Posted 22 November 2008 - 06:32 PM
Gravity,
I admire your support for Bush's prosecution of the war in Iraq. I never protested it or endorsed it. I also understand that there are many very intelligent people who see it differently than other intelligent people. Addressing a few of your points:
I think that the major criticism leveled at the media is that they were not more critical of the claims being made with little supporting evidence. I didn't listen to news reports of Colin Powell's speech to the UN, I listened to the speech itself. He himself has apologized for the contents. Bush has admitted that although he thought there were WMDs in Iraq, there weren't.
Much of that information came from political opponents who wanted to destabilize the Iraq government, but did not have political support within Iraq (even after the invasion). The administration has admitted as much.
The Iraq Survey Group noted that while Saddam had the ambition to rebuild his defense, including rebuilding WMD stockpiles, but that he had concluded that he could only do so after sanctions were lifted and his economy stabilized. So he was a long way from being a threat. And the Iraq Survey Group was no leftist or UN-sanctioned group. They were 1,400 hand-picked experts from the Pentagon and the CIA. It is their conclusion and not the media's that I rely upon for my conclusions. There were two separate leaders of the Iraq Survey Group, both reached the same conclusions. They spent approx. 1 billion dollars on scouring Iraq for evidence. That's a billion of US tax money.
Now why was Iraq saber-rattling if they didn't have any goods? Well, Saddam may have been nuts, he may simply seen this as the best way to respond to threats of any kind. But the ISG concluded that his main motivation was Iran, a nation he went to war with for many years and whom he feared greatly. As many have pointed out, having Iran and Iraq at odds kept both nations distracted from their other pre-occupations - wanting to blow Israel to bits and trying to damage US interests.
These hindsight assessments are just that. None of them are trying to say Saddam was a warm and fuzzy guy, or that you are in any way morally wrong to believe the invasion was the best policy, despite all else. But while the Bush administration was making its case for war, many other parties were stating other opinions. France, Germany, Canada, etc., all stated that they didn't see the dots connecting, that the case for war was riddled with assumptions that didn't make sense to them. They turned out to be right about those assumptions. Saddam, had (under great pressure), before the invasion, let inspectors in, let them into his personal "palaces" and had cooperated with the destruction of his missiles that could be used for long-range attacks. He had turned over all his documents (mess that they were) on his weapons programs. The Bush and Blair administration dismissed these out of hand, although the documents turned out to be complete. The head of the UN Atomic Energy Agency (I think) declared before the war that inspections would be difficult and expensive - $80 million a year, but the cost of war would be about $80 billion. Again, maybe the result was the best, the cost worth it, but this is rather different than the Bush administration's line that the war would pay for itself with oil revenues from Iraq.
What did these errors in judgement mean strategically?
We went in with too few troops to keep peace and secure locations. Because we believed the "average Iraqi" posed no threat to our soldiers, and because we were so focused on finding weapons that didn't exist, we famously bypassed a weapons storage bunker that was filled with conventional but very powerful explosives. This was soon raided and the results were seen in the use of roadside bombs that killed hundreds of Americans. Similar weapons stockpiles were left unguareded because we misjudged the threat.
We convinced ourselves that if Saddam fell from power the nation would greet us as liberators like Americans entering Paris during WWII. Sure, "millions" of Iraqi's celebrated the fall of Saddam, but our failure to anticipate the animosity between ethnic and sectarian groups costs tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and quite a few US soldier's lives. Iraq was a nation whose borders has been drawn rather randomly by Brits. There had been political struggles between Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites for a very long time - according to one article I read, the 600s. But we didn't see it coming. And we had no plan for it. The result was terrible bloodshed which continues to this day. So, unlike the fall of Germany, or the US transitional occupation of Japan, we found our soldiers the targets of killers, and a network of terrorists sprang up that didn't exist before. To me, we did bring the war to them, but we also brought the targets to them. Now, soldiers are paid to put their life on the line. I have great respect for that. But the killing of Americans, whether in Iraq or in the US, is tragic to me.
Further, because we believed that there were "terrorists" in Iraq when we got there, we allowed for reprehensible behavior to take place in Iraqi prisons. I've heard arguments that this was just a few bad apples, but I also heard Bush admin officials defending various interrogation methods (or simply refusing to discuss certain methods), and others who have made a much stronger case to my mind that torture was tacitly and in some cases explicitly encouraged and endorsed by the administration. Did this help us find WMDs? Did it help us destroy Al-Qaeda? Do I feel safer because people representing my country treated Iraqi prisoners like dogs? No. Others may disagree. I accept that there is an argument to be made on that end. But to me, and many others, the revelations from Abu Ghraib were a great stain on the US.
You mention Saddam's support for Palestinian terrorists. He was a very bad man. Agreed. But the Saudi Royal family was sending money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. It was Saudi money (privately held) that has funded terrorist training camps in more secular nations with majority Islamic populations. And Saudi Arabia is one of the most (if not the most) religiously conservative nations on the planet. They have a terrible human rights record. We don't go after them. In fact, we've defended their borders. None of this is to say Saddam wasn't very, very evil. Or that we shouldn't be allied with the Saudis. It is just to say that lots of wealthy Arabs have tries to support the Palestinians in some way over the years. I wish they wouldn't. But I'm not getting on a plane to go plead my case with them either. But of all the black marks on Saddam, that is the one that I just can't see as being worthy of invasion without similarly taking on the entire Middle East.
In conclusion, to me the question of whether Saddam was evil is separate to how we conducted ourselves in the prosecution of his removal. Saddam being worthy of being deposed does not equate with our behavior being beyond criticism. I think this adventure has revealed an administration that did not understand almost anything about the battle it was undertaking. The result cost lives and tarnished our honor around the globe. I personally don't ever want to hear from Bush or Blair again. To me, they blew it. I respect that you see it differently, and for the sake of history, I hope that someday facts come to light that change the world's perception on this. I don't see that happening, but I try to keep an open mind.
Regardless, I was shocked, and intrigued, to see this all reflected in the themes of QoS. I loved that aspect of the movie. Can't wait to see it again.
Keep dancing...
). Not sure what the issue here is, expect that modern politics have changed quite a bit in the states post-Watergate. Blame Nixon. 
