Try brushing up on your reading skills Ted. I said "no provable WMDs". And your convenient ignoring of my critical Inspections point speaks volumes.
So be accurate please.


You prefer war and its multiple consequences to extended inspections. I most emphatically disagree.



What were the consequences of SH in power after Gulf 1 that were worse than what happened after the invasion? Let's see no Americans were dying and Al Qaeda was effectively kept out for starters.

Yeah, I'll take before the invasion.

A couple of posters have brought this up, and while it makes a good talking point, it doesn't reflect the situation in 2003. The largely Shia, largely conscript Iraqi Army had de facto disintigrated after we siezed Baghdad. There was not a platoon sized element left under arms after the last Republican Guard holdouts had been destroyed.
While an intact surrendering army could have been put to use following the invasion, there wasn't anyone left. The Shia conscripts had doffed weapons and uniforms and headed home. The largely Sunni Officer Corps had done the same, for fear of reprisal and/or internment. There is little evidence to support a claim that any semblance of the army could have been mustered, given the circumstances.

What I would have recommended [in hindsight] is a form of Job Corps, immediately employing Iraqi's without work to repair infrastructure and other civil actions.

What were the consequences of SH in power after Gulf 1 that were worse than what happened after the invasion? Let's see no Americans were dying and Al Qaeda was effectively kept out for starters.


Ya no resolution to the conflict and a UN heading for dropping sanctions – after which all experts say you buddy would have been back in the WMD production mode in a big way. Great resolution to the 11 year stad off. Sort of like the disaster in Korea.





Good point and in hindsight the “jobs corps” might have giver many something else to do but join the insurgency.

I also feel money and men came in from Syria, Jordan Iran and AQ to make sure we didn’t “win” in Iraq.

You failed to answer the questions. But you get a point for deftly blaming Clinton (again).



You, too, failed to answer the questions.

Once again, the big question is, if an American President has acted improperly to start a war, should he/she be held accountable, or is being Prez of the USA a blank check to act any way you please without fear of consequences?

I don't want to hear about what a bad guy Saddam was (no argument here), how there may have been WMDs (maybe they were moved, who knows?), whether or not Congress voted for the war (or was misled into it) - none of those things are relevant to the questions posed. It is strictly a theoretical question - should the US President be immune from any punishment in such circumstances? And would our impeachment (or other punishment) of a president help or hurt our credibility on the world stage?

America's credibility matters. Try to remember that we are asking Iraqis to take a great leap of faith here and side with the same Americans who made it rain bombs on their country over their own countrymen who are fighting the occupation force. Our credibility with the average Iraqi is probably about nil at this point, and who can blame them? Our credibility around the whole world has suffered because of this war. If there is any chance of rectifying the Iraq problem, I think one prerequisite will be to rebuild some of that good old U.S. credibility with the locals, if not with the whole Middle East.

Actually I'm mostly just going by the fact that they had allied in the recent past. The op-ed piece you cited made the same argument that you've made as well, which is that the surge had nothing to do with the tribes' decision to turn on AQ. To which my response is the same: the surge, I'm sure, didn't have anything directly to do with it, but indirectly, I think it made a huge difference. I don't think the tribes ever liked AQ to begin with. It was fear of the Shi'ites that kept them together at first, and, I would argue, it was the relief from that fear that the surge provided that removed it as a motivating factor for keeping them together. Hence, the animosity against them that was always present then had nothing to counter it. And to boot, the fact that U.S. troops were available to render assistance no doubt made the decision that much easier for them.

And I also have to keep harkening back to the Taliban. Everything you said about the relationship between AQI and Sunni tribes could also be said about the relationship between the Taliban and Afghan tribes. The Taliban, as we all know, went far beyond what had been known in the Islamic world at the time, and were viewed by most Afghans as an occupying force, whatever superficial similarities they might have had with the locals. They were accepted because as bad as they were, they were preferable to terror and death.

Now maybe the Iraqi Sunnites have in fact moved beyond the point where they would need to rely on a group like AQI in order to defend themselves against a resurgence of death squad activity. I very much hope that's the case. In the final analysis, you'd ultimately have a better perspective on that than I would, given your vantage point. I'm just trying to make the best sense I can out of the information that's available to me, taking into account all the applicable historical lessons.