lvwhitebir said:
If the UN told Iraq to disarm in 1992 and it's taken until 2005 to show that it had been done then something is wrong. What we did is try to wrap up a potentially dangerous situation, where the '90s were all about appeasing Saddam (who incidentally barred the inspectors from doing their job as much as he could) and using a sit-and-wait policy.
The fact that something was wrong with weapons inspections was not the issue; the issue was whether Saddam Hussein's regime has WMD. The previous UN inspectors believed they had destroyed Hussein's WMD program.
Before our recent invasion and occuation, the United Nations was inspecting his program, had not found evidence of a WMD program, and requested more time to complete their investigation. This time was denied them, and the invasion was launched. If Hussein had then proceeded to throw out the inspectors, or continued to prevaricate, then the UN could have acted; if the UN had continued to fail to act, then the US would been justified to act unilaterally. None of these actions were allowed to take place.
As has been demonstrated previously, neoconservatives (many of whom, such as Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld) have been calling for an invasion of Iraq during Bush 1, Clinton, and GW's administrations. The WMD "threat" was merely the pretext for this. Even American intelligence agencies could not agree on the nature of Iraq's intelligence threat; evidence has shown that the Administration's own intelligence agencies did not believe that a threat clearly existed, but that pieces of evidence were "cherry-picked" only to support the case for war.
To answer the questions about website bias earlier, I would have hoped that our discussion opponents would have studied logic and debate, and realized the problems with the ad hominem fallacy. *Every* source of information is biased. We, as intelligent people, can look through that bias and use the facts within to support or refute arguments; if, however, we simply refuse to debate issues because a source is biased, then we are committing the worst kind of intellectual cop-out.
Flatlander's point about the Iraq invasion being a
fait accompli is also a cop-out; we have a duty to continue to point out where the Bush Administration lied and distorted the truth (in the worst case) or failed (in the best case) if we as a people are to learn and improve. If we had not gone back to study the mistakes and lies of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, we would never have learned of the lies, manipulations, and horrors of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Watergate.
Why was it "okay" to invade Afghanistan and not Iraq? First, many believe that it *wasn't* okay, for a number of reasons... including that we never declared war on Afghanistan. Those arguments aside, the reasons should be obvious... the Taleban were harboring a group of terrorists that had committed acts of murder and war on American soil, had been given an opportunity to turn them over to justice, and had refused to do so. The United States and its NATO allies felt they had a justification to act.
Iraq had not attacked the United States; had not been proven to have WMDs; inspections were underway again; the sanctions regime punishing Iraq for its previous failure to comply with inspections was, all of its brutal human rights violations aside, depriving Iraq of its ability to develop WMD; the United States did not declare war on Iraq; there was no clear causus belli.
Loki, your point about "tough leadership" is interesting and well-taken, but when tough leaders make catastrophic mistakes, they need to be held accountable for them. Clearly enough Americans disagreed with me to re-elect the guy, but Bush's decisions about Iraq killed over a thousand Americans, tens of thousands of Iraqis, cost us billions and billions of dollars we can't afford, and led to political and military instability that we'll pay for for generations.
What's worse, I think there's plenty of evidence that Bush's "tough leadership" didn't lead to just a bad mistake, but was actually part of a deliberate, misleading campaign that led to a massive, horrendous mistake. That's not just "tough leadership", in my estimation.
