Benghazi: What's the Charge Again?

[Cato]

Ran across this yesterday. Seemed like the right place to share...

[A Theist]

I never did agree with that group of conspiracy theorists which demanded proof of Barack's birth certificate. I just think Barack is a rotten lying president. The real crazy conspiracy theorist nut jobs are the 9-11 truthers.

You know, A Theist, I'm always ready to acknowledge where we have common ground and THIS is one area where the "both sides" argument is actually valid. Specifically, both sides have their embarrassing conspiracy theorists nuts. I'm glad to hear you're not a birther any more than I'm a truther.

PROOF that God is alive and is still working miracles! DP and I have found common ground! So, does this mean that you and I are still buisness partners in our "Sham Wow Political Nose Plugs" venture?

[Statler Waldorf]

It's not backpeddling. It's calling you out on quote mining.

Nope, go back and read the quote. A Theist said there was an anti-American bias worldwide and you said “Gee, maybe this anti-American bias isn’t for no reason…” You made no mention of the UN. You’re just trying to backpedal after I pointed out that the world hated America long before the Iraq War and will continue to do so no matter what we do. You were championing an easily refuted Liberal talking point, nothing more.

According to the crimes we prosecuted Nazis for at Nuremburg. They were:

The Nuremberg Trials were conducted under the authority of the Allied Forces. Of course this no longer even exists today so whose authority are you using to conduct these trials?

1. Conspiracy to commit aggression
2. Crimes of aggression
3. Crimes of war
4. Crimes against humanity

Actually they were indicted for…

1.Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace
2.Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace
3.War crimes
4.Crimes against humanity

Of course these would not apply to the Iraq War because we now operate under the United Nations Charter which allows a nation to use force if attacked by another nation in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter. Since the assassination attempt on George HW Bush in 1993 and the firing on coalition aircraft enforcing the no-fly zones over Northern and Southern Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War ceasefire agreement qualify as direct attacks on the US by the nation of Iraq the invasion was completely legal. Even if these attacks had not taken place the US and UK would still be authorized in using force in accordance with Article 51 because of Iraq’s violation of specific UN Security Council Resolutions. The launching of a major offensive against the city of Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan is a violation of UN Security Council Resolution 688 prohibiting repression of Iraq's ethnic minorities. To add more, both nations would have still been justified in their use of force due to the fact that the act was a resumption of previously temporarily suspended hostilities due to Iraq’s violation of the cease fire agreement. The act therefore was not a war of aggression as the United States and UK were acting as sanctioned agents for the defense of Kuwait in response to Iraq's 1990 invasion of that country. The act was also justified due to Iraq’s violation of the UN Security Council Resolutions 699, 707, 715, 949, 1051, 1060, 1115, 1134, 1137, and 1154. Iraq’s violation of these resolutions was documented in Resolution 1194. Under resolution 670 the US and UK were authorized to use all means necessary in order to force Iraq to comply with all applicable UN Security Council Resolutions. Even without the existence of weapons of mass destruction the US, UK, and other participating nations were legally justified in their use of force.

The UN Security Council possesses the sole authority to bring action against the US and UK for any violations of international law. Of course no such action has ever been brought against either nation because no case can be made against them.

Comparing this somehow to the atrocities committed by the Third Reich is ignorant, shameful and a direct insult to the tens of millions of innocents adversely affected by that horrible regime.

You can call it meaningless if you like. I won't.

Once you’re in full possession of the facts you’ll realize how meaningless it was.

Downing Street Memo.
Yellow Cake from Niger.

How are either of these lies?

Testimony from Gen Clark that the W administration wanted to attack Iraq even before 9/11 and, when 9/11 happened, wanted to find a way to pin it on Saddam.

They were already justified in taking action against Iraq prior to 9/11 so that’s absurd. Secondly, you must prove that General Clark (I assume Wesley Clark the failed Democratic Presidential Candidate from 2004? Very unbiased source I see) is indeed telling the truth and is not the one lying. Good luck.

The continued lies after the links to Al Qaeda were debunked.

Debunked by whom?

Bush continued to push the narrative that we had to attack Iraq in response to how we'd been attacked on 9/11.

How do you know this? No, Oliver Stone’s movie “W.” cannot be used as a source.

That's quite enough to at least make the allegation. Actually, I'm confident it would be enough to convict at a war crimes trial.

A President lying is not a War Crime. Considering your embarrassing ignorance concerning the subject of international law I am not the least bit surprised that you possess such ill-founded confidence.

The fact that there were many such embassy attacks that night, leading some in the intelligence community to think this was another one of them.

Who in the intelligence community? Tell me exactly who started that politically convenient narrative. It had to come from someone.

An unconvicted war criminal is fascinating.

You become a criminal once you are convicted of a crime. There’s no such thing as an “unconvicted criminal”. If President Bush committed war crimes then so did President Clinton in 1996.

And HOW DARE YOU call the president of the United States a piece of shit?

I think calling him a war criminal and comparing him to Nazis without any evidence is worse.

I'm rather happy that American fascists are once more focused on the Benghazi farce. It is a tacit admission that they understand that running on a platform of sentencing thousands of Americans to death and millions to staggering debt by denying them affordable healthcare is not going to win elections outside of the most deeply-inbred districts come November.

Yes, you keep running on the ACA with its 41% approve /52% disapprove popularity, please do it!

The Tu Quoque defense is where you use it in place of a defense, not in pointing out hypocrisy in addition to providing a defense.

Making unsupported assertions does not qualify as providing a defense bub.

We had a moral obligation not to put the fucker in power and prop up his regime in the first place. Seems like we are awfully choosy about which moral obligations we care about.

Bush didn’t do that.

Could have done that by simply walking away from the whole mess and letting it sort itself out, which was exactly what ended up happening anyway,

Then more of those Iraqis that you pretend to care so much about would have been slaughtered.

if you ignore the few hundred thousand dead Iraqis and the few thousand dead American servicepersons.

Wow, it’s up to a few hundred thousand now? Where do you get that number from? The Colbert Report?

First and foremost, we were at war with Al Qaeda. That should have been our top priority. We had an opportunity to crush Al Qaeda and squandered it because Bush placed Saddam as a higher priority.

The US Military (until recently) has always been funded to be able to fight two wars at once so this is just plain wrong.

Saddam and Bin Laden, by the way, hated each other.

This is irrelevant in regards to our reasons for going into Iraq.

Our enemy's enemy may not be our friend, and he certainly wasn't, but our enemy's enemy should at most be a secondary target.

Since HW Bush and Clinton had both taken actions against Iraq it is was actually our primary target. Given your logic we should have ignored Al Qaeda because they became a threat later on and apparently we’re incapable of handling two targets at once even though we are always funded to do so.

This is why I am glad Bush wasn't president during World War II. The Japanese would have bombed Pearl Harbor and we would have attacked Stalin in response.

We actually declared war on Germany as a result of Pearl Harbor. That was a rather poor analogy to use.

Second of all, we do not have the right to invade countries because they're run by dictators. That's called "aggression".

Illegal aggression has a very specific definition under the UN Charter and the actions taken against Iraq do not fit that definition.

Third, why just him? Why not every dictator on the planet? And why now?

A ridiculous argument. “Why convict this rapist of rape? You’ll never be able to convict every person who commits rape, so why this one?”

Fourth, nobody appointed us the world policeman.

Who said someone has to?

It's a role we have neither the authority, nor the financial resources, nor the manpower to continue.

Under whose authority do we not have the authority?

We're too broke to fund education but still want to pour money into our war machine.

The US spends more on education than any country in the world; find something else to whine about.

Fifth, what did we replace him with? What could we possibly have replaced him with?

I’d rather live in Iraq now than in 2000.

Sixth, you can't export democracy at the point of a gun. When are we going to learn this lesson? People have to fight for it if they want it. Right now, the government people seem to want to fight for over there is a theocracy.

If it ends up being a theocracy then so be it, at least they chose that government.

More Iraqis have died since the war and occupation than did under Saddam.

The bare assertion strikes again! Got anything to actually back that claim up?

To the OP: Being black while being the president?

Yes, and Clinton was impeached because he was black.

It's hard to avoid concluding that race is an issue with these people.

What do you mean “these people”? Racist.

No president ever before in American history has been heckled in the middle of a State of the Union address by a sitting member of Congress.

Perhaps not recent history, we do not know prior to that. No president has told such a bold faced lie in the middle of a State of the Union address. No president has ever scorned the Supreme Court Justices who are present in the middle of a State of the Union address either. No president has claimed that there are 60 states while on the campaign trail, Obama is just a bundle of firsts.

Instead of being forced to resign in disgrace, that congressman was celebrated as some kind of hero.

Forced to resign for being rude? You have to be joking. He apologized, time to buck up a bit.

No president ever before in American history has had to provide proof that he is actually an American citizen and "one of us".

Obama never had to provide proof he was born here, get your facts straight and get off of the Liberal websites.

And it's been a long time since a president has faced a thread of armed insurrection.

Thread? I have no idea what you’re even referring to here.

It cracks me up that the party who fought to keep the slaves, who fought to keep segregation, who fought against civil rights legislation is now telling blacks that it’s the other guys who are the real racists. You could not make this stuff up.

Ran across this yesterday. Seemed like the right place to share...

“Well I may beat my wife once in a while but my neighbor beats his wife every day!” Did I get the rationale correct? When someone points out your mistakes just point out the mistakes others committed 30 years ago?

[Heywood]

Um, no. Since we don't have infinite resources and power, we have to prioritize what we wish to accomplish. A decision was made to put Al Qaeda on the back-burner and make Saddam the top priority. We effectively traded catching Bin Laden for removing Saddam. That was part of the decision to go to war when we did.

Hope you can answer some of my other objections.

Well if we don't have infinite resources and all of them should be directed at defeating Al Qaeda......then why did Obama waste some of those resources on Libya?

Al Qaeda didn't take a back burner. It was on the front burner right next to Iraq.

[Cato]

“Well I may beat my wife once in a while but my neighbor beats his wife every day!” Did I get the rationale correct? When someone points out your mistakes just point out the mistakes others committed 30 years ago?

No, you didn't get the rationale correct. Care to try again or does interpretation of a political cartoon exceed your intellectual capacity?

[A Theist]

Ran across this yesterday. Seemed like the right place to share...

“Well I may beat my wife once in a while but my neighbor beats his wife every day!” Did I get the rationale correct? When someone points out your mistakes just point out the mistakes others committed 30 years ago?

That seems to sum up their rationale pretty good. But, since the left always loves harping back to, "What about Bush?", "What about Reagan?", we may as well go ahead and throw Bill Clinton's, "Wags the Dog" war out there too since he sent Americans into Kosovo. They were no threat to us.

[Statler Waldorf]

No, you didn't get the rationale correct. Care to try again or does interpretation of a political cartoon exceed your intellectual capacity?

If the political cartoon is based upon an irrational thought process I admit I have difficulty following it.

[Heywood]

Yeah, so reprehensible that there would be hundreds of thousands of them still alive today to do something about the problem on their own. So reprehensible even though it was obviously the right thing to do because our intervention was a catastrophic failure on every level, starting with the premise and ending with trillions in national debt due to us borrowing to pay for it. Note, of course, that I'm just going along with the idea that the true premise that this war was anything but an excuse to line some pockets with black gold that happened to come with a convenient excuse, because it's been eleven years and most of us figured it out quite a long time ago.

Gamblers(ones that actually make money), call this being results orientated. Basically a gambler(one that actually makes money) will not make a bet unless it has a positive expectation of profit. If they lose the bet, it still doesn't mean it was a bad bet to make. Just because you don't like the way this war turned out, doesn't mean it was a bad decision to go to war.

Japan and Germany turned out nicely after we clobbered them. It seems western style democracy can be exported by the barrel of the gun sometimes.

What happens in the long run Iraq remains to be seen.

[Ryantology]

Gamblers(ones that actually make money), call this being results orientated. Basically a gambler(one that actually makes money) will not make a bet unless it has a positive expectation of profit. If they lose the bet, it still doesn't mean it was a bad bet to make. Just because you don't like the way this war turned out, doesn't mean it was a bad decision to go to war.

Japan and Germany turned out nicely after we clobbered them. It seems western style democracy can be exported by the barrel of the gun sometimes.

What happens in the long run Iraq remains to be seen.

And then Vietnam showed the world how to beat a titan. You would think that lesson might have stuck, it being a lot more recent than World War II.

Yes, you keep running on the ACA with its 41% approve /52% disapprove popularity, please do it!

And you can run on a platform of "we're going to take health insurance away from 8 million of you." I bet it will go over swimmingly, if the GOP even makes more than a token effort.



Last November, when Obamacare popularity was at its lowest, Democrats ran the table in my former home state of Virginia, winning the gov, lt. gov, AG, and a majority in the House of Delegates, in a state which had been tampon-red up until 2008.

You better hope it works out better this year, because it's pretty much the last chance regressives have of achieving national political relevance.

[Minimalist]

Borowitz:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bo...20%2869%29

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Millions of unemployed Americans who have fruitlessly been looking for work for months are determined that Congress get to the bottom of what happened in Benghazi, a new poll indicates.

According to the survey, job-seeking Americans hope that Congress will eventually do something about job creation, but they are adamant that it hold new hearings about Benghazi first.