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Originally Posted by Doc

I don't love Bush. I don't hate him either. He has shown he can be a poor public speaker and he doesn't always know his part.

Thats all you can find fault in? His public speaking abilities? If that were his biggest problem, I'd be a bigger fan of his than you are.

Do you not agree that he is advised on what to do and say and act? Why blame only Bush? You can lay blame all you want but instead of generalizations why don't people try to dig a little deeper. Get to the root cause.

I agree 100%, which is why I hold him responsible. He's the president, the boss of all of those people. Its his ship to run into the ground, which he has done nicely. The root cause is - ta da - he's a fuckwit who does a shit job of being president.

I am in the military yes. I think that because I am in this culture i see thing differently. (not always for the better) but I do think that I see things that other Americans do not. My opinion is no more important or right than anyone elses. It is just different.

Attaboy, now you're getting it. Thats a big departure from some things you have said on this site before.

False Pretenses? The ONLY reason we went into Iraq was because we thought Saddam had WMD's? I firmly believe we went in to Iraq to topple a dictator.

You can firmly believe whatever you want, that just isn't true. Take a walk through the archives of any news source you like, the Bush administration didn't start crowing about what a bad guy Saddam was until it was apparent they weren't finding weapons. **Like it or dont, the American public and Congress were led to war on the pretenses that Saddam had weapons he would give to terrorists and cause another 9/11.** Everything else was excuses after the fact, a Bush Administration trademark.

Maybe if they just would have told us all that to begin with... oh but wait, the pansie asses wouldn't have went for it. "continue the sanctions" "let the UN handle it" Blah, blah, blah.

Pansies maybe, but I'd argue that it is possible and in fact likely that less people would have been killed, there would have been less cost to the American public, and considerably less credibility lost in the world.

Again - no one has ever argued that Saddam was a good guy. But he was not unlike several and many other leaders of countries in the world. It is apparent that he was singled out for a reason.

Report? What report? Oh you mean the news article?

The news article was describing a report, smartass.

"Named in the study along with Bush were top officials of the administration during the period studied: Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan."

Were they all backing u the liar or were they feeding him the intel they were getting?

Is it false if you believe it?

I'm not sure what you're getting at here, but if its that they all share the blame, then I'm with you 100%. But as I said above, they all worked under Bush, and manipulated facts to say what they wanted so they could achieve a goal - invading Iraq. Thats just plain crooked, and I personally would vote for an impeachment hearing at the very least.

One thing I've never understood about you Doc - its guys like you that I worried about getting killed over there. Call me a pansy, but I dont like people dying. I just dont think we ever had a good reason to bust into Iraq, all by ourselves, and lose our soldiers for that crappy country and its shithead leader. I think the Iraqis will greatly benefit from our actions, but that goal could have been achieved with a lot less blood if our leaders had acted differently. I know you're in the military, and ready to do whatever is necessary, but I hate hearing about guys getting whacked by fuckhead insurgents in a war that was started on such shaky, and clearly erroenous, evidence. And I'd like to see our Commander in Chief finally brought to task for that error in judgment.