Defending the Truth

I AM SICK AND TIRED OF REPUBLICANS THINKING THEY HAVE ESP. YOU DO NOT HAVE ESP. THE PROOF IS REPUBLICANS HAVE BEEN WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING. NOW WE SHOULD LISTEN TO YOU LOONEY BIRDS ABOUT LEAVING IRAQ? REPUBLICANS STARTED THIS IRAQ FIASCO. IF YOU ARE WORRIED ABOUT MONEY FOR IRAQ I AM SURE THE BUSH CRIME FAMILY WILL TAKE YOUR MONEY, SEND THEM ALL YOU GOT. FOR THAT MATTER GET YOUR BUTT OUT OF CHAT ROOMS AND GET IT TO IRAQ.

1. It wasn't just Republicans, everyone who voted for this war was at fault. A lot of Democrats voted to give the president the authority to invade Iraq, voted for the initial funding (And the funding throughout the last four years.), and voted for that recent emergency spending bill.
Iraq War Timeline of Votes

2. They do have a habit on being wrong about Iraq. I'm still waiting for the the Iraqis to greet us as liberators with flowers, unless "flower" is code for AK-47, then of course they would be dead on!.

3. You're right they don't have ESP, I love they KNOW precisely what will happen if we leave Iraq... and us.

I still don't understand the mantra they've been uttering. The "We have to fight them over there so we don't have fight them over here." chant is getting old. Guess what? We have been fighting them over there, but with the recent Fort Dix and JFK Airport incidents, it appears that they are fighting us over here.

I ONLY HAVE ONE CORRECTION TO YOUR POST. GEORGE BUSH, A REPUBLICAN, PRE-EMPTIVELY INVADED IRAQ FOR NO REASON. THIS IS A FACT. IT IS NOT DEBATEABLE. WE HAVE OPENED PANDORA'S BOX. I HOPE LIKE HELL SOMEBODY FIGURES OUT HOW TO CLOSE IT. UNTIL THEN TERRORISM WILL RAGE ON ALL OVER THE WORLD.

But it isn't just his fault(Though he was a major arbiter.), everyone who voted for the war and voted for funding it is to blame and that includes a lot of Democrats. If Congress didn't vote for the war, if they read the prewar intelligence that precisely prophesied the mess we are in now and used their heads, we wouldn't have invaded.
Prewar U.S. intelligence warned of Iraq war effects - Yahoo! News

I agree, but that does not change the fact that only one person can give the order to invade. That was George W. Bush, a Republican, I repeat, a fact, you cannot debate a fact. I don't like shoulda, coulda, woulda. Somebody has to be responsible. Neither you or I saw any U.S. intel. We just know what other people tell us. Now continueing to fund the Iraq War is a whole seperate debate.

bush would have invaded no matter what. The UN inspectors were actually in iraq destroying proscribed missiles when bush told them to get out because we were attacking. And then he perpetrated the lie that we had to attack because the inspectors were not allowed in iraq:

Consortiumnews.com

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and radio personality Jay Diamond are right to wonder why Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney got away with rewriting a key chapter of the Iraq War history without political reporters raising a peep.
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At the June 5 Republican debate, co-sponsored by CNN, Romney defended George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003 on the grounds that Saddam Hussein refused to let United Nations weapons inspectors in to search for WMD.

If Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction,” the war might have been averted, the former Massachusetts governor said.
But the reality is that Hussein did open up his country through the fall and winter of 2002-03, giving Hans Blix and his U.N. inspection team free rein to check out suspected WMD sites. It was President Bush who forced the U.N. inspectors out in March 2003 so his invasion could proceed.

The answer to the media question of why the U.S. press corps didn’t object to Romney’s bogus account is that Washington journalists have accepted this revisionist history since Bush began lying about the facts in July 2003.
On July 14, 2003, as the U.S.-led WMD search was coming up empty and only four months after Bush pushed the U.N. inspectors out of Iraq, he began asserting that Hussein had never let the inspectors in. Bush told reporters:
“We gave him [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.”

Facing no contradiction from the White House press corps, Bush continued repeating this lie in varied forms over the next four years as part of his public litany for defending the invasion.

On Jan. 27, 2004, for example, Bush said, “We went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.”

Color of Truth

As the months and years went by, Bush’s lie and its unchallenged retelling took on the color of truth.

At a March 21, 2006, news conference, Bush again blamed the war on Hussein’s defiance of U.N. demands for unfettered inspections.
“I was hoping to solve this [Iraq] problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “The world said, ‘Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.’ … We worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny the inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did.”
Only two weeks ago, at a press conference on May 24, 2007, Bush offered a short-hand version, even inviting the journalists to remember the invented history.

“As you might remember back then, we tried the diplomatic route: [U.N. Resolution] 1441 was a unanimous vote in the Security Council that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. So the choice was his [Hussein’s] to make. And he made a choice that has subsequently caused him to lose his life.”

In the frequent repetition of this claim, Bush never acknowledges the fact that Hussein did comply with Resolution 1441 by declaring accurately that he had disposed of his WMD stockpiles and by permitting U.N. inspectors to examine any site of their choosing. [For more on Bush's Iraq War deceptions, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Killer Talking Points.”]
Prominent Washington journalists have even repeated Bush’s lie as their own. For instance, in a July 2004 interview, ABC’s veteran newsman Ted Koppel used it to explain why he – Koppel – thought the invasion of Iraq was justified.

“It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies had been defeated once before by the United States and the Coalition, would be prepared to lose control over his country if all he had to do was say, ‘All right, U.N., come on in, check it out,” Koppel told Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now.”
Of course, Hussein did tell the U.N. to “come on in, check it out.” But he did so in the real history, not in the faux reality that now governs Washington.

‘Big Lie’

This strategy of repeating a “big lie” often enough to make it sound true was famously described in the writings of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels during World War II. However, given the relatively free U.S. press, many Americans felt they were protected from “big lie” techniques, counting on journalists to call lying politicians to account.

But that clearly is no longer the case – and hasn’t been for some time. Facing career pressure from well-organized right-wing attack groups, American journalists act more like triangulating politicians, fearful of accusations of “liberal bias” or unpatriotic behavior or softness on terrorism.

To have challenged George W. Bush in July 2003 – when he was near the height of his popularity and to do so in a way that might be interpreted as defending Saddam Hussein – would have looked like career suicide to many American reporters.

So, discretion – or in this case the acceptance of a lie as truth – was the better part of valor. And once the lie was repeated enough, it would have sounded odd to suddenly start challenging what had become the official version of reality. It was the smarter choice to stay silent and avoid certain punishment from Bush’s defenders.

Clever journalists know that it’s much safer to bash someone like, say, Al Gore. There’s virtually no career downside to do that. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The New Assault on Al Gore.”]

Now, the bogus history of Saddam Hussein barring the U.N. inspectors has been passed down to a new political generation and surely is believed by millions of Americans who will be called on to evaluate this latest cast of aspiring presidential hopefuls.

To state the obvious, this is not the way a healthy democracy should work.

We need to change the title of this thread from "we should not abandon Iraq" to "we should not be in Iraq".....plain and simple.

It's academic now - we're in Iraq and we're there to stay!

The US has a huge investment in making sure Iraq is stable and friendly to us for the forseeable future.

The US will have major troop presence in Iraq 50 years from now, just like Korea or Germany. 30-40,000 troops at least.

Does anyone really believe that US troops are required to defend Germany??

It's all part of maintaining US hegemony son.

You heard it first from garysher

Gary speaks the truth. The Germans, South Koreans, and Japanese (to name just a few) are far capable of defending themselves. And yet the same argument is being used for our troop presence in those countries as they are giving Iraq, and the same argument that nearly every imperialist force before us has given: that the US stabilizes the world, and withdrawing from such nations will cause a world in conflict. When in actuality the motives for keeping the boot to other people's throats is much more deeper and sinister than that; to consolidate the world's resources, as well as to ensure the world's subservience to US hegemony, free trade policies, and capital; all summed up in the much more used and undoubtedly politically correct term of "US interests".

It almost reminds me of India. The British rationalized their continued presence with the excuse that they acted as a barrier between the clashing of the Hindus and Muslims within India. Of course, they were right in that when they left, there was indeed fighting. However, they failed to realize that they were masters in someone else's country. Granted India would have problems, but they were problems for the Indians. There is no excuse for imperialism. The same goes with the issue of Iraq.

Put Saddam back!

Thanks for the Memories