'...One question that silenced many of the officers was a simple one: Should the war have been fought?

“I honestly don’t know how I feel about that,” Major Powell said in a telephone conversation after the discussions at Leavenworth.

“That’s a big, open question,” General Caldwell said after a long pause.' Blunt Talk About Iraq

'...The expiration date that Iraq has now set for the operation of a multinational force on its territory coincides almost exactly with the end of the Bush administration. As that date nears, the endgame question may become: How far can the administration go in repudiating its own erstwhile agenda and returning Iraq to its pre-war status -- that is, to U.S.-backed Sunni domination of Iraqi domestic politics. That would, of course, result in armed Iraqi hostility to the administration's enemy of enemies in the region, Iran, and a resigned return to collaboration with the Saudi-dominated Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the management of the world oil market, all under a largely offshore U.S. military umbrella. Will the fallback dream now be the one the President's father entertained after Gulf War I -- the creation in Baghdad of a kinder, gentler Saddam Hussein with whom, to use the classic phrase, the U.S. can "do business"?

Time will tell, but not too much time. The eerie silence of the Bush administration about oil grows all the more deafening as the price of crude climbs toward $100 a barrel. Blood for oil may never have been a good deal, but so much blood for no oil at all may seem a far worse one.' Endgame for Iraqi Oil

'President Bush has said that if Saddam and his generals “take innocent life, if they destroy infrastructure, they will be held accountable as war criminals.” Isn’t the United States about to take innocent life and destroy infrastructure?'

From Fallacies and War: Misleading a Nervous America to the Wrong Conclusion, originally published on February 28 2003.

'Three weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, former U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith's recently published account of the Iraq war decisions.

Feith's account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country's top military leaders.' ipsnorthamerica.net

"U.S. MIlitary concludes No Saddam Link to Al Qaeda"

Perhaps somebody should let Scotty and Lightningrodd know about their conclusions.

"I feel like, I felt like, there were weapons of mass destruction." GWB

'The Bush administration employed propaganda techniques, political spin and deception to promote and then justify a war with Iraq that was unwise and unnecessary.

And a "too-deferential" national press corps allowed the president and his aides to get away with it.

Who makes this devastating, if not entirely new, charge?

The man responsible for spinning the story of the Bush presidency, former White House spokesman Scott McClellan.'
www.thenation.com

Who's lying?

More from McClellan's book:

'"What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary"...

...In a 2003 interview with Vanity Fair, Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Secretary of Defence and intellectual architect of the war, gave a hint when he suggested that WMD were only one reason for the invasion - “something everyone could agree on”. Mr McClellan goes significantly further. The administration’s real motive for war, he declares, was the neoconservative dream of creating a democratic Iraq that would pave the way for an enduring peace in the region.

But the White House had to sell the war as necessary because of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. They accordingly took a different tack, not of “out-and-out deception”, but of “shading the truth”. This was achieved by “innuendo and implication”, and by “intentionally ignoring intelligence to the contrary”.

But, one might ask, what else is new? An identical conclusion after all was reached as early as the summer of 2002, in the celebrated Downing Street memo in which British officials just back from a visit to Washington said US intelligence was being shaped to fit a decision to go to war...'

Falling out with the President: the devious world of George Bush

You should treat yourself to the books being written by Iraqi's. Here's a story from one of them (Khidir Hamza, "Saddam's Bomb Maker"):

In the mid 90s, Khidir sought to get away from the environment around Baghdad and the corruption, so he bought a farm further away than his home at that time. One day, while at the farm, he decided to go to his next-door neighbors' home and make introductions and be hospitable. When the current resident opened the door, Khidir found out that he had purchased acreage just across the fence from a Palistinian terror training camp.

Khidir speculated, based on his access to the Iraqi military, the Mukhabburat, and his own industry (he was a nuclear scientist and weapons developer), that there were dozens of such training camps around Iraq, and in his own words, he surmised that Saddam was training these men to act as delivery devices for the chemical and germ weapons he had helped Saddam develop during the 80s and 90s.

It embarasses me that I have to quote a primary information source to prove that Saddam was a danger to the world. Only in a world where liberals use relentless intimidation can rational adults ask a question that you've posed.

If you have any value for human life, you should be asking why we didn't invade sooner.

'In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, Dr. Hamza stated that Iraq possessed more than ten tons of uranium, and one ton of slightly enriched uranium, which he claimed was enough to allow them to build three nuclear weapons by 2005. This testimony, and other statements by Dr. Hamza, were used by the United States government as part of their justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Dr. Hamza's credentials and testimony have been challenged by others who dispute his knowledge of Iraq's nuclear programme. Imad Khadduri, a former scientist with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, accused Hamza of exaggerating "to a great extent his own role in the nuclear weapon program." Hussein Kamal, son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, who defected to Jordan in 1995, described Hamza as "a professional liar." David Albright, a former nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq, stated "Hamza had some good information about Iraqi nuclear programs until his departure from Iraq, but that's it." Scott Ritter, a long-time colleague of Albright, insists Hamza is a "documentable fraud."' wikipedia

The speculations and surmises of a 'documentable fraud' hardly justify a war, do they? And, as he left Iraq following the Gulf War, Hamza's not a 'primary' information source on the threat, or lack of it, posed by Hussein's Iraq prior to Bush's invasion. Like Chalabi, he was maybe just another exile telling the US administration what it wanted to hear.

More on Hamza - Hamza's War:

'According to Hamza, the Iraqis were secretly reconstituting a nuke program and would have several nukes in a matter of months, not years. The International Atomic Energy Agency had been – and would always be – ineffective. The only way to keep Saddam from nuking us in our jammies would be to invade and occupy Iraq.

Hamza was wrong on all counts...

...Ziffereo [of the IAEA Action Team] asked Kamal [Gen. Hussein Kamal – Saddam's son-in-law] about Hamza, who had "fled" Iraq shortly before Kamal and was representing himself to the IAEA and to the CIA as having been in charge of Iraq's nuke program. Quoth Kamal:

"He is a professional liar. He worked with us, but he was useless and was always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver anything. Yes, his original name is Khidir, but we called him Hazem. He went to Baghdad University then left Iraq. He is very bad."

So, the CIA has known all along that Hamza was a fraud.'

This from that hot-bed of lefty liberalism, WorldNetDaily.

And where is Hamza now?

'After the war, Dr Hamza was rewarded, to the distress of many Iraqi scientists, with a well-paid job as the senior advisor to the Ministry of Science and Technology. Appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, he had partial control of Iraq's nuclear and military industries.

It was not a successful appointment, according to sources within the ministry. Dr Hamza seldom turned up for work. He obstructed others from doing their jobs. On 4 March, his contract was not renewed by the CPA...

...There were always doubts that Dr Hamza had been as central as he claimed to Saddam's programme to develop a nuclear bomb. Dr Hussain Shahristani, an Iraqi nuclear scientist, tortured and imprisoned under Saddam for refusing to help build a nuclear device, said: "Hamza really was only a minor figure in our nuclear programme and always exaggerated his own importance when he got to the US."..

...Of the Iraqi defectors after the Gulf War in 1991 who built a career in the US by providing evidence that Saddam Hussein was covertly building up an arsenal of WMD, Dr Hamza was the most successful. Once the war was over and no WMD had been found, he was something of an embarrassment, all the more so since he could not do his job. America quietly sacks its prize witness against Saddam

Yes, it seems people should be embarrassed to quote Hamza.

I wonder if it ever occurs to liberals how fraudulent it is to attempt to debunk the people who disrupt their world view.

Think about this:

A man who was materially involved in Saddam's nuclear program for 15 or 20 years is actually a fraud, according to this source. He has no knowledge of the programs, he was never there, he's a liar.

(Even though there were other Iraqi scientists and military leaders who have made the same claims, named the same people and events, and recounted the same developments.)

This is where liberalism departs reality and becomes a psychosis. When you try to overlay reality with your own pretended version of reality, you exhibit behavior similar to alcoholics and other addicts who are also desperate to deny reality.

I'm sure that you can search the internet and find every eye-witness account of any important event "debunked". The question is really one of personal wellness. When will you ever allow evidence to have it's own voice and allow it to guide your beiefs rather than pedaling someone else's worldview because you know no better?

quote:

I'm sure that you can search the internet and find every eye-witness account of any important event "debunked".

Actually, it's not necessary to search the Internet to debunk Hamza's claims. The programs and capabilities he described, supposedly necessitating an invasion of Iraq, have been shown not to have existed at that time - it's a matter of public record and common knowledge.

And Hamza is a fraud according to several sources who are in a position to know. It seems he exaggerated his own importance in Iraq's weapons and nuclear programs.

This is necessary to prop up your belief that the war was just wrong, right? Everybody else has to be wrong:

--including the people who worked the programs
--including Saddam's general staff
--including the Clinton administration
--including the CIA in the 90s and later
--including the captured communication between Saddam and Niger (oh wait, it wasn't yellow cake, it was uranium cake, that's all they had)
--including the men on the black market in Europe who were arrested in the 90s for supplying Saddam's weapons programs

All of them are liars, aren't they?

And then there's Egyptian and Jordanian intelligence agencies interviewed by General Franks in 2003, they're wrong too.

Russian and Israeli intelligence are also wrong, and Israel didn't really bomb anything.

Oh, wait, I know. The entire US Army and the National Archives are also involved in this massive, world-wide conspiracy because they describe special units in the Iraqi Army trained in the use and handling of biological and chemical weapons and equipped with protective gear. But it was just a ruse, right? They were all trained just in case we used something on them, right?

Oh, and then there's an entire department of government, headed by Chemical Ali, specifically charged with the development of WMD's. Both the UN and US inspectors have documented the diversion of billions of dollars into this department, but it's just a paper tiger. Dictators always divert billions of dollars for programs intended to fool us into thinking they have something that they really don't.

Are you trying to say that, following the invasion of Iraq, we did discover an arsenal of WMD, and evidence of significant WMD development programs?

All that hyped and cherry-picked evidence quite plainly turned out to be misleading, didn't it, when foreign troops actually got into Iraq, and turned it upside down trying to secure the oil WMD.

Law enforcement in Jordan found some, Iraqi officials published the movements of others.

Evidence of "significant" development during the 90s is unnecessary for people who still retain common sense, but yes, we have that as well.

This is one of the primary disadvantages that democrats have in the US today: everyone knows that almost every democrat on the hill campaigned for an invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003 on the basis of Saddam's illicit weapons programs. They all saw the same intelligence as the White House.

(But they're all liars, too, aren't they?)

Liberal hyped and cherry-picked evidence lead Bill Clinton to order the CIA to investigate a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, didn't it?

Liberal hyped and cherry-picked evidence lead Bill to bomb Afghanistan and the Sudan.

Liberal hyped and cherry-picked evidence lead Bill to write the Doctrine of Regime Change in Iraq in 1998.

Liberal hyped and cherry-picked evidence lead liberals all across the US to hide when the US Army declared that no evidence had been found, while conservatives stayed with their leaders.

It's simpler than you think: liberals have no spine, nor do they have humanity.

(It was never about the oil until liberals needed another explanation, one that would seek to undermine the president, and one that was simplistic enough for liberals to grasp.)

This idea that the invasion of Iraq was somehow justified because so many in the US opposition party also supported it is pretty lame. It doesn't make much sense inside the US, still less to those outside. It's as if Fatah or Hamas pointed out that their rival also felt it was justified to fire missiles into Israel, and therefore it was justified.

Democrats who supported the invasion were just as wrong (or right, although there doesn't seem to be much real evidence to show that) as their Republican colleagues. Any, Republican or Democrat, who have since had the courage to admit making a mistake maybe deserve some credit. "Staying with your leader" when your leader has clearly made one of the biggest blunders (to put it mildly) in US foreign policy, and refuses to admit it, doesn't show spine.

quote:

Originally posted by newnickname:
"Staying with your leader" when your leader has clearly made one of the biggest blunders (to put it mildly) in US foreign policy, and refuses to admit it, doesn't show spine.

Staying with our leader...why??? Because it is the right thing to do. We really didn't start having problems in Iraq until the Democrats started making a political issue of it. Showing divisiveness in the country. The terrorists see it, they absolutely love it. Because this played right into their plans.

What I am doing is making the case is the Democrats political games are why we have the mess in Iraq, not Bush's policies. The Democrats have changed their positions & continually lied to the public for the sheer purpose of political gain. They have shown without a doubt, they care nothing about the good of the country, just their political gains. And the country is now suffering because of the rhetoric & spin.

quote:

We really didn't start having problems in Iraq until the Democrats started making a political issue of it

You mean if it wasn't for the US Democratic Party, all would have gone well in Iraq? Give us a break.

Don't the centuries-old feuds between the various factions in Iraq have something to do with the current problems? The destruction of the country's infrastructure in 'shock and awe'? The decision to invade with too few soldiers to keep order after the initial stages? The blithe assumption that the invasion would be greeted with flowers, and solid planning for the aftermath was therefore unecessary or even undesirable? Some unarguably inept decisions by the CPA?

quote:

The Democrats have changed their positions & continually lied to the public...

You may well be right; that's what politicians do - but what lies about Iraq do you have in mind? And how on earth did they create the mess in Iraq?