doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Are these liberals you guys talking about?

Disaster is leaving Iraq too early. King is too much a Leeb socialist to understand or accept this.

No. The disaster was getting in too soon. A tar baby indeed. Jake

Indeed! Pete is too much a knee-jerk neocon to understand or get over this.

Brent

Who wants America out of Iraq depends on who you ask. Recently heard a long interview with the deputy PM. He most certainly does NOT want us out. Kurds certainly don't either. Sunnis are stupid if they want us out.

Regardless of how we got in, or whether we should have, that's all water over the dam. The issue now is what to do about it.

You are only half right, L. Brown. You cannot separate the two halves of your equation. Water over the dam washed away a great deal of confidence, trust, good will. It's a major reason so many are now against any further committment. I can only echo the second part of your post -- what do we do now? -- and observe that Pandora's box, once opened ... well, you know the story.

Whatever the Iraq peoples are saying now, there MAY be a window of opportunity in that they MAY want to change what appears as failing counter-insurgency operations organized by a foreign power resulting from a foreign occupation.

Imagine North America invaded and occupied by the mujahadeen, with their counter-insurgency going badly against conservatives, liberals, atheists---yes, Pete, socialists---and Christians fighting among themselves.

I think we'd get it together over time. We'd also ask for help from friends.

We shouldn't forget that some things have gone right, and are going right. Problems in Kurdistan (other than a recent car bomb or two) are infrequent. And the Anbar sheikhs appear to be turning against AQ and the hard-core insurgents.

By the time we're well into a hot Iraqi summer, we should know whether the surge is making any inroads.

That part of the world was trouble for the Greeks, trouble for the Romans, in recent times, trouble for the Brits. We did not want to go there but one can not ignore an enemy forever and we got snookered by AQ and can not allow that to happen again. We can fight them here or there but we are going to HAVE to fight them! David

David, Who didn't want to go there?
All the information coming out now shows that the current administration deeply wanted to "go there," to the point of ignoring all intelligence that did not support an invasion and misleading the American and world public.
And, exactly who are we "fight[ing] here or there?" We are trying to keep peace in a civil war that we kicked off. We are breeding terriorists, not stopping them.
Jake

Jake, have you read the declassified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, dated Oct 02? The Intelligence Community stated with high confidence--that's their highest level of certainty--that Iraq possessed chem and bio weapons. No one had to "doctor" that intelligence; it was the same information Clinton had when he was in office. (In fact, in a moment of candor that embarrassed other leading Dems, after the invasion he admitted to being surprised that we did not find WMD's.)

Post-9/11, if I'd been the guy in charge, I would've needed pretty strong intelligence that those WMD's--which Saddam used in the past--were no longer in his hands, in view of the fact that he had a history of supporting terrorists.

About a year after the invasion, in a speech at Georgetown, CIA Director George Tenet said, in reference to the WMD issue: "Based on an assessment of the data we collected over the past 10 years, it would have been difficult for analysts to come to any different conclusions than the ones reached in October of 2002."

Without the WMD intelligence, IMO it would have been highly unlikely that Congress would have supported the invasion of Iraq. But with that degree of certainty from the intel community--and an NIE represents the IC's "most authoritative judgments" on such issues--it was unnecessary to "mislead" anyone in the runup to the war. And remember, Congress had the classified version of the NIE in their hot little hands when they voted on giving W war powers.

The "misleading" crap comes from people who are hard-core Bush-haters. Every major intel service in the world agreed with us that Saddam had WMD's. There was no stream of reporting that showed Saddam had destroyed his WMD stockpile. Thus, there was no significant intelligence to ignore, concerning the major reason for launching the invasion.