We may know what. But does anyone *really* know why?

[Stinky The Clown]

I don't know why we went into Iraq.

I know all the popular theories and I know a fair bit of the tin foil theories.

But I do not fully believe a one of them.



Oil:
.....and it is why the Dick never unveiled his energy meetings early in 2001.

He tried to kill mah Daddy:
.....Nice thought. No way.

bin Ladin link:
.....:rofl:

Reagan and Poppy pulled some shit and Saddam was about to out them:
.....What? He couldn't find microphone between 2000 and the time he got caught in his hideyhole?

Saddam was about to start trading oil in Euros:
.....oh please :eyes: The Chinese, who control the dollar, would never allow that.



The theories go on and on, like a computer in a loop doing a screen dump.




Does anyone have any new theories that actually stand up to even impaired critical thinking?

I really would like to know the *why*.

[rug]

1. Location, location, location.

[Stinky The Clown]

6. That's the same reason Rummy was there in the 70s giving Saddam a blowjob.

[Xipe Totec]

7. Damn straight

Iraq is on one side of Iran.

Who's on the other side?

Afghanistan...

[valerief]

26. And Afghanistan poppy trade grew exponentially during the Bush War years.

Gee, I wonder who would making money off that opium???

[valerief]

2. They used the tools in their toolbox to loot the Treasury. nt

[Stinky The Clown]

8. There are easier ways

This theory is certainly more viable than many, but it seems an awfully convoluted road to take to get there.

[valerief]

18. I think they used standard tools, like any other dictatorship. nt

[glitch]

3. Billions in no-bid government contracts for companies that weren't doing so well.

Not a conspiracy theory, just the bottom line.

[Stinky The Clown]

10. There's no way to show that as a result or a cause.

As theories, either is operative

[glitch]

13. You are bending over backwards to not look at the simple answer to the time-honored question

Qui Bono?

What kind of reason are you looking for that allows you to discount the obvious?

edit: sexual inadequacy?

[Stinky The Clown]

28. No, and I am not being intentionally obtuse

Every theory posted here has more than minimal viablity, yours being better than many.

All I'm saying is that we really don't know. Not that any one theory or another isn't true, only that all can be defended for or against. And by necessity, if that's the POV I'm taking, I am by definition adversarial to any theory proposed.

I'm not arguing. Really. I'm not dismissing your theory. I am simply saying that it is, thus far, just that ... a theory.

And it isn't personal. Honest.

[glitch]

34. I know it's not personal stinky. I really am curious, what are you looking for?

We have plenty of evidence they are greedy, we have plenty of evidence they have behaved sociopathilogically. We know they strongly follow an authoritarian ideology (PNAC agenda laid it all out). We suspect they deeply resent not being loved as children. Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld have the additional burn of being professionally rejected in the early 90s.

If you want someone to propose that they are Nazi's on a vendetta for losing WWII looking for validation of their superiority and world domination, I can go there as well.

There is the online book on Authoritarians too, Altemeyer http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/. People have been trying to figure out the motives of crazies since forever. I think it's generally accepted their pathologies are based on fear and lack of love, they supplement their lack with greed and hunger for power. Since how they supplement their lack is easy enough to follow (the money) I stick with that.

Sorry if I appeared short in the above post. :hi:

[Stinky The Clown]

38. See ..... you're doing **exactly** what I have been doing .......

There are *too many* viable reasons, some sane, some a little loony, but every damned one of them viable ..... or not.

Everything from being nazis pissed off about the loss of WWII, to greedy oil robbers, to a kid defending his father's honor.

And as much as a case can be made for all of them, so can a case be made against them. And all cases would be strong.

I guess I just wanted to have a discussion about all this.

JackpineRadical, elsewhere in this thread, makes the case for "overdetermined behavior" wherein more than one reason exists, but all lead to the same action.

I think it is fair to say that we'll have to wait for history to determine what one or two reasons actually *were* the right ones. I just worry I'll be dead by then.

[glitch]

41. It probably is a mix of motives since we are dealing with quite a few people.

I am sure Condi's motives were different than Rummy's. Bush and Cheney have their own thing going on and I sure don't want to go to wherever Karl Rove is coming from.

I just hope they all get the help they need from the prison psychiatrist.

And look at it this way, if you die before we get justice you can always haunt them. :evilgrin:

edit: forgot to say, nice thread, interesting discussion.

[truedelphi]

33. Halliburton stock was like under $ 4 on September 10 2001

And in the mid thirties some three years later.

[glitch]

35. Yep, not to mention other cronies like KBR, Blackwater, Bechtel.

And that doesn't even get to the latest looting of the Treasury, still in progress.

[truedelphi]

43. And not a legal looting either. Laws are on the books right now, but

Apparently no one holds Geithner or Bernanke's feet to the fire when they don't read the rules they should be using.

[glitch]

44. Yeah, not too happy about that either.

But perhaps there is a "yet" coming on that one too, we'll have to "make them do it" per Obama.

[truedelphi]

45. Here is hoping.

:toast:

[Old Codger]

4. Simple really

he had to outdo daddy, that is really all it was, they are macho assholes and that is what macho assholes do.

[Stinky The Clown]

11. I have a few issues with this theory

No way did he EVER wield that much influence in the White House.

Were he EVER to have done this, they would have impeached him. That would have been just too insance an action even for the people he had around him. Cheney would have made him chew his own thumbs off.

[Old Codger]

22. But

You want to find deep meanings to this guy and he is way too shallow to have anything deep...Occams razor put simply

"when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better."

[Stinky The Clown]

25. I'm not saying it is right or wrong

I'm saying we really don't know.

[Old Codger]

30. I understand

I understand where you are coming from, and I pretty much agree with that, I just have a hard time giving * any credit for having enough brains to come up with anything that deep. Having said that he did have a lot of smarter people around him telling him what to do.. I doubt seriously that he ever had an original thought. He just was not smart enough to do any of this on his own.

[malaise]

5. Hmmmmmmmmmm

To steal the oil, seize the country and set up a US puppet state from where they would try to control the ME. Epic Fail.

[Stinky The Clown]

14. That could have been accomplished with a relaltively few CIA assets, a gun, and a suitable man .....

..... or woman in a puppet suit.

Also, we did that next door, and we know how that turned out.

How do you spell Pahlavi in Farci?

[malaise]

37. True but you can't loot the treasury that way

Men are filthy rich now.
I wonder what secrets those overseas accounts hold and who owns those accounts.

[Jackpine Radical]

9. Disaster capitalism requires a disaster?

Why did PNAC want to go in in 1998?

Oil--center of the board in the Great Game--defend Israel--probly lots of reasons.

Freud used to call it "overdetermined behavior." Behavior with more causes than are actually needful to trigger it.

[Stinky The Clown]

17. "overdetermined behavior." .... .not a specific reason, but the best reason I have heard thus far.

I'd never heard that term before.

[RandomThoughts]

12. look at history,

Thats what people with empire mentality do.

They, in thinking power to blow things up is power, thought the break up of the soviet union meant they could do what they want. They envisioned a long goal of global dominance built on the illusion of power of war.

Note that this was not a goal of American dominance, but dominance for the few they cared about, that would get rewards from the war, and then, in there view, rewards from a controlled economic structure imposed in other areas of the world.

The attacks done against other countries, were also used on average Americans, but not with violence, but with fear, and lack of feelings of security in economic stability, health care, and even freedom to speak or organize to argue a point of view.

They did it because that was there character, to take for the good of their few friends. And they allowed themselves to be deceived, or even deceived themselves to give a rational their own minds would accept.

Just like the fact that there are sadist in the world, how can you explain what they do? You can't, because you are right, it does not make sense in worldly terms.

Edit: It is the same mentality terrorist use when killing or blowing things up thinking it helps them. Violence done claiming to be for a cause, usually backfires and hurts the cause it claims to help. That is why false flags exist, because people know violence does not work.

[TheWraith]

15. I think it was a little bit of a lot of reasons.

Because of the oil. Because Bush had a hardon for Saddam. Because Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the rest of the neocons wanted a testbed to try out their nationbuilding on. I think that it's a mix of a lot of different reasons.

[Stinky The Clown]

21. That's the same as the "overdetermined behavior." cited above

And maube the most plausible

[EFerrari]

16. They did everything they could to frighten us into quiescence

so that when they emptied the treasury we'd be passive. It worked. We were.

[valerief]

20. Yeah, that's what I said. To loot the Treasury using standard dictator tools. nt

[EFerrari]

24. BushCo did everything to us that bin Laden swore to do.

Mission accomplished.

[glitch]

39. And the Bushes and the Bin Ladens are old friends and business partners.

Oops, there I go with my coincidence theories again. Ok, it's tin for conspiracy theories, what do I use for coincidence theories?

[rateyes]

19. Ever heard of the Project for a New American Century?

The neocons wanted American Empire.

The first Gulf War was a farce over oil. Kuwait had just about run out of it, and was angle drilling on the border taking oil from underneath Iraq. Saddam Hussein went to Poppy Bush and said that he would sell oil to the USA for as cheap a price as he was getting from Kuwait if the USA would back his going into Kuwait and taking it back as an Iraqi province. After all, it was the colonialists who drew that border. Kuwait was, indeed, a former part of Iraq. Bush said he would turn a blind eye, and then double-crossed Saddam Hussein---who, BTW, under Reagan purchased chemical weapons from the US, and used US intelligence to turn the weapons on the Kurds.

The second Gulf war was an adventure in American Empire. Plain and simple. All you have to do is look at the names of those pushing for that war---Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al...all members of PNAC.

The Iraq War was nothing more than trying to have the USA dominate the whole world. Same as Hitler, IMO. Fascist dictators, all of them.

And, on edit---they needed control of oil fields in Iraq to try and pull it off. While the rest of Iraq was being looted, the troops were sent FIRST to the Ministry of Oil building to protect it. The neocons could not let all of the oil producing countries to control their own resources. American Empire, fueled by oil. Follow the money.

[Fire1]

23. There's only one that makes any sense to me. He did it to get

re-elected in 04. Period.

[rucky]

27. I had an honest to goodness neocon tell me this:

"How else are we going to get our oil?"

she gets points for telling the truth.

[Stinky The Clown]

29. A professional, inside the clubhouse neocon .... or a civilian like us?

[rucky]

32. Arms dealer. War profiteer.

so a civilian, but not like us.

[glitch]

36. Damn, forgot the most obvious reason: they really are simply stupid greedy people with power.

edit: to add greedy, because while all greedy people are stupid not all stupid people are greedy.

[Shell Beau]

31. I think a lot has to do with it just being a Bush.

They are cocky enough. Stupid enough...

[Sparkly]

40. Will you stop posting our dinner conversations???

Because then when I do, I realize you already have!!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5516030

[glitch]

42. Lol! you two are a hoot! nt