house votes to withdraw troops from iraq by sep 2008

[jim schmidt]

I'll give you that, but I think they were lied to just as you were. Frankly, given the tens of thousands of deaths and the twenty year effect this will have on the fabric of our society, I wish they hadn't done it and I wish you'd have been paying more attention.

That said, Bush is to blame. Others may have culpability or gullability but it is Bush and his minions that have blood on their hands.

[PhilB]

Originally Posted by jim schmidt

I'll give you that, but I think they were lied to just as you were. Frankly, given the tens of thousands of deaths and the twenty year effect this will have on the fabric of our society, I wish they hadn't done it and I wish you'd have been paying more attention.

That said, Bush is to blame. Others may have culpability or gullability but it is Bush and his minions that have blood on their hands.

I agree that, given how it has come out, everyone involved would be much better off had we not done it. I also agree that Bush and his cohorts are responsible. I wish to point out that a great many of the cohorts in question are Democrats; this was not at all a solely Republican failure, no matter how much the Democrats get all self-righteous and would like now to pretend it was; it was a bipartisan failure.

I don't think that "paying more attention" would have made the difference; as I said, it was not possible at the time to know for sure.

If I may be permitted an analogy, it's kind of like you're out camping and you find a snake in your sleeping bag. You can't tell if it's poisonous or not. One of your buddies says, "it's not dangerous, just shake it out". The other says, "Holy crap, it's poisonous! Kill it!" You know that Buddy #1 is a vegetarian animal activist; you know that Buddy #2 is a reactionary paranoid; so neither can be trusted to be unbiased. You know that there are bad consequences for guessing wrong in either case; if you think it's safe and are wrong, you have a serious medical situation; if you think it's dangerous and you're wrong, you have killed it without cause and probably stained your sleeping bag. What do you choose? It's not irrational in that situation to decide to play it safe and get the camp axe. So you do that, take a swing at the snake, and kill it, but didn't take a proper stance for the swing and lose your balance and also chop Buddy #2's toes off. And you look at the dead snake head and the snake turns out to have been non-poisonous. Buddy #1 says "I told you so. I *knew* it wasn't dangerous. We'd all be better off if you hadn't attacked it. Now he's going to bleed to death." But the decision was as good as you could have made at the time, and the missing toes are not about whether the decision was itself right, but about you screwing up the execution of that decision. So you are responsible for the dead snake and the damaged sleeping bag and his missing toes. And Mr. Vegetarian was right after all. But that still doesn't mean that you could have known the whole outcome ahead of time; your culpability mainly lies with your failure to take adequate care with your axe usage. Buddy #2 could justifiably sue you for that.

PhilB

[jim schmidt]

Damn! When you offer an analogy you sure torture the hell out of it first!

[PhilB]

Originally Posted by jim schmidt

Damn! When you offer an analogy you sure torture the hell out of it first!

Yeah. I put the anal in analogy.

PhilB

[Ershank]

You thought going to Iraq was logical at the time?

You could probably change your analogy to... "And even though it wasn't certain whether the snake was poisonous or not, you decided to leave your friends in the tent, find a can of gasoline and a lighter, and proceed to burn the forest down, even after the park ranger advised against it. After your friends left for home, you continued to patrol the forest with your flamethrower as the complete loony bin, because you were 'staying the course'. No one gave you a hard time because, well, who's going to fuck with the crazy guy and the flamethrower?"

[PhilB]

Originally Posted by Ershank

You thought going to Iraq was logical at the time?

You could probably change your analogy to... "And even though it wasn't certain whether the snake was poisonous or not, you decided to leave your friends in the tent, find a can of gasoline and a lighter, and proceed to burn the forest down, even after the park ranger advised against it. After your friends left for home, you continued to patrol the forest with your flamethrower as the complete loony bin, because you were 'staying the course'. No one gave you a hard time because, well, who's going to fuck with the crazy guy and the flamethrower?"

Okay, we can go with your version of the analogy. Your version still places the problem with the execution of the decision, not with the decision itself.

PhilB

[Ershank]

Nah, because his solution never even intended to fix the problem in the first place.

[Ershank]

Besides, even with your rationalization of "Oh but his heart was in the right place!", we aren't talking about a fucking 12 year old nephew that screwed up, we're talking about the president.

That isn't acceptable.

[PhilB]

Originally Posted by Ershank

Besides, even with your rationalization of "Oh but his heart was in the right place!", we aren't talking about a fucking 12 year old nephew that screwed up, we're talking about the president.

That isn't acceptable.

Look, I'm not defending Bush as a president in general or with regard to how he has handled Iraq in particular. I think he's a crappy president, and would be happy to see him get impeached for any of a number of un-Consitutional things he's done. I'm not even saying that he decided to invade Iraq for the right reasons; I'm perfectly ready to believe that his own motives were money and fame and cronies and whatnot.

What I am saying, though, is that there were at the time valid concerns that indicated that an invasion of Iraq was a reasonable thing to do.

A big part of the problem (and responsibility) lies with the U.N. It was the U.N. that had been tasked with managing the economic sanctions to prevent Saddam from having the resources for major mischief, and with conducting inspections to make sure. This latter task required Saddam's cooperation, which was imposed as a condition of his remaining in power after the first Gulf War. If the U.N had managed these tasks competently, this would all be moot. But instead, the U.N. bureaucrats, including relatives of Kofi Annan, took bribes from Saddam to let him divert oil money to his own unknown purposes. And when Saddam started playing games with the inspectors, the U.N. Security Council failed to credibly back up the inspectors with real consequences, allowing Saddam to continue to stall and hide and shuffle about. These are the reasons why it could not be clearly demonstrated at the time that Saddam was not continuing to be a threat. At the end, after much waffling, the Security Council did finally tell him that he had to cooperate with the inspectors or be removed from power. Saddam called their bluff. France and Russia were preparing to admit the bluff, which would have just let the whole mess drag on indefinitely (or until Saddam was ready on his own terms to do something different, yet to be determined).

I don't like or respect Bush any more than you do, and didn't then either. I completely agree that he has screwed this all up to a completely unacceptable level. However, you can do the "Nyah nyah I told you so" dance all you want, but it is still true that the decision whether to invade Iraq or not was not at all clear cut at the time, and deciding to do so was a reasonable choice given the actual known data.

PhilB