It is good to establish stability throughout the World. To have a stable government without bias due to race,sex,or cread is indeed a valuable comodity in any country. I don't care who you are.
Tumba June 26, 2008

 

Taking quotes out of context justifies what?


The quote this line was taken from was expressing why we shouldn't invade Iraq. Thank God there were no WMD's, because, sadly, Gore was right:

"Moreover, if we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth rate military of Iraq and then quickly abandon that nation as President Bush has abandoned Afghanistan after quickly defeating a fifth rate military there, the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam. We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

We have no evidence, however, that he has shared any of those weapons with terrorist group. However, if Iraq came to resemble Afghanistan - - with no central authority but instead local and regional warlords with porous borders and infiltrating members of Al Qaeda than these widely dispersed supplies of weapons of mass destruction might well come into the hands of terrorist groups.

If we end the war in Iraq, the way we ended the war in Afghanistan, we could easily be worse off than we are today. When Secretary Rumsfield was asked recently about what our responsibility for restabilizing Iraq would be in an aftermath of an invasion, he said, "that's for the Iraqis to come together and decide."



Clinton preferred a diplomatic solution:

"President Bill Clinton said Wednesday that while the United States still prefers a diplomatic solution to the current standoff with Iraq, 'one way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction.'

'That is our bottom line,' Clinton said, while attending a White House event on education."


Clinton was talking about a strike, not an invasion (as were most of the other quotes you listed):

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program. We want to seriously reduce his capacity to threaten his neighbors.

I am quite confident, from the briefing I have just received from our military leaders, that we can achieve the objective and secure our vital strategic interests.

Let me be clear: A military operation cannot destroy all the weapons of mass destruction capacity. But it can and will leave him significantly worse off than he is now in terms of the ability to threaten the world with these weapons or to attack his neighbors.

And he will know that the international community continues to have a will to act if and when he threatens again. Following any strike, we will carefully monitor Iraq's activities with all the means at our disposal. If he seeks to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction, we will be prepared to strike him again."

 

Others worth noting...

"Well, let's distinguish between two stages. The first stage was the classified version, which was tilted towards weapons of mass destruction but contained a number of areas of disagreement with that conclusion. We asked that that classified version be scrubbed; that is, any security-related information be redacted and then the rest of it be made available to the American people.

Well, what we got three days later was not a redacted version of the original classified report but a wholly new report, which had eliminated all of the conditions and doubts and was a full-scale argument for weapons of mass destruction: imminent threat; we don't get Saddam Hussein now, you're responsible for putting the American people at risk. I was incensed at that point that the American people were being told one thing, and we, in a classified situation, [who] were prohibited from saying anything about it, were being told a significantly different assessment of how sure we were of Saddam Hussein's capabilities, and particularly his intentions.

In the first report, there was a statement that said Saddam Hussein would not use any weapons of mass destruction which he had unless he was first attacked. What does that say? If you don't attack him, even if he has them, our best assessment is he won't use them. That statement of intention was left out of the version that went to the American people.

The Washington Post reported subsequent to all of this that in the late spring of 2002, the White House had called down a number of CIA professionals and told them that they wanted a document which could be used to convince the American people that the threat from Iraq was sufficiently serious that that should be our first priority. So beginning in April or May, the CIA started to put together such a document. ... That was what we got as the public version of their conditional, nuanced-with-dissent classified version." - Sen Bob Graham on the NIE regarding Iraq's WMD's.


"I believe the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq. This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude--we know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers." - Gregory Thielman, the recently retired head of the State Department's intelligence office.


"The decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for bureaucratic reasons.... [T]here were many other important factors as well." - Paul Wolfowitz in a 2003 Vanity Fair interview.


"The U.S. persistently alleged that Baghdad tried to buy high-strength aluminum tubes whose only use could be in gas centrifuges, needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Equally persistently, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the tubes were being used for artillery rockets. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed El Baradei, told the UN Security Council in 2002 that the tubes were not even suitable for centrifuges." - London Independent, 2003


"'Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists,' President Bush said in Cincinnati on October 7.... But declassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released Friday by the White House show that at the time of the president's speech the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began circulating October 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military attack by the United States." Walter Pincus, Washington Post, 2003


"The first occasions when I became more skeptical about intelligence was in January 2003, because we had sent the inspectors to a number of sites we'd got intelligence; and in none of those cases did we find any weapons of mass destruction. " - Hans Blix


"In the late summer of 2002, we had a meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a closed meeting with Director Tenet, and several of us ask him as he was presenting the case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, "What did the National Intelligence Estimate say about this issue?"

The NIE is the highest level of intelligence product of our community. It represents not one agency, but all of the agencies. It encourages dissent, conditions, nuances, so that the reader can see, "Is this 100-0 confidence, or is it 45-55 confidence?"

The answer that we got from Director Tenet is: "We've never done a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, including its weapons of mass destruction." - Sen Bob Graham in a 2006 interview.

 

I agree, but by invading Iraq, we destabilized the region.

 

I do not agree. There now is the best and most compasionate Army in the world.

Don't start about the puppy again please

 

I agree with you there!


Puppy?