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Mr. Luddite

On 10/25/2015 1:21 PM, wrote:
On Sun, 25 Oct 2015 12:42:15 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 10/25/2015 12:32 PM, wrote:

The flaw in your logic is the no fly zones were not part of the
original cease fire and that essentially restarted the war.
Overflying a sovereign country with armed aircraft and shooting
missiles into the crowd is an act of war.
They were started right before the 1992 election and actually became
the Clinton policy.
By the time GW took office, a state of war had existed in Iraq for
over 8 years.
People are trying to reinstate that situation in Iraq again as we
speak.
What could possibly go wrong? ;-)

I also think the way we are parsing "combat deaths" with the rest of
the people dying is down right Orwellian. Most of the GIs who died in
Iraq were not "combat deaths" in the current twisted definition.

I stand corrected. The UN did not authorize the no fly zones. The US
Britain and France did, mostly to protect the Kurds.

"Protecting the Kurds" was just a euphemism for supporting a CIA
inspired coup. It became clear that we needed boots on the ground to
actually accomplish that so we did.

Regardless, it wasn't the only Resolution being broken and Saddam was
certainly starting to behave in a militaristic manner again.

He was simply emulating Bill Clinton and believing he was bullet
proof. We bombed him just about every day for a decade and he was as
powerful as ever,. The US was even losing the allies they had counted
on for most of that time.
By 2003, the only choice was becoming, walk away and let him have the
win or go get him. Pressure from the Eastern Med assured, walking away
was never going to be an option.
I doubt Al Gore would have come up with any better option either.
If we were seen as supporting an Israelis in a war with saddam it
would have been infinitely worse. You only have to look at 1974 to get
a clue and that did not even involve an invasion of a muslim state.

I've often thought that the morning after a new President's inauguration
a meeting is held in a secure room and he is briefed by the CIA, the
NSA, the FBI and other intelligence groups (that we probably don't even
know about) as to what the world situation *really* is. The public
never knows the details. We get the dumbed down versions that have gaps
that don't often make sense.