NO WMD

$$

Ok , Piggy Saddam is out of the question, what do we do with Iraq? What is the alternative , you have stated that Saddam was "cruel and vicious dictator who murdered his own people willy nilly" USA and the UK knew this and took action , but what do we now do to solve the problem , i get tired of everyones slating statements , but none offer answer or solutions, that is why i say who cares, to what end.

"Yes...we're all guilty of looking at the world merely from our point of view."
Yes, obviously, but as above, lets try looking at it from another angles, then form an opinion, that might bring a solution , all i see on this site is illegal , human rights , Anti USA and Bush ranting.

Re: $$

I somehow doubt that the US government are reading this thread waiting for someone to offer a solution to the Iraq problem.
I can't think of any realistic solution to it, to be honest. By realistic, I mean, something that could conceivably happen.

Can you see the US handing over the reins anytime soon? I can't. They'd lose what they went in there for for starters.

Only conjecture, but I'd imagine that what they're hoping for is that once the elections take place next January (no matter what state they happen in) people will start to forget about Iraq and it'll become another Afghanistan.

.

So.....

Hans Blick was right and the Yank & Brit Govts wrong

Consultants are hired to give the answers that their employers want to hear.

Result : Tens of thousands dead, Iraq infrastructure wrecked.

How would we all like it if some country the far side of the globe decided for some false reason to do to Ireland what has been done to Iraq ?

What would you do ? Go join the IRA eh ?. Iraq is no different in this regards as GWB & Co are starting to learn

Short memories

Disgusted[/], SH was a pariah on the international stage for at least 15 years. He was subject to sanctions and no fly zones and UN inspections etc. and yet he continued to flaunt international authority, periodically throwing out all UN inspectors.

SH actually courted an image that he was a major threat. This is what his hero worshippers, such as the Palestinains wanted to believe - they wanted to believe that they had a hero who was a World threat and might some day "free" them.

SH encouraged this myth - his megalomania was such that he never believed that he would be invaded - after all he wasn't invaded in 1991 when the whole international community would have been behind such a move. It was only in those final days before the invasion that SH got a reality check and made a very belated confession that he once had WMD but had kicked the habit. Too late - he finally got what he asked

.

I am confident that it was well within the powers and expertise of the US military to have assassinated Hussein years before the 2003 invasion took place. The Israelis seem to have no problem in this regard. The danger with that was it would leave the governance of Iraq in total disarray and Iraq would be more unstable than ever. The West needs a stable Iraq because it has come to depend on its oil "exports". Why WMD are still at the core of the debate I'll never know because they never were anyway. The debate seems to switch between WMD and links to Bin Laden at a furious rate when in both cases it has been proved that neither existed. The last remaining excuse for illegally invading Iraq is now freedom and peace for the Iraqi people. It becomes a farcical situation when the people who are closest to this (Rumsfeld) start to trip themselves up on their own lies.

Re: .

Why WMD are still at the core of the debate I'll never know because they never were anyway

Precisely davido.
WMD was merely a plausible reason given to us poor plebs. It sounded better than the real reasons.

Intelligence was sketchy at best about what Iraq did or did not have. One only has to look at the evidence of those dossiers to understand that war was inevitable for both governments come what may. They both purposefully ignored the weapons inspectors. I wonder why we haven't invaded North Korea yet? They have a small (and ever growing) nuclear arsenal...and we know that!

mouse

It seems the Iraqis would rather be dead than 'free'.

weapons of mass destruction

The problem is this. The reason two nation-states (UK and USA) gave for the invasion of Iraq - that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaieda were about to unleash untold horrors on the global community - were lies.

Those posters who dismiss what happens next in Iraq as unimportant are right........but for the wrong reasons.

What has happened with the invasion of Iraq is something that never occurred on such a scale before. An attempt to flagrantly deceive electorates who had put the statesmen in question in power as their representatives and figureheads.

The world has been rendered much less safe by this betrayal of trust as much as by any Afghanistanian freedom-fighters (which is what incidentally those looking from the other side of the mountain, see themselves as!)

Memories

Anybody remember the good old days in Iraq before the invasion? Weren't we told then by the piggyists that millions of children were being killed by UN sanctions? UN sanctions are now gone so we don't hear that one anymore.

Can the piggyists not admit that even by their own warped model of blame attribution that the current coalition "aggression" is one heck of a lot less deadly than the United Nations aggression which preceded it?

OH MY GOODNESS

YD. You need to just go back to sleep. You're too stupid for an intelligent posting like this.

Highbrow response.

An attempt to flagrantly deceive electorates who had put the statesmen in question in power as their representatives and figureheads.

Watergate was pretty bad.

This kind of thing will continue to happen for as long as humans walk the face of the Earth. Where there's money and power, there's war.

On-topic

Brainiac - not a highbrow response at all but an attempt to focus on the question before it gets lost immediately in "whose side are you on?" exchanges. I take your point about the Watergate deceptions but in that case the situation did not extend beyond the USA nor did it jeopardise world stability and trust. We're in a new league now.

re:Memories

Your ability to ignore the facts and turn a blind eye to what this war is really about yd is astounding. well done.

Re..

The case against the legality of the invasion of Iraq and the situation on the ground in Iraq at the moment relative to what it was under Saddam are two separate issues.

The reality is that fewer Iraqis are being killed now than under Saddam. That’s according to the UN.
It is also the reality that the people of Iraq have a chance, for the first time in about 60 years, of having some say in how they are ruled.
As for the world being a more dangerous place, the western world it a more dangerous place but I don’t think that the rest of the world is more dangerous. To say it is makes one sound a bit like the very people who are being accused of imposing a western agenda on the rest of the world.
UN sanctions killed Iraqi children only because their leader chose not to spend the funds available on food. It is plain that the US and others obstructed the Iraqi oil ministry when it attempted to maintain and upgrade it’s drilling and pumping facilities and this was a major contributing factor to the suffering of normal Iraqis but to blame the UN or the US is to ignore the facts.
Another charge levelled against the US and UK etc is that this is an attack on Islam. I can’t see how this stands up. Saddam was the head of a secular dictatorship that oppressed the majority of the Muslim population. Now he is gone and Islamic parties will field candidates in the coming elections.

As for the legality of the war, it was clearly illegal.
The premise for the war was WMD’s and links to international fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. Both of these charges have been shown to be false.
The conduct of US troops in Iraq has been less than adequate (unlike the British troops who learned how to do that kind of work on the streets of northern Ireland) and the coming elections leave a lot to be desired, but are a dam sight better than what was there before.

There are two separate issues here; it only muddies the waters to lump them together.

Re: Re..

The conduct of US troops in Iraq has been less than adequate (unlike the British troops who learned how to do that kind of work on the streets of northern Ireland)

There are numerous recent reports that the British soldiers are just as brutal in their dealings with civilian Iraqis (in the areas they look after) as their American counterparts.

I'll try to hunt down the articles.

news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=498152004

more subtle definition....

Purple - I agree they are separate issues and you define them with elegance and parsimony. The question of whether the tyranny of "the coalition" (and there is visual documentation of treatment of Iraqis which contravenes the Geneva Convention) is worse than the tyranny of the resident dictator is a thorny one. It sometimes seems as if West bloc too readily assumes "the lesser of two evils" is comprehensive civil restraint. Iraq, the Emirates and a good number of other countries might not find that restraint on personal and collective expression to be so congenial.

Iraq

Iraq is better off now than under Saddams control. Remember how he treated his own people? How he gassed the Kurds. How he invaded Kuwait. How he slowly immersed his political opponents in to acid baths.
How he strung people up from lamp posts and in football stadiums.

Many of the people fighting the dozens of peace-keeping Armies in Iraq ( US, UK, Australian, Polish, etc etc etc )
are blow ins from outside Iraq just looking for a fight. Most Iraqis just want peace and a chance of a democratic future, and they know that they have a chance of that now thanks to the allies.

Iraq

I still remember how I laughed when Powell was showing the UN pics of Iraqi WMD factories and bla bla last year before war. How can a government of world's most powerful country be so stupid.

Iraq today is what Afghanistan was when it was invaded by Russians few decades ago. Not all fighting in Afghanistan were Afghanis (remember OBL?) . History is repeating itself and no one is learning anything. As long as US and its puppies stays in Iraq there will never be peace in the region. If they decide to leave we will have another post war Afghanistan that will breed more terrorists. Bush and co really got their head in $hit with no easy way out.

.

Iraq - I agree! Do we EVER learn? About 2,500 years ago the Chinese strategist Lao Tzu wrote down the terms of engagement for conflict in "The Art of War". He said do anything you can to avoid war and conflict. If you do engage with an enemy make sure you have a clear means of exit. Don't start a war unless you are positive you can win.

Bushbaby and Bliar haven't been reading the right theorists nor are they keeping the history of their own nations in mind - in the former the debacle of Viet Nam, in the latter the 500 year long conflict in Northern Ireland!

...

Blame Bushbaby and Blair all you want, but their countries are all there is between civilization and world tyranny. This was the case in WW2, this was the case in the Cold War, and this is the case in the war on Islamic terror. How many do-gooders / anti-West people ever done anything positive? Ah , Hitler wasnt that bad. Saddam never meant to gas the Kurds or invade Kuwait or pay the families of palestian suicide bombers or put his political opponents in torture chambers.