Poll: On 10th anniversary, 53% in U.S. see Iraq war as a mistake

Translation: 53% only favor going to war if no Americans die or get wounded.

Bitter Clinger on March 18, 2013 at 12:17 PM

I was a strong advocate for blowing the crap out of Saddam. I was not a strong advocate of building a nation…that was absolute foolishness.

War should be about destroying the means of attacking us. Saddam attacked us twice in the United States. We have ample reason to destroy him…but building nations in the ME is a fools game.

Go in destroy the leadership…put the hurt on the population that supported the leadership then leave with the warning that we will return if they start acting up.

PierreLegrand on March 18, 2013 at 12:31 PM

You may have heard of this guy…Andrew Codevilla on Atta.

Three Monkeys
“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” describes U.S. intelligence in the war on terrorism. Nine months after September 11, U.S. intelligence still has no idea who most of the hijackers were, where the operation was organized, by whom, or who paid for it. Our professionals concluded that, except for Osama bin Laden, the identity of America’s enemies is a mystery. Still, they are certain that our enemies are amateurs, unconnected with professional intelligence services.

Start with the Saudi hijackers. The photos and names released by the U.S. government match flight manifests with visa files from U.S. consulates. But the only pictures of the hijackers from security cameras are of persons other than the ones in the visa files and flight manifests. Indisputably, the hijackers used stolen identities. That is a mark of a major-league intelligence service. (The Saudi government prevented independent investigation of who the hijackers really were.)

The hijacking itself bore marks of professionalism: the hijackers used sophisticated chemical sprays and methods of rapid entry into the cockpits, they had mastered navigation beyond what had been taught them in their U.S. flight schools, and they had turned off the planes’ transponders — which also had not been taught them in the flight schools.

Then there is the $100,000 that financed the U.S. part of the mission. Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian, reportedly got it after a meeting in June 2000 in Prague with Ahmed al Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer who specialized in handling terrorists. The account from which the money came had been professionally scrubbed of the owner’s identity. On April 9, 2001, Atta made a 72-hour trip to see al Ani again. Two weeks later, the trained “soldiers” in the hijacking left Saudi Arabia for America. Did the two terrorists talk about the lingerie business?

From all this, a reasonable person — also knowing that Iraq has a facility where terrorists train to take over Boeing aircraft — might conclude that September 11 had been organized by Iraq, with connections in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

But the CIA paid attention to trails that the hijack operation had chosen not to cover. On September 9, Atta wired $15,000 back to a different account. This one had an unhidden owner — an associate of Osama bin Laden. Osama had done it! And Atta had left his flight manual in a car he had rented in his own name. He only knew what he learned in flight school! See? An amateur operation planned in one of those fabulous Afghan caves.

PierreLegrand on March 18, 2013 at 1:52 PM