistic mind) is:
- what went wrong (not was it Clinton or Bush's fault)
- how is the war on terror coming along?
- are we safer now or less so?
- how can we improve

Joe

 

"The majority of Americans are aligned with the goals and issues of the Democratic party."

Art my man, you have been watching too much CBS, NBC, ABC & PBS. Not to metion Time, Newsweek and the NY Times!

8^)

From Kerry's $0.50 a gallon gas tax, to the the shrill and unthoughful campaign to impose gay "marriage" - the Democratic party needs a major re-alignment in order to start winning some campaigns.

 

Is that the same type of Democratic thinking that says that Americans want MORE gun control? That's what the liberals like Feinstein always say. Of course they conveniently ignore the REAL facts like: 37 states now have right-to-carry laws. http://www.nraila.org/Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?ID=18 And read the fine print at that link. SIXTY FOUR PER CENT of the population lives in those 37 states.
And one after another, these states are responding to the TRUE goals and issues of the PEOPLE, not the agendas of a bunch of truth-twisting liberals.

 

Fundamentally, the issue is: the basis, grounding and truth of the premises'/justifications used to invade, and go to war with Iraq.
It seems as though Clarke is simply presenting that the Bush administration played on the anxieties and fear exacerbated by the 9/11 attacks to justify a war in Iraq. The mistake(s) was the fallacious use of a WMD litany to garner approval and the premise was that we were in clear and present danger. The fact that no such usable weapons were found, nor that any such "clear & present" danger existed, leads both the cynic and the rational observer to the same question: Were we lied to?
We were sold on the notion that Sadamm had the means, the weapons, the desire and the inent to launch a fullscale (terrorist) attack on U.S. soil using WMD. Since our President, and his admin, assured us of this (in light of contrary evidence furnished by the U.N. inspectors) the people of America agreed to leverage U.S. lives, and money, to invade a country poised to attack us.
Now that it has become well known that neither the means, the possiblity, or the weapons themselves existed, it's only reasonable to ask whether or not we were lied to and used by our Admin.
Art's intital link in this thread simply points to evidence that the Administration had a vested fiscal interest to push for an invasion of Iraq; moreover, with the added implication that the military justification was of dubious merit (i.e., no WMD), the possibility that the invasion of Iraq was waged as a chessmove to establish a fiscal foothold in the mid-east is a very real possibility, and as Art has proclaimed, the evidence to that end will mount.
My utter confusion arises from the fact that people, on both sides, are willingly forgetting the last two years. The war in Iraq, in my memory, went from being: a mission to erradicate a clear and present danger to the U.S. by way of a terrorist like attack using WMD jointly executed by a co-op of Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorist cells ... to a Humanitarian mission to dispose of a Dictator guilty of murdering his own people to, and to speard Democracy throughout the mid-east to ... well, what is it now?
In my mind, I've only seen a wanning of credent evidence for why we invaded Iraq in the 1st place, and since we've discovered no weapons, there's been a flurry of spin to "justify" what in minds of many, has become a conflict based on lies. No matter what moral perogative is used to jusifty the invasion, the root question must remain: Did the President knowingly, and willingly, lie to garner approval (i.e, link b/w Iraq and AlQaeda; lie about WMD and present danger; etc)?
A lot of you give Art a helluva a lot of **** about his views, but have forgotten that another, more conservative (and also extremely well read) member of this board Mr. Jon Kofod was not convinced by the Admins argument for war with Iraq, and found it to be unfounded -- but I have yet to see any banter against Mr. Kofod's contentions (which in hindsight, had impeccible clarity -- as usual.)

 

So we're saying that it was wrong for the Bush administration to waffle back and forth on the facts behind the Iraq invasion, but that it is acceptable for Richard Clarke to waffle back and forth on the facts? By waffling back and forth, I am referring to the transcript of his letter of resignation. There was no mention in that letter of any large disagreement between Clarke's viewpoints and the administration's actions. So why all of a sudden is he grandstanding about these great concerns that he had about the way the Bush administration was handling things? Why didn't he make mention of any of that in his letter of resignation? Or was he just being a good soldier and not questioning the orders of his superiors at the time? It would seem to me that if Clarke was so against the way that things were going, maybe he should have resigned sooner and voiced his concern in his letter of resignation.

 

The lying or silence of Clarke to keep his job (if then) or sell books (now), or the lying of Kerry to get elected are one thing.

Lying that results in actions that kill 16,000 people, at least 500 american soldiers, alienate the u.s. from the rest of the world community, turn a secular middle east country into another breeding ground for islamic radicals to raise terrorists, and so on is quite another level of lying. No?

 

All I'm presenting is this: I remember being explicitly told that Iraq (as embodied by Hussein) had WMD and presented a clear and present danger; i.e., an immanent threat to the U.S. This justification was brought to bare, part & parcel, with the contention that Hussein, and AlQeada, was in cahoots (of one for or another). Thus, Hussein (as an implied co-conspirator), was guilty, and stood to be eradicated for his alleged complicit actions. Then (after no WMD surfaced), we were told that the true mission in Iraq was a humanitarian one to disenfranchise a homicidal dictator, and to spread democracy in the mid-east.
This is where a lot of people threw the BS flags, and pointed to the possibility of an overriding fiscal opportunity that the Admin was taking advantage of by invading Iraq, and how it could have used the anxieties and fears generated by the 9/11 attacks to garner approval for an invasion.
Now, when evidence (like that in Art's org. link) arises, and presents --on paper-- the likelihood that the Admin did have a paramount fiscal motivation to invade Iraq, I begin to think that this campaign was built on a lie; i.e., the WMD lie.
In the end, my beef is this: there's a growing tenant that the Admin lied to us about the WMD, Iraq's links with terrorists and AlQaeda, and about their original intentions behind the invasion. The more pressing these allegations have become, the more " back & forth" the Admin has engaged in.
I'm not advocating for the absolute acceptance of Clarke's "facts." What I want is the opportunity to investigate the possibility that we were told a huge lie, and that we're still being undermined with that regard.

 

What am I, chopped liver?

 

i have just read eight pages of ...i don't know what!

it should always be about issues folks ...not about party!!

art, while you fight a great fight, why do you do it here? why do you waste your words on some of these people?

tifosi...you will get your chance to vote a straight ticket in november.
we would expect nothing less!! thanks for all the ranting as it has been memorable. i just pray you are done now.

guys it really is all about election or re-election...and ego period!!

party politics aside, can you not see that the war in iraq has been and will continue to be a collassal fug up?

 

There's 2 sides to that coin: Why does anybody waste their words with Art?

 

and here we go again.....
it does not make any sense for people to say that bush, blair, clinton, blix, chirac, albright, powell etcetc lied about wmd. they all agreed that the means or the weapons were there.
now that only limited evidence has been found, the conclusion should be that there intelligence gathering on the subject was evidently flawed.

because firstly to claim that they ALL lied conspirationally, is just impossible given the lack of coordination between people of such disparate perspectives. secondly, if bush all by himself lied, then he should have planted evidence to justify his lie, suppressed the kay inquiry in some way etcetc. he didn't.

so could the wmd evidence be false? yes absolutley. blame and pillory whoever you want for this error. but don't try to make it into a lie.

 

One thing I know is that Bush shouldn't be joking in public about the fact that they haven't found the WMDs. He asked many American families to give up their sons and daughters to find and remove those WMDs and it is no laughing matter. How anyone in the military could vote for him after hearing those jokes is beyond me.

 

the military vote? they will probably vote for bush given that he has proven that he is looking out for them. yes he sent them into battle and asked for sacrifices (as did kerry by voting for the war), but he backs it up by giving them what they need to survive and succeed (unlike kerry since he voted against the appropriations, and every new weapons and military expenditure in the last 20 years).