[quote]angry chicken wrote:
[quote]Bismark wrote:
[quote]angry chicken wrote:
Looks like all of the Left wing Democrats who have been constantly shouting, “we went to war for NO REASON, cuz they didn’t find the WMD’s” can shut the fuck up now.
Turns out they found THOUSANDS of chemical weapons warheads.
Perhaps Colin Powell can show his face again…
The turd in the punch bowl is that ISIS now controls most of the territory where the stockpile of weapons was found. I heard on the radio this morning that there is security footage of ISIS militants over running a warehouse that had some of these weapons. Ooooops…
Two questions:
-
Why the fuck did the Pentagon keep this a secret when we openly declared this was the REASON for going to war?
-
Why the fuck are they telling us about it now?
[/quote]
From the article, “The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an ACTIVE weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of LONG-ABANDONED programs, built in CLOSE COLLABORATION with the West.” (Capitalization added for emphasis)
[/quote]I’m pretty sure that the average American would have been pretty happy to have found a bunch of chemical warheads - regardless of how old they were. I know I would have hated Bush a little less if that were to have been made public. At least I would have felt as if they didn’t LIE about it. They may not have gotten it “right”, but at least it would have been better than a big fat nothing.[quote]
Even if Iraq had an active chemical weapons program, this would not be a sufficient reason to use military force. The Iraq war was preventative, as opposed to preemptive. One is not equipped to discuss the merits of the war if they do not know the difference between the two. Even if we set the discussion of what constitutes a “just war”, the fact of that matter is that Iraq was neither necessary nor prudent. Foreign policy should be based on Realpolitik, not normative idealism. The decision to invade Iraq is arguably the moment that the war in Afghanistan was lost. You know, the war that actually had something to do with al-Qa’ida.
[/quote]I agree that we “should” have just stuck to Afghanistan. But we didn’t. Hindsight 20 fucking 20.[quote]
I have written ad nauseum that the term “weapons of mass destruction” is a emotive misnomer that lacks analytical rigor. Weapons of mass destruction was frequently employed securitizing speech acts post-9/11 to justify the proliferation of the state security apparatus and the invasion of Iraq.
Unconventional munitions are more accurately described as chemical, biological, nuclear, or radiological(CBRN) weapons. Chemical weapons are not particularly effective weapons. They are highly dependent of geographical and weather conditions, are costly to produce, hazardous to store, and have profound political and security repercussions as their unconventional nature is antithetical to several nearly universal international norms. This is not an uncommonly held position in the intelligence and defense communities.
The “turd in the punch bowl” is that a foreign terrorist organization in the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham was facilitated by the destabilizing effect of American adventurism in Iraq. Who cares if they possess antiquated and ineffectual chemical weapons besides ignorant Joe Citizen?
[/quote]Well, I care. Our border is so porous and our intelligence/security agencies are so weak under this pathetic POTUS I feel that we ARE vulnerable to an attack on American soil. Imagine the pandemonium if the bad guys actually successfully used chemical weapons here… Regardless of how “effective” you say they are, it’s still a weapon of terror. Look at how our lifestyle has changed over the last ten years as a result of box cutters and a few airline tickets… Life would seriously start to suck if they actually used chemical weapons.[quote]
They already possess a prodigious quantity of conventional weapons, which have killed and will continue to kill exponentially more people than the Iraqi chemical phantasms could ever hope to do.
Do you honestly believe that American and international security would not be better served if the Iraq war genie could be put back in the bottle? [/quote]
Do you think the world would be better off if the Hitler genie could be put back in the bottle? How about the Viet Nam genie? While we’re at it, can we give frogs wings so that they don’t bump their ass every time they jump?
Instead of pointing fingers and playing the blame game, how about talking about what to do NOW? Not that this president has the balls to ANYTHING remotely correct. But it is a discussion “worth” having.[/quote]
He’s not pointing fingers and playing the blame game. He’s evaluating the reasons for going to war at the time that we actually went to war, with the results we have achieved after said action. He’s claiming we made a mistake, saying why we made a mistake, evaluating how we made such a mistake, and hopefully using this analysis to avoid future mistakes.
Posting this article as if it’s somehow a legitimate, posthumous justification of a failed war is nothing more than an inversion of the blame game, AC, and you know it.
Without an evaluation of our past courses of action and the end results thereof, we will always be finding ourselves in future situations in which we are saying “fuck playing the blame game, we need to figure out how to address the problem NOW.”
Understanding our previous mistakes IS how we fix the problem now. The shithole that Iraq currently represents is not a very far departure from what Vietnam looked like when we left, what parts of Korea looked like when we pulled out, and quite frankly, what parts of Iraq looked like when we pulled out in 1991.
What do you think we study history for, because the stories are so good?