First no one said that Iraq ever had any nuclear capability, just that they had WMD’s and

were interested in developing nuclear tech.

And my post obviously stated that it was said that Iraq had WMD so Sam I’m not getting your gotcha reply.

Iraq had neither nuclear facilities going

Was what I responded to. You then say

And I also never said they had them, but that they were trying to build them and that was enough to go in.

Sam you did not say Iraq had Nuclear facilities rather that the lack of facilities show how we were “lied” to. The only problem was that there were never claims of any facilities by anyone. Just comments on Saddam’s desire for nuclear capabilities. As to who believed Saddam had WMD’s, how about United States, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Australia, Japan, even Iran. Show me where I’m wrong. What nation on my list before 2003 said they didn’t think WMD’s were in Iraq.

Meanwhile, I’m asking my broker to by me some ExxonMobil stock. Then I’m going to get my prescriptions changed.

You lack the required cynicism, I would suggest a different line of work. You would be doing yourself and the American Public a favor.

Iraq floats on a sea of oil and anyone who can control access to said oil can use that control to manipulate oil prices and supplies. That control can be used to reward or punish their adversaries/competitors/enemies.

He who controls the Spice controls the universe – Dune

I love the way you employ terms like “the government of Iraq” and ” [events in Iraq]subsequently became chaotic”. Untethered from any general meaning.

Bones,

The “smoking gun be a mushroom cloud”? Nah, Americans would not think that Iraq had, AND WAS GOING TO USE, a so called WMD.

That claim, in fact, is incorrect. Repeating it doesn’t make it right, either. Isreal has the finest intelligence network in the Middle East, and they didn’t seem too concerned about any perceived threat of Saddam’s WMDs. When there is a threat, they simply fly a few F-16′s in the dark of night and take out the WMD, as they did in the 1980′s and again in Syria earlier this year. If there were a chemical or biological agent that could wipe out tens of thousands of Isrealis, they wouldn’t hesitate to strike…and yet they sat quietly as Bush’s agents kept trotting out France, Germany, Russia and Britain intelligence reports (which all relied on the CIA) to the MSM.

Bruce Fein recovered documents from Cheney’s secret energy meetings, and the maps of Iraqi oil fields contained the names of American corporations that otherwise had no claims to Iraqi oil fields before 2005. Why? Don’t be flippant or dismissive in your response. Any serious answer would acknowledge that these were the spoils of imperialism footed by money borrowed from China and owed by American taxpayers.

And we never provided aid to Saddam? I don’t know if you were born after the 80′s but we provided Saddam with quite a bit of aid back in the day. He was our go to guy when we wanted Iran to bleed.

And the Iran thing is totally incidental, just a byproduct of the situation. I honestly think Bush thought we’d have the whole thing wrapped up in short order with a pro-america democracy gov’t by 2004 perfectly willing to keep Iran in check. Thats just not how it worked out.

Second, we have a war that was started on unquestionably false premises. Iraq had neither nuclear facilities going or active assistance to terrorist networks going. The administration could not have definitive proof of either since it wasn’t going on, which at best meant we started a war on a hunch. Our purpose was retconned to spreading democracy once this was shown to be true to the public.

This statement is misleading or wrong in every aspect. First no one said that Iraq ever had any nuclear capability, just that they had WMD’s and were interested in developing nuclear tech. They whole “yellow cake” issue was that they didn’t get it not by anyone standards that the didn’t try.
Since every major intelligence agency on the face of the planet believed it was more likely than not that there were WMD’s in Iraq pissing and moaning about how it was all a conspiracy is absurd.

The rest of the tirade is no better. We never provided significant aid to Saddam, nukes were never mentioned, and now maybe it was because Bush wanted to help out Iran?

First off, we had a very secretive grp(Haliburton was almost certainly one of them) of energy execs meeting with the administration pre-war. For some reason energy policy discussions are now top secret.

Second, we have a war that was started on unquestionably false premises. Iraq had neither nuclear facilities going or active assistance to terrorist networks going. The administration could not have definitive proof of either since it wasn’t going on, which at best meant we started a war on a hunch. Our purpose was retconned to spreading democracy once this was shown to be true to the public.

This reason rings hollow as despite our rhetoric as we routinely support dictators who provide us with strategic support, Saddam himself was one of them. Pakistan is another. Maybe its true, but considering the likelyhood of it happening and the fact that frankly that obligates us to fix half the world we can’t be that serious about it. Clearly there is another reason we are there.

Now we have an agreement, despite claims from the administration previously that we specifically were not going to do this, to stay in Iraq indefinitely. Our asking price is apparently favorable deals for private companies to get access to resources within Iraq for the forseeable future.

So, there were no guarantees about finding nukes or stopping terrorists, there is no guarantee about democracy getting up and running in Iraq anytime soon, nor even of a country living peacefully under any gov’t anytime soon. Hundreds of thousands dead, trillions in taxpayer money going down a rathole, and our influence in the world greatly diminished.

As far as I can tell there were only two groups that were 100 percent guaranteed to make out well from a decision to go into Iraq. Iran, for whom Iraq had traditionally been a check on to middle eastern dominance, and the corporations who are a) directly profiting from this chaos and b) have close, some would say intimate, ties to the Bush administration.

Since I’m pretty sure Ahmadinajad was not allowed into the pre 2003 energy policy meetings I would really really like to see a list of who was and check it against those who have been making fortunes as a direct result of the invasion of Iraq. Life is not an episode of Three’s Company. Things are very often exactly as they appear.

DLS, doesn’t any of this outrage make you want to bash Bush?

I believe you’re missing the real issue. The Usual Suspects are screaming that we never should have been in Iraq are invader-plunderers, et cetera. Then when the government of Iraq actually does not take this position but chooses on the rational side that many in the USA and West already took, namely that we obviously cannot rush out right away or there would be chaos, the howling begins anew. That is the issue here, not Bush’s ineptitude in “winning the peace” (to quote Anthony Cordesman at CSIS; Rudi’s not the only one aware of this subject). The issue here is that the most vocal, least rational anti-war people are using another excuse to hurl venom at Bush and the US presence in Iraq. Never mind that they’ll probably be first and loudest (the usual case) if we left early and Iraq subsequently became chaotic.

Its basically really starting to look like all this death as war was literally about lining the pockets of those with ties to the administration.

This is where I believe you engage in excess. Certainly this is an issue; we started to see this as well with the hurricane cleanup back here at home. For all I know, given the situation with favored contractors in Iraq, we (Bush administration) may have bribed the Maliki government, not merely convinced them that we were its best bet for current survival. But it’s hardly the only thing, or element with the Iraq situation. What about Iranian misconduct, for starters? And so on.

This thread was just more howling at having some, this time some in Iraq, not merely in the USA, express a desire for the US forces not to leave IMMEDIATELY! [stomping feet and flailing arms]

This is like returning to the stone age, where it was simply an animalistic competition for survival. Kill whatever is in your way. Grab whatever you can grab. Centuries of striving for a civilization that offers something for the spirit as well as the belly are being turned 180 deg.

All those fine speehces. All the lives lost. All the agonizing attempts to understand Iraq and the ME.
For this?

Oh,and I can see the tax breaks coming for those who will profit, as the ordinary folk shoulder the financial burden of this accomplishement. If they dare to complain about health care, or affordable
housing, they’ll be dismissed as ‘unpatirotic’

Not ever having had the least desire to live in a jungle, I just want to avert my eyes from this one.

.

Honestly, I thought Clinton was a creep for lying to America. But at least his lies were engineered to cover up embarassing personal behavior, not the goals of our foreign policy. The PNAC urged Clinton to remove Saddam in 1998- many of those who signed that letter ended up in the administration- so it should surprise no one that one of the first acts after 9/11 was to go after him. We also tend to forget that this administration intended to use their policy of regime change in many other ME countries- Iraq and Afghanistan were just the beginning.

What I want more than anything, and i’m sure it would damn Bush forever, is information on those meetings held in secret at the start of Bush’s first term with his “Energy advisory” people on our energy policies. I don’t know if the Freedom Information Act would cover it but I’m certain that many of those reaping the benefits of this war were at that meeting and helped to steer us towards it. The staunchly defended secrecy of the meetings alone warrants further investigation.

Just another day of bashing Bush and the USA…

Well, I don’t think anyone is bashing the USA, or Bush for that matter.

Just pointing out that they tend to lie through their teeth.

Does Bush (or DLS for that matter) really believe Americans suffer from mass amnesia?

President George W. Bush, April 13, 2004:

“As a proud and independent people, Iraqis do not support an indefinite occupation and neither does America.”
then-U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, August 14, 2005:

“We do not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. Our goal is to help Iraq stand on its own feet, to be able to look after its own security, and to do what we can to help achieve that goal.”
Condoleezza Rice, April 4, 2006, quoted by Agence France-Presse (Via Nexis):

Rice would not say when all U.S. forces would return home and did not directly answer Rep. Steven Rothman, a Democrat, when he asked, “Will the bases be permanent or not?”
“I would think that people would tell you, `We’re not seeking permanent bases really pretty much anywhere in the world these days.’ We are, in fact, in the process of removing base structure from a lot of places,” Rice replied.

But as knowledgeable as I have been about the ebb and flow of the military campaign, the growth of the insurgency and civil war, the eventual success of the Surge strategy in the absence of any effort by Prime Minister Al-Maliki and his American helpmates to get serious about trying to attain that stability, I did not want to believe that this was merely a 21st century version of American imperialism in Latin America, which included nearly 20 invasions in the Dominican Republican, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and elsewhere to protect and advance American commercial interests.

The Phillipines is actually a better model. Cernig at Newshoggs has an excellent post about this – he brings in Iran and Hakim into the mix, something others are ignoring. wonder what Maliki’s wifes shoe closet looks liek?

Shaun: Like you I weakly supported the war- provided WMDs were there. I still think it was justified, had they been there. But I still found all the wacky Leftists, who’d never take up arms, even after another Pearl Harbor, to be annoying.

Yet, one has to admit that they were right, even if, like the old saying, even a broken watch’s time is correct once a day.