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October 16, 2006
Bush Haters
As I watch all the negative news reports and efforts to discredit all the good we have accomplished, and continue too do, I can some what understand the polarization that it has created in our country. What I really find ridiculous is the amount of people that really believe our President and cabinet attacked their own country on 9/11. People really believe it.
I have talked to several people that believe President Bush just wants oil money and the ability to take away the constitutional rights of all Americans.They also believe that we have failed horrbly in Iraq and continue to do so. They love to say Iraq is now in a civil war.and we should just pull out. I always wait until they are finished simply because I find these people very intresting and want to understand where they are coming from.
After they feel they've proved their point I ask them how many people that were there, are are there now, have confimed what you believe, In other words how can you prove your point. It's almost always the same " Just look at all the news from there and the bodies that are being found". I then tell them that I was there for an entire year and was at the base of the Sunni triangle in central Iraq. I tell them that much of the stuff they see is from the efforts of the enemies of Iraq, Syria, Iran Jordan and the Takfiri. The hundreds of Iraqis that I spoke to know this and will tell us often. I tell them that fueds over land, waterways and other property often result in gunfire. The loss of any life is a tragedy but this is life in that entire region. It really is important for alot of the Bush haters to believe that none of what the press is reporting never would have happened had we not gone into Iraq.
The Bush haters all love to say that WMD's were never found, I remind them that thousands of chemical weapons were, in fact, found early in the liberation of Iraq, the press spent about two days reporting it. These were found twelve years after they are said to have been destroyed. I let them know that I also served at the chemical weapons depot in Utah after 9/11 and know that just one drop of this stuff the size of a pinhead can cause violent and painful death. The usual response, from the few that know this, is " Well these were all very old weapons and not really a threat ". People just can't give President Bush credit for anything.
I like asking these people for the names of anyone they know that was killed over there, Iraqi or American, they don't know anyone but believe they are doing all of us a favor by bad mouthing our Government and President, which is their right of course, but they really aren't helping.
I recently saw a young Army officer that lost his leg in combat that was trying to help disabled vets with gainful employment, he admits these vets could just get retirment and not work again, but this would only hurt our vets. He descrbed lots of things these wounded could do. he never brought in
poltics or the war. When asked about it he just said what the majority of us say, we are making real progress and are doing the right thing. The most important thing he said though was that he could only speak on what he saw in his province, he would not comment on something he didn't have specific knowledge of, yet the Bush haters and conspiracy theorist seem to have all the facts because they watch alot of TV and read the New York and Los Angeles papers.
I wonder why there is so much outrage with the " No blood for oil " people and yet nothing is ever mentioned about the blood lust of the press. It seems that so many of these people want only to find mangled American bodies to report on and never the hundreds of thousands of acts of kindness our soldiers do every day.
When the librals, and their usually Democrats, talk about the war mongers of the Republican party I remond them that Democrats were in power for WW2, Korea and Vietnam. I also remind them of Samalia and we are still in the Sinai and Bosnia, none of these places will bring the kind of stability that a stable and powerful Iraq, Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt. It's much bigger than a thirty second sound bite.
Comments
August 21 2006 - President George W. Bush: "Now, look, I -- part of the reason we went into Iraq: was -- the main reason we went into Iraq: at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction."
Posted by: Paul W. at October 23, 2006 12:30 PMThe price of freedom is eternal vigilance. - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
"If there is anything which it is the duty of the whole people to never entrust to any hands but their own - that thing is the preservation of their own liberties and institutions." Abraham Lincoln
It is the fist responsibility of every citizen to question authority.
Benjamin Franklin
"I tolerate with the utmost latitude the right of others to differ from me in opinion without imputing to them criminality." --Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804. ME 11:52
"Most codes extend their definitions of treason to acts not really against one's country. They do not distinguish between acts against the government, and acts against the oppressions of the government. The latter are virtues, yet have furnished more victims to the executioner than the former, because real treasons are rare; oppressions frequent. The unsuccessful strugglers against tyranny have been the chief martyrs of treason laws in all countries." --Thomas Jefferson: Report on Spanish Convention, 1792.
"Whenever our affairs go obviously wrong, the good sense of the people will interpose and set them to rights." --Thomas Jefferson to David Humphreys, 1789. ME 7:322
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But I repeat myself. - Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Posted by: Paul W. at October 25, 2006 11:47 AMYou have said:
The Bush haters all love to say that WMD's were never found, I remind them that thousands of chemical weapons were, in fact, found early in the liberation of Iraq, the press spent about two days reporting it. These were found twelve years after they are said to have been destroyed. I let them know that I also served at the chemical weapons depot in Utah after 9/11 and know that just one drop of this stuff the size of a pinhead can cause violent and painful death. The usual response, from the few that know this, is " Well these were all very old weapons and not really a threat ". People just can't give President Bush credit for anything.
I will use you own words in my argument:
"...how many people that were there, are are there now, have confimed what you believe, In other words how can you prove your point."
Now I will prove the contrary by quoting your president:
August 21 2006 - President George W. Bush: "Now, look, I -- part of the reason we went into Iraq: was -- the main reason we went into Iraq: at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction."
And again from George Bush:
"Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there,"
And from Dick Chaney:
"The headlines all say `no weapons of mass destruction stockpiled in Baghdad.' We already knew that."
And from Donald Rumsfeld:
"...it appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there."
These three people, if they had any reason or even the smallest sliver of evidence that there were significant WMDs in Iraq would be be touting that evidence but they are saying the exact opposite. So my question to you is: "Where are you getting your information from?" And don't just tell me that "I was there." Did you see the WMD with you own eyes? It seems as thought no one else has.
Bush and Cheney told us that Saddam had nukes. That he was rebuilding his nuclear weapons. By the March 2003, we knew this was false, you can't hide a giant nuclear infrastructure from knowledgeable weapons inspectors. Remember that we were required to tell them about any site we knew of. And zero of our tips turned up good. In Fiasco, Thomas Ricks interviews the Army officer in charge of securing the WMD at 943 sites suspected by the US. However, when he looked at the intelligence, he realized, the more he looked, the less there was. He realized not one site of the 943 at more than a 20% chance it might have weapons.
Chemical and biological weapons would not have been a great threat to the US. Considering that at any point, we could have just had B52's carpet bomb Iraq at any moment. It was said that Iraq could use these weapons for terrorism. Well Iraq has not committed terrorism against the US since 1994 when we bombed their intelligence headquarters. So it was said they could give the weapons to someone else. This was always incredibly dubious. Since the weapons would be traced back to Iraq and then we would carpetbomb them if we wished, it would have always been an incredibly stupid move on Saddam's part. The lesson of the Iraq war is not that we found old discard shells of chemical weapons. It's that there were no stockpiles, the weapons were not battle ready and not distributed to Iraqi forces, they were found in the corners of some warehouses as part of the millions of tons of armement strewn about Iraq. The lesson was that containment worked. Saddam did decided inspections and sanctions were too much of a hassle and got rid of WMD. Iraq was a much weaker country than it was in 1991. Saddam knew that. He represented an internal threat to Iraqis, but he was not a threat to the US and only a threat to his neighbors if we decided to stop the sanctions and stop the no fly zones. With a heavy US military presence in/above his country, he was very, very, very unlikely to invade Saudi Arabia.
It's not the "liberal" media's position that we didn't find the WMD. It's the official position of the US government and everyone who was charged with investigating this. The media just reported what they found. There's a reason that Kay, Duelfer, the CIA, the official US government position and finally Bush is that we didn't find the WMD. It's because the old outdated shells are not what we went to war for. "He may still have pre-1991 shells that we will find in some Iraqi armories" is not much a casus belli.
After we invaded Iraq we discovered who Saddam considered his enemies and threats to his regime. The US, was fourth on the list after, Iran, a coup by those around him, the Shiite south.
"I argued on the air during the war, that the coalition did not have enough troops to finish the conventional campaign against the Iraqi Army and simultaneously disperse to centers of regional and tribal power to establish the safe and secure environment needed to support reconstruction, says Gen. Meigs, a retired four star general, former commander U.S. forces in Europe who appeared on MSNBC during the war. "I think that position has been born out by events."
"We're in a civil war now; it's just that not everybody's joined in," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina. "The failure to understand that the civil war is already taking place, just not necessarily at the maximum level, means that our counter measures are inadequate and therefore dangerous to our long-term interest."
Some of the officers from the first generation of the volunteer Army, now mostly retired, are speaking out and influencing their active-duty colleagues. Retired Lieut. Gen. William Odom calls the Iraq War "the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States" and draws a grim parallel with the Vietnam War. He says that US strategy in Iraq, as in Vietnam, has served almost exclusively the interests of our enemies.
General Abizaid acknowledged the seriousness of the situation in Iraq. "I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it, in Baghdad in particular," he told the committee "And that if not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war."
Posted by: Paul W. at October 23, 2006 11:57 AM