<p>“True to form, Mini speaks for our enemies. Iran may arrest these guys for variety of reasons. Al Qaeda operatives receiving aid from US ? Are you for real?”</p>
<p>Absolutely. And this time, the department of mendaciousness didn’t even bother to deny it.</p>
<p>Maybe your enemies, not mine. Ahmadinajad will be voted out of office just like the guy before him, and the guy before him. That’s what democracy is all about. </p>
<p>Look - Iran didn’t torture 100,000 Americans in the U.S. It didn’t set up torture schools in Isfahan, and bring American torturers to learn their trade, to take back to America. They didn’t supply torture equipment for use in Cleveland. They didn’t instigate a U.S. war with a crazy dictator in Canada, who killed 500,000 Americans, and used chemical weapons against the United States.</p>
<p>Even after all that, Iran aided the U.S. in the war against the Taliban. See where it got them. </p>
<p>Folks like Ahmadinejad woud be in the dustbin of history (as he deserves), if it wasn’t for the U.S. positioning 200,000 aggressive, hostile troops on Iran’s border.</p>
<p>As for nukes, think Pakistan, three bullets away from Al-Qaeda having them.</p>
<p>I’m a right-of-center kind-of-Libertarian-leaning middle-aged guy who usually votes Republican. Having said that, for the first time on this forum, I think, I always thought the Iraq war was ill-conceived, brilliantly executed militarily, and mind-bogglingly pointless in the after-conflict phase. I mean, even people who supported the idea of military action against Saddam predicted an eventual 3-way civil war. What was the Bush administration thinking?</p>
<p>Anyway, that’s just to set up my philosophical background before getting into my real topic of interest, and that is this bizarre notion of “illegal war.” This can mean one of two things. More, possibly, but two are the most common.</p>
<p>First, you could be trying to make the case that it is illegal because Congress didn’t pass a declaration of war. Congress hasn’t declared war since 1941, and strangely seems to be happier passing war support resolutions and allocating money to support military action than they are to scrape up some guts and just pass a declaration of war. In any event, I don’t see anywhere in the Constitution where the President needs Congress’ permission to conduct military operations. I am not a Constitutional scholar, but I’m guessing that the Supremes haven’t ruled that a declaration is necessary, either. And let’s hope the Supremes stay out of it, too. The LAST thing I want is this country ruled by a non-elected, permanent elite. (And keep your election-rigging whining out of this thread, please. Try not to be a whiny wimp when your guy loses.)</p>
<p>Second, and more interestingly, you might be making the argument that there is some sense of international law where conducting war should be approved by the EC in Brussels, or the United Nations (about 2/3 of which countries are ruled by non-elected governments by the way). This is a really modern idea, started in western Europe. I can’t even express how bizarre this idea is. War is about enforcing a political decision by death, destruction, and the threat of death and destruction. There is nothing “legal” about war. Attila the Hun didn’t get the Security Council’s permission. William didn’t ask anyone in Brussels before moving into England in 1066. The North Koreans only had to ask the Soviets for permission before invading the south. Given that war is all about violating another nation-state’s political integrity, how can that act ever be “legal?”</p>
<p>If anyone is actually interested in the history of the notion of “legal war” I recommend John Keegan’s “The Iraq War.” It has a really informative section on this.</p>
<p>I basically agree. The war is clearly illegal under international law (which provides two specific conditions for a war to be legal, and neither of them was met). </p>
<p>But in agreeing to abide by international law, I don’t think any American court would ever find that the U.S. ever thought to consign its warmaking powers to international oversight.</p>
<p>No, it was a legal war made possible by George Tenet and co. cooking the intelligence books to cover up Clinton’s genocide, and then having that intelligence trotted out again and embellished by the neocons to meet the later Administration’s purposes. “It’s a slam dunk” wasn’t the result of a quick review, but dated back almost a decade. And given that, given that Hillary and Co. were in on the big lie to begin with, the Dems caved.</p>
<p>it seems like they are running a lot of our service people through multiple rotations just to keep up the troop strength we have in Iraq. Where are we supposed to get the additional people to go into Iran?</p>
<p>Tenant’s role, the pressure applied by Cheney et al, and the misuse of intelligence was a little more complicated than you are describing.</p>
<p>The internal politics of the Bush administration (with Cheney as the de facto NSA and gate keeper working with Rumsfeld and an off-the-books neocon intelligence operation in the Pentagon) resulted in a short-circuit of the analyst-level intelligence prepared by the CIA and State.</p>
<p>Tenant played a role, but it is really unfair to place the blame at his level. The blame belongs squarely on the shoulders of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell, Rice, etc. The decision to take out Saddaam was made before 9/11 and they made sure that everything else fit accordingly.</p>
<p>ID, you forgot Doug Feith. Iraq could be considered the prototypical Feith-based initiative in fact.</p>
<p>And Republicans who have a simplistic and ill-informed understanding of the Middle East don’t get it why those of us who dissent from the administration’s actions get absolutely infuriated at being accused of treason, disloyalty, etc. Get ready for another drubbing at the polls next November. We’re not going to take it. I’m just sick at the damage we’ll be incurring to our country in the meantime. You’re lucky that we just vote. But we’re going to do our damnedest to see that you’re completely irrelevant to American politics after about 2010, leaving time to work on your canasta and tennis games. You had a nice run with bullying, the lies, the manipulation, and ensuing electoral successes of 2002-2004. Payback’s a rhymes-with-witch.</p>
<p>The Bush administration war plans against Iran don’t include a ground invasion. It will be air bombardment of their defenses, their nuclear program, their military bases, and their manufacturing base.</p>
<p>It may involve Israeli strikes against the uranium enrichment plants. Those are buried underground and may require nuclear tipped bunker buster bombs. We can’t use those under non-proliferation treaties. However, we have sold them to Israel, which is not a signatory to the non-proliferation treaties.</p>
<p>"The internal politics of the Bush administration (with Cheney as the de facto NSA and gate keeper working with Rumsfeld and an off-the-books neocon intelligence operation in the Pentagon) resulted in a short-circuit of the analyst-level intelligence prepared by the CIA and State.</p>
<p>Actually the more “complicated” part is whether the “intelligence” used to justify the child murder and genocide by Clinton (based on production of WMDs, etc.) was cooked before hand (unlikely) or after the fact, to justify his crimes. Tenet’s slam dunk was based on lies concocted in the Clinton Administration. Most of what followed was window dressing - it was easy to build the non-existent case for war once the big lie was already accepted by the Dems, who had a hand in perpetuating it.</p>
<p>One of the reasons I think the Clinton lie was created after the fact (and that the genocide had nothing to do with WMD, etc.) was that it was first unveiled, as far as anyone knows, just before the Christmas bombings of 1998. The genocide having provoked international outcry (and resulting in “oil for food”), Clinton changed tactics and decided that perhaps he could provoke a military revolt by bombing palaces, etc. So Dems were “briefed” on the non-existent WMD threat.</p>
<p>“So what is really going on with Iran? Is Iran just a way for countries and companies to make a buck?”</p>
<p>They feel under siege, as they have for a very long time. They have memories of what the U.S. had done to them under the Shah. They are quite aware that all other attempts to overthrow the Shah had failed, and most of the participants murdered (my first published paper, in 1973, was on what happened to all the writers and poets.) And as a result, although many are western in outlook, are quite attached to their religious establishment. They remember keenly the U.S. attempts to overthrow their democratically elected government in the '80s, the death of 500,000 people, and the use of U.S. sanction chemical weapons against them. They are also aware, as a secondary issue, that they are world’s only functioning Shia government. They see 200,000 aggressive, hostile troops on both the borders, despite having supported the U.S. against the Taliban.</p>
<p>As to the nukes, under similar situations, wouldn’t you want nuclear weapons? AND they are also aware what the market for oil is like, and by producing nuclear power for their own needs, they become very much more powerful. Isn’t producing nuclear power precisely what it is being proposed by many in the U.S. and for similar reasons?</p>
<p>“ID, you forgot Doug Feith. Iraq could be considered the prototypical Feith-based initiative in fact.”</p>
<p>I’m not going to contribute anything substantive to this thread right now, but I would like to say that it’s comments like this that have caused me to have a secret crush on The Dad.</p>
<p>Mini, I can see Iran’s point of view; although, its leader is a nut.</p>
<p>We need a dialog.</p>
<p>What bugs me is watching countries like Russia help Iran. If Iran even gets close to getting nuclear weapons, people are going to die.</p>
<p>The whole situation reminds me of Casablanca, especially the scene where the Claude Reins character says, “I’m shocked. Shocked to find there is gambling going on in here”, as somebody hands him his gambling winnings.</p>
<p>Russia, China, France, and the US know what is going on in Iran. There is no Iran as we know it without the actions of these countries. Why are these countries behaving the way they do? </p>
<p>Human life is worth less than money and power is what I see. Everything else is a smoke screen.</p>
Besides a well-honed democratic whine about being called “traitors”, such as lately pronounced by Pelosi, perhaps some substantive quotes would go a long way to support the allegations. Dems can’t stand to have their opponents criticize their views so they start throwing around slime like this and hope that it sticks.</p>
<p>Not really. The three main underpinnings of the Bush WMD claims were the “aluminum tubes”, the “Niger yellowcake”, and the “mobile bio labs”. Most of this was championed by Chalabi to Feith’s off-the-books neocon intelligence [sic] group.</p>
<p>BTW, Sadaam had tried to reconstitute a nuclear program during the Clinton years after the factories in their second effort were destroyed during the 1991 bombardment. (Their first effort had been bombed years earlier by the Israelis). </p>
<p>They played cat n’ mouse with the UN inspectors while hiding efforts to restart the program, but very quickly gave up as the combination of the sanctions and inspections simply made it impossible. When they gave up, they showed the inspectors the stuff, including the buried material. The reason the whole Niger yellowcake story was such a joke is that Iraq had its own uranium mining operation. Unrefined uranium was never their problem.</p>
<p>The long term goal of Saddaam was to eventually start up the nuke program again and he tried to keep the scientific team together (largely by coercion) doing other projects for the government. But, there was no nuclear program. The CIA had recruited 30 US relatives of the Iraqi nuclear team members to visit their families and approach the scientists. The scientists were flabbergasted at questions about the nuke program, because they knew that the inspectors knew the program was dead – because they had shown the inspectors everything.</p>
<p>Some of them wanted to defect but the US refused to help unless they could get to the Kurdish region on their own. They were under constant surveillance and couldn’t.</p>
<p>Let’s not be too revisionist about the “mother theresa” international motivations for Oil for Food. We now know that many of our allies were involved in corrupt schemes to profit from Oil for Food and that the program actually worked to Sadaam’s benefit.</p>
<p>The nuclear claim (long term) and the WMD (short-term) were all part of the lies told by the Clinton “intelligence” teams to Democrat lawmakers days before the Christmas bombings of 1998.</p>
<p>Oil for Food was indeed very, very corrupt. It also saved literally tens of thousands of lives. It was not created until AFTER European nations had charged Clinton with genocide. Of course, they worked to Sadaam’s benefit, in the obvious way, but also in the less obvious one. The theory behind the Clinton genocide seems to have been that if enough Iraqis died, the generals would revolt, and the U.S. would not have to resort to direct military action to secure the oil fields. It actually had the opposite impact, turning an entire generation of Iraqis, most of whom had been pro-Western, against the United States, even before GWB got there. (The less direct idea seems to have been that, if they killed enough children, the next generation of Iraqis would be severely weakened, and, in terms of population, data, that seems to have been really the case.)</p>
<p>The revisionist history is that Dems were swayed by the lies of the Bu****es. That may be, but the larger reality is that they were already prepared for these lies by the lies the Clinton Administration used to cover up its crimes.</p>
<p>I have a friend who did a tour based in the Green Zone in Baghdad for the army and was there until approximately last July. Since one of my chief reasons for initially being opposed to the war was that I thought it would put majority Shi’ite Iraq more or less squarely under Iranian influence, I asked him whether it was known that there were Iranian agents functioning in Iraq. He said it was widely known and widely discussed that there were many, and that the fairly large numbers of Iranians were not just civilians. (He was essentially a war supporter, though he really didn’t like to take a particular position and has now increasingly moved against the war.) He said that most of the Iranians were in the South where the Shi’ites are.</p>
<p>For people who think the Administration is showing good faith “discovering” the Iranian connection now (though it has been obvious on the ground for a long time), I would point out three things for you to think about: 1) why is this being emphasized now? Mossad (Israeli CIA) declared the Iran-Iraq border a kind of mirage within months of the start of the war; 2) anybody who paid attention knew that this was going to be a likely outcome of the Iraq War, ie, that the Iranians would become much involved in Iraq and expand their power over it; 3) why would you believe an Administration whose exagerrations (or, as I would call them, out and out lies) have been documented by a department of the Pentagon itself?</p>