Fo Sho wrote:No Safer? I doubt any person on Earth would argue with the fact that since Saddam Hussein is dead, not only are the people of Iraq safer but so is the rest of the world. And political gain?
Bush had nothing to gain politically by going into this war. You could argue wrongly that we would get economic gain from the oil there. But politcal gain makes no sense. And yes it is a lot of money, but you are thinking from your own individual small perspective. In the grand scheme of things, and also compared to any of the previous wars we've had, this amount, while definitely not small, is also just as definitely not huge.
Oh come on. Think about it a little...
No safer? This is the videotaped statement given by one of the suicide bombers (who, incidentally, came from Leeds, the city where I live, not Afghanistan or Iraq):
What you have witnessed now is only the beginning of a series of attacks which will intensify and continue to until you pull all your troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Would that attack have happened in the UK if we were not supporting American foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan? No. It wouldn't. Neither would the Madrid bombings in Spain. I'm not even gonna attempt to convey the loss of life in Iraq either, because others have done it as wel as I could.
Ok your second point... Bush (and America as a whole) has EVERYTHING to gain politically from this war. You'd be completely ignorant to deny there was at least the hope of political gain in Iraq, and you'd be hard pressed to find a political scholar or commentator who disagreed with me. Every war is for political gain to one degree or another.
You obviously aren't gonna believe the arguments, but at least accept that the reason we went to war (to get rid of WMDs) was a misconception, and has been certified so by official governmental reports of both the US and the UK (I've supplied those before in this thread so I'm not going to now).
We changed the motivation to war to be 'freeing the Iraqi people from a dictator' after we had invaded. Now lets assess this claim. Pakistan has a dictator AND nuclear weapons... Should we not invade them? Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe is perhaps the worst dictator after Stalin and Hitler, and has committed numerous genocidal atrocities, but we don't invade Zimbabwe... So why invade Iraq? If we trust our leaders when they say they wanted to get rid of a genocidal dictator then there must be some other factor that influenced their choice.
Those factors include:
Oil - The second or third largest reserves in the world at the moment, and just before the invasion Saddam changed the currency of oil exchange to the Euro, taking a lot of trading power away from the US. A US-backed regime in Iraq would move back to the dollar and supply lucrative contracts for US companies. These companies and oil barons are George Bush's prime supporters. They're his friends, his family and his source of electoral funds. I in no way think this is the SOLE cause of the Iraq war but I just want you to see political benefits Bush has gained from invasion, even if we do take the given reasons for war to be true.
American Hegemony - Israel is awfully isolated isn't it? Iran seems to be in the process of developing Nukes, and is gradually becoming a very major player in the Middle East. The US needs to do more than just keep pumping arms into Israel to ensure it has political influence in the Middle East. A US-backed democratic state would work wonders! Whatever state Iraq ends up in, there WILL be an extensive US military presence in the Middle East indefinitely. They can site missiles, build airbases... All in reach of Iran and Syria, the main aggressive states. Thats a political advantage. The US military will now have a significant force in the region to almost work as a 'tag-team' with the Israeli military should anything 'kick off', as it were.
Political gains make a lot of sense. And I'm discounting the attempted (but not achieved) political gains of coming out looking like a strong war President (and PM in the UK, which is one of the few gains we'd share over here), and also the fact that if a democratic state HAD been created with ease then it most likely would spread to other Middle Eastern countries thoruhg people saying 'hey, those guys over there have a McDonalds but we're not allowed one... dissent dissent dissent.'