An entire war based on one man's lie?

[mar1t1me]

http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/02/20/rumsfeld.interview/index.html?hpt=C1

Asked if the United States would not have invaded if the administration hadn't believed Iraq had the weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld said: "I think that's probably right."

All those trillions spent. Billions more unaccounted for. Thousands of US lives lost. Families destroyed by prolonged deployments. All apparently for a lie.

I can tell you from my close work with service personnel, this is the other shoe they were waiting for to drop....

Jesus I hate politicians.

[Eric]

Now peddling a book, four years after being replaced by Robert Gates as defense secretary following heavy Republican losses in the 2006 mid-term elections, Rumsfeld maintained the swagger and bravado that were his hallmarks when dealing with the media as a Cabinet member.

He said said the Obama administration was "wrong in attacking the Bush administration's structures that have kept this country safe for almost a decade now," including the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

I'm sorry, but if you are going to announce his book promotion in a negative tone, maybe you shouldn't make 3rd grade grammatical errors a sentence latter???



Jackass.

[RainierHooker]

Get off your high-horse. Its easy to arm-chair quarterback from behind your keyboard in your nice comfy home. This wasn't one mans lie. The "WMD" situatio came from an entire inteligence community breakdown. The CIA, the NSA, and various Non-US organizations, to include the UN.

The simple fact is that Sadam Hussien's government, even if it didn't have WMD's was still doing shit that they weren't supposed to militarily, ethicly, and socially. Remember the missles that they launched into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia just before the ground-invasion? You know, the one's that they wren't supposed to have, and which they denied existence of to the UN.

Nothing can take back the fact that we did invade. All we can do is ensure an ethical means of completing what we have started. That is why I'm in SW Asia now. Have you ever been to the middle east and seen what his and similar government have done to people? Have you ever seen empty swimming pools stained by the blood of executed dissitants killed for sport by corrupt leaders? If not, STFU.

[E30Kaiser]

Not to mention we still don't know WTF happened to those WMDs, the WMDs that we know they had at one time because we gave them to Iraq during the Iraq-Iran War.

[mar1t1me]

So they're just scapegoating this one guy, now? Curveball? I feel much better. All that money spent on multiple layers of intelligence are apparently unnecessary and redundant if one guy's lies are enough.

What was it he said?

Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right," al-Janabi said in his exclusive interview with The Guardian newspaper. "They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy."


I understand you feel Saddam was a bad guy, Ranier, but if it takes trillions of dollars to get rid of one guy, we are well and truly fucked. And no, I have not physically been to a bloody swimming pool. Most of my work happens on the water. But there are plenty of bad guys to go around. It CAN'T cost a trillion each to deal with them every time they get a hard on to rattle their sabers in our direction or decide to whack a few thousand of their own citizens. We are far too overextended to play WorldCop any more.

Eric, are you complaining about "said said"? I think it's funny you call someone a jackass for "3rd grade grammatical errors" and then incorrectly use the word "latter" instead of later. Irony, writ large.

[e30e]

What Rumsfeld is stating, has been said for almost 8 years now. Why is it coming from his mouth any different? Because he spewed the shit, this was Dick Chaney's war and everyone knows this.

[StereoInstaller1]

Actually, the war is my fault. They asked me if I thought they had WMDs, I thought they meant "washing machine detergents" so I said yes, next thing I know America is at war again!

[Bene]

Get off your high-horse. Its easy to arm-chair quarterback from behind your keyboard in your nice comfy home. This wasn't one mans lie. The "WMD" situatio came from an entire inteligence community breakdown. The CIA, the NSA, and various Non-US organizations, to include the UN.

The simple fact is that Sadam Hussien's government, even if it didn't have WMD's was still doing shit that they weren't supposed to militarily, ethicly, and socially. Remember the missles that they launched into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia just before the ground-invasion? You know, the one's that they wren't supposed to have, and which they denied existence of to the UN.

Nothing can take back the fact that we did invade. All we can do is ensure an ethical means of completing what we have started. That is why I'm in SW Asia now. Have you ever been to the middle east and seen what his and similar government have done to people? Have you ever seen empty swimming pools stained by the blood of executed dissitants killed for sport by corrupt leaders? If not, STFU.

we actually know North Korea has the bomb, and KJI is just as bad, if not worse than Sadam, but he doesn't really have any resources that we want, so we're leaving him alone because....?

[Eric]

Eric, are you complaining about "said said"? I think it's funny you call someone a jackass for "3rd grade grammatical errors" and then incorrectly use the word "latter" instead of later. Irony, writ large.

HAHA, damn! I guess I shouldn't work for CNN.com then:drink:

[mrsleeve]

we actually know North Korea has the bomb, and KJI is just as bad, if not worse than Sadam, but he doesn't really have any resources that we want, so we're leaving him alone because....?

Study up on the Korean Conflict, when you see why the DMZ is still at the 38th. Then think about who is holding a sizable portion of our govt debts.

The answers you seek should be glaringly obvious.

Stop with the securing oil argument, many of the current production contracts for Iraqi oil have gone to the Russians anyway.

[87e30]

we actually know North Korea has the bomb, and KJI is just as bad, if not worse than Sadam, but he doesn't really have any resources that we want, so we're leaving him alone because....?

Of all the arguments to make this has to be one of the least intelligent.

[kishg]

I don't buy that the US went to war over just one guy's false intel. the fact is dubya was itching to invade iraq even before 9/11. he wanted to finally make his poppa proud. the WMD intel was just to convince/force congress and the rest of the allies to go along with the plan. there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the intelligence agencies were ordered to find evidence or make it up.

[mar1t1me]

Stop with the securing oil argument, many of the current production contracts for Iraqi oil have gone to the Russians anyway.

I understand that this is true as of 2009 when the Russian company Lukoil outbid a BP-led consortium for the rights to develop one of Iraq's largest fields. But back when it was all cranking up, some pretty high-up people were saying quite the opposite.

The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir, "Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." He elaborated in an interview with The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first Gulf War."

Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. "We had virtually no economic options with Iraq," he explained, "because the country floats on a sea of oil."

Let's go back a few years to the 1990's, when private citizen Dick Cheney was running Halliburton, the big energy supplier. That's when he told the oil industry that, "By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."

Fast forward to Cheney's first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates were handed backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEO's and lobbyists were trooping in and out for meetings with their old pal, now Vice President Cheney. The meetings were secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq -- and a list of companies who wanted access to them.


So while the Iraq War might not have been "just" about the oil, it sure looks like it was certainly on the minds of the very architects of that war. And it can't be denied that the Iraq war has made associates of Dick Cheney very much richer.

[87e30]

It seems logical to me that oil was on the back of people's minds.


I have no problem with this.

[joshh]

Removing Sadam+1

Attacking a Sovereign nation based on bad intel-1.