Obama and the younger generation

Okay, no one has yet to respond to the verifiable fact that there were U.N. weapons inspectors evaluating Hussein's weapons capabilities. Before we told them to get out of the country, they were finding evidence that there was no longer a significant weapons program. All evidence pointed to him focusing the entirety of his efforts on internal control.

Even if Saddam needed to be deposed eventually, we rushed the job and didn't plan all the way through. The occupation has been more costly, difficult, and prolonged because we hadn't planned the entire operation.

GlennS wrote: Yes, WJC supported removing Saddam. Like Bush Sr. though he wasnt stupid enough to get us stuck in a prolonged occupation to do it. No one here has anything against afghanistan. We do have problems with iraq, which had nothing to do with terrorism till we invaded. The war on drugs is a rediculous failure and thewar on terror will be as well with people like Bush Jr. at the helm.

Bush Sr. stopped at the Iraqi border only because the UN mandate did not allow a push all the way to Baghdad. It allowed coalition forces to go to the Iraq/Kuwait border and that was it. So I suppose the blame for not verifying that Saddam did not have WMDs should go to the UN.

Right?

You keep missing the point that I keep making, which is that there is plenty of 20/20 hindsight blame to go around everywhere. Yet it's fashionable in your circles to crap on Shrub because he got stuck with it.

Sheesh. Get a CLUE.

Jensenman wrote: Bush Sr. stopped at the Iraqi border only because the UN mandate did not allow a push all the way to Baghdad. It allowed coalition forces to go to the Iraq/Kuwait border and that was it. So I suppose the blame for not verifying that Saddam did not have WMDs should go to the UN.

You mean the UN that had inspectors in Iraq immediately prior our invasion, telling us that there weren't any WMDs? It didn't require hindsight when the latest and most direct intelligence said that everything had been disabled years before.

As already stated UN weapon inspectors found no weapons leading up to the war and guess what. After we invaded we didn’t find any either. Guess the UN was right.

Bush didn’t get stuck with anything when it came to Iraq. He decided for unknown reasons that we had to invade. There was no clear or imminent threat to the US.

We isolate every oppressive regime that we can around the world. What was the compelling reason for invading Iraq?

I dont blame any american for 9/11. Thats completely OBL and friend's fault. Saying that bush had no choice but to invade and occupy Iraq though and that he was stuck doing that is BS.

Please lay off the personal insults.

I can still remember hearing Rice squirm when she claimed no one had anticipated and attack using airplanes and then being asked to read the title of the briefing "Bin Laden Determined to Attack using Airplanes". Her response was that it was a "historical" document, when clearly it was not.

Cheny was the head of the anti-terrorism task force which met exactly 0 times before 9-11.

They screwed up, except they didn't because they intended to start an endless war before they even got into office.

Jensenman wrote: Oh, boy. (rubs hands together.) Maybe, just maybe, that's because the vast majority of intel gathered on Clinton's watch completely missed the planning by OBL and Associates.

I still get the giggles when I hear 'it's Bush's fault, he was President when it happened' and 'it's Cheney's fault, he should have been able to divine what was gonna happen' and 'all the reports said it was gonna happen' and all this, that and the other. Or that Cheney and Co. intended even before 9/11 to start a highly unpopular war. Yeah, right. That's what people do, unless they are libs. Right?

Consider this:

Oklahoma City bombing: took everyone by surprise, even though McVeigh had given indications that he had something big in mind. He and Terry Nichols bought huge amounts of ammonium nitrate fertilizer even though they had no real use for it. Yet no one put two and two together until it was way too late.

First WTC center attack: took everyone by surprise, even though OBL had planned that one for a long time and there was intel indicating a possible attack. In fact, the only reason the case was broken as quickly as it was was because the bombers tried to get the deposit back on the truck they destroyed.

OBL had a plot started in the Phillippines to hijack and destroy 12 jumbo jets. It was originally dismissed as a wild fringe rumor, in hindsight the fact that it was uncovered is probably the only reason it was never put into action.

9/11: intel indicated a possibility of OBL using airplanes to attack the WTC, but it mentioned no names. Even though the 9/11 hijackers enrolled in flight schools late in 2000. Or may I elaborate: on Clinton's watch.

All this is deemed now to have been good intel, right?

Then the intel saying Saddam was after yellowcake uranium and was trying to restart/sustain his WMD program is now said to be bad intel. Yet it was gathered by the same organizations at the same time as the OBL stuff everyone is now supposed to have believed. Imagine, just for a moment, that the intel was good and Iraq hadn't been invaded and Saddam was able to run a nuke weapons program now.

Or the intel that Iran was trying to start a nuke program as well, which looks to be quite true. What do you do now? Wait for Ahm-a-nut-job to start sprouting mushroom clouds all over the planet?

The point: 20/20 hindsight is real easy to have and as usual it's what I see from the board libs. It's reading goat guts and tea leaves to try to figure out what WILL happen that's tough. When y'all get good at that, come back and see me, okay?

Knock off the blamestorm, guys. There's plenty to go around on every side.

Back to Obama: if he gets elected, I hope he has the good sense to understand that just because he believes he is the salvation of America from all the evildoers before him that doesn't mean OBL and Associates are willing to give him (and us) a free pass. But I fear he won't take threats seriously.

Intel for Saddam acquiring yellowcake came primarily from a single source, who the analysts gathering intelligence from said was probably full of E36 M3 and not a reliable source.

There was a constant stream of good up-to-the-minute intelligence coming from the weapons inspectors who were actually examining sites and documents on the ground in Iraq.

None of that excuses the fact that this administration launched the attack on Iraq without taking the time to plan the operation to completion. Even if you believe Saddam was a threat to his neighbors and needed to be disposed of, the threat was not of immediate urgency to necessitate a rushed operation.

Because we rushed the operation without a rebuilding plan, I have no doubt that this has made that job take longer, cost more, and foment more anger than if we'd actually planned it out. I fully blame the administration for this, since they planned and led this operation. Their half-assed job is costing me money, costing lives, and I believe has made our nation and the world less safe by fomenting hatred that will be directed into terrorist acts against us and our allies.

Lots of people made mistakes that led to the 9/11 attacks. I believe the ultimate verdict of the 9/11 commission is "We had the intelligence. But it wasn't in the right hands; the puzzle pieces weren't getting put together; and there was no way of categorizing which intelligence was more urgent or valuable. We need to fix this E36 M3."

Let's not forget the whole idiotic 'who outed Valerie Plame' affair came about as a direct result of CIA involvement in the yellowcake uranium investigation. The British government also believed that intel.

Saddam kept the weapons inspectors out of many key places; that's one reason the UN signed off on the invasion. Which is a key point many libs forget, the UN also blessed the Iraq invasion along with the whole list of US liberal Congresscritters.

Gee, since the UN is supposed to be the libs' salvation of all mankind through one world government, doesn't that mean Shrub should get a free pass, since the UN okayed his and Cheney's dastardly plan?

I'm just askin'.

Jensenman wrote: Saddam kept the weapons inspectors out of many key places; that's one reason the UN signed off on the invasion. Which is a key point many libs forget, the UN also blessed the Iraq invasion along with the whole list of US liberal Congresscritters.

Umm... and when was this with the UN?

We invaded shortly after the inspectors left. They had not finished their job. We admitted to act essentially unilaterally without UN support.

And, once again, what was the rush that we didn't have time to develop a rebuilding strategy?

Hey look. I found an interesting article with a transcript from a statement by Hans Blix, from 2003:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/01/27/sprj.irq.transcript.blix/index.html

Here is another CNN article that is more concise and came after it:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/03/21/iraq.weapons/

To summarize. The weapons inspectors were provided with the access and documents they asked for. The documents were mostly inconclusive. Iraq had largely been disarmed in 1997 and the vast majority of their weapons facilities and stores destroyed. The documents implied that Iraq had probably not made the effort to destroy their remaining stores. But there was no evidence that they'd restarted programs or attempted to build up or acquire new weapons.

The inspectors critiqued the stance of our administration for assuming that, just because a claim couldn't be verified, we assumed they had as many weapons facilities as could be not be disproven.

My own analysis is that they'd just not bothered to do anything one way or the other. Sounds to me like, if weapons weren't destroyed, it wasn't because they were planning to use the nearly ineffectual amount remaining, but because they were too lazy and sloppy to bother.

Once again, a student of history could recognize that Saddam Hussein was crazy and far more interested in maintaining domestic control, than of launching an offensive for which we knew he was not equipped.

Google no longer has the squeal of approval from the muckety mucks at work so I can't go find the UN resolution. Check for it if you have a minute; the UN passed a resolution telling Saddam he had to allow inspectors, he refused, then Bush et al used enforcement of that resolution as justification for invasion and the UN agreed. Just before the invasion, Saddam said okay, they can go in but by then no one trusted him.

FWIW, in 2003 Blix had the luxury of hindsight. And if I remember correctly, that was the year two MiGs were found buried in the Iraqi desert. Saddam was definitely crazy and he was definitely hiding stuff. Did he hide WMD? We may never know. I hope he didn't; I'd hate for al Quaida or the Iranians to find something like that.

Would he have used any WMD he may have had outside the Persian Gulf? Who knows? FWIW, if you assume that SH had WMD or even really big conventional explosives (easy to do, you can create a lot of that kind of stuff with kitchen chemicals) he could have shut down oil production in the Gulf almost immediately. (Most of which goes to Europe, I might add.) He had already proven he was after such with his invasion of Kuwait. So should we sit around, cross our fingers and hope his dementia lifted? Or should we try to keep WW III from erupting?

Okay, y'all are the Prez. Each of you, stop and think this through. The Twin Towers are still raw and fresh in everyone's minds, the Taliban have been revealed to be deeply entrenched in Afghanistan and they enabled 9/11 and intel points to a strong possibility of WMD in Iraq. What do you do?

Rebuilding strategy: it sounds so easy. We are back to 20/20 hindsight again. Let me ask this: what rebuilding strategy do you think the Allies had for the Axis powers after WWII?

What is our rebuilding strategy for Afghanistan?

I'll tell you real quick: there ain't one.

Why?

Because there is no way to see into the future. There's those pesky goat guts and tea leaves again.

Maybe this graph will help.

Jensenman wrote: Google no longer has the squeal of approval from the muckety mucks at work so I can't go find the UN resolution. Check for it if you have a minute; the UN passed a resolution telling Saddam he had to allow inspectors, he refused, then Bush et al used enforcement of that resolution as justification for invasion and the UN agreed. Just before the invasion, Saddam said okay, they can go in but by then no one trusted him. FWIW, in 2003 Blix had the luxury of hindsight. And if I remember correctly, that was the year two MiGs were found buried in the Iraqi desert. Saddam was definitely crazy and he was definitely hiding stuff. Did he hide WMD? We may never know. I hope he didn't; I'd hate for al Quaida or the Iranians to find something like that.

In the 2003 article, Blix was speaking pre-invasion, or during the initial stages thereof. The 2004 article was post invasion.

You're getting your history confused. The resolution occurred quite a while back. The UN was in Iraq with groups disarming Hussein and shutting down his facilities from 1991 through 1997 (there was a big push then). In 1998 those groups were told to leave, but by the end of 1997 he was more than 90% disarmed and all his major programs had been shut down.

Prior to the invasion, Saddam dragged his heels about allowing investigators. No one took him at his word that he'd disarmed everything. He eventually acquiesced and allowed a team of inspectors in. Their investigations were cooperated with and they were allowed essentially everywhere and given everything they asked. The documentation they received wasn't very good, not because it appeared doctored, but because people hadn't really bothered to keep decent records. There was no evidence that he'd restarted any programs or holes in evidence to indicate that he might have been trying to hide any.

At the time of the invasion, Saddam had been complying with what the UN asked of him.

In your scenario, were I president, I would not have invaded Iraq. We had (still have) a clearly defined target that needs to be shut down. I would not have divided my forces, but would have focused a more significant portion of military resources in Afghanistan.

The theory that terrorists might have been able to get their hands on some of the few remaining chemical weapons that Iraq maybe still had left is a much smaller threat than all the old military stuff left over from the old Soviet Union that isn't being kept track of, and much of which is just being sold to whoever has money.

You can buy old Russian Migs from guys via e-mail. My dad was chatting with one just to see what he could get offered at what prices. Frequently, these guys just go out and and grab whatever no one is paying attention to on the tarmac, box it up and ship it over. I heard of a guy who went to pick up his Mig at the docks, only to discover that it had been shipped fully uploaded with ammunition in the guns and missiles on the hard points. Guy called customs and the DATF immediately to be sure he didn't get in trouble for it.

ignorant wrote: Maybe this graph will help.

I find your map to be highly accurate. Especialy the part about california being awesome. It leaves out hawaii-vaction and alaska-eskimos.

http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/18252.pdf

2002 UN Security Council Resolution 1441. Read it in its entirety.

Then there are the other resolutions linked here: http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/01fs/14906.htm There are links to PDF's of the pertinent resolutions.

The Iraq invasion began March 19,2003.

Copied directly from the CNN Blix report document linked above, dated January 2003:

(begin quote, italicized works weird) While UNMOVIC has been preparing its own list of current unresolved disarmament issues and key remaining disarmament tasks in response to requirements in the Resolution 1284, we find the issues listed in the two reports I mentioned as unresolved professionally justified.

These reports do not contend that weapons of mass destruction remain in Iraq, but nor do they exclude that possibility. They point to a lack of evidence and inconsistencies which raise question marks which must be straightened out if weapons dossiers are to be closed and confidence is to arise. They deserve to be taken seriously by Iraq, rather than being brushed aside as evil machinations of UNSCOM.

Regrettably, the 12,000-page declaration, most of which is a reprint of earlier documents, does not seem to contain any new evidence that will eliminate the questions or reduce their number.

Even Iraq's letter sent in response to our recent discussions in Baghdad to the president of the Security Council on 24th of January does not lead us to the resolution of these issues.

I shall only give some examples of issues and questions that need to be answered, and I turn first to the sector of chemical weapons.

The nerve agent VX is one of the most toxic ever developed. Iraq has declared that it only produced VX on a pilot scale, just a few tons, and that the quality was poor and the product unstable.

Consequently, it was said that the agent was never weaponized.

Iraq said that the small quantity of [the] agent remaining after the Gulf War was unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.

UNMOVIC, however, has information that conflicts with this account. There are indications that Iraq had worked on the problem of purity and stabilization and that more had been achieved than has been declared. Indeed, even one of the documents provided by Iraq indicates that the purity of the agent, at least in laboratory production, was higher than declared.

There are also indications that the agent was weaponized. In addition, there are questions to be answered concerning the fate of the VX precursor chemicals, which Iraq states were lost during bombing in the Gulf War or were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

(end quote)

So I ask again: what's a Prez to do? Man, I hope if O is elected that he doesn't have to deal with something like this, because I swear I think he'd fold like a house of cards in a hurricane.

This repeats most of what I have said. Iraq let the inspectors in and gave them the information they had. The information was poor, probably because no one had given a damn about it.

No indication of significant programs. Seems like most of the evidence was that they didn't do a whole lot afterwards. There were perhaps some small weapons program that hadn't accomplished a whole lot.

So I say again: you focus on the real and immediate threat (Afghanistan) and don't engage in what was obviously going to become a prolonged occupation unnecessarily and without a rebuilding plan.

So Blix saying they couldn't verify no VX existed, they had indications that yes it had been weaponized and they were being held off from inspecting in certain areas doesn't count. Okey doke, have it your way.

I has found L0Lr0z

I can quitz nowz

ignorant wrote: I has found L0Lr0z I can quitz nowz

Please don't.

Salanis, your memory of the weapons inspectors is missing a key part from back then. It was widely believed that Saddam Hussain had fully penetrated/bought off the weapons inspectors, and that their every move was monitored and orchestrated. Where they were going for the day or week was known to the Iraqis and they had teams clean up those areas before the inspectors arrived. If they changed their plans at the last minute, "car trouble" or other restrictions were put on them and they didn't go there. It was a sham. Even the mainstream newsmedia was reporting it as such back then. You are also forgetting to mention the tons of uranium that came out of Iraq after the US took over, the biological warfare factory trucks that they found, the chemical weapons that are still showing up as the Pavement Challenged try to use them as IED's, and the pieces of nuclear refinement equipment that show up burried in people's gardens. Also, the Bulgarians insist that the 911 planner guy met with Hussain's intel guy in their country prior to 911. If there's one thing the Bulgarians can do, it's keep track of what's happening inside their own country. If you just read CNN.com then you'll miss those little pieces and anything else that doesn't directly support the next Democratics candidate or agenda.

Oh, that explains why no one goes to school, or build houses, or plans for lunch, or goes potty, because you can't see into the future, so why plan for anything. Use Percy's voice for that if you want it to sound really snarky. :)

The Allies had all sorts of post WW's plans. We had plans to rebuild Afghanistan, even got other countries to commit money for it.

20/20 hindsight is critically important, it is what allows you to plan for the future with any hope of success. Try building a home with no knowledge of how homes were built in the past, for instance. Or choosing food to eat with no knowledge of what people have eaten in the past, or, etc etc.

Jensenman wrote: What is our rebuilding strategy for Afghanistan? I'll tell you real quick: there ain't one. Why? Because there is no way to see into the future. There's those pesky goat guts and tea leaves again.

skappes, as usual you are lost. The Allies 'rebuilding plans' for Europe and Japan were created AFTER the war was over, not BEFORE. Even then, it was a patchwork. For that matter, the British had no plans to rebuild their country until after the war was over.

And you confuse 'armchair Monday morning quarterbacking' with the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next.

Um, according to our president, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were over a long time ago. Lost as I may be, there were international donor meetings on the rebuilding of Afghanistan before the Iraq war started. There are active rebuilding programs going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were post Iraq plans made before the Iraq war started, just not good ones. There were extensive efforts and many millions of dollars spent buying our way into Iraq before the war started.

I'm sure you are making some sort of point, but I can't tell what it is.

There is of course one huge differencebetween Iraq/Afghanistan and the WW's. In the WW's we were on the defense. I'm pretty sure the Nazi's had a plan for the end of the war when they started it. Of course, rebuilding wasn't really their goal.

I prefer doitover by the way, it much better represents my mechanical abilities.

Jensenman wrote: skappes, as usual you are lost. The Allies 'rebuilding plans' for Europe and Japan were created AFTER the war was over, not BEFORE. Even then, it was a patchwork. For that matter, the British had no plans to rebuild their country until after the war was over. And you confuse 'armchair Monday morning quarterbacking' with the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next.

skappesitover, there were some plans being made for rebuilding AFTER the invasion. I clearly remember the squalling by the German and French companies who were cut out of the bidding process AFTER the war started since their respective governments were not interested in helping oust Saddam. I seem to recall they started making noises about that prior to the invasion. Maybe that's what you were thinking of.

Re: are the wars over? It depends on your definition of 'over'. Most people take it that when the old government is out and a new one is installed (true in both Afghanistan and Iraq), the war is over. Now it's time to win the peace, which is much harder.