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No, that's BS. Different countries had different reasons to be against the war, no doubt, but I don't know anyone who thinks the UN had better intel than we did.

"Iraqis" without the "u" is more sinister and terroristic.

This presumes the sanctions were motivated by WMD. I think we pushed for the sanctions as part of a containment policy, motivated more by the threat posed by Iraq to its neighbors from conventional forces. That was the focus after the first war. And it's not like the sanctions were something invented by a bunch of foreigners without our input. It was Bush/Clinton foreign policy to use the UN this way.

You could be modest in that way, but now that we know there weren't WMD, the idea of waiting to invade until inspections turned up WMD doesn't sound so out there.

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The fact that anyone could not latch onto it with a degree of fervor is what's so dismaying to me. We're debating the efficiencies of stopping the Holocaust. That's the philosophy that kept us from Rwanda, to our eternal dishonor. To ignore such a need is, to me, antithetical to one's own humanity, and I cannot make myself believe that the majority, as you term them, doesn't share that basic value. Thus, to me, it has to be a wilfull decision to ignore the slaughter. And the only motive I can see is the political one.

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I'm still saying it was the right analogy. A good army is necessary but not sufficient.

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I haven't read the National Geographic article, and am willing to accept that there is lots in there I don't know. But before the war, I would have put Iraq in a league with Haiti, Rumania or China as a totalitarian regime that killed its own citizens to a disturbing degree, but not up there with Sudan, Cambodia or Rwanda as a country in which the central government was engaged in genocide against its people. Hussein's treatment of the Kurds might tend to put it in the latter category, but for a decade we'd been protecting the Kurds with the no-fly zone.

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I heard of some guy who was saying Bush/cheney started plotting invading Iraq in '95, but now you're saying they were behind the sanctions too?


Except that if we didn't have 200000 soldiers on the border they'd get kicked out and even then, they weren't being allowed to inspect freely.

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Larry King is boring.

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Before Clinton, there was another President named Bush. Actually -- small world -- he was W.'s father. Look into it. It's one of those little things that makes studying history fun!

I haven't read Blix's book, so I will have to take your word for it that they were not allowed to conduct protological exams of SH and OBL.

As for the soldiers on the border, golly gee, once you got the troops that far, I guess you really had no choice but to invade, huh? That was thinking that got World War I kicked off. Note to non-historians: That one is widely seen as bad news now.

etfs

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Like I've said, I admire the worldview. But many people (not just americans, but univerally) do not share it for their own selfish reasons, and not all of those reasons are tied to membership in A.N.S.W.E.R.

Run a poll, asking that if you knew Saddam slaughtered 5-7 million of his own people, would it be worth (or, even retrospectively, would it have been worth) 5 million american lives to stop it?

Ok, what about 3 million?

1 million?

The results will be depressing, but the results do not occur simply because they would be useful Democratic talking points.

I agree, it is antithetical to one's humanity to ignore such a need. But it's also an inherently human inclination to ignore suffering unless it threatens one's selfish, self-interest.

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you know, i have feelings. Flower outed me earlier as not having gone to Harvard, now you're making it seem like i'm not educated. you're getting like Atticus, except without the big words, which somehow soften the blow.

And I remember there was the other bush, but when people say Bush/Cheney they usually mean the current Bush and they say /Cheney because they're implying current Bush can't think so Cheney is actually pulling the strings.

So your take is the inspections were unfettered? I'd love to respond to discovery requests from you.

Austrailipithicus called. He wants his sloping brow line back.

you guys are saying putting the troops in Iraq distracted from fighting terror, but now you're saying leaving them on the border of Iraq indefinately wouldn't. Okay, if you say so. You're smarter than me and all.

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Whil discussing numbers, I believe that this Big "Mess" and "quagmire" we are now bogged down in has resulted in ~850 American deaths.

Which, in perspective, is about one third of how many Americans were killed on D-Day alone.

Don't get me wrong - the loss of one mere American is terrible - but these actual numbers at issue are miniscule to say the least.

eta clarification of deaths versus casualties

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Iraq is different from Rwanda in that Iraq is more than just a humanitarian effort. It is a visionary long-term effort as part of the war on terrorism to stabilize the middle east, which is in the US's strategic interest. Or a conspiracy to steal Iraq's oil and make Cheney's Halliburton buddies rich(er) (Hi Ty!).

One of the two.

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Not at all! Without WWI we wouldn't have gotten WWII and the men who fought in it, and then whose gallant memories would Donald Rumsfeld trade on when he bitches about the pesky free press and meddlesome Congress?

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While this may be true, I said "Bush/Clinton." I think maybe you misread this as "Bush/Cheney."

Unfettered? I dunno about that, but Blix saw enough to change his mind. Administration minds were determined not to be changed by inconvenient things like facts on the ground.

You've never going to depose me, so nip that thought in the bud.

Good one. Heh.

Now that we know that Hussein didn't have WMD and ties to AQ, why would we need 200,000 troops on his borders indefinitely? His military couldn't have invaded a wet paper bag.

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Let me put it in terms that will make a Republican cry: $200,000,000,000.00.

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I don't see them as 2 different wars. II was a continuation/resolution of the what was left unresolved from I. Similarly, I see Iraq I and II as 1 long war with a 10 year break in between.