OPEN THREAD: were we wrong?

Everything John Kerry warned us in 2004 about the war in Iraq has come true. ~ Ed Shultz

Comments

[sparky]

No, we were'nt wrong, except for maybe things are even worse than we predicted. But that isnt something I happy to be right about.

[sparky]

"This is a good analysis" from the Washington Post blogger William Arkin

[Marsha]

How could anyone be surprised at the outcome of the war?

During the weeks before the war there was so much discussion. If you listened to all those opinions it was clear that it would never work.

Logistically, psychologically, philosophically it cannot work.

It doesn't take genius to see this. You just have to take off your Republican glasses.

[joanie]

Well said, Marsha.

So, so many intelligent and informed people were saying no. KIRO hosts (Jenko for one), magazines and journals, CSpan, a few (not many) other TV outlets. I argued with so many people who just were not informed but listening only to this administration and believing every single word.

They quit thinking.

Kerry voted for the war. Kucinich did not. Kerry should have known better. And Dean campaigned more vociferously than Kerry against the war. I guess I don't really remember much of what Kerry said . . . come to think of it.

I do remember telling my friend at school who was a precinct chairman that Kerry better define himself pretty soon or he wasn't going to win; but, I don't think he ever did define himself.

["progressive" idiot]

Simply pointing out that a path is wrong is not the same as offering solutions. Of course, if John Kerry had won the election Muslim radicals would have immediately stopped their violence, Palestinians and Israelis would be living in peace, we would all be driving hydrogen cars, North Korea would capitulate to the world's demands, Iran would stop its anti-Semitic rantings and open its own WWII holocaust museum.

If only...

[sparky]

You left out how it's Bill Clinton's fault.

Sorry, Idiot, but when Jack Murtha, and others suggested some solutions, they were branded as hating America, wanting the terrorists to win, blah blah BLAH. So, either you are open to hearing some solutions, or you just want to bitch. When Poppy Bush has to send in James Baker to clean up yet another of Jr's disasters, I believe the tide has turned...even though Jr wont listen.
With Bushie's ratings at 33% this morning, and Republican candidates unwilling to even put that they ARE Republicans on their campaign ads, apparently Americans are ready to listen to, and debate about some of those things that Murtha said months ago.

[joanie]

"idiot" said: Simply pointing out that a path is wrong is not the same as offering solutions.

Where's yours?

if only . . .

[joanie]

According to Political Buzz, Liebermann has a 17 point lead over Lamont. Republicans must be crossing over and it is too bad because Schlesinger, the other republican candidate, is a real republican.

[sparky]

Joanie..go read the lead story on Kos right now...read the loooooong list of White House contributors to Liebermann's campaign.
Party over country, you know.

[joanie]

Just did . . . Lieberman was so smug during that debate. He was unwatchable.

Thom Harmann is on CSpan right now . . . he looks younger than I expected.

[blathering michael]

Solutions? I get so tired of hearing all the talk about the Democrats having no solutions. First of all there are plans and policies offered by Democrats Kerry is one of them) that will never see the light of day in the well of the Senate because they're in the minority. (Even Republicans- McCain comes to mind- in Congress's plans and oversights have been ignored by the idiot Prez and his ego-corrupted SecDef). But most importantly. THERE'S NO EASY SOLUTION TO THIS UNCONSCIONABLE MISTAKE! To say that Democrats could or should be able to come up with a soundbite solution like Bush's non-policy "Stay the course," is disengenuous and unfair. Neither George Bush, nor the rest of the King's men have any idea how to win this foolish war, or even how to mitigate the senseless slaughter resulting from their grave miscalculations. It'll take years and many more lives to unravel us out of this mess. It's another bad war and we've already lost it.

[mark]

The irony is that Bush could have pulled it off. After reading a few books, it is painfully obvious he pitched the existing plan (1006-98, formed by CentCom during Clinton) and had a group of idealistic NeoCons gin up a shoestring mess. When Paul Bremer dissolved the Iraqi army- the cats were tossed out of the bag for good, as were any chance we had of getting out with our whiskers unsinged. MCCain has it right- it will take 200,00 guys ten years to damp things down enough to fix this.

[mark]

two hundred thousand, not 20,000...

[joanie]

And are you suggesting that we have 200,000 troops to send? Would McCain be able to do that?

[joanie]

Oh, haven't you heard, Michael, that their new strategy is adapt to win. Hmmm. . . can't wait to hear their tactics: alter this; change that; adjust over here and modify in the middle.

I do agree and was entirely supportive of Kerry's most recent plan that was voted down even by the timid Democrats.

BTW, if you haven't read David Sirota's blog on Steny Hoyer you should. Apparently, he has subverted Democrats in Congress in an attempt to undermine Nancy Pelosi. His goal is to become Speaker himself. Several links and a good read - if you're interested.

[mark]

well, Tuesday we supposedly hit 300 million people here, and considering in WWII we had a standing army of 6 million with half of today's population- it is easily doable: with a draft. Question is, do we want/need to? I was against this whole thing to start, but jr. has now wrecked the car- so now we need to decide whether to fix it or scrap it.

[Oly]

A substantial percentage of those on the left who opposed the invasion of Iraq back in 2003 did so not because they believed it was doomed to fail but because it was to be initiated by a GOP president rather than a Democratic one. The possible success or failure of the enterprise - and certainly any concerns about the military assets which might be diverted from the hunt for Bin Laden - weighed far less in their reasoning than the imperatives of the cheap partisanship which usually fuels their decisions. Indeed, a good number of them may well have been uneasy at the thought that the invasion might succeed (and thereby benefit the Republicans at the next election).

Now those same people pretend that their opposition has only ever been based on the fear of a Vietnam-style debacle. Who do they think they are fooling?

(Before some of you freak out, please recall that I said "a substantial percentage", not "all" or "a majority". If you know in your heart that you have always opposed the invasion for honorable and logic-based reasons having little or nothing to do with cynical political calculation, rest assured that you are exempt from my criticism.)

I will admit that I supported the invasion three years ago, not out of any love for George Bush but because I believed we owed it to the people of Iraq to remove the cancerous family which continued to enslave them after 1991. And I trusted Rumsfeld and the generals to submit a vastly wiser set of plans than that which McNamara's crew presented LBJ. I figured that everyone in the White House and State and DoD had so thoroughly learned the clear lessons of Vietnam that there was no danger of repeating the mistakes of that earlier era.

Needless to say, my trust proved to be horribly misplaced.

[coochie mama]

I opposed the war from the beginning for two reasons.

1) I felt Afganistan was justified, but was never conviced that Saddam had anything to do with 911, which was the rationale put forth at the time by Bush & Co.

2) It was pretty clear to me that the intent of bin Laden on 911 was to provoke our leader(s) into a retalitory quagmire...their stated goal is to ruin our economy --"bleed the beast".

Cowboy fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

[sparky]

So, Oly, you are saying that a "substantial portion" of the millions of people around the globe who protested, marched in the streets because they were against the war wouldnt have been there if the President had been a Democrat?

The original premise for going to war was that Saddam had WMDs....did you believe Bush when he said that?

[joanie]

Oly says: A substantial percentage of those on the left who opposed the invasion of Iraq back in 2003 did so not because they believed it was doomed to fail but because it was to be initiated by a GOP president rather than a Democratic one . . .

Proof please.

As a liberal who listened to lots of people who were informed about Iraq, I was against the war. Being against it had nothing to do with Viet Nam and nothing to do with party. In my case, it was information, common sense and a desire not to wage preemtive war.

I'm curious, Oly, what did you think shock and awe would be? Blank bombs?

[chris]

All one has to do is read PNAC...

[Rick]

"I believed we owed it to the people of Iraq to remove the cancerous family which continued to enslave them after 1991"
Oly, do you realize that by what ever number you care to use, more Iraqi's have been killed in this messy exercise than all the people killed by Saddam the butcher? Most of these dead people were not terrorists or dead-enders or alqeada-types but in the wrong place at the wrong time or just wanted the "occupiers" out of their country.
Bush says we are trying to change the hearts and minds of people in the middle east,but when you kill an innocent person all you do is harden the hearts and minds of these people.
What a monstrous mess George has made for all of us...

[Right Wing Willie]

Bush has created a new generation of terrorists. God help us all.

I am not voting for anyone in two weeks. I am sitting this one out.

[joanie]

Iraq was the most secular country in the Middle East. Women had more rights there than anywhere else. The level of education was high. Saddam was holding together a tribal country. And Saddam was keeping terrorists out - he had no time for Bin Laden and other religious terrorists. (There were some terrorists in the northern? northeastern? reaches of the country but they were pretty much out of his realm.) He would share his country with no one.

Not a compliment for Saddam at all. Just a fact. No administration thought of him as a good person nor a good leader. No one trusted him. But, the world is full of equally if not worse leaders. We certainly used him when we needed him.

Finally, Oly, you say you trusted the generals and Rumsfeld. How could you trust anybody when it was clear that the existence of WMDs was questionable from the very beginning? When our coalition was so small? When our major allies - except for GB - wanted nothing to do with it? And when our job in Afghanistan was not completed and Bin Laden had not been caught? What were you thinking?

And I want to know why we don't hear more about the resort destination being built in Iraq called a US base.

I'm curious, Oly. What did you know about Iraq before Bush and Co. decided they should be a democracy?

[FREMONT]

Joans, I think Turkey would tie with Iraq as the most secular Middle Eastern country...and amen to your Saddam comment that we used him when we needed him!
Anyway, StephanhopouAlos interviewed Bush and Kerry this morning: full transcripts here Kerry reiterates your thoughts, Bla'M, but says the solution is not not military. ""Either they resolve the political differences within this year because they want to, or they don't want to. If they don't want to, there's nothing American troops can do," he said.

Let's hear from some more Oly's who

[FREMONT]

oBla'M' of ops....Let's hear from some more defnders who aren't members of Bla'M's choir...

[FREMONT]

Oops again...(I'm having a hard time Mac-ing)

[Oly]

Thanks for the feedback, folks.

Why did I support the invasion? Because I wanted Saddam out of power, and preferably dead. The WMD argument didn't mean anything to me, nor did the lack of evidence connecting Saddam and 9/11. Had neither reason been offered by the Bush crowd, my opinion wouldn't have changed. And I figured that we could remove the Baathists from Baghdad as swiftly as we removed the Taliban from Kabul, and things would be okay. Am I saying that I was right to feel that way three years ago? No, I'm not. Am I saying that I support our continuing involvement in Iraq? Hardly. I am all for getting the hell out of the place as soon as humanly possible. (Got that, Rick?)

Why did I trust the Bush team at the time? Because I couldn't believe that they would end up doing a Vietnam on us all over again. I thought the lessons of Nam had been learned by everyone. I thought nobody running this country could be so stupid as to make the same idiotic mistakes that were made forty years ago. I was wrong - as wrong as a guy can get.

As for the WMD issue, plenty of prominent Democrats assumed in 2002 and even 2003 that Saddam had them, and they thought there might even prove to be ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Some of them can honestly admit today that they were deceived by horrendously bad intelligence; others, who are not quite so honest, now pretend that they never accepted the faulty intel in the first place. I respect the first group alot more than I do the second.

And by "substantial percentage" I was CLEARLY referring only to left-of-center Americans, not to war opponents worldwide. (Got that, Sparky?) The hundreds of millions of non-Americans who opposed the invasion had reasons of their own, some of which were legitimate and some of which were not.

The responses of some of you to my first post border on the hysterical. Please reread the third paragraph of that post - the one in parentheses. It says that if you don't fit the profile of the politically-motivated war opponent, my criticism is not directed at you.

But there are some among you who process everything through filters of political and ideological bias, and I don't believe that your true motives three years ago were anything more exalted than the instinct to oppose the standard-bearer of a political movement which is the sworn enemy of your own. I had this exact debate with rightwingers in the late '90s who ranted about Clinton's intervention in the Balkans; I told them that if Bob Dole were the commander-in-chief and making the same plans, they would be singing a far different tune.

Here's what irritates me about some of you: You will not admit - at least not to BlatherWatch - to being mistaken about anything, ever. It's like you think your very lives depend on always being regarded as 100 percent correct about everything. That mentality pervades - indeed drenches - every online political debate group in Internetland, and it is the chief reason I normally avoid such places. (It's also one reason I stay away from hardcore ideologues; they too will never admit error.)

I was wrong about Iraq, and I'm man enough to admit as much. But I am skeptical about the pose adopted by some of you who carry on as if you saw this catastrophe coming ages ago, and who claim sanctimoniously that your only consideration back then was a nonpartisan, rigorously objective worry about how the invasion might harm America in the end. Too many of you eat, sleep, and breathe political bias for me to buy that.

[joanie]

Thanks, Fremont. I may have missed more than one . . .

Oly, such a sweeping statement about liberals should be supported. I'm curious about it. You haven't supported it but only repeated it.

But there are some among you who process everything through filters of political and ideological bias, and I don't believe. . .

In your first post, you didn't say "some." You said "a substantial percentage." Probably "some" on both sides. But who are you to tell anybody what is in their mind? You can believe what you want . . . but your opinion is just that. It is not fact.

I was not wrong about Iraq so have nothing to regret nor apologize for. Perhaps you thought so much of yourself during the runup to the war that you "just knew" what was right just as you now think you "just know" what we are all thinking and believing. When you say "plenty of Democrats assumed . . . " then I respond that they should have known better because the information was out there. Just as it was for you. And I don't believe in war based on assumptions. I hope you don't either.

I appreciate your honesty in declaring that you supported the war just to eliminate a regime. But god help us if we get into the habit of starting wars everytime we dislike an abhorrent leader.

Do you think our overthrow of Mossedegh, a democratically elected leader, to install the Shah was okay? Do you think we had a right to support Pinochet in his overthrow of Allende, another democratically elected President?

Your superiority will continue to isolate you for no one will ever measure up to your perceived higher intellect. I'm sorry about that because your opinions could be very interesting if they weren't so righteous.

BTW, one of the things that does continue to bother me about your post is the lack of any substantive support for your opinions.

[joanie]

This is a must-read for Ann Coulter admirers. (And for those who aren't.)

[sparky]

Oly,,i understand your comments a little better now, although I still think you use the broad brush where I would not. I cant wrap my brain around the idea that a war started by one party is more acceptable than one that is started by another...but maybe that is just me. And I think that people ( public not politicians) who supported the war MAYBE got their information from fewer sources than those of us who didnt support the war. I remember hearing a lot of people who had been in Iraq who said there were no weapons, and I remember Bush being hell-bent on going to war regardless of what anyone else thought. I could not understand at the time how that could go unchallenged.
Life for the majority of Iraqis is far worse today that it was under Saddam. And I will never forget that picture of Rumsfield shaking hands with Saddam when Reagan wanted to use him against Iran.

[joanie]

Sparky is a lot kinder than I am, Oly. I think she said it well.

Have to admit, whenever I see your name posted, I know I'm in for an interesting read.

[Oly]

People here make "sweeping statements" about conservatives all the time. (So do I, for that matter.) I don't see you bleating about THAT.

What is this "your superiority" and "perceived higher intellect" shit? This one-note tune of yours really wears thin after awhile. Or are you simply projecting here? I don't claim to be smarter than anybody - I only claim to be less burdened by an ideological ball and chain than you and your buds here are. If I support or oppose something, it isn't because I'm told by some social-movement guru or propagandist, either from the left or the right, to support or oppose it.

(I might add that BlaM is not one of those propagandists; he is simply a razor-sharp chronicler - biased, to be sure, but by no means blind.)

And excuse me but what you think of my opinions concerns me damn near about as much as what Fidel Castro thinks about the color of my car.

You are not only a blind ideologue of the worst sort but an intensely annoying woman, and I have no desire to communicate further with you beyond perhaps quoting Dan Aykroyd's standard response to Jane Curtin's Weekend Update commentaries thirty years ago. (Perhaps I'll just be polite and use an acronym: JYIS.) No doubt you will continue to reply to my posts, being the serial bigmouth that you are, but I don't plan to reciprocate. Feel free to pretend that this means I have conceded the field of truth to you, or whatever other fantasy you choose to comfort yourself with.

[Oly]

For the record, the above rant was not directed at Sparky.

[joanie]

Another interesting read, Oly! Still looking for some substance but still interesting.

For the record, I'll continue to read you and post responses. And, no, I won't consider that you've conceded. I'm not so sensitive nor insensitive as all that. :)

PS: Sorry you don't like me anymore.

[Steve]

Oly;

You are not only a blind ideologue of the worst sort but an intensely annoying woman, and I have no desire to communicate further with you

Great comments.

I used to think Joan had possibilities of sanity-then she posted that she felt clinton had character. Nuff said.
I don't need to be on this website any longer.

Good luck.

[umo]

Bill Clinton has character...if character is the new term for a "boner".

[joanie]

Goldy - fabulous show! It was engrossing and interesting. No complaints for once.

Hope you have Geov on more often. And Phillip Gold should be mandatory listening for Oly and Steve. Imagine, a lifelong Republican voting a straight Democratic ticket. And I really felt Darcy was on her game and well spoken. Peter Goldmark is a winner - no doubt!

Thanks for a fast-moving and informative three hours. I didn't want to miss a minute!

[Other Steve]

I to thought Joanie was master debater until she said our hero's who just wanted to serve their country and died fighting for us were just some sort of dead meat hanging on a butchers hook.

[Other Steve]

I'm sorry I forgot the

"I think I'm gonna Baaarff"

You need a little of this to keep thier attention.

[joanie]

Gee, you guys. I'm feeling special tonight.

Nightie night. :)

[KS]

Goldmark and Burner - pathetic. Can't the Democrats do better ? Neither of them are in my district, but I'd be surprised if either of them can win and if they do, I'll eat some bar BQ'ed crow...

[rosco]

Answer: no the dems can't do better. Because they are spineless and because the election system is rigged so that only folks who have and/or can raise millions of dollars can win.

If you want better candidates support election reforms like:
Maine style finance reform
Instant Runoff or other types of Proportional Representation. The top two primary format might be a good start here in WA.

[Melissa Maroff]

"Obama is too good- he'd better look out- liberals who look as good as he does have gotten shot in this country."

Or he can always resort to shooting ducks. Almost worked for Kerry...he pulled in some swing votes.