Asymmetrical Information

"Bush screwed up in Iraq!"
"And you would have done...what exactly...?"
"...."
"Nice talking to you."

This is convincing

I'm losing a lot of respect for you. FDR specifically told his generals not to do much postwar planning till the war was won and the actual situation in germany could be assesed. This is nothing more than a new, unrealistic set of standards being applied to this particular war at this particular time.

The most disturbing thing is that suddenly effeminate white liberal males are military experts. There's a whole range of subjects I'd defer to these guys on...from luxury cars and wine selection to interior decorating and bathouse etiquette.

So "pretty much everyone" agreed? Yeah, right, if "pretty much everyone" excludes people like Butler and the rest of UNSCOM...but that's a pretty ridiculous exclusion. It might not be true that Bush lied, but it's also not true that there was a consensus strong enough to support the very specific and certain statements that he/Rumsfeld/Powell made.

A critique of decision-making by a guy who couldn't decide whether to s*** or get off the pot re Bush vs. Kerry last November? Think I'll pass.

"The most disturbing thing is that suddenly effeminate white liberal males are military experts. "

OOTW has been part of Army doctrine for at least 10 years. Shinseki said before the war even sarted that we would need 300K.

The most disturbibg thing is that white pseudo-cnservative civilian males are military experts, presuming to dictate to actual military leaders. The progress of the occupation is the least of their damage; what they have done to the Army when it comes to torture is an abomination. Rumsfeld should be deported back to Germany.

In historical context the Iraq war and peace have went well.
We should have a war against the medical profession. They have killed and maimed more people than anyone in Iraq.
How about incompetent Mayors and Govenors. They've destroy more property value than anyone in Iraq.
Between W and hurricanes maybe we'll have something that works out as well in the US. Katrina will be to domestic policy what 911 was to foreign.

"The progress of the occupation is the least of their damage; what they have done to the Army when it comes to torture is an abomination." I assume that you are referring to restricting normal/legitimate interrogation techniques simply because some people equate them to real torture?

Boy -- you are sure losing your key-board warriors.

Bush definitely hasn't handled this well. I'm unconvinced that any of the alternatives (i.e., Gore or Kerry) would have been an improvement, though.

As for the WMD issue, the existance of actual WMDs doesn't seem particularly important to me. We know he wanted nukes and had tried to develop them in the past, and I haven't heard any credible argument for why he wouldn't resume his research programs once the sanctions were lifted (and the momentum was definitely moving in the "lift the sanctions" direction).

So basically we had to either (a) take him out, (b) accept that he'd eventually get nukes, or (c) leave troops there indefinitely to keep the country under our thumb. The latter two alternatives are worse than invasion, so invasion was (even in retrospect) the right thing to do. Plus, of course, there's the huge bonus of potentially getting a stable democracy going in Iraq.

Shinseki said before the war even sarted that we would need 300K.

That factoid gets kicked around a lot. So far as I can tell, it is an example of the all-to-common fallacious reasoning that, when things go wrong, that means that everyone who said we should have done something else must have been right.

Our problems in Iraq aren't caused by a lack of manpower; they are caused by the difficulty inherent in fighting people who look like civilians, and hide among civilians, without killing the civilians too. Rumsfeld may have been wrong, but there's no evidence Shinseki was right.

The latter two alternatives are worse than invasion

Why? We're leaving troops there now, after the invasion. How is invasion plus leaving troops an improvement over leaving troops alone? Is it because we think Saddam Hussein was the only possible Iraqi leader who might think of WMD? That invasion wouldn't lead to WMD components and experts going to other "rogue" nations, and/or such nations following the North Korean example of ensuring that they have nukes precisely to discourage invasion? It seems far from proven that invasion was the superior alternative.

What some can't seem to understand is that the folks who condemned the rush to war did not generally think it was OK to let Saddam Hussein have nukes. They thought that monitoring and containment were preferable to the chaos of war as a more effective and less costly way to prevent that very thing. Only time will tell, of course, but so far their predictions of what would happen after an invasion have been considerably more accurate than the Bush administration's. The idea of an easy one-shot solution to the problem of WMD proliferation is just wishful thinking from those who always want a short cut. Well, there was no short cut. War didn't fix this problem, and probably even made it worse. Vigilance is as necessary now as it was before, and more costly. That's why the administration itself has changed its rationale to "freeing Iraq" - not that that is holding up any better in the harsh light of empirical results.

it is an example of the all-to-common fallacious reasoning that, when things go wrong, that means that everyone who said we should have done something else must have been right

That applies as well to the people who wanted to replace the previous monitoring/containment approach with an invasion approach. If the inspection regime wasn't working, maybe it should have been changed or replaced . . . but not necessarily with the mess we've seen. Accusing others of a fallacy while committing it yourself doesn't help your case.

I don't have a lot of time to reply in detail, but those who propose that maintaining the status quo was a better alternative convieniently ignore the numerous factors which made the status quo ( sanctions-led containment) unsustainable. the real choice was invasion or continued Baathist rule or Iraq, unshackled from sanctions, therefore not contained.

Wilkerson confirms the argument only if one accepts his opinion as the final authority.

The US, France, Germany, Great Britain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan all believed that Iraq had WMD’s, and UNSCOM did not disagree. Even Hans Blix didn’t say there were none until well after major ground operations were completed. Prior to the war UNSCOM held the view that, by looking for WMD’s, they would keep Saddam from deploying them. The problem with that approach was that it was far from clear that Saddam could be deterred by a group of unarmed UN inspectors – by this time he had thoroughly corrupted the UN, after all. And Saddam only allowed the inspectors in because the US had massed troops on Iraq’s borders. Isn’t it safe to assume that, if the US troops were removed the inspectors would have tossed out again? And how long could the US maintain a massive force deployment in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, etc. before engendering a huge, regime threatening backlash in those countries? Say what you will about the “Arab Street” and general Muslim dissatisfaction with the US presence in Iraq. It’s a trifle compared to the hornet’s nest we would now be battling after years of deployment in the countries surrounding Iraq.

In fact, it’s implausible that those countries would have allowed the US to remain in force for that period. Recall that the Saudis’ fear was that the US WOULD NOT remove Saddam. They had witnessed that outcome in the first Gulf War, and weren’t interested in expending any political capital on behalf of the US effort if we were not committed to removing the Baathists. It was critical for them that we get out of Saudi Arabia and into Iraq as quickly as possible. So, relying on the weapons inspectors backed up by 2 or 3 mechanized armored divisions across the borders to keep Saddam caged in was not an option that was available to us. It was a fantasy, not a policy.

The fact that Saddam apparently had no WMD’s is not, by itself, an argument against the war. After all, neither we nor anyone else knew or could have known this until after the invasion was complete. All we really knew with a high level of confidence was that he wanted them, had made mighty attempts to obtain them, and had used them in the past. That and the fact that he was rolling in money from smuggling and corrupting the Oil for Food program.

Leaving aside the impact of huge scale oil “smuggling” through Jordan and Syria, the Food for Oil program was not working as it was intended. And its failure to keep money out of the hands of Saddam was, as we now know, coupled with the massive, institutional corruption of the UN. It’s quite clear that the sanctions would have been lifted in short order had the war not interceded, either because members of the Security Council had been bought, or ironically, because they were rapidly becoming completely ineffective, destroying the credibility of the UN in the bargain.

So what do you do when the current course is untenable? It seems to me that there was only one course of action that held out the possibility of success, and the President took it.

Why? We're leaving troops there now, after the invasion.

Because we wouldn't have been able to leave troops there indefinitely. There was mounting pressure to end the sanctions and let Iraq return to business as usual.

How is invasion plus leaving troops an improvement over leaving troops alone?

Because in the first case, the troops need stay only until the country is stable. In the latter case, they have to stay forever.

What some can't seem to understand is that the folks who condemned the rush to war did not generally think it was OK to let Saddam Hussein have nukes.

Most of those who condemned the twelve-year "rush to war" had, during the years prior to the invasion, been screaming for an immediate end to the sanctions that were supposedly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It may be the case that they didn't want Hussein to have nukes, but who cares what they wanted -- what matters is "what they were willing to DO to prevent Hussein from getting nukes", and the answer is "nothing".

I am not a particular fan of the Bush lied meme either but Jane misses the key issue.

Almost everyone believed that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons but Bush's team went beyond that agressively selling the fear of nuclear weapons. His team also made a number of comments the clearly overstated the strength of their evidence. Not quite lying in my book but very agressive selling.

Tom

About 10 years ago I read a book on memetics and believe that you all use the word incorrectly. Memes are building blocks, not paradigms of thought.

Read a book and quit watching Fox news. Pushing the media (which is not liberal nor conservative, but leans toward big business; the examples of which are more abundant than those that a conservatively or liberally biased author could site about the liberal or the conservative media respectively) even further to the right does not = fair & balanced.

I came to this site because I was going to advertise on it. Nein Danka. Probably won't be to this site again to see a response either. I'm feeling verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic. Bushs' (plural) nor Clinton's domestic polies are/were neither domestic nor policy. Discuss....

Tom,

The hornets nest stirred up by the war on radical Islam revealed that A. Q. Khan, a Pakastani nuclear weapons scientist, had been selling nuclear weapons technology to Islamic countries. Unbeknown to anyone, and especially the IAEA, he had helped Libya to get a long way down the path to a nuclear weapon. The Libyan program was uncovered by the Strategic Proliferation Intiative, the brain child of John Bolton.

The MSM won't tell you this, but Saddam had 500 tons of yellowcake, technically under IAEA seal. He had some more enriched material as well, which the US removed. Once Saddam had bribed his way out of the sanctions regime and weapons inspections, he could have used his oil-for-fraud wealth to buy Khan's enrichment technology and Nork missile technology. He already had enough Uranium for around 20 weapons and he had scientists capable of designing nuclear weapons.

Besides opposition to the US, Saddam had one very good reason for wanting nukes. The Iranians are building them and the mad mullahs still thirst for revenge over the Iran/Iraq war that Saddam started.

The example of Libya shows that the Administration did not over-hype the threat of Saddam gaining nuclear weapons.

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