Understanding the Iraq War.

I would like to get a basic understanding of the Iraq war, and I would like to refer to facts.  I will state some assumptions, which are based mostly on what the American media has given me. (CNN, MSNBC, the Times, FOX (with a grain of salt), local newspapers, etc).  Keep it civil.  Emoticons denote automatic failure.

9/11 assumptions: Both Clinton and Bush missed opportunities to confront Al Qaeda, but I am more concerned with Bush at the moment, being as how he's president.  The Bush administration was also lacksadaisacal up until 9/11.
After 9/11, I said that congress ought to have formally declared war on Al Qaeda (your opponent doesn't need to be a country), which would imply engagement with countries harboring Al Qaeda operatives.  This still hasn't been done.  The 9/11 commission also

Justification for the Iraq war: The central justifications for the Iraq invasion were that Iraq possessed WMDs, had explicit links to Al Qaeda, and that the operation itself would run smoothly.  All of these have been thrown into some degree of doubt and semantics.  I would like to hear the specifics about just what has been found in Iraq, what was said to be there,

when Iraq had WMDs and how it is relevant to us: The obvious sticking point  which conservatives and liberals never seem to plumb in great detail is who had what, when, who SAID what was where, and what Iraq may have done about it in the interim.  Saddam gassed Kurdish peoples on dozens of occasions, although there is also speculation that Iran played a role:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_poison_gas_attack
The things which need to be investigated is which specific assertions by the Bush administration were false, or based on faulty intelligence, what the possibilities for the dearth of actually located WMDs are (moved to another country/being researched/never made in the first place)
This is the main point about which I would like to amass lots of FACTS, and save the politics and conclusions for later.  Which vans did we find?  what stuff DID we find?  If intelligence was faulty, how do we know?  I believe they actually have found some chemical weapons, and much as they might have liked to pursue a nuclear program, they were nowhere near doing so, contrary to Bush rhetoric.

what to do in 2006: Whatever the fallout from neoconservative ambition, and whatever faults can be shown to have existed in war rationale, we must now move to make Iraq stable, and able to defend itself.  This involves training the native police and military.  Is Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal responsible, or even tenable?  Why can't we ever get specifics from Bush on the matter?  I'm not talking about a timetable, I'm talking about a quantitative statement of what has to be established in Iraq before we leave.  Will this work in the long term? 

lastly, I would like some civil discussion in /poli itself, not just links.

John Murtha may have been a Marine, but so was Lee Harvey Oswald... General point made.

Train the Iraqi military and police, then leave, and stop spending so much freakin' money on that so we can spend it actually defending us from terrorists over here. We've practically done nothing to that effect other than giving TSA agents vacuum-looking bomb sniffers. Yeah, like they'll try another attack like 9/11 after the fact...

It might work, or Al Qaeda might simply bring everything back that they took over to Syria and kill all the new government officials and take over again, who knows... Hey, maybe the asteroid that has a good chance of hitting us in 30-something years will just smack right into the Middle East and get rid of the problem for us, yeah? ... Nah.

Personally, I think Clinton should have done more than he did about the terrorists. George W's probably about ready to rip his hair out with all the crap he's had to deal with as president... Especially that Cindy Sheehan chick.

The short end is, the war is crap and we'll probably end up doing something politically *coughBushcough* to fail hard.

>>2
You can't just discount his service like that.  It's utterly disrespectful to him and anyone else who's in/been in the armed forces.  Way to go and "support our troops" by making such an irresponsible blanket statement, essentially calling them all nutcases with weapons training.  Yellow ribbons can't hide the lack of respect that some of you unfortunately have for people like him.  While you're at it, you might as well tell John McCain, Colin Powell, Max Cleland, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Wesley Clark, Bob Dole and other current and former members of our government who have served in the military, as well as the many current and former members of the armed forces that you may encounter on a regular basis that they are no better than shellshocked drug addicts, and should be treated as if they are dangerous criminals and murderers.

Murtha spent a significant amount of his life in the military, and his experience in military intelligence has led people on both sides of the political spectrum to ask him for advice, and he's been willing to give liberally it throughout his tenure, whether it was asked for by Republicans or Democrats.  It's a shame that once he decided to make a decision that was against the Republican political agenda (attempting to call for an effort to withdraw many of the U.S. soldiers that have been fighting in Iraq through a systematic process), the Republicans stick to their party line and slander him, one such member of Congress even going as far as telling him he didn't have a clue what he was talking about, despite the fact that he has led a decorated military career and is easily one of the most knowledgeable congressmen in regards to the inner working of the armed forces.  He made a decision that was not in the best interests of any political agenda, but was in the best interests of the soldiers, and he was attacked and ridiculed by those who would rather further their political agenda than help out the very people they represent, military or civilian, one of his biggest attackers being the vice president himself, who unlike Murtha, vehemently detested the military to the point where his efforts got him five draft-deferments during the Vietnam War (as Murtha made it a point to express during his argument with him, which shut up Cheney real fast).

Murtha isn't asking for an overnight withdrawal.  That's just what pro-war people want you to believe; like he's some irresponsible imbecile or something.  What he actually proposed is a much more rational and systematic process of leaving Iraq, mainly with the goal of reducing the amount of U.S. military in the most dangerous combat zones of the country.

And for your information about Clinton, what he actually did to further the U.S. counter-terrorist efforts, especially against Al Qaeda, read the 9/11 Report.  How that book became a best-seller, I still don't understand, because nobody seems to have actually read it.  I hear people to this day blame Clinton for his "failure" to do the same things that the 9/11 Report says that he accomplished.  But as a thick book, I guess it looks impressive on one's shelf no matter what.

Besides, I thought Republicans liked Lee Harvey Oswald; after all, he killed JFK, and you know how much they hated him.

>>3
Agreed.  A rather blunt statement, but it rings true.

If you can honestly say that before the Iraq war begain that you did not think that Iraw was in violation of UN restrictions placed upon the country after the first war, then you can say the current Iraq war is not justtified, if you are like most of the world and cannot, then you were fooled by Sadam.

Why do you think the UN was conducting weapons inspections within Iraq.  Of course they were suspicious, that's exactly what Saddam wanted people to believe, so he could bluff his way into a position of political clout within the Middle East.  Unfortunately, those weapons inspections were prematurely cut short by this current war, before anyone could confirm or disconfirm the fact that Saddam actually had WMDs.  That's why the so-called "coalition" did not consist of much of the rest of the world, who, while they might have at that point believed that Saddam had some form of WMDs/working on WMDs/etc., they were also willing to wait for better evidence than claims from a guy named "Curveball" who claimed to have worked on and helped hide WMDs, but was really a cab driver in Iraq that had a tendency to have one too many drinks.

That's right: the French, Germans, Russian, and other countries that were illegaly profiting from the UN's Oil for Food program wanted to wait for better proof.

First off Teddy Kennedy isn't a "shellshocked drug addict", he's a flat out liar, hypocrite, and publicity whore.

Secondly, UN weapons inspections were going nowhere. Saddam was constantly kicking them out of facilities and restricting their access while the UN just sat back and watched unable to get off their bloated butts and do something.