[MrLemon]

When Bush and Cheney decided to kick the crap out of Iraq, they had almost no support in Congress or the world. But they did it anyway.

Why?

Some people think it was a stupid move, but like many at the time, I never thought it was stupid. Harsh, yes, but in the eyes of many, necessary to the future of the world.

The middle eastern countries had attacked the US on 9/11. They used terrorism and thus, could disclaim personal responsiblity. Bush and Cheney knew they had to nip this in the bud. The entire basis of world peace is this: if your country attacks a big nation, you will be obliterated. But using terrorists, the Iraq/Iran/Saudis had undercut that system. If that trend were allowed to continue, the next step would be, you would have nukes set off in Wash DC. That would destroy world peace utterly. It was a very dangerous situation and Bush, as president, had to stop it by any means necessary. That was his job.

So he randomly picked a middle-eastern nation. Yawn. Well, why not Iraq? Good choice. Evil dictator, had already pissed on America's leg, had a seemingly huge army. Great choice.

So Bush stomped Iraq, as a man might stomp a bug. He did so without anybody's approval. He didn't ask or care if Iraq was the main aggressor. He was conveying a message, that if terrorism was used, anybody with even a partial connection to the terrorists could and would be destroyed.

All the nations of the world were reminded: "oh fuck, the US military can stomp us casually, any time, with or without UN approval."

It was the perfect demonstration. It conveyed the message that the POTUS wanted to convey.

After his term of office, Bush essentially went into political exile, knowing that his choice would forever darken his reputation, but he is regularly visited by American citizens, who thank him for doing what needed to be done.

Of course there are many evils that have come from this choice. There are many evils that come from any situation like this. But the choice still has to be made.

[Off The Reservation]

You meant to put this in your cover letter for CNN but accidentally post it here?

[MrLemon]

(03-18-2019 11:42 AM)Off The Reservation Wrote:  

You meant to put this in your cover letter for CNN but accidentally post it here?

Feel free to discuss or refute any point.

[Leonard D Neubache]

We have a politics and war lounge for this kind of shit.

Are you addicted to creating threads or something?

[BelyyTigr]

Some fun facts:-
1)Saddam Hussein despised Al Qaeda.
2)The Bush and Rumsfeld gang actually created and supported Al Qaeda.
3)There never were "WMDs" in Iraq. As most of us knew at the time.
4)NOTHING would surprise me about Bush. He's part of the same gang as Hillary Clinton.
Utterly evil.
5)Many thousands of innocent people (Westerners and Middle Easterners) died because of that corrupt silverspooned moron.

Yes, as Leonard says this kind of shit has a politics lounge.

[DarkTriad]

If think next time we have a problem, we should just nuke Canada right off the bat. Then we say "Hey, don't mess with us, that's what we do to people we LIKE.".

[TigerMandingo]

So are you saying that starving 500,000 Iraqi children was "worth it"?

[Foolsgo1d]

I hope this is a troll post but something tells me it isn't.

[MrLemon]

(03-18-2019 12:16 PM)BelyyTigr Wrote:  

Some fun facts:-
1)Saddam Hussein despised Al Qaeda.
2)The Bush and Rumsfeld gang actually created and supported Al Qaeda.
3)There never were "WMDs" in Iraq. As most of us knew at the time.
4)NOTHING would surprise me about Bush. He's part of the same gang as Hillary Clinton.
Utterly evil.
5)Many thousands of innocent people (Westerners and Middle Easterners) died because of that corrupt silverspooned moron.

Yes, as Leonard says this kind of shit has a politics lounge.

I'd be happy to move it to the politics lounge. How does one decide what should go where? What threads deserve full thread status? Serious question.

[CaptainChardonnay]

Tactically speaking it is sound. If someone shoots you, you shot back with a full mag or drop a bomb on them. That teaches the enemy to never do that again.

Instead of having the enemy come to your home and wrecking it, you take the fight to the enemy and wreck their home. Fear is the only way terrible people who want to destroy your way of life will respect you.

The Bush doctrine:
Take the fight to the enemy
Make no distinction between terrorist and the nations that harbor them
Confront threats before they emerge
Advance freedom

Morally speaking, its debatable, which is the purpose of this thread.

[MrLemon]

(03-18-2019 12:26 PM)TigerMandingo Wrote:  

So are you saying that starving 500,000 Iraqi children was "worth it"?

Was firebombing Tokyo and Dresden worth it? Was nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki worth it? We killed millions of innocents in WW2, Korea, and Vietnam.

Like I said in my post, there were a lot of evil outcomes.

[MrLemon]

(03-18-2019 12:22 PM)DarkTriad Wrote:  

If think next time we have a problem, we should just nuke Canada right off the bat. Then we say "Hey, don't mess with us, that's what we do to people we LIKE.".

That probably wouldn't be a good move. When you are the world's policeman, you have to support the narrative that there are "good guys" and "bad guys".

Canada, at least for now, is a good guy. However, if they keep sending down those fucking geese every winter to shit on our cars, we might have to re-evaluate.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

Following that logic, upon being invaded by Nazi Germany, Soviet Union should have turned around and attacked... Cambodia.

You know, just to nip things in the bud.

[Luvianka]

Getting Iraq's oil is a very logical reason.

[kaotic]

(03-18-2019 11:40 AM)MrLemon Wrote:  

So he randomly picked a middle-eastern nation. Yawn. Well, why not Iraq? Good choice. Evil dictator, had already pissed on America's leg, had a seemingly huge army. Great choice.

Randomly picked?

(((Why not Iraq?)))



Good choice?

Let's completely omit the shitshow and chaos after Iraq was invaded that STILL causes us problems.

The amount of hamstering here is hilarious 1/10 junk thread.

[TigerMandingo]

The other problem with the OP is he assumes Iraq was revenge for 9/11, when in fact plans to invade had been put forth in the late 90s by PNAC and other neocons, and had nothing to do with stopping terrorism.

[MrLemon]

(03-18-2019 12:57 PM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

Following that logic, upon being invaded by Nazi Germany, Soviet Union should have turned around and attacked... Cambodia.

You know, just to nip things in the bud.

Not a good analogy. Cambodia wasn't related in the eyes of the world with Nazis. If you had said "Italy" or "Austria" that would have been closer.

Saddam - was - connected to 9/11 in the eyes of the world. He may in fact have not been connected to them at all in reality...but that doesn't matter. All that mattered was that he appeared linked to 9/11 and he had a seemingly big army suitable for demonstration purposes.

[MrLemon]

(03-18-2019 01:07 PM)TigerMandingo Wrote:  

The other problem with the OP is he assumes Iraq was revenge for 9/11, when in fact plans to invade had been put forth in the late 90s by PNAC and other neocons, and had nothing to do with stopping terrorism.

Are you going to answer my question? Was firebombing Tokyo or nuking Hiroshima "worth it"?

I'm asking to better understand your objection. Do you object to killing innocents in -any- war, or do you object to the Iraq war only? Is Bush any smarter, or stupider, or more or less evil than Harry Truman?

[Syberpunk]

[Orson]

(03-18-2019 11:43 AM)MrLemon Wrote:  

(03-18-2019 11:42 AM)Off The Reservation Wrote:  

You meant to put this in your cover letter for CNN but accidentally post it here?

Feel free to discuss or refute any point.

ADDING to MrLemmon points: There sure remains the matter of the 16 (or 17?) UN mandatory resolutions against Iraq. (Of course, "mandatory" does not mean the UN does anything forceful to enforce them, except perhaps diplomatically.)

In addition, while there were no recent stockpiles of WMD, these resolututions on inspection REQUIRED "show your work" in disposing or dismantling prohibited WMD. Saddam didn't abide these quite deliberately.

Third, there is the "The Bomb In My Garden" problem (SEE the book a memoir by Saddam's authorized nuke engineer who neither the UN nor US authorities knew about (Johnny Depp is reported to be producing the film of the true book.) People entirely neglect this inconvenient truth.

Actually, it was only a prototype for a centrifuge for separating enriched uranium to make a nuke device, just as Iran and the Norks operate.

Finally, the war in Iraq did the world this great favor: it kicked the can of nuclear device proliferation down the road fifteen to twenty years into the future - about where the Norks revealed they had such a weapon.

Furthermore, it revealed that the primary path for this future ran through Pakistan and "The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets... and How We Could Have Stopped Him" (SEE the book, 2007) for who built nukes for the Pakis, A. Q. Khan.

This taught authorities to keep a close watch on Khan and those he sold technical secrets to.

And as a postscript, given the 9/11 attack, if you were newly president, what would
you have done differently? I never get a serious answer. In the 00s, I got "President Gore would have done the same things (as Bush did)!"

So consistently blaming Bush for the Iraq war is bogus. What were the serious alternatives, given what we learned after the war? That would have secured the US and the world against gathering threats like nuke devices gained by threatening actors against us and the world?

[Lance Blastoff]

People forget that we were about to see the sanctions regime against Iraq collapse in 2002-3. I was in graduate school, studying economics at the time, and I can remember the discussions around Iraq in the 2001-2003 period, prior to the US starting to make the case for invasion. There was a strong movement, led by France, to try and normalize relations with Hussein's regime and I can remember a number of magazines like Time having cover stories about the deprivations on the common people caused by sanctions and their ineffectiveness in removing the regime there. To some degree, Bush was preempting a strong international push to relax the sanctions.

The other thing I don't understand why people don't factor in more often - Hussein plotted to assassinate George Bush, Sr in 1993. If you were president, and someone had tried to murder your your father, what would you do? It would take an incredible amount of restraint to not kill the man. Restrain I certainly don't have yet and I don't think George W. Bush had either. Maybe nobody has that much restraint. (Maybe nobody should.)

[MrLemon]

(03-18-2019 02:05 PM)Lance Blastoff Wrote:  

The other thing I don't understand why people don't factor in more often - Hussein plotted to assassinate George Bush, Sr in 1993. If you were president, and someone had tried to murder your your father, what would you do? It would take an incredible amount of restraint to not kill the man. Restrain I certainly don't have yet and I don't think George W. Bush had either. Maybe nobody has that much restraint. (Maybe nobody should.)

Thanks. Plotting to assassinate a POTUS, when you are the leader of a country with the 3rd or 4th biggest army, is itself a declaration of war against the US.

[SamuelBRoberts]

There've been something like 10 million memoirs written by people involved in the Iraq war at all levels, from the very top of the government down to the lowest soldiers on the ground.

Does anything in any of these books support the idea that Iraq was chosen "at random" to "remind countries of America's power"? Is there a scene somewhere in W Bush's biography of him and Cheney get drunk in the oval office and throwing darts at a map? Maybe a book by some secretary, talking about how she was asked to print out a list of all the names of the middle eastern countries and cut it up into little strips, and then put the strips into a hat for the Chiefs of Staff to draw out of at a party?

[BoiBoi]

So you do actually believe that the USA (or any major power) goes to war randomly? I hope that you are kidding. Also, the middle east never attacked the USA. Saudi-funded, CIA-trained terrorists did it. And talking about "world peace" because of the USA being the knight in shining armor policing the globe is just laughable. You should stay off the MSM and read some books.

P.S. I'm not trying to insult anyone here. The USA is a great country full of great people. It's the government and its shady ass agencies that I'm talking about.

[Foolsgo1d]

So when the time comes for Irans asshole to be split open would this be to show how tough the US and NATO are or will it be for (((random))) reasons?

Lets check;

> Afghanistan
> Iraq
> Libya
> Almost Syria - But technically NATO and US, including Israel attacked and still carry out runs on Syrian and Iranian assets

On the chopping block are Venezuela with their (((random blackouts))) and (((exploding electrical grid))) and Ukraine with their strategically supplied MANPADs and training for their military.