blackworx wrote:Airshark wrote:Is it an assumption by omission if I didn't say it, and you're making the assumption and ascribing it to me?
In that case please do tell. What are your thoughts on the matter?
Well, I prefer to place the responsibility for the Iraq war directly on the shoulders of the administration, and not some amorphous and ill-defined cabal of "military industrialists". Now, the administration is itself not just a single individual, but rather a group of people with divergent goals.
First of all, the man at the top is highly religious, fairly gullible, easily led, and really, really happy to be the President of the United States. For these reasons, I believe he really and truly believed he was doing the right thing at the time of the initial invasion - he simply excluded evidence that didn't fit his world view from his thinking. And that world view was basically "Saddam is a bastard, he MUST have had something to do with 9/11, and for sure he had weapons of mass destruction - I have the opportunity to do something really great, show that I'm a great President, Rushmore-quality, by finally fixing the Middle East, starting with Iraq." And so he sent in the military, and they kicked ass and took names, including Saddam's. But here's where the second part of those characteristics took over - his desire to remain President. Even a casual observer (and they don't come more casual than Bush) is bound to notice that Americans have never voted a war president out of office. While there were real reasons to believe that it
might be possible to salvage something good out of Iraq in December 2003, what pushed Dubya over the edge was the idea that he could call upon American's deep-seated disgust at leaving a war unwon to get him re-elected in 2004. In that light, the decision to stay after Saddam was captured was inevitable.
There's a lot of other guys that make up the administration, including but not limited to Dick Cheney. These guys are true believers, especially Cheney. They're willing to play fast and loose with the facts to carry out the policies that they are certain should be followed, and hang the Constitution and the sensibilities of those of us who aren't fond of fabricated evidence. I dismiss out of hand their connections with Halliburton, or the oil industry, etc, for a simple reason - while I am not prepared to say the Vice President of the United States cannot be bought, I am reasonably convinced he cannot be bought
cheaply. And Cheney's personal share of whatever profits are being made in Iraq are peanuts. No, I'm afraid ol' Dick really and truly believes that a tough foreign policy is best, no matter who else thinks otherwise.
One more thing: it's not obvious, even now, that a lot of the reasons Colin Powell enumerated before the start of the Iraq War weren't in fact legitimate, in accordance with the best intelligence available. For example, WMD. NOBODY seriously doubted that Saddam had
some, even if they weren't found by Hans Blix and his ilk. Note that even Blix told a tale of Iraqi deception and concealment. My personal gut feeling is that even
Saddam thought he had WMD, and was simply being deceived by his own people in the military and research communities in Iraq. When the time came to use them, he found out he was wrong - but think about it, isn't it fairly plausible that if you're a rational military commander, you know you can't use real WMD on the West because you'll get killed - but you'd also better not tell Saddam that, because you'll also be killed. Now imagine similar questions being put to the head of Iraq's nuclear program. Is he going to be the one to tell Saddam that no progress has been made in securing him a nuclear weapon?
The French intelligence services thought Saddam had WMD. The Russians thought Saddam had WMD. The British thought Saddam had WMD. And most of the CIA thought Saddam had WMD. It is entirely conceivable to me that the administration was sincere when they said that it was necessary to invade to remove WMD. Ditto for Iraq's support for 9/11. Same again for their support of terrorism. When they found out they were wrong, truly evil men would have fabricated WMD and claimed they found them - which was what I expected to happen. People
wanted to believe Saddam was involved with 9/11. People
wanted tto believe Iraq was a hotbed of terrorist training. And so it became very, very difficult for those who had provided those erroneous intelligence estimates, as well as the politicians who made the decisions, to avoid selling that belief even though they now knew it to be largely false.
To say that the Iraq war was started for the purpose of producing and expending munitions strikes me as a little naive. The reasons I think we went to war meet the test of Occam's Razor much more squarely than a giant economic conspiracy, especially since we already spend more on armaments than the rest of the world combined, even without Iraq. Since the invasion, oil production from the region has decreased, not increased - if the oil companies are behind it all, they sure are stupid. The military itself isn't doing all that well financially and recruitment-wise - are you suggesting that perhaps guys like Blackwater are responsible for getting this war started? Seems pretty unlikely to me. If it's the defense industry in general, well, they're pretty dumb too if they're responsible, because the Iraq war is being fought with low-tech, relatively inexpensive hardware (not surprising, since there's no advanced enemy to overcome) in vast quantities. The war is about logistics, not military hardware. Lockheed would have made much more money selling Raptors that'll never fight, General Dynamics and Newport News and Boeing and the rest would have done better selling Star Wars antimissile systems that'll never even be tested, ATGMs that will sit in warehouses, ATACMS that will never be deployed, and nuclear subs that have no opponents if they weren't draining the military budget (and the general fund) procuring plain old bullets and rifles. And nothing sours Americans on purchasing armaments more than when they don't work - and Al Qaeda, though now starting to show some serious cracks, is still around.
The simplest explanations are best. A whole bunch of people, including the President and the rest of the administration, simply made gigantic mistakes, and their personailities and character were such that it was much easier to try and cover their butts than admit they had made those mistakes.
Never ascribe to malice what can legitimately be explained by stupidity. I try to live my life by that idea. I've found that it's almost universally a more accurate way of looking at things than the reverse.
OK, THAT's what my thoughts are on this matter. Not making "assumptions by omission".
