Cheney Admits that He Lied about 9/11

Takeda, do you really think I would have been doing it if I wasn't sure I could back it all up?

[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

Takeda, do you really think I would have been doing it if I wasn't sure I could back it all up?

That's not the point. The point is that you knew that you could back it up, I knew you could back it up, Dowly knew you could back it up, and most everybody knew you could back it up. All of that and you refused to actually back it up. Instead, we got this game.

I give up.

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen

Thank you. And here's one of the others.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/24/op...day-after.html

this one is more sort of on point:

In one Shiite city after another, expect battles between rebels and army units, periodic calls for an Iranian-style theocracy, and perhaps a drift toward civil war.For the last few days, I've been traveling in these Shiite cities -- Karbala, Najaf and Basra -- and the tension in the bazaars is thicker than the dust behind the donkey carts.

So before we rush into Iraq, we need to think through what we will do the morning after Saddam is toppled. Do we send in troops to try to seize the mortars and machine guns from the warring factions? Or do we run from civil war, and risk letting Iran cultivate its own puppet regime? In the north, do we suppress the Kurds if they take advantage of the chaos to seek independence? Do we fight off the Turkish Army if it intervenes in Kurdistan?

Unless we're prepared for the consequences of our invasion, we have no business invading at all.

So après Saddam, le déluge? That's only a guess, of course, but it's exactly what happened the last time Saddam was in trouble, at the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

of course he also says.

Of course there are happier scenarios as well. Iraq also has a 95 percent literacy rate and a secular middle class that could eventually be fertile soil for a democracy that would be a model for the Arab world. So it's fine to hope for democracy, as long as we brace for civil war.

of course he also says.

Yes, and when wolfowitz was appearing to answer questions on the failings this...
So it's fine to hope for democracy, as long as we brace for civil war.
....was a central theme, as in "since you had all the warnings why was the invasion lite option chosen despite all the objections raised about the aftermath"

[Bilge_Rat]

So I have to admit I was having doubts and thought perhaps my memory was failing me, but then I thought, nah, this is Tribesman we are talking about.

So I pulled out one of the many books I have read on Iraq, in this case "Fiasco" by Thomas Ricks to see what he had to say about the civil war. Thomas Ricks was the senior Pentagon reporter for the Washington Post and a leading critic of the war.

So I checked the pre-war period and the objections people raised to the war, odd, no mention of a possible civil war; checked late 2003, 2004, 2005 still no discussion of a possible civil war. Finally, when he wrote the conclusion in the fall of 2005, he discusses the possible outcomes as best, middle or worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is a civil war which he mentions as a possibility. So, one of the leading critics of the war did not think a civil war was an obvious outcome as late as the fall of 2005.

So as usual Tribesman you have no idea what you are talking about. The civil war was not obvious to everyone, unless you can explain why Thomas Rick or any of the other persons he interviewed in his book did not see it coming as late as the fall of 2005.

[August]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

So I have to admit I was having doubts and thought perhaps my memory was failing me, but then I thought, nah, this is Tribesman we are talking about.

So I pulled out one of the many books I have read on Iraq, in this case "Fiasco" by Thomas Ricks to see what he had to say about the civil war. Thomas Ricks was the senior Pentagon reporter for the Washington Post and a leading critic of the war.

So I checked the pre-war period and the objections people raised to the war, odd, no mention of a possible civil war; checked late 2003, 2004, 2005 still no discussion of a possible civil war. Finally, when he wrote the conclusion in the fall of 2005, he discusses the possible outcomes as best, middle or worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is a civil war which he mentions as a possibility. So, one of the leading critics of the war did not think a civil war was an obvious outcome as late as the fall of 2005.

So as usual Tribesman you have no idea what you are talking about. The civil war was not obvious to everyone, unless you can explain why Thomas Rick or any of the other persons he interviewed in his book did not see it coming as late as the fall of 2005.

Bam!

So I have to admit I was having doubts and thought perhaps my memory was failing me, but then I thought, nah, this is Tribesman we are talking about.

See your problem, you were writing about the poster not what was written.

You dug your hole nice and deep and jumped right in youself with only the slightest hint of a push. Now you are stuck in your hole claiming that you are not.

So as usual Tribesman you have no idea what you are talking about. The civil war was not obvious to everyone, unless you can explain why Thomas Rick or any of the other persons he interviewed in his book did not see it coming as late as the fall of 2005.

Obvious to anyone who actually looked and thought.
No doubt you can provide books from the past few years which will still claim that the WMD claims were true, yet it doesn't make it so.
You can probably provide links to the flat earth society too.
What is obvious is never obvious to everyone.


You were provided with indications to public statements from the US chief of staff, the US special envoy, the official stance of the Turkish government , the Indian foriegn minister visiting Washington to discuss the matter, the Saudi foriegn minister doing the same , the ruler of Jordan visiting Blair on the way to meet Bush, the British MPs raising the concern in their parliament, references to many news articles stating the same.
You were provided with US politicians rubbishing the warnings and a US hearing where the administration are castigated for ignoring the obvious warnings.
You come back with one reporter and one book he wrote

I must say though, I did have a good laugh about your attempt on S. Africa.
Off hand can you tell me the ethicity of just the cabinet, maybe stretch it out to deputy ministers to include more blacks, do the same with the military the police and the judiciary...all blacks you see

Bam!

Is that the explosion of those WMDs you recently claimed really did exist

[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

So I have to admit I was having doubts and thought perhaps my memory was failing me, but then I thought, nah, this is Tribesman we are talking about.

So I pulled out one of the many books I have read on Iraq, in this case "Fiasco" by Thomas Ricks to see what he had to say about the civil war. Thomas Ricks was the senior Pentagon reporter for the Washington Post and a leading critic of the war.

So I checked the pre-war period and the objections people raised to the war, odd, no mention of a possible civil war; checked late 2003, 2004, 2005 still no discussion of a possible civil war. Finally, when he wrote the conclusion in the fall of 2005, he discusses the possible outcomes as best, middle or worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is a civil war which he mentions as a possibility. So, one of the leading critics of the war did not think a civil war was an obvious outcome as late as the fall of 2005.

So as usual Tribesman you have no idea what you are talking about. The civil war was not obvious to everyone, unless you can explain why Thomas Rick or any of the other persons he interviewed in his book did not see it coming as late as the fall of 2005.

I just gave you an article that did. This is what you asked for back in post No. 74. Now you are moving the goalposts and claiming victory.

No worries Tak, even with his shifting of the goal posts his "evidence" undercuts him and puts him in a deeper hole.
When Ricks writes of the terrifying concusion that the white house wasn't listening to the generals warnings he is writing about the generals warnings that invasion lite wouldn't allow for any containment of the inevitable blood letting which would come about due to the ethnic divisions in Iraq.

Or
Another virtue of retelling the whole ugly tale is to dispel a favourite accusation of the Bush administration: that its critics are “Monday morning quarterbacks”, emboldened only by hindsight. At every step, in fact, from the pre-war intelligence to American interrogation tactics, wiser men than those in power questioned each facet of the Iraq policy.

Or maybe
A lot of people were saying that this is going to be harder than you think. But that advice was systematically excluded. It was aggressively not welcome in the inner circle.

Perhaps
A phrase that came to haunt me in the research for my book was [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz's "hard to imagine." It turned out that, yeah, it was the imagination. Wolfowitz said it was hard to imagine that you'd need that many more troops for an occupation than for an invasion.

Not wanting to quote Bilges source of "supporting" "evidence" too much of course

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen

I just gave you an article that did. This is what you asked for back in post No. 74. Now you are moving the goalposts and claiming victory.

He is the one who claimed that it was obvious to everyone that there would be a civil war, when it obviously was not. As usual, he is just trying to score cheap debating points and is not interested in the truth.

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

Obvious to anyone who actually looked and thought.
No doubt you can provide books from the past few years which will still claim that the WMD claims were true, yet it doesn't make it so.
You can probably provide links to the flat earth society too.
What is obvious is never obvious to everyone.

is that the best you can do, man you are really stuck in that hole you dug. Keep digging.

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

No worries Tak, even with his shifting of the goal posts his "evidence" undercuts him and puts him in a deeper hole.
When Ricks writes of the terrifying concusion that the white house wasn't listening to the generals warnings he is writing about the generals warnings that invasion lite wouldn't allow for any containment of the inevitable blood letting which would come about due to the ethnic divisions in Iraq.

“President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy,” Mr. Ricks writes. “The consequences of his choice won’t be clear for decades, but it already is abundantly apparent in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information — about weapons of mass destruction and a supposed nexus between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda’s terrorism — and then occupied the country negligently. Thousands of U.S. troops and an untold number of Iraqis have died. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them squandered. Democracy may yet come to Iraq and the region, but so too may civil war or a regional conflagration, which in turn could lead to spiraling oil prices and a global economic shock.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/bo...anted=all&_r=0

"may" is not "obvious".

read the book, you might learn something.

He is the one who claimed that it was obvious to everyone that there would be a civil war, when it obviously was not. As usual, he is just trying to score cheap debating points and is not interested in the truth.

Cheap point scored again, damn this is easy
Thank you for throwing me another point, your claim is false.
I must say you have managed to give yourself a real solid asswhooping, that really is some achievement.

Would you like to deal with what I have written instead of tilting at your own strawman arguements?

[MH]

So they all knew there would be civil war and pressed with invasion of Iraq?.
I suppose a lot of lessons had been learned for the next time if ever...which will include more of possible scenarios.

Taking aside all the crap throwing and the coast of the war to Americans it still possible that Iraqis will eventually benefit from this all.
With all the chaos there they are more of democracy than any other post Arab spring country.