SubscribeThe White House Iraq Group’s doctrine, in a nutshell, has ample evidence that the Saudis, including the royal family, are up to their eyeballs in financing Wahhabi extremism, and this includes Al Qaeda... Effective prosecution of the War on Terror must include taking a hard line against the Saudis, the neo-con doctrine goes, but no U.S. executive branch has felt it could without jeopardizing the US’s lifeline to a stable national oil supply. The neo-cons believe that sponsoring a client state in oil-rich Iraq will guarantee the U.S. stable oil imports enabling it to deal from strength when confronting Saudi Arabia about terror and the need for continuity of Saudi oil flow to the US at a time of increasing world demand.Daniel Ellsberg on Exiting Iraq
It is one thing to have traveled to the area as a senior government official. It is another to have lived there and worked with the people of the region for long periods of time. People with that kind of experience in the Muslim world are strangely absent from Team Bush. In the game plan for the Arab and Islamic world, most of the government's veteran Middle East experts were largely shut out. The Pentagon civilian bureaucracy of the Bush administration, dominated by an inner circle of think-tankers, lawyers and former Senate staffers, virtually hung out a sign, 'Arabic Speakers Need Not Apply.' They effectively purged the process of Americans who might have inadvertently developed sympathies for the people of the region.Instead of including such veterans in the planning process, the Bush team opted for amateurs...Drinking the Kool-Aid
Those are easy ones. We don't invade Saudi Arabia because it's unstable enough to already show the cracks ...and the war in Iraq, by contrast, is a shining example of a perfectly controlled conflict that hasn't exceeded its initial scope and is totally going according to plan.
Syria's a pretty deadly hotspot, what with its proximity to Israel/Palestine meaning that any attack might blow way out of control ...
Iran is the easiest. Iran's government is by no means simply despotic ... in the late '90's, things were really looking up in Iran; they were opening up economically, and the president, although he wasn't extremely powerful, was clearly a proponent of liberalization.and for all of that his country gets rewarded with the Axis of Evil monicker, and the hardliners in Iran get to say, "see! see where all of this moderation gets us?! The Great Satan still shits in our turbans and makes us think it's hair."
It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong... Saddam was a threat and the American people, and the world is better off because he is no longer in power.Oh, I see. The intelligence that said that Iraq was a threat to us was wrong. It turns out that Saddam Hussein personally was the real threat.
If he admits responsibility, he and his adminstration should resign.
In 1941, Hitler did not pose an immediate, military threat to the existence of the US. Period. As others have posted here, shouldn't that make the American involvement in WW2 immoral and reprehensible?loquax -- Hitler declared war on America first. German U-boats were sinking American merchant vessels within days of the battle of Pearl Harbor.
Yes, but it appears from many comments here that those actions were not required in order for the US to preemptively go to war with Germany. Hussein also had in effect declared war on the US, and his army had been attacking coalition forces for years. Of course there's no direct comparison between the two situations, only the principles involved.not even that. The state of conflict between the Iraqi army and the US was unresolved at the end of Desert Storm. A peace treaty had not been signed and hostilities were continuing. Therefore Hussein did not have to declare war against the US, in effect or otherwise (besides, it was the US who had declared war on him1 after he refused to depart from Kuwait ).
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posted by Rothko at 8:36 AM on December 14, 2005