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In Reply to: Follow the money trail! Is it all about money? posted by Bloodhound on March 27, 2003 at 09:10:25:
of course things don't just boil down to the money. There are a lot of complex issues here, including people's viewpoint about whether any war is moral, period. Bush is probably a mixed bag: he wants the world's second-largest oil reserves secured for the U.S. and the West, and he genuinely believes Saddam is a threat. Sure, he hasn't been able to prove a link between Saddam and Al Queida, but his gut instinct is that it's inevitable that Saddam would give chemical and biological weapons to the terrorist cells. It was just a matter of times.
While he's at it, with all these motives, selfish and otherwise, I believe he genuinely does want to help the Iraqui people. Saddam has a history of torturing and killing his own people and not just the Shiites in the south and the Kurds in the north, but his own Sunni critics as well. Some of the most outspoken advocates of Bush's war against Saddam and Iraq are Iraqui refugees living abroad, who were tortured by Saddam.
But I believe the liberation of Iraq is not the first motive. A pre-emptive strike on a potential terrorist threat is no one, with oil running number two.
On the other side of the coin, Bush is really only going on gut instinct in attacking Iraq. He's offered some proof of connections to Al Queida, but it hasn't been much. He could be right about the connections but he could be colossally wrong. Which suddenly paints this war in a whole new light. You drop out the terrorist reason and you're only left with the oil and the liberation reasons, with liberation of the Iraquis running some distance behind the oil reason.
And in the meantime innocent Iraqui civilians are being killed. Of course, they were dying under the U.N. sanctions already, of disease and malnourishment, and these are sanctions that every peace-loving nation in the world approved of--except for France of course, who wanted higher oil production so that they could get paid back the billiosn they were owed. But no one except for the French bankers were squawking against ten years of sanctions.
It's really only when the U.S. bucked the UN and went it alone with Britain. That showed an arrogance that many people couldn't swallow.
