Obama was wrong?

Now before anyone jumps on me here I would just like to point something out that has been on my mind. Believe me I do not want to start a fight or offend anyone here but would just like to start a civil debate on a very important topic. Hear me out please.

After Sept 11th 2001 our CIA and almost every other major intelligence agency in the world including Russia, Great Britian and even China all said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and possible ties to Osama BinLaden right. So for OBAMA to say that if he were a United States Senator he would have voted AGAINST useing force to get rid of Saddam is alarming to me. So in the future if he is elected President and he gets intell that says there is a high risk of an unstable dictator somewhere in the world who hates the USA and that dictator has ties to terrorist organizations and EVERY intelligence agency in the world tells him that the United States is at risk, that he will just sit there and do nothing? My friends that to me sounds like someone I would not trust with keeping my family safe. Now I know that the intell was wrong but at the time everyone was saying it wasn't. How could he say he would have voted NO after we were hit on 911. Didn't he think the threat was real. Again let's look at the facts here. Every intelligence agency in the world said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and wanted to give those weapons to people who would have made 911 look small! If he becomes President and the CIA tells him that a country or terrorist organization has the possible means to obtain weapons of mass destruction from a dictaor that he will just sit by and not do anything about it? How could you say you would have voted NO. I don't ge it. Even Biden voted for it.

If so, be like Freddie C. I knew Freddie C., he was a friend of mine...And you sir are no Freddie C.



Go read up on "Curveball" sometime. Thank him for that intel. Also, why would Saddam help Bin Laden? Al Qaeda wanted to overthrow Hussein's regime, so yeah Saddam may hate America, Bin Laden may hate America, but its like Iraq/Iran (go read that up too), they HATE each other more than their shared adversary.

So again, why would Saddam, if he had nukes/WMDs, had given Al Qaeda WMDs that could be deployed on his own government?



Why would it? He argued that because Iraq hadn't attacked anyone in Israel, Turkey, Arab allies, or much less America...go read up on Pat Buchanan. You know, that Conservative who run for President in Republican primaries a few times. Anyway, he himself was against the Iraq War as well, because as he put it against NeoCon thinking that Saddam was an imminent threat: "Why would he stupid enough to step on Superman's cape?"



Ever heard of a run-on sentence?

Anyway, there is no such thing as an "unstable dictator." Only such people that rule absolutely must have consolidated their power totally, and thus stable.

But in point to your question, I posted a report days back of how Israel asked President Bush back in the Spring for the greenlight to bomb the known/possible sites of nuclear development in Iran, and Bush's Answer?

NO

So what does that tell you if YOUR President from YOUR party, who already pre-empted strike over intelligence, gave the thumbs down to Israel?



Pfft, please. If we survived the goddamn Cold War, and if you study all 46 years of it, every President will go hawkish if the situation goes for it. Yes, even liberals Kennedy and Johnson. For example, overthrowing the regimes in Iraq and South Vietnam.

Oh and that thing called the Cuban Missile Crisis, where JFK was willing to take the world into World War 3 if the Soviets didn't withdraw.



WRONG. There were people who questioned that intelligence, like a few of those UN Weapons Inspectors, and in fact Colin Powell (our Secretary of State at the time) reportedly said to an aide after his United Nations presentation: "Wouldn't it be something if we scour all over that place and find not one single WMD?"

In fact, in interrogation, Saddam reportedly told his American captors that his regime elaborated or helped exaggerate, the WMD capabilities of his regime so that the West would be "impressed/scared" by such a strength.

But there was people who spoke out at the time, who were either ignored, or told to fuck off because they weren't being "patriotic."





Let's see....those 9/11 hijackers were all Al Qaeda, which was based from Afghanistan, and most were Saudi Arabian nationals.

Yeah, I see the connection to Iraq.



Are you quoting facts or TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE?



Then hardball diplomacy will come into play, and if we must, force will be implemented.

You shouldn't take politics outside and inside offices of power so literally. Clinton bitched at Bush Sr. for doing nothing after the Chinese stomped those protestors at Tietnamen Square...and what did Clinton do in office? Enhanced our financial relationship with that same government.

But more than anything else....you really think McCain would make you feel anymore safe than Obama?






Why would he? Do tell me.

I suggest this is moved to the Campaign thread before we have 100 other political threads started.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhHODhTIvgo

"Again let's look at the facts here."

What are the facts? No WMD were found - FACT. All that "intelligence" stuff is politized bullshit. Obama or McCain, Flip a coin. They are both playing the politics game.

Dude. Haha, yes!

This, too, is crap.

During a "discourse", it's customary to back up your reasons why you feel something may be "crap" or not. Otherwise, the comment is pointless...

(And no, I haven't even read it. I'm just saying... )

A topic like this deserves a reply only as intelligent as the original post.

Nah, that's a self-defeatist approach. Using facts and a hammer does the job much better.

You clearly are unfamiliar with the way this board works.

Smitty,

committing a nation to war is probably the most serious decision a President can make. Wrong is wrong. The WMDs were not there. Now, we are stuck in Iraq and if McCain is elected President he will keep us there. It is only the presence of US troops that is keeping a lid on Iraqi violence.

So lowering yourself to another's level makes more points??

Well, it certainly lowers the mods down to my level.

Yes, I know I am too smart for you.

You think so?

Iam being honest when I say I just wanted a civil debate. Sorry I even posted here. SC ,JEFF and a few others here, you guys are awesome I will always remember the good times I have had here on the boards .........Don Smitty [idiot] ......... signing off.

Uh oh.

*Cue the Serta Sheep*

Don Smitty, for the most part, most of the people here are willing to have a civil debate. Don't let the minority few here that have absolutely nothing intelligent or worthwhile to reply make you to believe that the majority here also do not.

Over the years spent here on these boards I've found that a large majority of the members here do enjoy discussing and debating the issues that are brought up here. And most will do so by respectufully giving their opinions as to why they may or may not disagree with you. Unfortunately there are those few here who just cannot seem to ever get involved in a discussion or a debate without making a personal attack of some sort or without resorting to totally nonsensical replies.

Smitty, Obama was wrong.

"If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; . . . If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same . . . Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it." Kipling.

Hey pizzaboy, what happened to the post that you originally made agreeing that Smitty made some valid points?

Nice catch, DC. I just thought it was too vague. I'm working on it right now.

If you're going to contest your intelligence, try using sentences that aren't fragments.

Let's pretend Smitty's initial argument was skillfully crafted.

A rebuttal: OBAMA WAS RIGHT!

Oh, yeah, it's just oozing in banality.

Take it off the boards.

If that's not proper English, fuck it. Just do it.

Indeed; a very scholarly approach.

Now where does said fucking occur?

Right here... at your suspension.

Enjoy your vacation.

No, seriously, fucking--your place or mine? My apartment is being fumigated, but I love to pass out during a decent climax. There's nothing better.

Fuck cock shit.

...And one more fuck for the road.

Byez.

Dude... really? Is puberty that rough these days?

Not sure how much SC gave you, but hopefully it'll help...

How are you JG?

Speaking of puberty... Hey, SB, 'sup!

Sorry, tho, almost time to crash... a lot of personal shit the past couple weeks, and I'm freakin' exhausted from it.

ok, 'night JG

I see.

What do you see?

Do you see what I see?

I looked under Jordan and what did I see

what did you see?

Mrs. Jordan


(sung to the tune of Swing low sweet chariots, the part talking about Jordan)

Way up in the sky little lamb
Do you see what I see
A star, a star
Dancing in the night
With a tail as big as a kite

There's only one sweet chariot, my friend. ...said the little lamb to the shepherd boy.

Do you hear what I hear
Ringing through the sky Shepard boy
Do you hear what I hear
A song, a song
High above the tree
With a voice as big as the sea

I see.

You got it. Google is your friend, too?

Why don't you just reply to all the points RRA made as counterarguments to your statement; instead of runnning away when someone posts things in your thread that have nothing to do with the topic being discussed?? Ignoring those posts and just replying to the (mostly valid) points by for exemple RRA is the smart move you know.

This overloks the FACT that the "intelligence" that Saddam had WMD was predicated on a forged document and the Bush Administration knew it but withheld the fact from the public. Presumably President Obama will not take us to war based on a forgery.

Hopefully, whoever does become President won't have to take us to war....period!

And at the same time, hopefully whoever does become President, if the need arises and we God forbid have to go to war, will have the the know how on what needs and has to be done to protect the people of this country. One that will step up, regardless of world opinion, and act as a Commander In Chief should in a time of a national security crisis!

[quote=Don Cardi[Hopefully, whoever does become President won't have to take us to war....period!

And at the same time, hopefully whoever does become President, if the need arises and we God forbid have to go to war, will have the the know how on what needs and has to be done to protect the people of this country. One that will step up, regardless of world opinion, and act as a Commander In Chief should in a time of a national security crisis! [/quote]

Point well taken DC, and let's hope if god forbid we have another war we allow the generals and admirals more latitude in making strategy.

Amen to that. Let the Generals on the ground do the job!

I totally agree!

Look, as former military, let me tell you that general staff officers make as many mistakes as politicians when it comes to waging warfare. As Red Foxx once said refering to military experience, "One time I retreated so far that i backed up into a general."

Point taken olivant. However, I'll put it this way.... I'd rather have an experienced Head Coach of a football team call the plays and risk his making a mistake than having the president of the team call the plays and risking the chance of his making a mistake. Bottom line is that with the trained and experienced head coach calling the plays, the probability of your team coming out a winner is much much higher than if you have the president of the team calling the plays.

I love when Fred is bragging to Lamont about how the pack on his back made him wobble when he was in the Army. Lamont tells him, "the only pack that ever made you wobble was a six pack."

Sorry for hijacking the thread. And I agree with Olivant. For every high profile General, like a Patton or Schwarzkopf, there are more than likely 50 obscure guys who have been mistake prone. Unfortunately, warfare is largely learned on the job. I don't care what they teach you at school or in training camp.

Most Generals are said to have fought the "last war." And I agree there have been many mistakes by the military. In Iraq, to which I was referring, I believe the consensus among the military was that we needed more than the 130,000 troops who invaded, and Rumsfeld stubbornly refused...and Bush effectively fired his chairman of the joint chiefs for holding this view (which turned out to be correct). Clearly Petreaus has been the best of the lot (Franks the worst) but now that he's out, we need an exit strategy to allow the Iraqis to run their own country and start spending their ten billion dollars a month surplus.

Vietnam and Iraq suffered both partly from micro-management from the Presidential Administration. From McNamara's infamous "guns-per-body" kill/cost ratio calculations to Rumsfeld being Rumsfeld...

The US Constitution specifies that the President is Commander and Chief of the Army and Navy, and militia when called into service of the federal government and, by inferrence, the CIC of the Air Force and Coast Guard. Thus, the Founding Fathers recognized the necessity of civilian control of the military. Wars are never fought in a political vacuum. That's a fact of life. There are strategic political considerations that accrue to any war that must be recognized.

No question about this. And there are times when it is necessary for the civilian power to trump the military, such as in Korea when McArthur wantd to enlarge the war to bring China in, and Truman had to fire him. On the tactical side, however more attention should be paid to the people who specialize in their field.

Well said Don T. Well said.


Now getting back to Don Smitty's original question, I think that he was tryig to ask if Obama was wrong in voting against going into Iraq.


I still stand by my original feelings and strongly believe that we had to remove Saddam and his evil government from power. I strongly believe that if Saddam and his regime had stayed in power that they would have supported, funded and been behind more potential terrorist attacks against this country and it's interests. I strongly believe that. We can debate if the timing to go into Iraq was right or not, or if we should have gone to the ground after what was a very successful airstrike, but I honestly believe that we had to go into Iraq and destroy Saddam and his evil regime.

So to answer Smitty's original question, yes, I think at the time he voted not to go into Iraq, Senator Obama was wrong.

It's a two-way street, though. LBJ was misled by his military advisors (who told him that conventional warfare would work in VietNam). I agree we should normally listen to the military "experts" but thank God we have a system of checks and balances in which the armed forces are really under civilian control.

I totally agree.

If you mean Saddam supporting/funding Syria and Hamas, then alright that's a fair point, but can we both agree that the Saddam/Al Qaeda story is nonsense?

He did fund terrorism. There is no question about it. As far as I am concerned terrorism is terrorism no matter what they want to name themselves or what the name of the terrorist organization is. So tell me something - can you say for certain that he did NOT fund ANY organizations tied to Al Qaeda? And having a history of funding terrorists could you be so sure that he wouldn't have funded Al Qaeda after the attacks of 9/11? Would you have trusted him not to, especially knowing the history that he had for funding terrorists? Shit, the man and his regime were terrorists themselves.

And what exactly terrorism? That term is very easily thrown around and abused this side of a pillow, so tell me the qualifications for a terrorist is, you mind?

And no, it can't just be "Arabs wearing shrouds, yelling gibberish while blowing shit up and burning the American flag."



Which is the exact-reverse of asking, "You certain that Iraq DID fund Al Qaeda?"

And my answer to both is, NO. I'm open up to the idea, but even back in 2003 when the Dubya White House was pushing the Saddam/Al Qaeda supposed connection, polled Americans were not really buying all those rumors and speculations as "evidence.

Also, I explained earlier the logic against the Hussein/Al Qaeda alliance concept in the first place. Not saying it was impossible, but give me something to hook into, to wing with, to actually believe the possibility seriously of such a hypothesis.



Yes they were, but to quote conservative Pat Buchanan, who's now person-non-grata with the NeoCons: "What was Saddam gonna do with those WMDs? Attacking NATO-ally Turkey or top-regional-ally Israel or the other American-friendly Gulf States would have amounted to stepping on Superman's cape, and Saddam knew this."

DC, I fear you fall at times into the same trip that got us fucked in Vietnam, the "Monolithic Theory."

That is, that all these enemies world-wide belong on the same side, when in fact, not really.

It's a fact that Stalin gave his blessing to North Korea invading South Korea in 1950, and afterwards the American government thought that every other communist-affiliated regime was a transparent hand of Moscow, and thus the ole "Domino Theory."

Yeah North Vietnam were communist, as was China, but that didn't mean necessarily that they were allies to Moscow. Oh sure you can bring up how they got aid/weapons from the Soviets and Chinese, and I can bring up Afghanistan with the Mujahadeen: We didn't support that group in the 1980s because we agreed with their ideology or necessarily their cause, but because the Russians were there, and those Afghans were willing to blow them up for us. You know, Convenience.

As the Nixon White House realized and exploited, North Vietnam was more a bitch of China than it was of the USSR, and China itself by that time was no longer an ally of Moscow, wanted to chart its own foreign policy to address its needs. Thus Kissinger/Nixon played off China/USSR off each other, and got us detente, the ABM Treaty, the Paris Peace Accords, and so on.

Likewise in the 1980s, our government nearly pulled another Vietnam down in El Salvador. Thankfully we didn't escalate our involvement, because those commie hick-guerillas down there were more CUBAN-affiliated than SOVIET-affiliated (hell, the Moscow-sponsored Communist Party in El Salvador was reportedly the smallest group of the socialist parties within that nation, and rather irrelevant.)

My point is DC, don't fall into that Monolithic mindset with today. Yeah North Korea are a bunch of dicks in trying to demand respect with their nukes, and Iran has unfortunately grown into a regional super-power of considerable more influence and impact than say before March 2003, who apparently also want their own nukes, and Iraq supposedly wanted nukes too (though as Saddam reportedly told his American interrogators, all that was mostly a bluff to solidify his regime's power).

Look at all this with well a Nixon mindset, and not a Containment Theory/Reaganite approach here, and see how its not GI JOE vs COBRA here, one side against the other, but everyone for themselves, and how you can negotiate or pilot around that, or if we must, hammer those fuckers out.

As I've said over and over, what was the geopolitical national self-defensive advantage to Iraq? What's the difference between invading in say 2000 instead of 2003, or 2002 or 2001 or 1999 or 1998 or whatever the fuck?

1998, 1999 & 2000? - President Clinton.

2001 - 2003? President Bush.





No where did I ever say that "terrorism" is defined as those from the Arab world who wear shrouds. Those are your words, not mine.

And yes, I do agree with you that the terms terrorist and terrorism are used very loosely these days. But you and I both know what we're talking about here without having to get into definitions and qualifications. Besides, as you being someone who is smart enough to know of all the different supreme court cases in the history of our country, then I think that you're defintitely smart enough to know what the qualifications for a terrorist is.

Oh sorry, I thought we were talking about the same region of the world, or am I mistaken? I don't think we've gotten into anything about current Asian or European or Latin American terrorism so far today...



Do you?



Errrr, dude, I only named like 5 cases, and trust me...in case you don't know it...there were a lot more than that decided by the SC. I feel like that Hicks stand-up act where I'm carrying a book into a bar, and some redneck locals come up and say "Boys, looks like we got ourselves a reader here!"

And you dodged my question, as I expected. Why?

Because I myself don't know what exactly is the difference between "terrorists" and "freedom fighters", except that one is against us, and the other is on our side.

There was an awesome line from the otherwise mediocre 007 movie DIE ANOTHER DAY:

CUBAN""Who you call terrorist may be a freedom fighter to others."
BOND:"Zao doesn't care about other people's freedom."

No. I have absolutely no idea what terrorsim is. I have absolutely no idea what a terrorist is. I've never seen or been subject to any acts of terorrism first hand.

Perhaps you will be kind enough to educate me and tell me your first hand experiences regarding acts of terrorism.

Are we gonna have that WORLD TRADE CENTER movie debate again here, because I rather not.

Don't need to debate the movie! Don't need to re-watch it on the big screen! I was there, in person, both times.

DC, we both park our cars in the same garage, unlike some naive liberals and NeoCons, that there are people out there in the Middle-East who want to blow us up, and no matter how much love or democracy is given out like candy, they're still out there.

All I'm trying to say is, those 5 years we wasted in Iraq, we could have spent in eradicating Taliban for GOOD in Afghanistan, and then fight in other theatres of the War on Terror like Somalia or Sudan or Pakistan or whatever. Instead, we got our eye off the ball, and let those fuckers escape into the mountains, reform, and strike back.