Would we have gone into Iraq if... ....some one other than Bush was elected president in 2000? I have to write a position paper on the above question. Just looking for some input, and some helpful resources if anyone knows of any. I'd greatly appreciate the help. As of now, I have a feeling that we wouldn't be there. It is my understanding the administration pressed hard to get a war going, but would have happened if another administration held the reigns? I am doubtful that any democratic president would have been eager to wage war. Thoughts anyone?
I was aluding to Gore, more than the democratic party I suppose. But you're missing the point, and the question. Whether Democrat or Republican, would we be in Iraq if some one else had been president?
No, I didn't miss the point! The "point" is that no one can know what might have happened. Your paper/report can't show it either. What you have to do is "invent" enough bullshit so the teacher gives you a good grade. It ain't got shit to do with whether something would have happened ....no one knows and no one will ever know. And to think so, is just more bullshit. If I had been elected, for example, the Iraqi war would already have been over and done for years!! And there would have been almost no loss of American lives! ...and Iraq would now be a smoking, ruined pile of rubble and sand. Baron Max
Of course no one can know for sure, we're playing the 'what if' game here. Nothing can be certain, its all hypothesising and looking at things in hindsight. And I don't think its bullshit to do so, as you say it is. Lovely. In that case I am quite glad that you were not elected...
No, we would not have gone into Iraq if somebody else were president. Colin Powell before the war warned Bush, "If you break it, it's yours" But Bush is reckless. He thinks everything will turn out all right. He is surrounded by the PNAC people who want to "seize the unipolar momment". Rummy, Wolfowitz, Feith and the rest believe that they have the competence to organize a successful seizing of the unipolar moment. The first step in their plan is to place an American puppet dictatorship disguised as a democracy in charge of Iraq for the indefinte future. This new Iraq/ permanent American millitary pace was to threaton every oil importing nation with a cut off of their oil supply if they disobey the american neoco leadership at any time in the next 100 years. The plan is insanely ambitious. Olny geniuses could have any hope of making it work. Rumsfeld and the PNAC signers are not geniuses but Rumsfeld and George Bush junior didn't seem to realise that Rumsfeld was not a geniuse. Colin Powell, Clinton, Gore and George Bush senoir knew that the PNAC crowd were not genuises and that things would and could go wrong. With any of them as president Iraq would not have been invaded even though each of the support the idea that America should seize the unipolar moment if it could seize the unipolar moment and agree that controll of Iraq would greatly enhance the possibilty of seizing the unipolar moment. The difference between the mainstream CFR mindset and Neocon/PNAC mindset is that the neocons are reckless and think the CFR guys are too cautious. The mainstream CFR guys think the neoco/PNAC guys are unrealistic dreamers who ignore reality when it doesn't fit with their dreams. Bush the elder, Clinton and Gore are traditional CFR believers not neocon believers. The prime target of the war in Iraq is China. Read late 1990s neocon writing. WMD and the war on terror and even to steal the oil are not why the USA entered Iraq. We went to Iraq to control what China and it's future allie might become twenty years from now by establishing and maintaining military and political over the oil producing nations of the Gulf. I don't think the USA can pull that off. I think step one Iraq is already lost because we can't get our people elected. We knew Saddam was a thug ever since he was an unimportant unknown thug young man on the CIA payroll in the 1950s. Despite knowing that Saddam was a thug we gave him loans to buy WMDs from us when he was fighting Khomeini for us. We used our satellite to tell Saddam's troops where to fire his outlawed WMD weapons to hurt our enemies. Iran and their Kurdish allies were fighting Saddam arround Halabja. Saddam used WMD on Halabja. I believe the usa knew who used WMD at Halabja but they blamed Iran to protect Saddam at the UN. Soon after that Rumsfeld is photographed shaking Saddam hand and I believe was arranging to get Saddam more WMD. Nobody but extreme lefties cared about Halabja because the USA government did not want anybody caring about Halabja. Saddam feared and persecuted Islamic extremists. If Saddam found somebody recruiting for Bin Laden Saddam would kill them just as he killed everybody else that he feared. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10874-2003Apr11?language=printer : "On Feb. 15, 1991, President George H.W. Bush called on the Iraqi military and people to overthrow Saddam Hussein. On March 3, an Iraqi tank commander returning from Kuwait fired a shell through one of the portraits of Hussein....... Indeed, the U.S. administration seemed to prefer the continuation of the Baath regime (albeit without Hussein) to the success of the rebellion....... As one National Security Council official told me at the time: "Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime.".... ....The United States allowed Iraq to send Republican Guard units into southern cities and to fly helicopter gunships. (This in spite of a ban on flights, articulated by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf with considerable swagger: "You fly, you die.") The consequences were devastating. Hussein's forces leveled the historical centers of the Shiite towns, bombarded sacred Shiite shrines and executed thousands on the spot. By some estimates, 100,000 people died in reprisal killings between March and September. Many of these atrocities were committed in proximity to American troops, who were under orders not to intervene." If president George Bush the first had wanted an Iranian influenced Shiite ruled Iraq all he had to do was shoot down a few helicopters in 1991. No other president would do this war because they would have known that the chance of the outcome of the war being something that they desired was too small to justify the expense of the war.
wasnt the iraq war hatched during clinton's watch? why do the democratic leadership support the invasion?
Only if the other person's name was "Clinton". Or any of the other thugs that work for him and the Bushes. They all have the same agenda. - N
Orestes... If it was someone else there is no doubt in my mind that we wouldn't be there now. We have the presidents top advisor about to be possibly indicted for stuff relating to "false" pre-war intelligence. Baron Max always answers a serious question with a bullshit question about something totally unrelated to what your talking about. There was only one (I believe) British report of a "suspected" uranium transfer from Africa to Iraq. However there was overwhelming evidence that this report was false! After 9/11 Bush tryed relentlessely to link this to the Iraq war but was not able to do so. So instead he lies daily about the link to the american people. I suggest doing some research on Richard Clarke (Bush's former advisor)And also some on the downing street memos.
President William McKinley In 1898, President William McKinley, having been goaded by muscle-flexing advisers and jingoistic journalists to make war on Spain, sought divine guidance as to how he should deal with the Spanish possessions, especially the Philippines, that U.S. forces had seized in what ambassador John Hay famously described as a “splendid little war.” Evidently, his prayer was answered, because the president later reported that he had heard “the voice of God,” and “there was nothing left for us to do but take them all and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them President Woodrow Wilson .... he recognized that the great majority of Americans wanted no part of the fighting in Europe, and in 1916 he sought reelection successfully on the appealing slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.”??Soon after his second inauguration, however, he asked Congress for a declaration of war, which was approved, although six senators and fifty members of the House of Representatives had the wit or wisdom to vote against it. Wilson promised this war would be “the war to end all wars,” but wars aplenty have taken place since the guns fell silent in 1918, leaving their unprecedented carnage—nearly nine million dead and more than twenty million wounded, many of them hideously disfigured or crippled for life, as well as perhaps ten million civilians who died of starvation or disease as a result of the war’s destruction of resources and its interruption of commerce. And what did the United States or the world gain? Only a twenty-year reprieve before the war's smoldering embers burst into flame again. President Franklin D. Roosevelt President Franklin D. Roosevelt began the maneuvers by which he hoped to plunge the nation once again into the European cauldron. Unsuccessful in his naval provocations of the Germans in the Atlantic, he eventually pushed the Japanese to the wall by a series of hostile economic-warfare measures, issued clearly unacceptable ultimatums, and induced them to mount a desperate military attack, most devastatingly on the U.S. forces he concentrated at Pearl Harbor.??Campaigning for reelection in Boston on October 30, 1940, FDR had sworn: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Well, Peleliu ain’t Peoria. Roosevelt was lying when he made his declaration, just as he had lied repeatedly before and would lie repeatedly for the remainder of his life. (Stanford historian David M. Kennedy, careful not to speak too stridently, refers to FDR’s “frequently cagey misrepresentations to the American public.”) Yet many, many Americans trusted this inveterate liar, sad to say, with their lives, and during the war more than 400,000 of them paid the ultimate price. President Johnson As chief executive, he had to deal with vital questions of war and peace, and like his beloved mentor, he relied heavily on lying to the public. In October 1964, seeking to gain election by portraying himself as the peace candidate (in contrast to the alleged mad bomber Barry Goldwater), LBJ told a crowd at Akron University: “We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”??In 1965, however, shortly after the start of his elected term in office, Johnson exploited the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, itself based on a fictitious account of an attack on U.S. naval forces off Vietnam, and initiated a huge buildup of U.S. forces in Southeast Asia that would eventually commit more than 500,000 American “boys” to fight an “Asian boy’s” war. Some 58,000 U.S. military personnel would lose their lives in the service of LBJ’s vanity and political ambitions, not to speak of the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians killed and wounded in the melee. Chalk up another catastrophe to a lying American president. President Reagan The Reagan administration’s 1983 invasion of Grenada was a clear-cut violation of the UN Charter articles 2(3), 2(4), and 33 as well as of articles 18, 20, and 21 of the Revised OAS Charter for which there was no valid excuse or justification under international law. As such, it constituted an act of aggression within the meaning of article 39 of the United Nation’s Charter. The Reagan administration’s illegal intervention into El Salvador’s civil war contravenes the international legal right of self-determination of peoples as recognized by article 1(2) of the United Nations Charter. The Reagan administration has provided enormous amounts of military assistance to an oppressive regime that has used it to perpetrate a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of the people of El Salvador. The Reagan administration’s policy of organizing and participating in military operations by opposition contra groups for the purpose of overthrowing the legitimate government of Nicaragua violates the terms of both the UN and OAS. Charters prohibiting the threat or use of force against the political independence of a state. The Reagan administration has flouted its obligation to terminate immediately its support for the opposition contra groups in accordance with the Interim Order of Protection issued by the International Court of Justice on 10 May 1984. President Clinton Kosovo was one of the best modern examples in American history of an unjust war unjustly fought inasmuch as the US intervened in a civil war being waged between the Marxist government and the Islamicist terrorist separatists fighting to establish a 'Greater Albania' on the side of the terrorists. The Clinton Administration bombed a lot of civilian targets in Belgrade in an attempt to terrorize the Yugoslav people into overthrowing their government or getting President Milosevich to submit to NATO aggression. The war in Kosovo was unjustly fought by the US and NATO because they targeted enemy non-combatants by conducting terror bombing raids against Belgrade and committing gross negligence in attacking Kosovar civilian and truck convoys and buses. In all, NATO bombers killed nearly a thousand innocent Serb and Kosovar Albanian civilians some by mistake, but many if not most were killed by deliberate action. The US-UK bombing of Iraq from 1998 to the present was unjust inasmuch as it was not initiated in response to any Iraqi aggression, but merely in an attempt by President Clinton to wag the dog and disrupt and delay the House vote, which impeached him. It has been continued on a weekly basis through the present day to punish Saddam for failing to bow to the will of the United Nations and allow UN weapons inspectors to re-enter the country. Although Saddam has agreed to the reintroduction of inspectors into Iraq, the bombings continue and the President has signaled his intention to proceed with plans for a US invasion. The enforcement of UN-mandated anti-sovereignty no-fly zones by US planes resulting in the deaths of sixteen American soldiers from friendly fire in 1994 has also served as an insufficient pretext for the continued US bombings, let alone a full-scale US invasion. President George W. Bush President George W. Bush is telling the American people that we stand in mortal peril of imminent attack by Iraqis or their agents armed with weapons of mass destruction. Having presented no credible evidence or compelling argument for his characterization of the alleged threat, he simply invites us to trust him, and therefore to support him as he undertakes what once would have been called naked aggression.
The British report that Bush cited was derived from an Italian report that was none by the USA to be a forged fake bogus report. Both the USA and the British received that bogus report from the Italians at which point it became American and British "intelligence" information. The Americans had several people (including Joseph Wilson) separately investigate the report. They all found it to be easily proved to be phony. People in the Bush administration signed off on having Bush cite as British intelligence information that they knew to be false. It would have been cited as American Intelligence but people in the CIA told the white house that they were not willing to allow it to be called American intelligence. Calling it British Intelligence was the compromise the faction of the executive branch that did not want Bush to mention Niger and those that wanted to say that American "intelligence" had evidence that Saddam was trying to auire uranium from Niger. My main source is Seymour Hersh. He has one or more sources in the CIA. They say the rumor at Langley is that it was disgruntled CIA agents who made a deliberately bad forgery and passed it to Italian inteligence as a joke to be played on the neocons in the whitehouse. The story goes that they wanted the neocons to get all excited and enthusiastic about the report only to be made fools of privately within the White House when they try to cling to an obviously worthless piece of phony evidence. According to the story, the perpetrators of the hoax never imagined that the Bush team would continue to use the phony documents as evidence after they were discredited.
