Try to figure out who our allies were before this admininstration, and you'll find the answer.
The jerks of the current administration gives our country a bad name; and it's gonna take years before our allies trust us - if ever.
ican711nm wrote:My comments are in blue. I infer from your comments below that you have changed your mind and have decided to participate in one more round of discussion with me. If so, I'm happy to oblige.
revel wrote:Skipping the argument that the slight AQ in Iraq was a growing threat, a growing threat is not an imminent threat.
I agree that "a growing threat is not an imminent threat."
However, one cannot prove in advance that a threat is imminent; one can only provide evidence that a threat is growing. We had a growing pile of evidence that what eventually happened on 9/11/2001 was a growing threat. We had zero evidence that it was an imminent threat until after it happened. Even the case of an armed man yelling threats to kill you is but a growing threat. Only after he whips out his pistol and shoots you can you in retrospect prove his yelling was an imminent threat. Of course, by the time you are shot, it's too late to do anything about his imminent threat, because it has already been executed.
We didn't have zero evidence that what happened on 9/11 was an [imminent] threat. If you go back and read more parts of the 9/11 report it is evident that we had warning that something was gearing up to happen. The mention of people using planes was even mentioned. However none of was what they termed actionable intelligence; however we should have been more on the alert and if the administration was more tuned in with something other than Iraq maybe we could have at least been more prepared.
My additional comments are in green. Correction made and boldface emphasis added in your preceding paragraph by me.
Clearly, the time to stop a growing threat from becoming an imminent threat is before the threat grows into an imminent threat.
I take it from your above statement that you believe in preemptive wars. I disagree. There were steps already being taken which should have been allowed to have been played out before we lost so many lives and untold amount of lives on Iraqs side.
I disagree that a couple of hundred AQ terrorist in Iraq who are training to kill Americans whereever they can be found is "slight AQ in Iraq." I recall that each airliner high jacked on 9/11/2001 was highjacked by 4 or 5 AQ terrorists whose principal weapons were box cutters. Also, there exists persuasive evidence that one suicidal AQ terrorist who sets off a bomb strapped to him or her in a crowd has killed more than a dozen civilians and/or military. Also one roadside bomb planted by two AQ terrorists and triggered via a remote cell phone by one AQ terrorists has kill more than a dozen civilians and/or military.
I don't believe it was the case that a hundred AQ were in Iraq training to kill Americans. I don't think it has been proved. Before the war the one AQ camp was very small and mostly was concerned with Saddam Hussien and the secular way of doing things in Iraq.
Neither of us were there to witness the truth personally. My principal evidence about the camps of al Qaeda in northern Iraq come from General Frank's book.
Quote:"American Soldier", by General Tommy Franks; Published 7/1/2004 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.; (hardcover); my boldface emphasis added
Chapter 10, page 427--As the secretary spoke, I thought: This is a powerful presentation; there is no way we can leave the fate of our children and grandchildren to chance To do so would be a mistake—of grave proportions.
Chapter 12, page 483—The Air Picture changed once more. Now the icons were streaming toward two ridges and a steep valley in far northeastern Iraq, right on the border with Iran. These were the camps of the Ansar al-Islam terrorists, where al Qaeda leader Abu Musab Zarqawi had trained disciples in the use of chemical and biological weapons. But this strike was more than just another TLAM [Tomahawk Land Attack Missle] bashing. Soon Special Forces and SMU [Special Mission Unit] operators leading Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, would be storming the camps, collecting evidence, taking prisoners, and killing all those who resisted.
Chapter 12, page 519—And they had also encountered several hundred foreign fighters from Egypt, the Sudan, Syria, and Libya who were being trained by the regime in a camp south of Baghdad. These foreign volunteers fought with suicidal ferocity, but they did not fight well. The Marines killed them all.
Chapter 12, page 522—This whole country is one big weapons dump, I thought. There must be thousands of ammo storage sites. It will take years to clear them all.
Chapter 12, page 532—We knew that pockets of Baathists and jihadists would make trouble for the Coalition—and the Iraqis—every step of the way. Jerry Bremer would “fight through the problem,” as we used to say in Midland.
Chapter Epilogue, page 541—Many of the violent young men on Iraq’s streets and highways—planting mines and booby traps, firing RPGs at truck convoys, dropping morttar rounds into police stations, driving suicide car bombs, assassinating clerics and aid workers—are leftover Baathists who already had blood on their hands and face a grim future in a free Iraq.
Chapter Epilogue, page 562—Colin Powell said recently that he was disappointed that some of the intelligence on Iraq’s WMD program was “inaccurate and wrong and in some cases deliberately misleading.” That of course is the nature of human intelligence. The issue is not whether the source of human intelligence was telling the truth, but whether George Tenet, Colin Powell, and President George W. Bush believed that the information was true. I believe they did. I know I did. And I do not regret my role in disarming Iraq and removing its Baathist regime.
Additional evidence was provided by the 9-11 Commission Report, Chapter 2.4; boldface emphasis added by me.
www.9-11commission.gov/report/index.htm
Quote:Bin Ladin seemed willing to include in the confederation terrorists from almost every corner of the Muslim world. His vision mirrored that of Sudan's Islamist leader, Turabi, who convened a series of meetings under the label Popular Arab and Islamic Conference around the time of Bin Ladin's arrival in that country. Delegations of violent Islamist extremists came from all the groups represented in Bin Ladin's Islamic Army Shura. Representatives also came from organizations such as the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hamas, and Hezbollah.51
Turabi sought to persuade Shiites and Sunnis to put aside their divisions and join against the common enemy. In late 1991 or 1992, discussions in Sudan between al Qaeda and Iranian operatives led to an informal agreement to cooperate in providing support-even if only training-for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States.
...
To protect his own ties with Iraq, Turabi reportedly brokered an agreement that Bin Ladin would stop supporting activities against Saddam. Bin Ladin apparently honored this pledge, at least for a time, although he continued to aid a group of Islamist extremists operating in part of Iraq (Kurdistan) outside of Baghdad's control. In the late 1990s, these extremist groups suffered major defeats by Kurdish forces. In 2001, with Bin Ladin's help they re-formed into an organization called Ansar al Islam. There are indications that by then the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al Islam against the common Kurdish enemy.54
I agree that one AQ or another terrorist group or person could do a lot of damage and kill a lot of people. However there are terrorist all over the world and the one camp that was in Iraq was out of the control of Saddam Hussien.
There was nothing that was imminent that a delay would have hurt. With a delay all the concerns could have been talked about among parties much like issues that we still face today are talked about among the parties involved, like the North Korea issue and now the China issue and any number of security issues that have come up.
Neither you or I know that a delay in our invasion of Iraq would or would not hurt. We do know that some of the AQ that had successfully escaped our Afghanistan invasion (October 2001) subsequently fled to the AQ bases in northern Iraq before we invaded Iraq (March 2003). It was not unreasonable to expect the population of those AQ Iraq bases to continue to increase. How much of an increase would "hurt"?
I don't know if it was true or not if some AQ fled into Iraq. I am sure they fled all over the place into the middle east region and even some staying right there in those hills in Afghanistan.
Since the inspections stopped in Iraq the world’s attention was not centered on Iraq despite the no fly zones occurrences and the occasional bombings by Clinton. I will agree that with the lead up to the war it got the world centered on the issues of Iraq. Powell going to UN got the world centered on Iraq even though he used evidence that was in dispute at the time. But since the world was centered on Iraq and the inspections were on going and reports were being made, there was an avenue in which any concerns such as even the oil for food aspect and the slight AQ presence in Iraq could have been brought up and discussed among nations and leaders.
I disagree that more discussion of AQ based in Iraq would have solved the problem of AQ based in Iraq, anymore than more discussion of AQ based in Afghanistan would have solved the problem of AQ based in Afghanistan. We now know that the two countries, France and Russia, that possessed UN Security Council veto power, had a major vested interest in keeping Saddam's regime in power. In fact both contributed to the build up of the over a thousand weapons and munitions (i.e., military ordnance) sites found in Iraq after our invasion. Surely it's reasonable to expect that a significant part of this ordnance would have eventually found its way into AQ hands and used against Americans and many others. AQ has been using this ordnance in Iraq since our invasion, but fortunately the AQ have been too busy in Iraq to have yet become an imminent threat with that ordnance in the US. In fact, worldwide AQ terrorist attacks have decreased since our invasion of Iraq.
I don't believe that France and Russia were only going to veto because of some oil for food thing. In any case there were other countries who were against the war who didn't have any alleged interest in the oil for food scandal.
You are correct! They were also going to veto because Saddam owed them plus Germany billions of dollars for ordnance Saddam had purchased from them.
We should have allowed the inspections to continue and we should have made our case without stretches of the truth.
There are others here who have brought up other reasons why the war in Iraq could not have waited another minute. The only one for me that has the slightest merit is the humane situation that was going on in Iraq. However, that situation was in no way so unique that it outstripped all other concerns in the world.
IMO two good things have come out of the Iraq war despite all Bush’s and the leaders of military starting from Rumsfeld on down bungles and outright IMO criminal behavior with regard to abuse of detainees was the removal of Saddam Hussein and people getting a chance to decide on their own future through the elections.
But the way that they set up the elections in my opinion was corrupt because it denied a full democracy for those who risked their lives to vote.
I am hopeful though that soon through the efforts of Iraqis themselves who are fight the insurgents since they now have a something to fight for and through the renewed efforts of the coalition to fight the insurgents that maybe in the end it will turn out to have been worth it all.
I don’t hate George Bush and administration so much that I wish for a million people to live in bloodshed and misery for all time in order to prove what a disaster the Iraq was. Personally I have long held a direct and personal insult for those implications and presumptuous assumptions.
My concerns about you (as well as many others in the US) do not relate to my perceptions of your (or their) feelings about Bush and his administration. My concerns relate to what appears to me to be your and (their) excessive focus on Bush and his administration's errors and bungles and blunders, and too little focus on the real nature of the growing threat of AQ to Americans and others, since AQ's inception in August 1988 from its original Afghan jihad against the Russians, and its subsequent rapid growth ever since (not just after our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq).
Sure Bush senior and Clinton and Bush junior screwed up. American presidents always have and probably always will. But that doesn't change one iota the fact that we damn well better face the reality of what can happen to us if we focus only on the AQ, and not on the governments that provide them sanctuary, .... and what we should do about both to make AQ a reducing threat and not a re-continuing increasing threat.
I focus on Bush because he and administration are/were presently in charge.
I focus on what is actually accomplished or failed to be accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then I decide who to praise or vilify.
