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Originally Posted by Mojo_PeiPei
Regime change was right up there with WMD's. I thought that was universal knowledge... I must admit Shakran, your knowledge here is a little lacking. Regime change was the samething CHeney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfield came pushing on Clinton in 98' in and around Operation Desert Fox and us actually finding some WMD's. Only thing was Clinton didn't want regime change, so the Hawks had to bide their time until they had a window being 9-11 and Dubya.
Maybe we are saying the same thing though, the WMD's were the means, but the objective was most certainly regime change.
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My knowledge is not lacking. Througout the buildup to war we heard nothing but "weapons of mass destruction" and how the Axis of Evil member was gonna create 9/11's all over the place with 'em. THAT is what the public was told was the reason for going to war. THAT is the publicly stated objective.
Now obviously I'm not gullible enough to think Bush really believed that nonsense, and of course I know his REAL objective was to go get the guy that tried to kill his daddy (and to have a nice fun little war while he was at it).
But the public was told nothing of this until AFTER the war started and they realized there was no way the WMD story was gonna hold water. So slowly they started removing WMD's from the rhetoric and replacing it with "regime change."
Remember, initially in his list of demands, he said Saddam must disarm. Only after Saddam said "ok, I'll disarm" did Bush change his demands to "Saddam must disarm AND step down and leave the country forever."
It was very obvious at that point to those of us who were paying attention that Bush wanted his war and he would get it no matter what concessions Saddam made to try and stop it.
And back to the original question, this "democracy comes to iraq" garbage is pure crap. They've had "democracy" for all of 2 weeks now, and it's not working real well considering there's well over 15,000 insurgents in the country, and only a tiny fraction of those are non-iraqi. In other words, there's a whole shitload of Iraqis who aren't going to take this democracy thing lying down.
Makes sense really - democracy (I always laugh when Bush says he wants them to be a democracy like us. He's not real good with political systems because we are a constitutional republic, NOT a democracy) is not something that can be forced on people. They have to choose it for themselves. It's certainly the height of irony to march in with soldiers and tell people "you do not have a choice. You must install a government with freedom of choice."