Posted on 10/24/2015 8:29:04 PM PDT by DaveinOK54
Tony Blair has finally said sorry for the Iraq War – and admitted he could be partly to blame for the rise of Islamic State.
The extraordinary confession by the former Prime Minister comes after 12 years in which he refused to apologise for the conflict.
Blair makes his dramatic ‘mea culpa’ during a TV interview about the ‘hell’ caused by his and George Bush’s decision to oust Saddam Hussein. (snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
+1
Bush should have listened to his officers in theater instead of his cronies back in DC.
My understanding was the Sunni's boycotted the election because Bush listened to his advisers and purged the government and army of roughly 250,000 Sunni personnel immediately after we took Baghdad. These former Iraq soldiers became the insurgency and started blowing things up.
And I believe it was Gen. Petreus implementing a suggestion of one of Bush's advisers to bring these former Sunni military back into the fold by doling out huge sums of cold hard cash which put down the Sunni revolt - not the actual surge. We had cargo aircraft flying pallets of cash to Iraq for paying off Sunni rebels.
After Obama stole the election, he turned his back to Iraq and the Sunni insurgents again rose up, merging into what is now called ISIS.
I think you did a great job of describing what led to ISIS, I add the above for further clarification/discussion/understanding.
You've got that right. But we're all missing the biggest problem we're facing as a nation. That is when it comes to selling morality, we find ourselves with nothing left to sell.
We must fix ourselves before we try to fix the world. If we don't, the world will eventually fix us, permanently. And probably much sooner than we care to think; especially now that the enemy is inside our gates.
It may be hard for old school Americans to think this way, but them's the cold hard facts.
Either way, we're facing much worse trouble ahead.
Our grandsons will fight a world war against the Muslims.
And it won’t be like the other World Wars, it will be a bunch of civil wars.
Why is he saying this now, after the fact, umpteen years later? All wars have pros and cons. I can only speculate that Tony wants to get some social status or lucrative position that would only be made available if he disavow his role in the Iraq War. He may already have called W. to explain why he would be doing it. “They say I can become Dean of the College, but only if I apologize for that war.”
I need the money George, I’m down to my wife’s last 4 Million Pounds!”
He shouldn’t have apologized if he did what he thought was right at the time.
I hope he gets death-cancer then.
It was Gen Allen who passed out large sums, but Petraeus was also. That is what brought all the Sunni tribal leaders back into the fold, to support Maliki, and because Maliki, at that time was doing what Bush told him to do and sharing power.
There was period of time there of 2-3 years when Iraq was stable before Maliki started purging sunni and kurds. According to Obama and his spokesman, they were urging Maliki to get back on the right path, but he didn't.
Apparently, Obama, and many others knew ISIS was a potential threat, but felt that because of all the training and weapons the Iraqi military had received from the US, they could stand up to ISIS.
Nobody expected the Iraq military to abandon their arms and equipment to flee from ISIS. That was the shocker, and the game changer.
The details of what you describe are rather accurate but they involved a lot of individuals who are not named George W. Bush.
Bush largely did the right thing by standing strong with military force to back better decision making in Iraq and the larger region.
Remember that the radical anti American Left was committed to making sure that we don’t have permanent bases in either Afghanistan and Iraq. That is because they know that the antiAmerican fantasies they seek cannot win in a world where we can regularly assess and kill our enemies. We need those bases today. We cannot have them because ISIS and Michael Moore are agreed about what the world should look like.
Ironically Bin Laden was right— the world looks to the man on the Strong horse.
Bush was the strong man. Obama is the weak man and that is exactly what the anti americans want— both here at home and abroad. Obama and his advisers have deliberately conveyed a message of confusion and weakness. They have helped the Muslim Brotherhood and other Arab supremacists in the region.
We all would do well to stop pretending Bush is the enemy. He really is not.
I sadly would give Obama a third term if 80 percent of Americans would finally realize how stupid all this BDS is. If the Left and the Right want to agree that Bush was the problem — go ahead. I won’t be traveling that road with you.
I will sadly simply wait for the next attack that blows that stupid theory out of the water.
And again I don’t fault anyone who wants to be more strong or direct than Bush. I am not going to pretend that Bush is the worst. He is quite far from the worst and much much much much better than President Obama.
If Bush leaves Saddam alone, the rest of chain reaction never takes place. Obama was never going to invade Iraq. Absolutely and unequivocally Iraq invasion by Bush-43 was the worst foreign policy blunder since Vietnam blunder.
I will grant you that Obama/Hillary speeded up the kerfuffle in middle-east. But it was inevitable. American troops could not stay in Iraq for ever. Islamic extremists will never suddenly turn peaceful. Allah will not permit that.
The invaluable lesson: Leave non-jihadists dictators alone. They can control the jihadists much better than American military ever can. If you have missed this lesson, I am afraid you do not understand Muslims, Koran, Islam, jihadists and the middle-east.
Good Grief!!
And one more point.....The Arabs & Persians MUST sell their oil. They can not drink it. Who cares if it is the dictator selling the oil, or the Mullah’s selling the oil. My car does not care who sold the oil. The world markets will determine the price of oil. Fracking has fxxxked the OPEC cartel’s blackmail for ever.
You are the one that is propounding the liberal talking points re: Obama’s disastrous decisions leading to the rise of ISIS and trying to blame it on Bush - ‘then why sign it?’ - utter nonsense. The decision to pull out major combat forces was indeed in place...that didn’t mean a separate agreement should not have been reached to have a small contingency force in place to repel any outside attacks before they became a major problem. Are you so ill informed that has to be explained to you, or are being a troll and deliberately trying to mislead people?
OK OK you win. Go away!
Lots of countries have chemical weapons, lets invade them all so none of these weapons ever fall into the hands of bad people. Yea that will work out just swell.
My understanding is Iraq’s chemical weapons were so old and unsafe that it would have killed anyone who tried to use them.
Turning ME into a cashcow for Rainbow Dick Cheney's Halliburton crew; and allowing a bunch of foreign service "certified" parasites to shove their perversion into the face of the indigenous culture from atop the US Embassy in New Babylon - NOT. SO. MUCH.
>>My car does not care who sold the oil
What determines the value of the Petrodollar 1s and 0s flowing through the digital economic pipeline that determine how many units of product you can afford to have flow into your automocashcow?
Let us know how that ratio is operating when OPEC is fixed to petrorubils instead.
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