SciFiFisher wrote:Gullible Jones wrote:You tell me. Who preemptively invaded a country that hadn't attacked us yet, based on dubious and possibly falsified intelligence?
(Yes, I know; 20/20 hindsight. Even so.)
Factually speaking it was a UN coalition acting on a UN resolution. Just sayin. Yes, the U.S. had the largest number of troops and was the front runner. But, (I will repeat it because it is worth saying again) It was a UN backed coalition of countries that invaded and maintained a military presence in Iraq. And they were acting on a UN Resolution. Keep repeating that. Because you keep talking as if the U.S. acted unilaterally and without any regard to what the rest of the world was doing.
And as for your claim that the U.S. has committed war crimes I would suggest you research the definition. and look at what the U.S., the U.N., and the rest of the world consider to be a war crime. Because I think you are confusing your own decision that the war was immoral and therefore illegal with what constitutes a truly binding case of war crimes committed by a sovereign nation. Crimes committed by individuals may have been "war crimes" but to best of my knowledge the U.S. as a country has not committed a war crime. If you have factual proof that you can cite please do.
Late to the party as life has kept me busy. Not looking to resurrect this, I can wax philosophic on all the things we did wrong in Iraq.
However, the little canard about our "unprovoked" attack on poor, innocent Iraq is so much bullshit.
A minor history lesson:
At the end of Gulf 1, all that was signed between Iraq and the U.S. was a cease-fire. No peace terms were vetted, discussed, or agreed to.
Iraq had a decade-plus of flouting U.N. resolutions, beyond even the arguments about WMDs. It was an open secret (marvelous euphemism that) that Iraq was using money from both its legitimate "Oil for Food" sales, as well as black market sales of oil outside that framework, to rebuild its military. And couple of new palaces. And fill a couple of mass graves we discovered once we invaded; granted we didn't know *that* little tidbit in advance.
So, we didn't even need the arguable WMD assertions as a reason to start smacking Iraq again. We were already in a state of war with them. And had been.
Now...that doesn't excuse the fact that Bushco had no real plan, or clue for that matter, what to do when Saddam's gov't was toppled. And it doesn't excuse the fact that it diverted all the attention away from Afghanistan, which was/is the bigger problem. And...well, as I said, I can detail the failings of the Iraq war at length.
But the whole "preemptive invasion" canard is so much crap. Along with the other, oft-cited assertion...which was *not* floated here happily...that the invasion was "illegal."