Iraq and the economyFollow

You have to hand this to Bush, his guys run a good offense in campaigns. I had hoped that Bush and his surrogates managed this election as he had his office and now I realize they are. The talking heads on tv are always on message, never giving an inch even when they are obviously wrong.

In case you missed it on Friday, the day the Bushies always release bad news and concessions, some of Bush's cabinet conceeded that global warming is occurring from human activity. One talking head, a 6th term Rep from Cali must have missed the memo and kept on the old message, rather comically. The move looked to me like a feignt towards center voters. Bush ran as a moderate in 2000 to sufficient outcome, and then appointed his friends in big business to oversee the EPA and the dept of Interior in order to gut them.

The economy and the environment are intertwined issues. There is a constant pull between what is good for the environment and what is good for industry, with regulation the guiding force. Bush has certainly been steadfast in how he approaches regulating industry, he has consistly let these guys do whatever they want.
The gas companies are tearing up the west, doing irrevocable damage the scarce water and soil, while the meat industry spreads listeria because strict regulation of ***** takes away from the bottem line.

There has to be a better balance between profit and wage, between profit and pollution. Kerry most likely has Bush beat here. Who can say for sure whether Kerry will reverse bad industry policy? I heard him mention it during his acceptance speech, I have some trust that he will act more responsibly. I know with certainty how Bush feels about this issue from his actions, which often passes unnoticed by the electorate as a whole. The environment is not a red hot issue in 2004, it just doesn't rev people up like gay marraige, but it should. Ask everyone you know, a majority probably favors a raise in minimum wage and regulating sh*t in meat.

I am a firm believer in a balanced budget locally statewide and nationally. Bush 1 and Clinton raised taxes to their political detriment, but they did the right thing and did what needed to be done. Noone wants to pay more taxes, everyone would like a total free ride but that is not how grownups act. Kerry is soft on this issue as well. I think a Bush win means new rounds of tax cuts, primaraly benefitting the rich, and Kerry says he will raise taxes on people who make $200,000 or more. So Kerry is probably a step in the right direction.

Ok, as far as Iraq goes, the whole issue is a disaster for everyone involved. Say this whole adventure ends well, with an independant Iraq in the model of Germany or Japan, I will still fundamentally disagree with unilateral preemptive war. Remember, we fought Germany and Japan because they were starting preemptive unilateral wars, misleading their own people the whole time. We cannot spread freedom onto unwilling subects with bombs and tanks, and I am not convinced that are our intentions in Iraq anyway.

I believe that the Bush people came into office with Iraq on their minds. Richard Clarke tried to get them up to speed on al Qaida but was ignored. Iraq was the problem, Cheney said, not al Qaida. So we were ill prepared for 9/11. I will give Bush a pass, he didn't destroy those towers, bin Laden did, but after it happened Bush summoned Clarke and rather than seek his expertise on fighting al Qaida he demamded Clarke supply him with a link between 9/11 and Iraq. Clarke point blank told him there was no link, to which Bush impressed on Clarke that he should ignore what he knows and tell him what he wants to hear.

Meanwhile Cheney was lurking amid the CIA anylists cherry picking BS intelligence to be used to push the war. Tenet went along happily and ended up falling on the sword, to be replaced as CIA director by a Cheney toadie.

So we are in this stupid war, reasons untold, but my two concerns now are how are we going to get out of Iraq without leaving it to chaos, and are we going to start any more preemptive wars? Bush may not have the credibility to start another one, but it is in his realm. Kerry seems more like a go along kinda guy, he certainly wasn't pounding pulpits but also didn't have the integrity to stand up to a popular president during a moment of national weakness when he should have known better.

I am a complete slacker yet I knew from January 2002 that the reasoning for war where bogus, so I resent the play dumb act from both sides. I mean if you are going to lie to me at least have the decency not to insult my intelligence.

In the end of the day, when all is said and done and it is time to punch the ballot, these are some of the reasons I will accept the risk of Kerry's misguided flipflops over Bush's gross competence any day, specifically on Nov 2.

Not sure where you're going with this one. If you think that we went to Iraq "reasons untold", how about you spend 1/10th the time it took to write this and do a google serach on the Congressional Act of war for Iraq. There are 22 listed reasons we went to war with Iraq. I'll give you a hint too. Only 9 of those reasons even mention WMD, and only 2 of them mention them in the present tense.


How about you spend the 9 seconds required to realize that there is no Congressional Act of war for Iraq.

Fool.

Were you referring perhaps to the Join Resolution To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq? It's good to occassionaly know at least the NAME of the document you're imporing someone else to read.

Did you read the part where all the resolution does is allow the President to make a DECISION to use force in Iraq to DEFEND the US from the threat Iraq may pose?

Just checking, I'm sure since you can't even get the name of the document correct, that you've spent a great deal of time studying it.

use (link=www.really long link that makes your post unreadable)small link(/link)

But replace the ( with [ so I can read it without having to side scroll every ten seconds.

Yeah, I remember hearing that excerpt from Clarke's book when it came out (last year?). Almost sounds like Clarke just wants to make Bush look like a jerk.

Oh, that's who that was? I was never clear on that. That was a whole stupid mess, too.

Smash. I was just giving him an idea of what to use to search for it on the web. How about you stop getting hung up on the name and look at the relevant issue? What's important is that there are 22 reasons for the war with Iraq, only 9 of which mention WMD, and only 2 of which mention them in the present tense.

If you do a google search and type in the keywords: US congress act of war Iraq, the second one on the list will give you the White House Copy of the resolution wording. The 4th entry links to Another copy with more info (including the resolution number). Text of the resolution itself is identical in both cases.


Not exactly rocket science here.


Um. Yeah. It's not technically an "act of war", but that's a pretty silly semantical difference. They authorized the use of full military force in Iraq *if* the president wanted it. Given that the president asked for authorization of said force, it amounts to the exact same thing.

Um. Yeah. It's not technically an "act of war", but that's a pretty silly semantical difference. They authorized the use of full military force in Iraq *if* the president wanted it. Given that the president asked for authorization of said force, it amounts to the exact same thing.

No, actually it's not the same thing at all. It's not even in the same ballpark.

If you type in "Congressional Act of war for Iraq" as you said to do, neither the second nor the fourth hit tell you much of anything.


Come now, you're savy enough to recognize a lame excuse for making a mistake when you see it, aren't you?

You must have realized that everything surrounding it was ********* no? Or were you just demonstrating that for the masses?

Of course the poor economy had nothing to do with the exorbatant taxes paid under Clinton's watch right? Remember a "Surplus" is still YOUR money. Perhaps too much was yanked out of circulation too fast grinding things to a halt even BEFORE Bush stepped into office. Thus, the reaction we had in policy in order to get things moving again.

Although our infrastructure isn't all in one place, no doubt about it, 3000+ lives lost in one of the greatest financial institutions in the world does little to help an economy either. In retrospect, I'm surprised we hadn't fallen into a true recession. But Bush is the bad guy...... right?

Gbaji man, come on. Give up the ideology and face reality. Do you really want to run record deficits for 4 more years? Do you want to see America permanently damaged some more from superfund toxic messes created by unsupervised and unregulated industry? You'll get all that if Bush wins again.

How about we keep the minumum wage at $5.15 an hour for 4 more years? Want that? Then vote for Bush.

How about another regime change war in say North Korea or Syria? Wow, you get the reinstatement of the draft as a bonus!

Tell me Gbaji, do you earn $200,000 year or more? Because that is a great reason for voting Bush. You are the guy who Bush represents.

The help needs to vote for the other guy.



Edited, Wed Sep 1 01:37:13 2004 by Meadros

Find me a single legitimate source that supports that. I'm sorry, but that's pure wishful thinking coming from a group of people who desperately want to find and point out every flaw, real or imagined, in the Bush administrations foreign policy.

It didn't happen. There is no record of the Clinton administration trying to warn Bush's people about Al-queda. There is no record of Clarke doing that either. He missed that threat completely. That's a matter of public record. How on earth did he miss it, admit to missing it, and yet apparently also repeatedly attempt to warn Bush about it?

I'm serious. People with much better connections then you have tried to find some sort of evidence that Bush should have known about Al-queda and 9/11 prior to the events. It simply didn't happen that way.

When Bush entered into office Iraq *was* seen as the primary concern in the region. We were running active combat missions over the country. We were trying on the political front to get weapons inspections restarted. Why wouldn't you think a new president would take a look at that?



Yes it was. I've already said that several times. What you seem to fail to get is that based on the information they had Iraq *should* have been their focus on that region of the world.

You are looking back at that time period and seeing it through the lenses of someone who's already made the mental leap that 9/11 was used as an excuse to invade Iraq. You are then seeing the focus on Iraq *before* 9/11 and thinking that that's why we missed 9/11.

Nope. The reality is much more simple then the complex consipracy that would need to be involved for your idea to make any sense at all. The reality is that Iraq was considered the primary threat in 2001. The fact that we have congressional resolutions stating such in 1998 and condeming Iraq for not complying with resolutions means that this isn't something that Bush made up when he took office. It was a primary focus of attention for a number of very good reasons (did you read the links with the 22 reasons listed? If not, please do before posting on this topic again).

Why do you think there's anything suspicious about there being a focus on Iraq when Bush took office. I'd be suspicious if there *wasn't*.



Excuse me? Who was in this fictional "room"? Who was saying this? Please provide a shred of support for something you are saying. Just because you read this off some whacko's "conspiracy theory and free tinfoil hats" web site does not make it true.

No one told the Bush administration about the threat of Al-queda. The 9/11 commission made that abundantly clear in their report. There is no documentation of such warnings. Sure. There are "warnings" with "unspecified threats" from "terrorists" utlizing "aircraft", but there are *always* threats like that. There were no credible threats, and certainly no huge workup on or about Al-queda that ever reached the Bush administration prior to 9/11.

Hindsight is 20/20. Do you know how many terrorist organizations there are in the world? Your argument is essentially: "Al-queda was a known terrorist organization, and terrorists are a threat, so they should have dropped everything they were doing and done something about it". If we did that, we'd be chasing every single nutball sitting in a cave somewhere spouting off anti-american statements and nothing else would ever get done.

Prior to 9/11 Al-queda was just considered one of many terrorist organizations around the world. There was no information conveyed to the Bush administration that they were any more of a threat then any other organization. It's really easy to look back and say that our intelligence guys knew about them, so they should have done something. The reality is that the guy who decides what intelligence threats reach the presidential level did not elevate Al-queda to that level prior to 9/11. He also did not order investigations into the group to determine if they were more of a threat then the average group (despite some evidence they were). You know who that guy was? It was Clarke.

If he thought Al-queda was such a threat, why didn't he order a full workup on them? Why not put more people on it? Why not build a file? Why not present a report to the president about it? He did none of those things. A president does not know every detail that every member of the executive branch of the US government knows. The people that work for him are supposed to discover and distill information in their specific area and then present the *important* info to the president for condideration and policy direction. They don't just hand over everything they run across, or else nothing would ever get done.




Really? So the fact that one of the Al-queda agents involved in the first WTC bombing in 92 was living as a guest in Iraq during much of the 90s means that Iraq was a threat at that time, right?

Thanks for proving my point. Um. Your statement is totally flawed, but what the heck?





Ok. Let me explain this really slowly:

Al-queda is still the problem. Other organizations *like* Al-queda are also still the problem. We could kill every member of Al-queda tomorrow, including Bin Laden, and the day after that, there'll be 5 more organizations doing the same thing.

Get it? It's not about one group. It's not about one person. That's an amazingly short sighted way of looking at the problem. You're insisting that we should deal only with the symptoms.

The "problem" is that international terrorists are freely able to abuse national sovrenity to hide from the nations that they conduct attacks on. A group of Saudi's can train in Afghanistan, buy materials in Liberia, conduct an attack, and then hide out in Iraq after the fact, and there is *nothing* anyone can do legally about it. We could know that they are training, but we can't send in our military to do anything about it (we do on occasion, but only after the fact when it does no good). We could know that they are buying weapons, but again can't stop the sale overtly. We can know that they are hiding after the fact, but we can't go in and arrest them for their crimes in our country.


That's the real problem. It's a matter of international law. If you want to draw a parallel to the American West, it's exactly like a bank robber hitting a bank in Texas and then simply riding across the border into New Mexico and knowing they are safe from the law. Guess what? We had a period of pretty wild outlaw activity while that went on, comlete with bounty hunters and outlaw lawmen (as strange as that sounds). Eventually, the US government started creating laws that allowed certain agencies to cross state lines when certain crimes had been committed. That fixed the problem.


What's needed is a similar solution on an international scale. We need to get buyin for the idea that certain laws (like terrorist acts) allow for an international body to arrest and extradite criminals regardless of extradition treaties in effect. That's the long term goal. The big stumbling block is that the UN (which is the logical body to manage this) is pretty much gutless when it comes to enforcing anything of importance.

And in exactly the same way that some states overstepped their boundaries in the old west (oh, like groups of texas rangers charging into New Mexico anyway), we're going to push the issue in this case. That's how the change will get made. Asking politely for it will never work. So, until then, we have to make a case for it. Iraq is such a case. Perhaps not the best case, but the best one we had available. By going into Iraq, we send a pretty clear signal: "If you're supporting terrorist groups, we wont let your sovrenity stop us".

The whole point is to fight the Al-queda's of the world by cutting off their support. You can never stop people from hating you, or wanting to do something mean and nasty. That's just impossible. But what made Al-queda dangerous was their connection to a number of nations, and their economic resources. Well. Money requires a nation to hold it in. Training facilities have to be inside someone's country. You can't do that sort of thing, on the scale that Al-queda was doing it, without some level of support from a government. That's why we're targeting the governments. We're sending a clear message of what they should not be doing.


And by all accounts, they've gotten that message. We've seen huge concessions from Libya, Egypt, and Syria over the last year. While Iraq and 9/11 were not connected directly, Iraq is related to the war on terror policy that grew out of 9/11. Iraq has born us more fruit in that war then taking out the Taliban did. One group of backwards people that no one really cared about wasn't a message. Iraq was. Right now, every nation in the world knows that if a group of terrorist commits an attack on the US, and we can track them to their country, they had better bend over backwards to help us catch them. 2 years ago, they would not have held that opinion. That's what Iraq has bought us.

Gbaji, you really need to purchase a premium account, what with all the gigs of storage your posts are consuming. I mean, what the hell! I know long posts are your schtick, but you're out of control now, man.

Sigh. This again. Let's see. Nations opening supporing terrorist groups and working on WMD programs one year, then denouncing terrorism and signing non-proliferation treaties the next? Coincidence? Only when wearing Smasharoo tinted goggles.

Here's an interesting paper on the topic, which debunks some of the talking head nonsense about Gaddafi's turn about. A relevant part:




But hey! What the hell does an Eqyptian expert on International Relations in the Middle East actually know about the region, right?