The Iraq War retrospective Thread

[Thecla]

The bottom line is that you deny the actual concrete evidence.

Lol:)This is a comment almost worthy of a Bush administration Press Secretary. Iraq has no WMDs, no ties with al Qaeda, and I'm the one denying the actual concrete evidence.

The bottom line is that the Bush administration used the supposed terrorist threat posed by Iraq as a pretext to invade the country, deceived the bulk of the US public (btw, hardly very respectful of them to feed the american public a simplistic rationale, because, presumably, they're too stupid to understand a complex one), and attempted to deceive the international community. I've steered away from any comments about the legality of the war, since I don't want to engage in tiresome arguments about international law, but I don't think that's legal.

Presumably (and here I'm speculating, though it's surely why the war was supported by the business and financial interests), the administration saw an opportunity to knock off Hussein and install a pro-US government in the heart of the middle-east, which would then be a key economic, strategic, and military ally.

I dare say the war has turned out to be more expensive than its planners expected, even if they low-balled the prewar estimates, but they may also feel that in a world with increasing competition for dwindling energy resources, almost no cost is too much to secure US access to middle-eastern oil.

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Alan Greenspan: I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

Martha Raddatz: Two-thirds of Americans say the Iraq war is not worth fighting.
Dick Cheney: So?