As A Wise Man, Umm, Guy, Once Said

Is Iraq better off with thousands of Americans killed there, plus countless Iraqis, and people there less secure than when the dictator ruled? I don't see how.

Yellow Cake from Nigeria, Nuclear weapons, Chemical weapons .... W "explained" lots of things, only they didn't exist. W created this whole fucked up situation with his lies.

You believe in this **** so much you'll volunteer anybody else but you. You'll fight someone else to the death for your values, as long as you can stay here and misreport history. Hypocrite.

You insufferable ass.

1. Nigerian yellow cake
2. WMDs
3. Working with al Qaeda
4. Involved with Sep11

There's more lies that, cretin.

edgarblythe wrote:

Is Iraq better off with thousands of Americans killed there, plus countless Iraqis, and people there less secure than when the dictator ruled? I don't see how.

Probably depends on which part of Iraq you are enquiring about. The Kurds certainly think so. So do the crazies attacking now. Just because you don't see how doesn't really matter much. Bush isn't President anymore, get over it. You don't see me bitching about Clinton do you?

Let me ask you a counter question. Do you believe (And I know your answer already) that the US is better now then 5 years ago when Obama took over? (It's a trick question, we aren't and it isn't.)

No, you have not dispatched anything. You have been peddling that BS for years. The yellow cake story was phony. The CIA asked Joseph Wilson to investigate it because of his expertise in west African affairs and his knowledge and contacts among influential people in west Africa, specifically Nigeria. He reported that the yellow cake story was phony. But the administration continued to tout the story, so Wilson went public to say that it was phony. That's when Cheney sent his hatchet man, Scooter Libby, to attack Wilson through is wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA agent. Libby outed here, has been convicted for it, and has been sued by Wilson and Plame. But you keep peddling this BS, have done for years, and probably will still peddle that BS in years to come.

Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission stated publicly that Iraq had no wmds and no wmd programs. But the Neo-cons in the administration didn't like that ansser, so they started a campaign to smear Blix. Subsequently, we spent billions of dollars to invade Iraq, killing tens of thousands of people at least, if not actually hundreds of thousands of people, to find that Blix and Wilson, the experts, were right all along.

You've got you head slammed so far into the sand that you'll never see the truth.

No, you have not dispatched anything. You have been peddling that BS for years. The yellow cake story was phony. The CIA asked Joseph Wilson to investigate it because of his expertise in west African affairs and his knowledge and contacts among influential people in west Africa, specifically Nigeria. He reported that the yellow cake story was phony. But the administration continued to tout the story, so Wilson went public to say that it was phony. That's when Cheney sent his hatchet man, Scooter Libby, to attack Wilson through is wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA agent. Libby outed here, has been convicted for it, and has been sued by Wilson and Plame. But you keep peddling this BS, have done for years, and probably will still peddle that BS in years to come....

Robert Reich

I'm here in Florida visiting my father, Ed Reich, who, at the young age of 100 and a half, just came up with one of the most incisive assessments I've heard of what's happened in Iraq: "George W. Bush and the crooks he hired are responsible for this. If they hadn't lied to the American people about weapons of mass destruction we wouldn't have lost nearly 5,000 American lives and god knows how many Iraqi lives, and stirred up this hornet's nest. Obama has spent his entire administration cleaning up Bush's ****, like someone with a giant pooper scooper." Dad has lived during the administrations of 17 presidents. "Bush was the worst," he says. "Reagan the second worst."

I am not a military expert, but even I knew that we had complete control over the sky there, after the first war. Our planes and satellites would have detected any serious moves by Iraq in plenty of time to bomb them. Everything Bush and his men said were lies, not just in part, but a whole fabric.

Hundreds of young Iraqi men gripped by religious and nationalistic fervor streamed into volunteer centers Saturday across Baghdad, answering a call by the country's top Shiite cleric to join the fight against Sunni militants advancing in the north.


Dozens climbed into the back of army trucks, chanting Shiite slogans and hoisting assault rifles, pledging to join the nation's beleaguered security forces to battle the Sunni group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which has launched a lightning advance across the country.

"By God's will, we will be victorious." said one volunteer, Ali Saleh Aziz. "We will not be stopped by the ISIL or any other terrorists."

The massive response to the call by the Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued via his representative Friday, comes as sectarian tensions are threatening to push the country back toward civil war in the worst crisis since U.S. forces withdrew at the end of 2011.

Fighters from the al-Qaida splinter group, drawing support from former Saddam Hussein-era figures and other disaffected Sunnis, have made dramatic gains in the Sunni heartland north of Baghdad after overrunning Iraq's second-largest city of Mosul on Tuesday. Soldiers and policemen have melted away in the face of the lightning advance, and thousands have fled to the self-rule Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

On Saturday, insurgents seized the small town of Adeim in Diyala province after Iraqi security forces pulled out, said the head of the municipal council, Mohammed Dhifan. Adeim is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad. There was no official confirmation of the loss of the town.

Jawad al-Bolani, a lawmaker and former Cabinet minister close to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said a military offensive was underway Saturday to drive the insurgents from Tikrit, Saddam's hometown north of Baghdad, although fighting in the area could not be confirmed.

AP Television News footage showed Kurdish fighters, known as peshmerga, driving out militants who had taken over an army outpost some 24 kilometers (15 miles) west of the oil city of Kirkuk. The position had earlier been abandoned by Iraqi army troops. Long coveted by the Kurds who have a self-rule region in northern Iraq, Kirkuk fell under the control of the peshmerga this week after Iraqi army forces left.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Saturday his Shiite nation is ready to help Iraq if asked, adding that it has "no option but to confront terrorism." Addressing a news conference, he suggested the Sunni militants in northern Iraq are linked to Iraqi politicians who lost in parliamentary elections held in April.

"We will study if there is a demand for help from Iraq. Until today, no specific request for help has been demanded. But we are ready to help within international law," he said. "Entry of our forces (into Iraq) to carry out operations has not been raised so far. It's unlikely that such conditions will emerge."

Iran has built close political and economic ties with Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam's Sunni-led regime and many influential Iraqi Shiites, including al-Maliki, have spent years in exile in the Islamic Republic.

The fast-moving rebellion has emerged as the biggest threat to Iraq's stability since even before the Americans left.

Long-simmering Sunni-Shiite tensions boiled over after the U.S.-led invasion ousted Saddam in 2003, leading to vicious fighting between the two Muslim sects. But the bloodshed ebbed in 2008 after a so-called U.S. surge, a revolt by moderate Sunnis against al-Qaida in Iraq and a Shiite militia cease-fire.

The latest bout of fighting, stoked by the civil war in neighboring Syria, has pushed the nation even closer to a precipice that could partition it into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish zones.

Shiite cleric and political leader Ammar al-Hakim was shown on television networks donning a camouflaged military fatigue as he spoke to volunteers from his party, although he still wore his clerical black turban that designates him as a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.

State-run television also aired a constant flow of nationalist songs, clips of soldiers marching or singing, flying aircraft, brief interviews with troops vowing to crush the militants and archival clips of the nation's top Shiite clerics.

Extensive clips of al-Maliki's visit on Friday to the city of Samarra, home to a much revered Shiite shrine that was bombed in 2006, also were broadcast.

The footage seemed clearly aimed at rehabilitating his reputation in the eyes of Shiites, with a dour-faced al-Maliki seen praying at the Shiite shrine — an apparent reminder of his commitment to his faith and the protection of its followers. He also declared that Samarra would be the assembly point for the march farther north to drive out the militants, another decision with a religious slant to win over Shiites.

In an address to military commanders in Samarra, he warned that army deserters could face the death penalty if they don't report back to their units. But he insisted the crisis had a silver lining.

"This is our chance to clean and purge the army from these elements that only want to make gains from being in the army and the police," he said. "They thought that this is the beginning of the end but, in fact, we say that this is the beginning of their end and defeat."

Also Saturday, the Iraqi government's counterterrorism department said the son of Saddam's vice president, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was killed in an air raid by the Iraqi air force in Tikrit. It said Ahmed al-Douri was killed with some 50 other Saddam loyalists and ISIL fighters on Friday. The report could not be immediately verified.

I gave you all the lies. It is obvious you don't want to consider it that way. I have read all your arguments on other threads for years. If you expect to do a thousand argumentive posts on it here, it will have to be with somebody else. Not me. The whole world, except some holdouts like you know the world got bamboozled by Bush and now we have a worsening mess as a result.

Iraq had had active WMD research programs.

Iraq signed a treaty promising to destroy them and to allow UN inspectors unfettered access. After 12 years of trying to obtain cooperation, the UN was still declaring Iraq in material breach of the treaty. All Saddam Hussein would have had to do to make us go away is keep his word and allow free inspections.

Along with IAEA, UNMOVIC led inspections of alleged chemical and biological facilities in Iraq until shortly before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. According to its Executive Chairman, Mr Blix

"in the buildup to the war, Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis were cooperating with UN inspections, and in February 2003 had provided UNMOVIC with the names of hundreds of scientists to interview, individuals Saddam claimed had been involved in the destruction of banned weapons. Had the inspections been allowed to continue, there would likely have been a very different situation in Iraq."

UNMOVIC never found any operative weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and although its inspectors were withdrawn in March 2003, continued to operate with respect to those parts of its mandate it could implement outside of Iraq and maintained a degree of preparedness to resume work in Iraq. It maintained a roster of more than 300 experts ready to serve and continued to conduct training.

Brandon9000 wrote:

Iraq had had active WMD research programs.

Bullshit--you have no source for that claim...

In the early 1970s, Saddam Hussein ordered the creation of a clandestine nuclear weapons program. Iraq's WMD programs were assisted by a wide variety of firms and governments in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1988, Iraq stated that it formally decided to build nuclear weapons. Under the 1988 plan, Iraq intended to have its first weapon by the summer of 1991. German centrifuge experts from the company H&H Metallform, came to Baghdad in 1988 and sold the Iraqis old designs for centrifuges. Five other German firms supplied equipment to manufacture botulin toxin and mycotoxin for germ warfare.