jjacobs43

We were lied to...plain and simple. The Neocons were going into Iraq no matter what.

If you're not being cocky then you're just being ignorant. They don't hate us because of our 'freedom'. It's that kind of ******** that makes the rest of the world have a right to hate us.


In other words, don't think. Just trust whatever Big Brother tells us.



Monkeycat - TruthSpeak does not represent the majority of Americans on this. A majority of the people here understand the negative effect we have on other countries. But, when we complain, we get labeled as UnAmerican.


Big Brother tells us the economy is good and that we're winning some kind of war on terror but I'm not seeing it. What I see is a loss of jobs and us pissing off the rest of the world with our arrogance.

TruthSpeak

Yeah, you're right...we should just ignore all facts, independent comissions that looked at the evidence, and everything that is logical...and just beliefve what we want because we are a sheep of the democratic party.

I didnt say they hated us because of our freedom...I said people like spain and people in other countries show disrespect toward us because of it...its called jealousy.

The terrorists hate us because we arent muslim.

Yeah, we liberated 50 million people in this war alone, we have come to the rescue of half of europe in previous wars, and paid to rebuild half of europe in those previous wars. Not to mention how we have helped countries in the east previously..

What a negative affect we have on other countries. France would be speaking German, the soviet union would be spreading communism around like butter, korea would be ****ed, iraq and afghanistan wouldnt be free, jews would still be getting slaughtered, and japan wouldnt be half as powerful as it is today.

I think the world forgets reality.

Answer me these two questions:

1. Which president got you your job?

2. If you have ever lost a job, which president lost you that job, and did you wait for another president to come along to give you another one???

And about pissing the world off, the terrorists should be pissing the world off...why is the focus on us?

Ray

It takes all sorts to make the world.

__________________


"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

jjacobs43

Well, thank you but I'm not a sheep of the democratic party. While most of the democratic party was voting to give Bush the authority to go to war I was not supporting it. I used some of that so called 'logic' you think I'm ignoring by not believing everything Bush tells us in his Statue of the Union addresses.

I've read every book from every former insider in this administration and there is just no way you can believe that Bush wasn't exagerating the intelligence. If you want to tell me it was sound strategy for other reasons then fine, but it was NOT because of WMD and it was NOT to free the people of Iraq from Hussein.



I honestly don't know if other countries are 'jealous' of what we have or not. But the hate they show is for other reasons. It sounds like to me they don't like Bush's attitude. And I can't blame them at all.


The U.S. has a lot to be proud of in it's history. I'm not saying everything we do has a negative effect. I just don't ignore the things that do have a negative effect and say screw off when these things are pointed out by others.


I'm not sure what you're getting at here. What I do know is that I make about 25% less now than I did when Clinton was president. But I don't really hold that against Bush.

Whether it's Bush's fault or not, I won't speculate on. But to sit there and tell me how great the economy is doing is a load of crap. A few jobs that were lost at the start of the recession are coming back but for much lower pay. That is not a strong recovery

Well I don't know. Is the focus on us? I, personally, focus on us because this is where I live and actually have a vote.

Confed999

I just wanted you to know that it does happen, and when it does there are people out there hunting them, and punishing them.
They're supposed to be private groups that aren't for any candidate in particular. They just put out ads to attack each other, IMHO, and I listen to very little of what either side of these 527s say, because I usually can't find proof.
You mean besides the equipment and live rounds found? Can you show me where anyone in the world, with any credibilty, said Iraq had no WMD? Kerry said they had WMD, and said he would have voted to go to Iraq even knowing what he knows today. Spain said they had WMD. France said they had WMD. Russia said they had WMD. Egypt said they had WMD. Jordan said they had WMD. I could do this all day...
Sorry, a bi-partisan commission says there are links. What about his links to Palesinian terrorists? What about his own state run terrorists? Saddam himself was a terrorist.
Then Spain should increase it's military budget and take over keeping the world in check. Saddam is the cause of the Iraq invasion, all he had to do was comply with the cease-fire, he didn't.
I've been to Europe and I can tell you this, some people care, others don't, it's the same there.
From your own words, you are not stating a fact, you're repeating what you heard from your friends.
What was dubious about the moral argument to invade, and liberate, Iraq? Was Saddam not starving, imprisoning, torturing, murdering, gassing and opressing the people of Iraq? I suppose that's all a lie too.
Bingo! LOL
No, but the other choice is Kerry, and he might as well be a socialist. We want to stay a superpower, and to protect our freedoms, we don't need socialists destroying that.
What was the lie?
Ummm... You do remember Saddam was given the chance to comply with the cease-fire right? He could have, and nobody would have gone anywhere. I do not support this move though, because I actually care about the Iraqis he was killing.
Freedom is not BS. Much of the world wishes it had the level of freedom we have, even some of western Europe.
Can't make everyone happy, and most of the world's countries are big enough to take care of themselves.
LOL Did you believe it when "Big Brother" told you the economy was doing good when Clinton was in office? How much experience do you really have with the economy to know either way? The best thing for the economy is for the government to stay out of it as much as possable. Government is not responsable for jobs.
I'm mad at the rest of the world for their support and appeasement of terrorists and tyrants, even now when they have a powerful ally to help them stop it instead.
Yeah, screw the Iraqis, they deserve to be slaves.
It was for both of those reasons, and many more. Have you been listening to them talk about Iraq for the last 2 decades? This didn't just start 2 years ago. According to Clarke, Clinton made removing Saddam policy, not GWB, and the Dems all said we should listen to Clarke.
It's growing at over 5%. Clinton did no better.
Ummm... If these aren't government jobs, what do you want the government to do? The government doesn't provide job security, it's your responsability to do the career planing, anything else would be communism.

__________________
No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

jjacobs43

The lie was that there was WMD. It doesn't matter that Clinton or other countries thought that. Bush had the evidence at hand and there was no conclusive evidence that Iraq had WMD in their posession. In fact, there was contradictory information. We were lied to in order to sell the case for war. There are way too many reliable sources that say this for it not to be true in my mind.

I never said that freedom is BS. I said that it's BS to think that freedom is the reason were hated by other countries. It's the arrogance of the United States that makes us hated.

Can't help it - by nature I want everybody to be happy.

I have enough experience with the economy to know when it's not going well. The statistics support what I can see. There is a small amount of job growth but the jobs are not nearly as high paying. And many economists feel like the little momentum we have is not a healthy burst at all. I also know that having a huge deficit is not good for the economy.

It's hard to argue this point without looking like a bad guy. But when all of this started we were supposed to be going after Osama. And economically, we were struggling as a country. To me, it just seemed like a bad idea. If we were actually in danger from Sadamm at the time then I can see it. But we weren't.


I wasn't make any claims about the government's role in our economy one way or the other. I'm just saying the economy is not all that great right now. It's a big stretch for Bush to be talking about how great the economy is doing right now.

Confed999

He had them, and since there was no conclusive evidence he had destroyed them, the logical conclusion would be...
Ever heard the phrase "Monday morning quarterback"?
We're free to be arrogant, just as they are free to be arrogant back and hate the US. I still don't see what's arrogant about hunting terrorists and tyrants.
Me too, but it isn't going to happen. So I say lets help those that need help, no matter how unhappy it makes the people that are allready doing fine.
Is your local government liberal or conservative? The economy in Florida is one of the tops in the nation, even with hurricanes, thanks to a conservative local government.
Actually, the flat statistics, unemployment and GDP growth, say things are going pretty much like they did in Clinton's first term.
As a percent of the current GDP, it isn't as big as it was durring Reagan's term, and it's nowhere near Lincolin's term. Another point that was made to me just the other day, we can give countries economic aid, or we can pay them intrest.
Now you're living in my world.
I'm willing to agree it was the wrong time, but I think it should have happened when the terms of the cease-fire expired, I believe that was 15 days after the Gulf War. Since nobody did anything for over a decade, I believe the US should have waited until Afghanistan was further along. We all have to remember though, Saddam was killing his people at a good rate, everyday more of them were gone forever, with their deaths wrongly blamed on us...
It's a big streach to say it's doing badly too.

jjacobs43

It's not Monday Morning quarterbacking if they were saying it before the war. Based on what I had read BEFORE the war, I never believed there were weapons to be found. When I tried to argue it, it was dismissed as bogus. Now, afterwards, there are a ton of sources who have outlined the lead up to war and it is pretty clear what happened. The Neocons trumped up the evidence to justify the invasion.

Confed999

From who, and how did they know he didn't have them? BTW, I never cared about the WMD argument, I did care about the humanitarian argument, the defence argument, and the terrorism argument. Still, to prove a lie, you have to show conclusively that not only did Saddam not have WMD, but that they knew he didn't.

jjacobs43

The first names that come to mind are Scott Ritter, Hans Blix, and Joseph Wilson. Two weapon inspectors and Joseph Wilson who investigated the so called attempted purchase of uranium for nuclear weapons. If there was solid evidence there was no need to tell us obvious BS like the uranium purchase. You combine that with the common knowledge of the Neocons goals and it is quite obvious that the evidence was trumped up in order to achieve that goal.

I remember arguing with a conservative friend of mine who agreed that Bush had probably lied but he still supported the idea of liberating the Iraqis. Which is a fine argument but not one that was presented to us as the reason for the war. I personally, can not accept the President of the United States lieing us into a war.

Confed999

None of those people said definitively that Iraq had no WMD. Hans said Iraq wasn't cooperating as they had agreed to.
There was uranium in Iraq, and they had been caught buying it before. I would have believed the intel too.
Actually, that was one of the reasons...
Saddam could have complied with the cease-fire and avoided all this, he restarted the war. Can you prove the lie, or is it just assumption?

jjacobs43

Scott Ritter -

Quote, March 9, 2000:
“... from a qualitative standpoint, Iraq has in fact been disarmed... The chemical, biological, nuclear and long-range ballistic missile programs that were a real threat in 1991 had, by 1998, been destroyed or rendered harmless.” [Boston Globe, 3/9/00]

Quote, October 19, 2001
“Under the most stringent on-site inspection regime in the history of arms control, Iraq's biological weapons programs were dismantled, destroyed or rendered harmless during the course of hundreds of no-notice inspections. The major biological weapons production facility—al Hakum, which was responsible for producing Iraq's anthrax—was blown up by high explosive charges and all its equipment destroyed. Other biological facilities met the same fate if it was found that they had, at any time, been used for research and development of biological weapons...No evidence of anthrax or any other biological agent was discovered.” [Guardian, 10/19/01]



Nobody in the know believed that intelligence. It was laughable according to Joesph Wilson who was assigned to investigate it. The Bush administration was warned not to include that information in any of his speeches because it was bogus but it somehow ended up in his State of the Union address anyway.


I'm sure it was mentioned but all I remember from back then was what a threat Iraq posed to us because of WMD.

Once again, I've heard it from Scott Ritter himself and from a couple of other sources after the war that the weapon inspectors were not allowed to complete there job because of the US. Not because of Saddam.

Confed999

That turned out to be false, durring the inspections. I still don't see how he had searched the 437,072 sq km that makes up Iraq, without cooperation. Saddam did have WMD, and if we do not find his disposal site soon there will be a massive ecological disaster.
"When the inspectors left in 1998, they left unaccounted for:
10 thousand litres of anthrax
a far reaching VX nerve agent programme
up to 6,500 chemical munitions
at least 80 tonnes of mustard gas, possibly more than ten times that amount
unquantifiable amounts of sarin, botulinum toxin and a host of other biological poisons
an entire Scud missile programme"
http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page3294.asp
Let me help you out a bit, when the word intelligence is used in this manner it means educated guess. Oh, and qualitative standpoint, means he still had some...
It's been discussed for about 16 years, the WMD argument was for the people who don't care about others.
All Saddam had to do was cooperate with the inspectors and the disarmament would have been completed in a matter of weeks. Remember South Africa's disarmament? Saddam had plenty of time to cooperate, over a decade in fact, he didn't, so it was because of Saddam.

jjacobs43

They were all old weapons that were useless a decade later. Scott Ritter explains it all in his book.


I'm not really sure what you mean by this. I'm talking about a specific piece of intelligence that was deemed bogus. The papers were obvious forgeries and the whole concept didn't make sense. When you use info like that as a selling point that tells me that you don't have real information to use. That's the only obvious conclusion I can come to.


Whatever.

There were other options. Colin Powell did everything he could to stop Bush from doing it but, unfortunately, Bush only listened to Cheney and the other Neocons who were hell bent on going after Saddam.

You should be upset about being lied to instead of defending the invasion. When a small group of people can effectively take over our country with their personal beliefs it's not a good thing. Yet, conservatives want to give him a free pass on