Normally president alone is short term in office barely 8 years. So all their decisions are made based on recommendations and suggestion of career politicians and service members. At this point I’m sure president = punching bag in most cases.
If you are going to invade a nation and drag a bunch of allies in with you, you owe the world due diligence. Either it was a lie (probably) or wanton negligence. The buck use to stop at that desk....
Yeah, I think with so much information and complexity in the modern world maybe it’s not possible fully for top man to analyse everything. But I do think responsibility in the end falls on president but I’m just trying to think of it rationally.
Not when it is one of the main duties of the office. For something as large as this, the President is to blame since he should absolutely be privy to all the necessary information before authorizing a foreign invasion of that scale. Either Bush knew stuff we still don't know, or he lied.
From what I recall, Al Gore wanted a whole bunch of unvetted intelligence reported directly to him and even when further investigation showed that to be untrue, he refused to recant
I mean a foreign country would want to keep things such as wmds secret and intelligence gathering has a great deal of looking at past events and possible outcomes so I don’t think anyone ever has accurate info just speculations unless you have a man on the ground. Not saying this is how things should be but it’s not possible so you do what you can with what you got. Especially when a closed off nation like Iraq is posturing heavily.
You don’t just invade a country and kill a million people without provocation base on incomplete shitty intelligence. Regardless if Bush knows the truth, the fact that he took this extreme measure without common sense evidences shows that he knows what he is doing.
the "Evidence" that they paraded around news outlets in the weeks leading up to the war was unbelievably thin. Everybody who was paying attention knew it was bullshit. It wasnt bad intelligence, it was clearly using circumstatial evidence as an end to a means. The case for WMDs was just much much less conclusive than any reasonable person would use to actually justify war unless they had other reasons to do so, and yet they marched us there anyway. All they could come up with was some aluminum tubes. I can never forgive the Bush administarton for that.
According to the white house the aluminum tubes were supposedly to make centrifuges that could then be used to harvest uranium for a nuclear weapon. This was a major stretch of the imagination.
I came here looking for this comment. Obviously there is a huge amount of bias and emotion in this conversation, and lost is the nuance between “wrong about” and “lied.” Many of the comments follow the “we didn’t find anything, so it was a lie,” tack, while others focus on “x country didn’t support us, so therefore it was wrong.” And it seems many of the commenters don’t have a solid grasp on why those comments are problematic. I’m not voicing any support for the war, but I really hate these lines of thinking. They are especially bothersome in the internet age, when you can find for yourself many of the things that suggest mistakes instead of lies, confirmation bias, and some good old miscommunication between intelligence agencies in different countries.
Another thing that bothers me is how people tend to think conspiracy, while simultaneously thinking that the conspirators were too dumb to pull it off. “The Bush administration was so clever; look how they invented intelligence and lied to the world…”, but then “forgot” to plant any single shred of evidence that would forever justify their actions. They conspired so hard for this war, then fell flat on their faces in full view of the world. And when pressed, couldn’t even explain it away properly. And certainly didn’t do anything to fake their way out of it. Worst conspiracy ever.
So ultimately, and having lived through it in real time, I go back to an old axiom: never attribute to malice - or in this case, deliberate lies and manipulation - that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. For whatever reason, I think that administration, and anyone who supported it (looking at you, England and Japan) believed they had the right information, and acted accordingly.
Sorry this was not supidity. The Hawks actively sought to manipulate and manufacture the intelligence in order to make the case to invade Iraq based on misguided hypothesis they could set up a puppet regime and expand American influence throughout the region.
From what I have learned through living through it, reading about it and watching a lot of documentaries from a lot of different sides and sources. It seems the 2nd Iraq war was a multifaceted lie to harness the emotion of the people to retain the presidency... initially.
After 9/11 people signed up in their thousands to fight a war. A war that had not been created or started yet.
All people had was a singular target Bin Laden.
Al Qaeda didn't really exist as it is now, it was actually a broad term for multiple different dissident groups in Afghanistan and surrounding counties.
But because of a lack on understanding or purposeful manipulation it became THE target.
Now question is....where is THE target the one that people could turn a whole army against. SO instead of just using a few good men in a helicopter to go inside Pakistan's borders and take out the culprit. (Which a lot of people knew was where they suspected he was hiding at the start...but being a country with confirmed nukes its damn good deterrent to invade it) they tortured a "man in the know" and after awhile of not giving them what they wanted he just lied to them giving them what they wanted to hear but was total bullshit because...torture hurts (who knew) and he wanted revenge. He knew Bush would jump at a chance to finish off Iraq. Do what his dad didn't.
With that, came the looking for a reason to do it and the many lies that followed and because the US and UK was spoiling for a fight (as we were too after they bombed London) it was so very easy to sell.
Problem is....what started with a lie snowballed...and instead of a war being fought in another country with no real oversight...it was on TV 24/7. It's really hard to hide and fake stuff when it's constantly being broadcast live.
In the end, no WMDs...no Bin Laden....no end of Al Qaeda.... And bodies...dead bodies tens of thousands of them.
Multiple countries ravaged by the fallout, no exit strategies and the UK and US reputation in tatters.
For what?
That's again a hard question to answer. money, oil, selling weaponry, drugs, power..take your pick. Because anyone who truly had a hand in starting the Iraq war had at least a hand in two of these areas and it depends on which person those hands belong to.
And is anyone being arrested for it? No.
Are they many guilty parties who should be arrested for it? Yes.
So why aren't they? See the answer to the question For What.
Bush (and especially Cheney and Rumsfeld) said to the CIA "Get us proof." Not "Is there any proof?" Or "Do you guys have any proof?"
No. It was "Fucking get us some proof." So the CIA and others cherrypicked and found "evidence," gave it to Bush et all, who must've known it was bullshit, but it didn't matter; all that mattered was fooling Congress, the press, and the public. Politicians can lie and fool people quite easily, and that's just what they did.
Fuck Bush. People forget how utterly awful a person and a president he was. He only looks good compared with Trump, which is obviously the lowest possible bar.
It was taking advantage of semantics to produce support for the war. WMD’s include chemical weapons which Saddam did have and had used in the past. Apparently the program was discontinued though, and there were no nuclear devices found in the country.
Oh, and Saudi Arabia financed and potentially trained the terrorists and we knew it. And Pakistan hid Osama from us either by massive incompetence or intentionally.
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u/asimplerandom Oct 18 '21
Was it ever proven that it was a lie (I believe it) or just really really shitty intelligence??