Of course. That's what a few of us are very much opposed to. We think it is the wrong kind of economy, and that we would all be better off if we avoided spending our resources on war. Some of us would like to become the country our 9th grade civics teachers said we are.
One fact we should not forget is that the entire country was lied to by the administration, and that included the democrat and republican leadership in Congress. The Congress made their decision, a bad one, on the basis of bad information. The administration is entirely, 100%, responsible not the Congress. The CIA told the administration that they had no evidence of WMDs in Iraq, but they could not be certain. The international inspectors said they could not find anything. The administration, i.e., Cheney, needled the CIA almost daily until they revised their assessments to read the way the administration wanted them to read. The administration accepted with out question any reports that would support their trumped up reason for attacking Iraq, and ignored and suppressed contrary reports.
That's not what I recall. We saw the pics of a bio containment vehicle circling a research compound. There was also a substantial amount of yellow cake found in Iraq which is used to make fissile material. This 2004 CIA article on Saddam's WMD's will shed some light on your incorrect implications. You really need to quit reading that tripe over at those liberal doctored news sites. Let me turn to biological weapons. The Estimate said that Baghdad had them, and that all key aspects of an offensive programâResearch and Development, production, and weaponizationâwere still active, and most elements were larger, and more advanced than before the first Gulf war. We believed that Iraq had lethal Biological Weapon agents, including anthrax, which it could quickly produce and weaponize for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert operatives. But we said we had no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons, agent, or stockpiles at Baghdadâs disposal. Much More: https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/2004/tenet_georgetownspeech_02052004.html
I hate to break this to you but all foreign expenditures are unnecessary. You know how much money we spent on the cold war? Try 13 trillion plus. Thank you Democrats. And yes, that WAS the democrats. Eisenhower tried in vain to stop it and Barry Goldwater made his case and got slaughtered by the left. THAT was a waste of money. As for your comment about unconscionable killing. Are you fucking serious? Try reading about what we did to Dresden, Germany. My mother lived in Germany while we patriotic Americans were carpet bombing schools, churches and residential neighborhoods. Heil Roosevelt!!!! Ah yes, and while we needlessly killing German women and children we were locking up the Japanese in our own little Nazi labor camps. Heil Roosevelt!!!! Give me a break. Your knowledge of history is dropping like a rock now in my book. As bad as Iraq was, and it was bad, it was a pittance compared to enumerable damage we caused in all the other wars. And yes, ALL those other wars were based on lies and misinformation and bullshit. There are many people that absolutely believe that Roosevelt had a 24 hour heads up on the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But he wanted to get into WWII so bad and stop the Russians (yes the Russians, not the Germans) and anti-war sentiment was so bad at the time, the only way we could possibly justify it was if we would be attacked. Not saying I believe this whole story, but it's an example of just how spineless these leaders are. Roosevelt has more blood on his hands then any other American leader in History. The Iraq War was started way before Bush and as Obama has showed us, it will continue for many years after. As for the Bill of Rights? Dude, we killed protestors during Vietnam. Killed them! Our civil liberties were long gone before Bush came into office and what few we had remaining, Obama kicked them to the curb. Maybe you forgot about the McCarthy hearings in the 1940's. I don't know. I think your history books are missing a few chapters.
Mav, I'm not dismissing the many other unconscionable actions of our government, nor of other governments as well. Nor am I willing to overlook, or make excuses for the terrible harm Bush and Cheney together did to our country.
Thanks. I read Tenet's remarks. (Didn't he end up being the fall guy?) There is nothing there of course, and he bungles the job of covering up for the fact that there is nothing. That's what the report says. "There is nothing, so far as we can tell." Delivered as a speach this would be more difficult to latch on to. Look at the following paragraph taken directly from Tenet's speach. "Our second stream of information was that the United Nations could notâand Saddam would notâaccount for all the weapons the Iraqis had: tons of chemical weapons precursors, hundreds of artillery shells and bombs filled with chemical or biological agents." [ The word "or" being written in the last sentence of the above quote rather than "and" is a dead give away of uncertainty.] As you can read for yourself in Tenet's own words, the inspectors could not confirm any of what is claimed in the second part. It is simply assumed that: "...the Iraqis had: tons of chemical weapons precursors, hundreds of artillery shells and bombs filled with chemical or biological agents. " It is assumed that the Iraqis had these things with zero hard evidence. The assumption is based on the belief that Iraq used chemical weapons against the Kurds in the past -- the exact delivery method uncertain, but guessed at. The reliability of the reports themselves were uncertain because they were handled by not disinterested parties. Tenet gives us a picture of the worst kind of incompetence in the CIA -- or by Tenet himself, we can't be sure. They have used the absence of information, which they acknowledge, to conclude that Iraq had all of that that the CIA (or perhaps just Tenet) said they had!!! This is a truly startling admission of incompetence, that frankly I had never noticed before. (Do you see what I'm talking about?) And of course when our troops looked for evidence of these things they found virtually nothing other than more or less conventional weapons. For Tenet to make the above statement in 2004 he had to have assumed it to be true, based on NEGATIVE intelligence reports! You can't prove something does not exist with a negative report, but you certainly can't prove that it does either!!! This situation exactly parallels the absurd reports of Soviet weapons which were also unconfirmed guesses, and also wrong, but resulted in huge unnecessary U.S. defense expenditures. (Read Moynihan's book "Secrecy") Me saying what I have said does not make what I have said true, any more then Tenet saying Saddam had all this stuff makes it true. It has to be confirmed before it is true. It was never confirmed. The U.S. administration did rely on reports and conclusions that were later confirmed false.
Right there in lies your error. Intelligence sources were incorrect about the extent that Saddam had acquired and maintained WMD's. Even members of Congress came to the same conclusions the Bush administration did. To try to blame everything revolving around the Iraq war on Bush is a lie of monstrous proportions. It seems to me and many others here that you are the monster here, pie. You are unable to grasp simple facts that existed at the time actions were decided. Hindsight is 100% and liberals make use of that fact... well, quite liberally!
I'm looking at the reports and data that were available to the Bush administration. The interpretation of those reports was either intentionally fraudulent, unintentionally (subconsciously) biased, and/or grossly incompetent. I'm convinced the latter two explanations apply here. The reports were not confirmed false until later, simply because there was no opportunity to do this until later. The hopelessly biased, nonobjective Bush administration saw to that. Only an idiot, which neither Cheney nor Bush are, or an extremely biased persons with an agenda that included invading IRAQ and finding a way to justify it, would have put any trust in the information available from the CIA. The most reliable information coming out of IRAQ was coming from Hans Blix, and he was ignored when he suggested that the wisest course of action was to continue to monitor Iraq at a cost of 80 million/year. Certainly the CIA analysts knew their analysis was unreliable because they said so. They also knew that Cheney was going to the CIA almost daily to brow beat them into recasting the analyses in a way less obviously unfavorable to his objective. Cheney is a war criminal. Bush may be pardoned as a simpleton who did not know better. "... suspicions are one thing and reality is quite another. U.N. inspectors were asked to search for, report and destroy real weapons. As we found no weapons and no evidence supporting the suspicions, we reported this. But U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed our reports with one of his wittier retorts: 'The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.' " -- Hans Blix On this, Rumsfeld could not have been more obtrusively wrong. Absence of evidence by the competent Blix Team was, indeed, strong evidence of absence, though not proof, of course, because it is impossible to prove a negative. http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/18/opinion/iraq-war-hans-blix
When all you do is find biased opinions from the leftist minion you are going to come away with a picture of enormous inaccuracies. The fact is that Senators and Congressmen with access to the intelligence came to the same conclusions. Unbiased analysis of the intelligence at the time of the start of the war also supports the fact that everyone making the decisions believed the intelligence coming from our sources and several allied countries. Like your IRS misconceptions, you are all wet and just producing contrived analysis that is not objective, pie. You are striking me as a conspiracy theorist when it comes to policy makers you don't like politically. If you are an active instructor in our educational system, you are exactly the type of biased, untruthful person who should NOT be teaching young people. ---- The Senate Report on Iraqi WMD Intelligence (formally, the "Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq") was the report by the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concerning the U.S. intelligence community's assessments of Iraq during the time leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion. The report, which was released on July 9, 2004, identified numerous failures in the intelligence-gathering and -analysis process. The report found that these failures led to the creation of inaccurate materials that misled both government policy makers and the American public. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Report_on_Pre-war_Intelligence_on_Iraq
Are you saying that the government of the United States of God loving America would distort the facts, even lie to get us in a war? This is news to you? 4,486 American men and women died in Iraq, the latest trumped up war. 58,148 American men and women died in Viet Nam. One was trumped up by a republican administration, the other by a democratic one. Republicans got a lot of catching up to do in order to even the score with dems.