Dugger

Do you think Bush mistyped us into war? Maybe he meant to type car. Like send our troops to a car. Maybe he meant to say Iraq was perusing a nuclear program (maybe on their TVs) instead of pursuing.

Dugger, has zero ability to form a reasonable opinion of the motives of his elected officials.

I’m just saying, in light of the fact that I also say that I probably would not have initiated the Iraq action, in fairness to Bush et al that I don’t know every thing they considered (doubt you do) – some data was certainly classified. And its hard to know whether Bush is doing his typical poor selling job, just being the poor communicator that he is, or that he is the left’s fantasy evil incarnate.

How do you know Bush lied? Is every seeming contradiction a lie? Every mispeak? Every thing you don’t like? Do you acknowledge that telling a ‘lie’ must reflect a conscious intent to deceive? I am the world’s worst typist. Is each mistype a lie? You refer to me as “Dukker. I you as ‘mitter’. Both lies?

Dugger, Has Zero Magical Ability to divine the motives of other posters

You know what realities they took into account as well as I do. It’ll cost the taxpayers nothing, we’ll be greeted with flowers. I can be certain of what they told us.

And making the argument that the democrats enabled the incompetence of Bush in executing the war is just plain, well then. Bush asked for the power to make the decision to go to war. All along he was saying he hadn’t made up his mind, that war was not inevitable. Guess what, he lied. He told congress he would do certain things. Guess what he lied. It’s like when your grandmother gets scammed by a con man into giving up her credit card number. You can blame her for losing her money, but are you going to send her to jail as an accesory?

If the war went as planned, they could take the lion’s share of credit.

If it didn’t, they could spread the blame evenly over both parties.

They knew they had all the cards with National Security.

No one could stand in their way without risking political fallout
from the accusation they are against the WoT.

They ‘cherry-picked the intel that served their agenda.

How does the manipulation and control of information by the WH
equate to bi-partisan support? Sounds more like the dems
were victims of extortion by the mob.

Dugger?

I’d like to see the evidence for that, Dugger. Even if 90 percent of the dems in congress vote against it, the resolution still passes. And even if it doesn’t pass Bush would have simply declared that he don’t need no stinking resolution.

Responsibility at least 80% Bush. If he had any honor he’d claim full responsibility.

H*ll I agree it was ‘primarily’ Bush, but it would not have happened -period- without bi-partisan support.

And I don’t know what realities they took into account – neither do you. I have my suspicions – you appear to have your certainties.

Dugger, Missed you Big Gay Al

Macro strategy. It isn’t working because like you said, they failed to take into account the basic realities of Iraq. It won’t work because they still won’t take into account the basic reality of Iraq. And it isn’t so clear cut, because they have many goals to pursue in Iraq beyond some cold war flypaper strategy.

Wilbur, That was a neat perspective on your view but, please keep in mind that it is no sin to cherry pick intelligence. It is in fact a necessity – defining cherry picking as intentionally upgrading the importance of certain intelligence and downgrading that of other intelligence. Its the Pres’s job to do that. Now if he selected wrongly, its open season to second guess.

Having been military for a while, I understand and sympathize with ‘mission accomplished’. It is how we thought, how I thought and think – like it or not. Their job or mission was to meet the other country’s armed forces and beat them. That they did – smashingly. God bless ‘em all.

Hey and if you want to apportion credit blame for the war, my estimate is about 50% Bush WH, 30% Republican Congress, 20% Democratic congress. Argue with that all you like. I am not shunning Bush having primary responsibility, but I do shun him have sole responsilbility and Dems having none – or even your 5%.

If you are able to look back (i don’t care to) you will find that I have been ppessimistic about Iraq, but I also think it would be intellctually dishonest not to consider the neocons macro-strategy.

And what happened to Big Gay Al?

Dugger

Bush campaigned on a policy of avoiding unnecessary overseas committments of our armed forces. But upon taking office he came under the influence of neoconservatives who had long been in favor of forcing the issue in Iraq, militarily if necessary, as a means of effecting widespread reform and democratization in the Middle East.

Some historians have speculated that Bush’s change of heart had something to do with a deep-seated impulse to both vindicate and conquer his father, but such psychologizing histories have met with justifiable skepticism, and have never won broad acceptance.

Early on the administration began a search for justifactions for a potential invasion. No incontrovertible evidence has ever been uncovered that intelligence was deliberately fabricated or misrepresented, and it is that lack of solid evidence that allowed Bush to escape impeachment by the Democratic congress that was voted in in 2006, but it is incontrovertible that questionable evidence favorable to an invasion scenario was cherry-picked. In an earth-shaking memoir published just months before his death in 2037 Paul Wolfowitz admitted that the tendency amongst senior administration officials to think of invasion as a foregone conclusion created a dangerous atmosphere in which intelligence and policy issues could not be evaluated judiciously.

Terrible and unexpected as it was, the carnage of 9/11 presented the adminstration with a golden opportunity to push their Iraq agenda. Public sentiment would be receptive to arguments that preemptive action against Iraq was necessary, and that sentiment could be translated into political pressure on congress. The president delivered his “Axis of Evil” speech, laying a groundwork for a campaign against Iraq that had been percolating in the minds of many administration officials for years. The president’s advisors and political operatives realized that pie-in-the-sky goals of democratizing the middle east would be a hard sell, so the campaign deliberately focused almost exclusively on the alleged threat of Saddam’s WMD’s and WMD programs.

The administration and its allies lobbied congress directly and through the press and in the fall of 2002 congress passed a sweeping war authorization. The majority of democrats supported the bill. Some were convinced by the administration’s heated rhetoric and selective presentation of the intelligence, others cravenly calculated that in the post-9/11 climate anything that could be spun as being soft on terror or defense would be a political death sentence. Many thought that it was important for the president to be seen to have the backing of congress to make credible any threat of force that would move Saddam toward a peaceful settling of outstanding grievances. Among that group many voiced or at least harbored the hope that the president would only resort to war after all peaceful avenues had been exhausted, but that hope was in vain, since the administration had long since settled on its course for war. Regardless of the motivations of congress, most scholars have come to the conclusion that the legislative branch of government failed in this instance to perform its essential constitutional duty to provide a check on an imbalanced executive. Nevertheless, it is clear that congress never would have taken such action without the constant insistance and pressure of the Bush administration, and it is on the shoulders of the adminsitration that the responsibility for going to war firmly lies.

The rest makes sordid reading even at the end of a century that set a new standard for sordid. In the specious name of enforcing UN resolutions, Bush curtailed the UN process and ordered the invasion to begin. The subsequent litany of mistakes, miscalculations and what even congressman Glenn Reynolds would later refer to as “an astounding lack of foresight, and astounding ignorance about the effects invasion would have on Iraqi society and its politics,” is all to well known and agreed upon to be rehashed here. In the end the mistakes may not have been criminal – no one was ever prosecuted – but they could hardly have been more horrifying, and more deleterious in their effects, if they were.

I wasn’t referring to this post. In this post, he’s mainly being braindead. All I’m saying is that he’s a damn site better than frank, ian, et all.

You know what? On rereading Dugger’s comment I don’t actually see where he is disagreeing with the President or his policies in Iraq. He believes that a mistake was made in judging the nature of Iraqi society but he still agrees with the goal of the plan based on that mistake and he doesn’t think the plan should be changed. Where’s the disagreement here?

Oh God, how could I have fallen for it, look at that glaring MAY, “MAY have made a misjudgement.” Dugger, pack it in, pack it up. You’re done.

So what. How rational is it to recognize the crucial failure of judgement in the origianl plan for Iraq only to suggest that the best way to avoid total catastrophe is to continue following that very same plan? Dugger concludes that the biggest threat to our goals for Iraq are the anti-war left but that doesn’t make any sense if you read what he wrote. It follows from his above assessment that the greatest threat to our goals in Iraq are the very people who set those goals and decided on the plan in the first place. Which is to say that if the plan is in jeopardy because Bush misjudged the nature of Iraqi society then the plan’s ultimate failure lays within the plan itself. And yet somehow, at the end of his assessment, Dugger fobs off any failure in the plan on to the anti-war left who “hold sway” over national policy. Okay, so Dugger doesn’t agree with immediate withdrawal. But surely some change in policy or strategy is demanded right? Others on the right and left have asked for more troops to be sent in. Rejected. Others have asked for a reasonably flexible, target-based timetable to be established so that progress can be measured and assessed. Rejected. So if we can’t pull out but we can’t change the originally flawed plan just what exactly are we supposed to do? It sounds like Dugger believes all we have to do is tell each other pretty stories and hope for the best. That isn’t rationality. It’s pure fantasy.

So the Bush administration misjudged the nature of Iraqi society and so, even with the best intentions, our mission in Iraq is unlikely to succeed. The best we can hope for is to achieve a modicum of stability before we exit.

I don’t know if you are aware of this or not but that’s the most damning thing that could possibly be said about this administration and its policies in Iraq. It’s also a statement that totally vindicates most pre-war critics of the invasion who included an assessment of Iraqi civil society as a central reason in their opposition to the war. Indeed, this administration actively worked to undermine those critics.

You either have a situation where the mission never could have succeeded because of the nature of Iraqi society — and so never should have been carried out in the first place (as pre-war critics advised).

Or you have a situation where, if we misjudged the nature of Iraqi society, we might have compensated and or adjusted to this new knowledge such that the mission would now be likely succeed, as when many critics of the president’s strategy called for more troops. But, in fact, the Bush administration failed to make any significant changes in strategy and worked to undermined their critics.

You don’t need wild conspiracy theories after you recognize this. Your assessment alone tells of a massive failure in judgement combined with massive incompetence to produce tragic consequences. It’s astonishing really the extent to which you are willing put it all down to a simple case of good intentions gone wrong. What were the three praiseworthy qualities you saw in Bush: Loyalty, Determination, Decisiveness? The scenario you just laid out exposes the serious damage that all three can do when one lacks good judgement. It’s simply astonishing.

Your first mistake is saying a bi-partisan congress authorized the war. Cyberian lays out the basic case against that picture above.

Next you try to defend the lack of WMDs. Long story short: they weren’t there, and most of the intelligence presented by the Bush people was tainted, dated, or based on untrustworthy witnesses, forged documents, speculation, bad conclusions and was known to be questionable at best at the time. Furthermore, UN inspectors were on the ground and found nothing, as a matter of fact, they said US tips were useless, always wrong, and did nothing but waste their time and resources.

Third you say the mission accomplished crap was justified, I would like to remind you the White House directly LIED about the origin of that sign when it came under fire, and tried to claim it was the ship’s personnel that made it and hung it, when in fact it was the White House advanced staff that did that for a photo op. The mission is not accomplished when Saddam Hussein is running loose, the majority of our troops are in harm’s way, the WMDs are not found, Al Qaeda is stirring up trouble, insurgents are stirring up trouble, the Taliban and bin Laden are running around in Afghanistan, etc etc etc. It may reflect the “we’ll be greeted with flowers” assumption that was the sole basis for post-invasion planning of the Bush administration, but I think we can all admit that assumption was stupid, short sighted, murderous and wrong.

Next comes the dreamy motive and goal mind reading. Yummy moonbeams for you. You blame every critic of mindreading the motives of these people. Noble, right. You can look at how the war has played out to at a minimum add shadowy, evil goals to the situation. Unaccounted for money, Union Busting, selling off of Iraqi assets, oil, corruption, no-bid contracts, US politics etc etc. Maybe these aren’t part of the ‘Main Goal’, but these things certainly went along for the ride. Anyway, what we have created there is a seething mass of violence and corruption on the brink of a civil war. Even if that doesn’t occur, all indications based on the Iraqi constitution and what is playing out in the elections and politics indicate we have created an Islamic Republic friendly to US-hating Iran. Good job.

Next you describe the Neo-Cons that led us into this war as smart people. Its not that they needed “close attention” to realize all the conditions you lay out as horrible mistakes. All they needed was any one page intelligence background history of Iraq, a memory that stretched back to the first Gulf War, to listen to any meeting they had with a US General who said they needed more troops, the ability to read a newspaper… It was the act of stupid short sighted people who had no idea how to define or plan to reach even the goals you stated.

Then you reiterate some vague exit strategy. Great. 20 years.

Much of the evidence indicates your trust of the Bush company motives is misplaced. You have not seen one iota of evidence that Bush lied? The only way that can happen is if you keep your eyes and mind closed. He mispoke, the message was jumbled by other representatives, CONTEXT!

Bogey men. Alot of them.

Telling Cyber you interpret the resolution differnetly is not a valid “agree to disagree”. I think we can say that Cyberian was alot more in tune with the democrats’ reasons and motives than you were. You are correct in saying they need to take responsibility for voting for that resolution, but that would be for making the mistake of letting politics trump Bush’s untrustworthiness. And those weren’t conditions “we felt the president should take” those were conditions the president SAID he would take (untrustworhty).

But say you are correct, how much does that make the democrat’s who voted for the resolution responsible for having the war? 1%? 2%, 5%? That leaves 95+% of the blame for starting the war squarely in Bush’s lap and 100% for the missteps and lack of basic planning in carrying out the war in Bush’s lap.

Isn’t that nice? Covers the hypoteneus of reality.

Timeline?

We don’t know whether Rove told Bush. We do know he told Scotty.
Bush knows now what Rove told Scotty was not true. Where is
his loyalty? Is it blind allegiance to friends?