"Palme D'Or" for Mike Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11&

[kandrathe]

The biggest problem is here "why did he go to war?" When you say now " it is easy to in hindsight point out all the mistakes that are made" please check some older threads here in the lounge from when the war just started or even before. (I am almost sure there was this kind of thread) You see that a lot of people allready said at that time what was wrong with going to war. I myself allready had the opinion that there were no WMDs in Iraq anymore and that Saddam did not have anything to do with Al qaeda. Even before this war there were more or less proofs of these two things (at least there were serious doubts) and Bush still took this decission.

I was a part of those discussions, and still no one seems to understand or see the big picture of the situation. Again, here is the anti-Moore story I believe;

1] Iraqi intelligence did have substanitive dialogs with Al Queda operatives, including OBL in Sudan in the mid 90's. I even presented here Jonathan Shanzer's detailed account of how Al Queda ran a base in northern Iraq under the control of Iraqi Intelligence, linked to Abu Wael who is a high ranking Iraqi official within the Tikriti mob. So, to say that there is no connection between Iraq and Al Queda, to me, is ludicrous -- what is missing is that there is no evidence of a connection between the Al Queda plot of 9/11 and complicit support from Iraq, or any other nation for that matter. So not to single out only Iraq, which other nations have had substanitive working relationships with Al Queda and OBL?

2] The attempts to influence Iraq to dismantle their WMD programs via sanctions had failed. Iraq proved itself duplicitious over and over and over again. Containment was not working, and Saddam was growing a 3 billion dollar annual black market economy and now it comes out that they were even corrupting the UN Oil for Food program. The humanitarian cost of a decade of sanctions was unbearable for compassionate western democracies. We wanted to put pressure on Saddam, not the Iraqi people. Again, to be fair to Iraq, they are not the only nation on our terrorism supporters hit list that also has WMD programs. It did not matter whether or not Iraq had stockpiles of WMD's. Only that they had the capability and the willingness to build and use them. And, in fact the ISG has found that they had active WMD programs throughout the 90's to research and perfect their knowledge and techniques so that once inspectors had left they would begin to reconstitute their stockpiles.

3] Saddam and his regime were willing to do anything. America was target number one and there was no room for diplomacy. For Saddam, there was no end of Gulf War 1.

So, when you add these together with the 9/11 realization that the American mainland is not a fortress, but a sieve, and you can see where the administration concluded that having a sworn and motivated adversary with the possibility of training or arming their terrorist compadres with chemical or biological weapons was a situation that could not be allowed to culminate in an attack. That is the new Wolfowitz doctrine of preemption. The US has determined that the old status quo of responding to aggression was not a good strategy when you consider the use of WMD.

It was the UNSC's responsibility to follow through with "enforcement" of "serious consequences". They failed that test. That left the responsibility for dismantling the Iraqi threat to the US. Bush might have waited a little while, but the growing tide of political sentiment in Europe was to lift sanctions. In fact, some countries like Russia and France had already signed multi-billion dollar contracts with Saddam. Again, in retrospect the "threat" posed by Saddam was less than the worst case scenario that was presented to the American people and the world. But, the "threat" did exist and the removal of the regime was one way to alleviate the threat. So, I believe that Iraq was a problem that needed correcting. Clinton failed to keep Iraq contained, and Bush took the responsibility of fixing the problem.

Back to my point. The motivations of the Bush administration were not clearly communicated. You now have a politcal situation where 1/2 the population is saying "There is no connection between 9/11 and Iraq, so the war was unjustified." It really was Bush's job to present all the information about why a war with Iraq was neccesary and more so that there would be no room for doubt that Iraq was a situation that we needed to shed blood over. Bush failed to make that case. It's not that he is ignorant, or untrustworthy, just bad an innundating the press with information to support his positions. He needs someone more bombastic to be his press secretary.