than AQ. No way for the US to solve this.

KSA vs. Iran...

Only ISIS is too radical for even Al Quaeda= NOT GOOD

The U.S. deliberately stoked a Sunni-Shi'a civil war as the response to the Iraqi (Sunni but mainly secular) insurgency against the U.S. invasion and war of aggression in their country.

Certainly it is not for the original destroyer of the house to now step in and protect it against opportunistic looters. On that much we can agree: no further military interventions by the U.S. imperialist forces.

However, your post obscures U.S. responsibility. The U.S. government was the prime wackadoodle in creating this situation and bears the moral responsibility. Eventually, reparations must be paid. The first step would be war crimes trials for the architects of this horror, Bush, Cheney, et al.

We reap what we sow.

"We" reap none of it. The price is being paid by the people who live in the region, and not by the criminals who are responsible for the situation. They, on the contrary, are prospering. They have learned only that crime pays, and no doubt plot how to commit further such crimes.

The U.S. invasion was a war of aggression by a small coalition of witting criminal architects. Their motives combined a geopolitical vision with a drive to plunder resources and profit personally. They cajoled and bribed and threatened other factions so as to get the collaboration of many who should have known better, including (decisively) the majority of the Democratic party leadership at that time, including Kerry, Clinton and Biden.

Whether it went as planned or not is irrelevant to the fact that it was an intended international crime of epic proportions. If some methhead gang ran into a bank in the attempt to loot it, murdered people at random, and then failed to gain their objective, you wouldn't say they were mistaken, you'd say they were criminals. To call it a mistake is to exonerate for people who should instead be kicking their last at the end of a rope.

most of them knew at the time about the fake intelligence case, and thought it would turn out to be quick and popular like the first gulf war. In other words, they were out of their depth and league on foreign policy, and didn't realize what they were getting into (most in Congress are still this way--maybe even worse). The Bush team had a lot of old hands from the CIA and Pentagon, so even though Bush was clearly just a figurehead, no one thought that Poppy Bush's old buddies would drive the bus into the ditch that badly.

They are sending young people off to fight, die, get legs and arms blown off, suffer from PTSD and mental problems for the rest of their lives, etc. Try a little responsibility and accountability, Congress. And this war was clearly over oil so those responsible should be held accountable.

to make wise decisions. Totally let us down.

Many a moon we here at DU contemplated and discussed all of these things but the real Boogie-man is coming out of the bag now.

The oil and the money that came from it were only the elixirs. Those peoples lives who live over in areas have been effed with for decades or even centuries. They now can peer over at the rest of the world and see the unfairness they have endured. Those grandiose kingmakers people that hemmed this country together after WW1 did it that way to dis-empower the people by fractionation. That has all been undone now and it was undone by the greed of the oil lobby and war merchants. Every dictatorial regime in that portion of globe is now just a crap shoot.

The ''Shit on the neighbors because it is easy to get away with' is now in short supply.

Wake up and smell the coffee

they were criminally negligent.

The real facts were available to them from many sources. They were well-covered in the international press. People who were on the ground in Iraq, like Baradei, Blix and Scott Ritter, made amply clear that there were no Iraqi WMDs. And EVERYONE could understand that the connection to 9/11 was pure fiction from Cheney. So whoever voted for it was responsible for what happened, yes. Not necessarily criminal, but certainly dangerous if not removed from politics. No career should survive such a "mistake."

And are you seriously going to plead naivete for Clinton, Kerry and Biden?! PLEASE!!!

bu$h started bombing Iraq almost from the first day he slithered into the White House. Iraq had been one of the most bombed, the most surveilled, the most sanctioned countries in the world for the 12 years between the two Iraq wars. It was so painfully obvious that it would have been impossible for Iraq to develop weapons of mass destruction, and the means of delivering them, under those conditions.

For most of us on this board (at the time), anyway...

I'm sorry, but congress wrote, debated, and passed legislation to give domestic legal cover to an international crime against humanity. That was not a "mistake"-- it was complicity in war crimes.

However, it's also important to recognize those who stood against those crimes: 60+ percent of the house democrats and 40+ percent of the senate dems voted NO.

Never forget.

Don't put me in the category of responsibility---I never would have voted to go to war. It was all over the oil---let the oil profiteers and their BushCo friends and puppets pay for this mess.

and hardly just "BushCo." Everyone in Congress who voted for it are also responsible, e.g., Clinton, Kerry, Biden. The media who transported obvious lies and played cheerleaders while ignoring the contradictory evidence are responsible. This is a system. This is a bipartisan-supported system of imperialism that also produced the U.S. war of aggression in Vietnam, the Condor-backed dictatorships in South America, the 1980s massacres in Central America, the many years of starvation of Iraq prior to 2003.

It was the ONLY possible way to prevent that war....it didn't work.

So the authorization to use military force was the only way to prevent the use of military force!

Everyone understood at the time that this was the vote for or against giving the Bush regime authority for the invasion they intended. Twenty-three (Democratic) senators understood that, and voted against it. More than 120 House members voted against it.

But now you explain that it was the ones who voted FOR the Bush war who were really doing the "ONLY" possible thing to prevent it.

Is there no limit to the contortions of sophistry in the service of party lines?

Do you really think anyone can be persuaded by such transparent and poor PR work?

Clinton, Kerry and Biden voted to authorize the Bush regime's announced intent to invade the nation of Iraq on the basis of "WMD" and "9/11." End of story.

Deny that all you want!

in the Bush war of aggression -- starting with the senators and House members who voted for the authorization for use of military force, which everyone understood was the only carte blanche the lawless regime would need in a historical period where declarations of war are no longer made yet war is the every day reality.

Clinton, Kerry and Biden in particular will always be remembered as among the chief enablers of the murderous Bush war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Those who voted against it, and those who protested, did the right thing. For those who voted for it: NO EXCUSES.

It's just a shame that so many will be swayed by the posting puppets of the corporate party.

Keep up the good work.

but few members can be inconvienced to visit the Capitol's secure facility.

go read them.

Additionally,

1. Intelligence Community compartments & subcompartments are briefed at least annually to members of the Intelligence Committees

- Waived sensitive information briefed to SSCI Chair & Vice Chair, HPSCI Chair & Ranking Member, and, Staff Directors.

2. DoD Special Access Programs are briefed at least annually to members of the Armed Services Committees and Defense Subcommittees of Appropriations Committees.

- Waived SAPs limited to Chairs, Ranking Members & Staff Directors.

3. Any member has access to the classified appropriations & authorizations bills

Classified material must be kept in the Capitol's secure facility. Most members don't go read them and don't see them because they aren't delivered to their offices, which are not approved for classified discussion, storage and processing. Like the President and Vice President, members do not submit SF-86s, undergo security clearance investigations or take polygraphs.

Daily breifings. I bet if you ask Richard Clarke he would tell you that you are wrong.

They DO have SOME of it....but most assuredly they do NOT see all of it.

The whole world knew Bush was lying. It was no problem to understand it, at least if you weren't looking for bullshit justifications to do what was politically expedient.

Baradei, Blix and Ritter were telling the story.

23 Senators and 120+ House members knew enough to vote against the invasion.

These people trying to justify the collaboration of certain Democrats in the Bush regime's war crimes should stop insulting our intelligence!

consensus that there was insufficient access to infer Iraq had a nuclear program, You also know there was strong consensus that Iraq had a robust chemical weapons program and large stockpiles - and that there was insufficient evidence on any Biological Weapons Program.

And you probably read Hussein's FBI debriefing where he discussed the Chemical Weapons Program was a deliberate deception he conducted to deter his neighbors. (Dude, it worked too well.) He admitted also that he intended to rebuild his WMD programs. Links attached but let me guess, years later, the FBI is part of the conspiracy?

Short Version: http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2008/january/piro012808

Long version with GWU National Security Archive (documents from FOIA releases): http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/

All of the world's "intelligence communities" agreed? Really?

Saddam wanted to pretend he had some nasty gear? That's a real surprise -- you'd think he had a legitimate fear that some insane country on the other side of the globe would come and bomb Iraq. If only he'd had some nukes and delivery systems, the foreign aggression might have been deterred, and the half-million or more people murdered in the war and its aftermaths might still be alive.

Problem is, the actual inspectors on the ground, the most credible ones, made clear that Iraq didn't have this machinery. (And again, if Iraq did, that was no justification for an aggressive invasion!)

Every state that can afford it maintains big agencies (or several) that specialize in lies, propaganda, deception, covert warfare, surveillance of their own populations, political policing, espionage, collaboration with criminal elements and the breaking of laws (their own and those of other countries). You can call these self-perpetuating criminal cultures "intelligence communities," if you like. Anything that comes out of them is going to be self-interested. Sometimes it's in their self-interest to be truthful.

No "conspiracy" (a concept you injected here) is required to expect that some of them might not want to directly contradict their American counterparts (like the NATO partners), or might want to see the Americans invade Iraq (like Saudi and Israel did, for example). Nevertheless, I'll take what Schroeder and Chirac did a lot more seriously than what their spook shops said.

As for the FBI, it is a political police. Like any political police, it extracts the confessions it desires. And what does it matter if Saddam genuinely believes he was successful in fooling the other countries. That doesn't mean they believed it.

Again, if the US and UK had believed their own bullshit, they might have hesitated before striking. They struck KNOWING the target would be helpless.

Anyway, if Democrats had not voted to authorize the aggression, we presumably wouldn't be having this discussion, because you wouldn't need to come up with excuses.

The Dems that voted for war were either too lazy to read the classified NIE available to them, or voted yes as a political calculation, or were MIC puppets. Any of the above was inexcusable.

And weren't a threat to us or anyone in the region. It should have been a straight Party vote against the IWR. But if I recall, we still had not a public investigation into 9/11 nor had the anthrax perps been found. I further think many Democrats in Congress felt that this administration's willingness to ignore the warnings of 9/11 made them criminally liable for this dereliction of duty.

What if every Democrat had voted against this act? I'm betting another attack occurs shortly thereafter and the evidence this time implicates Iraq directly. Immediately, Bush, Cheney, and the neocon Wurlitzer go into ovrrdrive, demanding an immediate attack. But, equally important, Democrats are now framed as "IRAQI APPEASERS...a Party complicit in letting this happen. Democrats are completely taken out as an opposition party - Bush Cheney get their war and kill the Democratic Party in the process.

Call me a paranoid, but I think that administration had a plan for One Party rule to compliment their PNAC.

for something worse.



USA! USA! USA!

F this.

it'll be interesting to see if we abandon that shiny new bazillion-dollar embassy compound.

Or try to hold it.

in some form or another. Their primary fear is Iraq's oil falling into ISIS control.

I'm just sayin....

Operation
Iraq
Liberation.


Otherwise known to all involved as OIL!

These "folks" are Riyadh's Wahhabi proxies.

made public now.

Remember those millions Petraeus used to bribe the Sunni tribal leaders???

"nation building" funds from a decade ago...

I remembering Powell's alleged Pottery Barn rule: "You break it, you own it".
Really, we should send W, Cheney and Rumsfeld to Iraq to clean up their mess in person. Except that (to state the obvious) they're not competent to do so, as the multiple tragedies in the middle east confirm.

W: the disaster that keeps on "giving".