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Let me explain how I remember the aftermath of 9/11 and the months leading up to the Iraq war.

Everyone in Europe was absolutely shocked that the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon could happen. I had come home from work a bit early that day, and I was turning on the radio to find out who had won the election in Norway on 9/10. Instead there were all these frenzied reports from the United States. I turned on the television. Both towers had already been attacked, but none of them had fallen. As I watched, the towers fell, one after the other. I was numb. Reporters talked about the Pentagon and about a fourth plane that had been hijacked. It felt as if a war had started, and you didn't know when it was going to end.

After a while it appeared that the immediate attacks had stopped. Only the utter shock remained. I don't remember how soon after the attacks that Sweden's present - but back then, former - minister of foreign affairs, Carl Bildt, started explaining his views on the matter. I should add that Bildt is Sweden's most respected expert on foreign affairs, and he was deeply involved in trying to sort out the mess in former Yugoslavia in the nineties, since he had been appointed by the EU, the European Union, for the job. In other words, Bildt is respected in Sweden. He is also known as a man with right-wing sympathies.

Anyway, it didn't take Bildt many days to point his finger at Al Qeada. Bildt also confidently stated that Al Qeada's base of operation was in Afghanistan. He explained that the very fundamentalist Islamic Taliban government in Afghanistan had given Al Qeada a safe haven there.

I remember that Bildt's statement made a lot of sense to me. No, I hadn't actually heard the name "Al Qeada" before, but I had indeed heard of strange and scary attacks carried out by Muslim groups before. I did remember that the Twin Towers had been attacked before, and Bildt claimed that Al Qeada had been behind that attack, too. And I remembered a horrible attack on U.S. forces in Somalia(?), where more than two hundred Americans had been killed.

Also, I was very well aware that the Taliban government in Afghanistan seemed to be, in opinion, horrible. They practiced the most severe form of the Sharia law. They oppressed women horribly. I remembered very well that they had taken over Afghanistan a few years back, and I had followed reports of how they started oppressing women. It was horrible. It did seem reasonable to me that people who were so extreme would support a movement like Al Qeada.

Apart from Afghanistan, two other countries were mentioned in connection with Al Qeada and 9/11. They were Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Al Qeada was described as a Saudi invention, founded by Osama bin Laden of Saudi Arabia. It had its roots in an extreme Saudi Islamic movement known as Wahabism. The other country mentioned was Egypt, since most of the people who actually carried out the attacks on 9/11 were Egyptians.

Relatively soon, George W Bush demanded that Afghanistan must hand over the Al Qeada people it sheltered to the United States. If Afghanistan refused to comply, the United States would declare war on it. This seemed quite reasonable to me. The way I remember it, Bush's threat of war led to very few protests, and those who protested were widely regarded as crackpots. We thought that they were either incredibly naïve, or else they were militant Islamists themselves.

After a while the United States attacked Afghanistan. Again there were a few scattered protests that no one paid any attention to. The war went very well, the Taliban government was toppled - what a relief that was! - and Osama bin Laden was almost captured. I remember how disappointed I was when he got away. That was really frustrating. But apart from that, it seemed to me that the United States had dealt very properly with the enemy that was behind 9/11. Now, I thought, the United States would go home again and do other things than making war.

Imagine my shock when I read in my newspaper that George W. Bush wanted to attack Iraq, too. Believe me, I read newspapers. I listen to the news on radio and TV. I read British and American publications. But no one - no one - had suggested that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 before Bush said that he would attack it.

Sure, I knew very well that Saddam was a horrible dictator. I remembered the unspeakably awful poison gas attack on the Kurds in northern Iraq back in the eighties, which left thousands of people dead. That was a genocidal attack. I believe that Bush Sr. was President of the United States back then, or else it was Reagan. If the United States had attacked Iraq after Saddam's gas attack on the Kurds, I would not have protested. And I certainly didn't protest when the United States and a lot of Arab nations attacked Iraq in the early nineties. I remember very well how shocked I was when I heard on the radio that Saddam had invaded Kuwait, just like that. I was glad that the United States and its allies drove him out of there.

Bill Clinton enforced a lot of sanctions on Iraq. I remembered that Carl Bildt, among others, claimed that Saddam tried to make a nuclear bomb. Also he definitely possessed poison gas, as his attack on the Kurds demonstrated. But Carl Bildt also said that the sanctions that were enfored on Iraq would make it hard or impossible for Saddam to make any more poison gas, or to make a nuclear bomb.

When 9/11 happened, nothing had been said about Saddam Hussein for a long time. He hadn't attacked another nation since Kuwait. He hadn't carried out any horrible attacks on the Kurds since the 1980s. No known international terrorist had ever come from Iraq. No one, certainly not Carl Bildt, had ever claimed that Saddam Hussein and Iraq was a dangerous international threat at the beginning of the 21st century that had to be dealt with urgently. And no one had ever said that he was behind 9/11.

I remember how utterly shocked I was that the United States would attack Iraq. The idea that Saddam was an immediate threat to the world seemed to come absolutely out of the blue. It seemed so totally unfair and unreasonable. And I was not the only one who didn't understand anything at all. There were big protests and demonstrations worldwide in February 2003:

Millions join global anti-war protests

Those who had protested against the war in Afghanistan had seemed like crackpots to me. Those who protested against the war against Iraq seemed like very reasonable people to me. What will the world be like if wars are started so easily, just because one nation doesn't like another nation?

TEEEJ, I have to comment on something you said. I'm not advocating the idea of spreading eveybody's money out absolutely equally, just spreading it out a bit more equally. And if you earned - and worked for - $29,000 last year, I wouldn't want you to have to pay very high taxes at all. But if you had earned $290,000 it would have been another matter. Or if you had earned $2,900,000... or $29,000,000... or $290,000,000....

I seem to have earned the reputation of being a communist among some people on these boards. So I can't resist telling you about when I studied sociology at the university in Lund in 1974. All the other people who took that course with me were communists, I'm not kidding you. They were nuts, some of them. Really. I remember that one day a whole bunch of them went on strike. And guess why? Because the Professor who taught us had decided that we all had to read a particular book on sociology. The book was written by a man who was an avowed communist. So why were all those communist students protesting? Why, because the author of that book was an American, of course!!! Imagine being forced to read a book that was written by someone from the United States!!!

I remember I spent hours and hours and hours arguing against those other students, trying to make them see that communism didn't really work. In the end, however, I gave up. That was when one guy said this to me:

"You can't compare the Soviet Union with the Capitalist world! Capitalism has had 200 years to perfect itself. But Communism has only existed since 1917. You must wait for a hundred years, and then you'll see that the Soviet Union will be a paradise!"

Can you believe it? The guy told me that I would see that he was right in a hundred years, when I would be dead. I would see that he was right when I was dead!

I realized two things. This guy was using the same argument that my Pentecostalist relatives would ultimately resort to if someone put pressure on them - those doubters would see that the Pentecostalists were right when the doubters were dead! And I would see that Communism was paradise when I was dead! Yeah, maybe. But it is a lousy argument.

People who claim to know the future are just too self-assured. People who claim to know that their God or their political movement will triumph when we all are dead... well... there's just no reasoning with them.

And if you ask me... no. I'm not a communist. And I never have been one.

Ann

The amount I earn has nothing to do with sharing out the hard work I put into it or why I should share with someone who doesn't. Sorry, but I'm not convinced and think even more so that given the US has become the most progressive and advanced country in the free world due to capitialism in only 200+ years just goes to show that capitalism works logically best. It's only breaking down recently because of the socialist regime of the liberals infiltrating our government and it's going to get worse. I will be glad to be dead (or Raptured) before the disease of socialism has completely infected my country.

Here is a link that explains why it's wrong to make people who make more money pay more taxes.

Honestly, we all know a 10% sales tax across the country is all we need to pay for roads and military, which is all the government should ever be responsible for.

Per Thomas Jefferson, when a government gets big enough to DO everything for you, it's big enough to TAKE everything from you.




TEEEEEJ

Agreed. And it's the latter that I'm claiming. Intelligence reports said there were no WMDs. Except the ones that cherry-picked facts, relied on untrustworthy sources, took stuff out of context... He pressured people into saying it was a "slam dunk" even when they knew better. There was no reason to go to Iraq except that Bush wanted to. He implied a connection to 9/11 that wasn't there and claimed he had surefire evidence of WMDs. And if he didn't know better (and I think he did), it's because he chose not to hear it from people who did. That's lying.

Ann, on your point about Iraq, it's true that no one ever accused Saddam of being behind 9/11. He wasn't and no one with any authority in the US government said he was.

In President Bush's speech on September 20, 2001 before the joint session of Congress, the president laid out the foundations of the War on Terror. It was not intended to punish merely those behind the attacks on New York and Washington but was intended to prevent any such danger from reaching our shores ever again.

In the speech, the president outlined the Axis of Evil: North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. It was never even hinted at that any of those three nations were behind 9/11. They were merely the foremost sponsors of terrorism in the world. Instead of playing defense, the United States would go after all terrorists of "global reach" wherever we find them. This exempted local organizations such as the IRA in Northern Ireland, the Basque Separatists in Spain, or FARC in Columbia but included groups supported by the Axis of Evil nations.

In each case, the response would be different. For North Korea, who had just announced that it was now a nuclear power, the Six Party talks would be convened, including the regional powerhouses of China, Russia, and Japan, as well as South Korea and the United States, to pressure North Korea to give up their nuclear arsenal and to stop sponsoring terrorism. For Iran, it would be pressure from the UN to stop the enrichment of uranium and to stop them from sponsoring terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. For Iraq, stonewalling by Saddam and the violation of all seventeen UN resolutions meant that the Gulf War armistice would come to an end unless Saddam allowed unfettered access to all suspected chemical, biological, and nuclear facilities. When the stonewalling continued, that's when the military option came to the forefront.

When Iraq failed to comply, that's when the president went to Congress and to the UN to authorize the use of force. Congress voted to give the president the authority in a vote of 296-133 in the House of Representatives and 77-23 in the Senate. Following fourteen months of agonizing negotiations with the permanent members of the UN Security Council, the Security Council gave approval to UN Resolution 242 warning of "serious consequences" if Iraq continued to violate the resolutions. Everybody knew what that phrase meant. It meant invasion. Saddam refused to cooperate and rejected an eleventh hour offer from President Bush for Saddam and his two sons, Uday and Kusay, to go into exile to avoid attack. That final offer was rejected and Operation Iraqi Freedom began.

Some will say that UN Resolution 242 did not grant the allies the right to use force. It certainly did and that was the understanding the US had gotten from the permanent members. On the eve of the attack, Tony Blair began to get cold feet and wanted an even stronger resolution saying outright that invasion would happen. To give his friend political cover at home, President Bush agreed to go before the Security Council again despite already having the authority, even knowing such a new resolution was likely to fail. It had taken fourteen months to get the wording, "serious consequences." As expected France and Russia balked at the explicit language of the proposed resolution and the motion was withdrawn. It's one thing, diplomatically, to passively support an attack but actively supporting such a thing was a bridge too far.

The War on Terror was not merely military in nature. The domestic component had to do with beefing up the intelligence agencies and reorganizing the government to go from fighting terrorism as a crime to fighting terrorism as a threat to national security. The wall between law enforcement and intelligence agencies had to come down. The Patriot Act essentially gave the federal government the same powers as they had to fight organized crime under the RICO Act. While some claim the Patriot Act went too far, they ignored history, showing many wartime presidents with far more unilateral power than President Bush ever asked for. President Franklin Roosevelt used secret military tribunals to punish and execute spies caught in the US. Censorship of the press in WWII was unprecedented. President Lincoln unilaterally suspended habeas corpus and even went as far as expelling and exiling a sitting member of Congress to Canada, Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham.

Internationally, friendly governments all over the world would be enlisted in the effort to find the terrorists and choke off all forms of support, including any financial support terrorist groups enjoyed. You may recall the New York Times blowing the lid off of one of those programs to stop terrorist funding. If President Roosevelt had been in office, the owner and editor of the Times, Arthur Sulzberger and Bill Keller, would have gone to jail immediately without trial.

After having been caught napping, essentially, the people of the United States finally realized that we weren't safe behind the two oceans that had protected us for 200 years. Instead of passively waiting to be attacked again, we would root out any global terrorist organizations, not just al Qaeda. Besides Israel, the United States would always be the main target of any global terrorist organization. And in any subsequent attack, we could expect it to be either chemical, biological, or nuclear in nature. With such awesome weapons available to terrorist groups, we could not afford to sit back and play defense. The cost could be millions of lives. As President Bush has said many times, the terrorists only have to get it right once. We have to be successful every time. Just one successful attack could cause a slaughter of civilians that would make 9/11 look like a street mugging and make Nagasaki look like an IED. The dire consequences of failure are the reasons why we are engaged in the Global War on Terror and why stopping at Afghanistan would not make us safe.

Well, Ann. You wanted to know why. I hope that answers your questions.

Except that was false. President Bush's opponents wanted to cover their votes on approval of the use of force after public opinion began to turn, claiming that President Bush had access to information they didn't. A bipartisan commission looked at those Presidential Daily Briefs and concluded that the information within them was not significantly different than that provided to the Intelligence Committees in both houses of Congress. They were merely organized differently.

The lie was on the part of the Democratic Congressmen who had to justify the votes to their anti-war constituents by claiming the president had lied to them. That simply didn't pan out. Even Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Democratic Representative Jane Harman, the senior minority members of their respective Intelligence committees disputed that the president had lied.

Even if you don't believe President Bush, name one intelligence service in the entire world that thought Iraq had no WMD's. There weren't any. Even the finest intelligence service in the world, Israel's Mossad, believed it as did all of America's principal allies: France, Germany, Russia, and Great Britain. You can fool a few Congressmen, but how do you fool the intelligence services all over the world? George Tenant wasn't that good.

Oh, and on hinting that Iraq was somehow involved in 9/11, every time they were asked by the press, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney would deny it. This was just another story concocted by the anti-war crowd in their attempts to rewrite history. It was basically a hatchet job to try to get the president's poll numbers down as far as they could get them. Pure politics in action.

If CNN were around during World War II, they would have advocated learning to speak Japanese following Pearl Harbor and telling us how little we had to fear from Nazi Germany.

We would never have even gotten to 1944 with organizations like today's CNN or MSNBC or CBS. The call to surrender or pull out would have happened after our defeat at the Kasserine Pass in North Africa or after the Bataan Death March and our loss of the Phillippines.

Wolf Blitzer would have accused President Roosevelt of exaggerating the danger when he said that December 7, 1941 would be "a day that would live in infamy".

Pinchy Sulzberger would have demanded that we put a wall around the intelligence services and would have decried warrant-less wireless intercepts after breaking the Japanese code just before Midway and after our P-38 Lightnings shot down Admiral Yamamoto's plane after our code breakers learned about his itinerary.

After our victory at Midway, Aaron Brown would have been criticizing Rear Admiral Spruance for sinking all four Japanese heavy carriers, saying that was overkill and would only anger the Japanese.

Lou Dobbs would have demanded that we return the artwork and gold "stolen" by high-ranking Nazis from museums all over Europe to the thieves since we didn't have the right to confiscate them.

The invasion of Italy would have prompted calls for impeachment from Christiane Amanpour, who would wonder why President Roosevelt was hinting that Benito Mussolini had something to do with Pearl Harbor. And that wallpaper hanger guy with the funny mustache. What did he ever do to us?

Even if by miracle we made it to D-Day, the failure to break out from the hedgerows on D-Day plus one would have prompted calls of quagmire. We'd have been accused of littering with all those parachutes hanging over the steeples of St. Mere Eglise. Operation Cobra, the breakout in France, would have been called demeaning to snakes. George Patton's dash across France would have drawn accusations of pollution for using up too much gasoline. MSNBC would have demanded a speed limit on the autobahns to keep those Sherman tanks from going too fast. Shouldn't we be using electric tanks?

Our defeat in Operation Market-Garden, which prompted Cornelius Ryan's brilliant book, A Bridge Too Far, would have caused Paula Zahn to say that our commander-in-chief was incompetent and that the enemy was too strong for us to beat.

The Battle of the Bulge would have had Dan Rather saying that we needed to lose weight. Then he'd spy that Snickers bar in the corner and say, "Aww, nuts!"

And the signing of the peace treaty between the Allies and Imperial Japan on board the battleship, Missouri, would have been criticized for embarrassing the Japanese.

Nope. I'm convinced we would never have made it past Kasserine.

I'm not going to convince you, and you're not going to convince me. We've each got our sources and our beliefs.

But Bush did lie to our troops. They had contracts specifying how long their tours of duty would last, with the option to renew or not. Contracts expired, but he still needed troops there. So he broke the terms of the contract and refused to bring them home, forcing them to stay.

And while they were there, what did he do for them? Well, after he slashed taxes on the people with the least need for yet more money, seriously cutting into government revenue, he went and spent piles of money we didn't have on the war. Multi-million dollar missiles. Billion dollar airplanes. Huge transportation costs. Thousands and thousands of mercenaries paid several times what our troops make. You know where he decided to cut corners? Protecting our troops. Body armor? Forget it. Don't have the money. Armored vehicles designed to be far less vulnerable to IEDs? Too expensive.

But at least they had people to keep them company. The national guard is the branch of the military tasked with dealing with emergencies on US soil. When something like Katrina happens, its their job to come in and help out. They have the equipment to get through to difficult places and clear roads and paths, and the uniformed manpower to provide help and order. And if terrorists actually strike within the country, it's their job to mobilize and respond. So where were they and their equipment when we needed them? Where were our national defenses against terrorist attack? Sent off to Iraq. Because, for some reason, they were having trouble getting enough troops. I guess he lied to them, too, because their terms specify service on US soil.

And spies. We needed good intelligence. People who could quietly go around, find our enemies, and figure out how best to defeat them. Valerie Plame, a covert operative specializing in WMDs, was outed. Bin Laden wasn't found. We were in Iraq for years before the people in charge realized that they were using the wrong tactics. So where were all our spying efforts going? Spying on Americans. Things like warrantless wiretapping of US citizens. Why no warrants? They were easy to get. Quick, quiet, nearly 100% approval rate. But a secret executive order said not to bother with petty things like due process and civil liberties. In this and many other things, the Bush administration has shown us that they care more about their own unchecked power than they do about anything else - rights, freedoms, laws... right up to the constitution itself. (Where's Tempus in all this? "Let's wrap fish in the constitution and chuck all the old laws...")

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Environmental policy has been set back 30 years. Education is a mess. I could go on.

And you're trying to tell me that he's done a good job? Been honest with us? Managed things well? Protected us from attack instead of making new enemies and stripping our defenses? Made us stronger?

You're never going to convince me of that.

Roger, I remember that a lot of experts said that Iraq most probably didn't have any weapons of mass destruction. The reason why it was widely believed that such WMDs didn't exist was precisely because of the sanctions that had been imposed on Iraq for many years by President Clinton. I remember that the UN was really skeptical that Iraq had any significant WMDs. In Sweden, we had a man, Hans Blix, who had worked for the UN before, inspecting Iraq for WMDs. He hadn't found any. Another Swede, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, had also worked for the UN as a weapons inspector in Iraq. I once had the opportunity to listen to this man and ask him how the inspections were carried out. He told us many interesting details, for example how he oversaw the inspection of flood water in the Tigris and other floods. The inspectors were looking for the kind of chemicals that would be there if Saddam was trying to build a bomb. They also continually took samples of water and soil to look for increased radioactivity. They never found anything.

I remember that Hans Blix expressed the opinion that Iraq probably didn't have significant WMDs. The UN decided that Hans Blix would go to Iraq with a number of inspectors to look for WMDs. If Saddam didn't let them in, the UN would automatically OK a military attack on Iraq.

The inspectors were let in. They looked. They found nothing. They wanted to keep looking. But after a while, President Bush said that the inspections were a waste of time and that it was time to take decisive action. Most of the allies of the United States didn't dare to contest the U.S. over this. The weapons inspectors were pulled out of Iraq, and the United States attacked.

Right or wrong, Roger, it is certain that the international approval of the U.S.A. has plunged precipitously over this. Perhaps it will turn out to have been the right thing to do after all. Only time will tell.

Ann

He followed the rules. The rules entitled the commander-in-chief to extend tours of duty. This is a lie? That's a stretch. I don't remember President Bush ever giving a timeline. Do you? I seem to recall the words, "long war" and "may last beyond our lifetimes and certainly beyond my administration." That was said back in 2001. I didn't ever hear, "you'll be home by Christmas," or "it'll be over quickly and you'll never have to go back." I'm with Pam. The definition of lying has been completely redefined for President Bush and really, really re-defined for President Clinton.

John Kerry, who I'll bet you voted for, voted against body armor. Oh, after he voted for it, of course. The military had supply problems, partly because Bill Clinton gutted the military. Every Democratic president's first task upon taking office is always to gut the military. And the men and women in uniform know it. That it's the job of Democratic presidents to gut the military and the job of Republican presidents to build it back up is a given like the sun coming up in the East.

What good's the National Guard when the governor (I'm looking at you, Kathleen Blanco) won't send them in and won't let the president go in with troops until it was too late. Ever heard the term, Posse Comitatus? Once the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the Army were allowed in, relief help came quickly. Oh wait, there aren't any. They're all in Iraq. I guess all those Coast Guard choppers pulling people from their rooftops were special effects by Industrial Light and Magic.

Plame was outed by her own husband, probably the biggest publicity-hound there ever was. Plus his own book, the Politics of Truth (an oxymoron if I've ever heard one) proved she wasn't covert. She was a desk jockey, not a covert agent and had been for six years. Covert agents don't do photo layouts for Vanity Fair.

President Clinton gutted our intelligence services. President Carter made sure that human intelligence (humint) was non-existent. You're trying to tell me that Democrats support intelligence services?

Power wasn't the reason why the warrants were deemed unnecessary. The process of obtaining warrants usually took so long that the need for wiretaps was over before they got approval. Minutes mattered. Even hours was too long. And those warrantless wiretaps were only permitted for calls into the US from outside or to outside the country. That rule was absolute. Any intra-US calls required a warrant. The Speaker, Minority Leader of the House, the Majority and Minority Leader of the Senate, the chairman and vice chair of both Intelligence committees and the chief judge of the FISA court were kept fully informed of everything that was happening related to the program. This was unchecked power? Unchecked power is the abolition of habeas corpus and the unilateral imposition of an income tax by Abraham Lincoln, one of our greatest presidents. The Emancipation Proclamation would have been an egregious misuse of executive power. I guess you would have had President Lincoln impeached.

Yeah he signed the bill to outlaw incandescent lights that Democrats so desperately wanted to become law, meaning that we're going to be filling our landfills with poisonous, mercury-filled flourescent light bulbs. I hate fluorescent lighting. You should be demanding Nancy Pelosi's removal for that one.

Since when was education a federal matter? Go talk to your governor about that. He's a Democrat, isn't he? Why hasn't he fixed it? I would have voted against the No Child Left Behind Act as an unconstitutional encroachment upon state powers. Doubly-so especially since Ted Kennedy wrote most of it.

Yes. When was the last successful attack on American soil? A president's chief job is to keep the country safe, not to provide cradle-to-grave services and a pension. Considering there hasn't been a successful attack, I'd say he's doing his main job quite well. al Qaeda's on the run. bin Laden's been reduced to a video star. Zarqawi's dead and 30 feet under (big bomb crater). Saddam and his precious boys, Uday and Kusay, are safely in the ground, no longer free to rape and kill millions of their own people. al Qaeda's tied up in Iraq, desperately trying to stop the spread of democracy, knowing that democracy is the death knell of terrorism and not free to launch unlimited attacks on us or our allies.

Blix also said he couldn't be sure since he wasn't given unfettered access to many facilities.

It's unfortunate that many in the international community don't support our efforts. Unfortunately, the only way to not earn the ire of most of our allies is to do nothing about terrorism. And that is unacceptable. As Americans, we're right in the cross hairs of just about every bad guy there is. Until you're in that position, it's hard to see that viewpoint.

I've got two young kids who I want to see grow up to be adults. I want them to live in a world where terrorism is something you read about in history books, not watch on your TV screen. That won't happen with the European way of doing things which is to do nothing. These bad guys look at inaction not as strength, but as weakness. If President Clinton had reacted strongly against the first attack on the World Trade Center or against the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia or against the attack on the USS Cole, or against the twin attacks against US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, maybe September 11 might have just been another day?

To give equal time, I'll also criticize President Reagan here. His reaction to the bombing in the Lebanon airport that killed 241 Marines was shameful and contributed to the terrorists' feelings that the United States was nothing more than a paper tiger.

I should turn around the statement about popularity and say that our allies aren't terribly popular in America either, except for Great Britain, Australia, and Poland, since America's always left alone to do the dirty and hard jobs. I wonder why Europeans never seem to care what Americans think of them?

I've been staying out of this, since I don't have a lot of facts, but I just wanted to comment on this:

Let me say first that I was one of these people affected by the stop-loss. I was never deployed (thank god), but I did spend time in service beyond my contract. There is a clause in every service contract that states that the contract can be extended at will by the government in a time of conflict. Trust me, I looked, trying to find a way out. When a contract expires while deployed, the contract is extended until the end of the deployment, plus a certain number of days. Deployments can be extended at will. I don't believe that Bush is the one to extend the individual troop deployments, since he doesn't sign every order. He just says "send troops!" Rather, that would be the military heirarchy who actually determines which units are going where.

I have other issues with the military heirarchy, such as the lack of communication that ended my contract in May and I wasn't notified until August. Not to mention all of the conflicting reports I heard. "Your contract is done." "No it's not." "If you don't show up for six months, you're out." "No, you have to show up for at least 1 period a month or you're AWOL." AUGH!

Hey, doesn't seem to have stopped most everyone else from posting, Karen!

LabRat

I chose McCain because well, as most of you know, I'm pretty conservative and he's the most conservative of the group. I'm not a big fan of any of them though. They just reek of 'slimy politician' to me. All of them. I guess the reason that I love Bush so much is because he is such a doofus and lacks that smooth talking political savvy that irks me in so many other candidates. And of course I agree with a lot of his policies.

I took this quiz online that's supposed to let you know what issues you agree with and disagree with for each candidate and I had Alan Keys as my number one and Fred Thompson as my number two. But of course they're not going to be options. McCain was maybe about the 6th for me but Obama and Hillary were way at the bottom. What can you do? There's never going to be a candidate that is 100% for everything I believe... Unless of course I was running... Hmmm <me starts planning my political career to be President by 2028>

I agree with Teej on that issue. One of the great things about America is that it is a Capitalist nation. We can work hard and be rewarded for our hard work accordingly. I'm not against every social program but I see too many of them being taken advantage of by lazy people who basically just don't want to work hard for anything. There are definitely people who really need the programs but I don't want my hard earned money going to the ones who don't deserve it. I think the social programs in the US need to be reevaluated and modified, not abolished. In the mean time, I'll work for my money, spend it how I want, and give to charities that I feel led to give to.

I probably should stay out of this, too. But I'll take one more (hopefully the last) try at a few points:

Thanks to Karen for clearing up the contract issue. I stand corrected.

We could debate the finer points of lying and get into intentions and implications and created beliefs and suchlike, but that's just going to get us into a murky swamp. I do, however, agree that Clinton perjured himself and did a pretty sleazy job of it. I don't think you'll find many people who disagree. If you believe otherwise, you might want to check your sources.

Speaking of checking sources... You state that Plame's husband is a publicity hound and then take his own self-glorifying book as a reliable source? Plame was outed by Novak, who was tipped off by Karl Rove. And her actual job was covert nuclear inspection... finding evidence of production of nuclear materials for WMDs. She went to Africa looking for the presumed source of Saddam's supposed WMDs, and when she reported that the supply lines weren't there, she was outed... essentially a public firing.

Huh? Oh. You mean that it's the Republicans' job to complain about government spending, slash income, and then spend billions of dollars that they don't have bloating the military so that they can buy thousand-dollar toilet seats and several-hundred-dollar intra-ship phones that can't even do the job of a $20 walkie-talkie.

And then it's the Dem's job to come in, balance the budget, and deflate at least some of that bloating.

You know, there was a thing in Newsweek (not the greatest source, but not too bad) about where the candidates would spend the most money. How much it'd cost to put into effect their top 3 most expensive plans. The dems (both of them) want something like $300 billion for health care, and then 50 or so for education and the environment. Comes to about $400 billion. Sounds like a lot? McCain's number one alone tops that. They estimate that his plan for Iraq would cost $550 billion over the next four years.

That's the Coast Guard. But there were calls for the National Guard to bring in equipment to help clear the roads, rescue people in need, transport them over land, etc. I'm sure they could have helped out at places like the Superdome, too. But they and their equipment were in Iraq.

As for the governor... There was no shortage of incompetence. Plenty of mistakes made by just about everyone involved. One person's screw-up doesn't excuse the next.

Environmental policy... There was a law on the books enacted in the 70s that would have required major upgrades to heavy polluters. The regulation was designed to have major impact 30 years down the road, when the buildings in question came due for repairs (and thus their equipment would no longer be grandfathered in). We would have had much cleaner air, and the upgrades would most likely have boosted efficiency, too... But the companies didn't want to deal with the one-time expense of making the upgrades. So, just when they were finally about to make the key difference... guess who made sure those regulations expired?

You mentioned No Child Left Behind, so you know. Many things are set at the state level, but Bush put national regulations into place in the form of NCLB. He was pushing hard for them. He was very proud of them. It's a program which he instituted in Texas, and which he and his wife made into major talking points at the elections. But, well... Maybe I should let the National Education Association explain what\'s wrong with it .

And when was the last successful foreign attack before that? And before that? Going 6 years without a major attack is hardly uncommon in US history.

Saddam wasn't a threat to us.

North Korea, who arguably was the greater and more credible threat, has gone largely unignored.

Any president would have gone after Bin Laden. But others might have done it more subtly. And perhaps more effectively. But who can say, really?

As for democracy... It works for us, but that doesn't mean it's the one true path, right for all people and all cultures. People don't like it when you take over their countries and tell them how to run them. (In fact, wasn't that the reason for the first Gulf War?) And democracy doesn't automatically mean freedom and rainbows and the end of terrorism. And the idea that you can impose freedom is just inherently contradictory.

coming late to this, and this is not as lengthy a response as this hugely important topic merits.

But:

Why are people even talking about Bill Clinton? He's not a candidate.

The American media (and also the Canadian ) have been quite sexist in their coverage of the Clinton-Obama race. As well, they've mostly failed to provide serious coverage of the campaign, and fallen into a cult of personality thing. Admittedly, an easy thing to do because it's much easier to do personality/celebrity that to do research and analysis.

As an outsider, I'm troubled by both Democrat candidates' trade protectionism, and by Obama's willingness to attack Pakistan unilaterally as well as his lack of interest in European Affairs (that Senate sub-committee!)

Mr. Obama's personal financial relationship with Tony Rezko. (Honestly is any politician anywhere free of lobbyist money?? - my cynical self here)

Were I an American, I would never have though I'd be a Rebublican, but honestly right now, McCain is looking like the best of the lot.

better stop now

c.

Correct me if I'm wrong (and I want to know, if I am since it affects how I feel generally about candidates) but didnt't he give back the money? .

More discussion on that and the media circus related to that here here .

Frankly the media frenzy is driving me up the wall. I have been increasingly alienated from the Hillary camp by stuff like that that obnoxious Gloria Steinem article on the Times that basically said that if you're a woman you should ally with Clinton and then played "who's oppressed the most."

*facepalm*

Not my feminism, thankyouverymuch
alcyone

PS I'm greatly enjoying the back and forth (and actually whenever you disclaim Paul, I'm like NOOOOO, please keep talking ).

All joking aside, even if I tend not to agree with conservatives, I do like knowing what other people think and why on a one to one basis. So thanks, Roger.

No, the money for Obama's house wasn't returned, although the Obama committee did refund $40, 000 of Rezko's cash donation to the campaign.

Even the editor of Tine has admitted (on The VIew) that his magazine was much tougher on Hillary from the outset of the campaign. (although he didn't seem to regret this much ) And what about the t-shirts worn by Obama's people , directed at Hillary: Cry Baby? Or the shout out in the McCain campign: How do we stop the bitch? or.... so many of these examples.

but more importantly, where is the serious covergae of the issues in the campaign?

It's okay, Carol. If it'll make you feel better, I can assure you that liking McCain by no means makes you a Republican. That's part of his whole schtick -- "even non Republicans will vote for me!" Trust me, there are a lot of Republicans who cannot stand John McCain.

I agree, the media's being exceptionally shallow on this race, especially re: Clinton v. Obama. I suspect part of it is that their programs aren't all that different. So it's easier to focus on things that should be irrelevant. "Oh, look, a woman! and a black! aren't we wonderful that we're so progressive."

It ticks me off when Hilary plays the "poor little me; those big bad men are being mean to a girl!" act. I like her a lot better when she's cranky. At least that points to her strength of character, instead of weakness. Come *on*. You can't face Tim Russert, how on earth are you going to do anything about Iran... or much of anything, really. Speaking of Kathleen Blanco...

Paul, you are correct. Saddam wasn't a threat to us at that point. The idea was to stop him from ever *becoming* a threat. He probably didn't have a thing to do with 9/11, either. So what? We acted against him *before* he had a chance to act against us or anyone else (remember Kuwait?). That kind of pre-emption is somewhat speculative, I grant you. The signs seemed clear that Saddam would love to be a danger to the region and hence the world. Now, since we went in, there is no way to know what he might or might not have done by now. We can argue that. But I don't think anyone really misses him much.

And really, if you found a rattlesnake was living in your backyard, would you leave him there on the grounds that he hadn't killed your children *yet*? Why, he might not *ever* kill them. I mean, sure, the neighbors' kid died last year, but that's different. Probably it was some other snake, anyway.

Or would you think it was a lot smarter to get rid of the rattlesnake?

(Yeah, yeah, the analogy's not perfect. And actually, I can imagine some people agreeing with the first approach, so for them it won't make the point at all. But that's what the thinking was.)

Saddam's Iraq was a rattlesnake. Me, I'm glad the rattlesnake's not out there anymore.

Could we have done it better? Yeah, probably. But I'm a bit cynical about that -- it's the government, of *course* they screw up. Which is another reason I don't want them taking over my health care, come to think of it...

PJ

Come on, Paul, this is fun! I love political debates. I could do it for hours on end. I've enjoyed the give and take.

I will have to correct you here since a few of your facts are off. The reason why I said her husband outed her was because of his eagerness for publicity. Everybody in town knew she was the one who had sent him to Niger. And everybody knew Valerie Wilson, which is how she introduced herself. She and her husband were very big on the Washington party circuit so just about everyone in the press knew her. Andrea Kramer of NBC, plus a few other reporters came out and said they knew her and what she did. She was an analyst in the WMD division, not a spy. She was well known long before any of this Niger stuff came about, so there wasn't any necessity in outing her. She'd already been outed.

She had been classified as covert many years ago at the lightest classification, meaning she was no James Bond. She went abroad a few times, but after a few years, she and Joe wanted to come home and stay home. Six years before the whole incident, they came back to the US to stay. The source of this? Joe Wilson's book. The CIA basically said that she wasn't really covert but they hadn't bothered to change her classification, but she was never planning to go back into the field. The law that was supposedly broken was co-authored by Victoria Toensing, who said that the law didn't apply to Plame. That's why Fitzgerald indicted no one on the charge of outing a covert agent. It was not a very merry Fitzmas for liberal Democrats.

As for the whole Niger incident, Wilson's report alleged that he was sent to Niger by the Vice President to see if there was any truth to the reports that Saddam was looking to buy yellow cake uranium. When this report came back in the negative, Cheney was informed about it and started some inquiries about who this Joe Wilson was and why he was saying he spoke for the Vice President when in fact nobody in the VP's office had ever heard of him. Even worse, Joe Wilson was a major critic of the administration and was no supporter of the Iraq policy, so people wondered why this person, of all people, was given that job. Paul, Valerie did not go to Niger. Joe did.

That's when the VP's office discovered that Joe Wilson was sent by his wife. When confronted with it, Wilson lied, denying his wife had anything to do with it. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence then uncovered emails from Valerie Plame to her boss recommending her husband for the boondoggle. All Wilson did was have two lunches with a Niger official and took his word that Saddam wasn't looking for yellow cake. Considering Niger has only one major export, uranium, just what else would Saddam's agents be looking to buy?

Wilson's report was immediately round-filed by the CIA as much evidence came about that he was dead wrong. The Butler Commission in the UK and the Senate Select Committee both determined that the 16 words about Niger spoken by President Bush in his State of the Union address were "well founded."

That his wife didn't send him was only one of Joe Wilson's lies. He also claimed that he debunked some forged letters alleging that Saddam was looking for yellow cake and that was one of the reasons why he concluded that Saddam was not trying to obtain uranium. The problem for Wilson was that those forged letters were not in American possession until ten months AFTER his report was filed. He could not possibly have seen them.

Once his lies were exposed, John Kerry's campaign dropped him like a hot potato. Once an advisor of the Kerry campaign and prominently featured on Kerry's website, his name quickly disappeared from the website and he was publicly disavowed by Kerry, himself. So much for Wilson's veracity.

Bob Novak started nosing around, trying to figure out who was whom and who told whom. Novak's main source was NOT Karl Rove, but Richard Armitage, Colin's Powell's deputy at the State Department and a harsh critic of the administration's Iraq policy. Armitage was no friend of Bush.

Novak asked Rove in a wide-ranging interview about many topics about Plame. Rove's response was that he'd heard that too. So he was basically acknowledging that he'd heard what Novak had already known. Rove didn't even know her name. Rove's legal problems were due to his testimony that he claimed that it was Tim Russert of NBC who had told him about Plame. Russert denied it. As it turned out, Rove just had a bad memory. Bob Woodward of the famed Woodward and Bernstein was the source who had told Rove, not Russert. Since guys like Rove do dozens of interviews a week, it shouldn't be so surprising he couldn't remember precisely who told him. In any case, Rove was told by a reporter, not the other way around. So Rove was completely innocent and was not indicted for perjury since Fitzgerald essentially took Woodward's word that he was Rove's source and that Rove simply didn't remember correctly. So if Rove was such a bad guy, why is it he had to find out about Plame from the press?

So no, the administration was not out to destroy a covert agent. They were trying to figure out who was trying to sabotage their Iraq policy by claiming the Vice President was responsible for Joe Wilson's trip. it was Wilson's own big mouth and his huge desire for publicity that made this even a story. As I said, covert agents don't do photo layouts for Vanity Fair.

Wasn't I the one complaining about how bad the government was at spending? And wasn't I the one who used that as an example of why government shouldn't be trusted to run health care? Wars are expensive. First you complain about no body armor because it was too expensive, now you complain about them spending too much on the war. Which one is it?

Also when it comes to fighting wars, do you really want bean counters making war decisions? No, wars are not fought on the cheap. It costs billions.

I am not a McCain fan and never said I was. This is the guy who tried to beat Bush in 2000 by relying on Democrats and Independents in the open primary states like Michigan.

We agree. Anytime a liberal like Ted Kennedy gets his hands on education, like with his principal authoring of the NCLB Act, education is bound to suffer. That's why so many Republicans voted against it. Unfortunately, the Texas portions of the bill that would have made a difference were stripped out by Kennedy. The federal government has no business being in education. It's best left to the states and localities.

We could give it back to Saddam's family if you think democracy's a bad idea for them. Seriously, though, we didn't tell them how to run their government. It was their decision to go for a Parliamentary system where we urged a strong executive like ours, mostly because a strong executive to them meant Saddam and they wanted nothing to do with Saddam. We made many recommendations that they simply ignored. The government of Iraq is their own. We didn't fashion it for them They were the ones who wrote the constitution and voted on it and risked death threats from al Qaeda. The people voted overwhelmingly to ratify it. The people spoke, and without a gun held to their heads, unlike when Saddam always received 100% of the votes when he held an election.