Are you talking about the CIA extradition program or Saddam.

We have abused thousnad of peoples rights during this process.

We are no better

The weapons his father sold him were used already.

When you create a special arm to create and pump the hype you are the one guilty.

They had a special office putting together intelligence.
The same people who wanted change in Iraq forever.
So what do you think the reuslt of their gathering would be.

The tactical problem with going into Iraq was that we were not done in Afghanastan. Saddam wasnt going anywhere.

And on top of that we rushed to war.

We kicked the inspectors out. There was no need to rush.
Bush sped up his attqack because people were starting to question the evidence.

That was the reason we rushed. It did not have to happen.

We were lied to and rushed to war when the evididence started falling apart. Colins powell at the UN was a disater.

If it was agreed upon that the evidence was correct why did the UN not go in with us. Its simple. They were lying.

Remeber Coalition of the Willing. Please.

My previous post is addressed to Deb. So are all posts which make any reference to stories about people being eaten by lions or references to “Chief Wiggles.” Cal, I think that you thought that one of my posts to Deb was addressed to you. My fault.

Compared to the 300,000 to 500,000 that Saddam killed during his regime?

“We could have threatened to reduce our oil imports from them unless Saddam changed his ways.”

Yes I’m sure this would make a big difference since you had France, Russia and China being bribed with kickbacks and oil to vote against anything that the US put forth in the UN. They were also actively trying to lift the sanctions against Saddam. At which point we wouldn’t have had any weapons inspectors inside Iraq. During the time that we did have weapons inspectors, Saddam played games with them constantly. Considering that a ‘year’ passed by while trying to get the UN to enforce it’s resolutions (with a promised vote of NO by France and Russia) we still don’t know what type of weapons Saddam had.

“We could have demanded that human rights inspectors be given access. ”

Certainly, especially since they did such a bang-up job of protecting the 300,000 bodies in the many mass graves!

“We could have sent food and medicine to help prevent unnecessary deaths. We could have raised it as an issue at all, but we didn’t.”

That is exactly what the oil-for-food program was about…. It wasn’t working very well was it? How much longer should that have gone on??? Since Saddam was getting his way with France, Russia and China’s support, paid with the money from this very program…. this should tell you that the most important thing on Saddam’s mind was to be able to reconstitute his weapons program… that is why he was paying so much in bribes for votes in the UN to have the sanctions lifted!!!

“Get real? Stop acting like people aren’t getting tortured and killed right now, and then tell me to get real. And especially stop talking about people getting fed to tigers. ”

I couldn’t remember if it was lions or tigers, apparently it was lions….

“We also went over to what was Kusai’s Palace where he kept his lions. On the grounds of the palace there is a cage, back where the large Jacuzzi is, where there is a lion, two lionesses, and their 6 cubs. Knowing that the adult lions had been fed humans in the past, we decided not to get too close to them, opting to play with the cubs instead, who licked our fingers through the chain link fence. ”
source: http://chiefwiggles.blogspot.com/

We tried that for years. Until the Oil-for-Food program that was intended to make the lives of ordinary Iraqis better… and if you’ve been reading the news lately, you know how that turned out.

“We could have demanded that human rights inspectors be given access. We could have sent food and medicine to help prevent unnecessary deaths. We could have raised it as an issue at all, but we didn’t.”

Have you been paying attention to the Oil-for-Food scandal at all? Especially today’s revelations? Billions in kickbacks to thousands of companies all over the world (even here in the US). All the money that was supposed to go for that food and medecine instead went for kickbacks and massive palaces.

Do you really think that Saddam would have changed his ways because of a Stern Talking To, when it’s very clear he had the UN in his back pocket?

I don’t like the fact that we went to war. But I’m finished with the could’ves and should’ves. At this point we must give the Iraqis a chance at a better life that they would not have had under Saddam.

Who’s “we?” You and George Galloway? You and Jacques Chirac?

“Saddam changed his ways?” Who needs to get real here?

Quotation marks around words I never wrote.

Thjis conversation is officially at an and. Slime away, bro. I’ve tuned you out.

I don’t expect you to accept this answer, but it is nonetheless an honest one. You ask why war is a possible path to social change, and I’ll tell you why, in some situations, I think it is — though it always is a tragedy.

If you look at it historically, going to war seems like going down a rat hole. You go in one place, and no matter what you intend, you always come out somewhere else.

A quibble with the Mother Country over a petty tax of three pence a pound on tea becomes the birth of a nation. A boundary dispute with Mexico over a few square miles of Texas scrub becomes a land-grab of a third of a continent and keeps the valuable port of San Francisco from defaulting to British hands. A dispute with Germany over unrestricted submarine warfare and spies in Mexico becomes “making the world safe for democracy.”

But in each case, the goals got bigger, and broader. Sometimes it was military necessity that forced the American leaders to take the higher ground — Lincoln and Wilson. Nonetheless, once they were driven up to it, they made a stand for it, imperfectly.

It’s also true that the shock of a war can unleash pent up forces in a society. As it has in Iraq, and, in ripples, across the Islamic world. Some of them very destructive, but some of them potentially great.

To shift metaphors, going to war is like the break shot that opens a pool game. You can;t entirely predict the outcome, but some vectors are predictable.

This also, incidentally, is one reason I care very little why George W. Bush went to war. I am sure his mix of motives was different than mine, and included some unsavory elements. But once the battles begin, it’s out of his hands, too. He’s as much forced by circumstances as any of the rest of us. And if it drives him out of selfish isolationism and towards nation-building and democracy promotion, I say great!

What seems, after the fact, to be the great justification for a war turns out to be something that did not figure among the stated reasons for starting it. Study World War II today and you’ll get a big unit on the Holocaust. How odd, then, to discover it played no part in the justification for the war at the time. Lincoln freed the slaves. But the American Civil War began as an constitutional chess match and an attempt to enforce U.S. authority in certain forts and arsenals, and to collect the tariff in Southern ports. Lincoln publicly disavowed any intention to free a single slave.

Now of course, all these ultimate outcomes were in the minds of somebody somewhere at the time the wars began. There are some crafty pool players out there. Many abolitionists, even among the pacifist Quakers, let Lincoln go on with his rhetoric about not wanting to free blacks and intending to protect slavery where it existed. They understood — and I have read their letters — that once the tug of war began, the only way out for the administration was to end slavery and subvert the South by stealing its labor force.

Certainly, too, the more radical American revolutionaries were angling for independence from the first bullet. But to draw the bulk of the country they needed to hold John Dickinson and the other moderates on the platform by making a general appeal to the rights of British citizens (as most Americans still felt themselves to be).

It’s an awful risk, and a terrible price to pay, whether it turns out well or not. It ought to be a tool of last resort, a crappy choice among crappier alternatives. You can argue whether the U.N. options had been exhausted with reference to Iraq in 2003 (though, for me, that was decided when the French rejected an American compromise proposal before Saddam did, and has been bolstered by subsequent oil-for-food revelations).

You may call that a hideous sort of optimism. For me, I’ll agree with Churchill; yes, I am an optimist, ” it does not seem to be much use being anything else.”

Oh, you mean what exactly? That we should have just ‘voiced’ that we cared? Just, told them that we were behind them? I don’t know if you are familiar with the ‘battered wife’ syndrome, but when someone is constantly beaten down, held back from making outside contacts, kept from getting any ’schooling or job training, and put in fear of their lives everyday…. there comes a point where they completely lose their hope and along with it, their will. It takes some time and some counciling for them to understand that they are worthwhile, that they can make it on their own, that they do have some personal power to make their own decisions, etc.

“Why are you patient now but okay with the fact that war was the first step in our “human rightsâ€Â? campaign in Iraq, even before we declared human rights as our objective? This war has killed 100,000 Iraqis in the meantime, so why is now the time for patience.”

Please, if you want to be taken even halfway seriously you have to quit pulling ridiculous numbers out of your ass…. 100,000??? Yeah, right… the whole reason that we have ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq is so that we don’t have ‘mass civilian causualties’ that bombing from the air would bring. Just to let you in on a little secret, when a study says that there have been between 3,000 and 100,000 deaths…. it isn’t worth using it to wipe your rearend with….

With that said…. with Saddam and his demented sons gone, people won’t be tortured and killed, won’t be fed to lions, tigers or the plastic shredder. Nobody’s tongue will be cut out…. fingers won’t be cut off, and there won’t be entire villages killed. There won’t be the government sanctioned rape rooms, children will not be arrested and jailed, tortured or killed to intimidate the parents. With these things out of the way, it is a little easier to be patient.

“Given how extreme war is as a solution, how quickly we decided to use war, and how extreme the consequences have been, I think that I have the right to demand peace, human rights and democracy pretty damn quickly. ”

You have the right to demand anything that you want. But you, as an adult, also have the responsibility to society to recognize this isn’t the world that you live in. You have to play the cards that you are dealt, even when it isn’t the best hand.

Just out of curiosity, how do you ‘demand peace’?

But, you aren’t facing the fact that they are getting democracy, and it has been pretty darn quick…. we didn’t write their constitution, we don’t get to vote on it, and we don’t live under it, they do! They have to try things out and make amendments to change what doesn’t work…. just as we had to.

Sure, but then what’s the point of our invasion? If you’re willing to have such patience, then why couldn’t we just have supported the Iraqi people from the outside and been patient while they improved their rights themselves? Why are you patient now but okay with the fact that war was the first step in our “human rights” campaign in Iraq, even before we declared human rights as our objective? This war has killed 100,000 Iraqis in the meantime, so why is now the time for patience. Given how extreme war is as a solution, how quickly we decided to use war, and how extreme the consequences have been, I think that I have the right to demand peace, human rights and democracy pretty damn quickly.

The decision was made in 2003, not 2005, with the information that we had then, not what we have now that we have gone in and looked for ourselves. We wouldn’t have this information if we hadn’t gone into Iraq. Saddam would still be playing games with the inspectors….

“However, does this “Monday Morningâ€Â? attitude mean the Administration didn’t ignore evidence that suggested Saddam didn’t have any weapons systems? And furthermore, who’s held accountable for the mistakes and the possibly purposeful oversights? Seemingly nobody.”

Exactly what evidence are you talking about? What evidence did they ‘ignore’? How do you know that it was ignored? How do you know that it wasn’t weighed against what their other intelligence reports said, and they placed a less weight on it than you would have? Who made the mistakes? Would that be every intelligence officer that wrote a report that turned out to not be true? Every superior officer that combined these many different reports and then notified someone higher up of the threat? How about the person that brought it to the President’s attention? The Senate for voting for it? The President for believing the intelligence that was presented to him, or for possibly taking the threats a little more seriously because of the 3000 people that died on 9/11? Exactly where does the blame lay?

“This hypocrisy by Clinton doesn’t mean that Bush is any more right. It isn’t as if now that we know that Clinton was hypocritical that we should go with the worse of two evils- Bush. This article just inadvertantly shows that the anti-war left was correct- that a pre-emptive, “shoot firstâ€Â? mentality is incredibly reckless. ”

Would you still feel this way if it was the reverse? If Bush had decided that we wouldn’t do a pre-emptive move and Saddam really did have WMD’s and used them in our cities???? Or would you have been screaming about the ‘incompetence’ of this Administration?

I think that we both know the answer to that question.

As opposed to the rape rooms? Torture chambers? Watching your child be killed in front of you?

This is Iraq’s constitutiion, it is the one that they created for themselves, it is the one that they voted for. It isn’t supposed to be our constitution, we don’t get to vote on it. As long as there is a way to amend it, and there are elections for the people that run the country, it can always change. Ours did. I really don’t understand how you can expect that they would go from what they had to our constitution overnight? It took us 225 years to get where we are now.