Talk:Rationale for the Iraq War
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contents |
[edit] Reference Problems
In the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" section, references are not cited according to the proper format. I would fix this, except I simply don't know how. User:Mewok|(talk) 09:52, October 26 2006
[edit] POV
Seems to me, some of the points in the article represent a viewpoint often presented by people in opposition to the war, thus it is important to find and include citations that properly attribute statements to the leaders of the coalition. User:AlMac|(talk) 04:02, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
- Article is HIGHLY POV and needs to be cleaned up accordingly. I honestly don't care enough to research and do it myself. Frankly, if it wsn't such an important issue, the article is so POV it should probably be entirely scrapped and started over from scratch. But once again, I'm not gonna do it myself, because I have some stupid Greek texts I have to translate. To quote that great man, Homer Simpson, "Can't somebody else do it?" pookster11 04:10, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
Working on it. There's a lot to do, especially with regard to vetting the references to see if they say what they're being cited for. Warren Dew 06:03, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Benefits of Democracy
I personally recall some of the leaders promoting the idea of Democracy in the Middle East. Hamas winning Palestinian election, Newly elected President of Iran calling for destruction of Israel, are examples of Democracy in action. After all, Hitler came to power in a popular election. User:AlMac|(talk) 04:02, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
Update on === Benefits of Democracy === "Elections in a "fear society" in which there is no law and order and in which democratic institutions are nonexistent, can bring the worst elements to power." - Natan Sharansky User:LaRue|(talk) 12:13, 1 March 2006 (MT)
AlMac, do your research. Iran is not a democracy. The Supreme Leader has absolute power, and the elected president is mainly a spokesperson for him. Plus, the only candidates allowed to run are those pre-approved by the mullah's. In other words they have a closed loop of autocratic power. If we went by your rules we would have to count Saddam Hussein and Slobadon Milosevic as democratically elected leaders too since they also ran in elections. Both got 100% of the vote i believe. Not hard to do when you imprison or kill anybody who votes against you.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bportman (talk • contribs) 17:31, 26 July 2006.
But neither Saddam nor Milosevic obtained their positions through elections. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hamas did. --Mr. Billion 18:07, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Sanctions section
This section includes alot of heavy allegations, many of which are unsubstantiated. Looking through the sources sometimes supports some of the claims, but parts of the section stray considerably even from the sources. Secondly, the sources themselves are often Fox News or NewsMax.com, both of which have attracted controversy over their alleged bias concerning the Iraq war. If true, it should be trivial to find much of the information in these sources in other sources.
What I'm bothered by is the implications that the money diverted from the Oil-for-Food (OFF) programme was used to bribe the governments of France, Germany and Russia to oppose the war. I've yet seen no credible source claiming that government policy in these countries was changed due to bribes with money diverted from OFF. The US Senate investigations committee have accused British MP George Galloway and former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua of being rewarded with oil allocations by Saddam Hussein's regime, and Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and former presidential aides Alexander Voloshin and Sergei Issakov, of receiving oil allocations in return for Russian lobbying on Iraq's behalf. The majority of the populations of France and Russia (as well as that of most other countries in the world) supported the policies before these alleged kickbacks were supposed to have taken place. —Gabbe 08:52, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
Working on it. Might take a while.Warren Dew 08:27, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
Okay, done. The main change was to clarify that sanctions formed a justification for the war because of humanitarian reasons, as mentioned earlier in the article in the discussion of Donald Rumsfeld's outline of reasons for going to war, and not because they succeeded in changing the behavior of the Security Council nations that Saddam favored. The rest of the section was rewritten for clarity as well. I added cites for the official investigation by the Volcker commission into the sanctions; I believe everyone (including the U.N.) considers that source credible in its documentation of the bribery and corruption in the Oil for Food Programme. While Fox News is a perfectly legitimate news source, I ended up removing the Fox News cites because (1) they didn't actually support the previous version of the section anyway, and (2) the sections they did support were tangential to this discussion, and were already covered in the main Oil for Food article (which I also referenced). I also removed the dispute tag since the section is completely rewritten to address the issues mentioned, and there has been no further discussion for over six months; Gabbe, if I misunderstood your reasons for tagging it, feel free to put it (or a more limited tag) back and clarify here.Warren Dew 16:37, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Article is Laced with POV Problems AND Irrelevance/Disinfo
This article is horrible. I was going through it simply picking sections apart to fix typos and improperly formatted links and I'm coming across all sorts of junk. As some examples:
Found in a section "Weapons of Mass Destruction", there is a claim that there is a "general consensus" that the reason for the war being based on false statements was that there was a massive intel failure. This claim is tenuously supported by a few news reports that apparently have little to do with the actual claim. It either needs to be shown that there is some "consensus" by citing actual arguments and claims as such, or removed. One thing that immediately leaps to my mind is Paul Pillar, a respected Ex-CIA official who claimed quite publically that the primary problem was not the faulty intel, but that the Administration cherry-picked details and did not request or receive any comprehensive overview on Iraq.
Found as apparent "support" for the "general consensus" claim above:
On August 14, 2005, The Washington Post published an article titled Iraqi Chemical Stash Uncovered [37]. The presentation identifies a chemical weapons facility discovered in Iraq and chemical weapons uncovered which were in the process of being classified. The time of instantiation was unknown. The article incorrectly indicated that Chemican Weapons was not used against allied forces in Iraq (ignoring the May 22, 2004 IED attack), ignores the July 2, 2004 discovery of Sarin Gas warheads and launchers by Polish Allies, and even contradicts the self-same article by indicating that chemical weapons were not found in Iraq.
This may or may not have a valid place in this article, but in its current location it's obviously pro-Bush propoganda. It either needs to be moved to a more relevant place or eliminated. The various charges it makes of "Sarin Gas warheads" and whatnot also need to be cited.
The entire section "Purported Iraqi intelligence plots" is nothing but a laundry list of far-right speculation and wild-eyed accusations. This article is already of an excessive size. I have to seriously question why every random claim against Iraq needs to be listed, and I would suggest removing this entire section. To my knowledge, nothing has ever come of the various claims leveled in this section, so it's really nothing more than putting random private-sector, non-official accusations with no real recognition of validity into an encyclopedia.
When it comes down to it, is it really necessary to include every tiny little claim anybody anywhere made about Iraq? I would like to propose that this article be whittled down to include two primary sections (with necessary subsections): one detailing official arguments presented by governments and a smaller section that can be used to briefly mention some of the more prominent popular arguments used by people in the media/blogs/etc. The way it is now, there's too much unsupportable hearsay and speculation mixed in with the official lines and it's too difficult to tell when we're talking about the CIA/Bush Regime or some wild-eyed frat boy posting on DKOS/Freep. --208.41.98.142 14:50, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
Working on it. Reorganized to move some of the, shall we say, "less official" items to the bottom. Warren Dew 06:03, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] "The two points of view"
That's currently the title of one of the sections. There are only two possible points of view on this subject? I don't think so.
It might be accurate to say that there are two main points of view, although that's probably oversimplifying also. For now, that's what I'm changing it to. --Mr. Billion 17:10, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] unwarranted gloss
The paragraph on House Joint Resolution 114 glossed the bit of the rationale dealing with support of terrorists with the parenthical addition "(PALF)" and these two references: "Saddam Pays 35K for Palestinian Bombers", Fox News, 2002-03-26. "Saddam dispenses blood money to win Palestinian hearts", The Age, 2002-03-26.
However, no version of the resolution (see all of them; surprisingly it was not linked before) is specific about which terrorists were supported/harbored and how: what it says is "Whereas Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations;" and "Whereas the United States is determined to prosecute the war on terrorism and Iraq's ongoing support for international terrorist groups. . .".
Editors should not be inserting their own interpretations of what Congress meant as if they were unquestioned fact; this gloss not warranted unless there's some source in a position to know (e.g. the author or authors of the bill) which says "Those bits about international terrorist groups, refer to the payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, etc."—and of course that source needs to be cited. —Charles P._(Mirv) 06:19, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Israel
Support of/defence of Israel/1996 "clean break" plan is not mentioned? Strange considering the volume of people, up to and including Bush, claiming that it had something to do with the war. Will edit in some of the details assuming no objections. D Mac Con Uladh 09:02, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Unprofessional article
"Promoters of the war often referenced the religion of Islam, which proponents claimed was likely to produced (sic) a future alliance between Iraq and rogue terrorist elements"
This is deeply unprofessional writing.
Promoters of the war? War promoters? That immediately demonizes the subjects.
"often referenced the religion of Islam"? How often? 3 times a week?
That's a ridiculous way to start a sentence, never mind an article. It also paints the subjects as "the accused".
Article brings Wikipedia into disrepute; an example of the kind of article that makes Wikipedia uncitable.
80.229.242.179 21:29, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Imminent threat
That's what this war was sold on. Why doesn't it appear? Blah42 02:26, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
- A good point, but members of the administration deny using this exact phrase. Indeed, they said "deep and gathering threat," "sobering threat," etc., while leaving "imminent threat" to their allied news commentators. Debating the precise language used is a frustrating exercise, but certainly Saddam Hussein's Iraq was portrayed as a threat to the United States, which was absurd. Iraq was no more a threat than Poland. In truth, George W. Bush's United States was a threat to Iraq, as confirmed by subsequent events. Paul 01:57, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] MAD
Here's evidence the U.S. government knew Iraq didn't have WMD's; if it did, the U.S. would never have invaded for the same reason they never invaded the Soviet Union: mutual assured destruction. Any thoughts? VolatileChemical 02:35, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
- Absolutely correct, but others will claim it is oversimplified -- "If Saddam Hussein actually possessed nukes, how many would he have possessed?" -- that sort of thing. This subject matter contains so many intensely debated fairy tales that it practically amounts to a religious argument. Paul 01:50, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] "Policy towards Iraq" Contradiction
'Furthermore, in November 1998, at the urging of President Bill Clinton, the U.S. House of Representatives and the US Senate passed the "Iraq Liberation Act of 1998," [12] which "declare[d] that it should be the policy of the United States to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and to replace it with a democratic government." President Clinton signed this bill into law.'
The next section starts off with: "After the September 11, 2001 attacks the Bush administration policy toward Iraq became that of regime change."
My question is, how can the policy suddenly "become that of regime change" when a law had already been passed 3 years prior stating that "it should be the policy of the United States to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and to replace it with a democratic government"
To me that sounds more like a jab at Bush than a fair statement. 66.83.182.123 15:39, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
