No, actually, given the information available at any time, it did not
make sense to invade Iraq for WMD or to spread democracy or to
defeat al Qaeda or to start putting an end to political Islam.
Anyone other than a complete head in the sand could know so
for the second, third and fourth reasons, and anyone with access
to CIA analysts could know so for the first reasons. One has to
be willfully blind or obtuse to go to war for these reasons.

-Arun

The proof is left to the reader.

Well, ”You are either with us or with the terrorists” is not that different from Chimp doctrine.

I didn’t say every decision human beings make is about money. I was referring to decisions by the Bush/Cheney regime. I am not trying to argue with you here. I am suggesting that the Bush/Cheney regime (not administration) is the most corrupt in American history and in place only to do the bidding of their financiers.(including the Saudia Arabian government/royal family)

I realize there may be a cultural gap and you may be unfamiliar with the Watergate history. “Follow the money” was a comment made to a journalist investigating the break in. It was a clue as to who was involved.

I sense you frustration at not getting clarity to your query but as stated previously, things are not always simple in politics. My viewpoint, and I am not a professional journalist, is that the decision to invade Iraq was primarily a business decision.

Also to consider, IMO, The Saudis who felt Iraq was a threat to their country, were likely complicit in this decision as were the Israelis.

Regards,

Elliot

What I said was

People are complicated. A lot of people is a lot more complicated. Several of those reasons can be true all at the same time.

In other words, despite what you seem to think (rather amusingly), Bush is not the sole person making the decisions. In fact, he may be one of the least important of the decision makers. There are lots of people involved and therefore, contrary to what you say, several conflicting reasons can all be true at the same time.

I repeat: People are complicated.

Despite what you say, it is in fact helpful to remember that.

Cheers!

-cvj

Right, because everything everywhere is about money. Every decision human beings make is about money – every single one. Sounds like vulgar marxism to me.

I think you are taking the “Chimp” moniker for Bush a little too far.

what I said is that “they can’t all be true.” You can’t have both a spread of democracy and an American empire. You can’t have both control of oil and a fully sovereign local government. That’s the point. A lot of reasons for going to war with Iraq have been given, and some of them are incompatible. Maybe Bushco have lost control over events (which I think is quite likely), but that still doesn’t explain the rationale(s) for why they went in, which remains important.

Maybe lots of people had different rationales and they all cooperated to invade Iraq. Maybe, but I don’t think it is likely that Bush himself had ten different rationales, some conflicting, for going into Iraq. Merely saying that “people are complicated” isn’t particularly helpful. Fisk’s claim that superpowers just “throw their weight around” also isn’t that helpful, because it means that there isn’t anything to be done about it – it just happens regardless merely by being a superpower. If you are interested in mitigating the current disaster or preventing future ones, which I would think most of us are interested in, we have to go farther.

This is a side point. Of course Fisk and Cole are not objective. There’s something about Middle Eastern studies that kills objectivity in people. The issue is their level of expertise. I don’t know enough about Fisk to tell one way or the other beyond the superficial (knows Arabic, traveled around Iraq, etc.). I know a little more about Juan Cole – he’s an expert on Shiism and a scholar of Arabic and Islam. He doesn’t seem to know much about northern Iraq beyond what anyone reasonably educated on the region would know, and he has some kind of animus against the Kurds which I don’t understand. It’s important to know these kind of things about the people you read for information, even if you think they know more than you.

there was a program on NGC channel a few weeks ago about Chimp warfare. It was argued that human bahavior, the way we do politics etc. dates backs millions of years.

Chimps will patrol their territory and sometimes make incursions in teritory of their rivals. If they encounter another group of Chimps they will fight that group if that group is smaller than their group. They will retreat if the group is as large or larger.

The US was making incursions into Iraqi ”territory”. They were patrolling the air space and they ware maintaining the UN sanctions. Their objective was to topple Saddam, just like Chimps want to kill rival males. Saddam was a rival because he had attacked Kuwait, which is ”US territory”.

So, the Iraq war was sort of ”territorial” behavior.

With respect, I am listening. You did not seem to be since you kept asking for one reason, I told you that I do not think that there is one reason. You asked for one reason again, so I refered you to my previosu answer.

Now that you’ve got the hint and are asking to weigh the reasons, as I suggested, you do now seem to be listening. Excellent. Thanks.

I don’t know how to weigh them in any more meaningful way that some of the others here (on this thread and others) have already done. I’m not going to pretend to have any answers. I’m still learning, and this is why I like to listen directly to people like Fisk (and others), who have actually been on the ground, and Cole, who have a historical perspective, rather than just rely on armchair pundits, the standard news outlets, and politicians who want to control what most people hear. I’m not claiming that these guys (Cole, Fisk, etc) are objective. Everybody has motives. It’s just nice to hear comments on the issues from people who are actually informed, from time to time. Call me old-fashioned.

I’m not the one to hear answers from. Sorry. Just reporting a little of what I’ve heard, and occasionally my own frustrations. I’m just a physicist.

All the Best,

-cvj

The reason we didn’t invade Saudi Arabia is pretty clear. The Bush family and the Saudi royal family have been very close both politically and in business for many years. This is well documented. Remember the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis. The Bush adminstration made special provisions, while general aviation was grounded in the days after the attack, to ensure that key Saudis, including members of Bin Laden’s family were allowed to fly out of the United States. During this period Saudia Arabia has had a horrible record of human rights violations particularly with respect to women but the United States has failed to do anything.

I repeat my advice from my previous post “follow the money”

Elliot

you don’t seem to be listening either. How do you weigh the reasons? Which one was dominant in Bush, do you think? Neither you nor Fisk are really answering this question, which seems to me to be of great importance. It’s fine to say that Fisk is a good journalist or commentator or makes you think, but shouldn’t he be able to answer this question if he really understands the Iraq war and the resulting occupation?

Part of the reaason to figure out why we got into it is to help us find a way to get out of it, hopefully in a constructive manner. If we can figure out the reason or reasons why we got into it (and I agree there may be more than one), then that means we can apply pressure and arguments to get out of it.

Arun, fairly obviously, the real reasons must have made sense to the people who had them. A lot of the reasons offered here make sense, in at least a superficial way. Part of the problem is that there are almost too many reasons to invade Iraq. I’m sure we could come up with a lot of reasons for invading Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia too, and most of them were true 5, 10, or 15 years ago also. But it wasn’t done. There has to be an explanation for that, too.

To quote Deep Throat, (inside source of information for Watergate) “Follow the Money”.

Elliot

With respect, you don’t seem to be listening. See my comment #24. There is no need to pick one reason. There is never one reason. This is not physics, this is life. It is complicated.

Cheers,

-cvj

Anyway, why should there be only one reason? Different people in the administration and in the think-tanks pushed for the war for a variety of reasons. The final decision rested with Bush, but he was in a position to make a decision because of all the supporting work done by a cast of dozens if not hundreds.

So, this search for the one reason why we’re in Iraq is futile, and IMO, it is the wrong question. A somewhat better question is – is there any reason for the war with Iraq that makes sense (or that made sense at some point in time, given the information that was available at that point in time)?

We have a lot of different reasons for the invasion of Iraq right here:

Clifford: control of oil
Fisk: nature of superpowers to throw their weight around
Elliot: control of oil, domination of middle east, no-bid contracts for Halliburton, American empire, mixed in with anti-Zionist comments
Thomas Palm: Bush II lost contact with reality
Count Iblis: Saddam thumbing his nose at the US
Chris W.: driven by domestic political strategy

So which is it? It’s fine and good to speculate, but don’t kid yourselves that you know the answer. I don’t know the answer myself.

The Bush administration’s approach to policy-making has been dominated by an overriding effort to flatter the disparate parts of its political base with the illusion that their pet agendas are being coherently implemented. Of course, this strategy is coming unglued.

———————(* four, from which he never graduated)

Well, if I had been on campus, I would have been there…

Ultimately Iraq was invaded because Saddam was thumbing his nose at the US. Saddam, like Bin Laden, had a boogyman image in the US, unlike other dictators like Kim Jung Il or historically Stalin.

Caspar Weinberger told just a few weeks before the invasion on CNN that he thought that Saddam didn’t pose a danger to the West and that’s why the US had to attack. Why wait till he does pose a danger, he argued. I’ve read that some US generals in the 1950s were for a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union for the same reason. They were convinced that WWIII was going to happen anyway…