... Yeah, I get that you disagree with my attitude towards politics. I understand how the way I express it looks to you, and it's not worth engaging you on this subject.
What I don't understand is how your description of me relates in this case.
Iraq was a solidly pre-emptive war. Unless faced with overwhelming evidence of imminent catastrophic consequences, this should be tossed out by anyone with a shred of sanity on principle alone. If you consider this a childish absolute, then I have nothing else to say.
And there was not overwhelming evidence. Even if you believe everything, the war was built on two cases.
1. They might have some materials that could conceivably be made into components for things that could hurt us.
2. Saddam has ties to the terrorist organization that just attacked us.
#1 was outright refuted or heavily contested by actual experts and investigations on every count, and this was incredibly obviously ignored by the war proponents of the time. Multiple inside agents and investigators from multiple organizations on multiple levels of government, both U.S. and international, looked into the claims and made it clear that they found no evidence. I understand that Bush's inner circle constructed blatant lies to push the legislator, but I absolutely will fault them for running with that when every other source was turning up absolutely nothing. The only two explanations for this are ignorance or inability/unwillingness to apply the slightest critical thinking to the situation, which is not acceptable when considering a decision guaranteed to result in hundreds of thousands of deaths. And even if it were true, there was never even any attempt to establish that there was intent or imminence to actually use any supposed capability that I can recall or find reference to now, so this still wasn't even halfway proper justification for a pre-emptive invasion.
#2 was never substantiated at all. It was just put out there and accepted without question until years later. Seriously, I cannot WTF at this hard enough.
And there were obvious red flags besides the flimsiness of justification. The eagerness was overwhelming and disturbing, and in my experience, it was near-universally recognized, even among war supporters, that it was hard not to assume unfinished family business as a factor. Bush was so hyper-focused on Iraq that even though he sold the invasion as a front line on the War on Terror in direct response to 9/11, he would also blatantly tell the public long before the invasion had even begun that the person named as directly responsible for 9/11 wasn't a priority to him. Then there's the gigantic flashing neon red flag that was the warmongering inner circle's financial ties to the defense industry. I mean fucking come on really... this is not a product of hindsight. I was asking the exact same question in 2003: how the fuck can anyone with half a brain not see the mountainous shitpile of conflicts of interest and contradictory rhetoric going on here.
So yeah, I get the statement that it wasn't healthy for anyone's political career aspirations at the time to oppose any war in the middle east, with a good chunk of the country screaming "We should nuke that entire region to glass!" with flaming bald eagles and flags firing from every fucking orifice. That's not hard to understand.
But when you tell me that it was a difficult decision for a politician to be faced with, you're either telling me that politicians are gullible and stupid, or that no amount of ethical gravity is enough to make it easy for a politician to sacrifice political points. Either way, you're telling me that it's immature of me to expect anything of a politician.
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1586080 times)