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Comment by euroclydon | Hacker News Reader

Its actually surprising that US fell for it.

Yep. Bush would have been a hero if he hadn't fallen for it. Compassionate conservatism, expressed in Medicare Part C. Tax cuts combined with modest military expansion would have held the deficit in check.

But remember the pundits saying, "this one calles for boots on the ground"? Even Jon Stewart showed a clip of Bush or someone making a compassionate statement, and commented "you're killing my blood lust." And he meant it!

I don't guess Clinton wouldn't have fallen for it -- he didn't during all of OBL's significant attacks in the 90's.

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What the hell are you talking about man? They bombed the crap out of Iraq during Clinton's term.. 93, 96, 98 And almost continuously from 99-01.

Richard Clark (who had worked for Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton) had the right idea of small targeted attacks rather than a widespread military invasion. He even warned the WH about al Qaeda months prior to 9/11, but he got demoted and vilified under Bush's administration and supporters.

I think the invasion of Afghanistan was inevitable, but not Iraq. Afghanistan was a big mistake (even Rthe USSR, with a land border, couldnt handle it) but Iraq was worse and bizarre.

>I think the invasion of Afghanistan was inevitable

Inevitable as in "in response to 9/11"? I don't think so, it was planned months, if not years before September 2001. [edit, corrected typo to 2001]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/afgh-n20.shtml

US planned war in Afghanistan long before September 11 By Patrick Martin 20 November 2001

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1550366.stm

Tuesday, 18 September, 2001, 11:27 GMT 12:27 UK US 'planned attack on Taleban'

A former Pakistani diplomat has told the BBC that the US was planning military action against Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban even before last week's attacks.

Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26410.htm U.S. government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and recently posted on the website of the George Washington University National Security Archive shed some additional light on talks with the Taliban prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, including with regard to the repeated Taliban offers to hand over Osama bin Laden, and the role of Pakistan before and after the attacks.[1] ... It is already known that the U.S. had demanded in secret discussions with the Taliban that bin Laden be handed over for more than three years prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The talks continued “until just days before” the attacks, according to a Washington Post report the month following the attacks. But a compromise solution such as the above that would offer the Taliban a face-saving way out of the impasse was never seriously considered. Instead, “State Department officials refused to soften their demand that bin Laden face trial in the U.S. justice system.”

http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80482&page=...

U.S. Rejects New Taliban Offer Oct. 1 [2001]

The United States today rejected yet another offer by Afghanistan's ruling Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden for trial in a third country if the U.S. presents evidence against bin Laden and stops air attacks. ... "There's no need to discuss it," Bush said. "We know he's guilty. Just turn him over. … There's nothing to negotiate about. They're harboring a terrorist and they need to turn him over."

Couldn't Osama claim that he knew there were criminals in those buildings that he attacked and that there is nothing to negotiate about?

This is largely hindsight bias--because we did go to war with Afghanistan in response to 9/11, you look back at planning prior to 9/11 and perceive it as proof that war with Afghanistan was inevitable.

Prior planning is not proof of future action. For instance the U.S. spent decades planning in great detail how to go to war with the USSR, but we never did it.

Put another way--every war-like situation the U.S. has ever entered was pre-planned to some extent. But we also planned for a great many wars that never happened.

I'm not arguing justice or decency. Simply that in response to the 9/11 attack the US was going to do something, and Afghanistan was that something. I think in pure pragmatic terms it was a stupid something.

From his own point of view. Osama had declared war on the US and picked what he considered to be strategic targets. In purely military terms I think he picked his targets very well.

Clinton would have done the same. 9/11 was much different than the attacks in the 90s.

Clinton would have attacked Afghanistan, sure. But would he have stayed in Afghanistan and/or attacked Iraq? Those are the two items that have cost dearly.

There were two big reasons reasons the US went into Iraq. One was Saddam Hussein and WMD. Everyone believed that he had them, and it's a matter of fact that he had used them in the past. Though they were never found, it's not illogical to believe that he was simply able to move them elsewhere or destroy them before they were discovered. And taking out his regime would remove a large destabilizing factor in that part of the world (in theory anyway).

The other reason was to create a local distraction. To keep "the terrorists" occupied, their violence and attacks confined to that part of the world, and not in the US. In that sense, they "fell for it" too.

If the public need for "revenge" had been satisfied by attacking Afghanistan, I think Clinton would have stopped there. He was not a risk-taker, and he was totally driven by polls.

This was the narrative toed by the Bush administration and Fox News, but many Americans and the international community by and large did not agree.

I think that's largely a case of selective memory. People often have a rosy memory of what they believed.

Bush said he had clear evidence of WMD's in Iraq, that he showed this to Blair and Blair confirmed. I think it would be fair to say that most people would agree that Hussein wanted WMD's.

So I think it's fair to think that most Americans and most in the international community believed that Iraq had WMD's. The argument was mostly over whether an invasion was an appropriate response.

It was only "crazies" who believed both that Bush lied and that he was able to either snooker Blair or convince him to join in the lie.

Sometimes the crazies are right, though.

I think the selective memory comes in when people claim that there weren't a huge number of people that thought and proclaimed loudly that the evidence was bunk at the time. It's the same type of historical retcon that happens when people say that no one could see the housing bubble coming, and that everyone during slavery/segregation thought black people were inferior, so no one should be judged terrible for it because they were "of their time."

The television was always sure that the war was necessary, that Powell's speech was coherent, and that the government always knows best because it has access to secret sources that it can't reveal and our best interests at heart. Of course, the television is also in the arms business.

Um... I was on anti Iraq war demos when I was 18, because it was obvious to me Saddam Hussein had no WMDs. And I was _not_ alone in this assumption:

"In London, at least 750,000 people demonstrated in what police called the city's largest demonstration ever." Source: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Protest-Iraq-War16feb03...

But I bet that most of those 750,000 believed that Iraq had WMD's of some sort, perhaps very limited in capability.

But they also believed that a war was an inappropriate response to the existence of those WMD's.

No, it was more or less assumed to be bollocks. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Blix#Iraq_disarmament_.27... for an idea of what we were hearing).

*Correction: and those who didn't assume it to be bollocks generally had not made up their mind one way or the other, and wanted the weapons inspectors to be given time to find out. When they were given the bum's rush out of Iraq by the Coalition, that persuaded many of the fence-sitters the skeptics were right.

> So I think it's fair to think that [...] most in the international community believed that Iraq had WMD's.

Hm... "A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It's a proof. A proof is a proof, and when you have a good proof, it's because it's proven." - Jean Chretien, discussing what type of proof Canadian government wanted before assisting in a war with Iraq (which it ultimately did not)

I remember recently seeing polls that showed a large group of Americans still think (were brainwashed into thinking) that Iraq was largely responsible for 9-11.

Of course a (different?) large majority also believe the Earth is only around 10K years old.

So maybe selective/programmed memory is a more accurate term?

"...Everyone believed that he had them, and it's a matter of fact that he had used them in the past." - I am European and I clearly remember the feeling that the US openly manipulated the rest of the world. But it did not work, at least in Western EU, excluding UK.

Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq. There are lot of sources for some of the quotes that I will take here:

* "Four countries participated with troops during the initial invasion phase, which lasted from 19 March to 9 April 2003. These were the United States (148,000), United Kingdom (45,000), Australia (2,000), and Poland (194)." - So out of all the EU countries only UK and Poland went to the war.

* "The invasion of Iraq was strongly opposed by some long-standing U.S. allies, including the governments of France, Germany, New Zealand, and Canada."

* "On 15 February 2003, a month before the invasion, there were worldwide protests against the Iraq war, including a rally of three million people in Rome, which is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest ever anti-war rally."

Saddam was planning to sell his oil only in euros and bush and company could not stand for that.

Really? Are you talking about the Clinton whose sanctions killed half million Iraqi infants from 1991 to 1996 alone and his the secretary of state though the cost of sanctions was worth it? The Clinton who in 1998 knowingly bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan that supplied cheap medicines to millions of Africans?

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1084/

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.

--60 Minutes (5/12/96)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/chatterbox/2...

But a British engineer, Thomas Carnaffin, who worked as a technical manager during the plant's construction between 1992 and 1996, emerged to tell reporters there was nothing secret or heavily guarded about the plant at all, and that he never saw any evidence of the production of an ingredient needed for nerve gas. The group that monitors compliance with the treaty banning chemical weapons announced that Empta did have legitimate commercial purposes in the manufacture of fungicides and antibiotics. The owner of the Shifa factory gave interviews in which he emphatically denied that the plant was used for anything other than pharmaceuticals, and there was never persuasive evidence to contradict his assertion. At the same time, members of the administration retreated from claims they made earlier that Osama bin Laden had what [Defense Secretary William] Cohen called "a financial interest in contributing to this particular facility." It turned out that no direct financial relationship between bin Laden and the plant could be established.

Nobody thinks of Clinton as committing us to the kind of war which drains our resources. Everyone thinks of Bush that way. Remember Bosnia? That was Clinton style.

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