Name: Anonymous 2005-12-07 20:02
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.
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.