You have a a problem with reading comprehension.

I said to quote a lie. Repeating what was said at the time and thought true then is not quoting a lie.

I don’t watch FOX news.

“WMDs.” Thought to be true, so not a lie. Also, several thousand tones of previously unaccounted for WMDs were recovered from Iraq. Organized depots were not found, much smaller ad hoc collections were.

“Iraq’s ties to al-Qaeda.” They existed. Sorry, not a lie. Also, Saddam’s support of suicide bombers and harboring terrorists puts him firmly in their camp, so not a lie even in the elliptic sense of exaggerating the truth.

“Liberate Iraqis from Saddam Hussein and create a democratic government.” 100% done, so not a lie.

“His lies” None yet. “and refusal to accept or admit any accountability for the results of his lies have had tremendous cost to Iraq and to the U.S.” How exactly is the responsibility for any of it solely his when it’s Congress’ job to cut the check, to oversee the intelligence services, and they did to their own satisfaction? Also, unlike Obama’s proposed and current expenditure’s the Iraq war is of net benefit to the US, and a really very light cost in terms of what like wars have traditionally cost, especially in terms of what has and will be gained. You need to read more so you develop a better sense of history.

Richard Engel misses the point that the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds he’s carping about are voting–it is all about democracy within the bounds of of popularly accountable, responsive law.

Oh, and 1 million Iraqis are dead? Okay, the utterly discredited Lancet study said it was 600,000; and that was a stupidly high faked number. You just keep on throwing up BS numbers, your crowd will always believe them no matter how large they are.

Oh, and there’s refugees and civilian casualties in a civil conflict, who knew!?

On what cloud do you live where that is a reasonable criteria? By your rules, we lost WWII because therefugees weren’t all settled by 1950–your rules are unintelligent.

If we had simply departed Iraq in 2004, or in any year since, the Turks would have occupied the Kurdish north in large part or comletely, and there would be worse conflict there, the Shiites would have fought the Sunnis into extinction, except where the Saudis shoved enough arms at them to prevent it, and the resulting arms embargo would have the Iraqi Shiites turning to the disliked (by them) Iranians in open alliance.

Not one earthly thing about it would be improved by our absence, including our own goals being met, which they generally are. In your desired course of action, none of our goals are met except the end of Hussein’s government, which was not the sole goal of the war.

“and especially for Iraqis.”

Then they should have managed their own affairs better.

This became our mess to fix when they wouldn’t do it.

George W. Bush reasons for the Iraq War: LIES. WMDs. Iraq’s ties to al-Qaeda. Liberate Iraqis from Saddam Hussein and create a democratic government. His lies and refusal to accept or admit any accountability for the results of his lies have had tremendous cost to Iraq and to the U.S.

I just finished reading the riveting ”War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq” by Richard Engel, NBC News Middle East Correspondent. Richard says none of those reasons for starting the war are true, and that the war in Iraq “…has always been more about geography, religion, and power than democracy. If you see where Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds live, it’s easy to understand their struggles for dominance.” Bush never understood that…and frankly didn’t care. He did what he wanted to do and what he wanted to do has been…and continues to be…extremely costly.

Here are some statistics on what the Iraq war (taken from think tanks such as the Brookings Institute and from the media) has cost the U.S. as of 1/21/09 due to Bush’s folly of inserting us in the middle of a civil and religious war:

4,231 U.S. soldiers killed; 30% of them younger than 22 years old
30,984 U.S. soldiers injured, with 20% of them having serious brain or spinal injuries
30% of U.S. soldiers develop serious mental health problems within 3-4 months of returning home and suicide rates in the U.S. Army hitting an all-time high in 2008
$800 billion through mid-2009 in U.S. taxpayer money
$390,000 per year to deploy just ONE U.S. soldier
142,000 – 148,000 (depending on whose statistics you use) troops in Iraq currently
513,000 U.S. troops deployed since 2003; 197,000 of those more than once and 53,000 more than 3 times
According to February, 2007 Congressional hearings (and that was two years ago so the number is probably much higher now) an estimated $10 billion wasted and mismanaged in Iraq
Now add to those staggering numbers the affect on the Iraqi people:

An estimated more than one MILLION Iraqi citizens killed as of August, 2007 (according to the Opinion Business Research survey); the official documented number around 100,000
2.25 million Iraqis displaced inside Iraq and 2.25 million Iraqis who are now refugees in Syria or Jordan as of May 2007; an additional 840,000 people displaced since May 2007 – a total of well over 5 MILLION Iraqis displaced
A note: Syria has refused to allow the 1.5 million who came there to work so many of the refugees have been forced to send their daughters – even as young as 5 or 6 – to clubs to dance to get money unofficially, becoming the family breadwinners. The girls make usually $20 to 30 per day in the clubs and the fathers of these girls act as pimps for work outside the club. These girls and their families are casualties of the U.S. War on Iraq.
Bush used the fear that the Iraq War would disintegrate into chaos to get re-elected in 2004. The cost to the American people of having four more years of Bush as president has been immense. He used fear again to continue to justify the now $12 billion per month the U.S. spends to keep our troops there. This is triple the burn rate of what we spent in the early years of the war. John McCain used fear about the war to try and get elected president and said he would never take our troops out until we had won. Only Barack Obama seems to understand that we are in a war we should never have started and that we cannot win.

The fear the Republican warmongers have perpetuated is that Iraq would descend into civil war if we leave. It has been happening for years now. Richard Engel cites countless atrocities that Iraqis have committed against other Iraqis during the Iraq War, continuing the torture and violence of Saddam Hussein:

A father’s beautiful 17-year-old daughter is kidnapped. The father talks to the kidnappers and convinces them to let him speak to his daughter. He asks her if she has been violated and she says yes. He tells the kidnappers to keep her…that he doesn’t want her back in that condition. The kidnappers execute the girl.
A family refuses an order to move from their home and their two-year-old boy is kidnapped, split open, stuffed with rice, roasted, and delivered to their doorstep.
People are executed and thrown in the streets as a warning to others to not cross the executioners.
Body parts are everywhere, bombings are commonplace, and women in particular hide in their homes in fear.
Some infrastructure improvements have been made since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. Phone subscribers have increased from 800,000 to over 14 million. Internet users have increased from 4,500 to around 850,000. Those improvements do not negate the fact that the cost of the Iraq war has been very high…for the U.S., other countries, and especially for Iraqis.

Bush’s lies have caused unbelievable destruction, death, injury, harm to the U.S. reputation around the world, increase in terrorists and terrorism, U.S.-sanctioned use of torture, and money. And we wonder why our country is in the place it is now. We had an immoral, destructionist, lying, and above-the-law president who felt he was accountable to no one. The American people followed suit…we felt we could do anything and not pay a price. We are paying now…both as a country and individually.

WAKE UP and stop making excuses for obama and company. people keep saying it doesn’t make sense what he is doing. IT DOES IF YOU UNDERSTAND HIS END GAME. HE IS DOING WHAT HE SAID HE WOULD. HE IS A MARXIST.

My first reply to you did not post.

Essentially, I asked you to quote even one lie, just one, which was a pretext for war with Iraq.

The catch is, is you have to show it was known to be untrue when it was said. Hindsight doesn’t count.

Then I asked you to have courage to ask youself what changed to permit the financial institutions to party with our money? Greed has been around for along time, what changed were the policies and laws of the of the government, and those changes were made on behalf of Democrats and by Democrats. Dodd, Franks, and Obama were all a part of that. The Republicans there are at worst guilty of inattention, the Democrats were the active offenders.

Per credit cards, if you don’t like the rate, don’t use the card. If they want to modify the rate, and you tell them you are freezing the account and then you don’t use it, then they can’t raise the rate.

BTW, you did know you don’t have to use any credit cards at all, right? It’s a choice you made.

The fools is the one who can’t deal with reality. The reality is that the Iraq war ia both far less expensive than Obama’s plans, and we’re actually getting something good out of it.

Suffer us the fools.

The financial disaster was caused by the Democrats, who changed the rules of mortgage lending so they were friendly to Angelo, like what Frank, Dodd, and the President did.

Greed has always been with us, what changed was the rules the Democrats wrote.

Name one actual lie, quote just one, that was used a pretext for the war against Saddam Hussein.

Tell me how Obama is better than Bush when Bush at least proposed to reform Social Security, and Obama’s promises to give us a deficit four times the size of Bush’s.

OR… how about credit card legislation allowing credit card companies to operate legal ‘loan sharking’ interest rates?

OR… how about financial institutions that partied at the top with our money?

I could go on….

I wish all these screamers and whiners had had the guts to speak out when we were being lied to and bankrupted. Now comes a President that actually is trying to help us, and the sheep continue to lobby on behalf of the organizations that are feeding off the bottom (that would be us!).

Sad…. to be a follower.