blatham wrote:McGentrix wrote:blatham wrote:Heritage org for your verification? Jeez, McG. How is it you continue to learn absolutely nothing about what went wrong and who is responsible?
Sorry I couldn't find anything on Salon.com that supports anything remotely positive in Iraq. I guess we all have our bias.
Proof, as if it was needed, that you don't read Salon.
Heritage is intimately associated with the neoconservative group that pushed for the war with Iraq and who have continued to insist, through all periods and phases of the war, that it has "been going swimmingly". Other than a few individuals who have left the movement, this community refuses utterly to take any responsibility for what happened and refuses consistently and blatantly to lie through their teeth about why the war began and the rationale for it. Get off the internet and read some books, for christs sakes.
Quote:The Bush administration still has not told us why they [american kids] died. was not to protect the US from "weapons of mass destruction" (see below; that was a fabricated cover story). It was not to spread democracy. It may have been to nail down a major petroleum-producing country for US geostrategic goals (ensuring its resources were available to the US and could be denied if necessary to growing rivals such as China). If so, one has to ask whether the objectives (which were hidden from the American people) were the top priority for the US, or only for the petroleum industry; whether those objectives have been achieved; and whether there was another way to attain them. No such debate has ever been held. Was it in part to ensure Israeli security, as Mearsheimer and Walt argue (and Craig Unger implicitly argues, below)? If so, that should be stated, it should be debated. Even the former head of Shin Bet did not agree that it increased Israel's security. It is not right to ask men and women under arms to die for their country without telling them exactly how they are benefiting their country. For all we know, they have died so that Bush and Cheney could throw goodies to their "base," so that Halliburton could escape bankruptcy and Hunt Oil could get new development contracts.
http://www.juancole.com/
Some
other quotes from Juan Cole...
1-
March, 2003:
"My analysis is not meant to support an anti-war or pro-war position. Like most people, I have mixed feelings about all this (I despise the Baath Party)."
2-
April, 2003:
"The Iraq war has resulted in many human casualties that make any humane person want to weep. I hope the human sacrifice will have been worth it; certainly Saddam's regime was virtually genocidal and it is a great good thing that it is gone."
3-
February, 2003:
"I am an Arabist and happen to know something serious about Baathist Iraq, which paralyzes me from opposing a war for regime change in that country (Milosevic did not kill nearly as many people). If it is true that Chirac thinks the Baath party can be reformed from without, he is simply wrong."
4-
March, 2003:
"I remain convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides. The rest of us have a responsibility to work to see that the lives lost are redeemed by the building of a genuinely democratic and independent Iraq in the coming years."
5-
July, 2003:
"I don't think this Iraq war was a last resort, and I became increasingly uncomfortable with the way the war fever was whipped up with very dubious claims by powerful Iraqi expatriates and the right in Washington. However, and this is the big "H," I have lived with Baathist Iraq since I got into the Middle East field, and being a specialist in Shiism and a friend to Iraqi Shiites meant that I knew exactly what the Saddam regime had done to them. So, I refused to come out against the war. I was against the way the war was pursued--the innuendo, the exaggerations, the arrogant unilateralism. But I could not bring myself to be against the removal of that genocidal regime from power."
