Wherein you suggest 20/20 hindsight was required to assess that:

• Official pretexts turned out to be baseless.
• Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction..
• ..and wasn’t in league with terrorists, as the White House alleged.

I suggested otherwise; that many, many people were quite certain of those things at the time.

That’s it really. That was the gist of my exchange with you, and if you re-read my comment again @72, in context, you will probably see that. I apologise if I was unclear in what I was addressing, I thought the headline quote would take care of it.

When Bush went to war 90% backed him vocally how ‘relative’ is that? And then they (very slowly) backed off but why? American deaths (they rarely speak of the wounded strangely; are they too embarrassing those walking, living proof of the carnage?), American gas becoming too expensive, American deficit, American economy…

Oh and wait: there are those who aren’t backing up Bush/Cheney anymore because they find that the couple just ran the war wrong, while still estimating that this war was just. But, ‘relatively’ speaking, I still prefer these to those who resigned themselves to continue a war just because, since it was started, it would make the US look bad to pull off before some kind of (fake) resolution.

What happened to those Americans of the ’60s and ’70s who stopped an unjust war and who had balls, possibly drug induced, but still… which were apparently lost in the process of becoming yuppies. Still the hard core of them was all that was left to protest Bush in the first days of the invasion.

For the rest blah-blah-blah and no fucking ACTION. And they let Obama serve it to them through the butt hole with a snow shovel. In a few years we’ll hear them say: we didn’t know, we’ve been fooled…

Even Einstein knew that a protest had to not be relative.

The two quotes attributed to Bush by Chirac are “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East” and “the Biblical prophecies are about to be fulfilled”.

The Superbowl bit is: “‘They’re going to set the region on fire. They don’t know anything about anything and are profoundly ignorant of the workings of an already-complicated Orient. Ask them to name a single Arab poet. It’s almost as though the Sunni-Shiite conflict was some sort of Middle Eastern Super Bowl to them!”

http://warnewstoday.blogspot.com/

Bush loved the Iraqis: that’s why he worked so hard, to send millions many of them to heaven!

(Apologies to Shakespeare!)

IMHO This is far and away the most disturbing thing you or any other mutant has ever posted.

Isn’t Dick Cheney more or less secular? Gee I wonder who fed Jr all these crazy ideas… Hmm who could it be?

To some extent the origins of will always be obscure. The reason is not that it was the product of a conspiracy, as some have come to believe. Many strategic objective were presented in its justification, some of them seemingly rational. Yet when the history of the war comes to be written it will show that none of the groups that supported it had goals that were achievable.

If the Bush administration had an overall strategy it assumed regime change in Iraq would promote American interests while curbing terrorism and furthering democracy in the region. But these are not facets of a single programme that can be realised together. They are disparate and competing objectives and in acting on the belief that they were one, the Bush administration revealed its distance from reality.

The distance from reality Gray talks about is a common feature of American neo-conservatism, and it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to think that the psychosis of religiosity contributed to this chasm of ignorance.

Blair gives himself away on the reality issue, having said this about his Iraq war decisions to a Labour party conference: ‘I only know what I believe’.

Large percentages of the American and British population are willfully ignorant to the point that they allow themselves to be convinced by hubris and arrogant militarism.

Robespierre has this to say about the likely success of invasion, and he said this in 1792!

The most extravagent idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and institutions embraced.

And in Iraq, the hits just keep on coming! Saw this while sipping my morning cup of Arabica:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8192669.stm

Tangentially, I am, but I’m pretty sure she she didn’t actually say it, as indicated in your Wikipedia link (my link goes to another, somewhat closer-to-primary source on that).

As a sort of aphorism, though, it has a life of its own now, which is why I didn’t attribute it to Kale.

Worst. Teletubbies. Ever.

Kael, of course.

This looks to me like another hit on an entire minority group, like the one targeting the Yezedis some time ago…

As to American “Christianity”, I notice that they seem not even aware of the existence of the so-called “Oriental” Christians, the Nestorians & Copts, also called “Arab Christians”(20% of all Palestinians , IIRC) : who have lived many centuries peacefully under Islamic rule, experience having taught them to prefer it to the treatment they had received at the hands of their European Christian “brothers”, whenever they had held the power over them.

After all, the Koran itself proscribes any attack on Christian monasteries….

But that some Arabs may be in fact be at present Christians with ancient origins and long histories of living amongst the Moslems seems beyond the understanding of the American evangelicals, who only see Arabs (and by extension all followers of Islam?) as the enemies of Israel.

But then again, American Christians have a strange way of “loving” their enemies: I’d use another term…

I, properly re-educated by you & yours, won’t get over this.

Here’s something of interest for those contemplating “Democracy by Twitter”: why’s it so selective?

http://123realchange.blogspot.com/

“The war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse!”

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/2/29/115039/049

Elwood: We’re on a mission from God.