I won't defend Congress, because they for years enabled Bush with limp-wristed oversight borne out of the political fear whipped up by administration distortions. However, I'm sure you're implicating at least 100-150 people. Got a source for your claim? Direct quotes only please.

Use the search feature or Google it. My recollection is that both Hillary and Kerry admitted to voting on the measure without reading it. This "Mission Accomplished" topic has been rehashed repeadedly and I am tired of posting the same material. I don't believe that it would have mattered anyway. Hillary, Kerry, and the others who voted to authorize war would have voted the same way if they had read the material that was made available to them.

 

Obama, OTOH, did not have access to any of the intelligence reports. He was convinced that Saddam had WMD and that he was attempting to develop nuclear weapons, yet Obama was still opposed to the war. On the Iraq War, Hillary showed much better judgment than did the second coming of Jimmy Carter.

And another thing. I love it how war supporters have been allowed to define our adversaries in Iraq as "terrorists" when it is politically expedient, yet we turn a blind eye to factions responsible for many hundreds (if not thousands) of U.S. casualties. In the desperate attempt to quell out of control violence, we have resorted to paying off many who formerly killed U.S. servicemembers. And even though Al Sadr is an avowed enemy of the U.S. and openly opposes the U.S. occupation, we have made no apparent attempts to take him out. He has undoubtedly directed operations resulting in attacks on U.S. servicemembers. War backers are all-too-willing to get up on their soapboxes and hurl scorn about "surrendering to the enemy" blah blah blah.

 

I put these questions to you: Is not the willingness of U.S. leadership to get into bed with such groups essentially tantamount to surrender? One could easily draw parallels to U.S. activities in the Russian-Afghanistan war that eventually empowered the Taliban and al Qaeda. How can we have victory if we're not willing to vanquish our enemies?

And I love how the anti-war crowd that argues that we should not be involved in a civil war in Iraq but were silent as Clinton decided to intervene in the Balkans (a real civil war), are so eager to use euphamisms to describe terrorists. Most of the indiscriminate violence against Iraqis has been perpetrated or facilitated by foreigners. I do not agree with all of our actions in Iraq because I have difficulty understanding why Iran's puppet, Al Sadr, is still breathing.

Use the search feature or Google it. My recollection is that both Hillary and Kerry admitted to voting on the measure without reading it. This "Mission Accomplished" topic has been rehashed repeadedly and I am tired of posting the same material. I don't believe that it would have mattered anyway. Hillary, Kerry, and the others who voted to authorize war would have voted the same way if they had read the material that was made available to them.

 

Obama, OTOH, did not have access to any of the intelligence reports. He was convinced that Saddam had WMD and that he was attempting to develop nuclear weapons, yet Obama was still opposed to the war. On the Iraq War, Hillary showed much better judgment than did the second coming of Jimmy Carter.

 

Where have you read or heard that Obama believed the Iraq war hype? He made the right decision to not back the war. I knew the intel was bunk from the start.

And I love how the anti-war crowd that argues that we should not be involved in a civil war in Iraq but were silent as Clinton decided to intervene in the Balkans (a real civil war), are so eager to use euphamisms to describe terrorists. Most of the indiscriminate violence against Iraqis has been perpetrated or facilitated by foreigners. I do not agree with all of our actions in Iraq because I have difficulty understanding why Iran's puppet, Al Sadr, is still breathing.

 

Clinton intervened in the Balkans to stop ethnic cleansing. We weren't lied to as to the reasons for intervening. Most of the violence in Iraq is Sunni vs Shia between Iraqis. Killing Al Sadr (the most powerful man in the country) would be like kicking a hornets nest while whizzing on an electric fense. BTW, the whole Iraqi government is chummy with Iran, not just Al Sadr.

The American public long ago recognized that administration declarations about the war are simply not credible.

Many others have learned that the Democrats' declarations such as Harry Reid's, "The war is lost" and Nancy Pelosi's insistance that the war is not winnable are nothing but cynical attempts to undermine our war efforts for political gain. So much for Democratic "leadership."

The mission was to remove Sadaam from power. That mission was accomplished.

 

I thought that the mission was to find WMD, nope remove Sadaam from power, nope, to set a gov't like our own up in the middle east, maybe...

 

I got confussed with the mission's goal. But I do know one thing if the mission is accomplished, should we have not brought our boys home, because, what is the point, if we have won. Are we so much more intelligent then the Iraqi people, can they not make up their own mind about the gov't. Before someone starts in on my about power struggles and so forth, that is part of it. We had one here remember the civil war...

Many right wingers believe that this war will end with an American walking into a room and BANG, shooting the last terrorist. The hero then blows smoke from his gun and says, "I'm glad that's over." What Bush and his ilk failed to realize is that the world is more complex than that. We won the war part of the fight in Iraq, but we failed to secure the country. We fired their army and sent thousands of mad soldiers home without pay or guns. We didn't secure weapons depots and ailienated a huge section of the population. Remember that Bush didn't even know the difference between shia and sunni until after the war started. The war itself was needless from the beginning.

 

Unfortunately the only thing that we've accomplished in Iraq is to make Iran more powerful. We're trying to force a Western system on a totally different culture, and we're trying to get three distinct groups to adhere to national boundaries that were imposed by the British with no regard to the people who live there. We should set a timetable to get out and tell the Iraqi government that they have to step up. The best solution would be a three state federation.

Where have you read or heard that Obama believed the Iraq war hype? He made the right decision to not back the war. I knew the intel was bunk from the start.

If you still believe that, then you are smarter than Obama.

 

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income - to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear - I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. - Remarks of Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama Against Going to War with Iraq

You probably agree with Obama but he apparently believed the worst about Saddam Hussein and was still unwilling to support action against Iraq. That is quite different than believing that there were no WMDs, which is what many Obama supporters believe was the reason for his position.

And I respect your opinion and I'm not sure that I can disagree with your assertion that certain key players felt, before Bush's election, that Hussein needed to be removed. I'm willing to assume, based on their vast experience in foreign policy matters, that they had good reason to feel the way they did.

Rumsfeld and some of the big Pentagon players (Wolfowitz and Abrams among others) had called for Saddam's forced ouster in a letter to President Clinton in 1998. The letter was from a group called (to the best of my memory) the Project for a New American Century, an organization that adopted a very neo-connish foreign policy approach.

 

Cheney was also aligned with the group, although I don't think he signed the letter.

 

It's also been reported that Rumsfeld mentioned a possible invasion of Iraq on 9/11, and Cheney was playing up an Iraqi intelligence connection with Mohammed Atta (since discredited, I understand) on "Meet the Press" a few days later.

As you stated there was intel that said there was not any wmds. Yet there was intel that stated there was; and we knew that he had wmds in the past; and we knew that he had used wmds on the Kurds; and we knew that he had sworn to hurt us; and we knew he was mentally unstable. You may have chosen to ignore all of those things. I would not. And when taking all those things into consideration and the possible devasting results of waiting until later to remove him, I would have done the same thing as Bush did and invaded Iraq.

Saddam hadn't used the WMDs against his own people since before the Gulf War. Those events were nearly 15 years past when we invaded.

 

Early in the Bush administration's tenure, high officials such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice had proclaimed that the enforcement of UN sanctions had Saddam "in a box" ... unable to pose a serious threat to his neighbors and unable to acquire the wherewithal needed to make him a serious threat.

 

That all changed as the drums for an invasion started banging.

To think that the UN was forever going to be able to stop Hussein from restarting his wmd program is being really optimistic in my opinion. Can we be sure that he would use the wmds against us once he had them again? Admittedly we cannot. But that's a chance I would not want to take as the President.

All conjecture at best.

 

Saddam wanted no part of us ... he hadn't since he got his butt kicked in the Gulf War.

I will say this: given the belief you have that a President can be so easily persuaded by foreign policy advisors that have an ax to grind, you have provided a solid reason why America should elect McCain, as he is the only candidate with enough foreign policy experience to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff in the advise given to the President by his policy advisors. If you believe that Bush was duped by Cheney, Rumsfeld and others, which would only have been possible due the fact that Bush had no real foreign policy experience to rely on, then McCain should be very appealing to you, as it's my guess is that he will have as much foreign policy knowledge as any of his advisors and thus will not be able to be duped. Clinton and Obama will, like Bush, be forced to rely on her/his advisors like Bush was forced to rely on his.

Maybe, maybe not. McCain's been in the Senate much longer than Clinton and Obama, but the Clintons have also dealt with such events in the Oval Office.

 

I respect McCain and could possibly even vote for him. That will be decided much later. I will say this for McCain ... I disagree with his vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, but he's pretty much been right about Iraq since then.

And that brings another point to mind: Bush was recruited to run for President by big wig Republican players (some perhaps with foreign policy axes to grind). With McCain, its pretty much the complete opposite. Unlike Bush, whom many feel was beholden to certain people and groups in the Republican party, such is clearly and uncontrovertiby not the case with McCain.

Thank goodness. I hope that McCain continues to work that way.

Clinton intervened in the Balkans to stop ethnic cleansing. We weren't lied to as to the reasons for intervening. Most of the violence in Iraq is Sunni vs Shia between Iraqis. Killing Al Sadr (the most powerful man in the country) would be like kicking a hornets nest while whizzing on an electric fense. BTW, the whole Iraqi government is chummy with Iran, not just Al Sadr.

No, the whole Iraqi government is not chummy with Iran and no, Al Sadr is not the most powerful man in Iraq. His forces took a beating in the fighting around Basra while Al Sadr hid in Tehran.

No, the whole Iraqi government is not chummy with Iran and no, Al Sadr is not the most powerful man in Iraq. His forces took a beating in the fighting around Basra while Al Sadr hid in Tehran.

 

The majority of Iraqi's and their government are Shia and are friendly with Iran. The majority Shia population voted in a majority Shia pro-Iran government. The Iraqi leadership is chummy with Iran and Al Sadr only called off his Basra fighting b/c of Iran's request to do so.

I thought that the mission was to find WMD, nope remove Sadaam from power, nope, to set a gov't like our own up in the middle east, maybe...

 

I got confussed with the mission's goal. But I do know one thing if the mission is accomplished, should we have not brought our boys home, because, what is the point, if we have won. Are we so much more intelligent then the Iraqi people, can they not make up their own mind about the gov't. Before someone starts in on my about power struggles and so forth, that is part of it. We had one here remember the civil war...

 

 

Now the mission seems to be countering Iranian influence in Iraqi affairs.

 

Colin Powell was right--we broke Iraq and now we own it. :madman:

Saddam hadn't used the WMDs against his own people since before the Gulf War. Those events were nearly 15 years past when we invaded.

 

Early in the Bush administration's tenure, high officials such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice had proclaimed that the enforcement of UN sanctions had Saddam "in a box" ... unable to pose a serious threat to his neighbors and unable to acquire the wherewithal needed to make him a serious threat.

 

 

Another point that needs to be made here is that Dick Cheney was on record in 1991 and again in 1996 articulating very clearly the reasons why invading Iraq to topple Saddam was a path strewn with entanglements for the U.S.

 

Cheney's 1991 comments as Bush 41's Secretary of Defense:

 

I was not an enthusiast about getting U.S. forces and going into Iraq. We were there in the southern part of Iraq to the extent we needed to be there to defeat his forces and to get him out of Kuwait, but the idea of going into Baghdad, for example, or trying to topple the regime wasn't anything I was enthusiastic about. I felt there was a real danger here that you would get bogged down in a long drawn-out conflict, that this was a dangerous, difficult part of the world; if you recall we were all worried about the possibility of Iraq coming apart, the Iranians restarting the conflict that they'd had in the eight-year bloody war with the Iranians and the Iraqis over eastern Iraq. We had concerns about the Kurds in the north, the Turks get very nervous every time we start to talk about an independent Kurdistan.

 

Plus there was the notion that you were going to set yourself a new war aim that we hadn't talked to anybody about. That you hadn't gotten Congress to approve, hadn't talked to the American people about. You're going to find yourself in a situation where you've redefined your war aims and now set up a new war aim that in effect would detract from the enormous success you just had. What we set out to do was to liberate Kuwait and to destroy his offensive capability, that's what I said repeatedly in my public statements. That was the mission I was given by the President. That's what we did. Now you can say, well, you should have gone to Baghdad and gotten Saddam. I don't think so. I think if we had done that we would have been bogged down there for a very long period of time with the real possibility we might not have succeeded.

 

Hmmmm. Do you know what's worse than a defeatist? Answer: Someone who knows the chances for success are very poor and starts a war anyway.

 

 

Cheney's 1996 comments suggesting that getting rid of Saddam would have little beneficial effect:

 

f Saddam wasn't there, his successor probably wouldn't be notably friendlier to the United States than he is. I also look at that part of the world as of vital interest to the United States; for the next hundred years it's going to be the world's supply of oil. We've got a lot of friends in the region. We're always going to have to be involved there. Maybe it's part of our national character, you know, we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war, and the problem goes away, and it doesn't work that way in the Middle East; it never has and isn't likely to in my lifetime

Rumsfeld and some of the big Pentagon players (Wolfowitz and Abrams among others) had called for Saddam's forced ouster in a letter to President Clinton in 1998. The letter was from a group called (to the best of my memory) the Project for a New American Century, an organization that adopted a very neo-connish foreign policy approach.

 

Cheney was also aligned with the group, although I don't think he signed the letter.

 

It's also been reported that Rumsfeld mentioned a possible invasion of Iraq on 9/11, and Cheney was playing up an Iraqi intelligence connection with Mohammed Atta (since discredited, I understand) on "Meet the Press" a few days later.

Saddam hadn't used the WMDs against his own people since before the Gulf War. Those events were nearly 15 years past when we invaded.

 

Early in the Bush administration's tenure, high officials such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice had proclaimed that the enforcement of UN sanctions had Saddam "in a box" ... unable to pose a serious threat to his neighbors and unable to acquire the wherewithal needed to make him a serious threat.

 

That all changed as the drums for an invasion started banging.

All conjecture at best.

 

Saddam wanted no part of us ... he hadn't since he got his butt kicked in the Gulf War.

Maybe, maybe not. McCain's been in the Senate much longer than Clinton and Obama, but the Clintons have also dealt with such events in the Oval Office.

 

I respect McCain and could possibly even vote for him. That will be decided much later. I will say this for McCain ... I disagree with his vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, but he's pretty much been right about Iraq since then.

Thank goodness. I hope that McCain continues to work that way.

 

If I may respond:

 

I don't disagree that some Republican policy advisors came into Bush's administration wanting to take out Hussein. I only trust that they had good reason for wanting to do so.

 

The fact that it had been 15 years since he had used wmds on the Kurds, may indicate that he had turned a new leaf and was no longer the diabolical and sinister person that he once was. I'm not sure I'd have been optimistic enough to believe that also. I'm also not sure that Hussein wanted no part of us. He had every opportunity to allow the inspectors to freely inspect his facilities yet he refused to do so. Either he was not afraid of us or he thought we were bluffing. Either way, he lost his life because he failed to lift his skirt completely.

 

Bill Clinton no doubt gained valuable foreign policy experience in his 8 years in the Oval Office. One can seriously wonder what if any input Hillary would permit him to provide to her. As to the experience Hillary gained as First Lady, I'll let her and Obama slug that one out, but from what appears to be coming out, it doesn't appear as if she was "in" on many foreign policy decisions when Bill was the President.

 

As to your thoughts about McCain, I am glad to read that you are at least considering McCain. He's the moderate Republican that I have been hoping for, for quite some time. We need someone that can work with both parties to move this country together and forward. While there are a lot of important issues facing this country, in my mind, foreign policy experience is the most critical of them all, as foreign policy decisions often don't (and can't) be beaten around in the public like the other one's can and are. Thus, it becomes critically important that the President have expertise in that area. Anyone critical of Bush's reliance on Cheney, Rolfowitz, et al, has to be concerned with Obama's and Clinton's similar lack of foreign policy experience I would think. While the President's importance on economic matters is real, its no where near as critical as it is in foreign policy and military matters in my opinion.

 

Finally, I appreciate and respect your position on these issues.

If I may respond:

 

I don't disagree that some Republican policy advisors came into Bush's administration wanting to take out Hussein. I only trust that they had good reason for wanting to do so.

 

The fact that it had been 15 years since he had used wmds on the Kurds, may indicate that he had turned a new leaf and was no longer the diabolical and sinister person that he once was. I'm not sure I'd have been optimistic enough to believe that also. I'm also not sure that Hussein wanted no part of us. He had every opportunity to allow the inspectors to freely inspect his facilities yet he refused to do so. Either he was not afraid of us or he thought we were bluffing. Either way, he lost his life because he failed to lift his skirt completely.

 

Bill Clinton no doubt gained valuable foreign policy experience in his 8 years in the Oval Office. One can seriously wonder what if any input Hillary would permit him to provide to her. As to the experience Hillary gained as First Lady, I'll let her and Obama slug that one out, but from what appears to be coming out, it doesn't appear as if she was "in" on many foreign policy decisions when Bill was the President.

 

As to your thoughts about McCain, I am glad to read that you are at least considering McCain. He's the moderate Republican that I have been hoping for, for quite some time. We need someone that can work with both parties to move this country together and forward. While there are a lot of important issues facing this country, in my mind, foreign policy experience is the most critical of them all, as foreign policy decisions often don't (and can't) be beaten around in the public like the other one's can and are. Thus, it becomes critically important that the President have expertise in that area. Anyone critical of Bush's reliance on Cheney, Rolfowitz, et al, has to be concerned with Obama's and Clinton's similar lack of foreign policy experience I would think. While the President's importance on economic matters is real, its no where near as critical as it is in foreign policy and military matters in my opinion.

 

Finally, I appreciate and respect your position on these issues.

 

 

Not meaning to but in on this conversation but the bolded above I think has been shown that Hussein felt he had to bluff his way around not just vs. the Americans but the Iranians. That's why he didn't let the UN inspectors in because they would have reported a "paper tiger" existed and that would have shown his hand to Iran. I think he was more worried about them than the US. (at least in the beginning)