Weapons were the primary reason given to the American public, if there were
other reasons they should have been spelled out in the same detail, but they
were not, it seemed to public that weapons was the only real reason ever
given.
When I say Saddam was legally in charge that is because he was the leader of
the government recognized by the UN and the US. Just as Fidel is recognized
as the leader of Cuba and Kim Jong Ill is recognized as the leader of North
Korea, because they are dictators does not mean they are not the legal
leaders of the country.
We deal with a number of non-democratically elected governments, that
doesn't make the deals any less valid. If we claim that Saddam was not the
legal leader of Iraq, then the UN resolutions he agreed would not be valid.
In the end, the legal basis in regards to the United Nations resolutions
allowed us to go to war because it was believed that he had the bad weapons,
if he did not and we knew he did not, then we have broken international law,
while I don't care much about that, it still is something we have done.
I voted for Bush, and I supported the war when I was shown intel that
pointed to the existence of these weapons, I also feel there were a number
of other valid reasons to go to war, however those reasons were not given to
the public up-front, only now are we getting the information from Congress
we should have gotten over a year ago, only now is the President talking
about other reasons, a year too late.
Over the past 60 years, we have put troops in a number of countries,
including Korea and Vietnam, wars where 45,000 and 55,000 were lost
respectively, however there was no declaration of war, we have assigned new
terms to things like police action, and conflict to allow us to say it
wasn't really war. The constitution doesn't contain anything about police
action, as a conservative, I look at the Constitution in a strict light, it
states only the Congress can declare war, and they didn't. In WWII Europe,
we declared war on Germany, that was a war of liberation, we still declared
war.
All I am saying is that it doesn't make you a bad Republican to be upset the
President and the Congress, I'm also not saying the Republicans are more to
blame than the Democrats, they all voted to fund this invasion. I'm not even
suggesting that you shouldn't support it, only that you should still be a
little upset that when the President gave us his reasons for going to war,
he used bad intel, that ended up wrong, the congress saw the same intel, and
if they had other reasons to go to war, why didn't they tell us before we
went in instead of after we went in and couldn't prove the first accusation?
_____
From: Sam Morris [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2004 12:02 AM
To: CF-Community
Subject: RE: 9/11 Commission to Cheney - You're still wrong.
Ted Koppel reported: "We wanted to see whether the
conclusions reached by the Intelligence Committee
would have made any difference to the other senators
who voted to authorize the war in Iraq, so we called
them.
"Of the 42 we reached, only three said they would have
changed their minds had they known then 'what they
know now.'
And then there's Sen Rockefellers statement on October
10, 2002
http://www.senate.gov/~rockefeller/news/2002/flrstmt0102002.html
Seems like we would have still gone to war.
WMD's were just a part of the reason we went to war.
When you say Saddam was legally in charge, is that
because he won the election with 100% of the votes?
World War II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarations_of_war_in_the_United_States
-sm
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