Redwingtom
Progressive filth
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RE: Egypt- Causal Chain
(02-15-2011 02:18 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: (02-14-2011 04:04 PM)Redwingtom Wrote: And again, while I think we all agree that Saddam was bad and needed to go, the honesty, or lack thereof, that proceeded his removal will take a looooong time to forget.
I find this line of attack particularly troubling. It wasn't a lack of honesty, it was bad intelligence. There's a huge difference.
You can't be 100% certain when you act on intelligence. They're called intelligence ESTIMATES for a reason.
If you wait to get 100% certainty, you will ALWAYS be too late. At some point, you have to make the best guess you can. If you guess wrong, that's not a lie. If it turns out later that there were people who disagree with you, that doesn't mean you lied. There were probably plenty of people who disagreed with Joe Rochefort's assessment that the Japanese were about to attack Midway. But once three Japanese carriers were on the bottom of the Pacific, they probably weren't all that interested in speaking up.
If you were 100% certain that Saddam had nuclear, biological, and/or chemical (NBC, a term I find less misleading than WMD) weapons, would you favor invading? If yes, then at what percentage lower than that would you favor attacking? 70%? 30%? I'm guessing that for most people, the answer is somewhere between 30% and 70%. That means you take actioin when there's a fairly high possibility that you are wrong.
What was dishonest is that our leadership should have been upfront with what's going on. What would have been your reaction if they had said, "Our intelligence indicates a 70% probability that Saddam has NBC weapons, and a 30% chance that he will use them against Israel in the next 5 years. We believe a preemptive strike is necessary to cut off that possibility"? Could Shrub and the neocons have been more candid about what the intelligence actually represented? Absolutely. Does that make what they said rise to lie proportions? Absolutely not.
Where Shrub did lie is that he said on the campaign trail in 2000 that he was going to reduce the size of the federal government and get us out of the nation-building business. And no, before you ask, I am not willing to give him a free ride on those promises because of 9/11. I think we INCREASE, not decrease, the risk of future 9/11's or the like by keeping boots on the ground in the Middle East. But before we can completely disengage, we need to find a viable alternative to imported oil. That should be priority number one, and it isn't.
I'm no apologist for the Iraq war. I would not have gone into Iraq, at least not until the war in Afghanistan was done, and the only reason I'd go in then would have been to keep Israel from nuking Baghdad. And to clarify, by war in Afghanistan done, I mean complete and total victory--bin Laden dead, Mullah Omar dead, for starters, at a minimum--and that's way beyond where we are even today.
Today, I'd bring the troops home and tell the powers over there that it's really quite simple. We don't care who runs your country, it's none of our business, as long as you obseve some simple rules. If you're willing to deal with us peacefully, and respect our citizens' rights to life, liberty, and property, then we are more than willing to extend the same to you. If you violate those rules, or choose to harbor people who violate them, the we reserve the right to blow you to smithereens at the time and in the manor of our choosing. Of course, after 60 years of wimping out, we'd actually have to blow a couple of people to smithereens to convince anyone that we meant it. That's fine, once we did that a time or two, we'd not have to worry about it again.
Never fight a war you don't intend to win. For whatever reason, we're fighting two of them, and have been for nearly a decade.
In all honesty, we are not that far apart on this subject and your analysis of things is spot on.
I just have this feeling in my gut that Bush 43 was out to get Saddam from Day 1 to avenge the attempt by Saddam to assassinate Bush 41. And if you believe Paul O'Neill, this started a week after the inauguration.
“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.
“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”
Bush Sought Way to Invade Iraq
So if you believe this, you are inclined to believe that the intelligence may have been cherry-picked to suit that goal, as I am.
(This post was last modified: 02-15-2011 03:41 PM by Redwingtom.)
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