"The regime has longstanding and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are Al Qaida terrorists inside Iraq."

- George W. Bush (War Criminal) Delivers Weekly Radio Address, White House (9/28/2002)

full interview here: http://www.videosift.com/video/Bush-Interview-ABC-News-Shoe-insult-Iraq-Al-Qaeda

Tags for this video have been changed from 'bush, iraq, al qaeda, sadam' to 'bush, iraq, al qaeda, saddam, so what' - edited by BicycleRepairMan

You guys haven't been paying attention: when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.

Um, hate to say it but that is the most articulate I've seen Bush since 9/11. He actually is clear in this interview about going into Iraq to remove Saddam, and staying because Al-Qaeda declared they would make it a battle ground(post-invasion). It's a sound enough argument, too bad the entire lead up to the invasion was full of statements that contradicted or ignored all of this.

^ if we weren't there, the Iraqi's would kill Al Qaeda quicker than you can say Al Sadr. But, with the amount of *lies that have been propogated in this *waronterror, it's easy to be confused about *worldaffairs.

Adding video to channels (Lies) - requested by volumptuous.

ok - sifty doesn't add to channels of edited posts, so here's my *waronterror and *worldaffairs tags once again.

Adding video to channels (Waronterror, Worldaffairs) - requested by volumptuous.

>> ^bcglorf:
...too bad the entire lead up to the invasion was full of statements that contradicted or ignored all of this.


Which is a very sanitized way of saying that he lied to the American public and tricked them into starting a war that they didn't need, couldn't afford, and can never win.

>> ^rougy:
>> ^bcglorf:
...too bad the entire lead up to the invasion was full of statements that contradicted or ignored all of this.

Which is a very sanitized way of saying that he lied to the American public and tricked them into starting a war that they didn't need, couldn't afford, and can never win.


It doesn't need to be sanitized, and your right and I'd even agree. I'd also still say in spite of all that, Saddam was a great enough evil the world is better off as a whole for the war having taken place. I don't care if it made America any better/worse off, I'm just glad the world has one less sadistic, genocidal dictator terrorizing those under him. As bad as Iraq looks today, it is an improvement on the concentration camps and mass graves that characterized the Saddam-era.

>> ^volumptuous:
^ if we weren't there, the Iraqi's would kill Al Qaeda quicker than you can say Al Sadr. But, with the amount of lies that have been propogated in this waronterror, it's easy to be confused about worldaffairs.


Actually, no. If the British and Americans weren't there, Saddam(not Iraqi's) would be killing Kurds and Shia quicker than you can say genocide. Yeah, he might off some Al-Qaeda chaps at the same time too, but I consider the current situation the lesser evil myself. Go read about Saddam's Al-Anfal campaign before pining for the days that Saddam 'kept the peace'.

>> ^bcglorf:
Actually, no. If the British and Americans weren't there, Saddam(not Iraqi's) would be killing Kurds and Shia quicker than you can say genocide. Yeah, he might off some Al-Qaeda chaps at the same time too, but I consider the current situation the lesser evil myself. Go read about Saddam's Al-Anfal campaign before pining for the days that Saddam 'kept the peace'.


Lesser evil my ass considering the death toll of the iraqi war is higher than the deaths caused by Saddam during his entire reign.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

Bush has the blood of a million Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers on his hands. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Don't condone and make excuses for what he has done.

>> ^mentality:
>> ^bcglorf:
Actually, no. If the British and Americans weren't there, Saddam(not Iraqi's) would be killing Kurds and Shia quicker than you can say genocide. Yeah, he might off some Al-Qaeda chaps at the same time too, but I consider the current situation the lesser evil myself. Go read about Saddam's Al-Anfal campaign before pining for the days that Saddam 'kept the peace'.

Lesser evil my ass considering the death toll of the iraqi war is higher than the deaths caused by Saddam during his entire reign.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Bush has the blood of a million Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers on his hands. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Don't condone and make excuses for what he has done.


I think Bush,Cheney and Rumsfeld should all be impeached and tried for war crimes for ever defending the use of torture. I feel no need nor inclination to defend them. I do feel a strong need to condemn Saddam and the even more horrific evil he inflicted on the world. If you want to compare body counts for Saddam you should include the Iran/Iraq war, Kuwait invasion, and an unknown number of internally executed Iraqi's buried in mass graves that are still being dug up. You're blissful ignorance of that count wouldn't be offensive if you weren't so keen to stay informed about the costs of ending that nightmare.

Go look at Saddam's Al-Anfal Campaign before talking about how much 'worse' Iraq is today. You might be surprised just how nice the today's horror show in Iraq is compared to yesterday's. Be warned though, it's hard to watch the stories about something that makes 100,000 casualties the lesser evil.

>> ^bcglorf:

Actually, no. If the British and Americans weren't there, Saddam(not Iraqi's) would be killing Kurds and Shia quicker than you can say genocide. Yeah, he might off some Al-Qaeda chaps at the same time too, but I consider the current situation the lesser evil myself. Go read about Saddam's Al-Anfal campaign before pining for the days that Saddam 'kept the peace'.


OK, let's go back even further.

If BP and Winston Churchill didn't go there, there would be noone to overthrow, and Kurdistan would still exist, probably as a very very wealthy country. Sadaam would never have been in power, because there would have been no Iraq for him to stage his coup.

But if we're talking about today, then why not ask what the Iraqis want? Especially the women who now live under strict sharia law, or the children who have no clean water and no schools, or.... we can just go on and on and on about this.

It's bullshit saying that the world is better off without Saddam.

Total fucking bullshit.

He was a paper tiger by the time we invaded, and his crimes pale in comparison to what Bushco has done to that country.

You're an apologist.

You will always sugar coat our invasion to suit your contrived conclusions.

>> ^rougy:
It's bullshit saying that the world is better off without Saddam.
Total fucking bullshit.
He was a paper tiger by the time we invaded, and his crimes pale in comparison to what Bushco has done to that country.
You're an apologist.
You will always sugar coat our invasion to suit your contrived conclusions.


Then I must be ignorant of the crimes that Bushco has done that make the following crimes described by Human Rights Watch pale by comparison:

With only minor variations ... the standard pattern for sorting new arrivals [at Topzawa was as follows]. Men and women were segregated on the spot as soon as the trucks had rolled to a halt in the base's large central courtyard or parade ground. The process was brutal ... A little later, the men were further divided by age, small children were kept with their mothers, and the elderly and infirm were shunted off to separate quarters. Men and teenage boys considered to be of an age to use a weapon were herded together. Roughly speaking, this meant males of between fifteen and fifty, but there was no rigorous check of identity documents, and strict chronological age seems to have been less of a criterion than size and appearance. A strapping twelve-year-old might fail to make the cut; an undersized sixteen-year-old might be told to remain with his female relatives. ... It was then time to process the younger males. They were split into smaller groups. ... Once duly registered, the prisoners were hustled into large rooms, or halls, each filled with the residents of a single area. ... Although the conditions at Topzawa were appalling for everyone, the most grossly overcrowded quarter seem to have been those where the male detainees were held. ... For the men, beatings were routine.

After a few days in the camp, without a single known exception, the men were sent out and executed:

Some groups of prisoners were lined up, shot from the front, and dragged into predug mass graves; others were made to lie down in pairs, sardine-style, next to mounds of fresh corpses, before being killed; still others were tied together, made to stand on the lip of the pit, and shot in the back so that they would fall forward into it -- a method that was presumably more efficient from the point of view of the killers. Bulldozers then pushed earth or sand loosely over the heaps of corpses. Some of the grave sites contained dozens of separate pits and obviously contained the bodies of millions of victims. (Iraq's Crime of Genocide, p. 12.)


If you'd like to enlighten me on what exactly it is Bush has done since the invasion that matches that please tell me, I'd hate to be defending something that horrific.

^the invasion itself is what he did, forcing far too many civilians to move, or die, or live without water for days, or be accidentally bombed and killed, or be recruited into terrorist forces that you would call patriots if the situation were reversed.

i know bulldozering graves is a sick image, but just try to imagine a starving baby that had plenty of food before the invasion, and think about how you would assess world politics if you were the father.

>> ^MINK:
^the invasion itself is what he did, forcing far too many civilians to move, or die, or live without water for days, or be accidentally bombed and killed, or be recruited into terrorist forces that you would call patriots if the situation were reversed.
i know bulldozering graves is a sick image, but just try to imagine a starving baby that had plenty of food before the invasion, and think about how you would assess world politics if you were the father.


That doesn't overwhelm the starving babies from before the invasion that died of malnutrition in their mothers arms in Saddam's concentration camps. Their father's never had a chance to re-assess world politics though as they were executed before they had the chance.

I'm sorry if that sounds calloused about the current plight of Iraqi's, it honestly isn't meant to be. The conditions there ARE still horrific, and for many are worse than before the invasion. But no longer is it because their own leadership is actively trying to starve or kill them.

It is the terrible sectarian violence and hatred causing the grief, and blaming that on the invasion is damagingly naive. The decades of brutal repression and encouragement of sectarian hatred that Saddam imposed did infinitely more to create the hate that is the problem in Iraq today. It's not as though Shia and Sunni factions were dancing in the streets holding hands before the invasion turned them into mortal enemies. America's greatest guilt in all of it is not the invasion, but the decades of support given to Saddam prior to the 90's.

Saddam never had concentration camps. I have no idea where exactly you pulled that one from. Yes he was an oppressive dictatorial leader. But the violence begets violence, the violence inflicted in removing him has created not one Saddam but a thousand, from the Sadr loyalists, the 1920 brigades, the Bader brigades, the AQI, the sunni killers, the shia killers and countless other movements that inflict terror in Iraq today.

Stability is coming I agree, but I do not agree that such a unilateral course of action should have been taken in removing Saddam, it wasn't like this was well planned at any stage, there was no concrete coalition plan to restore order in Iraq, the CPA dismantled the Iraqi army that was willing to impose a semblance of order and let loose a chaotic environment pushing more military trained men into insurgent forces. The US started planning a reconstruction of Germany and Japan plans nearly 5 years before the end of world war 2, plans to restore Iraq were ignored and actively thrown out in favor of appointing naive young republican bleeding hearts, who sat behind in the Green zone without ever connecting with the Iraqi people they were to govern.

I understand what you are trying to say, and I would have agreed with you had this war been carried out with international support, with a realistic time table instead of pushing invasion as soon as possible (the war started in less then 3 months), with a clear and defined goals for the reconstruction effort, and so much more.

But it wasn't. It was a cowboy shotgun adventure paid in the lives of both US, coalition and Iraqi lives.

Saddam never had concentration camps. I have no idea where exactly you pulled that one from.


I got the idea from many sources, two good sources are Human Rights Watch and this documentary I linked earlier that nobody can be bothered to watch. Both have countless first hand sources and accounts of the concentration camps from both survivors and captured official Iraqi government documents. The mass graves existed too, and they are further proven because they still exist and are being dug up where they are able to be found, many are over 2 decades old though in the middle of a lot of desert.


I understand what you are trying to say, and I would have agreed with you had this war been carried out with international support, with a realistic time table instead of pushing invasion as soon as possible

And I would agree with you about waiting for international support, but I dare say I don't believe it was EVER coming. After Saddam's genocide of the Kurds the world couldn't agree on removing him(even the Americans<spits>), even after he invaded Kuwait the world could only manage enough agreement to remove him from Kuwait. I'm sorry, but I am convinced waiting for international agreement absolutely meant never doing anything.

Ah the Kurds, I never knew that concentration camps existed, it seems kinda of odd to me. I had thought that intervention with Kurdish affairs ended with Operation Provide Comfort.

Even then I would not agree to the grounds for war in 2003. I would have agreed to them in 1991, when there was a strong international coalition and strong legal and moral pretense with the Iraqi use of chemical and biological weapons against its own people, Iran and the Kurds, as well as the invasion of Kuwait. But its hard to say something like that, knowing that the US bankrolled the Iran Iraq war, that it propped up Saddam Hussein after the CIA blowback from installing the Shah in Iran and the subsequent Islamic revolution. It's hard to support the American effort knowing that their meddling in middle eastern affairs created the very problems they seem to address years later, the aptly called "hes a son of a bitch but our son of a bitch" foreign policy of propping up dictators and despotic rulers, this is not even starting to talk about the ISI, Afghanistan the Mujahedeen and the formation of Al Qaeda.

Personally I think the largest example of international do nothingness is the 800,000 killed during the Rwandan genocide. Somehow Iraq is okay to invade to liberate, Bosnia is okay to invade to liberate but not Darfur and not Rwanda. The UN simply sat and watched a country collapse into internal genocide.

>> ^Farhad2000:
Personally I don't think Iraq war was ever conducted for any altruistic reasons because if it was it means one life is valued more then the other, I think the largest example of international do nothingness is the 800,000 killed during the Rwandan genocide.
Somehow Iraq is okay to invade to liberate, Bosnia is okay to invade to liberate but not Darfur and not Rwanda.


I agree 100% with this. I fought against the Iraq war for this and many other reasons. At one point as my other reasons got knocked off I fought it for SOLELY this reason. If the American's couldn't be bothered to save nearly a million Rwandans, then why should anyone take humanitarian issues as a reason America would intervene in Iraq.

Then I remembered my entire argument was based on wishing America HAD gone into Rwanda. I can hardly say that I don't want America in Iraq if I believe removing Saddam will serve a great humanitarian cause, just like the one in Rwanda they(and the entire rest of the world) failed to serve.

I only care about America's motive in removing Saddam when it starts to adversely affect Iraqi's. The overall invasion and removal of Saddam ended a reign of terror the likes of which the world rarely sees and unimaginably worse than most realize.

america doesn't go and defend democracy in other places. why iraq?

america funded and supported saddam's evil, but now claims to be the shining white knight. you're fine with that line of argument?

Tags for this video have been changed from 'bush, iraq, al qaeda, saddam, so what' to 'bush, iraq, al qaeda, saddam, so what, dickwad' - edited by winkler1

>> ^bcglorf:The overall invasion and removal of Saddam ended a reign of terror the likes of which the world rarely sees and unimaginably worse than most realize.


But it did not end a reign of terror. We know Saddam was terrible, but they are now just terrified of someone/something else.
The invasion has gotten rid of one evil and in its replacement is another evil.

Regardless of which one would win in a game of the "Battle of Evilness", both situations are pretty bad before and after Saddam.

Like previously mentioned, if there had been more planning and less lies mixed in with so many innocent deaths, we would all look at this endless undeclared war differently.

From what I had picked up, people who were previously living in OK standards are now in absolutely hell with families broken up and poor.

Iraq torture 'worse after Saddam'
Iraq: Worse for Christians Now Than under Saddam Hussein
Report: Blix Says Iraq Worse Off After War
Was Iraq Better Off Under Saddam?
"we started to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and we walked toward it. But when the war happened, that light was the American train coming the other way that ran us over."

...

>> ^MINK:
america doesn't go and defend democracy in other places. why iraq?
america funded and supported saddam's evil, but now claims to be the shining white knight. you're fine with that line of argument?


Nope, America WAS responsible for funding Saddam's evil. I'm more in the you broke it you bought it camp, it's about time they where on the right side of things in Iraq.

>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^MINK:
america doesn't go and defend democracy in other places. why iraq?
america funded and supported saddam's evil, but now claims to be the shining white knight. you're fine with that line of argument?

Nope, America WAS responsible for funding Saddam's evil. I'm more in the you broke it you bought it camp, it's about time they where on the right side of things in Iraq.


I just can't agree with you there. Because if it wasn't the US we wouldn't be having this line of debate, say Russia attacked Afghanistan in 2001 after having fought with it in 1970s claiming to remove the oppressive Taliban government.

Everyone would be against that.

But because its the US, its somehow okay, because they claim to be there to bring democracy, but they are not, if they were hoping to instigate democracy they would stop funding the oppressive regimes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, stop bankrolling Israel even when it commits war crimes.

I just can't agree with that. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I just can't agree with you there. Because if it wasn't the US we wouldn't be having this line of debate, say Russia attacked Afghanistan in 2001 after having fought with it in 1970s claiming to remove the oppressive Taliban government.

Everyone would be against that.


That's a fair enough point. If you want to take the position that there is no difference to be expected between how America would try and rebuild Afghanistan and how Russia would do the same, you are absolutely right.

Personally, I'm convinced that NATO will take the concerns of the Afghan people a lot more seriously than the Russians would. I don't think that's an entirely ridiculous notion either, it seems pretty fair to say that human rights are valued greater by the American and British governments than by Russia, even if only because their citizens demand it. I don't think that refusing to take any sides because everyone's hands are dirty is a great approach anymore.

An American administration that allowed the concentration camps and mass graves that Saddam used to be built would be run out of office by the American public. Regardless of America's many crimes, they stop short of Saddam's and I'm glad to trade one for the other even while I try and push for more from America as well.

>> ^MINK:
america doesn't go and defend democracy in other places. why iraq?
america funded and supported saddam's evil, but now claims to be the shining white knight. you're fine with that line of argument?


I think I've repeatedly denied any impression of America as a white Knight. I've stated repeatedly just how horrific Saddam's rule was, and it should be clear how I feel about any support lent to such atrocities, and doubly so for my American neighbor's complicit role in it.

Here though, is the leap of logic that is oddly easy to miss, and I did for several years:

It is ENTIRELY consistent then to support ending(the opposite of aiding) the atrocities that Saddam had NEVER abandoned unless made to do so by force.

but dude, you're still talking like Mission is Accomplished.

and you didn't respond to the first part, about why iraq?

*dupeof=http://www.videosift.com/video/Bush-Interview-ABC-News-Shoe-insult-Iraq-Al-Qaeda

Invocations (dupeof=http://www.videosift.com/video/bush-interview-abc-news-shoe-insult-iraq-al-qaeda) cannot be called by gwiz665 because gwiz665 is not privileged - sorry.

*discuss

Is very clearly a dupe of the other one, posted after and a sub-clip of the other one. Dammit, need diamond power.

This video is being sent to Sift Talk for discussion - discuss requested by gwiz665.

>> ^MINK:
but dude, you're still talking like Mission is Accomplished.
and you didn't respond to the first part, about why iraq?


I've responded to 'why Iraq' repeatedly. It's because of just how truly horrific Saddam's rule was. Genocide is bad, m'kay?

Why not Rwanda, the Congo Darfur, Sudan, Somalia and on and on? Well, I'd love to see them helping any or all of those regions as well, but if America can only be bothered to remove Saddam I'll take it too.

From America's perspective it's own benefit no doubt plays a major, and maybe even sole, role in it's reasons for choosing Iraq over the many other disaster zones in the world. I can't know, and only care in so much as it affects Iraqi's. I'm still glad that Saddam is gone and the Kurdish people can now live their lives without living as fugitives with a permanent death sentence over their and their children's heads.

You wouldn't argue America has no business in Rwanda because they weren't helping Sudan, would you? So I'll turn your question around in the context of defending people from known genocidal government rule, 'What's so special about Iraq'?

For extra credit, why isn't the entire remainder of this violence forsaken planet doing anything about Rwanda, the Congo, Darfur, Sudan, Somalia and on and on? Do we really want to just watch as genocide occurs because we dare not intervene?

*return pending outcome of http://www.videosift.com/talk/Duplicate-Ruling

Returning this video from Sift Talk - return requested by gwiz665.