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.