loquitur

Pretty close to my own view. Thanks for coming out and saying it.

Some of the stuff that gets posted around here reads more like "my team has to win" than "how did we get here and where to now."

host

Why don't you consider it to be constructive to respond to each and every opinion that is posted that flies in the face of all of the facts....facts like the ones I posted to suuport my opinions in my most recent post, and in post #93.

Do my points make sense....how are they weak? Where are the weaknesses in the evidence that I've posted to support my conclusions?

You're an attorney loquitur, yet you give me the impression that all of our arguments are equally tedious and weightless. This is the "process" that we had to go through, here....to end the posting of assertions that Saddam "did too" have WMD.....and, obviously it worked. Months go by before anyone attempts to post that opinion, and hopefully, sooner rather than later, this will wind down in a similar way.....

mixedmedia

Personally, I think it's because there is only one person here defending the Saddam/wmd story and everyone else knows it was a bunch of horseshit.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

Willravel

I'd like to rewrite this slightly:

This war was a strategic move designed to force a 'democracy' on a sectarian, theocratic society that had been living under a false democracy (false-republic) for decades under tyrannical rule that we helped to create because we were unwilling or unable to have a healthy and mutually beneficial international relationship with the former Soviet Union. The simple plan was to, under the guise of both national security (proven incorrect) and humanitarian removal of a dictator (we kill more than Saddam), gain military and economic—and even social—dominance over a region rich in the only natural resource that our government seems to be interested in, despite the fact that not only will this resource will run dry soon and we will kill tens to hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

To say simply that this wasn't planned well overlooks the glaring fundamental flaws to the plan. Not only were the logistics overlooked—we don't have the manpower, oil is a very short term investment, the Baath military wouldn't just stop fighting—, but the entire endeavor was completely unethical from any and every standpoint. That unethicality* of the war clearly would ruin MANY of our strongest alliances and decimate our reputation further. The fact that the UK, our long time bitch, is withdrawing troops is not but further proof that even our closest allies cannot support us in this. We've lost 3,300 men and women serving in the military who simply wanted to serve our country honorably.



*that's a new word, and I've just coined it

aceventura3

I don't know if you have been reading all of this, but I have been. There have been several instances when I have looked into the details of an allegation of lies and have found no support.

This is a free market place for ideas. Given that freedom you can choose to participate or not participate. My desire is to come to a clear understanding of what Bush and Cheney lied about. If the issue of lies has not been made clear, it is because the support of the accusation lacks clarity, not the question.

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

mixedmedia

By saying it wasn't planned well, I don't mean to say that I ever favored a military incursion to force western-style democracy on the middle east. Only that western-style democracy in the middle east not an unfavorable concept to me.

The toll of what has happened as a result of this war is not lost on me, you can trust in that.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

pig

i don't know will, leaving the ethics out of it...if we simply wanted to know sadaam's guy off the totem pole and put some pretty well fortified military bases on iraqi soil...i'm not so sure that our pnac administration didn't accomplish precisely the minimum and main thing they wanted / felt they needed to accomplish. i think a lot of the other things were not thought to be immediate future objectives by the serious planners of this. i think it was to mainly get our foot in the door, wearing an ironshod boot. we're there. we're not leaving. i don't care if we pull our troops back to reduced levels, we're going to be there. we've got proximity to many big suppliers of oil, and we can respond militarily from close quarters if and when shit breaks down over there.

i mean, india and china are on the move with increasing consumption of oil and output of co2. there might not be a lot of oil remaining at current or increased consumption levels, but having access to that resource is absolutely critical if the united states wants to retain anything even remotely like its current standard of living.

then, when the ethics bit comes in...its sort of a 'oh fuck. but we can't do that....wait wait wait...we'll do that, and call it this. classic bait and switch. at least that's my take.

__________________
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ratbastid

ace, I respectfully request that you to consider that you're blinded by the context you're looking from.

Based on what you've posted in this thread, it's crystal clear that this statement is 100% not the case.

mixedmedia

For me the issue is not so much the lies themselves but the dishonesty by omission.

Or do you really still believe we went into Iraq because of Saddam and wmd's?

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

pig

to me, i feel like i'm taking crazy pills when i think about thinking about the concept that we would have allocated however many trillions of dollars to free people from a dictator so that they could be overrun by god knows what, or that we're so intent on the humanitarian movement that we can't do shit in darfur, and that we were afraid of sadaam having "wmd's' in iraq, as though he was going to pounce on our asses.

i remember back in grad school having an office mate talking about how sadaam had some sort of fucking balsa wood fliers that there were going to use to dispense chemical weapons in the us, and i remember thinking that my ass was going to rear up and eat me alive for having to let those thoughts cross by cerebellum. i remember thinking: thor gravyslapping hammerthrower, we'd better have something better than operation iraqi freedom! and wmds and crazy dictator going on to be doing this, and we'd better do it quick and clean and then get out. and of course, we're not out, and of course while i think we did have other objectives, i find them rather hypocritical unless we want to have the old dog eat dog america isn't the land of the free and the home of the brave, but just another group of shaved monkeys flinging their poo and trying to get by for another day. sometimes we're nice to each other, but shit - with mickey d's on the every corner, who has time to be pissed off?

/end rant. i'm going for a run.

__________________
You don't love me, you just love my piggy style

Willravel

To which I respond with Cheney's own words:
The President and Vice President repeatedly tied Iraq to 9/11 and lied about it.
Lybia approached the US in March 2003. Cheney lied in order to make the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq seem successful in stopping global terrorism.
I think we all know that's bullshit. We initially had tens of thousands of troops tracking down Osama Bin Laden in 2001 and 2002, and most of those troops were sent to Iraq in 2003. By 2004, when Cheney was in the debate, fewer than 10,000 troops were involved in the hunt for Bin Laden, whereas 100,000 troops were sent into Iraq.

I'm sure you've already read from what I've posted how Cheney saying he's cut all financial ties with Halbiruton is a big fat lie. Not only that but there is evidence suggesting that he was involved in awarding contracts to Haliburton.

Oh absolutely, but that was one of the fundamental flaws: we don't have the troops. It's becoming clear now that Giuliani and McCain have very little chance of overcoming Obama, Clinton or Edwards, all of whom have spoken clearly about troop withdrawals. I'd be willing to bet that if Obama or Edwards win, we might see the disassembly of the military bases in Iraq. I see UN peace keepers or an international force of some kind trying to clean up the mess, but there's no way that the US will continue to be in there along for more than a few years.

loquitur

We went into Iraq for a number of stated reasons (and I'm choosing my words carefully) of which WMDs was a rather late arrival to the list. It was added because Blair prevailed upon Bush to go to the UN, and the prior UN resolutions were heavily weighted toward disarmament and disclosure. So the UN presentation was heavily focused on the WMD issues. Bush had been prepared to go in without that whole kabuki dance in the UN, which ended up delaying things by about 6 months. WMD became a heavily stressed theme for the likes of Cheney but it was added relatively late in the game. As things stood at that point, before Powell's speech, the inspectors had been tossed out in '98 in violation of the Gulf War-ending resolutions, there were regular shots taken at coalition planes in the no-fly zones and a whole bunch of other stuff going on. That's the irony here - it's not like WMDs were a necessary condition to the Iraq invasion. Whether they were a sufficient reason is a different question. Whether the invasion was a good idea even if Saddam had WMDs is yet a third question.

I just read an extract of an article by Fred Kagan that essentially says the war was a mistake because there is no evidence that the culture in the Middle East as it currently exists can accommodate liberal democracy. I printed it out and will read it in a bit. If anyone is interested in the link, I'll try to dig it out. But if that blurb is right, then the issue as pertains to Iraq was twofold in 2003: (1) was there anything to be done about Saddam Hussein? and (2) if there was, what should have replaced him? Number 2 is the harder question to deal with, and that's the question that wasn't adequately analyzed. I get the impression that the administration assumed that liberal democracy is a default position for humanity, which is decidedly not the case - it's a relatively rare and relatively recent exception to prior human experience. And when a culture doesn't support liberal democracy, an implemented democracy fails -- as it regularly does in Haiti, as it did in Zimbabwe, as it did several times in Nigeria, and on and on and on.

The impression I'm getting here is that people are collapsing issue #1 and issue #2, and misdefining issue #1 as being about WMDs, which is a rewrite of history.

Willravel

And had the UN given up permission, things would have been different. They didn't. We had a coalition of the willing invade instead of UN forces. Saddam didn't break US resolutions, he broke UN resolutions. The horrible irony to all of this is that the US broke the UN Charter on the grounds of upholding an UN resolution.

If you remember the Gulf War, the invasion was MANDATED by the UN. That's how these things are done legally. Whether you agree with the Gulf War or not, the argument can't really be made that it was illegal (so far as I know). 'Iraqi Freedom' (ugh) was quite the opposite. Kofi Annan, the Sec Gen of the UN has specifically agreed with my expert analysis when he said:

roachboy

well, i haven't repeated this for a while, but i think its accurate.
i think the motivation for this debacle follow directly from the neocon interpretation of the first gulf war. it's pretty clear from the project for a new american century statement of purpose, from the 1998 letter these bozos sent to clinton advocating an attack on iraq. the necon interpretation is simple enough: they understood clinton in particular as a problem because he favored multi-lateral agreements as the basis for globalizing capitalism. for the neocons, this was insufficiently nationalist. the first gulf war was, for them, the theater of american national humiliation at the hands of the united nations--the "proof" is in the delusion that there was a "job to be finished" and that this job was toppling saddam hussein--and that the johnwayne amuricans would have "finished the job" had they not been shanked by the un. no matter that this is in historical terms somewhere between revisionism and hallucination--the first gulf war is for the neocons a symbolic conflict pitting two types of globalizing capitalist order--one embodied by the un, built along the multi-lateral model (at this point anyway)--the other a model emphasizing (assymterical) bilateral agreements as the basis for the new capitalist order with the american military apparatus wedged onto the top of it as the lone superpower, or military hegemon. the arguments advanced by teh bush people to legitimate this debacle were, as wolfowitz said a couple years ago, expedients--the action wasn't about any of it--they were all rationales for launching a war that the pnac had been advocating for a long time. so none of it was serious, none of it was true or had to be true.

apparently, the oil was a secondary motivation--it'd be a way to make the debacle pay for itself. i have never accepted the argument that oil was THE motivation. i dont think it irrelevant, but think it down the list a bit in terms of priorities. more a perk to be had by the heroic americans, an expression of undying gratitude or some such nonsense.

although this continues to boggle my mind, the idea was a short war, a quick victory, a bunch of photo ops and a fait accompli insofar as the emergent global capitalist order was concerned. if the political adversary is understood not to have been saddam hussein at any point, but rather an entire emerging order symbolized in neocon fantasyland by the un, you can explain pretty easily how the right treated the un--from powell's ridiculous, shabby presentation through the the amazing obfuscation of the reasons why only the resolution legitimating the war did not pass the security council (freedom fries anyone?) the tragic aspect of this--which is also ludicrous and would be funny had it not already cost so many lives--is that there was no plan b.

there was no plan b.

everything that has happened in and around iraq seems to me to have followed in a straight line from this.
if the interpretation is right, then it is not in any way surprising that the actual rationales floated for this debacle were horseshit.
the only surprise is that there is any surprise.

you can see that the whole of plan a, such as it was, was carried out too--the surreal "mission accomplished" photo op, complete with cowboy george in a flight suit and a knotted bandana over the penile region actually makes sense this way. it was supposed to be serious. it was supposed to be the coup de grace, the crowning of the colossal fuck you to the united nations, to multilateralism, to a globalization that does not leave a place for good old fashioned reactionary nationalism and all its foul correlates---why without nationalism, it is hard to mobilize racism to sell a fucking administration--but more broadly, as the right will find out soon enough on a scale that goes well beyond what they have already found out, without this illusion of "the nation" conservatives have nothing to say. nothing to say at all.

so far as i can tell, then, even the people who supported this misbegotten fiasco in iraq were duped. they don't have and will never have the actual arguments for the invasion given to them. not from the bush administration anyway. they wouldnt have sold the war, those arguments. they are transparently delusional--were from the outset---were in 2003--certainly are now--some backwater reworking of kissinger-style realpolitik lay behind it, along with some idiotic faith that amurica is somehow "gods country" and that therefore this god character will make everything hunky dory, so there need be no plan b or even a coherent plan a.


so it is pretty obvious that folk like ace, who appear to have believed in the bush people, to have assumed that they were operating in good faith, were used. that cant be fun.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

mixedmedia

I think you're right in that we continue to try turning societies that are socially and/or economically broken into democracies when it should be working the other way around.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

loquitur

actually, willravel, without going through the rigmarole of the legalisms, arguably it wasn't necessary to get UN approval because the 1991 resolutions that suspended the war already authorized the use of force for noncompliance. That doesn't tell you anything about whether the politics dictated a new resolution, or the optics, or whether getting another resolution was a good idea. I can think of good arguments either way.

But that is a very different question from the issue of whether Iraq would have a stable government in the short term or even medium term if the UN had been in charge from the git-go. Very very doubtful. The UN did come into Iraq after the fact, to run the reconstruction, and then the insurgents killed de Mello and the UN pulled out. (That's pretty consistent with the UN's record in general: the UN failed to protect people from massacre in Srebrenica, can't do noodlysquat in Darfur even as we speak.)

So whether it was a good idea to get the UN to say OK in late 2002-early 2003 is a totally different question from whether things would have been different if the UN had OK'd the invasion. I see no basis for believing there would have been no insurgency if the UN said the invasion was OK. The Iraqi insurgents are the kind of people who use children as decoys in car bombs - you think they give a rat's ass whether the UN says OK or not?

pig

roach: i agree with the analysis only to say that the end of the day, i think we really do work like little shaved monkeys; most other things i think are rationalizations for procurement and control of food, shelter, clothing, and mating. so i think that is the root source of drivers of something like pnac. no one else can fuck with us, because we are the it, the everything, the id and the ego and a pat of butter. personally i think, to a certain extent, that the bush administration wanted their motivations / explanations to be obviously full of shit, so as to up the ante on the fuck-you-ary. yes, we are saying we are doing this, and you know its not true, but those are the reasons we are giving and we are doing this whether you like it or not. fuck off.

so i suppose i can't ulimately separate reserving access to oil and military dominance in the region from the ideology behind it; its almost like left hand washing the right. we get access because we are the dominant, we deserve access by virtue of being the dominant, and as the dominant we must step to the plate and play the role that nature and god have intended for us to. anything less would be shirking the duties we have been given at this point in the history of the world.

pimpin ain't easy.

__________________
You don't love me, you just love my piggy style

roachboy

uh loquitor: these insurgents are living in a country under colonial occupation. what the fuck do you expect them to do?
i somehow expect that were you an iraqi under this occupation, you would be doing some actions on your own. i would. i think almost anyone would.

as for un approval: i think it would have made a huge difference--for example there might have been a plan b--there would have been far more attention paid to the post-invasion problems--there would have been nothing like the same meanings of occupation---but we'll never know, because i maintain, as i posted above, that alot of this was about the neocons wanting to effectively show the un that they were an obstacle to the assertions of american manliness in the form of unilateral colonial occupation.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

pig

as a quasi-aside, i was under the impression that we stopped seeking un approval because we knew we didn't have the votes in the security council. therefore, as we had already decided to go in, if the council had voted not to allow us to go in, we would have directly been in violation of a un resolution. is this not correct?

__________________
You don't love me, you just love my piggy style

aceventura3

That is why I need you. Help me see the light. I can identify a lie when it is presented to me with factual truth. It seems that we gone from Bush and Cheney lied to lies of ommision. That is pretty convenient, isn't it. Then we find that the data omitted was not material to any relavant question. So, I am concluding the whole "Bush Lied" thing is just an empty phrase.


100% of what I wrote? Are you guilty of a "lie of ommision"? You clearly did not qualify your statement with any contradictory intellegence.

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

Willravel

Point taken. It's easy to slip into the party line.
The use of force wasn't just anyone's to use, though. The idea was to leave the door open for another UN decision, and the UN was considering the "eighteenth resolution", the plan put fourth by the US, UK, and Spain (cha cha cha!) which was essentially what ended up happening in the invasion. The thing is, France, Germany, and Russia said no. In other words, this was all still tied up in the UN when King George suddenly exclaimed "Diplomacy has failed" and then gave very suspect information to the Senate in order to rush the war.

ratbastid

Here's what I'm saying, and ALL that I'm saying: Bush wanted into Iraq. There's anecdotal evidence that he was talking about Iraq the afternoon of September 11, when there was NO intelligence to link the two, false or otherwise. Then he culled the intel he needed to support the conclusion he had already arrived at and brought to the table.

What I'm inviting you to consider is that you're making the same logical blunder. You've concluded that Bush Didn't Lie, and that conclusion blinds you to the (ample, btw) evidence that he did. I know it LOOKS like you haven't seen any evidence that satisfactorily contradicts your position... but notice that you HAVE a position, and you're holding the evidence up against it. That's not exactly what you'd call the scientific method.

I assert that you're not actually interested in knowing whether Bush lied, per the second sentence that I quoted. I assert you're mostly interested in defending your pre-supposition.

aceventura3

This directly contradicts what many on the left have said. Many believe Bush wanted to invade Iraq from day one, for various reasons including revenge for the attempt on his father's life.

I guess there is so much stuff floating around - truth has to take a back seat.

I come to the debate with the premise that Bush did not lie, true. Anyone spending anytime reading my position on Iraq would know that. (I am guilty of a lie of ommision, I should have that disclaimer on every post.) On the otherhand, and I may be wrong, but I guess some people come to the discussion with the premise that Bush did lie, just a wild guess on my part. At any rate I put my views on the table and ask questions and provide support for my point of view. If that is wrong, so be it.

__________________
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion."
"If you live among wolves you have to act like one."
"A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

loquitur

roachboy, if you think the Iraqi insurgents give a rat's ass about UN resolutions, you're ......... well, to put this nicely, you're mistaken. I'm also curious about your use of the term "colonial occupation." Iraq is nothing like any colonization I am familiar with in history. Or is it just that you think any first-world war in the third world is by definition colonial?

powerclown

Can you imagine? MULTI-NATION Colonialism! A McDonalds drive-thru, a Volkswagen factory, a Crédit Lyonnais bank, a VimpelCom cellphone dealer, a Selenia gas station, a Heineken beer factory, a Lenovo notebook dealer, an Iberia aircraft company...in every Iraqi province!

Willravel

Did that happen in 1992? No? There ya go. The UN can be corrupt, but it's NOTHING compared to the Bush Administration.

ratbastid

How does "Bush wanted into Iraq" contradict the position from many of the left that... Bush wanted into Iraq? Do you still read the posts you reply to? Or is it all knee-jerk defensiveness over there?

ubertuber

Lots of posts in a short time.

Loquitur, if you get a chance, I'd appreciate a link to that article you mentioned. At least the title and publication and I'll track it down myself.

__________________
Cogito ergo spud -- I think, therefore I yam

loquitur

I found it. And the article wasn't by Fred Kagan, it's by Edward Luttwack. He has a few things to say, but what I was focussing on was this sentence: "It is not hard to defeat Arab countries, but it is mostly useless. Violence can work to destroy dangerous weapons but not to induce desired changes in behavior." BTW, he views diplomacy and concessions as equally delusional. His solution is to stop thinking so much about the Middle East: buy their oil (they have no other economy for most intents and purposes, so they HAVE to sell to us) and let them deal with their own problems.

Here is the name and link: The Middle of Nowhere by Edward Luttwak, Prospect Magazine, May 2007

Host, I don't get into the details on a lot of this stuff because for the most part it involves two people talking past each other. I wrote a blog post on methods of discourse and analysis, and the limitations of logic, that you might find interesting - it's here. Logic ain't all it's cracked up to be, at least outside mathematics.

If I were to try to address most of what you wrote I'd have to spend a long time diagramming your arguments, isolating premises, picking which were defensible and which not, and then reconstructing the argument, backed up with research. This forum is a form of entertainment for me - mental exercise, if you will. Here I'm just doing some mental noodling, not trying to win arguments or make definitive presentations. I respect what you do, Host - you put a lot of work into it, and I'm not belittling that by any means. I just don't feel I have to match it. I might do some detailed discussion from time to time, but it really would be as the mood strikes me.

mixedmedia

And he would be absolutely right.

Otherwise, from your assessment, I'd say I'm in intense disagreement with his concepts. I'll read the article, though.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

loquitur

MM, he was talking specifically about Arab countries - they simply refuse to recognize defeat, which as a cultural trait has certain positives, but the negative is that they refuse to draw lessons from setbacks. But you'll see how he handles that, if you read the article.

Willravel

Sounds like some other country I know....hmmmm....

pig

fucking jamaican bobsledders!

__________________
You don't love me, you just love my piggy style

reconmike

Will, I wonder why the Frogs, Germans, and the Russians voted no.

Could it have been because they honestly were looking for a diplomatic solution? Or did they have alterior motives?


We all know the UN security council members vote according to whats best for the world.

__________________
Where is Darwin when ya need him?

Willravel

What a magnificent strawman! Who the hell cares why they voted the way they did? The point is that they did. The vote in the UN meant that the "Eighteenth Resolution" was not endorsed by the UN. The plan that the US, UK, and Spain (cha cha cha!) used in Iraqi Freedom was voted down in the UN. They said no. Why? Well maybe they were psychic and saw a clear path to the clusterfuck that is Iraq today. Maybe they all voted C because they didn't study. It doesn't matter. The point is that they voted for some reason and the resolution didn't pass. The resolution didn't pass, and we did it anyway. We invaded a country that wasn't a direct threat to us and in doing so we broke a treaty signed in good faith: the UN Charter.

Tell you what, find an article that shows that bypassing the UN and invading Iraq didn't break the UN Charter.

mixedmedia

It's very late and this thread isn't really the place to get into it, but I thoroughly disagree with his assessments.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

host

Thank you, loquitur, I'll take a look at your blog post and the Edward Luttwack piece.

I found <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/search.php?searchid=854098">14 posts</a> that I've done since october that contain references to and quotes from Ben Ferencz. Loquitur, you are probably familiar with Ferencz's opinion of UN Res. 1441 and what it authorizes the US to do...as well as his overall opinion of the legality of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq:


This is from my <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=2237692&postcount=7">next to latest post</a> on the subject:
In my latest post, I shared this illuminating UK reporting on the behind the scenes process that the UK cabinet engaged in to achieve a needed legal opinion concerning Res. 1441:
I don't understand how you can entertain the idea, loquitur, that Res. 1441 provided the US with authority to invade Iraq unilaterally.

I have posted, a number of times....that US and UK warplanes had been heavily bombing Iraqi targets for at least 5 months before march, 2003 invasion, including targets outside the northern and southern "no fly" zones. Certainly the bombing of areas of Iraq outside of the "no fly zones" was illegal aggression, yet it was still not enough to satisfy those who wanted to invade Iraq.

If you examine some of the 1600 letters Gertrude Bell wrote from Iraq in the late teens and early 1920's, it seems obvious that democracy in Iraq is an ill conceived notion in such an artifically assembled nation of 3 historically adversarial groups, sunni, shi'a and kurds, within borders abutting much larger adversarial regional military powers (Iran and Turkey.)

I've traded stock and options, some years as a full time sole proprietor, since 1998. I've learned that logic is often an impediment to success....much smarter people than I predict the reactions of logical traders, and they crush them by squeezing whatever position that "logic" dictates one should take. "Squeezing the shorts" or flushing out the long stock positions of those who are at work druing market hours, setting "stops" on their positions to trigger automatic sell transactions, before taking the stock back up in price, is SOP....a game for the deep pocketed "hedgies".

That is the game that they play, and they are very good at it.....but this isn't a game. It's premeditated, elective war. It's a life or death matter, and logic needs to play a role in decision making, as well as consensus from the Secrataries of defense, state, and the director of central intelligence.

ratbastid

These fuckers don't learn. They STILL think they can pump their lies out to the American people.

In a speech DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY, Bush said, "For America, the decision we face in Iraq is not whether we ought to take sides in a civil war, it's whether we stay in the fight against the same international terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11... The primary reason for the high level of violence is this: Al-Qaeda has ratcheted up its campaign of high-profile attacks."
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...202305_pf.html)

There is plenty of evidence that there was ZERO connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq before our invasion. The group calling itself "Organization for the Foundation of the Holy Struggle in Mesopotamia", which has been dubbed "Al Qaeda in Iraq" by the administration and the media, has only tenuous connections to the actual Al Qaeda, having been founded by al-Zarqawi, who is known to never have been Al Qaeda. What we've got here is ANOTHER bald-faced lie.

pig

say it ain't so rat, say it ain't so. always reminds me of that quote from w about one of the hardest parts of his job being to draw the tie between iraq and al queda/911.

thinking about things like this make me wish i used drugs.

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You don't love me, you just love my piggy style

mixedmedia

What's also blisteringly arrogant and swallowed whole by so many Americans is the concept that the civil struggle in Iraq is all about the people out to "get us."

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Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce