We had a chance to prevent the Iraq War

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In summary, a secret message was received by an influential adviser to the Pentagon from a Lebanese-American businessman, stating that Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal with the United States. The deal included allowing American troops and experts to conduct a search for weapons of mass destruction and handing over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. However, the Bush Administration was more focused on retribution and personal vendettas, leading to a full-scale invasion of Iraq and causing tension with other nations. This decision was made despite the lack of evidence linking Iraq to 9/11 and the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, Bush's foreign policy and economic decisions have been widely criticized.
  • #1
RageSk8
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/06/politics/06INTE.html

As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal.

Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search. The businessman said in an interview that the Iraqis also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 who was being held in Baghdad. At one point, he said, the Iraqis pledged to hold elections.


Isn't this the type of deal the Bush Administration "said" they wanted from Hussein? Granted, the method was questionable, but one would think the government would have taken more steps than " `Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad.'" (Perle).
 
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  • #2
Bush wanted to go in and throw saddam out in retribution. It was personal. The Iraqi army could have laid down on the ground butt naked and we'd have still gone in shooting. Bush Satisfied is Vendetta- at the cost of 87 billion + to us the taxpayers, not to mention countless lives.

So here we are, out 87 billion, minus about 400 lives(so far), No WMD, no Saddam,no Osama Bin Laden, and we managed to piss off the UN, Korea, France(who cares) Germany, Russia, and half a dozen other nations in the process.

Good job George!
 
  • #3
Bush wanted to go in and throw saddam out in retribution. It was personal.

I can't believe an educated person could believe this. Are you telling me that the state of our democracy is so severe that a president of the United States could act on emotion alone? If so, i encourage us all to run into the streets, right now, and blow ourselves up in hopes to somehow interrupt the democratic process. I sincerely hope that if you think this is the truth, you should act on your thoughts and sacrifice your life in order to destroy this authority of leadership.

If you can give me any evidence of what your saying is truthful, I will personally march to the whitehouse, and try to kill the president of the united states.

Now, take responsiblility for what you have said, and either sacrifice your life in the name of what is right, or retract your statement.
 
  • #4
Rage, Saddam had been saying these things for several years. Infact, that is exactly what kept him in power during the clinton administration. If you recall, Clinton had ordered a multitude of times for Saddam to FULLY cooperate with the UN and it's inspectors, and saddam had sent a large number of appeasing letters almost identical to the letter you have just shown.

He would say one thing, and do another. It had worked for several years, but it stopped working eventually.

Au contrare, quite probably the only reason saddam had sent out this letter and other letters like this is so that some kid would mis-interpret it later on, and smear it across the media, as you are doing now.
 
  • #5
Originally posted by Mattius_
I can't believe an educated person could believe this. Are you telling me that the state of our democracy is so severe that a president of the United States could act on emotion alone? If so, i encourage us all to run into the streets, right now, and blow ourselves up in hopes to somehow interrupt the democratic process. I sincerely hope that if you think this is the truth, you should act on your thoughts and sacrifice your life in order to destroy this authority of leadership.

If you can give me any evidence of what your saying is truthful, I will personally march to the whitehouse, and try to kill the president of the united states.

Now, take responsiblility for what you have said, and either sacrifice your life in the name of what is right, or retract your statement.

I won't retract, simply modify. Bush may or may not have had a valid reason for entry into Iraq. Weapons of Mass destruction.. but.. oh wait a second.. We didn't FIND any WMD. Did we? And I don't expect we will. I think Zero used to have an excellent quote on this, so I'll paraphrase

"As the days and weeks go by the Hunt for weapons of Mass Destruction becomes more and more like OJ's search for the real killer- eventually we should just give up and go play a round of golf.

With no WMD, No Saddamn Hussien, and No Osama Bin Laden, I'd be happy to find a sniper wearing a fright wig carrying a hunting knife."


He may have had valid reasons for going in, but he screwed that up. It could have been resolved with a limited skirmish, or a tactical seals mission to take out key Saddam officials instead of a full scale invasion, and committing an already thin war budget to rebuilding Iraq while we were just scaling back in Afghanistan. There was no connection between Iraq and 9/11- that has already been acknowleged, but the public made that assuming leap because the government inferred that he did. That's what got him the approval for war.

He has horrible foreign policy- that is widespread knowledge. He's a terrible speaker. While we cannot hold him singularly responsible for the economic decline, he sure hasn't done anything to HELP it either. The tax cuts did nothing to stimulate the economy, he's done nothing to stimulate job growth, and according to the GOVERMENT we haven't been in a recession since 2001. I guess those 6.1 percent of americans who are unemployed must be "faking it".

Bush likes to run his mouth to the world, making us look like pompous asses to the rest of the countries, and sooner or later he's going to write a check our collective butts can't cash. If there's ever been a president I think is just overly cocky and stupid enough to launch nukes, it's him.

Oh and it's curious that you mention that scenario of self sacrifice. Don't know if you ever saw the movie "dead zone" but it portrays taht exact thing. Quick summary

This guy has a horrible car accident, goes into a coma, comes and and he's psychic- he can see the future of anyone he touches. Long story short he meets, and shakes the hand of an up and coming Senator(govenor?) and discovers that he will not only be elected president, but start WWIII by launching nukes and destroy the world. So he ends up killing the guy, dying in the process.

If you were him, would you do the same?

I just don't get you Bush supports who stand by him no matter how much he screws this country up
 
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  • #6
I think this is sort of 'conspiracy theory' territory, isn't it?
 
  • #7
I believe the guy touting this (Maloof?) is trying to rebuild his reputation. He was one of the neo-con's non-governmental hacks. He got caught facilitating gun-running from Syria to Charles Taylor, and lost his security clearance. He's now scrambling for any way possible to get back in the loop.

Njorl
 
  • #8
Originally posted by Zero
I think this is sort of 'conspiracy theory' territory, isn't it?

I like to think of it as speculation. I'm not going as far as to say Bush was responsible for 9/11 or anything. I'm simply saying that the reasons for invading Iraq that were given, are on very shaky ground, and it's very possible Saddam never had any WMD. And far be it from me to question the Prsident, but when it costs us hundreds of billions of dollars, and american lives, there is no "almost sure" or "probably". And it's looking like that's what he went on.
 
  • #9
Originally posted by Zantra
I like to think of it as speculation. I'm not going as far as to say Bush was responsible for 9/11 or anything. I'm simply saying that the reasons for invading Iraq that were given, are on very shaky ground, and it's very possible Saddam never had any WMD. And far be it from me to question the Prsident, but when it costs us hundreds of billions of dollars, and american lives, there is no "almost sure" or "probably". And it's looking like that's what he went on.
We can say with some certainty that the Iraq occupation was planned before 9-11, and that the evidence for WMD was mostly hot air.
 
  • #10
It is somewhat ironic that if we analysed the build up to the war, the only party that appeared to be acting in good faith was Saddam. If we were to look back to the stories of the doom-mongers before the war, we may note that the point of digression from those nightmare scenarios was that Saddam did not do what we were told to expect. He did not retaliate by using his supposed WMDs.

Oh but for the grace of Hussein?
 
  • #11
Mattius,

You are right - Iraq had played games with the US before and history would tell us that this was just another attempt to do exactly that. But there are two counterpoints: The Bush Administration said that if Saddam would submit to certain demands the war would be at least delayed. There is evidence that Iraq was scared ****less in the days coming up to the way because it looked as if America was serious (and we of course were). Read this section of the article on a top iraqi intelligence official:

But within minutes, Mr. Hage said, Mr. Obeidi collapsed, and a doctor was called to treat him. "He came to my office, sat down, and in five minutes fell ill," recalled Mr. Hage. "He looked like a man under enormous stress."

After being treated, Mr. Obeidi explained that the Iraqis wanted to cooperate with the Americans and could not understand why the Americans were focused on Iraq rather than on countries, like Iran, that have long supported terrorists, Mr. Hage said. The Iraqi seemed desperate, Mr. Hage said, "like someone who feared for his own safety, although he tried to hide it."


The question is why did we pass up the opportunity to do exactly what we said we wanted to do.
 
  • #12
I would suspect that this message was ignored primarily because the pre-war sentiment was only going to get worse for the administration as the weeks and months passed. The sooner the war started, the sooner politics and ethics of war could leave the media stage and make way for "bagdhad on fire" cameras and interviews with gung-ho soldiers. They started to war at the time they did because they didnt want to risk being put into an even more unfavorable situation.
 
  • #13
there's something fishy with this story, I don't see a maronite christian from lebanon putting theirselves out for a baathist regime without some personal benefit or without their being crooked in some manner. Just my two cents.
 
  • #14
Originally posted by Mattius_
I would suspect that this message was ignored primarily because the pre-war sentiment was only going to get worse for the administration as the weeks and months passed. The sooner the war started, the sooner politics and ethics of war could leave the media stage and make way for "bagdhad on fire" cameras and interviews with gung-ho soldiers. They started to war at the time they did because they didnt want to risk being put into an even more unfavorable situation.
The thing is, Iraq was cooperating plenty right before the invasion. "Iraq is uncooperative" was the way things were going to be spun, and NOTHING was going to change the spin, not for Bush and not for the media. When the U.S. suspended inspections back in 1998, we knew there weren't huge stockpiles of WMD left. Iraq (semi-reasonably) balked at U.S. spies invading every part of Iraq's defense. So, the lie of 'Iraq kicked out the inspectors' was created. Add that to the lie of 'Iraq will never cooperate', and 'they have restarted their nuclear program', and 'there are huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons'...

Why are people looking at weird conspiracy theories, when the truth is much more damning, and stranger too!
 
  • #15
Originally posted by Zero
The thing is, Iraq was cooperating plenty right before the invasion. "Iraq is uncooperative" was the way things were going to be spun, and NOTHING was going to change the spin, not for Bush and not for the media. When the U.S. suspended inspections back in 1998, we knew there weren't huge stockpiles of WMD left. Iraq (semi-reasonably) balked at U.S. spies invading every part of Iraq's defense. So, the lie of 'Iraq kicked out the inspectors' was created. Add that to the lie of 'Iraq will never cooperate', and 'they have restarted their nuclear program', and 'there are huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons'...

Why are people looking at weird conspiracy theories, when the truth is much more damning, and stranger too!


I honestly have no idea why people look for the conspiracy theories, I think the News and Media have a lot of cards to shuffle and they play along with it and bend the rules of truth. That could be one reason. It's beginning to become kind of unintelligable, even though it has been unintelligable for the past 6 months now.
 
  • #16
Given what you are saying is true zero (which i won't fully believe until you give me some facts), why would the clinton administration benefit from this hysteria?
 
  • #17
Originally posted by Mattius_
Given what you are saying is true zero (which i won't fully believe until you give me some facts), why would the clinton administration benefit from this hysteria?
Ummm...I have no idea why Senator Clinton would benefit from this either.
 
  • #18
what does that mean? does that mean you do not understand the question, or that you understand the question, but do not have an answer.
 
  • #19
Originally posted by Mattius_
what does that mean? does that mean you do not understand the question, or that you understand the question, but do not have an answer.
I think your question makes no sense.
 
  • #20
I meant why would it be beneficial to the Clinton Administration (Bill) to harp on Saddam...
 
  • #21
A bogeyman abroad is beneficial to any leader keen to divert attention from domestic or other foreign problems.
 
  • #22
yes but the four years of his presidency were some of the best in recent history...
 

What is the Iraq War?

The Iraq War, also known as the Second Gulf War or Operation Iraqi Freedom, was a military conflict that took place from 2003 to 2011 in Iraq. It was initiated by the United States and its allies with the goal of removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power and finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction.

Why do people say "We had a chance to prevent the Iraq War"?

Many people believe that the Iraq War could have been prevented if certain actions were taken prior to its initiation. This includes finding a peaceful resolution to the conflict, thoroughly investigating the presence of weapons of mass destruction, and listening to the advice of experts and international organizations.

What evidence supports the claim that the Iraq War could have been prevented?

There are several factors that contribute to the belief that the Iraq War could have been prevented. This includes the lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the failure to find a peaceful resolution, and the advice of experts and intelligence agencies cautioning against the war.

What were the consequences of not preventing the Iraq War?

The consequences of not preventing the Iraq War were significant and far-reaching. This includes the loss of thousands of lives, both military and civilian, the destruction of infrastructure and economy in Iraq, the rise of extremist groups, and the destabilization of the region.

What can we learn from the Iraq War and its prevention?

The Iraq War serves as a reminder of the importance of thorough investigation, diplomacy, and listening to expert advice when making decisions that can have significant consequences. It also highlights the need for accountability and transparency in government actions. It is crucial to learn from these lessons to prevent similar conflicts in the future.

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