Well, first of all, I disagree with your characterization of "95%."
As well you should. The speech was 10,416 words, 197 of which concerned internal human rights violations. That's less than 2%, so I was way off. The rest delt almost exclusively with Hussain being a threat to the rest of the world.
But, even conceding that for a moment..... what, does the other 5% suddenly not count any more?
Obviously not very much.
Lastly, what is so wrong with the Bush Administration saying that we
believe that we should invade Iraq for reasons A, B, C, D, E, and F.....
but we recognize that reason "D" is a bit complex/disputed, and that "D" is the reason that skeptics would be most receptive to, and so we are going to spend most of our time arguing for "D" as that is the reason that will get
us the most votes?
What's wrong with it is that the U.S. is a democratic republic meaning the government requires the consent of the government especially as it concerns sending our youth in to harms way and spending massive amounts of our money. The reason the people of this country consented to go to war against Iraq was because they were led to believe that that country posed an imminent threat to our security. What the Bush administration has done is a political bait and switch. With our money. With our kids.
It makes no matter how many reasons, secret or otherwise there were. And it doesn't matter how many U.N. resolutions were violated _if our security was not threatened_ which it is quite obvious, it was not. If our security is not threatened then U.N. violations should be dealt with by the U.N.
I would agree that the President in his role as commander in chief should have the power to use deadly force w/o explicit consent in order to circumvent impending disaster, but he damn well be able to justify his actions. In this case none of your reasons, secret or otherwise meet these criteria AFAIC.
And lets look at those secret reasons: Your argument that U.S troops in Saudi Arabia fostered the recruitment of terrorists by Al Qaeda, but the invasion of a sovergn Moslem nation is a hundred times the incentive that troops in SA were and beyond that the number of Americans in Iraq not only provide incentive, they provide greater opportunity for terrorism. As far as protecting SA from Iraq, it's pretty clear that the Iraq of 2003 was a shadow of the Iraq that invaded Kuwait, and we managed to defend SA back then. So we could have solved that particular problem by removing troops from Saudi Arabia and perhaps posting them in Kuwait.
So really it comes down to one valid reason for invading Iraq; that Hussein was a despotic ruler responsible for the deaths of millions of his compatriots. But did we exhaust every possibility short of war prior to the invasion to prevent these injustices? When we sent troops to the Middle East to pressure Hussein into permitting inspections did we also demand also that he recognize basic human rights for his own people? Were there any resolutions, U.N. or otherwise that demanded he do so? Just what measures did the Bush administration take towards this end. Nothing that I know of. Nothing short of all out invasion.
Furthermore, if our justification for invasion was to end human suffering aren't there places in the world would have been more effective than in Iraq? How far would 160 billion dollars have gone in the fight against the AIDS epidemic in Africa? How many tin pot despots in the subcontinent are there that are just as bad or worse than Hussein? Why aren't we focusing our attention on them?
The answer is that that is _not_ why Bushco invaded Iraq. They don't even care about the poor people here, why in hell would they give a rat's sphincter about the people of Iraq?
It is the nature of the republic and the nature of the United Nations that you don't spend a lot of time making a case based on reasons that *you* believe, but aren't like to convince many of the swing-congresspersons and swing-ambassadors who will be doing the voting.
So it's necessary to lie and deceive. Got it.
-- Doug _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
