They will not begin to be effective, or realistic, until it is understood what is happening, in terms of the middle east.

The war was the wrong approach, but I can certainly see how some Congresspeople might have thought it could work. Maybe. From what I have read, drugs and weapons dealing in the Middle East, and elsewhere, is it’s own parallel world economy.

But in the hands of the empty headed little narcissistic twat that runs Washington, right now, this problem will never be solved, it has been capitalized on, for profit, at horrific expense for the politically voiceless. And if OPEC does give Bush, and Cheney, and Obama their marching orders, well, the men of the middle east aren’t capable of winning, and /or governing, not a one.

Real winners: Russia, and China.

So now what?

THIS is what needs to stop.

He doesn’t talk here about the sanctions, and their effects on the civil society of Iraq - the intended effects - one of which was to kill a few hundred thousand little children

.

As opposed to the war we have now?

What would you have done, how would you have handled it?

You have Saddam, em>and bama’s sugar daddy, Auchi, laundering money and weapons out of Iraq, a plethora of corruption involving every government on earth, conditions you and me, the voters, can’t BEGIN to comprehend, and meanwhile, Clinton, say, has to keep Americans, and American strategic psotition, secure.

Bush can’t do it, the empty bamalama can’t even BEGIN to catch a clue as to the truth of the situation, financing himself with the same people who brought about Saddam’s sanctions, Auchi, and here you are, advocating for another MORON, voting against your own interests, for a criminal. So you’re either ignorant, a criminal, or just plain old stupid, yourself.

What is it with the bamadongs, and voting for stupid criminals, those who will screw them?

You look like an ignorant, silly fool.

Saddam was dealing with black market arms, and laundering money, for terrorists, and others.

Does this justify Bush’s approach, no, it doesn’t, but to throw this on Clinton, and others, as if there were not a threat, or problem, is either disingenuous, or wholly ignorant.

What do you think Plame was investigating?

America has enemies, period. I’m a FLAMING liberal, and I know this.

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
By Rev. Martin Luther King
4 April 1967

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html

A little humility, please.

If this is what her vote was for, she could have spoken out in 2003 when Bush took her vote and used it to invade Iraq, as you say she did not intend it to be used.

She did not.

If her vote was a craven act of political opportunism, it was a miscalculation on its own terms.

If her vote was because she truly believed Bush was going to use it only to get inspections, she was a fool and she did not act (as I stated above) in accordance with her position.

If she voted because she felt going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do but she is now backpedaling because it is not politically viable, she is wrong on the merits and does not show the courage of her convictions.

Under no circumstances is her vote defensible and I’m sorry that you think that it is. I voted against John Kerry in the 2004 primary for the same reason, so he is no defense to me.

…………………………………..

To the Editor:

Re “Begrudging His Bedazzling,” by Maureen Dowd (column, Feb. 27):

Ms. Dowd says Hillary Rodham Clinton is lame for accusing journalists of treating her campaign differently than they treat Barack Obama’s, and applauds the “open-mindedness of the press” in its treatment of Senator Clinton.

Here are the words she uses in association with Senator Clinton: “desperate,” “primal scream,” “clanging,” “churlish,” “discombobulated,” “gloomy,” “flipping,” “begrudging,” “whining,” “experience,” “pea green with envy,” “Sybil,” “cascading,” “dizzying,” “unsettling,” “struggling,” “tartly,” “peevishly,” “pointlessly,” “sarcasm.”

And here are the words she uses for Senator Obama: “golden child,” “sunny,” “consistency,” “bedazzling,” “confidence,” “excitement,” “exceptionally easy in his skin.”

If Ms. Dowd wants to make the point that she doesn’t like Senator Clinton, then she’s made it. If she wants to make the point that the press treats Mrs. Clinton fairly, contrary to what the senator may believe, then this column, alas, has made Senator Clinton’s point.

Donna Lawlor

Brooklyn, Feb. 27, 2008
http://tinyurl.com/2u86st

It’s very dangerous to toy with the historical record the way that certain fanatics have and certain cynics have encouraged over there. If you dick around with the reality of what happened you are setting up a mnarrative that will only get worse.

Obama can make a nice clean argument with his rebuttal, but he can’t govern by rebuttal, and he certainly can’t be a CinC if he’s got dickhead Senators riding him as they rode clinton in 1998 Kosovo.

Distorting the reasons for the Democrats going along with IWR can only hurt America and the Democratic Party in the end.

It Doesn’t Matter If Hillary Apologizes for Her Iraq War Vote
By Scott Ritter, AlterNet. Posted March 3, 2007.

“Hillary Clinton knew years before she voted for the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein didn’t have WMDs — Bill Clinton lied about Iraq’s weapons programs to justify attacking the country in 1998. Tools

Sen. Hillary Clinton wants to become President Hillary Clinton. “I’m in, and I’m in to win,” she said, announcing her plans to run for the Democratic nomination for the 2008 presidential election.

Let there be no doubt that Hillary Clinton is about as slippery a species of politician that exists, one who has demonstrated an ability to morph facts into a nebulous blob that blurs the record and distorts the truth. While she has demonstrated this less than flattering ability on a number of issues, nowhere is it so blatant as when dealing with the issue of the ongoing war in Iraq and her vote in favor of this war.

This issue won’t be resolved even if Hillary Clinton apologizes for her Iraq vote, as other politicians have done, blaming their decision on faulty intelligence on Iraq’s WMD capabilities. This is because, like many other Washington politicians at the time, including those now running for president, she had been witness to lies about Iraq’s weapons programs to justify attacks on that country by her husband, former president Bill Clinton, and his administration.

“While there is no perfect approach to this thorny dilemma, and while people of good faith and high intelligence can reach diametrically opposed conclusions, I believe the best course is to go to the U.N. for a strong resolution that scraps the 1998 restrictions on inspections and calls for complete, unlimited inspections with cooperation expected and demanded from Iraq,” Sen. Clinton said at the time of her vote, in a carefully crafted speech designed to demonstrate her range of knowledge and ability to consider all options. “I know that the administration wants more, including an explicit authorization to use force, but we may not be able to secure that now, perhaps even later. But if we get a clear requirement for unfettered inspections, I believe the authority to use force to enforce that mandate is inherent in the original 1991 U.N. resolution, as President Clinton recognized when he launched Operation Desert Fox in 1998.”

Hillary would have done well to leave out that last part, the one where her husband, the former president of the United States, used military force as part of a 72-hour bombing campaign ostensibly deemed as a punitive strike in defense of disarmament, but in actuality proved to be a blatant attempt at regime change that used the hyped-up threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as an excuse for action. Sound familiar? While many Americans today condemn the Bush administration for misleading them with false claims of unsubstantiated threats, which resulted in the ongoing debacle we face today in Iraq (count Hillary among this crowd), few have reflected back on the day when the man from Hope, Ark., sat in the Oval Office and initiated the policies of economic sanctions-based containment and regime change that President Bush later brought to fruition when he ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

“My vote,” Hillary said with great sanctimony, “is not, however, a vote for any new doctrine of preemption, or for unilateralism, or for the arrogance of American power or purpose — all of which carry grave dangers for our nation, for the rule of international law and for the peace and security of people throughout the world.” But by citing the policies of her husband, there can be no doubt that this was exactly what her vote was about.

I should know. From January 1993 until my resignation from the United Nations in August 1998, I witnessed firsthand the duplicitous Iraq policies of Bill Clinton’s administration, the implementation of which saw a president lie to the American people about a threat he knew was hyped, lie to Congress about his support of a disarmament process his administration wanted nothing to do with, and lie to the world about American intent, which turned its back on the very multilateral embrace of diplomacy as reflected in the Security Council resolutions Hillary Clinton so piously refers to in her speech, and instead pursued a policy defined by the unilateral interests of the Clinton administration to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

I personally witnessed the director of the CIA under Bill Clinton, James Woolsey, fabricate a case for the continued existence of Iraqi ballistic missiles in November 1993, after I had provided a detailed briefing which articulated the U.N. inspector’s findings that Iraq’s missile program had been fundamentally disarmed. I led the U.N. inspector’s investigation into the defection of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, in August 1995, and saw how the Clinton administration twisted his words to make a case for the continued existence of a nuclear program the weapons inspectors knew to be nothing more than scrap and old paper. I was in Baghdad at the head of an inspection team in the summer of 1996 as the Clinton administration used the inspection process as a vehicle for a covert action program run by the CIA intending to assassinate Saddam Hussein.

I twice traveled to the White House to brief the National Security Council in the confines of the White House Situation Room on the plans of the inspectors to pursue the possibility of concealed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, only to have the Clinton national security team betray the inspectors by failing to deliver the promised support, and when the inspections failed to deliver any evidence of Iraqi wrongdoing, attempt to blame the inspectors while denying any wrongdoing on their part.

This last fact hits very close to home. As a former Marine Corps officer and as a chief inspector responsible for the welfare of the personnel entrusted to my command, I take the act of official betrayal very seriously. “I want the men and women in our Armed Forces to know,” Sen. Clinton said in her speech defending her vote for war, “that if they should be called upon to act against Iraq, our country will stand resolutely behind them.” I am left to wonder if, in citing the record of her husband when he was president, Hillary would stand behind the troops with the same duplicitous “vigor” that her husband displayed when betraying the U.N. weapons inspectors.

In February 1998 the Clinton administration backed a diplomatic effort undertaken by then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to help get the weapons inspection process back on track (inspections had been stalled since January 1998, when a team I led was prevented by the Iraqis from carrying out its mission because, as the Iraqis maintained, there were too many Americans and British on the team implementing the unilateral policy of regime change instead of the mandated task of disarmament). Hillary stated that she wanted a strong U.N. resolution designed to promote viable weapons inspections and specifically singled out the compromises brokered by Kofi Annan to get inspectors back into Iraq as a failed effort that weakened the inspection process. What she fails to mention is that her husband initially supported the Annan mission, not so much because it paved a path towards disarmament, but rather because it provided a cover for legitimizing regime change.

I sat in the office of then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson, as the United States cut a deal with then-U.N. Special Commission Executive Chairman Richard Butler, where the timing and actions of an inspection team led by myself (a decision that was personally approved by Bill Clinton) would be closely linked to a massive U.S. aerial bombardment of Iraq triggered by my inspection. I was supposed to facilitate a war by prompting Iraqi noncompliance. Instead, I did my job and facilitated an inspection that pushed the world closer to a recognition that Iraq was complying with its disarmament obligation. As a reward, I was shunned from the inspection process by the Clinton administration.

In April 1998 Bill Clinton promised Congress that his administration would provide all support necessary to the U.N. inspectors. In May 1998 his National Security Team implemented a new policy that turned its back on the inspectors, seeking to avoid supporting a disarmament process that undermined the policies of regime change so strongly embraced by Bill Clinton and his administration. When I resigned in August 1998 in protest over its duplicitous policies, I was personally attacked by the Clinton administration in an effort to divert attention away from the truth about what it were doing regarding Iraq. Four months later Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of Iraq, Operation Desert Fox, referred to in glowing terms by Hillary Clinton as she endorsed the policies of deception that led our nation down the path towards war.

“So it is with conviction,” Hillary said at the moment of her vote, “that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our nation. A vote for it is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our president, and we say to him — use these powers wisely and as a last resort. And it is a vote that says clearly to Saddam Hussein — this is your last chance — disarm or be disarmed.”

It turned out Saddam was in fact already disarmed. And it turned out that Hillary’s husband, President Bill Clinton, knew this when he ordered the bombing of Iraq in 1998. Hillary can try to twist and turn the facts as she defends the words she spoke when casting her fateful vote in favor of a war with Iraq. But no amount of rewriting history can shield her from the failed policies of her very own husband, policies she embraced willingly and wholeheartedly when endorsing war.

Run, Hillary, run. But your race towards the White House will never outpace the hypocrisy and duplicity inherent in your decision to vote for war in Iraq.”

Scott Ritter served as a former Marine Corps officer from 1984 until 1991. and as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 until 1998. He is the author of several books, including “Iraq Confidential” (Nation Books, 2005) and “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2006).

From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/48729/?page=entire