Re: OT - some perspective on history...

"gtski" <xxgtskixm@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:J14Rh.3438$WL4.1836@xxxxxxxxxxx

We didn't attack Iraq in *response* to 9/11... we attacked the Taliban/Al
Queda in Afghanistan.. (some of us know this.. but obviously not all) The
reasons for attacking Iraq are known as well, and are public record for
you and anyone else to see. Just google Bush Speech/UN/Iraq... to get the
compete text of Bushs reasons for regime change in Iraq. Also, you can
google up the vote by the US Congress on whether to use military force in
Iraq.

Right, it was all about regime change, nobody ever made any speeches about
WMDs, not Bush, not Cheney, no mentions of mushroom clouds, never happened.
And all that post-invasion searching for WMDs that came up empty,
irrelevant. And the administration's public statements on how to deal with
Saddam were exactly the same after 9/11 as before, sure, 9/11 had nothing to
do with the invasion of Iraq.

What made Saddam a threat..???? Saddam made Saddam a threat... if after
all these years, you can't figure it out, no use my trying to explain it
to you.

Especially as an empty threat is no threat at all, and your explanations
tend to be just repeating the same opinions over and over.

Did Saddam have to be watched, sanctioned, even bombed occasionally as he
pushed his luck? Absolutely, he would always have had the intention to be a
threat. But without the physical means to deliver on his threats
containment was all that was needed. Maybe that could have changed if the
UN had loosened the sanctions and Saddam had rebuilt his military and
restarted his WMDs efforts, but that wasn't the case in 2003. Hey, you know
who expressed that opinion more than once prior to 9/11? Dick Cheney, funny
how that's been forgotten by some folks.

FWIW, there were some VERY *important* people back in the late 30s who
REALLY saw no danger in Hitler... actually admired him... This happens
through-out history... so you're in "good company"...

Are you really that desperate? Quote me ever saying Saddam could never
again have become dangerous, I've posted again and again that he would
always be a potential danger and had to be contained and subject to
sanctions to keep him from rearming and pursuing WMDs as he once had. If
you can't counter what I actually say, don't make up shit and represent it
as my views, that's a cheap stunt.

The freaking *intel* is slapping you on the forehead and you don't even
realize it..!!!!

The guy is SAYING that Saddam and his cronies WANTED to attack...! ! ! !

HEEEELLLLL-OOOOOO....

So what? He had nothing to attack with, the same guy who said Saddam wanted
to attack said he couldn't have done it, that what was left of Saddam's army
would have been smashed flat, he predicted the Iraqi Army would be finished
in *days* in a direct scrap with the U.S.

Hey, Hugo Chavez is no friend of the U.S., makes lots of outrageous
statements too, and he's shopping around for new military hardware, so do
you figure the U.S. should be looking at an invasion of Venezuela rather
than waiting for Chavez to take a swipe at the U.S.? After all, hostile
intentions are all that matter, right?

You claimed the Iraqi air force was small and incapable, yet to mount a
bio/chemical attack as it had before, few planes were needed. I know that
might be hard to follow... but there is plenty of documentation about it.
Google it up///

Your insistence that anyone who disagrees with you must therefore be
ignorant and needs to do some reading is going beyond being insulting, it's
becoming pathetic.

Ooops.. you said the US screwed up... you mean Clinton screwed up..?? He
allowed a LOT more than just letting helos fly around.. Oh, and are you
suggesting that gas attacks by helicopters happened after Gulf War One..??
Are you suggesting Saddam and his admin did NOT slaughter lots of people
after Gulf War One..??? Are you saying Saddam/Iraq had no ties to terror
groups after Gulf War One..??

??? WTF? Clinton? Was Clinton in the White House when Swarzkopf marched
those Iraqi generals into that tent and made them sign off on his terms but
unfortunately allowed them to keep their choppers flying with unfortunate
consequences for those whom the U.S. encouraged to rebel against Saddam?

And how exactly was Gulf War One "justified"... ??? Please compare how it
was more justified in comparison to other wars...

Hmmm, that's a tough one, let's see, Iraq invaded another nation and was
thrown out by the Gulf War I coalition, as opposed to the Gulf War II
coalition invading Iraq on the grounds that Saddam might one day attack
somebody. Yeah, I can see how you would find that a difficult
compare-and-contrast problem.

You must mean 'delivery by airplane/helicopter'... but, you could've save
the US/Coalition military force a HEAP of trouble/concern if you'd just
told them not to worry about chemical/gas attack by the Iraqis. They were
VERY convinced it was a real possibility... silly them.

The book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq discusses how
planners for the invasion kept pointing out that the claims of WMDs still
being available to Saddam weren't being matched with evidence to support the
claims, they kept asking why various locations were being listed as WMD
sites when there was no hard evidence to support that. After being told to
shut up and get with the program again and again they eventually did just
that. So there's the Army rolling in expecting gas attacks any minute, not
realizing that they were operating with bogus intel, that the WMDs they were
worried about did not exist, something their commanders should have known.

What threat...??? The one that Prez Clinton, most of the US Congress, and
all the Europeans thought to be there... (apparently, you think Bush was
the only one who thought they existed..???)

So if there is a drug problem in your neighborhood, who do you blame the
most, the people buying the drugs or the guy selling them? The Bush
administration eagerly believed anyone who said Saddam had a working WMD
program (like Ahmed Chalibi who had already been marked as an unreliable
source but was still listened to because he told the administration what it
wanted to hear) while ignoring anyone who presented evidence the
administration found inconvenient. And then Cheney gets up and announces
it's an absolute certainty Saddam has WMDs, not maybe, not possibly, for
sure. So, who gets the lion's share of the fault here, the ones who
believed the bogus intel, or the ones who promoted it?

You might recall that no nuclear weapons were found in Germany after the
war... obviously you are among those that feel we should suffer an attack
by WMDs *before* removing the threat. There are different levels of
threat, and you obviously don't see a capacity to develop, build, and a
well known propensity to use WMDs as a *real* threat.

This childish tactic where you resort to attempting to put words in other
people's mouths is about as pathetic as your assumption that someone with a
differing opinion is just ignorant. Like I said before, it would be wise
for you to stay away from a research-paper situation, that kind of cheap
stunt is not tolerated there.

You gratuitously leave out the deaths of how many Iranians died in the
Iraq/Iran war.

??? WTF?

Read and learn....

What astonishing arrogance.

DANG.... 40,000 Iranians killed by Saddam and his regime in two months of
fighting.... and after this, Iraq decides to use chemical weapons. But
YOU, you should have told the Coalition Forces not to worry... you knew
Iraq didnt HAVE chemical weapons...! ! ! BRILLIANT..! ! ! !

But I wasn't a senior policy maker in the Bush administration who
cherry-picked intelligence, relied on sources known to be unreliable,
discouraged dissenting views and generally cooked the books to push the
nation into the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place. It wasn't
my job to know bullshit from reality, that's what we trusted guys like
Wolfowitz and Perle and Franks and Bremer to do. Big mistake on our part.

Did you miss the part where he said Saddam WANTED to invade and said Allah
would help them..??? In case you forgot, Saddam was in total control. If
he said "attack", the army would attack...

And if he said he wanted them to attack Peru they would probably have given
it the old college try too, but of course they wouldn't have enjoyed much
success, would they.

Hey, I have intel that says a kid down the street from you is going to order
his blind, three-legged hampster to attack you and tear your throat out.
You better do a pre-emptive firebomb attack on the kid's house and probably
occupy the smoking ruins too, you can't afford to take any chances since you
apparently believe that intention by itself (without the means to make it
actually happen) is what counts.

Again, you tell us, what threat did Saddam pose when he was MORE than
willing to attack Kuwait..???

You mean before Gulf War I when his military was gutted, before his airforce
was shot to bits, 90% of his armor destroyed (according to this general you
referred us to), before he was put under international sanctions, part of
his nation occupied, before a no-fly zone was established, before the U.S.
routinely patrolled and bombed his territory when he got too frisky? In
other words, before Saddam lost the ability to invade anyone?

It matters not, how effective he felt the Iraqi force was, but how intent
Saddam was on attacking neighboring countries. You seem to miss that over
and over...

I hear the kid has some really mean gerbils too, you might need to put
together a coalition of neighbors to do something about this horrific
threat, because you don't want to wait for evidence in the form of a
mushroom cloud of stinky gerbil poop on your front porch.

You didn't hear it, nor pick up on the enormity of it. It's quite
obvious... and yet you miss it.

If it's so obvious, why can't you articulate it?

Your background on Iraq is obviously infinitesimally small..???

Well I'm not a career diplomat who did his doctoral thesis on Iraq under
Saddam as you did. . . . Oh, wait, that was sarcasm, sorry.

You must be a history major hoping to work for the State Dept...???
You'll learn...

I wish I could say the same for you, but you seem determined to believe that
one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in American history was
actually necessary and desireable despite how virtually everything the Bush
administration said about the invasion of Iraq has turned out to be smoke
and mirrors.

You should check out that book, Fiasco, the author is a long-time military
affairs journalist who interviewed hundreds of people researching the book,
from grunts to multi-star generals, diplomats, politicians. He quotes Bush,
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bremer et al. extensively, as well as those
with opposing views like Powell, Zinni and so on. But I'll warn you, it's a
depressing book. Reading of blunder after blunder committed before and
after the invasion--like stripping the force of most of the MPs who were
supposed to secure roads, arms dumps etc. after the invasion; or dissolving
the Iraqi army and police which put hundreds of thousands of armed, trained,
pissed-off unemployed men onto the streets; or wasting the talents and
experience of Special Forces; or failing to secure the borders--man, it's
really a tough story to see unfold. They ignored every lesson of
counter-insurgecy warfare, it's like the military and civilian leadership
alike wanted to forget everything they'd seen happen in Vietnam, and 3,300
Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis (so far) have paid for those
blunders with their lives.

Of course, you'd have to be willing to read a heavily-researched book that
challenges your beliefs in fine detail, only you can decide if that's
something you'd be willing to do.


.

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