If Bush Was A Liar On Iraq Then So Were the Libs

[Cyrus]

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I posted this article in another thread and Ill post it again. Article by Norman Padhoretz

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Please! The last thing I needed this morning was to be hit with a Podhoretz thumb-sucker. The man was a neo-con before anyone else was a neo-con.

Ex-leftists become right-wingers with such zeal, it is positively scary! I call it the Janissar Syndrome.

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There is no evidence whatsoever that this war was started because of Israel.

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I did not claim it was started by Israel. I sumbitted that the country that benefited the most, by far, from the invasion of Iraq, was Israel.

And I noted that the current administration, since taking over in 2000, has been obsessed with Iraq and Saddam Hussein! Even before 9/11. When Clinton's outgoing guys from intelligence and law enforcement were briefing the incoming Republican appointees about bin Laden, the Muslims, al Qaeda, etc, the Bushites' eyes were glazing over with indifference! There are records that have the guys flat out disputing and ridiculing the notion that those rag-tag camel jockeys were a serious threat, or a threat at all, give or take a couple of hits at an embassy abroad or on a military ship, is all. Everything was Saddam, Saddam, Saddam, with the new crowd.

It is the same administration that has been hailed by the Israeli leadership as "the best friends" that Jerusalem could possibly have in Washington.

...You guys who support the war and spend hours here trying to justify it, by all sorts of (desperate) reasoning, I'm sure that when alone and make an honest tally, and you assess the situation for yourselves, you can see all too clearly that this has been one goddamn royal snafu. It did not help the fight against terrorism. It helped other things -- but certainly not the war on terror.

[Cyrus]

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Did you know [Saddam hussein] paid Palestinian suicide bombers' families $25,000 for their little martyrs to blow themselves up?

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You are distorting what happened.

It's one thing to promote suicide bombing by promising to whomever will blow himself up that his family will be compensated for --- and quite another thing to simply take care of a family after the event, as a myriad of charities throughout the Arab world, secular and religious did, and as they did with millions of destitute people. By your logic, the charities that take care of prisoners' destitute families in the US, are promoting crime.

The truth is that Saddm Hussein's Iraq was never part of an anti-American terrorist act, that anti-American terrorists were deported out of the country (when not "eliminated"), that islamic fundamentalists were routinely jailed, tortured and killed by the Iraqi authorities and that the door was slammed on every approach that al Qaeda made to the regime. America's war on terror has been irrelevant to the war in Iraq.

But, yes, Israel feared Iraq, most definitely. Not that Iraq posed a serious threat to Israel (not being even a frontier state) but it certainly could become one.

Where do you think those Weapons of Mass Destruction, that some Arab nations tried to acquire, were to be used? To negotiate better prices for crude oil? To fight against each other? To threaten Peru?

[BluffTHIS!]

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It's one thing to promote suicide bombing by promising to whomever will blow himself up that his family will be compensated for --- and quite another thing to simply take care of a family after the event

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GET A FRIGGIN GRIP! They are the SAME thing once potential bombers know that will happen.

[Cyrus]

It is astonishing how, after all this time, and after so much "experience" with suicide bombers and religious fundamnentalists, there is so much misunderstanding and ignorance about their motives, their way of thinking and how to deal with 'em, in general.

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It's one thing to promote suicide bombing by promising to whomever will blow himself up that his family will be compensated for --- and quite another thing to simply take care of a family after the event

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They are the SAME thing once potential bombers know that will happen.

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In other words, the crucial question for a potential suicidal guy, someone who is not so sure if he wants to blow himself up, is what will happen to his family afterwards?

And that fellow knows that the Red Cross or the Red Crescent or the U.N., that someone eventually WILL take care of his family, then this makes him pull the trigger ??

Alright. Then I suppose the thing to do is to forbid anyone from helping the families of suicide bombers!

Or, even better, to punish all the surviving family! How about that?

[elscorcho768]

Did you actually read the Padhoretz article? Forget for a second your bias against neo-cons and just read the article. It basically says that a multitude of intelligence organizations supported the belief that Iraq possessed WMDs. Just read it and address the points brought up in the article and not the fact that it was written by a neo-con (which in my mind isnt a bad thing)

Also, when you bring up the pro-Israel faction in the administration and the connection to the Iraq war, there is no other way to take it except that you believe that the admin. acts on foreign policy based on what is good for Israel and not the US, which is complete insanity. I also think that you come down on the Bush admin. for being too allied with Israel (which in my opinion is a great thing) but fail to acknowledge the extremely close relationship the US has had with Israel through many other administrations, Democrat and Republican. Clinton has repeatedly called Israel "America's best ally"

[Felix_Nietsche]

Also, let's not forget Bush's duplicity in keeping on a member of his staff who outed a covert CIA agent.
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*You mean a "covert" agent that even the press knew she was a CIA agent (NBC's senior diplomatic correspondent Andrea Mitchell, who works for Tim Russert, Oct 3, 2003).
*You mean a "covert" agent who sends her hubby to Niger for a mission his has no qualifications for.
*You mean a "covert" CIA agent who values her covert status so much that they don't require her hubby to sign a confidentially agreement for this "secret" mission.
*You mean a "covert" CIA agent who hubby values her covert status so much that they he writes an Op-Ed for millions of Americans to draw attention to his "secret" mission to Niger.
*You mean a "covert" CIA agent that Patrick Fitzgerald could not even find enough evidence to indict anyone for outing her.

LOL. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]


"Do we have any idea how widely known it was in Washington that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?" she was asked by host Alan Murray in an Oct. 3, 2003 interview on CNBC's "Captial Report."

Mitchell replied: "It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger. So a number of us began to pick up on that."

[BluffTHIS!]

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Alright. Then I suppose the thing to do is to forbid anyone from helping the families of suicide bombers!

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What would be wrong with that as a deterrent to those who would kill civilians?

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Or, even better, to punish all the surviving family! How about that?

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Israel uses bulldozers to do that.

[Autocratic]

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Alright. Then I suppose the thing to do is to forbid anyone from helping the families of suicide bombers!

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What would be wrong with that as a deterrent to those who would kill civilians?


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As was said, it won't work.

[Felix_Nietsche]

We can't find Jimmy Hoffa so therefore he never existed. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Cyrus]

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What would be wrong with that [i.e. forbidding anyone from helping the families of suicide bombers] as a deterrent to those who would kill civilians?

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Only the Nazis and the Soviets legislated collective punishment. They were hauling in jail the families of anyone who was deemed a threat to the regime.

Imposing collective punishment on people who have nothing to do with a crime (and everyone should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, if we truly believe that our society is better) takes us to an extremely dangerous path.

What next? Rounding up and shooting hostages?

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Israel uses bulldozers to do that [i.e. punish all the surviving family].

[/ QUOTE ]Then Israel is wrong.

Both morally (see above), where Israel imitates the Jews' worst enemies ever in yet one more tactic, and strategically, in that such acts foment even more resentment among the civilians and result in more recruitments by the terrorists.

Of course, that would assume that Israel does not want terrorism to continue, does not want to see the ranks of extremists swelling, and would rather negotiate with a moderate Palestinian leadership the prospects of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. Hmmm...