Obama DOJ Asks Court to Grant Immunity to George W. Bush For Iraq War

[MARIS61]

See, Obama is above partisan politics

He is not above International Law, so his impotent move is laughably desperate.

 

[Denny Crane]

No, I don't think it works that way. You can't just point at WMDs and say, "Here is the reason." It takes a media campaign. It takes lots and lots of distraction.

Saddam was an evil motherfucker and got what he deserved. But WMDs weren't the reason since he didn't have any. So, it was his murderous, dictatorial style of government, wasn't it? Perhaps. Then why him, and why then? Why not years before? Why not some other murderous dictator?

WMDs were the reason because he did have them. Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998 because he had them. The UN inspectors destroyed enormous amounts of them. He used them on his own people.

Why Saddam? Because he was a monster that we helped to make. I don't think you can say that of anywhere else in the Middle East. At one point you could have said this about the Shah. How did we help make him? He was the enemy of our enemy, Iran. We played both sides of that war, but in the end gave Saddam what he needed to win. By the time GHW Bush went to war against him, he had one of the largest military forces in the world.

GHW Bush, Cheney, Powell, et al would not go into Iraq to take out Saddam then. The coalition was fragile. Arab nations that took part in pushing him out of Kuwait and protecting his other neighboring states would not participate in such an invasion. GHW Bush was quite public in encouraging the Iraqi people to rise up and rebel against Saddam, and suggested we'd provide support in the effort. They did rise up, no support came, and Saddam massacred them, using WMDs on the Kurds in the North, and he destroyed the livelihood of the people in the South by cutting down their date trees.

Why in 2003? Numerous reasons.

Because a decade+ of sanctions against Iraq were devastating to its people.

He diverted money from oil-for-food to build palaces while the children in his country went without and died.

The sanctions were unpopular with other nations in the world.

Other nations were ready to normalize relations with Iraq. Air France had resumed flights to Iraq, for example.

He used promises of oil deals to buy the favor of European countries and Russia and China if the sanctions would be ended.

We were flying over Iraq to enforce no-fly zones so he wouldn't massacre his own people.

His military routinely fired upon us, we routinely fired back.

The blood of those Iraqis who did rise up against Saddam was partly on our hands.

With him gone, sanctions could be removed, relations normalized, and the profits (in theory) would go toward building the nation instead of building palaces.

 

[bluefrog]

It looks like the U.S. didn't have a problem with WMDS, as long as they were used against Iranians

In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq's war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein's military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.

 

[Denny Crane]

It looks like the U.S. didn't have a problem with WMDS, as long as they were used against Iranians

But he didn't have WMDs!

 

[bluefrog]

But he didn't have WMDs!

America can not have it both ways. We can't discount war crimes directly attached to the USA in its war against Iran by proxy and justify an invasion of Iraq based on chemical weapons we were complicit in him using 15 years prior.

 

[Denny Crane]

America can not have it both ways. We can't discount war crimes directly attached to the USA in its war against Iran by proxy and justify an invasion of Iraq based on chemical weapons we were complicit in him using 15 years prior.

I fully agree.

We paid for that crime with our blood and treasure. And that's the point of taking out Saddam and not others.

 

[TradeNurkicNow]

Did he have nukes?

 

[Denny Crane]

Did he have nukes?

Israel bombed his nuclear reactor before he could build nukes.

But nukes aren't the only WMDs. He used mustard gas and sarin gas against his own people. That's use of WMDs. Killed thousands, if not tens or even hundreds of thousands.

And according to the Riegle report, we sold all the precursors of biological weapons to various institutions (hospitals, research labs, universities) in Iraq. Fronts for his WMD programs.

The bio weapons are the scariest kind of WMDs, I think.

For example, we sold Iraq resistant strains of germs. In hospitals, people get treated with various drugs and the bugs mutate and become impervious to the drugs. Over time, we force the bugs to mutate to the point where none of our drugs work. These resistant bugs are kept in storage for research use. We sold some to Iraq.

Bio weapons would be an engineered resistant strain of something like anthrax (which we also sold to Iraq). People get sick and die. The cures don't work because the germs are immune to our drugs.

Consider a homicide bomber who's willing to blow himself up in a pizza place to kill 100 people. Inject a guy like that with the bug, let it gestate, and get him a ticket on a plane to Heathrow.

Gas bombs kill thousands. Nukes kill millions. Bugs kill billions.

 

[3RA1N1AC]

Bugs kill billions.