Well do you remember the environment of the country at that time.
True: Bush, Cheney and his cohorts, distorted the truth, lied about Saddam's WMD.But,...
1. The senate approved the Iraq war.
2. The congress approved the Iraq war.
3. The vast majority of the people supported the war. Do you remember Freedom Fries other renaming of food with the word "french" in it, because France opposed the Iraq war. The people bought into that crap. It was said that Bush enjoyed the support of the people because he required very little from them. Charlie Rangel proposed to bring back the draft, it was a valid point.
I wonder how many people would be in favor of going to war if their child got drafted.
Answer: Very damn little. It is or was terrible that volunteers got sent back for 2 or 3 tours of duty to Iraq or Afghanistan, while everyone else in America was at the Mall !!
My point: every one gladly followed the leader and now we have a disastrous result
President Obama declared today that next week's climate change summit in Paris will be a "powerful rebuke" to terrorists.
...........who was famously told by Colin Powell, on his invasion of Iraq, If you break it you own it." IMHO, Bush II single handily created ISIS, by invading Iraq, this has resulted in the chaos we have in the Middle East today. The world will keep reminding you of this fact until our tongues fall off.😝
-- Modified on 11/25/2015 11:22:50 AM
Well do you remember the environment of the country at that time.
True: Bush, Cheney and his cohorts, distorted the truth, lied about Saddam's WMD.
But,...
1. The senate approved the Iraq war.
2. The congress approved the Iraq war.
3. The vast majority of the people supported the war.
Do you remember Freedom Fries other renaming of food with the word "french" in it, because France opposed the Iraq war. The people bought into that crap.
It was said that Bush enjoyed the support of the people because he required very little from them.
Charlie Rangel proposed to bring back the draft, it was a valid point.
I wonder how many people would be in favor of going to war if their child got drafted.
Answer: Very damn little.
It is or was terrible that volunteers got sent back for 2 or 3 tours of duty to Iraq or Afghanistan, while everyone else in America was at the Mall !!
My point: every one gladly followed the leader and now we have a disastrous result
Most of the Democrat members of Congress, were coerced/intimidated into voting yes to support the war against Iraq. Who can blame them after watching/hearing wall to wall coverage of the "smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud". The WMDs, the Bush administration was positive were near Tikrit and Baghdad -- east, west, south, and north somewhat, according to Rumsfeld. The yellow-cake and aluminum tubes, the mobile chemical labs, the biological weapons labs producing that white powder that Colin Powell assured us, the U.S. and the UK had proof existed. All LIES of course!
The imminent threat simply DID NOT EXIST. So, here we are, with almost 3,600 American troops dead and an estimated more than 34,000 injured and at least $2 trillion squandered -- and for what?
but once Obama was sworn in he owned the Iraq war just like GW Bush owned the housing bubble he inherited. Bush did a horrible job about fixing the problem he inherited and the bubble blew up in his face, under his watch. Bush got the blame for it and rightfully so, he had years to fix the problem so he owned it. The very same thing applies to Obama, he inherited the Iraq situation, and it was HIS decision to cut and run leaving a power vacuum that everyone knew was going to be filled by some very bad people, OBAMA owns that decision and he is every bit as guilty about the creation of ISIS as GWB.
......... -- not combat troops, but military advisers, special operations forces, to watch the counterterrorism effort." This Statement is rated Mostly True according to the Politifact truth-o-meter.
For a period, at least, the Obama administration did envision leaving 10,000 troops in Iraq past the Dec. 31, 2011, pullout of forces. That number went down to about 5,000 before negotiations stalled amid a legal snare over immunity of American forces in Iraqi courts.
Some History......
Shortly before Obama took office in January 2009, his predecessor, George W. Bush, finalized an important agreement after about a year of negotiations with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Called the Status of Forces Agreement, it spelled out the withdrawal of all American troops by the end of 2011.
Obama, who won office in 2008 partly for his pledge to end the war in Iraq, announced his own draw-down plans a month after taking office. "Let me say this as plainly as I can: by Aug. 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end," he said Feb. 27, 2009.
His speech revealed more details: He would keep between 35,000 to 50,000 military personnel there through the end of 2011 to train and advise Iraqi military and for counterterrorism purposes.
What would happen after Jan. 1, 2012, -- a central point in our fact-check -- was not settled until the fall of 2011. Obama and the Iraqi government had been open to leaving more troops behind to help the country remain stable. But it didn’t happen.
Military commanders in Washington and in Baghdad pushed for a residual force between 16,000 and 24,000 to conduct counterrorism work and train Iraqi security forces.
The White House, reports show, was not open to a force that size.
The Obama administration was initially open to leaving up to 10,000 troops in Iraq after the scheduled pullout at the end of 2011, a controversial pitch that would have required approval from Iraq’s divided government to change the 2008 agreement, the Los Angeles Times reported. The troops were to be placed in Baghdad and other "strategic" locations around the country.
It did not stay there. The New York Times detailed how the one-time goal of a 10,000-person force shrank before negotiations failed altogether.
Obama ruled out the 10,000-troop option in an Aug. 13, 2011, conference call, according to the New York Times, and "the new goal would be a continuous presence of about 3,500 troops, a rotating force of up to 1,500 and half a dozen F-16’s."
What killed the deal? The agreement failed over a demand that American troops be given immunity from prosecution by Iraqis, a very touchy political issue within the Iraqi Parliament. Some experts said Iraqi leaders may not have been willing to take great political risk with their citizens in exchange for a relatively small American force.
But no immunity meant no sizable residual troop presence. "When the Americans asked for immunity, the Iraqi side answered that it was not possible," al-Maliki said in an October 2011 news conference. "The discussions over the number of trainers and the place of training stopped. Now that the issue of immunity was decided and that no immunity to be given, the withdrawal has started."
By authorizing and executing "the surge" he was on his way to stabilizing Iraq. We will never know if it would have continued to work since BHO decided to leave.
the surge was not a fix, but rather an attempt to put a band-aid on it, and then kicking it down the road for someone else to deal with it. Face it; Obama, as a young state Senator from Illinois was right regarding going to war in Iraq, and Bush was wrong. Even the right wing was critical of announcing a withdrawal deadline, knowing those having been thrown from power would return to fight as soon as we left, and what did Bush do? Just that when he signed the SOFA. "Bush Set A Timetable For Withdrawal 'No Later Than December 31, 2011.' A 2008 Status Of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed by Bush set a deadline for withdrawing from Iraq "no later than December 31, 2011"
Why did Obama's position change once he became President?
President Obama could have through executive order, kept troops in Iraq and sent more in.
Couldn't an Executive Order, override a agreement between other nations? The United States of America can act as a independent entity if it so chooses.
leaving out.
"True: Bush, Cheney and his cohorts, distorted the truth, lied about Saddam's WMD."
They didn't just mislead us about Saddam's WMD's, but rather they sold it to the American people. They conducted an intense ad campaign, basically, in the press, and the press ate it up, but like many of them appear to be hungry for a war in Syria, now. In basketball terms they exercised a full-court press upon the media. Secondly, if one was against the war, like a young Illinois state senator, Barack Obama, they were called un-American, unpatriotic or a traitor.
Yes, the war was easy to sell, based on the illusion that it wasn't costing the average citizen that much. No draft, and the cost was not even included into the federal budget. 