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Notes -
Trump indicted with 4 counts over 2020 election
Why not?
Trump is perhaps the most hated man in America. He spent four years operating at the pinnacle of global power, an environment strewn with what are purported to be impartial legal tripwires placed to hinder abuses of power. He's incompetent and sloppy, arrogant, astonishingly vain, and defined by his contempt for anything that blocks his personal ambitions.
The people now indicting him achieved office through a population dozens of millions strong that uniformly believes that he's Satan incarnate, a criminal, a dangerous megalomaniac, a giant retarded toddler armed with a machine gun. They believe that his election was manifest evidence that our political system is deeply, perhaps irreparably broken. They see his Presidency as a disaster that needs to be cleaned up and then prevented from ever recurring. And again, he spent four years being, at the absolute best, sloppy and incompetent in an environment that purportedly is supposed to demand precision on pain of serious legal consequences.
Why not indict him, and jail him too while they're at it? How could doing so possibly be a bad idea? We're a nation of laws, right? He at least plausibly broke them, right? This is what the system does, these are the rules we all agreed to, what possible room could there be for complaint? And sure, there are some people, maybe even a lot of people who are too mind-killed to accept reality, and they're going to complain anyway. But what are they going to do about it?
Nothing, right?
The people doing this have the all the cards. They won the election, the bureaucracy is on-side, half the nation's voters have been screaming for this for four years. This is what power is for, to get good things done even when they're hard, even when bad people stand in the way! How could they not do exactly this, exactly now? If the bad people can't get it through their heads that they've fucking lost, then it becomes necessary to hammer the point, repeatedly and with vigor, until it finally sinks in. If they aren't getting it, then that means you aren't hammering hard enough. At some point in the escalation curve, they'll have to cave, won't they? That's how it works, isn't it? What possible reason could be imagined for doing anything else?
And if such a reason can't be imagined, why would you expect anything other than exactly this?
Doesn't this just establish how Chaotic Evil the US is as a political entity?
George W. Bush (the hanging chad to Trump's virgin 'unlawful means') invaded Iraq with a lie, recklessly oversaw a pointless, insane war in Afghanistan. He has rivers of blood on his hands, a good chunk of it American. How many US soldiers have killed themselves from their pointless service in his pointless, retarded wars? But this is all Presidential and Acceptable so he gets off scot-free. The most anyone thinks of it is when he makes a Freudian slip in the standard anti-Putin diatribe and suffers a little embarrassment:
Is it a mask-off moment? Is there even a mask?
Trump... moved some documents about that he shouldn't have? Had his supporters come into the Capitol where they were shot at and then left peacefully once they turned on the announcement system telling them to leave? And this is the most awful and terrible thing to ever happen to US democracy? This is the man who needs to go to prison, out of all living US presidents?
What kind of insane world is this? Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize before he even did anything, back in 2009 'for fostering nuclear non-proliferation and reaching out to the Muslim World'. He then preceded to wreck Libya. He should've been getting Nobel Prizes for War or Destruction of Functioning Countries.
This reminds me of Nixon too. Nixon could bomb Laos into oblivion without any approval for war and that was totally fine, apparently. It happened before and after Nixon too, it's basically standard practice. Yet Nixon authorizes somebody to break into a journalist's apartment and that's just beyond the pale? It's a parody of justice, anarcho-tyranny on a grotesque scale.
It's not even Chaotic Evil where one is unabashed and upfront about doing whatever one pleases. It's Chaotic Evil dressed up as Lawful Good, how the US is some noble Paladin defending the Rules-Based International Order (though just what those Rules are is never made clear, for obvious reasons). 'Wink wink, nudge, nudge, the International Criminal Court is based in one of our vassal states and if that's not enough, we'll invade the Hague the moment a US service member is brought there.'
Do you think W personally doubted there were WMDs in Iraq? It’s an interesting question.
I sometimes wonder if Saddam Hussein was aware there were no WMDs in Iraq - up to the point where resolution 1441 passes the UNSC, he acts like a man who has WMDs and expects to lose power if he gives them up.
I also think that W would have received a sufficient amount of stovepiped intelligence to convince anyone who doesn't start out with the prior that the entire US national security elite are lying liars that there were WMDs in Iraq. Apart from the fact that the national security establishment are lying liars who knew what the White House wanted to hear and were happy to provide it, Cheyney and Rumsfeld were exceptionally able DC power players, partially controlled the flow of intelligence to the Oval Office, and wanted the war even more than Bush.
The theory I heard is that Hussein was trying to pretend he had WMDs in order to intimidate potential rivals in the region like Iran, and accidentally did too good of a job.
The theory I heard is that the neocons in the Whitehouse wanted to find any kind of plausible reason to sell an invasion of Iraq to the American people, and just lied and lied and lied until they got it. I think there's more justification for this theory than the one you heard, however.
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I don’t think W’s personal motivations for the Iraq War had anything to do with WMDs, and so said intelligence was likely superfluous, his reasons were primarily that he wanted to avenge his father and secondarily that as a born-again Evangelical he had some weird eschatological views about war in the Middle East in general.
I agree that it’s unclear that Saddam knew he didn’t have WMDs until quite late, and given the extreme levels of grift in the Baathist party and Iraqi military pre-invasion it’s entirely believable that his own officials had repeatedly lied to him and claimed they did (I don’t know if there’s ironclad proof of this). Obviously he strongly encouraged the perception that he did until late 2002 as you say.
This is such a self-serving narrative, the blueprint for regime change in Iraq was written down by Zionists embedded in the American government for years before Bush II's invasion of Iraq, with the fabricated intelligence on WMDs likewise coming from Zionists in key positions in the highest places in American government. The last ingredient was 9/11, which created the American public demand for reprisal against the Arab world.
I remember reading the "Bush invaded Iraq as revenge for his father" in high school, and looking back it is astonishing those textbooks do not mention Zionists influence as playing any role whatsoever in the war, and likewise the Wikipedia article on PNAC makes not a single mention of Zionism or Israel. How long can that charade last, and can you ignore the elephant in the room?
We’ve had this discussion before, but in any case I wasn’t saying that Bush’s personal motives were the reason that the Iraq War happened, simply that they had very little to do with WMDs (or neoconservatism, for that matter). And yes, the presence among Bush’s advisers and in his cabinet of his father’s men - many of whom saw not deposing Saddam in the Gulf War as one of HW’s biggest mistakes - obviously affected the decision to invade. HW was almost assassinated by Iraq in 1993, so W’s personal motivation was even more salient. There are few things many a powerful man would not do in vengeance for the man who tried to kill his father and who his own father blamed in part for his electoral humiliation, and for unfinished business that said father considered one of his biggest mistakes.
Dismissing the personal motivations of countless senior Bush I and II officials regarding the outcome of the Gulf War, and the dynastic relationship of the president personally, is what is ahistorical.
"Personal motives" include "being pressured by your own cabinet and Media apparatus", of which there is monumental evidence, whereas you just mentioned the "daddy revenge" theory which has no historical evidence. Indeed, the decision to invade Iraq and depose Saddam was not based on WMDs, it was predetermined by the written agenda of Zionists deeply embedded in the American foreign policy apparatus and the WMDs just became the last part of the narrative to tie a bow on the casus belli. Of course that same policy apparatus insisted that failing to institute regime change in Iraq in the Gulf War was HW's biggest mistake.
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I think the most believable retrospective history includes the idea that Saddam knew that there were no longer WMDs in Iraq, but he went to great lengths to obscure this fact, to the point that a significant portion of the chain of command of the Iraqi military absolutely believed that they did have them, planned their defenses around the expectation that they would have them, and had to scramble to replan after being blindsided by the fact that they weren't about to show up in the next month's logistics delivery.
Seems to me Saddam was trying to posture to prevent attack — if he admitted no WMD his regime was vulnerable. At the same time, he had to try to walk a tight rope to prevent a second Iraq war.
I don't think this was the case. I believe it was North Korea style posturing, where it was all tied up in his ego of what he wanted to be able to do even if he was unable to.
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