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Acebuckeye13 posted:While his vote and initial support for the Iraq War has been (and should be) roundly criticized, I object to the term "architect" as A) that implies the motherfuckers who were making decisions about the war had any actual plans for the invasion and occupation beyond "topple saddam, prove we can knock over whatever dictator we want, get fat oil contracts, GTFO," and B) it lets the people like Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld who were the driving forces towards getting us into Iraq off easy, when instead their names should be in every American textbook and also headlining war crimes tribunals, treason trials, and burning effigies in the town square of every american city. Have you ever considered the possibility there might be a connection between the fact that Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumseld are not listed as war criminals in American texbooks and the equally true fact that the guy who was their point man in the Senate became the standard bearer for the opposition party some twenty years later?
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Nov 9, 2020 04:15
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Acebuckeye13 posted:... No, because that sounds like the ravings of an insane person, rather than my preferred take that life is grueling and disappointing, and that people in power who do bad things are rarely held accountable for a wide variety of reasons. He was the ranking member of the foreign relations committee, and in fact chaired it for most of the runup to the war. Who exactly do you think would be the more accurate person to describe as their point man in the senate?
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Nov 9, 2020 04:43
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Eighteen months? I think you've got your dates mixed up. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/17/joe-biden-role-iraq-war quote:But he had a power much greater than his own words. He was able to choose all 18 witnesses in the main Senate hearings on Iraq. And he mainly chose people who supported a pro-war position. They argued in favor of “regime change as the stated US policy” and warned of “a nuclear-armed Saddam sometime in this decade”. That Iraqis would “welcome the United States as liberators” And that Iraq “permits known al-Qaida members to live and move freely about in Iraq” and that “they are being supported”. C-SPAN links in the original article.
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Nov 9, 2020 05:00
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The Artificial Kid posted:Yeah, consent that was manufactured by the Bush administration with fake evidence of WMD. A consent that Biden and the other democrats had to take into account in deciding how to approach the issue. The most generous possible interpretation of Biden's actions you can come up with is that he was a political weathervane going along with the bloodthirstiness of the American public because he was scared of the polls. And this is supposed to comfort us that he's not going to commit war crimes in the future...why? Did you miss that this last election was a squeaker because it turned out that way more people were willing to vote for a warmongering candidate than anyone realized?
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Nov 9, 2020 05:20
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The Artificial Kid posted:Because this time around (I hope) nobody is going to 9/11 America, nor manufacture a case for war against another country and present it to the American public. If you can point to a time in the past where Biden has decided a war should happen of his own free will, then used America's intelligence agencies against their will to fabricate a case for that war, I'm all ears. That is not what happened in relation to Iraq. A cabal in the White House and Pentagon created that war, for their own financial benefit, and Biden was one of many who went along with it at a point in time when most Americans supported it (because the American people had been duped). You have defined the circumstances for which we can hold a politician to account for a pro war record so narrowly that the only people who could possibly ever be said to have started a war of "their own free will" are presidents. And strictly speaking George W Bush is literally the only president who actually meets this standard because you're choosing to hinge everything on post 9/11 comparable nationalism and a deliberate sustained nationalist effort. Which Joe Biden willfully participated in, however much you'd rather pretend he was just a tiny cog in the war machine rather than a big one.
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Nov 9, 2020 05:38
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The Artificial Kid posted:I'm choosing to evaluate Joe Biden in relation to the realistic alternatives (not just his actual opponent in this election, but the broad run of American politicians of recent decades). I'm not claiming he's the best of all of them, but I don't think he's anywhere near the worse, either. I'd say he's in the top half, and that he may rise to the presidency in surprising ways, especially since re-election is unlikely to be anywhere near his biggest concern. Even if you're choosing to compare Biden to Trump he still falls short. Trump has actually had the power for the last four years to at least attempt to manufacture nationalistic fervor for a war. On two occasions, with Syria and Soleimani, he even had the mainstream media urging him to do it. Both times he decided to back off instead, even though he likely would have reaped huge political dividends for doing so. What makes you think Biden would back off in either of these cases when, again by your own extremely charitable interpretation, Biden cares more about opinion polls than he does in doing the right thing?
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Nov 9, 2020 05:50
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OK. I'm a two by the way. The only reason it's not a one is because it will probably be funny in some horrible twisted way. It already is really.
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Nov 9, 2020 06:13
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Kalit posted:He has stated he would stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia and condemned their involvement in Yemen multiple times: https://www.forumarmstrade.org/2020_biden.html. This source also claims that Biden wants to end the forever war in Afghanistan which seems at odds with the messaging we've been getting over the last few months about how Trump isn't doing anything about the Russians giving bounty money to the Taliban.
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Nov 10, 2020 09:29
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Kalit posted:Um.... are you trying to say that this website is inaccurate? It's just aggregating links to what Biden has actually said. And... you know that the whole Russian bounty Taliban thing still isn't a confirmed thing, right (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/u-s-commander-intel-still-hasn-t-established-russia-paid-n1240020)? I don't think you're allowed to cast shade on someone for doubting a source accurately reflects the actual intentions of a potential Biden administration only to express your own doubt about the exact same source and even the exact same subject in the very next paragraph.
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Nov 11, 2020 13:17
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Maybe it doesn't come up much in d&d but we've observed in c-spam for quite some time now that the bounty story was never substantiated and hasn't served any apparent purpose except to prevent Trump from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and also given Biden surrogates a way to attack Trump for not being sufficiently tough on Putin. But yes my phrasing was a little ambiguous it's not that I don't believe that Biden said these things it's that I don't believe he was telling the truth about his actual beliefs.
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Nov 11, 2020 14:51
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