USAir757 said:
With all due respect, the original post of this thread was more or less an attack at the Bush administration.
[post="277339"][/post]
It was an attempt to hold the current administration to account for it's own policies, policies put in place well AFTER Bill Clinton left office. Yet your first response, indeed, your initial sentence, attempted to deflect the blame to Clinton.
Incidentally, if you think of an attempt to hold elected officials accountable for their actions, rather than their sexual pecadillos, as an "attack", perhaps democracy is in more danger than I thought.
It is difficult to wage a logical defense to the actions of the current president without so much as mentioning his predecessor of 8 years.
Despite the fact that the subject under discussion, the Iraq war, did not exist during those 8 years?
Consider your initial reply: "
You're probably right, the Clinton administration would have probably done a much better job with this war. ". How does that address the original issue? If the best defense you can come up with for the Bush Administration policies in Iraq is that "he isn't Clinton", our nation is in deeper trouble than I thought. Not much of a "logical defense" either.
My response post was more or less in jest, because I know President Clinton did not only spend his time in the way I suggested, but in my opinion fumbled the ball beyond recovery and the lives of 3,000+ Americans were lost as a result of it.
Yet, once again back to the actual subject, the Clinton Administration policy of isolating Iraq and working through the UN apparently worked, as the WMDs didn't exist and Iraq remained unable to attack it's neighbors, let alone the US.
If we are looking for people to blame, you will certainly admit that the actions of the Reagan Administration, in training and arming Osama Bin Laden in the first place, and those of the G.H.W. Bush Administration in abandoning Afghanistan after the Soviets/Russians pulled out and allowing the Taliban to come to power there had a far more direct effect on making 9/11 happen than anything Clinton did, or did not, do.
Consider the fact the the current Bush Administration paid over $60 million to the Taliban in May of 2001 in an attempt to reduce opium poppy production in Afghanistan, an attempt that failed as they took the money and planted the opium anyway. How much of that money subsequently found its way to Al Qaeda?
And that's going to make some people's blood boil, but deep in your hearts, you know it's true. Clinton's appointees to FBI and CIA were oblivious to terrorist threats...
Yet, Bush thought enough of one of those appointees, George Tenet, to keep him in the job for his entire first term.
... in fact, Clinton didn't even get a daily security briefing outside of his first six months in office.
Yet again, I'm unclear what this has to do with the Iraq war. Since we're bringing up people who had nothing to do with the current war in Iraq, when you consider that by all reports Reagan slept through most of his security briefings and had a flawed grasp of basic post-WWII geography, what's your point? Neither one of them, Reagan or Clinton, sat idle for over 7 minutes while our nation was under attack and neither one of them led us into the current quagmire in Iraq.
I still have reason to believe either action taken by congress, whether "voting for war" or "voting to give authorization for war", is an action of major consequence, and nobody in their elected office would hapazardly vote for either of these options. The administration correctly and constitutionally progressed our nation to where we stand today.
Actually, no, as there is no Constitutional precedent for Congress to delegate it's authority to declare, or wage, war. Just keep in mind, when a similar act known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution turned sour, Conservatives were among the first to take the Liberal President Johnson to task for abusing powers that rightfully belonged to Congress.
You know very well why we're not at war with Pakistan and/or North Korea. We've covered this at length.
Yet, if you apply the same standards that the Bush Administration has, (on a often-rotational basis), used to justify the invasion of Iraq, both nations rank higher than Iraq did. WMD posession and proliferation, direct rather than indirect support of terrorists, supression of liberties, etc., both Pakistan and North Korea are more direct and imminent threats to the US and its interests than Iraq.
Pakistan continues to harbor Al Qaeda forces that venture across the Afghan border to kill Americans on a frequest basis, and was the first nation to recognize the Taliban as the 'legitimate rulers of Iraq' and provided them direct support and aid while the Taliban were allowing Afghanistan to be used as an Al Qaeda training ground, a training ground that served for the majority of the 9/11 terrorists.
Rather than remaining the pariah of the muslim world that it was under Saddam, the Iraq that Bush has created will serve as yet another hotbed of Islamic radicalism, a flash point for both the Sunnis and the Shiites, and a training ground for terrorists for generations to come. No amount of "Mission Accomplished" banners or defiant sound bites will change that, nor will they bring back the troops we've lost there - troops we could have used in the REAL war on Al Qaeda. When the men and women of our armed forces put their lives on the line for our nation, we owe it to them not to waste their sacrifice to advance ANY President's political agenda. We certainly owe it to them to hold the leaders that made their sacrifice necessary accountable for their actions, rather trying to deflect the blame for those decisions.