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George W. Bush Is Intervening in Iraq—Again

Montecresto said:
The American public is aware of it. These were internal Bush administration documents.
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And this might have been a workable encouragement in 2008 but that seven years later that policy has long gone stale.
 
Grant said:
Christians, despite the propaganda, are not at war with Islam. Nor are Jews. Islamic factions are at war with the Christians, and Jews, and those Muslims who want to stand in their way. Is that about right?
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That's exactly right.
 
Grant said:
You can get of SOFA's here. Status of forces agreement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Keep in mind that negotiating a SOFA with a country like Iraq, with all the varying factions to please, is extremely complicated. What is said for public consumption may be quite different from what goes on behind the scenes. The first SOFA negotiated by the Bush Administration took a great deal of time and everyone knew that it would have to be renegotiated later. That was a given, and true of all SOFAs.

Barrack Obama as a candidate ran on pulling the troops from Iraq, period. There was no talk of extending SOFA or renegotiating the SOFA with Iraq. The military assumed this was just campaign promises, that about 40,000 troops would be remaining to protect what had been won. Only later did Obama use the SOFA as an excuse, that he was following the agreement signed by Bush, and so on. Another promise was to close Gitmo, and he is doing his best to do that, again against military advice.

If you know why Obama's withdrawing the troops from Iraq as per his promise, when it was 'stable and self reliant', was a good idea then perhaps you can explain it. But the usual excuse of blaming it on Bush just doesn't cut it.
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Actually I was against the pull out. There was increased activity all over Iraq and a fledgling defense system. Our military advisers were against the withdrawal. So, I can't explain what I don't believe. You may have missed the sarcasm in my original post.
 
Blue_State said:
Actually I was against the pull out. There was increased activity all over Iraq and a fledgling defense system. Our military advisers were against the withdrawal. So, I can't explain what I don't believe. You may have missed the sarcasm in my original post.
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My apologies because that's just what happened.
 
Fenton said:
Irrelevant.

You people seem to exist under the delusion that Bush " lied ".

He didn't and you dont have the courage or integrity to admit that you were manipulated and led astray by manufactured false narratives.

Its no skin off my nose if you want to continue to exist in a alternate reality. Being easily influenced is a prerequisite to being a left winger
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Just because you believe the Bush's excuse of ignorance of all the evidence that said there were no WMD's and his claim that he only believed the lies told by "curveball" and others does not mean he didn't lie. Ignorance is a poor excuse and far too easy to fake especially for a thick head like Bush. Who could doubt that this is the face of a clueless idiot? It was the perfect cover for a foreign policy agenda riddled with lies and false claims.
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iguanaman said:
Just because you believe the Bush's excuse of ignorance of all the evidence that said there were no WMD's and his claim that he only believed the lies told by "curveball" and others does not mean he didn't lie. Ignorance is a poor excuse and far too easy to fake especially for a thick head like Bush. Who could doubt that this is the face of a clueless idiot? It was the perfect cover for a foreign policy agenda riddled with lies.
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Why not point out the 'lie' if you are so confident this occurred? Be specific, in your own words, when this lie occured. Can you do that?
 
Jack Hays said:
The "Anbar Awakening" accompanied by a US military surge in 2006-2007 decisively improved the situation, and in 2009 GWB handed over to BHO a victory in Iraq. BHO then threw it away.
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There was no victory in Iraq...what history book are you re-writing? We ****ed the country up worse than it was before...for no reason...and then had to leave because we could only make it worse, not better. We had no 'solution' to fix Iraq. And it was ****ed up beyond fixing before Obama took over.
 
iguanaman said:
Just because you believe the Bush's excuse of ignorance of all the evidence that said there were no WMD's and his claim that he only believed the lies told by "curveball" and others does not mean he didn't lie. Ignorance is a poor excuse and far too easy to fake especially for a thick head like Bush. Who could doubt that this is the face of a clueless idiot? It was the perfect cover for a foreign policy agenda riddled with lies and false claims.
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1. The decision to invade Iraq preceded the intelligence, it did not follow it.
2. Nonetheless the GWB administration believed the (mistaken) intelligence, as did most other governments.
3. The Iraqis considered it more important to make the Iranians believe they might have had WMD than to make us believe they didn't. We missed that, and that was the source of confusion.
 
Grant said:
And this might have been a workable encouragement in 2008 but that seven years later that policy has long gone stale.
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Continue to put your partisan bias on display for all to see.
 
Grant said:
Why not point out the 'lie' if you are so confident this occurred? Be specific, in your own words, when this lie occured. Can you do that?
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I think the worst "willful deception" was during GW's 2003 State of the Union. It was already well know that there was no "uranium from Africa" and the tubes were not suitable for nuclear uses.

It was just bad intelligence! Everyone was fooled! You can’t say Bush “lied” about Iraq pursuing WMDs or about the Saddam Hussein regime having ties to 9/11 because he was just echoing what the intelligence community said, which was wrong.

This is a line of argumentation that Bush administration officials and Iraq war boosters have been clinging to ever since it became clear that U.S. troops would found no mobile biological weapons labs and no Mutual Admiration Society correspondence between Saddam and Osama. “We were wrong just like everyone else” isn’t a particularly compelling argument, though I suppose that if you’re responsible for one of the modern era’s most significant foreign policy disasters, “shared incompetence” is a more appealing excuse than “willful deception.”
But the Bush administration absolutely did engage in willful deception. Quite a bit of it, in fact. It’s one thing to simply repeat an intelligence assessment that is wrong, and quite another to take a disputed, credibly challenged intelligence assessment and state it as uncontested fact. That’s a lie, and senior Bush officials did it often. There’s no better example of this than the aluminum tubes.

If you were following politics in the six months or so leading up to the actual invasion of Iraq, then you probably remember how much importance senior Bush administration officials put on the fact that Iraq had tried to obtain a certain type of aluminum tube that was, per those same officials, only suitable for use in uranium centrifuges. The tubes were at the heart of their case that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a nuclear weapons program, and had been cited as evidence of Hussein’s intentions by Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell. They even earned a mention in George W. Bush’s now infamous 2003 state of the union address:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.

The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary, he is deceiving.

This was all wrong. And they knew at the time that the intelligence regarding those tubes was nowhere near as strong as they made it out to be. A number of intelligence agencies believed that the tubes were, in fact, made for uranium enrichment. There were, however, a number of dissenting views, including from the State Department and the intelligence arm of the Department of Energy, the agency responsible for maintaining the United States’ nuclear arsenal (i.e. the people who actually know this stuff). DOE determined that the tubes were completely impractical for use in uranium enrichment, and were probably intended for use in conventional rockets. The State Department came to a similar conclusion.

Senior policymakers, including President Bush, were aware of this debate over the tubes by October 2002. But with Dick Cheney calling the shots and applying pressure where necessary, the administration disregarded the dissenting views, prioritized the assessments that aligned with their preferred policy outcome, and hid the debate from the public while offering up the tubes as incontrovertible evidence that Saddam Hussein was in the process of developing nuclear weapons.
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Yes, Bush lied about Iraq: Why are we still arguing about this? - Salon.com
 
Lursa said:
There was no victory in Iraq...what history book are you re-writing? We ****ed the country up worse than it was before...for no reason...and then had to leave because we could only make it worse, not better. We had no 'solution' to fix Iraq. And it was ****ed up beyond fixing before Obama took over.
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You should read more. By 2009 Iraq was largely stabilized and had decent prospects. Even BHO and Biden proclaimed victory. Then they threw it away.
 
iguanaman said:
Just because you believe the Bush's excuse of ignorance of all the evidence that said there were no WMD's and his claim that he only believed the lies told by "curveball" and others does not mean he didn't lie. Ignorance is a poor excuse and far too easy to fake especially for a thick head like Bush. Who could doubt that this is the face of a clueless idiot? It was the perfect cover for a foreign policy agenda riddled with lies and false claims.
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It is not a lie to say something that you think is true, even if it isn't. Bush did not lie when he said that Iraq had WMD. The local weather guy didn't lie when he said it would rain and it didn't. Obama didn't lie when he said we could keep our health insurance. We throw that accusation around a lot, and it is not accurate.

So, when we say someone lied, and in fact they just made an error, are we ourselves lying? I say, no, as saying something you erroneously believe to be true is not a lie but a mistake.
 
Lursa said:
Political bull**** aimed at the US.

I didnt see you telling me what our victory was....what we 'accomplished?'
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I was quoting Barack Obama and what he said. Are you saying that Barack Obama was lying when he called Iraq "Sovereign, stable, and self reliant"?
 
iguanaman said:
I think the worst "willful deception" was during GW's 2003 State of the Union. It was already well know that there was no "uranium from Africa" and the tubes were not suitable for nuclear uses.
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"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

That statement was true.
 
Jack Hays said:
You should read more. By 2009 Iraq was largely stabilized and had decent prospects. Even BHO and Biden proclaimed victory. Then they threw it away.
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It was political bull****. From both. It wasnt stabliized and the country was practically destroyed which we had to pay to fix. Many factions were still active...and causing disruption.

They threw nothing away....we had no way to fix what we destroyed and destabilized. Our presence was not helping anything since we didnt have a plan to fix it. We never did btw....GWB didnt give a **** about 'after'....the plan was "we'll bring them democracy,' with no actual plans to do so.

Can anyone name a country where we...or anyone else...has 'brought them democracy' successfully? I cant. You cannot force democracy on a country that is culturally not ready for it. Why did I know that in 2003 but GWB didnt?
 
iguanaman said:
Obama was completing Bush's agreement for withdrawal of troops and fulfilling a campaign promise to the American people. Bush made and signed the agreement to withdraw our troops with much fanfare before he left office. If Obama lied then so did Bush.
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When Obama made that promise to remove the troops then the SOFA really didn't matter, right?
 
Lursa said:
It was political bull****. From both. It wasnt stabliized and the country was practically destroyed which we had to pay to fix. Many factions were still active...and causing disruption.

They threw nothing away....we had no way to fix what we destroyed and destabilized. Our presence was not helping anything since we didnt have a plan to fix it. We never did btw....GWB didnt give a **** about 'after'....the plan was "we'll bring them democracy,' with no actual plans to do so.

Can anyone name a country where we...or anyone else...has 'brought them democracy' successfully? I cant. You cannot force democracy on a country that is culturally not ready for it. Why did I know that in 2003 but GWB didnt?
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I always appreciate the voice of moderation.
 
Dittohead not! said:
It is not a lie to say something that you think is true, even if it isn't. Bush did not lie when he said that Iraq had WMD. The local weather guy didn't lie when he said it would rain and it didn't. Obama didn't lie when he said we could keep our health insurance. We throw that accusation around a lot, and it is not accurate.

So, when we say someone lied, and in fact they just made an error, are we ourselves lying? I say, no, as saying something you erroneously believe to be true is not a lie but a mistake.
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OK then we will call it willful deception then. There is very much evidence that Bush must have known that claims he made about Saddam's WMD's were far from written in stone. Shouldn't a President be held responsible for exaggeration of the verifiable veracity of claims he made in his 2003 State of the Union for example? Claims that all turned out to be false? Error is one thing but purposely not telling the whole truth is also a sort of lie.

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/10/yes_bush_lied_about_iraq_why_are_we_still_arguing_about_this/
 
Lursa said:
It was political bull****. From both. It wasnt stabliized and the country was practically destroyed which we had to pay to fix. Many factions were still active...and causing disruption.

They threw nothing away....we had no way to fix what we destroyed and destabilized. Our presence was not helping anything since we didnt have a plan to fix it. We never did btw....GWB didnt give a **** about 'after'....the plan was "we'll bring them democracy,' with no actual plans to do so.

Can anyone name a country where we...or anyone else...has 'brought them democracy' successfully? I cant. You cannot force democracy on a country that is culturally not ready for it. Why did I know that in 2003 but GWB didnt?
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There was democracy -- albeit imperfect -- in Iraq in 2009. Regardless, Iraq was a better place without Saddam Hussein. Again, the facts are not as you claim.
 
Jack Hays said:
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

That statement was true.
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SH was never a threat to the US.

Are we invading Iran? They are alot further along than SH ever was.

Bush wanted to believe it...or didnt and just used it anyway...to further his own ****tily-thought out agenda in Iraq. And then lied and bullied other countries into joining us. (After doing the same to Congress)
 
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