Teremia, when has Bush *ever* been able to resist sticking 9/11 into every speech he's ever made? Jon Stewart used to do 60-second montages of it. Shopping mall opening? 9/11. Agriculture bill? 9/11. It's been this administration's frickin' mantra.

Now: the official grounds the United States cited in its formal declaration of the resumption of hostilities against Iraq was that it was doing so, expressly, for Iraq's manifold violations of UNSCR 687- the UN's adoption of the ceasefire signed at al-Safwan in March 1991. It has *always* been the official ground. I don't in fact frequent neocon blogs and am unaware of what Jny asserts is a recent surge by conservatives on liberal blogs. I have been very much aware of Safwan, 678, 687, and the non-citation of 1441 since before the invasion began, and I'm frankly rather offended at Jny's implication that this is some sort of post-facto rationalisation on my part, when I know for a fact that I have maintained this position for five years.

It's really completely immaterial whether Saddam had anything to with 9/11 or al-Qaeda: it's beyond rational dispute that Saddam was one of the world's principal sponsors of terrorist groups, whether or not they used the al-Qaeda brandname. The 'War on Terror' (lousy name) is not just about al-Qaeda. None of the subsequent attempted terror attacks on US soil have been by AQ. 9/11 was a wakeup call demonstrating how ruthless and dangerous these groups *all* were, and that to have a major sponsor of these groups also in illegal possession of WMD (as we believed) was intolerable.

While we're discussing the consequences of the Iraq war, it's not inappropriate to bring up that other Leading State Sponsor of terror, which beyond question possessed WMD, including a nuclear program: Libya's Ghaddafi. Who, as a direct result of Saddam's fate, gave it up and turned everything over to the UN and IAEA for verified destruction. All without a shot being fired.

Now we have the new Leading State Sponsor of terror, Iran, who unquestionably has nerve gas, and a nuclear program which nobody believes is civilian...and Barack Obama wants to 'cooperate' with them. Madness!

I am boggled - boggled! - that anyone, left, right, or miscellaneous, would argue that the Bush Admin. didn't want the American people to believe that Iraq had ties to 9/11. Is it supposed to just be a coincidence that we invaded Iraq so soon after the 9/11 attack?

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I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists

Yovargas: (belatedly) Awwwww, thank you!



Now, for your current posting. Of course it wasn't a coincidence. 9/11 was a shocking demonstration of how much damage terrorists (and their masters) could do, and it became starkly apparent that merely 'containing' Saddam was an unacceptably risky course: he had to be removed, lest something like 9/11, or even worse, be perpetrated by his own pet stable of terrorists- without reference to bin-Laden.

By the way, I was just reflecting on the Phonetic Alphabet, as used by the military, airlines etcetera, and I suddenly realized:

Pronouncing GWB as Golf Whiskey Bravo ain't a bad fit.

Can we have another excision of the Iraq side discussion here?

This is patently absurd and ridiculous. Regardless of how much Saddam may have supported terrorism (and it is arguable that it wasn’t that much - payouts to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and harboring Abu Nidal who he later had murdered), the undeniable fact is that Saddam Hussien’s first and foremost concern was always his own self-preservation. As such it is inconceivable that he would have sponsored a 9/11 style attack on American interests since he knew good and damned well that any such attack even remotely connected to him would have resulted in his immediate annihilation. Seriously, if we had had hard and fast evidence that Saddam was behind 9/11 we would have bombed Baghdad off the face of the map on 9/12.

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“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Sorry, sol, your current argument is enormously unconvincing. The Bush Admin clearly wanted the American public to believe we were invading Iraq because of 9/11. The legal reasons may have been otherwise but the reasons he gave to the American people - the excuse he used to justify a war he couldn't otherwise justify - was 9/11 (and WMDs...). If you don't believe that that was enormously deceptive then you aren't nearly as shrewd and objective observer as I believe you to be. All other considerations aside, deceiving the American public to gain their support for a war he wished to wage is unforgivably immoral.

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I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists

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“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Good post, yovargas.

Unconvincing is one word a person can use.

Revisionism is another.

solictr is on one side of a fence, most people here are on the other. He, I believe, sees that fence as a division between "right" and "wrong" as much as a division between "right" and "left". It amounts to this: if you're on the "wrong" side, you're on the "left" side.

I don't see a fence. I see a bog, a quagmire, a swamp of nastiness. That swamp has to be waded through, its depths plumbed. The noisome vapours might gag us, but the work is necessary. To mangle another metaphor, it's a giant excrescence like a boil that must be lanced.

I have some sympathy for those who bought the Bush line. The anger over 9/11 was justified anger and it needed an outlet. A very savvy group of men saw their golden opportunity. They must have done high fives all around the room when the realization hit them: being the cynical opportunists they are, they did not let this chance go by.

I've never "blamed" the US for 9/11. And more to the point I've never blamed Mr. Bush, either. No doubt there were failures of intelligence and action that could have prevented it, but those failures can be spread around pretty liberally. The "blame" comes in the aftermath. Where Cheney and Rumsfeld saw one kind of opportunity, the real opportunities arising from a global wave of sympathy for the US were lost.

Now it's obvious that nearly everything these people did was the wrong thing. Wrong in every sense. But there are millions of Americans who would rather cut their own throats than admit it - they backed the wrong horse and there it sits, foundered and floundering, in the middle of that big swamp of misery. It's expecting a lot of a person to expect them to take their blinders off. The light is so bright it might hurt their eyes.

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Dig deeper.

Precisely.

But we didn't.

You'll certainly not get me to assert that the Bushies made anything other than a complete hash of their PR (not to mention the war itself).

That doesn't alter the fact that we had the legal right to remove Saddam.
As, unfortunately, we do not in the case of Iran (Carter blew that opportunity bigtime). One can only hope that some far shrewder and more subtle President might, FDR-like, maneuver Iran into making a fatal mistake; but Obama isn't that President.

Why do you love war so much? Have you been to one? Was it fun, or what?

What are you going to do if the "Iran problem" is dealt with without bombs or bullets?

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Dig deeper.

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“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Sorry.

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Dig deeper.

Sorry for yelling, but I did ask nicely twice.

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“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

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In gratitude forever … .

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In gratitude forever … .