9 posts tagged “iraq”

FactCheck

<stolen from FactCheck.org>

This is a summry...

Did Bill Clinton pass up a chance to kill Osama bin Laden?

Probably not, and it would not have mattered anyway as there was no evidence at the time that bin Laden had committed any crimes against American citizens.

What was known to U.S. intelligence and Congress about WMDs in Iraq before the vote to go to war?

Senior U.S. intelligence officials believed, incorrectly, that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and germ weapons and was developing nuclear weapons. They also agreed Saddam Hussein wouldn't give such weapons to terrorists unless attacked. Few members of Congress read the full 92 page report with all its qualifications and dissents.

Have tax cuts always resulted in higher tax revenues and more economic growth as many tax cut proponents claim?

No. In fact, economists say tax cuts do not spark enough growth to pay for themselves.

Does the person with the most money ALWAYS win the presidential nomination?

No. The biggest money-raisers are beaten fairly regularly. Just ask Howard Dean.

Read the full answers at FactCheck.org.

I saw this on another voxer's site and it eerily|humorously|perfectly describes our situation in Iraq.

Mess 'O patamia

The following is Doggett's speech during the Iraq War Resolution debate.  I must say I echo most, if not all of it.

This debate is late, very late, thousands of deaths too late. This escalation scheme is an unmitigated disaster.

   President Bush seems determined to continue to make the same old mistakes, just make them a little bit bigger; defying sound military judgement; defying the Iraq Study Group; defying the wishes of our allies and the Iraqis themselves; and, most particularly, defying the will of the American people.

   This President continues to pursue a go-it-alone strategy in Iraq. Like most every problem that he has created, and there are many, he seeks only to pass it along to his successor, who we will elect next year--pass along in this case what is no doubt the most colossal foreign policy failure in American history.

   The administration's top budget official told me in a hearing just last week that ``the best minds in the Pentagon'' see no need to fund this escalation, which has not yet really begun, for more than another seven months. In truth, our military has been so overstretched that it cannot sustain a prolonged escalation, even when it unfairly recalls inadequately supplied troops for a second, third, and fourth tour of duty. Little wonder that the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Gates, admitted last week that he is already looking for another plan after this escalation falls short.

   This week, this House, we say ``stop the increase.'' And next, we must begin the decrease with a phased withdrawal from Iraq. We should not act precipitously, but we must move very expeditiously to extract our troops from the crossfire of the warring factions in this civil war quagmire.

   To our troops, whose courage we honor today in this very resolution, we say to you, those of who you who are out there on the front lines today, we will do everything we can to protect you; but we will also be working as hard as we can to bring you home safely to your families sooner rather than later.

   There is a better way to show support for our troops than just sending more of them to be killed. There is a better way than continuing to give this President a blank check for war funding. Unless we move forward to place firm limitations on the appropriations, we will leave this war-making President constrained only by DICK CHENEY's imagination.

   The words of our adversaries in this debate have often been very short, but their true conflict is not really with us; it is with reality. They are in a losing war with the truth. Iraq has never been the central front in the war on terrorism. Like the alleged connection between 9/11 and Iraq, like the claim that Saddam's nuclear mushroom cloud was looming just over the horizon, this charge is but another falsehood foisted off on the gullible.

   The central front on the war on terrorism was largely abandoned by President Bush in his ideological rush to invade Iraq. Vital resources and expertise that were needed to capture Osama bin Laden and the terrorists who caused 9/11 were cut in Afghanistan when President Bush ran into Iraq. The real war on terrorism suffered a major setback from which today it has still never recovered. That is the only ``cut and run'' that now endangers our families. Nor does this debate in the people's House embolden the enemies of democracy when we exercise democracy here in America.

   To me, the terrorists seem mighty emboldened with their daily death and destruction that they wreaked across the Middle East long before anyone ever conceived this resolution. Frankly, it is the administration that is the terrorists' top recruiter.

   As we predicted at the outset, this war is creating new generations of terrorists who view it as a war against all Islam. We cannot kill our enemies fast enough with the current policies creating more of them every day.

   And now this President is stoking the flames of war with Iran. Ironically, that is the only country in the world to have directly benefited from his attacking Iraq. Widening the war to Iran with the macho slogan that ``boys go to Baghdad, but real men go to Tehran'' risks an even wider, even more destabling debacle that can eventually involve our families in a third world war.

   Having failed entirely to learn any lessons from Vietnam, this administration seems to already have forgotten our experience in Iraq. Some here who profess to be conservative have been very liberal with billions of misspent taxpayers' dollars and very liberal with the blood of others in the sand of Iraq.

   President Bush was absolutely correct when he personally declared his war in Iraq to be a ``catastrophic success.'' He has certainly been successful at creating one catastrophe after another in Iraq.

   Our Nation is great enough with sufficient resources and creativity to change course, but each day we delay we sink further into a quagmire from which fewer and fewer choices remain. We must step back from the abyss

Mess 'O patamia

For some time, there have been claims of Iran's direct involvement in attacks against Iraqi and U.S. troops, but without the presentation of sufficient actual evidence to persuade Congress or the American public at large. Congress - Members of both parties and key staff - have been very reluctant to trust any such claims ever since the Iraqi WMD intelligence debacle.

That might change after today, when U.S. officials on the ground in Iraq - not just at the CIA or the Pentagon in Washington - revealed reliable evidence of Iran's direct involvement, from the highest levels in the government, in the attacks. "(O)ne of six Iranians detained in January in a raid on an office in the northern city of Irbil was the operational commander of the Quds Brigade, a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that trains and equips Shiite militants abroad. He was identified as Mohsin Chizari, who was apprehended after slipping back into Iraq after a 10-month absence, the officer said. The Iranians were caught trying to flush documents down the toilet, he said. Bags of their hair were found during the raid, indicating they had tried to change their appearance, he added. He said the dates of manufacture on weapons found so far indicate they were made after fall of Saddam Hussein -- mostly in 2006. He said the "machining" on the components was traceable to Iran but did not elaborate."

Read the rest at Counterterrorism Blog.

Mess 'O patamia

An "alternative intelligence" unit operating at the Pentagon in the run-up to the war on Iraq was dedicated to establishing a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, even though the CIA was unconvinced of such a connection, the US Senate was told yesterday.

A report presented to the armed services committee by the Pentagon's inspector general, Thomas Gimble, exposes the Bush administration to new charges of manipulating intelligence to make its case for going to war against Saddam nearly four years ago.

Mr Gimble described a unit called the Office for Special Plans, authorised by then Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and overseen by the former policy chief Douglas Feith, to review raw intelligence on Iraq. The main focus of the unit was establishing a link between Saddam and al-Qaida - going against the consensus in the intelligence community that the Iraqi leader had nothing to do with the September 11 2001 terror attacks.

FactCheck

MoveOn.org Political Action began airing ads attacking four Republican senators in their home states, accusing them of favoring escalation of the war in Iraq and saying all are "willing to send tens of thousands more troops to face danger in Iraq." The ads clearly misrepresent the stands of three of the targeted senators, who in fact had publicly expressed strong disapproval of sending additional US troops.

MoveOn insists that voting to block debate on a non-binding resolution disapproving of a troop increase is tantamount to favoring "escalation" of the war. The ads fail to mention that two of those depicted as saying "escalate" are authors of the language contained in that very resolution. John Warner of Virginia and Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon sponsored the Republican measure whose exact language is now endorsed by leading Democrats. A third target, presidential hopeful Sam Brownback of Nebraska, has said "I do not believe that sending more troops to Iraq is the answer."

The fourth Republican target, John Sununu of New Hampshire, has been quoted as saying he won't support additional troops without further efforts from the Iraqis.

Read the full analysis at FactCheck.org.

Mess 'O patamia

From FactCheck.org:

President Bush's sobering address to the nation laid out his plan to rescue Iraq by sending in more troops at a time when polls show the American people want just the opposite. Is his approach a significant change of course? Will it work? We leave that to others to chew over. What we can say is that he was right on the facts he cited, although there were some notable omissions. While he highlighted the planned distribution of oil revenues to the Iraqi people and a new commitment of reconstruction funds by the Iraqi government, he didn't say a word about how the U.S. or Iraq would deal with rampant corruption that threatens to undermine both.

Similarly, we found the rebuttal by Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, the Senate's second-ranking Democrat, to be factually accurate but also somewhat selective.

Mess 'O patamia

As the Baker-Hamilton commission deliberates recommendations for Iraq, it faces a tremendous opportunity and responsibility. The opportunity is to help generate for the president and Congress a bipartisan way forward. The responsibility is to make the hard choices that are required to turn our Iraq policy around. If it fails to make those choices, its efforts will be in vain.

Read the rest.