wrote in message
...
On Wed, 2 Dec 2009 01:11:35 -0800, "nom=de=plume"
wrote:

My next step? I wasn't the president, and there was no threat to the US.
Israel certainly could and can take care of itself. He wasn't invading
anyone.

Yet again, you're revising history. Bush said nothing about the poor
Iraqi
people until the WMD bs wouldn't float any more. The Kurds has a very
secure
area with Saddam contained. He did nothing to them leading up to the
invasion. He gassed them in 1988...
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,190446,00.html.

Clinton was the one who said he was saving the Kurds, that was the
excuse for the no fly zones.

I said, "with Saddam contained." Thus Clinton was ensuring the Kurds'
continued security.

The no fly zones were unsustainable. At a certain point we were still
going to have to put boots on the ground or abandon the project.
Saddam was slipping out of the containment in 2000, before Bush took
office. Read a little about diversions from the oil for food program.
Clinton ignored it because it was an election year. The next guy had a
decision to make, either enforce the UN resolutions or get out.
I think Bush made the wrong choice but having Saddam rebuilding his
army was troubling too. We had lost the embargo by then and in
November of 2000 Iraq rejected any more inspections.

You don't know this. It's a guess and by no means a sure thing. This is the
same type of rationale that Bush used... preemption.

Bush lied to us and to the world. "Made the wrong choice" isn't what
happened. He deliberately mislead. There's a big difference.

The inspectors were allowed back in and were doing their work.

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/iraqtimeline2.html

I am not here to defend Bush, he was wrong. My question is why didn't
Clinton get us out of there? Saddam was clearly slipping away from
containment and without an effective embargo we really didn't have any
way to contain him without more military action.

Because the containment was still working. It's unclear if other means
could
be used to continue to thwart Saddam's greater designs on the region. We
didn't get a chance to try ala Bush.

Define "working". We were bombing them at least once a week because
they were shooting at UN planes and oil money was flowing into his
country at close to pre-war levels. He was using that money to rebuild
his military.

So what? We should not be in the business of preemption without a direct
threat to _us_ or our allies. No such threat existed.

--
Nom=de=Plume