Impeach them both?

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Bill Bonde ('by a commodi
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Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2005 8:05 am Post subject: Re: Impeach them both?

"jerry_friedman@yahoo.com" wrote:

Quote:

Bill Bonde ('by a commodius vicus of recirculation') wrote:
Charles Riggs wrote:
...

The grounds for impeachment of both I'd choose is the fact of their
lying to the American people when urging war against Iraq.

What's the "lie" supposed to be? The Britsh government to this day backs
up the 16 words that Bush said that got Joe Wilson so bug eyed.

And it's still not true.

What's not true? The 16 words might be like portions of Hillary's book

where she discusses her making 100,000 dollars on cattle futures, but
they aren't lies.

Quote:

Anyway, Charles explains below that he was
talking about alleged links to al-Qaeda.

There were links between Iraq and al Qaeda, that there is no question

about. The issue was links between Iraq and 9/11. That was much more
uncertain and it took time to understand some claimed meetings between
Iraqi intelligence and 9/11 plotters. But ignore that, Bush wasn't
counting on connecting Saddam to 9/11 itself. He was connecting Saddam
to terrorist threats in general and to al Qaeda proper or al Qaeda the
holding company.

Quote:

This is now
documented in a recently declassified document siting evidence that
the Bush administration knew full well that reports of Iraq's links to
Al Qaeda were highly suspect.

You mean like the aspirin factory in The Sudan that Clinton flattened
with cruise missiles because it was a WMD plant owned by a bin Laden
buddy and was using a technology for WMDs only used by Iraq? Richard
Clarke still stands by all that in his book, "Against All Enemies".

Possibly a blunder on Clinton's part, but on nowhere near the scale of
Bush's blunder/dishonesty.

You mean the factory had no ties to bin Laden or Iraq? Clarke defends

this action to this day in his book. I think he makes a plausible case.
And actually finally getting Saddam is a blunder in what way? Why does
Saddam get an endless pass? Why did we have to bomb the hell out of the
Balkans to get at Milosovic?

Quote:

Obaue: I'd write "the Sudan".

I think they insist on the "The" getting the initial cap. They don't

have much of a government to get you, so you are free to do what you
want.

Quote:

They had no reliable reports, in fact,
of such links -- they lied to make war with a sovereign nation appear
justifiable:

I've always wondered why Iraq and Saddam are such a big a deal when
Clinton's bombing the hell out of the Balkans was OK, his invasion of
Haiti was OK, his chasing of Adid around Somalia was OK, etc. Does
Saddam get a free pass for some reason?

OK with who?

I can't know what your entire world view is and was throughout all time

but I can assume that you aren't arguing here for never using military
force unless you state that is the case.

Quote:

Clinton got a lot of criticism for bombing the Balkans
from the left--Noam Chomsky, say--though not from the center that I
remember.

I suspect some important differences were the lower casualties in these
operations, the shorter durations (the bombing about Kosovo was pretty
much over before we began to hear that claims of an genocide underway
had been exaggerated),

But you aren't out for Clinton's head about those exaggerations? Didn't

FDR exaggerate the threat of Hitler to the US in WWII? Hitler had no
plans or capability to invade the US yet hold many American service
personnel died in the European theatre of war?

Quote:

and at least in the case of the Balkans, the
apparently positive results (ethnic Albanians back in Kosovo, no TV
reports of daily interethnic violence--though I don't know what's
actually happening).

I understand the place is on a short fuse, but in any case, would

positive results in Iraq change your mind about the operation? What do
you want exactly? I see movement all over the region, from the
intractable Israel and Palestinian mess, up through the endless
occupation of Lebanon by Syria, to Syria, across over to Iran to
Afghanistan back down through the smaller Arab states and into Saudi
Arabia, even over to Egypt and Libya. I'm not going to call it a failure
in a few years when we were ready to give negotiating with Palestinians
and Israelis a few more decades to bear fruit.

Quote:

didn't get the same compensation for their families. Politically
American deaths are more of a problem than any others, at least for
Bush. Of course a national leader is charged first with protecting his
own people and their own interests. OTOH, the numbers that we've lost so
far are about what we have lost on the roads in Washington state in car
crashes in the same time period. Plainly the problem isn't just that
Americans are dying.

Quote:

If there was ever anyone who had earned being invaded and arrested, it
is Saddam.

Like James Follett, you inadvertently put your finger on one of the
arguments against you. If we could have "invaded" Saddam, I'd have
been all for it, but we invaded Iraq.

Saddam was the leader of Iraq. We invaded Panama to get Noriega. It's

sometimes possible to do extreme renditions but not usually if you are
talking about the leader of a major country.

Quote:

He was the only person in power who had used WMDs in combat

since 1945

The two nuclear bombs? Truman was out of power for decades before Saddam

ever got to take power. Of course WMDs have been used by other world
leaders in the past but I don't believe that there are any world leaders
today who have used them in combat. Saddam was the last one.

Quote:

and the only one to use WMDs against his own people.

since the American nuclear tests.

Now you are being silly.

Quote:

He'd made war
against his neighbours in what appeared to be a clockwise fashion, Iran,
Kuwait and then Saudi Arabia.

But not since he found out that other countries would unite against
him.

So what was he likely to do to avoid another Desert Storm? He was likely

to get nuclear weapons before doing anything too nasty again.

Quote:

And if you're claiming that we invaded Iraq to protect Jordan and
Syria, I'll know you're joking.

Saddam wanted to create a pan-Arab state like Osama wants to create one.

They might not agree exactly on the religious aspects, they are both
Sunni however.

Quote:

He was paying Palestinian families to send
their children off to Israel in order to blow Jews sitting in pizzerias
or queuing for the kino to charred bloody bits.

I agree that his being arrested and facing a bleak future is a good
thing--I'd call it one of the few bright spots in the picture. But I
don't think it was worth about 2,200 lives of the invading and
occupying armies and at least 25,000 Iraqi lives, likely well over

Millions of Iraqis died needlessly under Saddam. The sanctions, which

could never be lifted as long as Saddam was in power, were claimed by
Saddam to have killed 150,000 Iraqis per year for a decade. That is 1.5
million alone not even counting the million dead in the Iran-Iraq war,
the dead in the invasion of Kuwait and the ejection from Kuwait, the
hundreds of thousands killed in genocides of the Kurds in the North and
the Marsh Arabs in the South.

Quote:

100,000, and probably a far greater number of wounds and mutilations,
with no end in sight and no reason to foresee much improvement in Iraq.

I think one way to see improvement in Iraq would be for the world and

for the US itself to just agree that Iraq has a new government and we
need to do all we can to build a democracy there. Endlessly arguing
about whether or not Bush and Blair exaggerated some intelligence
information in their push for the invasion doesn't do anything but
embolden the insurgents and depress the ordinary people who are dying
there in droves.

Quote:

(For comparison, according to Wikipedia, Yugoslavia estimates the
casualties, not just deaths, of the NATO bombing of Kosovo at between
1,200 and 5,700, while NATO says the total of deaths was no more than
1,500. I wish twenty times the casualties would lead to twenty times
the protests.)

I think you should look at serious military estimates of deaths in Iraq.

Don't blame the US for what the insurgents do.

Quote:

As long as Saddam
remained in power, the status quo would exist in the Middle East. And
while Saddam isn't linked directly to 9/11, 9/11 happened in that status
quo environment.

This could be said about any Middle Eastern government. Heck, I was
living in the same place in 2001 that I am now. Maybe I should move to
change the "status quo environment". In other words, I see no hint of
a connection between Saddam's ruling Iraq and the 9/11 attacks.

Do we want to limit our response to 9/11 to those we can directly tie to

the 9/11 attacks? Because everyone who was on all the planes who was
behind it died that day. I had thought that we'd decided to finally deal
with all the terrorist threats, all the supporters of terrorism. I think
that is what Bush was saying standing on the rubble in NYC with that
bullhorn.

--
Why do sequels seem not to continue the story but instead retell the
original? I still want to see a real sequel to "Universal Soldier" where
the new girlfriend and the reanimated soldier who has to take a break
and recharge in a special recharge machine every few days, and might
melt if he gets too excited, learns to live within his limitations,
perhaps getting a job selling life insurance nine to five while starting
his own country western band as an evening outlet, finally taking the
time out in his life for romance and smelling the lovely flowers. Have
some guts Hollywood, turn a full out violent action movie into a woman
friendly romantic comedy sequel!

Charles Riggs
Guest