Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
let's also not mention that, due to increasing rule by theocratic thugs and general anarchy, life is getting worse for Iraqi women and homosexuals
Life just gets worse in Iraq
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let's also not mention that, due to increasing rule by theocratic thugs and general anarchy, life is getting worse for Iraqi women and homosexuals
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
from Fareed Zakaria, a center-right conservative who initially supported the invasion:
[q]Oct. 16, 2006 issue - When Iraq's current government was formed last April, after four months of bitter disputes, wrangling and paralysis, many voices in America and in Iraq said the next six months would be the crucial testing period. That was a fair expectation. It has now been almost six months, and what we have seen are bitter disputes, wrangling and paralysis. Meanwhile, the violence has gotten worse, sectarian tensions have risen steeply and ethnic cleansing is now in full swing. There is really no functioning government south of Kurdistan, only power vacuums that have been filled by factions, militias and strongmen. It is time to call an end to the tests, the six-month trials, the waiting and watching, and to recognize that the Iraqi government has failed. It is also time to face the terrible reality that America's mission in Iraq has substantially failed.
More waiting is unlikely to turn things around, nor will more troops. I understand the impulse of those who want to send in more forces to secure the country. I urged just such a policy from the first week of the occupation. But today we are where we are. Over the past three years the violence has spread and is now franchised down to neighborhoods with local gangs in control. In many areas, local militias are not even controlled by their supposed political masters in Baghdad. In this kind of decentralized street fighting, 10,000 or 20,000 more troops in Baghdad will not have more than a temporary effect. Nor will new American policies help. The reason that the Democrats seem to lack good, concrete suggestions on Iraq is that the Bush administration has actually been pursuing more-sensible policies for more than a year now, trying vainly to reverse many of its errors. But what might well have worked in 2003 is too little, too late in 2006.[/q]
[q]Oct. 16, 2006 issue - When Iraq's current government was formed last April, after four months of bitter disputes, wrangling and paralysis, many voices in America and in Iraq said the next six months would be the crucial testing period. That was a fair expectation. It has now been almost six months, and what we have seen are bitter disputes, wrangling and paralysis. Meanwhile, the violence has gotten worse, sectarian tensions have risen steeply and ethnic cleansing is now in full swing. There is really no functioning government south of Kurdistan, only power vacuums that have been filled by factions, militias and strongmen. It is time to call an end to the tests, the six-month trials, the waiting and watching, and to recognize that the Iraqi government has failed. It is also time to face the terrible reality that America's mission in Iraq has substantially failed.
More waiting is unlikely to turn things around, nor will more troops. I understand the impulse of those who want to send in more forces to secure the country. I urged just such a policy from the first week of the occupation. But today we are where we are. Over the past three years the violence has spread and is now franchised down to neighborhoods with local gangs in control. In many areas, local militias are not even controlled by their supposed political masters in Baghdad. In this kind of decentralized street fighting, 10,000 or 20,000 more troops in Baghdad will not have more than a temporary effect. Nor will new American policies help. The reason that the Democrats seem to lack good, concrete suggestions on Iraq is that the Bush administration has actually been pursuing more-sensible policies for more than a year now, trying vainly to reverse many of its errors. But what might well have worked in 2003 is too little, too late in 2006.[/q]
deep
Blue Crack Addict
Irvine511 said:
the Christians in Iraq
are being murdered and driven out
and they have lived there since 33 AD.
it looks like Bush will succeed
where Mohammad failed
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
STING2 said:
[q]Oct. 16, 2006 issue - When Iraq's current government was formed last April, after four months of bitter disputes, wrangling and paralysis, many voices in America and in Iraq said the next six months would be the crucial testing period. That was a fair expectation. It has now been almost six months, and what we have seen are bitter disputes, wrangling and paralysis. Meanwhile, the violence has gotten worse, sectarian tensions have risen steeply and ethnic cleansing is now in full swing. There is really no functioning government south of Kurdistan, only power vacuums that have been filled by factions, militias and strongmen. It is time to call an end to the tests, the six-month trials, the waiting and watching, and to recognize that the Iraqi government has failed. It is also time to face the terrible reality that America's mission in Iraq has substantially failed.[/q]
deep
Blue Crack Addict
nation building?
do you know how stupid that sounds?
nothing is being built
and who made America the chosen one
Iraq/ Mesopotamia has been around, and a civilization for thousands of years
they will have what ever they choose to have
in the mean time our troops can hide and perhaps not die
or go out and get blown up
and here's the most disgusting thing of all
the Bush Administration knows it is over
they have James Baker and the Iraq group working on new plans
these plans won't be out until after the election
the new plan will be a phased draw down
to force the Iraqis to solve their own problems
they can declare it a success
and just do a phase out
this is what Nixon did with VietNam
declare "Peace with Honor" and pull out
do you know how stupid that sounds?
nothing is being built
and who made America the chosen one
Iraq/ Mesopotamia has been around, and a civilization for thousands of years
they will have what ever they choose to have
in the mean time our troops can hide and perhaps not die
or go out and get blown up
and here's the most disgusting thing of all
the Bush Administration knows it is over
they have James Baker and the Iraq group working on new plans
these plans won't be out until after the election
the new plan will be a phased draw down
to force the Iraqis to solve their own problems
they can declare it a success
and just do a phase out
this is what Nixon did with VietNam
declare "Peace with Honor" and pull out
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
STING2 said:
well done.
deep said:
Well, my friends currently in Ramadi would say that is horse dung. They are engaged in reconstruction task there even though Ramadi is actually the most dangerous city in Iraq, despite what is said about Baghdad in the media.
Iraq has never had the chance for a real choice until the United States removed Saddam. If your not interested in giving Iraqi's a choice, or prefer Iraq pre March 2003, start the campaign to put Saddam back in power.
Vietnam was a success, until the US government cut off all funding to South Vietnam and abandon all of its plans to help strengthen South Vietnam and keep it secure from foreign invasion. Alone, South Vietnam did ok for two years, until North Vietnam launched a massive conventional military invasion that overran the country after several weeks of fighting.
Nation building and counter insurgency are task that take many years to complete with many setbacks along the way. Provided that the United States and the Coalition do not withdraw prematurely, the operation in Iraq will succeed in strengthing the Iraqi military, government, and economy to the point that insurgents will be unable to tear it apart once the coalition withdraws.
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
STING2 said:
choice is really exciting when you're dead.
and love the trotting out of the False Choices that we all do when defensive and backed into a corner -- keep it up!
verte76
Blue Crack Addict
Irvine511 said:
That's no surprise. I predicted that when the invasion took place.
deep
Blue Crack Addict
Irvine511 said:
yeah, 1.7 million dead from Saddam's actions over 24 years he was in power. We have people claim they did not want him in power, yet were unwilling to support the ONLY thing that could remove him given his capabilities and the proven failures of all the other attempts.
The only ones backed into the corner or those that offer no solutions and only narrow and often repeated criticisms -- keep it up!
I can only hope that once this disgusting Republican administration and Congress is out of the picture, anyone who steps in will have a reasonable approach. Clearly they can't be any worse than this, the bar is set pretty low.
verte76
Blue Crack Addict
I have no love for Saddam Hussein, trust me. But I didn't support the invasion and I don't support the current occupation. There are other odious dictators, like the one in Zimbabwe, but alas, Zimbabwe doesn't have any oil.
phanan
Blue Crack Addict
STING2 said:
Yeah, and they just had to time it after 9/11 happened. Well done indeed. I can see why some didn't support it.
phanan
Blue Crack Addict
STING2 said:
Kind of like you repeating a gazillion statistics in each post, eh?
phanan said:
Kind of like you repeating a gazillion statistics in each post, eh?
Nothing wrong with repeating accurate facts in here since your unlikely to get that from the Washington Post and other media outlets.
In addition, several of my post do have solutions in them for the situation there, unlike many post that do nothing but attempt to criticize things without offering any sort of alternatives or ideas.
deep
Blue Crack Addict
STING2 said:
Saddam was contained
and guess what
he was disarmed, remember no WMDS
and it was not costing 5-7 billion a month to contain him
and the Iraqi people were living decent lives, with the containment, no fly-zones
now it is the worst American Blunder ever
and perhaps the costliest
deep said:
Do you understand what containtment of Saddam meant? It meant the most extensive sanctions and weapons embargo in history and maintaining that indefinitely. Did this exist in March 2003 the way it was set up in 1991? NO In fact, the entire Iraq/Syria border was open to any sort of traffic by 2000. Saddam was making Billions of dollars a year through the black market, as well as reselling humanitarian aid meant for many shia communities in southern Iraq. Saddam was making large amounts of money, starving in sort of opposition to him in the country, and was now essentially free to start acquiring new weapons because the embargo had essentially fallen apart.
Another thing that containment required was the verifiable disarmament of Saddam. This NEVER happened. As of March 2003, Saddam had yet to account for 1,000 liters of Anthrax, 500 pounds of nerve gas, 500 pounds of mustard gas, 20,000 Bio/Chem capable shells as well as several other things required by the 1991 Gulf War Ceacefire agreement. It was incumbent upon Saddam to verifiably disarm, it was never incumbent upon the United States or any other nation to prove that Saddam had weapon A or B. Verifiable Disarmament was Saddam's responsibility and he failed to live up to the agreement he signed onto in March 1991.
At most maybe 20% of the population had decent lives during some periods of Saddam's reign in power, nearly all of that concentrated in the 4 Sunni provinces. The other 80% experienced starvation, humanitarian disasters brought on by Saddam, WAR(Saddam invaded and attack four different countries while in power), executions, massacres, WMD attacks and experiments, just to name a few things.
The United States was spending over 20 Billion dollars a year, in its efforts to contain Saddam and was failing in this regard.
After all that Saddam had done, and given his close proximity to the economic life line of the planet, combined with the near complete erosion of sanctions and the embargo, its incredible that people would think it would be safe to let that condition persist and worsen.
Regardless of what Saddam did or did not have in terms of WMD in March 2003, one thing is clear is that Saddam had not given up his quest for more WMD as well as expanding his power in the region based on what has been found since the invasion. Better to remove Saddam now than to allow him to re-arm and and potentially throw the entire planet into an economic depression from which it may never recover from. The other options short of regime change through invasion were tried and all failed. That is why regime change through invasion proved to be necessary. The stakes are simply to high given the planets dependency on Persian Gulf Oil.
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
STING2 said:
as opposed to narrow and often repeated justifications and excuses?
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
STING2 said:
and if all of this is SO compelling and SO factual and SO accurate and the removal of Saddam was SO crucial to the future of the planet, then why didn't the administration use any of these reasons when making their case for invasion?
could it be because they, themselves, didn't find them as compelling as you do, and neither does anyone else?
A_Wanderer
ONE love, blood, life
It was left to the liberals to make that case.
phanan
Blue Crack Addict
STING2 said:
It wasn't necessary right after 9/11. We had more important things to do first.
We could have taken care of Saddam Hussein after we had taken care of Osama bin Laden.
Irvine511 said:
They did! The administration made its case starting September 12, 2002 in front of the United Nations. The #1 reason for the invasion was Saddam's failure to comply with UN Security Council Resolutions passed under Chapter VII rules of the United Nations involving the Verifiable Disarmament of Saddam. On October 13, 2002, Congress approved of the Administrations course of action and on November 14, another UN Security Council Resolutions was passed approving the use of military force if Saddam failed to comply.
The Security Council Resolutions passed against Saddam were passed for many of the following reasons I listed above. The reason the United States deployed over a half a million troops to Saudi Arabia in 1990/1991 and drove Saddam out of Kuwait was because of many of the reasons I listed above. It is rather obvious how important Persian Gulf Oil supply is to the planet and the need to prevent any threat to it, as well as avoid a repeat of August 1990 when Saddam overran Kuwait. The line in the sand was no longer the border between Kuwait and Iraq but Saddam's compliance with UN Security Council Resolutions to include those covering the verifiable disarmament of all WMD.
phanan said:
Yeah, just like it was more important for the United States to go after Japan and defeat it before it did anything about Germany, right?
The United States does not have the luxury of going about its security like a student does their homework, one at a time. The United States has to deal with a multitude of threats at the same time. Most of the troops on the ground in Iraq would not be used in Afghanistan anyways, in addition, the United States never stopped its operations in Afghanistan going after the Taliban and Al Quada, its only increased them since the start of the Iraq war as well as the number of troops inside the country.
Al Quada is a problem that the United States and the rest of the world will probably be dealing with for decades. Iraq was something that probably was done 4 years late if anything regarding the timing was incorrect. The United States can't afford to wait decades to deal with several other security issues.
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
STING2 said:
no, they didn't! it was all couched in WMDs-will-kill-americans, and hysterical talk by Cheney on various Meet the Press appearances about the reconstitution of a nuclear program, all of which was presented as a direct threat to Mr. and Mrs. American.
you and i both know you're dead wrong about 1441.
it did not, ever, authorize the US to go to war. it is up to the UN Security Council itself to determine how it enforces it's resolution. the opinion held by the Security Council, as well as most of the rest of the world, was that regime change was a disproportionate response to Hussein's alleged failure to disarm.
further, as for the Congressional resolution, Bush was required to prove to the Congress that Iraq was in violation of UN Resolutions by still being in possession of weapons of mass destruction, and secondly, that Iraq was behind 9-11.
the grand irony is that invasion and regime change on the basis of humanitarian need might have been morally persuasive -- but the administration chose not to pursue that.
Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
and just to quickly pre-empt: i'm not talking about 1441 anymore or reasons for the invasion of Iraq.
it's been done, over and over and over.
so i'm stepping out of this particular tangent of this particular discussion.
am happy to continue to talk about what's going on in Iraq as of right now, and current estimations of what's going on over there right now, and what needs to be done right now, but rehashing the same stuff isn't terribly productive.
so, before it goes any further, i'm walking away.
it's been done, over and over and over.
so i'm stepping out of this particular tangent of this particular discussion.
am happy to continue to talk about what's going on in Iraq as of right now, and current estimations of what's going on over there right now, and what needs to be done right now, but rehashing the same stuff isn't terribly productive.
so, before it goes any further, i'm walking away.
Irvine511 said:
There were other reasons listed by the chief and official case for war as presented by the United States to the rest of the world was given on September 12, 2002, in October with the congressional approval, and in November with UN approval.
I would say there a few things I've discussed in this forum in which I would be more right about and in which the evidence supports it, than the fact that resolution 1441 did authorize the coalition to go to war if Saddam did not disarm. I've discussed this issue back and forth and seen every counter arguement before you were even a member here.
The fact remains, if you can claim that 1441 did not authorize the current war then you could claim that resolution 678 did not authorize the first Gulf War in 1991.
If the UN did not authorize the war, where is the resolution condemning the invasion and calling for the immediate withrawal? Where is the attempt at a UN resolution along those lines? The fact is, there is no such resolution or even an attempt at one! There is a resolution authorizing the occupation of Iraq, not something one does if its "illegal".
It is up to the UN Security Council to decide these things, and the council decided on war in 1990 in resolution 678 if Saddam did not comply and it did exactly the same thing with resolution 1441 in 2002.
Resolution 1441 was primarly constructed by the United States and the UK and then presented to the UN for approval. It was a statement of the current situation and official offer to Saddam of one last chance to comply. Resolution 678 which authorizes military force for the purpose of enforcement of subsequent resolutions would legally already authorize the invasion.
Bill Clinton sited resolution 678 when the United States launched massive military strikes in November 1998 against Iraq. The fact is, the UN already had a use of force mechanism in place if Saddam did not comply with the resolutions. That is why all resolutions passed against Saddam are passed under Chapter VII rules of the UN allowing for the use of military force.
The Bush administration only had to show that Saddam had failed to comply with the resolutions which is very obvious to anyone. As of March 19, 2003 when the invasion was launched, Saddam had yet to comply with a single UN Security Council Resolution. The only one required to "prove" ANYTHING was Saddam.
The administration never claimed that Iraq was behind 9/11. Thats just totally laughable and false. There was intelligence indicated that Saddam had talked to Al Quada in the past though. Those are two different things.
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