BTW: Sorry for the long delay in responding. Life kind of reared up and demanded attention for a while.

You can put any spin on it you want to. Bush is a criminal, his war is based on lies, his legacy will be that of the worst president in our history, and he is directly responsible for the SHAME that all true Americans should feel by his behavior.

From the loss of habeas corpus, to free speech zones, to secret prisons to monitoring of phones and emails. He has stolen the very rights that make America a free country, all in the name of security.

I think it was Ben Franklin who said that those who give up liberty in the name of security, deserve neither.

Of course I’m more comfortable with Iraqi – or any foreign – deaths than I am with American casualties. Foreigners aren’t me or my family. I agree that it’s everybody’s loss, but we’d ALL prefer the loss not to include our own loved ones.

You said : “I much more comfortable with 100K+ Iraqi dead than with American dead. ”

Bravo Jonolan! You are no different from those who you called racist and bigot.
For me whoever got killed, it’s everyone’s lose.

I like comment from Expat Brian…he is fully aware of what his country’s image in international ‘eyes’.

The Intelligence Report only addresses whether or not the Administration misrepresented the available intelligence when we went into Iraq. It has nothing to do with why we’re still there. We’re still there because we couldn’t just remove the Iraqi government and leave. That would have been even worse – or at least I believe that to be the case.

What possible right do we have to invade a sovereign nation just because they don’t adhere to US policy? There are countries all over the world who call us the enemy and even those who harbor terrorists of their own but we are not invading them.

This president and all others have a primary duty, per their oath of office, to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States. Bush has violated that oath repeatedly. But I think the worst crime of this administration is the loss of international reputation and honor that it’s behavior has been directly responsible for.

I wear a very large, very colorful tatoo of an American eagle with the letters USA in the middle on my shoulder. I have it because I love my country. I cover it when I go out, not because I am afraid of being shot by some extremist but because I am ashamed of the behavior of my government and the blatantly arrogant and violent manner it employs to further its agenda.

I live overseas, in a nation friendly to the United States. And I read the international press. The admiration that people once had for the US is gone. It has been replaced with either fear and suspicion or amusement. Why? Because we have been exposed as a country that does not practice what it preaches.

I’m going to assume – please correct me if I’m wrong – that you and and your compatriots concluded that Saddam was not a direct threat to the US. I ask because I and my friends – ex and current US SpecOps – concluded exactly that – Saddam was not a direct threat to the US. We concluded though that his providing material aid and comfort to anti-US terrorists caused him to be a indirect threat to the US.

I bring this up because that indirect threat engendered by providing safe havens and training to terrorists is the same thing as the motivation the US had for removing the Taliban from Afghanistan – something there have been few complaints about from within the US.

As far as a trial is concerned, what charges would anyone bring against Bush? We do not as a rule charge rulers for waging war. We only charge them based on the goals of those wars and the methods employed in prosecuting them. Even at Nuremberg the only charges were those pertaining to specific actions, not the fact that Hitler invaded his neighbors.

The case as you represented it is accurate enough. If they were unaware of the inaccuracies and depended solely on intelligence given to them, they are innocent.

I appreciate your honesty vis a vis Iraqi versus American dead, and I would concur as my children are American.

However, when Colin Powell made his presentation in respect to mobile manufacturing of biological weapons, I knew by looking at him he was lying. He knew it, but he was ordered to do it. At that moment I sympathized with him and he lost my respect somewhat too, as the cost in this case was tremendous. I would have resigned before making that presentation.

One afternoon, before the war, an American, an Israeli ( a former Mossad agent), and myself were discussing this at lunch. We all concurred Saddam was not a threat to America.

If we could figure that out without the resources available to the President, what the hell went wrong? For that reason, they must try the people at the top, if for no other purpose than prevention in the future.

Regards

Robert

I agree that the process took too long and was badly handled.

I think that the 100K casualty figure is actually a bit low. I also think those lives matter, but I’ll be brutally honest – I much more comfortable with 100K+ Iraqi dead than with American dead.

You’re right, nobody needs a committee to realize that there turned out to be no WMDs or CBWs. That wasn’t the point of the report though. Rockefeller’s report was on whether or not the Administration misrepresented or ignored the intelligence they were presented before the war.

I don’t believe that they did misrepresent it – as my conclusion-by-conclusion commentary probably clearly showed. Sadly, that intelligence data was wrong. That’s the nature of such data; it’s based on rumor, informants, contacts, and analysis of disparate parts of a huge puzzle.

I also don’t know how Bush could be expected to check out those sources. The general consensus was that Saddam still had CBW stockpiles and was striving for nuclear weapons as well. How could the Administration doublecheck these facts? I don’t know of any way to do so.

It’s not about “due process of law.” It’s about protecting the US and its people in a post 9/11 world. There seemed to be creditable evidence that Saddam was a threat. It wasn’t in any way a “sure thing,” but the potential cost of ignoring the threat was fairly high.