We are in Iraq because of oil !!Follow

My gut reaction is because you didn't know what you were talking about.

I don't think I've ever said that the sole reason I believe that Bush invaded Iraq was because he wanted to steal their oil.

Even tho I believe that most wars are waged in pursuit of territory or resources I think that this US administration (aided and abetted by a large part of the Democratic party) went to war in Iraq for some arrogant belief in the 'superior' way of life in the west, exemplified by the neo-con arrogance that seems to imply that they know something that 'we', the unwashed masses don't know, and we should just shut up and let our betters tell us what to do and how to think.

Mixed in with a fair pinch of fundamentalist Christian fervour, (agin, theres that 'we know sumtin you don't', thing) a smattering of revenge( You'll tried to kill my daddy!) a healthy portion of 'our army is bigger than your army and we need to test some stuff out on some humans', and a belief that if perchance it all worked out, then they'd have a dirty great base in the ME, right near to Iran/Syria/Egypt. And some oil.

All of that was enabled by incurious dimwits in the press and the general public who fell for the blatant and obvious lies about WMD's, humanitarian concerns and helping a downtrodden part of the world find democracy (wether they wanted it or not).

Oil was a by product of the invasion, if it all worked out. Not the reason for the invasion.

I've never said anything different.

I don't think you quite understand the issue. Seriously. You're justifying the occupation of a sovereign country that never directly threatened the US, Australia, or the UK partly on the basis that you need cheap oil.

"Protecting your economic intrests" means putting up trade barriers, not stealing ressources from an occupied country, this is called... colonialism!!



Our "action" was not to illegally invade another soverieign country that didn't threaten us, or our allies. It doesn't matter if our reason for it was that we couldn't stop listening to Johnny Halliday's new single.

And France is extremely reliant on nuclear energy anyway. The fact we refused to invade had everything to do with the fact we have 4-5 million Muslims at home, and of course the fact that everyone knew Saddam had nothing to with 9/11.



What nagging issues? The invasion of a sovereign country, the removal of their government, the dismantling of their armed forces, their civil service, and their economy, the torturing, the killing of hundreds of thousand of innocent civilians in the process, bringing about the hatred of most of the Muslim world?

Yeah, nagging, indeed.



The same "facts" that put Saddam behind 9/11, and WMDs in his bathroom closet?

Come on. Everyone knows that if Iraq had asparagus instead of oil, the US would've never bothered.

Honestly, at this point who cares?

They are there and have been for years. Yes, it sure as heck hasn't improved much, but there is still a whole mess to be cleaned up.

I do agree with gbaji however that this quote is seriously stretched to "We are in Iraq because of oil!", I mean we all know this to be true, in part at the very least, but I doubt even Bush would be as foolish to explicitly say that.

Why is it btw that when western countries get involved in the ME, thousands of people start dying? (rethorical question)

ToUtem's RACKs still make me feel like a 5-year old ******* on hearing a Mariachi band dedicate their rendition of La Cucaracha to his pet spider.

Funnily enough, no. It makes me hanker for a career in lawn-mowing or cleaning windshields at stop lights.

What the fUck are EU Principles?

France & Germany use the EU to keep each others' ball-bags in a vice-grip, Spain uses it to subsidise its peasants, UK uses it to hide behind when Uncle Sam gets pissy, and the rest use it to leech off the 5 wealthy nations.

As an entity, it has bugger-all principles - certainly none that impacted the Iraq situation across any European national borders.

France (Oil), Germany (a post '45 fear of War), Spain (a chance for Aznar to try to prove he wasn't a wuss) & UK (Bliar's attempt to suck Bush's ****) dealt with the Iraq issue unilaterally, independently and without any consensus in the EU.

****

hush, the adults are talking.

Nexa

See?

Even when you're wrong, you can be wrong more concisely

Yes. And not once did he say anything remotely resembling a count of "usable" WMDs. His slides showed sites suspected of *building* the materials that could be used to make WMDs. See. The reason we went to war was not so much because Iraq *had* WMDs (present tense) but that they were clearly trying to build them, showed no sign of ever abandoning their goal to build them, and so we decided to act *before* they obtained them.

Kinda hard to do that if you wait until they've already finished, don't you think? I would argue that the fact that we didn't find any assembled and ready to use WMDs (but tons of materials, documents, and such) shows that we did this right, not wrong.

If you're still unsure of this, just read a bit further in the very same speach I linked by Bush before:



How can you read this and assume that he's saying we should attack Iraq becuase he's already built weapons and could use them at any moment? You can't. But that's why odds are you've never read this part of the speech, nor heard it on any news program. Wonder why that is?...




Do you? Or do you recall a bunch of news sources and anti-war folks *talking* about Blairs statement? You are aware that not all events occur at the same frequency that they are talked about, right? And that by hyping a particular statement you can make it seem more important in the eyes of the public, right?

How about we let Blair answer this one




Don't believe the facts though. Believe what the guy on TV tells you! Cause he's got no motive to exagerate at all! Nosirreee...



Not really true. They presented the potential threat of Iraq's continuing WMD programs in exactly the ratio to which those WMDs were relevant to the issue. It's the news that choose to focus on that one aspect of the case for war. More specifically, those opposed to the war choose to debate that one aspect as well, making it a "big deal", and therefore elevated the appearance of that aspect in the eyes of the average observer.


In exactly the same way that if you list off 20 reasons for taking a vacation to Vegas and I choose to argue with you about one of them, an observat to our argument will come to believe that this one reason is the most important reason to go or not go on a vacation to Vegas. It's simple psychology. And those who opposed the war know how to use it to manipulate the public. They knew that if they made the presense of WMDs (present tense) their main arguing point, that the public would believe that was the main case for war (else why were they arguing it).

That's a classic strawman, but it tends to work very very well.

"There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction." -- Colin Powell to the UN

"Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.
[...]
Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons. Saddam Hussein has used such weapons. And Saddam Hussein has no compunction about using them again, against his neighbors and against his own people." -- Colin Powell to the UN

Do you EVER get tired of being so wrong?

Edited, Jul 10th 2007 5:43pm by Jophiel

You missed the very next part of the quote about Biological weapons:



He didn't make these claims. He was repeating the findings of UNSCOM. I was specifically referring to the components of Powell's speech in which he presented the evidence to support the cause for war. You're quoting a statement made as part of his "setting the stage" for his arguments.


I'm also specifically addressing the arguement that "WMD" means "fully assembled biological, chemical, or nuclear warheads loaded onto rockets or missiles and ready to be fired at us at a moments notice". Because oddly enough, this definition changes depending on which side of the arguemnt the Liberal in question is arguing at any given moment.

When they're arguing that we found no WMDs, that's the definition. We didn't find any rockets with this stuff (ok. We did, but they were old and not in usable condition). But when they argue that "we went to war because of WMDs", the definition of what constitutes the Bush administration claiming that Iraq "has WMDs" suddenly expands to include any mention of WMDs at all in any context, past or future and by any source (international or not).



Again. Did members of the Bush administration believe that Iraq "had WMDs"? Yup. And so did members of the Clinton administration. So did members of Congress including most of the Democrat leadership (at the same time as the Bush administration). Does that automatically mean that this one aspect of the WMD issue as a whole is the single and entire justification for war? Absolutely not.


Yet that's what the argument being used by folks like Red and Nobby and yourself requires. That we somehow ignore 95% of the statement made by our leaders in the buildup towards war, focus like a laser on the tiny fraction that say "they have WMDs" and make that the entire issue...


Just like you did here. Think about it.