Hussein draws red line around Baghdad...

Who in their right mind thought he didn't have any red pens?

You report that like it's fact.

Just thank God he didn't aim any of those Scuds at America and Britain, right?

Doesn't matter. He supposedly had NO chem or bio weapons at all. NONE.

That was always the point.

None of the scuds launched had chem or bio warheads...

Nope. And hopefully we can stop the NBC loaded ones before they hit us. With that ridiculous, unworkable anti-missile technology.

I like how devil has an inside line on what Iraq will and won't do.

What about the CBS loaded ones? You know, full of "Everybody Loves Raymond" and some shit.

And you do? Obviously everything is based on pure speculation.

The UN was useless to disarm Iraq. I can not stop coming to that point. I don't agree with how we went in, but the UN has absolutely no teeth and is unable to do anything about disarming anybody. It's a farce.

Oh yeah, that weren't supposed to have SCUD's either.

Whoops

I don't understand what the presence of the Scuds proves. Saddam is a liar? And? We knew that.

It proves what about the UN? Best as I can tell, it proves that the disarmament process was interrupted by an invasion.

On top of that, I'm baffled by what Tariq Aziz hoped to gain by going on TV and denying that Iraq has WMD just this morning if we're going to be hitting the "red line" around Baghdad in probably the next day or so.

Again, I can list a TON of countries that are led by lying and murdering administrations, including the United States. No one wants Hussein's regime to stay in power, but the point is that people are against an illegal, imperialist war.

The 12 year disarmament process was interrupted? As I've said before, Iraq was only admitting things as they were found, and the inspectors had no hope of finding everything. I agree with Powell's statement about Hussein only making concessions when the threat of force was inevitable. I think Chirac making a blanket statement that he absolutely would veto any resolution in which there was a 'drop dead' date for Hussein to comply was just as obstinant and wrong as Bush eventually making it clear that there was no amount of compliance that would satisfy him. It was necessary to force Hussein to accept what was placed on him 12 years ago, and it was necessary to show a united front in doing so. Maybe I'm a simpleton, but I believe that giving Hussein a set amount of time in which he had to come into compliance from the beginning would have avoided this whole thing.

Comparing Saddam to Hitler is offensive to survivors of the Holocaust.

No one said to just leave him alone. The point is that a nation CANNOT just invade any country it wants whenever it wants. Saddam posed NO IMMEDIATE THREAT to anybody, and war should have waited until there was the support of the entire international community.

In the meantime, if the US wanted to topple Saddam, they should have funded and supported insurgency groups (hey, what if they had done that after the first Gulf War instead of leaving these people out to hang?), which is something we have done again and again anyway in other nations.

And if we are going to topple all evil dictators, where do we stop? Do we plunge the world into unending war as America gets to decide which countries are good and which are evil? Why is Saudi Arabia good while Iraq is evil? Why is it OK for Turkey to kill Kurds but not for Iraq to do it?

Obviously not, but comparing any regional dictator who kills lots of people to the man who was trying to conquer the Earth and wipe out entire races of people really trivializes things.

You mean like Bush and Blair, who invade sovereign nations in direct violation of UN law and yet receive no penalty.

No, we use current workable Patriots to shoot those down. The ridiculous, workable anti-missile technology is for long-range ballistic missiles, which Iraq doesn't possess.

How is exactly that the UN - as an organization - was BLOCKING diplomacy?

And the logic that not actively disarming and deposing tyrants is supporting them means that every country in the world also supports tyrants, since we none of them actively deposes and disarms them ALL, the US included.

Of course, Hussein can't be trusted. He's deceitful in the extreme. But only his military and Iraqi civilians are paying the price.

Again, the UN does not need to depose and disarm all tyrants. They do need to be able to disarm the ones that pass specific resolutions stating they are doing just that. I still think Chirac should shoulder as much blame as anybody for his stance, but you don't often see "peace mongers" garnering much hate in the international community. He was pretty busy castrating the UN this entire time, though.

The resolution calls for "serious consequences." Nothing else. anything beyond that or carried out in the name of those words should be specifically defined and authorized by that same body.

That's what no one seems to realize. We claim this is long overdue and that we're "disarming" him, but this is not a UN action. We're not acting their name nor are we acting in their interests. So what UN resolutions he did or didn't break is irrelevant, since this war has nothing to do with them.

It's like trying to justify shooting someone because they passed a bad check to the bank you work for.

And I don't see how Chirac is to blame for any of this when Bush had already stated - WELL BEFOREHAND - that we would accept nothing but regime change. Even if Chirac said "I'll back anything the US does at that point" and we got another resolution authored and passed, we'd still invade anyway because we didn't care whether he disarmed to UN satisfaction or not.

Once the most powerful nation in the world says it's coming to exterminate your government whether you like it or not, it's irrelevant what the rest of the world does because they cannot stop or slow down what said powerful nation does from that point on.

The SCUD's are violation of the 91' peace treaty AND resolution 1441.

Saddam specifically claimed he didn't have any missles with the range capability of the SCUD in his report to the weapon's inspectors. This is not, as Devin claims, just proof that inspections weren't let to go long enough.

It is proof of undeniable Iraqi deceit. You can argue the points of peace all you want, and that is fine. But this point is pure logic and undeniable.

I think everybody realizes that, actually. What I've been saying is that in my opinion Powell stating that Hussein makes concessions only in the face of imminent force is correct. While I also agree with Powell that every country was well aware of what the 'serious consequences' were, the language is fuzzy and is certainly not airtight. So you have a dictator who for 12 years has not been disarming as he was instructed and who is not allowing weapons inspections for a great majority of that time as the UN had instructed.
I will reiterate that I don't agree with how we ended up in this war. I disagree that it has nothing to do with the UN. If the UN had the ability to enforce their resolution, the US would have had no chance to gather any international support for this action.

One of the two of us has our timelines confused, it could be me but I certainly don't remember events unfolding like that. Chirac has repeatedly stated he would veto any resolution that included a date by which military action would be triggered if Iraq was not complying. That is my problem with Chirac, there is a dictator who only backs down in the face of force and France is still unwilling to say that force, or hopefully only the threat of it, might be necessary for the UN to finish what they started. I believe that Germany and the others opposing force would have signed off on a 'drop-dead' date if it came to that, Chirac made it abundantly clear that this would never happen.

While I agree to some extent with this, the fact is there is no way the US would have gone in had the rest of the world been against it. I doubt the US would have gone in without Blair on their side, actually. The opinion of the world does matter. Hussein used the split of world opinion to his advantage to hamstring the UN. Bush used the split of world opinion to excuse marching into a foreign land unprovoked.
I still believe Chirac had the opportunity to keep either things from happening. Again, call me a simpleton or naive, but I think there was opportunity.

As I have covered here before, we can't act in the name of the peace treaty of '91 because once both parties agreed to it our congressional war powers specifically related to that conflict expired. That, too, is undeniable.

And no one here is disputing deceit on their part. But that doesn't enable us through any pre-existing law to do what we're doing, so we're circumventing the UN and violating international law in our own interests JUST AS MUCH as they are.

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That's utterly irrelevant.

Who is invading Iraq right now? The U.N. or "allied forces" led by the US.

So it has nothing to do with the UN. What they did or failed to do or could or could not have stopped this is just so much minutae. The US is initiating this action SOLELY because of our interests.

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Again, irrelevant. Even as we "pursued" peaceful disarmament and made exile offers and all sorts of other unrelated BS, Bush plainly said that disarmament means regime change. Quote. And he kept saying it over and over. This predated Chirac's statement and made it pointless since we had already determined that we were going to invade in any case, with the sole exception of their government dismantling itself - which would never happen.

You may have a problem with Chirac not agreeing to force when only the THREAT of force could compel Hussein to capitulate, but that is in no way responsible for the single-minded action the US took when we announced we would accept no disarmament WHILE THE ARMS INSPECTION PROCESS WAS STILL GOING ON.

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We've gone in unilateralleraly before and would have done so again in a heartbeat. World support was desired, but by no means required. Fact.

Even if he had agreed to another resolution beyond 1441 and fallen right in line with us - and this is the tricky part - our President had already stated that no disarmament - even complete disarmament - would suffice and that we'd invade in any case barring that their government self-destructed. And he did this as arms inspectors were in the country doing the work of the UN.

At that point - and it has been a good long while since Bush first said it - it doesn't matter what anyone associated with the UN, or anyone in the world for that matter, says or does because we're going in anyway. We completely circumvented the UN, so how could he stop it? No amount of agreement from the entirety of the UN could change the fact that we'd already stated that we were going in with guns blazing and we didn;t care who agreed or disagreed.

There is no way around that.

......and it was at that point that we started sending thousands of troops overseas, because as far as the Bush Administration was concerned, war was inevitable.

*edit (sent prematurely) - There's no way in hell Bush would've sent hundreds of thousands of military personnel halfway around the world and NOT flex his military muscle. This decision was made months ago, and even though no one expected Saddam to step down and exile himself, I'll bet they had a contingency propaganda plan to invade Iraq anyways.

Perfect analogy.

CT, do you care that the same description fits the United States with the exception of the last paragraph?

How is posing as civilians any less honorable than dropping tons and tons of bombs on soldiers?

I do think this antiquated notion of "honor" or fairness" in war needs to be done away with.

We complain about their deception in misrepresenting themselves to American troops even as we've had special forces agents behind enemy lines for MONTHS now misrepresenting themselves to Iraq and acting against them.

And there wouldn't be a single soldier on the ground if no civilians were present and we could simply bomb the nothingness out of their plot of land in unannounced bombing runs.

It's the pot calling the kettle black.

Or how we send fake weather reports to CNN and the Weather Channel.

The same way that ordinary Americans are now in mortal danger over their because of the sheer amount of spies and special agents that have infiltrated the country.

I respectfully disagree. Saying that it is 'irrelevant' doesn't necessarily make it so. If the UN had the teeth to follow through with their own resolution, Bush wouldn't have had the excuse ready to go barging in. This is my opinion, and it certainly has just as much validity as yours even if I'm not willing to completely discount your points as if a response isn't warranted.

My point, again, is that had the UN been able to actually follow through with what they started 12 years ago, the built-in excuse would have disappeared. If the UN could say with a straight face that they believed Iraq had complied with their resolution and had zero weapons they were not allowed, how would the US spin this assault? The US needed some international support, but especially needed support domestically. Sending our boys off to die in order to topple a dictator that has been proven to be disarmed and to have acted as the UN has instructed is an awful hard sell.

12 years, Mikah. The arms inspection was a joke and everybody knew it. If you find something that was supposedly wiped out, Hussein would admit it and then destroy it. If we'd only given the inspectors another 50 years or so they may have found all of the weapons. In the meantime, Bush has his built-in excuse. The scuds reinforce it even. If chemical weapons (God forbid) are used it will reinforce it even more, make it look even more like Bush is in the right. If the UN had the stones to finish what they started, if Chirac hadn't made it abundantly clear that he had no interest in the UN being able to enforce their own decisions, if, if, if.

Saying something is a fact doesn't make it so, just like saying something is irrelevant. How can you claim that it is a fact we would have gone in without any world support? I suppose I could say I would have nailed Ashley Judd if she hadn't married that race car driver then.

Hermann Goering (commander of the German Air Force and president of the Reichstag), at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals in 1946.

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I'm not discount the validity of your points. I'm just saying they're not valid to THIS DISCUSSION: Who was responsible for the US invading Iraq?

If it was an action that the US and her few allied countries decided upon - BY THEMSELVES - based on the actions of Iraq - and they acted - BY THEMSELVES - to enforce their decision, what does the UN or any of its countries who're not in that group of allies invading have to do with the price of tea in China?

THAT is what I'm saying. It's not an opinion. We're looking at elements in an equation, and the UN and/or France is not amongst those elements. We took them out of the equation when we said that no amount of disarmament - the only part of this process concerning them - would suffice. The arms inspections process was still going on. France hadn't drawn a line in the sand yet. Iraq had threatened no one. We had no evidence that they would.

Therefore, only we are responsible for the decision to invade and the ensuing war. no one else.

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We have no excuse because we're not acting in the name of the UN. This is like trying to link the UN with our decision to ban partial-birth abortions. That has nothing to do with them. Neither does this. Not even the President offers any excuses. He says we're invading out of will, not authority.

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And yet, he was easily granted war powers to attack Iraq BEFORE Resolution 1441 even passed. And now we're predominantly responsible for every mission/sortie and the general direction of the war there with MINIMAL "support" from Poland, Britain, and a few other nations. How is it that we NEEDED international support again?

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I'm not disputing this. I'm saying that we just got fed up, said "screw it," and waged war on our own - exactly what we're accusing others of doing.

Because we had American authority to do so, Bush SAID that he would do so, and America has done so in the past. The same criteria you and Bush are using to determine that 12 years was enough and that the inspections process wouldn't work.

The "fact" refers to the fact that we've done so before. It also means that if our President announces that we're going to do something on a global scale - such as invade with or without support - then we're going to do it. Tell me one instance in which this hasn't happened with an American president.

I'm sure we could argue whether or not the sun is going to come up tomorrow for sure or not, but based on all available evidence, I believe we can say that the idea that it will is a FACT that gets proven daily.

Same here. All available evidence points to the same conclusion.

And yet it's still in the name of UN1441 at the very core. In fact, there's the one in 1991 that this is a follow-up to.

I'm getting whiplash from trying to keep track of when you guys think that people should be listening to the UN.

If your country doesn't listen to the UN, I can't imagine why you would expect Iraq to listen. I mean, isn't it fucking stupid to break UN rules to punish someone for breaking UN rules?

It can't be "in the name of 1441" if we're not acting in the name of the UN anymore than buying a police car, putting on blue lights, speeding, and arresting people you personally think are criminals is "in the name of" being a cop.

And as I already noted, our legal obligations and privileges under the '91 treaty expired once both parties signed it and agreed to it. Whether Iraq lived up to the deal or not cannot empower us to invade AGAIN, since we legally agreed to cease hostilities. There's no provision there for automatically renewing hostilities if they are in breach of contract.

I'm not going to quote the whole thing because this has gotten too large to begin with. I'm not quite sure how lumping myself in with Bush makes any sense, as I've said from the beginning that I don't agree with how Bush has handled this or that I think we should be there. It's interesting, you are adamantly defending something as if I am arguing your point even though I haven't once defended the US going into Iraq. You've apparently lumped me in with others that you disagree with and can no longer distinguish us, so there isn't a whole lot of point in dragging this on too much.
I am just trying to point out the shortcomings of the UN which might have (hopefully, possibly) averted this whole mess to begin with. It is always possible that Bush would have gone in gangbusters anyhow, but I have a hard time seeing the US get behind a war with a disarmed dictator when they could barely muster enough support to go in against a dictator who has been obviously lying and hiding weapons for over a decade.

Stupid? Quite possibly, but the UN has proven to be useless in more than a few matters (including the idea that Bush could veto the UN from bringing him to trial for war crimes). Who knows, maybe our conspiracy theorist who thought this was all a ploy to have the UN self-destruct was right. As with any form of government, it must adapt to cover up it's weak spots or it will die prematurely. Right now it's weak spots seem fairly glaring.

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Actually, you lumped yourself in when you said:

"12 years, Mikah. The arms inspection was a joke and everybody knew it. If you find something that was supposedly wiped out, Hussein would admit it and then destroy it. If we'd only given the inspectors another 50 years or so they may have found all of the weapons. In the meantime, Bush has his built-in excuse. The scuds reinforce it even. If chemical weapons (God forbid) are used it will reinforce it even more, make it look even more like Bush is in the right. If the UN had the stones to finish what they started, if Chirac hadn't made it abundantly clear that he had no interest in the UN being able to enforce their own decisions, if, if, if."

EXACT same rationalization that every pro-war individual is using.

So if you're saying the exact same things, why should I not address you and pro-war individuals concurrently?

Your mistake is in thinking that the UN could've ended this by disarming Saddam.

First, we called the entire country "evil" and said we'd deal harshly with such countries. Then, we tried to prove Al-Queda links. We tried to show him possibly handing weapons to terrorists. We tried to say we were "liberating" people. Then after all of the lame, baseless excuses, we just gave up and said we're doing it because we wouldn't "allow the American people to be held hostage by the arsenal of a madman."

Finally, we said that disarmament MEANS REGIME CHANGE.

What does any of that have to do with the UN, its resolutions, or its inspectors?

How would disarming him have stopped ANY of this? These all have to do with supposed PAST Iraqi actions, not present or potential ones. We were judging them on things we thought they'd already done.

SO no amount of cooperation would've sufficed once we'd announced we were invading unless they dismantled their government. We couldn't renege at that point because it would "weaken" and "bring shame" on America as well as destroy George Bush politically.

THAT is why the UN's shortcoming or greatness, or even their non-existence would've had no bearing on this action. They were straw men meant to distract you from these other happenings. And it worked, apparently.

So I'm a war monger if I don't believe that the UN inspections were working? These things are independent of each other. I can disagree with how the UN handled things and disagree with how the US handled things. Feel free to lump me in with whoever it makes you feel comfortable. At the end of the day you'll be incorrect and I'll be none the worse for wear I suppose.

Absolutely nothing if you believe things would have played out the same. Obviously you do. I am not as fully confident of this alternate timeline as you are. Unfortunately, the argument is moot as we'll never find out for sure. In the meantime, you can throw around whatever 'facts' you see fit.

I'd rather not repeat myself over and over.

Yes, Mikah, the old red herring got me. Unfortunately I must be the simpleton that I initially had stated I might be. They pulled the wool over my eyes, I was completely unable to complete a rational independent thought on my own and the next thing you know I was waving my flag in the streets and throwing rocks at peaceniks. You have me pegged, I surrender.