[quote=Arraya]It’s pretty obvious they had their eyes on Iraq since the mid 90s. Interestingly, in a frontline episode, discussing the run up to war, they would have went to Iraq first if it was not for Colin Powell arguing it would not look good. Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld were arguing hard for just bypassing Afghanistan and going right to Iraq.[/quote]
This is a little conspiratorial for my blood.
It neglects to mention that didn’t lots and lots of folks in Congress of both parties authorize Iraq? Wasn’t Obama like one of the few dissenters?
Also I believe Hillary and Biden both said at the time that it was “a question of when, not if” we go into Iraq.
Arraya are you saying Hillary and Biden were in on the conspiracy? Or were they like naive little rabbits that were duped by the Darth-vader like machinations of Cheney? I don’t believe that for a minute. I believe both of those two are able to think independently.
I don’t feel the action was sufficiently justified, and I wish we didn’t go. I would love to have all the lives (on both sides) and treasure back.
But I don’t agree with scaredy that there was ZERO justification. We didn’t just wake up one day and decide to do it for ZERO reason. That’s a lot of letters to parents of dead kids you’d be signing up to write, and you would KNOW that you would have to do that. Even if you were the allegedly retarded Bush.
Let me take a stab at a justification (acknowledging right up front that it IS weak, but it is more than zero): I believe that in that moment, at that time, after all the UN resolutions, after all the sanctions, after years of No-fly zones, after the Iran Iraq war, after gassing the Kurds, after Gulf War I, when he annexed Kuwait and massed troops just North of Saudi, after him going to great lengths to try to convince everyone that he had WMD, and THEN after 9/11 (try to remember how it felt when it was fresh), “we” (many of our leaders, not just neocons) just weren’t in a mood to take a chance. We wanted to experiment with pre-emptively “solving” the problem.
I don’t agree with that decision, and I remember emailing folks that I was baffled about it at the time.
But from the “it’s an ill wind that blows no good” department – do you give any credence to the idea that overthrowing Hussein and establishing a democracy in Iraq could have in any way contributed to the so-called Arab Spring? And might that be some small measure of “good” that came out of the war? Beyond that, might things be better for Shia and Kurds in Iraq now? Not saying it’s justification – but maybe it’s *something* to show for $1.5T or whatever it is.
