Iraq has made us less safe, end of story

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
AliEnvy said:


Wasn't that the plan in South Vietnam?

Yes, and it succeeded in its goal of defeating the counter insurgency movement in South Vietnam. By 1970-1971, the Viet Cong had been completely defeated in the South and the war was being carried on totally by North Vietnam. The 1972 Easter Offensive by North Vietnam was caried exclusively by NVA units from the North and was repelled by the South Vietnamese military with the help of a few thousand US advisors remaining the ground and US airpower. Had the United States remained in advisory role past March 1973 on the ground, and kept supplying the South Vietnames military and launching airstrikes to support the South Vietnamese military, the North would never have been unable to overrun the South like they did in 1975.

Unfortunately, the United States withdrew prematurely before the task of building up the South Vietnamese military was complete, and congress no longer would approve funding of the South Vietnamese military pass the fall of 1973.

Despite being cut of from all military aid and supplies and no advisory or air support from the United States, the South Vietnamese held out against the Communist North for nearly 2 years. Its a shame the South Vietnamese were abandoned by the United States and a few years later were finally conquered by the Communist in the North and forced to live under their brutal dictatorship.

Had the United States not withdrawn prematurely from South Vietnam, it would be an independent democracy today as strong as South Korea is today.

If the United States repeats the same mistake in Iraq as it did in Vietnam by withdrawing too soon, then the process will fall apart and fail.
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Iraq has made us less safe, end of story

STING2 said:
It was a serious strategic blunder that he himself alluded to later in documents that have been found since the invasion. Its not the first time Saddam mis-caculated and it would not be the last either.

Fair enough, after all he was found hiding in a ditch eventually lol.

His troops were VERY easily driven from Kuwait so even if he had progressed beyond and continued lighting up oil wells, he would have been easily pushed back.

Besides, I'm sure some of your 89 brigades are still in Kuwait for this very reason.

The urgency is still not clear.
 
STING2 said:
Unfortunately, the United States withdrew prematurely before the task of building up the South Vietnamese military was complete, and congress no longer would approve funding of the South Vietnamese military pass the fall of 1973.

Or you could say they knew the task would never be fully realized within the contraints of the time and cut their losses.

At what point does that decision get made?
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Iraq has made us less safe, end of story

AliEnvy said:


Fair enough, after all he was found hiding in a ditch eventually lol.

His troops were VERY easily driven from Kuwait so even if he had progressed beyond and continued lighting up oil wells, he would have been easily pushed back.

Besides, I'm sure some of your 89 brigades are still in Kuwait for this very reason.

The urgency is still not clear.

Thats incorrect. Had Saddam pushed beyond Kuwait on August 3, 1990, there were no US troops to stop his forces from moving easily through Saudi Arabia. He could have taken all the major ports, capital etc. The US force that removed Saddam from Kuwait required the staging area of Saudi Arabia to build up over a 6 month period the massive force that was put in place. The supplies and logistics of such a massive force were heavily dependent on having a staging area and excellent ports to keep the large force supplied. If Saddam had continued into Saudi Arabia on August 3rd, he would have taken away the staging area and ports required by the United States to set up the force that re-took Kuwait.

Without a staging area, the United States would have a far more difficult time getting onto the Arabian pennisula. The amount of military force that the United States can simply act with that is based at sea is very small relatively and would not have been large enough to dislodge the Iraqi military from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. A new amphibious force would have to be built capable of siezing territory and holding it while gradually more troops would be brought in. It would be over year, probably more before the United States could effectively respond, and by then it would be to late in terms of the economic damage that would be done to the planet from being cut off from such a large amount of energy supply.

The swift victory in Kuwait required the easy build up in Saudi Arabia over 6 months with its good ports and facilities. Without Saudi Arabia as a staging area, the military action the US and its allies took in January 1991 would not have been possible.
 
STING2 said:


Had the United States not withdrawn prematurely from South Vietnam, it would be an independent democracy today as strong as South Korea is today.

If the United States repeats the same mistake in Iraq as it did in Vietnam by withdrawing too soon, then the process will fall apart and fail.

That is probably the best summary I have read to this date.

Sting, I really appreciate your posts, especially in this thread. Unfortunately, not many people seem to want to believe it - and it absolutely puzzles me. It almost seems there are many who are actually rooting against success. Very odd.
 
AliEnvy said:


Or you could say they knew the task would never be fully realized within the contraints of the time and cut their losses.

At what point does that decision get made?


US losses in the war went down from 16,000 in 1968 to 250 in 1972. The Vietcong had been totally wiped out, and the only threat now to South Vietnam was coming directly from the North. With less than 20,000 advisors and troops on the ground in South Vietnam, and US airpower, the South Vietnamese eventually crushed the Easter Offensive by the North in 1972.

The United States was spending far less on the war in 1972 than it was in 1968. It was no longer the drain on resources that it was four years earlier. Another 5 years of commitment and gradual withdrawal instead of a sudden exodus, would have insured victory. US airpower would remain in the region on Carriers to support the South Vietnamese military with any problems it would have beyond the point. The process was working and was something that the United States could sustain indefintely at the level of commitment found in 1972 which was a fraction of what it was in 1968.
 
Last edited:
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Iraq has made us less safe, end of story

STING2 said:
The swift victory in Kuwait required the easy build up in Saudi Arabia over 6 months with its good ports and facilities. Without Saudi Arabia as a staging area, the military action the US and its allies took in January 1991 would not have been possible.

That makes sense.

So given how critical the borders of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are and how vulnerable they were in 1990, in 2003 there was no US military presence in those countries to prevent an advance from Iraq?
 
AEON said:

It almost seems there are many who are actually rooting against success. Very odd.



the understanding that Iraq is a failed state with over 3,000 civilians dying a month -- which is equal to Saddam-levels of violence even including the Iran war, currently117 a day -- after over 3 years of occupation and the election of a government that is powerless to provide stability to the country is hardly rooting against success. what is shocking to me is the callous disregard for the thousands who are dead and the ignoring the fact that this isn't like any other war, this can't be understood in terms of Vietnam or World War 2, because the nature of this violence is sectarian, it is Sunnis killing Shittes, and vice versa, the Shiites having inflitrated the government, police, and military (the very things some thing will somehow save Iraq from itself) and now operate as soldiers by day/death squads by night.

it's confronting reality and thinking that there has to be a better way. it's also understanding the complete lack of necessity for the war and the fabricated sense of drama and urgency that hoodwinked a shell-shocked American public into cautiously supporting this war. it's about the refusal of the administration to do what was necessary to win in Iraq, which would have required more troops to provide greater security, which might have resulted in higher numbers of American dead, but more overall stability and fewer Iraqi civilian deaths.

and, finally, this cannot be separated from this administration. they have fumbled the war, turned American soldiers into Abu Ghraib caricatures, trashed the constitution, wrecked the fiscal future, deeply damaged our reputation, and have fused intolerant religiosity with a big government, big spending ethos.
 
AEON said:


That is probably the best summary I have read to this date.

Sting, I really appreciate your posts, especially in this thread. Unfortunately, not many people seem to want to believe it - and it absolutely puzzles me. It almost seems there are many who are actually rooting against success. Very odd.

Thank you, I appreciate your posts as well! FYM is a heavily a heavily anti-Bush forum. Based on how Bush did in our FYM polls for the election, we found that there is more opposition in FYM ratio wise to Bush than there is in a state like Massachusetts. I think part of the opposition to many of these policies in here tends to be more political and ideological sometimes rather than being balanced and unbiased. Unfortunately this also tends to force the small minority in here to spend their time bringing up only the otherside of the debate that otherwise would never see the light of day.
 
[q]I think part of the opposition to many of these policies in here tends to be more political and ideological sometimes rather than being balanced and unbiased. [/q]



and support for these policies isn't?

:lmao:
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Iraq has made us less safe, end of story

AliEnvy said:


That makes sense.

So given how critical the borders of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are and how vulnerable they were in 1990, in 2003 there was no US military presence in those countries to prevent an advance from Iraq?

There were several hundred US troops in Kuwait, and a few thousand in Saudi Arabia. There was also some prepositioned equipment, enough for an airlifted brigade at most. This was the maximum number of troops that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait would tolerate at the time given the political difficulties of having foreign troops on their soil. Its debatable whether Saddam could have overrun Kuwait again with his smaller and weakened military force( CIA similuations showed that it could), along with a fully maintained sanctions and weapons embargo, plus full disarmament of his WMD program. What is not debatable is that the crumbling of sanctions and the embargo, WMD capability or at least to the capacity to produce again, plus the enevitable re-equiping of the Iraqi military with more modern weapons as the embargo crumbled, would indeed create a serious unstable situation given the size of Kuwaits and Saudi Arabia's military forces and the tiny number of US forces supporting them relative to the size of Saddam's military which in 2002 had a total of 420,000 troops.
 
STING2 said:
Another 5 years of commitment and gradual withdrawal instead of a sudden exodus, would have insured victory. US airpower would remain in the region on Carriers to support the South Vietnamese military with any problems it would have beyond the point. The process was working and was something that the United States could sustain indefintely at the level of commitment found in 1972 which was a fraction of what it was in 1968.

That is a matter of speculation and would have been directly related to the level of support the North would have continued to receive from the Soviets...whose government didn't have to deal with bad PR and elections...

The US wasn't willing to directly confront the North and there was no more political will to prop up the South indefinitely. It was a no win situation from the beginning.
 
AliEnvy said:


That is a matter of speculation and would have been directly related to the level of support the North would have continued to receive from the Soviets...whose government didn't have to deal with bad PR and elections...

The US wasn't willing to directly confront the North and there was no more political will to prop up the South indefinitely. It was a no win situation from the beginning.



:up:

good points. i love the assumption of victory, "if only we hadn't ..." in fact, much of what is presented as fact is mere speculation, or, less charitably, wishful thinking.

by 1973, the US realized the war wasn't winnable, in any sort of meaningful sense, and the Paris Peace Accords were an attempt to both save US face as well as scale down the mass death in Vietnam.
 
Irvine511 said:
[q]I think part of the opposition to many of these policies in here tends to be more political and ideological sometimes rather than being balanced and unbiased. [/q]



and support for these policies isn't?

:lmao:

No, it comes from an understanding of longterm US foreign policy interest, needs, and goals, as well as what is needed to protect such interest or effectively achieve its goals. Its only been since the 1980s that the Republican party began to predominately have the best policies when it came to national security. My support for the present policies is not based on some total devotion to the Republican Party or George Bush. But you do often find that situation in both parties, and its more evident in forums where one group heavily outnumbers the other.
 
STING2 said:
we found that there is more opposition in FYM ratio wise to Bush than there is in a state like Massachusetts.

We?

"WE" keep stats on FYM?

What else do WE know about FYMers, Ken? May I call you Ken? :sexywink:
 
STING2 said:


No, it comes from an understanding of longterm US foreign policy interest, needs, and goals, as well as what is needed to protect such interest or effectively achieve its goals. Its only been since the 1980s that the Republican party began to predominately have the best policies when it came to national security. My support for the present policies is not based on some total devotion to the Republican Party or George Bush. But you do often find that situation in both parties, and its more evident in forums where one group heavily outnumbers the other.



you overestimate the unbiased nature of your own understanding. it's hugely pro-military, almost naively so at points with a consistent overestimation of the abilities of the US army as well as the motivations of those who use the army to further their political goals.

it's clear you know a great deal about the US military and military history, but it isn't at all clear that this understanding is at all unbiased or ideologically based. and your often inaccurate, dismissive, condescending accusations about what "liberals" want or "Democrats" think undercuts your above paragraph.
 
AliEnvy said:


That is a matter of speculation and would have been directly related to the level of support the North would have continued to receive from the Soviets...whose government didn't have to deal with bad PR and elections...

The US wasn't willing to directly confront the North and there was no more political will to prop up the South indefinitely. It was a no win situation from the beginning.

The evidence from 1968 through 1972 shows that was not the case. The policy was working. The insurgency in South Vietnam, the initial reason for the war in the begining had been defeated. The United States in 1972 did not not need to confront the North directly as all of the Norths offensive were being defeated as they went south. The South Vietnamese military was rising in capability, this is something that has been and can be measured based on the results of the years through 1968 through 1972.

The Soviets had already maximized their support to the north which was reliant on shipping materials through the port in Hanoi which was often blocked by US forces. The United States had the advantage and money and equipment it could arm the South with and was better positioned do to its naval military power projection capabilities to supply the South than the Soviets were able to supply the North.

By 1972 Vietnam was no longer the front page issue it had been in 1968. Nixon won re-election in 1972 by the biggest landslide in US history. The US involvement in the war on the ground was low, only 250 deaths in 1972 compared to 16,000 in 1968. The South was winning battles on its own. It was growing stronger and if the North could not defeat the South in 1972 with such limited support from the United States, it would never be able to defeat the South, unless of course the United States pulled the plug on everything which the US congress did in late 1973.

In contrast, there is no metric that shows that the North Vietnamese would have been able to overrun South Vietnam if the United States had kept supplying it and was ready to use its superior airpower to always tip the balance in favor of the South. Casualties to the US would remain tiny and were politically sustainable.

The Economics and resources were on the side of the United States and South Vietnam, not the Soviet Union and North Vietnam.
 
Irvine511 said:




:up:

good points. i love the assumption of victory, "if only we hadn't ..." in fact, much of what is presented as fact is mere speculation, or, less charitably, wishful thinking.

by 1973, the US realized the war wasn't winnable, in any sort of meaningful sense, and the Paris Peace Accords were an attempt to both save US face as well as scale down the mass death in Vietnam.

Really? If the North Vietnamese could not overrun South Vietnam in 1972 with their massive Easter offensive given the limited amount of US troops in the country, what makes you think they would be able to do it three years later if the United States had continued its limited efforts in the country and continued to supply the South Vietnamese military. The North Vietnamese counter to US airpower was not any better in 1975 than it was in 1972.

The 1975 offensive Armored/Mechanized offensive by the North was the same one they launched in 1972, the only difference this time was that the South Vietnamese had been without supplies from the USA for two years and much of their equipment was inoperable because of that, plus there had been no US advisors to help advance and improve the training of the force in the intervening time, and just as importantly, there was no US airpower.

Add in the missing advantages that the South had in 1972, and its a repeat of the 1972 Easter offensive all over again with defeat for the North. The United States had severed much of the large cost of the war to itself by 1972 and it was now out a level it could maintain indefintely if need be. On the other hand, the cost to North Vietnam were increasing. The North was failing to accomplish their goals, while the cost to them was increasing while the cost to the United States had fallen to a tiny amount relative to what it was in 1968.

There has never been any metric that showed that the war was unwinnable and all the metrics by 1972 show that it was indeed being won.
 
STING2 said:
In contrast, there is no metric that shows that the North Vietnamese would have been able to overrun South Vietnam if the United States had kept supplying it and was ready to use its superior airpower to always tip the balance in favor of the South.

Exactly, there's no metric, just speculation that US airpower would have held off the North's Soviet supplies.
 
Irvine511 said:




you overestimate the unbiased nature of your own understanding. it's hugely pro-military, almost naively so at points with a consistent overestimation of the abilities of the US army as well as the motivations of those who use the army to further their political goals.

it's clear you know a great deal about the US military and military history, but it isn't at all clear that this understanding is at all unbiased or ideologically based. and your often inaccurate, dismissive, condescending accusations about what "liberals" want or "Democrats" think undercuts your above paragraph.

I made a general reference about bias in the forum, not a personal one directed at any one individual. I also mentioned that it indeed goes both ways, and you would see more on the Republican side in Republican dominated forum.

It never fails that you will eventually make some inaccurate personal statement about an individual you don't even know.
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Iraq has made us less safe, end of story

STING2 said:
What is not debatable is that the crumbling of sanctions and the embargo, WMD capability or at least to the capacity to produce again, plus the enevitable re-equiping of the Iraqi military with more modern weapons as the embargo crumbled, would indeed create a serious unstable situation given the size of Kuwaits and Saudi Arabia's military forces and the tiny number of US forces supporting them relative to the size of Saddam's military which in 2002 had a total of 420,000 troops.

Then what was needed was new and better sanctions and embargos to cut off his military growth?

I'm not feeling it yet, Ken.
 
AliEnvy said:


Exactly, there's no metric, just speculation that US airpower would have held off the North's Soviet supplies.

I think you mean the Norths military. It is not speculation because it indeed happened while US airpower was still involved. The North launched the same type of offensive that had failed in 1972 in 1975. This time though, the South had been without supplies from the United States for 2 years, as well as the training advisors it had 3 years earlier. But most important, US airpower was not in the skies to decisively tip the scales in favor of the South at any point that the North was making in sort of progress in 1975. Add back in the things the South was missing from 1972 and its repeat of the Norths Easter offensive campaign that year that was defeated.
 
STING2 said:

It never fails that you will eventually make some inaccurate personal statement about an individual you don't even know.



you've indicted yourself, STING:



[q]I think part of the opposition to many of these policies in here tends to be more political and ideological sometimes rather than being balanced and unbiased. [/q]

[q]No, it comes from an understanding of longterm US foreign policy interest, needs, and goals, as well as what is needed to protect such interest or effectively achieve its goals. Its only been since the 1980s that the Republican party began to predominately have the best policies when it came to national security. [/q]

and that's just in this thread. if you're going to present yourself as clear thinking and unbiased, you'd better watch the comments you make about "liberals" in other threads so the above self-descriptions have any sort of credibility.

it would take hours for me to go through and pick apart your arguments, but it can and has been done -- one example is how your understanding of Resolution 1441 is incorrect, and this has been demonostrated over and over -- and this is because you're every bit as biased as anyone else and the information you select to present your case is every bit as cherry-picked as anyone else's.

and that's fine. just don't present yourself as above and beyond the "bias" of the forum, when you're as much a part of it as anyone else.
 
Irvine511 said:




you've indicted yourself, STING:

and that's just in this thread. if you're going to present yourself as clear thinking and unbiased, you'd better watch the comments you make about "liberals" in other threads so the above self-descriptions have any sort of credibility.

it would take hours for me to go through and pick apart your arguments, but it can and has been done -- one example is how your understanding of Resolution 1441 is incorrect, and this has been demonostrated over and over -- and this is because you're every bit as biased as anyone else and the information you select to present your case is every bit as cherry-picked as anyone else's.

and that's fine. just don't present yourself as above and beyond the "bias" of the forum, when you're as much a part of it as anyone else.

Thats real fascinating, and I know how much you love to talk about me, but I think it would be a good idea to get back to the topic of your thread since this is obviously not it.
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Iraq has made us less safe, end of story

Irvine511 said:




Saddam was set up.

he could never comply to the satisfaction of the US interpretation of UN Resolutions, and there was never an expectation that he would have, or could ever, have complied.
Saddam set himself up, it was his policy of maintaining the illusion of stockpiles to keep Iran at bay that kept the world assuming that he had them, given the events in Iran over the last 3 years a Baathist Iraq would probably have ramped up it's programs.
 
Over 800 attacks every week in Iraq

· Woodward and Pentagon clash over war toll
· Colonel says only pullout will end insurgency

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Saturday September 30, 2006
The Guardian




The Bush administration has misled the American people about the level of violence in Iraq, where there is an attack by insurgent forces every 15 minutes, Bob Woodward, the investigative journalist, said yesterday.

In a new book, State of Denial, Woodward argues that the White House disregarded warnings from advisers in the autumn of 2003 that it needed thousands more troops to put down the insurgency. He says the administration continues to deny the gravity of the situation in Iraq because of Mr Bush's conviction that it was right to go to war.

"It's getting to the point now where there are 800-900 attacks a week. That's more than a hundred a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces," Woodward told CBS television in an interview to be aired tomorrow night.

The Pentagon's latest quarterly report on Iraq, presented to Congress and posted on the defence department website on September 1, shows the number of attacks rising to 792 a week in August. However, that figure includes attacks on Iraqi civilians, infrastructure and Iraqi police as well as US and coalition troops. Iraqi civilians suffered the majority of casualties.

Woodward argues the administration routinely glosses over such news from the ground, as well as intelligence predicting further deterioration in Iraq, because they collide with Mr Bush's convictions.

The White House failed to act on a memo from Robert Blackwill, then the senior Iraqi adviser on the National Security Council, calling for 40,000 additional troops in Iraq, he writes. It is equally resistant to intelligence forecasts of worsening violence in the year ahead.

The National Intelligence Estimate, parts of which were released this week by Mr Bush, predicted rising violence in Iraq as the conflict there becomes a "cause célèbre" for the global jihad.

"The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], 'Oh, no, things are going to get better'," Woodward told CBS.

The vice-president, Dick Cheney, remained similarly unswayed by mounting evidence that Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction, phoning weapons inspectors at 3am to advise on possible locations of chemical warfare sites.

Such criticism is unlikely to dent Mr Bush's confidence in his decision to go to war. In a speech in Washington yesterday, he criticised those who say the war exposed Americans to greater risk of an attack by al-Qaida. "This argument buys into the enemy's propaganda that the terrorists attack us because we're provoking them," he said.

But as he tried again to rally Americans, the commander of US forces in the volatile Anbar province was predicting that the insurgency would not end until US forces were gone. "The insurgency's days will eventually come to an end. And they will come to an end at the hands of the Iraqis, who, by definition, will always be perceived as more legitimate than an external force like our own," said Colonel Sean MacFarland.

In this, his third book on the administration, Woodward relies on the off-the-record interviews with US officials that have become his trademark. But unlike his earlier chronicles of the White House, Woodward did not have access to Mr Bush or Mr Cheney.


Wow, this should be an interesting book. The US government has a madman driving the country off a cliff.

And the reason many people here disagree with the positions of the Bush supporters is not politics. It's called evidence and the facts on the ground. More and more people are realizing that this administration has mislead and betrayed it's own citizens and sent it's sons to an unnecessary war. A blithering idiot who is stubborn beyond belief with an issue he has no stake in. His children and familiy aren't at risk, his standard of living isn't at risk, the only thing at risk is his legacy. Big F'n Deal! This administration's response to criticism is like that of an insolent child. They pay no heed to any advice no matter the source nor how experienced. The good will and empathy after 9/11 has been squandered, the respect of the world for the values of the US is shrinking with each new power given to this excuse for a president, diplomacy is a four-letter word for this government and yet some people think the sun shines out of his ass. No offence, but those people are fools! The reason so many people around the world "hate America" now is not because of the people or your society it's because of one thing, George W. Bush. That's his legacy, destroying the reputation of America. And it's not because he is a Republican, there have been other President's who were Republican but were accepted and not vilified.

Quote me all you want and condemn my remarks, if you wish Bushites. I don't read your stuff anyway, the only reason I see your Bush-coloured view of the world is through the quotes of others. I stopped wasting my time a long time ago.
 
AliEnvy said:


The ambiguities of the Cold War containment policy included not doing anything to provoke direct confrontation with the Soviets and China...so it was truly an unavoidable rock and hard place between military leaders telling the politicians what needs to be done to win and everyone in Washington jockeying for position.
I wish every war COULD be fought the way the Cold War was - antimidation through space programs and such. The enemy was real, and we had communist subversion even in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Unfortunately, I don't think it would be enough to combat Islamic Jihad if we intercepted Al-Jazeera and showed Al Qaida what our space programs are capable of. The fact that Al Qaida had planned two additional MAJOR attacks that would make 9/11 look like nothing, doesn't leave me a whole lot of comfort that they are pursuing nuclear weapons.

AliEnvy said:
Ohhhh I loooove death tolls :|

Does the 300,000 include those who died after the US purposely baited Japan to attack Pearl Harbour?
Pearl Harbor was the 9/11 of the New Dealer generation. No reasonable American asked for the attack. I cannot possibly say that the entire country baited Japan - although FDR did provoke the Japanese to a fair degree, and he did want war with Hitler before the vast majority of Americans had considered the option reasonable. In reality, FDR was right on the money, we couldn't afford not to get involved. By the time we were attacked, it was much harder to get involved and fight an effective war. Because we knew we had to unite, there was an unmatched loyalty in the US - nobody put politics before survival.

One thing is for sure - the Democratic Party of today hates the idea of George W. Bush or any sitting Republican president taking credit for fighting an effective war on terrorism. That's why they're playing politics against a sitting president in a time of war - putting politics before national security. There are few exceptions - Ed Koch, Zell Miller, Dick Morris, Joe Leiberman, etc. But other than that, what have they proposed that will lead to a US victory, other than fantasizing about peace?
 
Macfistowannabe said:
Pearl Harbor was the 9/11 of the New Dealer generation. No reasonable American asked for the attack. I cannot possibly say that the entire country baited Japan - although FDR did provoke the Japanese to a fair degree, and he did want war with Hitler before the vast majority of Americans had considered the option reasonable. In reality, FDR was right on the money, we couldn't afford not to get involved.

Since you've made the comparison, are you willing to accept that the Bush administration allowed 911 to happen because they felt they needed to rally American support to remove Saddam?
 
A_Wanderer said:
Everybody should be supporting Iraqi democrats and the Iraqi people against the religious nihilists and the fascists who are murdering them daily. These groups will be defeated by the Iraqi's -doing this and keeping the country a democracy should be a framework for this goal.
"Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it."

from The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln

:up:
 
AliEnvy said:
Since you've made the comparison, are you willing to accept that the Bush administration allowed 911 to happen because they felt they needed to rally American support to remove Saddam?
The whole argument is grainy from top to bottom. It would be as if you were arguing that Clinton wanted 9/11 to happen by letting Mohamed Atta in the country while he was in office (January 10, 2001).

Clinton did not ignore of the US embassy bombings because he had an agenda, either. He was however warned, and obviously wasn't able to stop the attacks.

Paragraph #623 on page 130
Final Report of the 9/11 Commission

On December 17, the day after the United States and Britain began their Desert Fox bombing campaign against Iraq, the Small Group convened to discuss intelligence suggesting imminent Bin Ladin attacks on the U.S. embassies in Qatar and Ethiopia.The next day, Director Tenet sent a memo to the President, the cabinet, and senior officials throughout the government describing reports that Bin Ladin planned to attack U.S. targets very soon, possibly over the next few days, before Ramadan celebrations began. Tenet said he was “greatly concerned.”114 With alarms sounding, members of the Small Group considered ideas about how to respond to or prevent such attacks. Generals Shelton and Zinni came up with military options. Special Operations Forces were later told that they might be ordered to attempt very high-risk in-and-out raids either in Khartoum, to capture a senior Bin Ladin operative known as Abu Hafs the Mauritanian—who appeared to be engineering some of the plots—or in Kandahar, to capture Bin Ladin himself. Shelton told us that such operations are not risk free, invoking the memory of the 1993 “Black Hawk down” fiasco in Mogadishu.

Nobody wanted it to happen - yet nobody took terrorism seriously enough until 9/11 happened. I can't flat out say that FDR wanted Pearl Harbor to happen, nor did Winston Churchill, but both of them saw it coming.

Churchill Knew of Pearl Harbour Attack

There is also evidence that indicates that Roosevelt had inside information on the first attack on Pearl Harbor (there were actually two - one in 1941, the other in 1945 - for those of you who don't watch The History Channel).

Pre-9/11 - The Bush Administration was spending too much time playing watchdog to Iraq and ignoring Al Qaida - when in reality they should have been watchdogs to both. The Clinton-era Republican Party was wasting its time attacking Clinton for going after Bin Laden as to somehow shift public interests away from the Lewinsky scandal.

Here are some of the findings behind what allowed 9/11 to happen:

from THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT

After releasing the report, Commission Chair Thomas Kean declared that both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had been "not well served" by the FBI and CIA [2].

In addition to identifying intelligence failures occurring before the attacks, the report claimed to provide evidence of the following:

* Airport security footage of the hijackers as they passed through airport security
* Cockpit voice recordings of the terrorists as they hijacked and sabotaged the airliners
* Eyewitness testimony of passengers as they described their own final moments to family members and authorities on airphones and cellphones from the cabins of doomed airliners

There is valid counter-criticism for the 9/11 attacks - whereas the bureaucracy for the CIA, the FBI, the NYPD, and the Air Force that stumbled the ability for them to communicate with each other. Bush was forewarned, yes, but the targets were not disclosed in the threat, nor was the date or time of the attack.

Bush & Co. learned a valuable lesson on 9/11 however, and completely revised counter-terrorism in order to pluck out the root of Islamic Jihad, by going after both Osama bin Laden and those who have funded unrelated attacks against democratic societies.

I do have to wonder why Clinton waited until 1998 to go after Al Qaida - they have an extensive history of killing innocent people. Clinton made little effort to secure the borders, the airports, or any other way to prevent Jihadists from committing more ruthless acts of violence after the first WTC bombing.

Even as early as 1997, Dick Morris - who was key to Clinton's the presidential electoral victory in 1996 - spoke out against Clinton's inability to fight terrorism in his book, Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties. He is NOT a conservative, especially on domestic issues. He is however disassociated with Clinton & Co. when it comes to terrorism.

Today, he is outspoken about what could have been done in order to prevent further terrorist attacks. He even co-wrote FahrenHype 9/11 with actor Ron Silver to defend such policies as The Patriot Act and to debunk falsehoods of Michael Moore.

We now know of many terror cells exposed inside the United States, thanks to Steven Emerson, who was given a death threat from a South African Muslim group in response of his expose of Jihad in America, which he received from the FBI. He now lives undercover.

Even under such a death threat, he went on to appear in Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, and is a contributor for the Counterterrorism Blog, which provides information to policymakers.
 
Back
Top Bottom