…

Bush has many times stated that this or that problem will be left for some other future president to decide…and on that one point I believe his words!

god told junior bush you invade the wrong country, go figure.

i don’t know where you got your facts from, probably from “the chimp” in the white house, but the iraq war is far from over. you see, you actually have a quagmire, a stalemate, a killing field in iraq.

bush, sadaam, you pick, both are criminals, both deserve to be executed for crimes against humanity.

“Many of us had worked on and off long years in Iraq, and had come to understand what made Iraq different from almost every other country we had ever been to. I personally have lived and worked in many of the world’s nastiest places over the last 30 years.

And Iraq was clearly the nastiest of them, saving only North Korea about which I know a great deal less, because visas for North Korea are a great deal harder to get.

Iraq was the most complete terrorist state. It was a frightening and pathetic thing to see how a nation of 25 million people had been reduced to a state of abject fear. And we knew that there’s only one way to produce this kind of fear, and that is by killing, by large scale killing.
Now we know with the war over that what human rights reports had been telling us for years was probably an underestimate. We know that he killed hundred of thousands of his own people.”

John Burns
New York Times
http://www.cbc.ca/ deadlineiraq/ burns.pdf#search=%22John%20Burns%20Iraq%20different%20fear%22

In an exchange that Exley originally claimed that “Saddam was unique,” I pointed out that Saddam was neither unique historically nor for his time.

After ducking me for hours, he posts this:
Barfly,
Now I am on MY way to the bar.
*Sigh* Fine…Saddam was not unique in among the dictators of all time.
But as John Burns explains in posting #125, he was a uniquely monstrous dictator in the modern world covering the last 30 yearsHappy?

1. As I showed you last night, the reign of Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot did not coincide. Pol Pot was out of power by the time Saddam Hussein becamse president of Iraq.

And it’s now 0-5.

Sorry, but considering what’s at stake what needed/s to be done, taking his eye off the ball in Afghanistan, turning world opinion primarily against us, strategically losing Iraq and Afghanistan if we’re not very careful, I think it’s entirely fair to say Bush is far and away the biggest screw-up in history. He took a difficult task and has made it damn near impossible. Almost everything he touches he makes worse. We shouldn’t be surprised, his life history shows the same sorry pattern in every aspect of his life. Sorry but that’s as plain as the nose on your face.

One more thing — You wrote: “I’m hardly a Clinton fan, and certainly not trying to defend him so much as demonstrate that as he stated he tried. Which is more than Bush did, and has done in regards to Bin Laden.”

Oh, come on, ML….Look, one can criticize Dubya for not doing enough to get Bin Laden after 9/11 or that the U.S. screwed up at Tora Bora or that he took his eyes off the prize and got diverted by Iraq, but you can’t say Bush has done nothing or hasn’t even tried to get Bin Laden…There are approximately 20,000 troops in Afghanistan and Lord knows how many CIA agents there and in Pakistan now….Maybe that’s not enough….But it is not nothing.

As far as what Bush said about freedom in the middle east, I take that as much to heart as anything else he’s lied about. He’s a uniter not a divider, he’s a compassionate conservative, they hate us for our freedoms, Hussein’s pursuing yellow cake uranium, etc… Hardly the first time a politican has said one thing and pursued another direction. Strangely enough Bush’s actions often seem contradictroy to what hes says.

Here’s an interview with Mr. Scheuer you might find interesting… http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/01/int05001.html

More from Mr. Scheuer in an interview with Nora O‘donnel on hardball:

“That is very spooky. Michael Scheuer left the CIA in 2004 after 22 years with the agency. He was the CIA‘s man in charge of tracking Osama bin Laden and what he was up to. And he warned the CIA director that our country faced an imminent threat from Osama bin Laden.

Michael, what can you tell us about these newly declassified memos from July and August of 1996, that the Clinton State Department knew that Osama bin Laden had the wherewithal to attack the United States?

MICHAEL SCHEUER, FORMER CIA TERRORISM ANALYST: Well, it was very much common knowledge across the intelligence community that if—once Osama bin Laden moved from Sudan to Afghanistan, that he would be much freer to operate. There was no government in Afghanistan, it was a free range sort of territory.

From the CIA‘s perspective, it was the best possible place for him to go because we could operate there more freely. And we thought for sure we would be able to provide the government with chances to capture or kill him. As it turned.

O‘DONNELL: But many people have made the impression that something in the Bush administration was done wrong. But there‘s evidence that the Clinton administration knew full well that bin Laden had the wherewithal and was planning to attack the United States. Who is to blame and did the president, Clinton, get this information?

SCHEUER: Certainly the president got the information. And most certainly his closest adviser, Sandy Berger and Mr. Clarke—Richard Clarke, had the information from 1996 forward that bin Laden intended to attack the United States. There‘s no question of that. And in terms of which administration had more chances, Mr. Clinton‘s administration had far more chances to kill Osama bin Laden than Mr. Bush has until this day.

O‘DONNELL: That‘s very interesting. I don‘t think that many Americans know that or think that everything that they‘ve heard—you‘ve spent your life tracking Osama bin Laden. From what we know now and what you know, how many missed opportunities were there to prevent the 9/11 attacks?

SCHEUER: Well, we had—the question of whether or not we could have prevented the attacks is one you could debate forever. But we had at least eight to 10 chances to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in 1998 and 1999. And the government on all occasions decided that the information was not good enough to act.

O‘DONNELL: What—who then is to blame? I think the American people want to know, then, who then is to blame for this?

SCHEUER: It can only be the policy-makers and the elected officials. The CIA provides the intelligence, the actual decision to act using military force or using.

O‘DONNELL: So what you‘re saying is that when you ran the bin Laden desk, you knew where bin Laden was. You knew that bin Laden was trying to attack the United States. You knew that bin Laden had the wherewithal and that the policy-makers in the Clinton administration and then the Bush administration did not heed your warnings?

SCHEUER: Not my warnings. I hate to make myself the center of anything, ma‘am. But the intelligence community as a whole had warned the administration repeatedly. And I think there‘s no lack of record of that. It just—the 9/11 Commission failed to find anyone responsible for anything. The CIA can‘t order an attack. Only the National Security Council and the president can order an attack.

O‘DONNELL: Let me ask you what you know about what we‘ve read recently about a secret military operation known as Able Danger. There are people involved in that that say that the United States knew about Mohammed Atta a year before the 9/11 attacks. Is that true? And was there a massive failure by our government?

SCHEUER: I don‘t know firsthand information about Able Danger, ma‘am, but from what I‘ve read in the media, that the lawyers prevented them from passing the information to the FBI, that certainly rings true. The U.S. intelligence community is palsied by lawyers.

When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden‘s safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn‘t irritate his beard. The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence community.

O‘DONNELL: Let me ask you, because you spent 22 years tracking Osama bin Laden, he is still at large, we are fighting an insurgency in Iraq where there are allies of Osama bin Laden, what threat do you think bin Laden poses to the United States now?

SCHEUER: Well, at first—I only tracked him for the last 10 years, ma‘am. I tracked him for as long as the U.S. government has been tracking him. He‘s an existential threat, as they say, to the United States. He can detonate probably a weapon of mass destruction inside of the United States, be it a suitcase nuclear weapon or a chemical or biological weapon. And we‘ve done really very little to stop him from proceeding along that course.

O‘DONNELL: Do you think that he is in Afghanistan?

SCHEUER: I think he is along the border. I think the general judgment that he is on the Pak-Afghan border hiding or at least living is very accurate. He is very comfortable there. He is protected by the tribes that live on the border. And the one thing we would hate to say but it is perfectly true is that he is the most important leader and hero in the Muslim world today. There are very few Muslims who would ever think of turning him over to the Americans.

O‘DONNELL: And, finally, the president has made the case that winning the war in Iraq is central to winning the war on terror and making sure that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda cannot take—harm the United States. Is that true, if we win there, will that help?

SCHEUER: No, ma‘am. The war in Iraq has broken the back of our counterterrorism effort. I‘m not an expert on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, but the invasion of Iraq has made sure this war will last decades ahead and it has transferred bin Laden and al Qaeda from being man and an organization into being a philosophy and a movement. We‘ve really made sure that the war against us is going to be a long and very bloody one. Iraq was an absolutely disastrous decision.

O‘DONNELL: All right. Well, thank you, Michael Scheuer. “Inside 9/11” airs Sunday, August 21st, and Monday, August 22nd at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time on the National Geographic Channel. Join us again tomorrow night at 7:00 Eastern for more HARDBALL.”

It’s apparent that he thinks Clinton had more chances than Bush to get Bin Laden, and he’s probably in a better position to address that question from an intel perspective, but we have to keep in mind the international and political realities Clinton faced vs. those Bush faced/faces.

Bush has and had much more international support, but then just turned away and screwed it all up. From a common sense, let alone political stand point, with world opinion firmly in our corner after 9/11 how can it be seen as anything other than a screw up of monumental proportions that Bush didn’t pursue Bin Laden until his capture or elimination when the world would not have stood in his way? In his wildest dreams Clinton never had that kind of opportunity or support from anyone.

In the Buzzflash interview Scheuer makes a pretty good common sense argument for a more intelligent and rational approach that could have and should have been taken in regards to the middle east.

1. Why do they keep referencing the history of terrorism when its all unrelated to whats happening now ? Every act was separate, by a different org if an org at all or just some loonie or cia op. I think about 2 or 3% of their documentation regarding past terrorism can actually be legit terrorist acts and the rest can be categorized as much a terrorist act as a typical nut case kidnapper (Not a plot of freedom hating rebels) however there is never information as to why the act was commited, yet one can conclude that since none of these acts were ever commited on US soil we were probably somewhere we should never have been…

2. Bush claims they will always find a reason to attack us. Bush Claims thats why we have to deal with them before they get the chance and he is responsible for protecting the American People and implementing national security. Bush Claims that “We werent even in Iraq and they attacked us on 9/11. Lets disect these statements …

a.) Has the American people ever been provided with the reason by the Gov. as to why terrorists attacked us in the past or present for that matter????

b.) Who is it that we have to deal with before they attack us ? Iraq never attacked us. And the excuse for going to war with Iraq was WMD not WTC.
SOOOO If “we werent even in Iraq and the terroists attacked us” but the terrorists werent in any way affiliated with Iraq, but will always find a reason to attack us, nor was it Iraq that attacked us then who was it that attacked us and for what reason and where is the one responsible and why are we in iraq spending billions and billions of dollars fighting “INSURGENTS” instead of “TERRORISTS” for fractions of a fraction less with intelligence and covert special force ops and guided missile strikes in the right country…? Where is the proactive national security in that or protection from whom?

c.) If Bush is, was and always has been so hot on national security and protecting “The American People” Why did he hide out in that elementary school with a bunch of school kids when we were supposably being attacked ? That does not match up with what he nor anyone else who supports him is projecting of himself…

Im sorry but everything that has to do with this guy turns up big time contradictions… the guy is a compulsive liar and a premeditating murderer as well as a traitor, guilty of high treason and should get the firing squad with the rest of his admin… if he doesnt fess up as to who is really behind all this… But then again we could always hang him up by the ears and pull his toe nails off with pliars to make him fess up…. since he made torture legal !?!?

BUSH: You know, I’ve heard this theory about everything was just fine until we arrived, and kind of “we’re going to stir up the hornet’s nest” theory. It just doesn’t hold water, as far as I’m concerned. The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

I’ll bet Bush can’t even pronounce NON SEQUITUR.