Is there a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda?

Even if that's true, and I think the jury is very much out on that, don't you think that it's possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons?And if so, don't you think that's a bad habit, because it's pretty easy to head right to the next step - doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons?I'm no left-wing nut or anything. I've always been on the fence about Iraq. But if you can look at our conduct there - at the prosecution of this war and occupation - with no unease whatsoever, then you've either been bamboozled by the administration or are too credulous to have a legitimate opinion.There's absolutely nothing to be proud of here. We took down the bully on the block, yes, but we became the bully to do so.

He did, though. He let inspectors back into the country and provided documentation that he had disarmed. We played chicken, and he blinked. That was supposed to be it - that's how chicken works.But we found the pretense to pull the plug on inspections and go in anyway. What's Bush's plan, exactly? Do you even know?There's not a general on the ground who doesn't realize that there's only three options here:1) Change nothing and lose a war of attrition with disasterous consequences for the Iraqi people and our own foreign policy goals. What we're doing is not enough to quell the insurgency.
2) Commit new troops. Since we don't have any new troops, that means a draft, with disasterous political consequences for whoever proposes it.
3) Withdraw. Iraq will almost certainly be split into three ethnic nations.That's it. Which one of those is Bush's plan? Since you're so proud of his "consistency", I guess you think it's the first plan? What Bush is doing isn't working. That's because nobody in the Administration thought it would take this long. They thought we would be greeted as liberators, and that we would be out of there in six weeks.Why do I say that? Because that's what Administration officials said in the run-up to war.

The administration can't even decide if we're going to have elections everywhere, or just somewhere. As for training police:

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The documents show that of the nearly 90,000 currently in the police force, only 8,169 have had the full eight-week academy training. Another 46,176 are listed as "untrained," and it will be July 2006 before the administration reaches its new goal of a 135,000-strong, fully trained police force.

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Six Army battalions have had "initial training," while 57 National Guard battalions, 896 soldiers in each, are still being recruited or "awaiting equipment." Just eight Guard battalions have reached "initial (operating) capability," and the Pentagon acknowledged the Guard's performance has been "uneven."

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Training has yet to begin for the 4,800-man civil intervention force, which will help counter a deadly insurgency. And none of the 18,000 border enforcement guards have received any centralised training to date, despite earlier claims they had, according to Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.

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They estimated that 22,700 Iraqi personnel have received enough basic training to make them "minimally effective at their tasks," in contrast to the 100,000 figure cited by Bush.

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What do I have to show you to convince you that Bush is doing a poor job? Tell me, and I'll try to find it. Apparently polls show that only 2 percent of Iraqis think of us as liberators, and a vast, vast majority favor immediate withdrawl of all our forces.Draw your own conclusions, I guess. How do you think they feel about our plan for their future?

How quickly they forget... think back to Sept. 17th, 2002. Still fuzzy? Maybe this article will refresh your memory:

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Saddam lets UN back in
By Toby Harnden and Philip Sherwell
(Filed: 17/09/2002)

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Saddam Hussein has agreed unconditionally to allow United Nations weapons inspectors back into Iraq for the first time in four years, Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, said last night.

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In a dramatic announcement that raised hopes that war could be avoided, Mr Annan said: "I can confirm to you that I have received a letter from the Iraqi authorities conveying its decision to allow the return of inspectors without conditions to continue their work."

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Of course, the inspectors were pulled out in March 2003. Why? Because we were about to invade:

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U.N. pulls inspectors, all staff out of Iraq
They join a stream of foreigners fleeing the Middle East
Associated Press
Last Updated: March 17, 2003

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Baghdad, Iraq - The United Nations ordered its weapons inspectors out of Iraq on Monday, widening the stream of diplomats and foreign journalists heading for the exits before any shooting starts.

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This message has been edited by crashfrog, 10-04-2004 05:20 PM

Why am I reminded of that scene in Robocop?

Do you believe that Hussein's response was any different than ours would be, if Canada decided to mandate inspectors for our missing WMD's?I mean, there's a limit to how far you can take your argument. Did anyone expect Saddam to drop his pants and give inspectors free reign of the country? Is that something we would have expected anyone to do, including ourselves?It's not surprising that Hussein would have tried to play it in such a way as to maintain some clandestine weapons program; whether or not he actually had one, or was just told he had one, is up in the air. After all, the US only invades if you're working on WMD's; if you already have them, you're safe.At this point, from the lesson of our actions, getting WMD's as soon as possible is in the best interest of every country that doesn't already have them. That doesn't seem like a positive outcome to me.

I don't understand why that's a reasonable expectation for a man running a country through fear in a culture where men must save face.Saddam wouldn't have done anything different even if he had been weaponless (which he may very well have been), because he had a country to rule and face to save. He wouldn't have totally capitulated to the Great Satan under any circumstances, because he would have lost face. He would have done what it turns out he did do - capitulate, but defiantly. Yeah. Don't you think we would resist them, on principle, even if we had nothing to hide? Don't you think our national pride extends that far?

So, you think that there's less of a cultural sense of defiance, national pride, and insistence on self-rule in the Middle East? You think that in the Middle East, capitulation to superior force is recognized as right and proper?I don't understand the argument that you're making, here. We're not talking about aliens on Pluto, with inscrutable motivations and feelings. If you want to know how folks feel about national soveriegnty in the Middle East, you can just turn on your TV.I asked a simple question. Do you really think we know so little about people in the Middle East that it can't be answered?This message has been edited by crashfrog, 10-05-2004 11:33 PM

You could have fooled me. What else did you mean in your previous post? No, we're talking about everybody.We're talking about Hussein, his advisors, his people, the leaders of the neighboring nations in whose eyes he would have had to save face or appeared weak. Yes, we are. And what do meglomaniacs do? Anything, to save face and avoid the appearance of weakness or capitulation. That's one interpretation. Another, possibly simultaneous, is that he felt absolute capitulation would have embarassed him, cost him esteem and face.I'm not saying you're wrong, but I can understand why you think my interpretation isn't a possibility, as well. Not somewhere, Iraq. Iraq at all costs.Again, I'm not sure what we're arguing about. Can you lay out your points of contention for me?

No, his primary motviation was his big fuckin' ego. Or at the very least, his egomania was not a factor that could be ignored, and that it was highly unreasonable to expect him not to resist, even if he had nothing to hide.But instead, the adminstration styled his resistance as evidence of perfidy, which they used as justification for war. When in fact, Hussein did exactly what one would have expected a weaponless-but-defiant leader to do.