Quote from OPTIONAL777:
I agree, the Soviet Union was a great potential threat on the basis of their known weapons.
Was Iraq in their league from a threat perspective? Or am I missing something?
Perhaps our policy is simply to engage in wars we know we can win and/or win easily.
I believe our policy is to wage war when doing so is the best solution, and by the best means. We and the Soviet Union did wage war with each other for around 40 years, almost entirely through proxy fights and other indirect means. No other option other than surrender or mutual annihilation was available.
If you paid attention I was one who thought the war would be a virtual cakewalk...which it was, further lending credibility to those who opposed the war claiming Hussein was no real threat to the national security.
I don't recall where you were during week 1 of the war when many of those same people were invoking quagmire and Vietnam, and loudly proclaiming that the famous "plan" was a sham and a scandal. That, in retrospect, the military victory appears easy is a credit to the armed forces and its military and political leadership. The threat posed by Hussein to US security was never that the Republican Guard was going to storm Washington DC, and was not merely the threat as it existed on or around the middle of March 2003, so the inability of Hussein's regular forces to withstand the concentrated force of the US military is somewhat irrelevant to the core issues.
Are you suggesting that there wasn't an urgency in the Bush administration to attack Iraq?
No, and I don't see where you draw any such suggestion from my remarks.
The administration continually told us there was no reason to wait, that all the waiting had been done, and we had to act now, for fear of delay would be giving Hussein a chance to use his WMD against the USA or further fund/train terrorists.
That set of arguments still stands.
As far as the legitimacy/legality of war, from the point of view you are taking, don't we also have the right to attack Great Britain, American Indians, North Vietnam, North Korea, Germany, Italy, Japan, etc. Is it written into declaration of war a date at which the war expires?
Some of those examples are obviously frivolous. Others pertain to conflicts that were concluded on the basis of peace treaties. North Korea is an interesting example, in that the conflict ended by ceasefire, and the establishment of a formal peace agreement - implying or coinciding with legal recognition of the NK regime's legitimacy - is one of NK's chief current political goals.
Vietnam is another interesting example. That conflict was concluded according to a laboriously negotiated peace treaty - whose terms were flagrantly violated by the North Vietnamese. The US lacked the will to attempt to enforce the agreement - much to the detriment of US allies, and, in the opinion of many historians, to US credibility and larger interests.
Or is there an objective of that declaration, once completed that voids the open ended nature of that declaration?
When we went to war with Iraq in the Gulf War, we won that war...jointly with the support of the U.N. and drew up terms of surrender.
It is factual that Iraq did not comply with those terms of surrender, yet was it spelled out the consequences of failure to keep to those terms?
Was it spelled out that the USA, or any other country, could at their own whim act as the police for that body?
When a conflict is concluded on the basis of a ceasefire agreement, the presumption is that violation of that agreement returns relations to the status quo ante. You are certainly correct, however, that the legal status of the war with Iraq has been the subject of controversy. While a reading of the pertinent UNSC Resolutions makes it clear that Iraq never complied fully with any of the resolutions that codified ceasefire terms, there are contradictions and uncertainties between and within specific resolutions, and questions about the UN itself that also come into play. The inability of Security Council members to agree upon an interpretation of their own resolutions - whose language at least from the Anglo-American legal perspective seemed clear, and supportive of the UK-US position - raised serious questions about the UN's own competence and relevance. Lacking a coherent and consequential new policy from the UN, the US and UK governments, among others, believed themselves justified in falling back on their own interpretations both of their national interests and of extant international agreements, conventions, and precedents.
Bush had been given a green light to fight terrorism by the congressional branch, but Bush needed to make a case that a war with Iraq fell into that category..i.e., war with Iraq was a necessary part of the war on terrorism.
Bush received specific authorization and relative freedom of action regarding Iraq prior to returning to the UN.
The text of the Congressional Authorization can be found at the link below. If you check it for yourself, you will see that, in the the four pages of "Whereas"'s setting forth the justifications for authorizing the President to use force, there is no mention of "immediate" threats of WMD attacks. There is mention of the risk of WMD attacks either directly or through third party terrorist groups, without respect to immediacy, and there is much mention of Iraq's long history of defiance, aggression, and hostility. Almost any one of the "Whereas" clauses can be read as presenting in itself a necessary and sufficient cause for action.
http://www.broadbandc-span.org/downloads/hjres114.pdf
In legal terms, within the US, once that Resolution was passed, Bush did not need any other justification to go to war.
You can argue, as some others have, that the fear of immediate attack alone made adoption of the resolution possible, though I believe that is to engage in facile revisionism, politically self-serving in particular for those Democrafts who need to distance themselves from Bush ahead of next year's elections. In any event, given all that we knew or thought we knew then, and all that we know or suspect now, there is nothing that would have definitively removed that fear.
Those who are unwilling to examining the motives, arguments, and case for the war on Iraq now, seem to me unwilling to think that it is possible we were wrong, and possibly the administration acted improperly in making their case to the American people.
There has been and will continue to be examination of the motives, arguments, and case. If the examination and whatever conclusions don't suit your precepts, it may as well be that your precepts are flawed.
And the key "evidence" in the argument for war was WMD and the suggested connection between Hussein and terrorism that was a threat to national security.
I might describe the role and the content of the Powell presentation differently, but, though individual items in his presentation seem clearly to have been ill-founded, in all critical respects his arguments and evidence still stand.
Threat sufficient to justify preemptive wars is either real or fiction.
I am still waiting for the real proof.
You appear to be waiting for the kind of proof that could only be called "real" after it was too late to be dealt with except at huge cost, it at all - for Iraq to have, in effect, become North Korea in the Persian Gulf.
Again, the thought experiment of removing WMDs, terrorism, and 9/11 from the equation is frivolous - they were all principle variables of the equation, and could not be removed without imagining an entirely different world than the one in which we live.
Frivolous?
I disagree. The WMD and terrorism were central to Bush and company and their arguments about the need for war.
What's frivolous is trying to imagine a policy that evolved directly in relationship to these issues in the absence of those issues. It's like trying to imagine how a marriage might have developed if only the husband and wife had been two entirely different people.
You don't want to look back less than a year because you deem it frivolous?
I'm happy to look back. I think it's a valuable exercise. I even enjoy it. I object to being forced to argue from artificially narrowed and distorted, wholly counterfactual premises.
Given what the Bush Administration knew and believed, which was not much different from what others knew and believed, it couldn't and shouldn't have argued the case for war very much differently. Was their presentation perfect, unmarked by elements of political salesmanship, by emphases heightened for political convenience, and by some misstatements? It would be absurd for anyone in the Bush Administration or for any war supporter to claim so, or even want to claim so.
I believe you mistake
your decisionmaking process and standards for the nation's. The tipping point for
you was your belief that an immediate and absolutely incontrovertible urgent physical threat, as you define all relevant terms, had been established. (And how urgent would it have had to have been? A minute? A day? A week? A month? A year?) Those may not be everyone's terms, and even those who largely share them may define them differently.
RS