Pardon my Freedom:
FoxNews has obtained a videotape of just a few of the torture and mutilation methods gleefully employed by Saddam's regime. Back beatings; shoulder whippings; fingers, legs, heads being chopped off by machete by the Saddam Feyedeen; men bound and then dropped from sixth story rooftops for their crimes of disobeying an order...all done publically -- in front of civilian men, women and children -- in order to instill the fear in them of daring to speak freely against their ruler and his psychotic (now ground temperature) sons.
As if we didn't know it already: the real weapon of mass destruction in Iraq was/is Saddam.
Tell me again, U.N./E.U./D.N.C.(and anyone else who hates Bush more than they love Liberty), why you think it was a good idea not to put an end to that. I fuckin' dare ya.
It's always fun to see the trembling piousness of the recently converted.
The fact is we've always known Saddam was and is a brutal thug who engaged in murder, torture, and all manner of unspeakable atrocities. We knew it in 1983 when Ronald Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld to laugh it up with the despot and offer him more weapons, equipment, and intelligence on his enemies. To pretend otherwise is foolish or an attempt to justify a lie.
There are bad people in this world. They murder and torture and loot their own people. Sometimes--not always--the US even supports these despots or turns a blind eye toward their transgressions.
The fact is your President knew he could not muster enough political support for his invasion of Iraq on the pretext that Saddam was a bad man--so he lied. And American servicemen lost their lives or were crippled on the basis of a lie.
Posted by: JadeGold at October 30, 2003 05:37 PMJadeGold, thanks for chiming in!
re: your middle two paragraphs:
Of course we've known this all along. My point of titling the post "WMD Found" was more to say that Saddam himself was a Weapon of Mass Destruction. That twist occurred to me last night, and so the "found" refers more to my own "revelation" -- as it were -- than to any revelation about torture, mutilation, rape rooms, mass graves, etc.
Should a wrong policy carried out by an Administration 20 years ago be perpetuated, well... just because?
I always wonder why anyone would answer the question "Why shouldn't we get rid of Saddam?" with "Because we propped him up." It's a silly answer that doesn't address any real-world present-day concerns.
I know that's not the specific point you were making, but by mentioning Reagan and the Iran-Iraq War, I have to wonder if that line of reasoning (a partisan anti-Republican reactionism) is what brought them to mind.
(I, btw, am not a Republican and by no means support Bush down the line. I call myself a Social-Federalist [just to confuse people].)
As for your final paragraph:
There were WMD in IRaq in 1998, when the inspectors left. Saddam, last December, provided no documentation that any WMD had been destroyed since the last inspector-witnessed destruction. The logical conclusion was that Saddam had WMD. They're either hidden in Iraq, or possibly in Syria or elsewhere.
But let's assume that all of Saddam's WMD were, in fact, destroyed by the time the inspectors left. That would seem to be unlikely (due to Saddam's track record), and what evidence is there to prove it? Blix's inspection showed several instances of non-declared weaponry and hardware and missles, etc.
If there were no WMD in Iraq after 1998 then that would be, I think (logically, I think), a counter-intuitive result. So, if Bush was wrong to conclude that Saddam still had WMD then that would be an understandable mis-assumption. So instead of "Bush lied, people died," I'd suggest "Bush assumed, American soldiers' lives were doomed" or something. It doesn't flow as well, but it's intellectually honest.
The way you phrased your post was to charaterize the EU, DNC, and UN were "Enemies of Liberty"--if as you note we've known for some time that Saddam was an evil tyrant--shouldn't we also include those, many of whom are currently serving in this administration, who actively aided and abetted Saddam in the past as "Enemies of Liberty?"
Beyond the fingerpointing, however, is the issue of forcibly removing tyrants. As I've noted, there are many tyrants in this world--should we remove them all? If we engage in such a policy are we not morally responsible to remove any and all tyrants--even those with whom we enjoy friendly or neutral relations? Off the top of my head, I can think of a half-dozen nations with despots as bad or worse than Iraq with Saddam.
There were WMD in IRaq in 1998, when the inspectors left.
You're mistaken. The UN inspectors' report at that time did not mention the existence of WMDs. They did cite a lack of cooperation from the regime WRT inspections and a lack of documentation regarding WMD the Iraqis claimed to have destroyed immediately after the Gulf war in 1991 or were in fact destroyed during that war.
Additionally, the IAEA was convinced, by 1998, that Iraq had no capability to begin a nuclear weapons program. And it should be pointed out most of the chemical weapons we knew Iraq had at one time possessed had a shelf life of 5 years.
The problem is Bush knew he couldn't gain political support for an invasion of Iraq on the basis of Saddam being a brutal despot. So, he created a lie based upon the promise of an imminent and immediate threat.
Posted by: JadeGold at October 31, 2003 11:15 AMJadeGold,
Bush never "promised" that the threat was imminent or immediate. His arguement was that we couldn't afford to wait until it was.
The whole debate from November to May was whether or not we should invade without an imminent threat. Now you actually claim that Bush had claimed that there was an imminent threat hoping someone might believe it? Stop lying; it doesn't fool anyone, and only makes you look rediculous. I'm guessing you're better than that.
