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Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq?
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Cobra II is a fantastic book on the invasion of Iraq. It goes it to a lot of discussion of the battle plans and build up to the invasion. It’s been a great resource in my collection.
For the recent invasion of Iraq try "Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq" Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor.
I had to delete a few of your quotes to meet the character limit. Don't think that the fact that I did that means that you're right about anything. You're not.
> Your point is not very complicated, and is just denial and I more than provided sources that it was in fact the deliberate targetting of civilian sites such as water treataement facilities, that predictably and deliberrately led to the mass suffering in Iraq -- including mass deaths of children in the link you ignored http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/01/world/iraq-sanctions-kill-children-un-reports.html
Um... have you even read your own links? That New York Times link says nothing about the bombing of anything and only talks about deaths related to sanctions, which, again, is something that I never even disputed. The Washington Post link does describe some bombing that took place during the Gulf War as hitting civilian targets, but once again that's different than your original claim that this all occurred "pre-invasion", as if it was between both wars and not a part of either war. In addition, because the Washington Post article was written shortly after the invasion it doesn't give a definitive civilian body count. So, your sources suck in advancing your claim.
In any event, please try to keep up with what I'm criticizing you for, and what I'm not. I don't doubt that civilians died in the 1991 Gulf War, and I don't doubt that civilians died as a result of the UN imposed sanctions. What I doubt is your original claim; that half a million people died from intentional U.S. bombing of civilian sites. Prove that, or shut up, because nothing that you've cited so far even comes close to doing so.
> The US doesn't have to directly bomb civilians to be responsible for their deaths. Bombing water threatment facilities, intentionally and with the knowledge that it would result in disease, is no different than bombing them directly so don't make speciious bullshit distinctions.
Actually, there are at least a couple distinctions to be made. First, 500,000 people did not die from those bombings. Second, the bombings occurred during the Gulf War, and were in the furtherance of that war's goals (namely, to get Iraq out of Kuwait). Those are very relevant facts that an honest person should include in the story rather than just saying (as you do) that the U.S. intentionally bombed civilians sites "pre-invasion" and killed 500,000 people in the process, which, again, just isn't true.
> , in addition to sanctions too, and that the US officails even justified making civilians suffer.
Um, I never denied that civilians suffered. You keep changing your argument (which is still incorrect) while simultaneously trying to change my argument (which has never changed).
> Sorry, them is the facts. Deal with it.
Yes, facts. Like the "fact" that 500,000 civilians died from civilian target bombing that occurred pre-invasion. When you refer to "facts" are you referring to facts like that? Because if you are, I'm still waiting for you to find me a source that corroborates them.
> And don't hide behind the UN's skirt - ther nations were relying on US intelligence and claioms after all. Deliberately falsified intelligence and claims.
What the hell are you talking about? First, it's not "hiding behind the U.N." to simply state that it was the UN that imposed sanctions on Iraq, not the U.S. Second, the sanctions were imposed because Iraq invaded Kuwait, and then the sanctions were expanded after the fact to cover a number of other things, including WMD's. It didn't take top secret reports from U.S. intelligence to convince the Security Council that Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Later on, when the sanctions remained after the Gulf War there were a host of reasons, and most of them - namely Saddam's continued non-compliance with UN weapons inspectors - had nothing to do with U.S. intelligence.
> (Re: Iran and Iraq) THis is one of the many excuses later cooked-up to explain away the non-existence of those "WMDs"
You call it an excuse, and that's fine, but it was one that was never made by the Bush administration itself. Rather, it was first advanced in the book on the definitive accounting of the Iraq debacle, Cobra II. I can't link you to a specific page number, but here is an archive of an NBC interview of the authors where they reiterate the claim.
> One version is "Saddam pretended to have WMDs in order to deter Iran so the US was tricked into invading"
Yes, and the first part of that happens to be true. I wouldn't say though that the U.S. was "tricked" into invading, so don't try to stick an argument to me that I never made.
> Another version claims that it was Chalabi, the "Iranian agent", who somehow misled the US into attacking Iraq.
Comparing this to the first "excuse" that you mentioned it's important to note that they're not mutually exclusive. The first claim - that Saddam wanted Iran to think that he had WMD's - doesn't prevent the other claim - Chalabi providing bad intelligence - from also being true.
> ALL BULLSHIT
Two of the three of them are true.
> In fact Iraq filed a 12,000 page detailed report with the UN that showed how the Iraqis had in fact eliminated their WMDs as required...
Yes, Iraq did do that a few months before the invasion and in the wake of a unanimous Security Council resolution that set the stage for the war. Until that point, Saddam was trying to have it both ways, on the one hand convincing the world that he didn't have WMD's so as to stop military action against him, while on the other hand playing a little coy so that Iran might think that he actually might have WMD's and therefore wouldn't perceive him as weak. That is supported by both the authors of Cobra II and the commission behind the Duelfer Report.
Once that Security Council resolution was passed, Saddam got really scared and decided to fully comply. At that point, however, the die had already been cast, and the U.S. was (unjustifiably) going to war regardless of what he did.
> Furthermore, the idea that Saddam somehow accidentally tricked the US into invading Iraq is UTTER RUBBISH and we know for an absolute and unquestionable fact that the US LIED about the WMDs, knowing FULL WELL that they were lying.
Bush lied in the sense that he trumped up weak (and sometimes non-existent) evidence to sell the war to the public. But he really did believe (to his own embarrassment) that Iraq had WMD's. After all, what's the point in lying about the existence of WMD's if you know that once you invade the public is going to expect you to produce them? It doesn't make any sense at all for Bush to spend months telling the U.S. that Iraq has WMD's, while knowing that he's going to invade and not find any.
For Bush, the ends justified the means in that he thought that he could oversell the justification for war, and the fact that it was being oversold wouldn't matter later on because, he thought, as soon as the WMD's were found, that in and of itself would have justified the invasion, so nobody would care about the trumped up evidence at that point.
Of course, when WMD's were found Bush played defense over the issue for the rest of his presidency, and his legacy has been permanently tainted because of the error, which is why it's not reasonable to think (as you apparently do) that he would just knowingly lie his way into war without any thought as to what would happen once his lies were revealed.
> The US deliberately made civilians die and suffer, to accomplish a political goal, the very definition of terrorism
You keep jumping back and forth between the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War. Stop doing that. Also, your incredibly broad definition of terrorism (which is your own definition, and not any official definition) can basically be applied to any war that was engaged in by any country. More specifically, if you honestly believe that the impositions of sanctions was a terrorist act, then you believe the UN to be a terrorist agency, which is obviously absurd.
> The US goal was to make people suffer in the hopes that they would rise up against Saddam -- in other words, the US was making civilians suffer for poltical aims, the very definition of terrorism. And that included killing a half million children, which the US officials blatantly said was "worth it"
That's three times in your response that you've invented a definition of terrorism and then applied it to your mischaracterized description of U.S. foreign policy. I wish that you would once and for all show me that half a million children were killed from U.S. bombs and not economic sanctions. Because your problem right now - other than your bad attempts at creating new definitions of words - is that you're trying to take casualty results from sanctions and apply them to U.S. bombings. You've utterly failed at doing that, but if you want to try again, I'll be happy to read your sources.
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