Politics War in Iraq...Vain or not?

[gurlygirl_89]

For a school deabte. Please post your opinions. thanks much!



Kara

 

[mexico city]

find the march 2004 issue of vanity fair
magazine
it includes an article entitled
"the path to war"
a breathtakingly thorough analysis
of the haste and lack of forethought
with which the u.s. went to war
alarmist rhetoric
illegitimate urgency

and a failure to plan for the initial aftermath
of the military campaign
so now we have a reckless dangerous insurgency
and the prospect of an endless military comitment
to iraq
with 1600 dead
and 15,000 wounded
many losing limbs
mentally and physically scarred for life
and the brutality of saddam hussein is not enough
to justify it
how do we look the other way in the sudan?
how do we look the other way
in east timor?
how do we look the other way in north korea?
and on and on?
it's a transparent attempt at oil revenue
it's the only rational explanation
and the insurgents see it
and resent it
so they blow up the pipelines
and dynamite refineries
i am revolted
i feel it is repulsive and repugnant
and still unjustified...

 

[the_alliance]

definitely in vain. sure Saddam is not in power anymore, but what good has that done? we claim that he's killed thousands of his own people, but that was over 10 years ago. we claim that he has WMD, but that was over a decade ago. now, not only have thousands of Americans died in the process but millions of Iraqi have died as well. all for what? nothing. at this rate, we'll need thousands more troops in Iraq.

did someone open the window, cuz i feel a Draft

 

[cdd91]

This war is really stupid. We shouldn't be losing this many lives. Why is the US always butting into other countries business? We have problems here in America, lets deal with those.

 

[Jamison]

^^^Perfect...couldn't have said it better myself.

 

[gurlygirl_89]

im kinda split down the middle. On one hand I can see how it's ok because of all the ppl Saddam killed ect. BUT i wanna why the hell that aspect was left out when we declared this war. Only after we found out Iraq didn't ahev WMD did we switch it to "let's save the people" So im kinda split. Bush has made alot of stupid mistakes. In the beginning I was for the war but now.....im not so sure. If we say we are doing this for humanitatiran purposes then that would mean we would have to invade Norht Korea and countless other contries. I think America's goverment just likes to have their hand in every cake.

 

[littlebirdy]

Only after we found out Iraq didn't ahev WMD did we switch it to "let's save the people"

[post="1321845"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post]​

So true

 

[Itz tha Dreila]

Bush Lied, 1,000+ Died

I'm sure that explains my thoughts on this

 

[Jamison]

The number of coalition deaths is 1,763 (with 1,586 of those being US forces).

There have been 11,888 coalition forces wounded.

There have been 229 contractors killed.

There have been at least 616 Iraq police/military deaths since January of 2005 through today.

There have been at least 21,239 Iraqi civilians killed.


The above is all that needs to be said...the Iraq war was a mistake and not the right thing to do.

Revealed: documents show Blair's secret plans for war
PM decided on conflict from the start. Blair told war illegal in March 2002. Latest leak confirms Goldsmith doubts
By Raymond Whitaker, Andy McSmith and Francis Elliott
01 May 2005


Tony Blair had resolved to send British troops into action alongside US forces eight months before the Iraq War began, despite a clear warning from the Foreign Office that the conflict could be illegal.

A damning minute leaked to a Sunday newspaper reveals that in July 2002, a few weeks after meeting George Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Mr Blair summoned his closest aides for what amounted to a council of war. The minute reveals the head of British intelligence reported that President Bush had firmly made up his mind to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, adding that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".

At the same time, a document obtained by this newspaper reveals the Foreign Office legal advice given to Mr Blair in March 2002, before he travelled to meet Mr Bush at his Texas ranch. It contains many of the reservations listed nearly a year later by the Attorney General in his confidential advice to the Prime Minister, which the Government was forced to publish last week, including the warning that the US government took a different view of international law from Britain or virtually any other country.

The advice, also put before the July meeting, was drawn up in part by Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the Foreign Office's deputy legal adviser, who resigned on the eve of war in protest at what she called a "crime of aggression".

The latest revelations could scarcely have come at a worse time for Labour, with a general election only four days away and the opposition parties lining up to attack the Prime Ministers credibility. Two polls last night showed the gap between Labour and Conservatives narrowing to 3per cent.

The minute revealed last night was of a meeting held in Downing Street on 23 July 2002. Signed by the Prime Minister's foreign policy adviser, Matthew Rycroft. It concluded: "We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any further decisions."

The minute records that the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, had warned that the case against Saddam was "thin". He suggested that the Iraqi dictator should be forced into a corner by demanding the return of the UN weapons inspectors: if he refused, or the inspectors found WMD, there would be good cause for war.

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith ­ who took part in the meeting ­ warned then that "the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action". But the Prime Minister countered that "regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD".

The document ended with the admonition: "We must not ignore the legal issues", adding that "the Attorney General would consider legal advice". The Government has consistently refused to say when the Attorney General was first asked for an opinion on the legality of war.

Eight months later, Lord Goldsmith drew up his 13 page legal opinion, released by Downing Street last week, which echoed many of the doubts expressed in the earlier Foreign Office brief. The Attorney General echoes the Foreign Office paper, rejecting US claims to be able to decide whether Iraq was in breach of UN resolutions. The Americans were alone in this position, he said, before dramatically altering his opinion 10 days later.

Mr Blair was challenged on whether he had seen Foreign Office legal advice in a BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman on 20 April. He replied: "No, I had the Attorney General's advice to guide me." In fact, Mr Blair had seen the Foreign Office advice as early as 8 March 2002, in an annex to a secret Cabinet Office "options paper". That annex is published in The Independent on Sunday for the first time today.

Asked to account for the discrepancy, a Downing Street spokesman said: "The Prime Minister accepts his legal advice from the Attorney General, not from individual departments. We are not going to comment on any papers prepared for specific meetings."

Those present at the 23 July meeting, alongside Mr Blair and Mr Straw, included Lord Goldsmith, the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, and military and intelligence chiefs, according to the minute leaked to The Sunday Times.

 

[Itz tha Dreila]

Iraqi Civilian Casualties

 

[noggi16]

Now this is in the shadow of our election and a leaked memo that said Blair discussed regime change in 2002.

Help I'm a Pro-War Leftie,

Help, I'm a pro-war leftie
by Oliver Kamm



FOR LONGSTANDING Labour voters, Iraq poses a dilemma. Do we vote according to conscience, or party?



The problem is not of Tony Blair’s making. Long before 9/11, he abandoned the conservative “realism” — more accurately, amoral quietism — that had characterised John Major's foreign policies.

Rather than acquiescing in Serb aggression, Mr Blair confronted it. Out of humanitarian obligation and an awareness that failed states breed fanaticism, he sent British troops to preserve Sierra Leone from hand-lopping rebels. Contrary to the Liberal Democrats’ depiction of it as the biggest foreign policy error since Suez, Iraq was the most far-sighted and noble act of British foreign policy since the founding of Nato. Mr Blair’s record exemplifies foreign policy “with an ethical dimension”.

Bien-pensant academics assert that a vote for Blair is a vote for Bush. The reverse is true: President Bush, who as a candidate in 2000 denounced interventionist “nation-building”, has adopted Blairism. After 9/11, Mr Bush’s instinctive conservatism gave way to promoting global democracy as our defence against theocratic barbarism — a strategy that accords with traditional liberal-democratic internationalism.

The party of Michael Foot is now the sole representative of a credible defence policy. The Tories’ tergiversations over Iraq are too cynical even to be dignified with the term “opportunism”; the Liberal Democrats’ predictions about the war (the inevitable refugee crisis; the stymieing of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks) were consistently wrong.

Yet last week The Times revealed that, of new candidates in Labour-held seats, barely one in twelve supported Mr Blair over Iraq. There lies the difficulty for progressive voters. Many Labour candidates, in preferring “stability” to liberty, are closet Kissinger Republicans. Their sole merit is that they are opposed by a Conservative Party whose populism on immigration, student fees and Mr Blair’s character marks a moral and intellectual decline even since the feckless Major Government.

There is a resolution to my dilemma. My Labour candidate (Hove: majority, 3,000) opposes the Government’s revolutionary foreign policies; her challenger, Nicholas Boles, is one of the few Tories to give them principled support. I do not balk at the logic. To support Mr Blair in a Labour marginal, I shall cast my first Tory vote.

 

[Jamison]

Audits find U.S. mishandled millions of Iraqi money meant for reconstruction
5/4/2005 9:30:00 PM GMT 


U.S. audits released Wednesday state that the United States carelessly, and possibly fraudulently, handled some Iraqi money used for reconstruction, in one case nearly $100 million in cash went unaccounted for in one area of Iraq alone.

Two audits by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found flaws in how U.S. government and military officials ran contracts paid for by the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) -- Iraqi money entrusted to the United States after the 2003 invasion.

The list of mismanagement includes contractors being paid twice, files getting misplaced, unaccounted cash payments and scant evidence that goods and services were provided.

"There was no assurance that fraud, waste and abuse did not occur in the management and administration of contracts funded by DFI," said the auditors.

The development fund is made up of proceeds from Iraqi oil sales, frozen assets from foreign governments and surplus from the UN Oil for Food program. Handling of the fund has already come under fire by previous U.S. as well as UN mandated audits.

Furthermore, an audit released by the Iraq reconstruction inspector in January concluded the U.S. had not properly safeguarded about $8.8 billion of Iraq's own money in the development fund.

Of concern in the new audits was poor oversight of hundreds of millions of dollars of cash used to pay contractors. Due to the current state of Iraq’s banking system, cash was the most common form of payment.

In one audit looking at about $119.9 million in DFI cash paid out in south-central Iraq, auditors found deficiencies "of such magnitude as to require prompt attention," with the account manager not properly accounting for over $96.6 million in cash.

"During this audit we found indications of potential fraud and referred these matters to the Assistant Inspector General for Investigations (for Iraq reconstruction)."

Other examples of incompetence included 645 transfers of more than $23 million in cash using the wrong form; one contractor was paid twice for the same work and 10 payments amounting to $324,500 were submitted for canceled contracts. Six cash handouts for $407,420 were submitted without contractor signatures.

Other problems included the fact that U.S. staff handling large amounts of cash had not signed appointment letters that included liability language.

Two payment officers with cash account balances of $777,050 and $715,000 left Iraq without clearing their balances with the account manager. An attempt was made to remove these outstanding balances by "simply washing accounts," said the audit report.

The military agreed with most of the recommendations made in the cash audit, and Col. Thomas Stefanko said in a written response that "extensive corrective actions" have been taken in the past four months to resolve problems raised by the audit.

Another audit looked at how DFI contracts were administered by the Iraq Project and Contracting Office, which is responsible for most of the contracts paid for by $18.4 billion appropriated by Congress for Iraq's reconstruction.

Auditors said they could not identify the total value of contracts financed by the fund and said the project and contracting office lacked the necessary controls and adequate documentation to effectively perform its responsibilities.

http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=8495

 

[xdancer]

I'm not sure that Al Jazeera's the most objective news source, Jamison.

 

[Jamison]

I'm not sure that Al Jazeera's the most objective news source, Jamison.

[post="1327191"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post]​

Is CNN or FOX news any better?

I think that's rather closeminded...and to be well rounded, you should look at news from all different sources. Al Jazeera is one of the only news sources we have in that region and oftentimes posts things that the American news sources don't get a hold of (or they post them a lot quicker). Do they have a bias? Of course...but so do all major news networks.

And as for the article I posted, I don't see any problems with it. The people who did the audits were hired by the US, and the military has acknowledge the problems with the money and is trying to clean it up.

But just to prove that Al Jazeera is not posting a bias and that their information is credible...here is an article on the exact same subject from Reuters.

Audits find flaws in U.S. handling of Iraq deals
04 May 2005 18:48:44 GMT

Source: Reuters

WASHINGTON, May 4 (Reuters) - The United States has carelessly, and possibly fraudulently, handled some Iraqi money meant for rebuilding and poorly managed billions of dollars of U.S.-funded contracts, said U.S. audits released on Wednesday.

In one area of Iraq alone, nearly $100 million in cash used for rebuilding was unaccounted for. Incompetence by U.S. procurement staff ranged from contractors being paid twice to files being misplaced.

Two audits by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found flaws in how U.S. government and military officials ran contracts paid for by the Development Fund for Iraq, Iraqi money entrusted to the United States after the 2003 invasion.

A third audit looked at a small sample of U.S.-funded projects paid for with $18.4 billion appropriated by Congress to rebuild Iraq and found sloppy and disorganized administration of some of those deals.

"There was no assurance that fraud, waste and abuse did not occur," all three audits said.

The most scathing criticism was in audits of the development fund, made up of proceeds from Iraqi oil sales, frozen assets from foreign governments and surplus from the U.N. Oil for Food program. Handling of that fund has already come under fire by previous U.S.- and U.N.-mandated audits.

An audit released by the Iraq reconstruction inspector in January concluded the U.S. had not properly safeguarded about $8.8 billion of Iraq's own money in the development fund.

Of concern in the new audits was poor oversight of hundreds of millions of dollars of cash used to pay contractors.

One audit looking at about $119.9 million in DFI cash paid out in south-central Iraq, the account manager could not properly account for over $96.6 million in cash.

FRAUD SUSPECTED

"During this audit we found indications of potential fraud and referred these matters to the Assistant Inspector General for Investigations (for reconstruction)," the report said.

Examples of sloppiness included 645 transfers of more than $23 million in cash using the wrong form; one contractor being paid twice for the same work, and 10 payments amounting to $324,500 were submitted for canceled contracts.

Two payment officers with cash account balances of $777,050 and $715,000 left Iraq without clearing their balances with the account manager. An attempt was made to remove the outstanding balances by "simply washing accounts," the report said.

Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin criticized the "disorganized, sloppy management" of Iraq rebuilding deals.

"Billions of dollars, the success of the stabilization mission and U.S. credibility are at stake," Feingold said.

The military agreed with most of the recommendations made in the cash audit, and Col. Thomas Stefanko said in a written response that "extensive corrective actions" have been taken in the past four months to resolve problems raised by the audit.

Another audit looked at how DFI contracts were administered by the Iraq Project and Contracting Office, which is responsible for most of the contracts paid for by $18.4 billion.

Auditors said they could not identify the total value of contracts financed by the fund and said the contracting office lacked the necessary controls and adequate documentation to effectively perform its responsibilities.

In its written response, the contracting office acknowledged confusion in the early management of DFI contracts but said new controls were now in place.

"We have taken many corrective actions and will continue to do so," said Maj. Gen. Daniel Long, head of the office.

 

[Itz tha Dreila]

Is CNN or FOX news any better?

I think that's rather closeminded...and to be well rounded, you should look at news from all different sources.  Al Jazeera is one of the only news sources we have in that region and oftentimes posts things that the American news sources don't get a hold of (or they post them a lot quicker).  Do they have a bias?  Of course...but so do all major news networks.

And as for the article I posted, I don't see any problems with it.  The people who did the audits were hired by the US, and the military has acknowledge the problems with the money and is trying to clean it up.

But just to prove that Al Jazeera is not posting a bias and that their information is credible...here is an article on the exact same subject from Reuters.

[post="1327285"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post]​

People don't want to admit there are problems.

 

[xdancer]

People don't want to admit there are problems.

[post="1327339"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post]​

i have no problem admitting there are problems with the US military, government, or press, but after some articles i've read in The New York Times Magazine discussing different news sources in the Middle East, I don't think that Al Jazeera is necessarily the best place to be getting news from. i'm not saying they lie or are always wrong, just that there might be better places to get news from.

 

[gurlygirl_89]

what newssource if any is objective...????

 

[Jamison]

i have no problem admitting there are problems with the US military, government, or press, but after some articles i've read in The New York Times Magazine discussing different news sources in the Middle East, I don't think that Al Jazeera is necessarily the best place to be getting news from.  i'm not saying they lie or are always wrong, just that there might be better places to get news from.

[post="1327484"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post]​

That's why you need to look at varying sources. And as it turned out the article I was using was quite credible, and was posted on Al Jazeera before any of the US sources did.

But in the experience I've had with Al Jazeera news (at least the stories I've taken from it) I haven't found anything grossly false (and I read their articles on a regular basis). It's good to get their views on things. The majority of their stories are just like ones you'd find over here (minus spending a week covering the "missing" bride in Georgia)...but they do have much more information on Iraq and the Middle East. Plus many of their op-ed pieces are very interesting.

And goodness...look at some of our sources. The New York Times had a reporter who plagiarized and even completely made up some of the information he used in his articles.