The War In Iraq

I've often thought that this war is being compared to Vietnam - in
more ways than one.

I was too young to remember Vietnam, but I read about it and I had
some cousins that really were War Heros as opposed to getting a
"purple owie" (just a jab, calm down).

Many think Bush was wrong. Many think Bush was right. Many aren't
sure. A lot of people are unhappy with the way the war is going
regardless of whether or not they originally supported it.

But, let's drop the politics for just a moment. Forget that it wasn't
solely Bush that declared war on Iraq if you can. Forget the war on
terrorism for a moment, too. Forget weapons of mass destruction.
Forget that Iraq was a country run by a madman that would do whatever
he could to harm America and Americans.

It has often been asked "what is more evil? The deed of the evil, or
standing by and doing nothing while the evil takes place?" I'm sure
you have probably heard it asked a million different ways, but the
gist of it is this: if there is evil taking place, and you have the
power to do something about it, yet you stand there and do nothing you
are also committing an evil act.

Those of you that are religious should be able to understand this very
well as you have probably had it preached to you at some point or
another.

Undeniably the Hussein regime was slaughtering tens of thousands of
people....perhaps hundreds of thousands of people (more likely, though
I don't have the exact figures). Can we, as Americans with a good
conscious, completely turn our backs on this? I don't see it being
brought up anywhere in the leftist media, but I'll grant you that I
don't watch a lot of television.

I don't condone killing of innocent civilians, but inevitably in a war
people are going to get killed. You have to break a few eggs...blah,
blah, blah.

One thing that the war in Iraq has done is to reduce the slaughtering
of innocent people to almost nil. Yes, some are still dying as a
result of the war, and some are dying because their own people are
still blowing them up, but the days of mass graves or having your
whole family wiped out because you said something wrong are pretty
much over.

If for no other reason than that, I support our efforts over there.
When we pulled out of Vietnam the Communist slaughtered MILLIONS of
people. Apparently all the "peace lovers" leave that out about the
war, but it happened and it would not have happened had we stayed and
fought.

If we pull out, now....and Saddam (or someone else) gets back to his
country and does it again we will be to blame. It doesn't matter if
it's Kerry or Bush we have to finish this and make an effort to do it
right.

--Fullstate

Me and Mah 'Priller!

 

well said sir........
Richard

 

There is one little consideration that is being entirely ignored... That is
"International Law".. entailing many of the treaties that the United States
has been a party to, since the end of WWII..

Something was being done about Saddam Hussein for more than twelve years..
Iraq had been under the most stringent sanctions of any nation in history..
The entire country was in economic shambles and was virtually helpless
militarily..

Religion certainly has nothing to do with the conditions in Iraq nor the
decision to defy consequences of our actions when we broke the International
Treaties that have bound us for more than fifty years.. The decision that
led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq was purely political and economical..

That was not the reasons that we were handed over and over for pre-emptively
attacking Iraq.. The reasons have changed so often that one can't really be
sure why we are in this position.. The argument that Saddam Hussein was evil
and inhumane was not made until the very end.. That was when it became
apparent that Bush and Cheney had lied to America and the World about WMD's,
and chemical weapons..

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein was/is an animal and should be treated
as such..

When you break those eggs, you best be making a cake or at least an omelet..
So far.. we have complicated a problem and compounded it.. Iraqis are
leaving their country by thousands.. because of the disaster that our
invasion and occupation has created..

Not according to the news that we get from around the world.. People are
disappearing and families are searching for them as we speak..

The United States involvement in Viet Nam has nothing to do with our
involvement in Iraq.. The comparables of history are there and in place..
History is the teacher in this instance.. The only difference is that Iraq
is sitting on a quarter of the oil reserves in the world.. Strategically,
the country is located in that region to provide control over the entire
area..

I've seen no mention that anyone suggests that we abandon Iraq.. Criticism
of the policies that have entrapped America in this mess, with no exit plan
or strategy is not any form of suggestion that we pull out..

The desperate attempts by Bush and Cheney to tie Iraq to 911, WMD's,
Terrorism, bin Laden, etc.. are nothing more than furthur attempts to
mislead and deceive ..

It doesn't matter if

That has nothing to do with the criticism of Bush.. and his policies.. Kerry
and Edwards have both offered plans to resolve the issues in Iraq..

There are sharp contrasts between the challengers for the White House and
the current office holders.. The decision is simple.. Bush and Cheney have
repeatedly lied and distorted facts to justify their actions.. If you
believe they should be rewarded with another four years of that kind of
corruption, then by all means, vote for them.. Meantime.. be very careful
when you wag the flag of patriotism..

Your friend in Irving
Bill Walker

 

Nossir... Fullstate is a very close and good friend.. as are you.. In this
matter, you are both full of not the "right stuff".. LOL.. But the kind of
"stuff" that makes your eyes brown..

During this past month alone, you both should have been aware of the calibre
of men that are running our government.. You've both witnessed first hand,
the ruthless and lying that these people are capable of.. There are no WMD's
... there are no programs of atomic weaponry.. there are no ties to bin Laden
or terrorists.. Their own administration keeps coming forward with
revelations to dispute those claims..

You've both heard Bush and Cheney campaigning and debating these very facts
and losing.. Your support of men like these are not complimentary..to your
own judgements..

Your friend in Irving
Bill Walker

 

That is exactly what I was referring to, since that is what this thread is
all about..

Clearly,

LMAO.. that is far reaching and many things have changed since 1940... Would
you endorse going back to that time in history ??

I think not.. After WWII and 1945, many of the treaties that have been
adopted and many of the International organizations to prevent the
situations that prompted WWII, were put in place, negotiated and endorsed by
the United States government.. One was the aggression act that provided
international support for the U.S. to engage Saddam Hussein when he invaded
Kuwait..

Our world becomes a smaller place each decade, and we can no longer exist
without treaties and international order.. There have been many instances of
"reasons" for those treaties and that order.. in Iraq.. Disregard for those
treaties and order is not a solution for the problems that we now face..

Your friend in Irving
Bill Walker

 

That is exactly what Kerry said..

No, FDR did not invade mexico, but he

With all the information that Bush had available to him, he knew that Saddam
Hussein nor Iraq had anything to do with 911 ... Remember bin Laden ? That
is our enemy and he was being harbored in Afghanistan..

Same for FDR. It

You are talking about two different theatres of war, here..

apply.

You can talk about Morocco and any other place you would care to, but George
Bush ignored our own non-aggression treaties with the international
community when he adopted the "Pre-emptive Strike" policy.. He has ignored
the REAL enemy who did attack us on 911.. His policies in Afghanistan and
Iraq has caused chaos and havoc .. He's responsible for the useless deaths
of more than one thousand of our own and countless tens of thousands of
"innocents" in Iraq..

All the while he did this, he was lying to the American people and tried to
lie to the world community.. They didn't buy his lies and deceptions.. The
credibility of America is now at the lowest point in our history.. Thanks to
George Bush and Dick Cheney..

Your friend in Irving
Bill Walker

 

This is quite true....and I'm not a big favorite of the US policing
the rest of the world. But there is a big difference between a brutal
dictator that is oppressing and one that slaughters his / her own
citizens by the thousands on a whim.


--Fullstate

Me and Mah 'Priller!

 

GOOD COMMENTARY. the only additive info I can think of is: A lotta
folks agreed that Soddam was bad....we first knew of him in 1990 Gulf
War. And most Americans agreed after 911, that we needed to go after
those cowards, where ever they were. BUT at that time, a few months
after 911, the talk was of Bin Laden, being responsible, not Saddam.
The ‘‘Get Saddam theory’’ could have waited. But, when we were
told, that Saddam was making and storing and pointing WMD at America,
and his neighbors.......We all thought..OKAY..I guess we better go get
Saddam. And now we all know how that turned out?!?!
sat-10-09-04-@1050am

<>haveAgoodDay-Bjay<>

 

Don't be too quick here...I wasn't part of that "we all thought".

I said from the beginning of Bush's clan claiming WMDs that it wasn't
true. Common sense would dictate that Iraq didn't have anything more
than a few missiles which were left over from years back...and they
couldn't fly those 2 miles over the border with any real accuracy. The
chemical weapons that Bush's clan was claiming was false in the
beginning to anyone who put any thought to the equation. Fact is, the
chemicals they were claiming Iraq had only had a shelf life of about 6
months. Here they were claiming Iraq had them since the mid '80s and
"hiding them" from inspectors. If you'd paid attention to Powell's
speech in the UN, you would've noticed one thing in particular...all
the "images" used were either cartoon drawings provided by a defector
which would say anything to stay in this country or there were
comparison photos taken with a span of several months..."see the
truck, it's gone in this one"...NO SHIT! This was what the media
claimed to us that was so "compelling" that we needed to go to war.

No sir, don't get me into your "we all thought", because I said in the
beginning that it wasn't true and we were invading a sovergn nation
for no reason other than "Bush wanted to".

 

I've been saying that for months! Everyone seems to like to
conveniently forget that when they go on their Bush hating tirades.
Go figure.


--Fullstate

Me and Mah 'Priller!

 

He can't. That's why this is considered "illegal". If you've been
keeping up, a few steps were missed by our glorious leaders.

And if you think it's "pure bullshit", perhaps you can find those
weapons we went in there to "disarm". Where are they? That's what Bush
said we needed to go there for. Wasn't anything in his speeches up to
the point of the invasion which comprised of "he's just got that funny
mustache that just pisses me off".

Play it back...weapons of mass
destruction...biological...chemical...nuclear...mushroom
cloud...destruction...chaos...terrorists...nine eleven...

Where's the weapons? Before you say it's bullshit, go back to the
original reasons and then show me where those reasons were true.

That's right.

Right down a one way street, into an alley and meeting a Mack truck
head on?

You would think. But who's in charge? Do you want to blame the men and
women in uniform who believed we were going there for weapons? Someone
has to be accountable. The Senate and Congress didn't vote to go to
war. They voted to give the President the leverage of power to make
the decisions. For their mixed up reasoning, they thought it would be
best to have the President able to make sound decisions believing that
the President would never do what he did.

Now here we are, more than a year later, and not one person in his
administration has taken responsibility. Not one.

Bush has side-stepped the issue and managed to avoid taking
responsibility for his actions. He's managed to get some of the people
in this country to accept that some "faceless" entity has put us in
this position...by claiming "bad intelligence". He's the one who stood
in front of Congress telling the people about weapons and the deeds of
Iraq. He's the one who provided fake documents. He's the one who sent
Powell to the UN with a tube of powder and some cartoons to make his
plug. He's the one who stood in front of the UN demanding like a
cowboy.

And he's the one who sat on TV declaring that we would send our men
and women in uniform into Iraq to "disarm" Saddam Hussein.

After all the time when Bush was getting daily briefings, don't you
think he ever thought to ask "is this for real?". No, he waited until
AFTER hearings and committees come to the conclusion that we aren't
going to find any weapons before he says "welp, looks like we might
not find the weapons...but he was still thinking about starting a
program".

Don't put it back off on Kerry...he didn't do any of these things. I
don't agree with Kerry for voting to shift the responsibility, but it
was Bush who took the responsibility and abused it.

 

You asked if I knew where you were heading...I'm just calling it as I
see it.

You want to blame "both parties", but "don't blame Bush for that"?

Who DO we blame? In June of 2001, Rice and Powell both stated clearly
that Saddam Hussein did NOT have weapons of mass destruction and had
no ability to make such weapons. They both said the intelligence
showed clearly that Iraq had been contained and was not reinstating
their weapons programs. Only a few months later, they changed to Iraq
possessing "biological, chemical and even nuclear weapons"...and even
repeating over and over for the many light headed folks out there "we
can't wait until the smoking gun comes in the form of a mushroom
cloud".

What changed? It's called "data mining". Going over the same
intelligence to find new results.

Okay, my point was which direction do you want to go from there.
There's two ways to go, you can go upward to the people who made the
decisions or you can go downward to the people who supported those
decisions.

Which way?

Where are those documents? We haven't had anyone step up and give any
real evidence of any such documents. We HAVE had many who stepped up
to say the information Bush was spewing was not correct. Those were
the many inspectors and the many leaders outside the United States.
There were also many in this country who said the information wasn't
correct. Remember those? Those were the one's who were labelled as
"unpatriotic"...and/or "not supporting our troops".

I can assure you that the CIA didn't just wake up one day between June
2001 and the end of 2001 to declare that Iraq had popped a bunch of
nukes and biological weapons out of Saddam Hussein's butt for all the
world to see. That's pretty stupid for someone like me...and I'm not
in the intelligence business. One doesn't build a nuclear weapon that
fast and on the other side, one doesn't contain biological weapons for
that long.

No, when Powell made his presentation before the UN, it was well
orchestrated...not to impress the UN, but to impress the people of
this country and gain support. He used cartoons that looked menacing.
He used photos of trucks moving around. He used a tube of substance
(that might as well have been diet coke, for the chemical he claimed
would've had as much shelf life as to been as strong as that cola) to
say Iraq hadn't accounted for it. He even used George Tenet as a
potted plant to say "see, the CIA is behind me on this". No one at the
UN bought his propaganda, and neither should we had we (and I'm saying
"we" as in "not me") been paying attention to what was going on.

Besides, as Hans Blix said "it's amazing to me that you can have 100%
certainty of the existance of weapons, and 0% certainty of their
locations".

Oh, one more thing...getting pissed off won't change the facts.

 

You're just upset that you lack the intelligent fortitude to conduct a
discussion on a political topic without insulting others.

Well said? You don't know *what* is being said. Remember? You have
that kill file turned up where you can't seem to follow a single
thread in it's entirety. Heck, with your demonstrated talents of kill
file designs I'm sure it's difficult for you to read your own
messages.

 

That's good. I don't care if you get pissed off, as long as it remains
civil on this topic. I'm not going to resort to insults, and I'd
appreciate the same in return. As much as I enjoy talking politics,
it's not worth it to me to get down to insulting someone else because
of their beliefs...even if their beliefs are incorrect.

I've been noticing lately that many who get on the subject of politics
expect to insult as a common way of discussion. I'll be discussing an
issue with someone who might agree with me, or at least mildly
disagree...and someone from no where screams out "well it's better
than Clinton screwing up the great things Reagan did for this
country"...so there-abouts. I'm finding I can piss more people off by
just giving the facts and evidence, than getting into a screaming
match with them. It works pretty well. Especially when I turn their
tactics back on them.

I was just calling it as I saw it. If you were going to "blame"
everyone who supported the decision, you have to blame everyone.
Passing all the blame on the CIA is just as ridiculous as blaming the
soldiers fighting the war. The CIA isn't so stupid as Bush and his
administration would make us believe. You can't convince me that
someone in the CIA would believe Iraq was an "imminent"(sp?) threat
against the United States...or the other things Bush made claim to.

I'm not using my sources from news networks. I'm using my sources from
the "horse's mouth".

I use interviews, speeches and reports to reach my conclusions. I
weigh what I hear them say and when they say it to what I know to be
factual. As with the WMDs, I just know/knew Iraq couldn't have
possessed those weapons based on the factors of time. Many called me a
liar and called me conspiracist and called me unpatriotic and not
supporting the troops, but who's right?