Hypothetical question...now what?

I dont 'hate' the man, I just think he has dug himself a very deep hole and just does'nt know how to get himself out of it.....why is this war thing 'still' dragging on today?

IMO being an outsider, I do not understand why he thought he had the right to go against the UN and feel it was up to him to supposedly save the world from terrorism...

What happens now? who knows.....

Now what?

Beats me, mysteryman.

What do you think?

If he did lie, and I believe he did, deliberately and with forethought, then the next thing we have to ask is why?

That war was against the rule of law... against every UN resolution. The UN was strong-armed into making a post-agreement to let us attack.

That war did not help us find any Al Qaeda.

That war has not found any perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.

That war has not helped us fight terrorists... more Muslims become angry and hate the USA with every day of our occupation.

That war has been hideously... hugely expensive. At least when Bush Sr. had us fight in Iraq the first time, the rest of the world helped pay for it. Americans are footing the entire bill and being gouged by the ridiculous prices from the no-bid contracts of Haliburton, et alia.

That war has not been good for the people of Iraq. While they got rid of a filthy ruler (who had been propped up originally by... the USA), they're in a physically devastated homeland with years of recovery and redevelopment to achieve, once they can finally come to grips with their own crappy political problems, PLUS they have to deal with 17 permanent American bases within their borders.

I'm not even going to discuss the loss of life by Americans, our allies and the Iraqi people. I'm not going to even mention the pain of those many more who have serious life-changing injuries on both sides. That is too easy and we know all those statistics, I think.

So... what you do is... what an investigator would do... you examine the motives and follow the money.

If it turns out, as I think it will when the truth finally does come out, that this war was created so that the Americans could gain a beachhead in a sovereign country, then we will have a lot to answer for as a country within the world community. What gives us the right to do that? Because our biggest city was bombed once? That's all it takes to turn us into the modern day version of the Roman Empire?

If it turns out, as I think it will when the truth finally does come out, that it was the Bush Insiders who have made huge windfalls in war profits.... then somebody ought to pay.

Yes, all Capitalism Hoo-Haw aside, there is something so disgusting about war profits that I truly believe all those windfall profits should be returned to the American people. It will begin to pay back the interest on our deficit spending.

Somebody big ought to be paying us back with jail sentences. Somebody ought to be driven out of office in disgrace.

Do I think that this president's actions were and continue to be criminal? You BET I do. Will it ever be brought to court... Omigod, I hope so. This goes way beyond partisanship. We need to regain our national honor. Right now this country is being run by people whose personal gain is more important to them than this country, whose party affiliation is more important that the needs of the people. And that isn't right... even if it has come from the right.

He should stand down, as ought anyone else under well supported suspicion. He should be impeached and hopefully go to prison for a long time, as well, whatever criminal and war crime offences should be prosecuted...and anyone else who colluded with the lie.

I have no idea what your constitution decrees, but it should be followed re who takes over.

Iraq is a mess that America and allies still have responsibility to do their best to fix....the egg is broken.


I assume we do our best to give them a working government and army and pay reparations.

There are two different questions here that are not really linked.

The question of whether Bush lied has nothing to do with what we should do now with the mess we are in. I am very angry with Bush because of his lies. My views on what we should would be the same had he not lied.

Iraq is a huge mess largely because of our occupation. We should leave now. A vast majority of Iraqis (82% according to a poll taken by coalition forces) want us to leave now.

Things will never get better until we leave. Of course, the violent mess will continue for a while after we leave but leaving is the first step toward things getting better.

I agree we should pay reparations. We don't have a chance in Hell of giving them a working government. The Iraqi's have made it quite clear they don't want an government instituted by America.

They will be able to make a government for themselves-- after we leave.

What we are doing now is giving the Shia the upper hand... and perhaps that means we are just accepting the inevitable. The Shite clerics (namelyl-Sistani) holds all the cards, and as long as we keep giving them what they want, they will let us pretend to be doing things.

But when we stop giving advantages to people who want an Islamic goverenment (and this really isn't what we want) we will be knocked on our asses pretty forceably. Watch what happens when Sistani calls for mass protests...

This is a no-win situation for the US. The only reason we are still there is to try to cover up our impending embarrassment.

This has nothing to do with the Bush lies that got us there.

All the talk about lies, yet none have been proven. All that has been proven thus far is that our intelligence agencies need to be improved. The war was based on intelligence provided by the CIA, FBI, Interpol, Russian Intelligence agencies, British Intelligence agencies, etc...

Unless you believe that Bush somehow manipulated all those agencies, you can't believe he lied about the reasons we went to war in Iraq.

McGentrix _ I think if George Bush stood in front of you and said "I lied about the WMD's and our reasons for going into Iraq" you would say "Well yes, but were is the evidence?".

Did you read the Downing St. Memo?, that's a good start.

I think history will find the truth. It's too late for all the dead of Iraq and if there is a God, I hope he will one day grant Bush a conscious so he will understand the damage he has done.

The Downing St. Memo was a copy written by a reporter who said the original memo was then destroyed..do you really want to put a lot of stock in that?

Way back in June a majority of Americans said they believe Bushie deliberately misled us into war. A majority also say if he did mislead us into war he should be impeached. That's a problem for Bushie especially since this was before Libby was indicted and before other revelations on torture and the mounting body count in Iraq. The coming days will reveal much more and Rove and Cheney and others are still under investigation by Firtzgerald. I cant think of a bigger treason than lying us into war. It looks more and more that Bushie will morph into Nixon and resign before his term is up. Wargate is bigger than Watergate by far.

Way back in June a majority of Americans believed Bushie deliberately lied us into war and a majority believe if he did lie us into war he should be impeached. That was before Libby got indicted. Rove and Cheney are both under investigation still and may have to testify in Libby's trial. And it was before the torture story and the mounting body count in Iraq. There are many more revelations to come and every day will be focussed on lying us into war. It's beginning to look like Bushie is morphing into Nixon and will resign before his term is over. Wargate is bigger than Watergate by far

More likely, I would ask why he felt the need to lie, as all the evidence supported him...

Mcgentrix, the evidence did not support him at all. That's one of the lies we hear constantly. Blix and ElBaradei were proving how dead wrong our evidence was. El Baradei said Powell's evidence at the UN was fake, fabricated and forged. Powell and Condi both said in 2001 that Saddam was weak and no threat to his neighbors or anyone else. And they said the years of sanctions had worked and Saddam had no WMD. Intelligence was twisted to suit an agenda and both Powell and Condi began spreading lies that contradicted what they had said in 2001. UN weapons inspectors had said for a decade that Saddam's WMD had been destroyed in the early 90s. Scott Ritter was right and outspoken and was ridiculed and slandered as were Blix and ElBaradei. When Blix was given evidence that Saddam had rebuilt WMD factories Clinton had bombed he visited them and found out they were still in bombed out condition. Yet American mainstream ridiculed Blix and ElBaradei rather than ridicule Bushie's ridiculous evidence. Now that we all see how we were lied into war you continue to support the lies. You've built your house on sand as far as I can see and a breeze is more than enough to blow it away. But it aint a breeze but a whirlwind you Bushie enablers are facing.

If it is proven, whatout a shadow of doubt, that the President of the US lied or manipulated intelligence that put this nation to war, he must be impeached and charged as a war criminal.

The only problem with your hypothetical is it is and will forever be impossible to know since all evidence was verified by multiple sources both national and international.

woiyo, keep telling yourself that even as Bushie World implodes.

Bush's Job Approval Hits New Low

CBS News | November 3 2005

(CBS) Tempers cooled a bit in Washington today after the partisan meltdown that brought Senate business to a halt Tuesday.

Even so, neither Congress nor the White House will find much in a new CBS News poll to put them in a better humor. President Bush's job approval has reached the lowest level yet. Only 35 percent approve of the job he's doing.

PRESIDENT BUSH'S JOB APPROVAL
Approve
35%
Disapprove
57%

Congress is rated even lower. Only 34 percent approve of its work.

Vice President Cheney has never been as popular as the president, but his favorable rating is down nine points this year to just 19 percent.

So where does the White House go from here? Mr. Bush is finding no shortage of advice, reports CBS News White House correspondent John Roberts.

The plunge in poll numbers is another dose of bad news for a White House mired in it. The only recent president lower at this point in their second term was Richard Nixon.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2005/031105newlow.htm

So far,we have people saying to impeach Bush.
So,ok,Bush is now impeached and out of Office.
Cheney is now the President and continues the war in Iraq.

Now what?

mysteryman, Cheney would be gone long before Bushie got impeached.

I doubt that we'll ever uncover outright and demonstrable "lies." Everything wrong about Iraq was a matter of presentation and a failure to engage in meaningful deliberation; we got dogmatism and idealism from a few key individuals (many of whom were intellectuals, naïve utopians, and armchair warriors without a whit of on-the-ground experience) when we needed empirically-rooted planning, pragmatism and a meaningful, broad-based debate. I think this lack of planning, foresight, and openness makes the administration incompetent, but that's not an impeachable offense.

I vote for staying in Iraq. But that doesn't mean we should "stay the course." The "course," as followed by the administration thus far has not generated the type of results we need to ensure a stable Iraq. Bush's "stay the course" rhetoric means little more than continued dogmatism in the pursuit of a defunct plan that was unrealistic from the start.

I'm no Iraq expert. It would be silly for me to outline a 10 point plan, if that's what you want. In fact, the idea of one person -- or a group of us at A2K -- making up a new plan is even sillier than the two-bit planning that got us into the mess in the first place. What Bush needs to do is change personnel. He needs fresh faces. He needs to take a pragmatic approach, with a willingness to change the course in the face of unexpected obstacles (and something unexpected always happens). For starters, perhaps the administration should actually engage the State Department, the CIA, and heck, even foreign countries. There are plenty of experienced people -- many of whom have significant knowledge of Iraq and prolonged warfare -- that were ignored because they had views divergent from Bush's inner circle. I personally know a number people who either quit the government or became totally disillusioned during the first term because Bush just didn't want to listen. The Bush administration had a horrible reputation at State, the CIA, and the DIA for harassing briefers when they found facts that challenged the administration's preconceived notions. And you don't have to take if from me. Take it from Shinseki, Powell, Armitage, Lawrence Wilkinson, Clarke and so on…

So that's it: Stay in Iraq, but broaden your base, bring in some new high-level personnel, don't be too stubborn to change the course, and start taking dissenters within the government seriously -- many of them were dead right during the first administration. Much of this means that Bush needs to admit that Iraq didn't go as planned. The academic utopians (Wolfowitz, Feith, etc.) were wrong. Let's move to plan B.

As a side note, this is a very rare Iraq post from Steppenwolf. I don't bother much with the Iraq threads. We usually get nothing but knee-jerking from both sides.