war in iraq

[jamesy boy]

Anybody in favour?

Come on, somebody must have approved.

[luckyboy]

Theres loads who approved of getting rid of a odious despot, there were at the time and there are still are.. between 40% and 50% of the british people if polls are to be believed...as this thread developes you will find hardly a soul who will concur with this view, instead it will descend into the usual bush and blair bashing you have come to expect when the issue of iraq is discussed, people who agreed with it are cowed into a craven silence, the weapons of mass destruction issue is used as the prime tool, the dossier etc, but conveniently it is forgotten that practically every nation believed he had these weapons at the time.. oh how everybody is wise in hindsight..

Most of the tory hierachy was in favour of using force against iraq, including all the tory leadership contenders except ken clarke, indeed most of them were urging blair to bypass the un route...

The world is all the better for the end of saddam..whats happening in pockets of iraq now is the unholy alliance of islamic facism many from other arab countries and baathists elements...who despise democracy..but remember as bad as these terrible suicide bombs are, the vast majority of iraq is peaceful, something the media, especially the bbc and channel 4 do not show or want to show.

Still this will never be enough for the professional againsters, who spend all their time accusing our democratically elected leaders of all sorts of crimes and conspiracy theories..

I feel the appeal, believe me. You are exasperated with the manifold faults of Tony Blair and George W Bush. Fighting your government is what you know how to do and what you want to do, and when you are confronted with totalitarian forces which are far worse than your government, the easy solution is to blame your government for them. including the mass terrorism that happened before sept 11.

[WaldoMcFroog]

Yes, that is a very brilliant and well thought out explanation of why people who objected to the war did so. It is very convincing and I think you are very clever and so does my friend, Dave (even though we did both object to the war, we now realise the error of our ways and why we were thinking as we did thanks to your enlightening essay that is definitely all true.

[jno]

I didn't believe Saddam had WMDs. No doubt this sounds like being wise after the event; but I just figured that if he'd had them, he'd be using them. He's just that sort of guy. Plus there were inspectors all over the place insisting that they'd looked, and there weren't any. It suited Blair and Bush to believe the inspectors were idiots. But the inspectors were right.

Thepoint about the supposed WMDs was that it gave other countries a pretext to attack Iraq, because it would be self-defence: Saddam can nuke us, so we have to remove him. Without that excuse, invading another countryis on dodgy ground. It amounted to 'I don't like you so I'm going to arrest you and kill your family'. Might makes right. That may be realpolitik, but it has no moral standing. (Would it be right of me to kill Bush and then claim God told me to? In most courts that wouldn't be a defence.)

There are plenty of bad leaders around the world but, without WMDs, there was nothing that made Saddam stand out - except oil. (And the fact that he'd embarrassed Bush Senior.) That's why people didn't, and don't, like the invasion.

[andy hughes]

Again with hindsight - although I did advance this opinion on the day of invasion - this war will become this generation's Viet Nam.

Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of forcing one nation's idea of 'freedom' on another by military force, the fact remains that Iraq is still in a state of civil unrest, with no apparent solution in sight.

It does appear that God told Mr Bush that it is right to invade other nations - He just must have whispered the bit about what to do next, and Dubbyah didn't quite catch it.

[bernardo]

I have always been strongly in favour of it.

[Elfin]

Yep I approved and still do, but do think they should have finished SH off first time round. I don't think Blair should have apologised either.

What's more, I find it ridiculous that any member of the public has the bare-faced audacity to presume to be informed enough to know exactly what went on, what his next move was going to be or indeed what's going on now.

Perhaps we should get rid of British Intelligence altogether and just consult a cross-section of shoppers in the Arndale Centre every time we need to make a decision on national security...

And if there is an energy crisis in the coming years I bet I know who'll be complaining loudest then too.

[Oneeyedvic]

Elfin - I love your argument - you say the general public don't know enough about the topic so they have no right to say anything about it.

I'm guessing that that applies to pretty much every topic of conversation, so maybe we should take away people's rights to vote as well - and obviously stay off answerbank.

[january_bug]

Like Bernardo, I'm going for the short answer - yes, I approved. 

[El D]

I predicted the war would happen 6 months before it did. It was so glaringly obvious the way B&B played it, and yet so many people were just too stupid to see it. . .

[Ding-Dong]

Yep, count me in.

[jamesy boy]

I have to admit, I whole-heartedly approved at first, but am now not so sure. I still think the world is generally a better place for the removal of Saddam, but at what price?

[ICEMANSAV]

ANother short answer. Yes I approved.

[jno]

the people in your average shopping centre could hardly have been wronger about WMDs than all the might of British and US intelligence put together, and might well have got it right. But Elfin is quite right, how can the public possibly know better when The Man In The Ministry knows best! (A 1950s mindset that I'd thought was outdated.)

[jake-the-peg]

The war was justified on the basis of there being an imminant threat to the UK from Saddam Hussein despite the resignation of a Home Secretary in protest.

It would not have been approved by Parliament just to remove a despot.

Whatever the ins and outs of what the security forces told him Tony Blair must take responsibility for that decision. Given that he sacked Mandelsson for not declaring an interest free loan and Blunket resigned over some train fares coming out of public funds surely Tony Blair should have taken responsibility for one of the most monumental errors of judgement since Neville Chamberlain's bit of paper and stood down when it became clear that the threat did not exist.

The fact that he was allowed not to must illustrate the total lack of effectiveness of the opposition parties. 

[surfer mike]

If we hadn't got rid of saddam and the baath party, they would still be in power and sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of iraqis would still be in place
and still killing poor innocent iraqis...

Presumely that would be ok then...the truth is the americans and british are damned if they invaded and damned if they hadn't..

The widespread view after the first gulf war was that the west should have gone in and finished the job and that the middle east would never have a chance for peace as long as saddam was still in power remember he had invaded a sovereign arab state...that is until bush acted and then the view changed..

[portocat]

I don't see how anyone can approve of mass slaughter of innocent people.  I believe that if women were in charge of the countries of the world it would be a better place for everyone as they would seek compromises rather than immediately arming their troops to the hilt and sending them in to kill anything that moves.

[Zen]

These people certainly did,
http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2005/usa-invade-p1.ph p

[ICEMANSAV]

unless it was rag week

[january_bug]

portocat - you are kidding aren't you!?!  It's regularly been said that if women could put their petty squabbling an bitching at each other behind them, and stop sl@gging each other off, they'd rule the world.  As we are at the moment, the world run by women would be chaos!

Why couldn't the world be run by men and women together!?!  50:50 - it's the combination that works best!

[Peahead66]

Never approved and never believed the lies.