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<i>Originally Posted by SOB</i>
Well, for starters, he's wiped out two thirds of Al Qaeda. Oh, and the Navy SEALS in Iraq recently destroyed an al Qaeda training camp consisting of 40 buildings and capable of training 600 recruits at a time.
So is it your position that we should ignore all terrorists who don't live in the US?
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To respond to the first part of your post, my criticism of Bush is that he
he failed in leadership of our military by not ordering them into war only
as a "last resort". History reveals now that he was wrong, and he refuses to take responsibility for his mistake, his own father's book reinforces the folly of his decision to invade Iraq:
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In the March 2, 1998 issues of Times Magazine publish an excerpt from George H.W.Bush book " World Transformed (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)."
While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.
You find this article at The Memory Hole: http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm
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The weapons inspector's report reveals the error in judgment Bush made by
not heeding the request for more time made by Hans Bilx:
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Ending Inspections 'Not Reasonable,' Blix Says
Citing Iraqi Cooperation, U.N. Arms Official Asserts More Time Was Needed
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 19, 2003; Page A17
UNITED NATIONS, March 18 -- The United Nations' chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said today that it "was not reasonable" for the United States to end U.N. inspections in Iraq at a time when its government was providing more cooperation than it has in more than a decade.
"I don't think it is reasonable to close the door on inspections after 31/2 months," Blix said in his first public appearance since 134 U.N. inspectors were evacuated from Iraq, effectively ending a 12-year effort to disarm Iraq through inspections. "I would have welcomed some more time. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A49075-2003Mar18¬Found=true">http://www.washingtonpost.com</a>
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James Chace, the biographer of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson,
wrote an article about Bush and Iraq that contained the following.....
(Chace died on Oct. 8, and the world has lost an important historian and
a critical thinker)
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(Exceprt) "Imperialism Lite"
At the very moment Washington was deploying its armed forces to fight a preventive war in Iraq, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a study (in January 2003), stating that "Saddam is in an iron box." With tens of thousands of troops massed in the region, "an international coalition united in support of the [United Nations] inspection process, and now hundreds of inspectors in the country able to go anywhere at any time, Saddam is unable to engage in any large-scale development or production of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons." 10 Under the circumstances, Iraq could have been tied down indefinitely by a U.S. policy of aggressive containment.
But the Bush administration rejected the reasoning that if U.N. inspectors were allowed simply to continue their job military intervention could be avoided. Had this been the policy of the United States, there was a good chance of establishing a terrorist-free Afghanistan by focusing on the unfinished work there while waiting to see if the U.N. inspectors could finish their task in Iraq. <a href="http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj03-3/chace.html">http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj03-3/chace.html</a>
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There is no way to verify how much damage Bush's response has inflicted
on al Qaeda. It is fact that bush diverted military resources from Afghanistan
for the invasion of Iraq.
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Bush also claimed that 75 percent of Al Qaeda leaders have been "brought to justice." While some security estimates suggest that that proportion of pre-Sept. 11 leaders have been killed or apprehended, it does not take into account an unknown number of new leaders and followers who have emerged since the terrorist attacks. <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0410100363oct10,1,7561876.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed">www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/</a>
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You provided no link to reference your claim that Navy Seals destroyed a
large al Qaeda training camp in Iraq. If you are referring to Salman Pak, it was
not an al Qaeda camp, and it does not appear that it was in use as a terrorist
training facility.
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August 14, 2004
Salman Pak -- The Smoking Gun Linking Iraq to 9/11?
In an interesting recent comment, Brian asked me whether I thought Salman Pak, the Iraqi training camp south of Baghdad, undermined my critique of Bush's decision to invade Iraq. The right-wing press has made much of the fact that two Iraqi defectors claim that Iraq used a 707 fuselage at Salman Pak to train non-Iraqis to hijack airplanes. Some even claim that Salman Pak may well be the "smoking gun" connecting Iraq to 9/11.
But not so fast. Here's what Seymour Hersh, whose insider access in Iraq is without parallel, has to say on the subject:
The U.N. teams that returned to Iraq last winter were unable to verify any of al-Haideri’s claims. In a statement to the Security Council in March, on the eve of war, Hans Blix, the U.N.’s chief weapons inspector, noted that his teams had physically examined the hospital and other sites with the help of ground-penetrating radar equipment. “No underground facilities for chemical or biological production or storage were found so far,” he said.
<a href="http://yin.typepad.com/the_yin_blog/2004/08/salman_pak_the_.html">http://yin.typepad.com/the_yin_blog/2004/08/salman_pak_the_.html</a>
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If this is true, these are not the actions of a U.S. government that I, and
I suspect, the founding fathers, could support. Can you ?
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U.S.: Detained al-Qaeda Suspects "Disappeared"
12 Oct 2004 01:55:08 GMT
(New York, October 12, 2004)-At least 11 al-Qaeda suspects have "disappeared" in U.S. custody, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. U.S. officials are holding the detainees in undisclosed locations, where some have reportedly been tortured. The 46-page report, "The United States' 'Disappeared': The CIA's Long-Term 'Ghost Detainees,'" describes how the Central Intelligence Agency is holding al-Qaeda suspects in "secret locations," reportedly outside the United States, with no notification to their families, no access to the International Committee of the Red Cross or oversight of any sort of their treatment, and in some cases, no acknowledgement that they are even being held.
"'Disappearances' were a trademark abuse of Latin American military dictatorships in their 'dirty war' on alleged subversion," said Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch. "Now they have become a United States tactic in its conflict with al-Qaeda."
Under international law, enforced disappearances occur when
persons are deprived of their liberty and the detaining authority refuses to disclose their fate or whereabouts or refuses to acknowledge their detention, which places the detainees outside the protection of the law.
<a href="http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/HRW/b7496379699509f7a0228908ed169344.htm">http://www.alertnet.org/</a>
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