te:
rote:
:when he lied to the country about Saddam Hussein.
pro-Republican fanaticism implying tantamount to a complete loss of critica l faculties.
eIf you aren't aware of any lie, you then you are exhibiting a degree of pro
-Republican fanaticism tantamount to a complete loss of critical faculties.
You should be aware that other people aren't as comfortable as you are abou t taking Republican Party propaganda at face value.
You've complained about an astonishing variety of subjects here. Your not c omplaining about the Republican mis-information campaign that preceded the invasion of Irak is consequently significant.
eased
ion.
t there was never a shred of evidence suggesting that Irak had WMD at the t ime of the invasion, and whatever evidence you may be thinking of is almost certainly the product of wishful thinking by analysts deliberately generat ing nonsense that will go down well with right-wing nitwits. Nobody outside the US administration thought that the evidence for weapons of mass destru ction in Irak adduced at the time was remotely convincing, and nobody I've heard of found any convincing evidence that after the invasion.
lolvement in Iraq. An investigation by C.J. Chivers, published in The Times on Wednesday, found that American and American-trained Iraqi troops discove red thousands of abandoned and highly dangerous chemical weapons left over from the rule of Saddam Hussein. These weapons, found from 2004 to 2011, wo unded troops from both armies. There are now fears that some could fall int o the hands of fighters for the Islamic State[...]"
ruction that the George W. Bush administration claimed as the excuse for em barking on the Iraq war and that, it turned out, did not exist. Instead, th ey are aged remnants left over from an earlier chemical weapons program in the late-1970s and 1980s that was shut down in 1991. Mr. Hussein used the w eapons against Iran in a war from 1980-88."
icle to the end? Or were you hoping that nobody else would?
He might have had them, but it doesn't sound as if he knew where they were. He'd gotten rid of everything that he knew about to get the UN inspectors off his neck, but he wasn't a famously good administrator.
The people who got injured by them ran into them by accident. They weren't
- as far as I know - ever actually used as weapons, because nobody knew whe re they were. Don't attribute to malice anything that is more easily explic able by stupidity, and the NYT is not going to get excited about administra tive oversights, any more than I am.
rOf course it didn't need to be started. Saddam was mad, bad and evil, but w hat we've got now may not be evil, but it's quite as mad, and quite a bit w orse.
ma
sWhere Dubbya really screwed up was in underestimating the size of the army of occupation that would have been needed to effectively control Irak. The Pentagon famously told him that it would take several hundred thousand troo ps, and my guess is that they would have had to stay there for a generation until you'd had a chance to brainwash the rising generation in a properly organised school system.
Dubbya couldn't afford that, and neither could Obama. Obama at least had th e sense to stop wasting money on an expensive but inadequate occupying army .
What was left in Irak was easy pickings for ISIS, but that wasn't something that Obama was in a position to do anything about.