so much for draining the swamp

[Dill]

(11-15-2016, 04:49 PM)JustWinBaby Wrote: Why, because he that's how he campaigned?  That's pretty much why you assume neither Clinton nor Obama wouldn't have invaded in the same situation.

Bush did not campaign to invade Iraq.

I assume neither Clinton or Obama would have invaded because they had better judgment (as did W's. father) and because the pretexts for invasion were manufactured within the Bush 43 administration, not the sort of thing the intel community would have discovered regardless of administration.

In January of 2002, the intelligence community was unanimous there was no evidence Iraq had WMDs and so posed no threat. Without cooked evidence, there were no grounds to claim Iraq was a threat to the US, and so no grounds for violent regime change. Cooked intel changed the view of Congress by Sept. 2002.

Congress would never have resolved to give a president the power to invade without that evidence. To claim Clinton or Obama WOULD have invaded is to claim that each of those men would have provided Congress with the requisite cooked evidence--which simply wasn't forthcoming from the intel community without a little "help." Unless they pulled necons into their national security staff--people wholly at odds with the Democratic party--and then supported their drive to cook evidence, Clinton and Obama were not going to invade Iraq.

Even Bernie Sanders would have invaded Afghanistan; the logic of the facts of the case and national security dictated that.
But the Iraq invasion was solely a consequence of the "accident" that one administration staffed its national security team with people driven by a foreign policy vision not widely shared by the policy establishment, and least of all by Democrats.

And we need to keep this history in mind as the uninformed Trump now looks to staff his cabinet with Neocons who still say the Iraq war was a good decision.