All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
Tony Benn, British Labour politician
President Bush came as close as he could to admitting a mistake when during a roundtable interview with reporters, he said his tough language had an unintended consequence.
The phrases he was referring to were: “Bring it on” and “wanted dead or alive” when referring to Iraqi insurgents and Osama bin Laden, respectively.
Now if we could just get him to admit he made a mistake when he said, “On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war.”
If the United States focused on bin Laden, maybe we’d have him now. Certainly there would be substantial fewer deaths and many families would have their sons, daughters, fathers and mothers home.
2 comments:
There is a question that has not been satisfactorily answered for me and that is this. What role did our intelligence play in the decision to go after Saddam.
We operated off of bad intelligence and I want to know if the decisions were made to go to war based upon that or if things were intentionally skewed to support war.
I have read a number of things that seem to support both positions.
As I understand it, the decision to go to war was a combination of bad intelligence and pressure. You have Dick Cheney pushing for the answers he wants and you have people trying to please him, so they pull out the information that they need to give them the conclusion they want to reach. If you have ever been in a meeting with a CEO or other top executive or even a lawyer, they will ask the same question a number of different ways to get the answer they want. From what I have read, the intelligence was cherry picked to allow them to come to only one solution – war.
The biggest issue is the U.S. policy of preemptive attacks. We attacked with less than solid information and now it turns out our reason for attacking did not exist at all -- there were no weapons of mass destruction.
Our policy makes us judge, jury and prosecutor.
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