OT: Raising or lowering taxes--what effect on the economy?

Is that you Michael Moore? LOL

Let see if I understand this. A guy who calls himself a STOOGE thinks Al Gore is smarter than Karl Rove, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, and Eisenhower, right? LOL

mike hunt

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Mike, you're a smart man. I never gave a thought to the three stooges, larry, moe and curly, Jezzus why didn't I see it before. So we have a stooge on board, LOL. I like it especially when they beat each other on top the head. They were funny and now we got a real live one among us.

Any guy who calls himself a vagina shouldn't make fun of someone who named himself after three comedians.

Gore didn't have to be smarter than Rove and any of those presidents, just smarter than GW Bush. Unfortunately he wasn't as crooked as GW Bush in 2000.

It was a mistake to:

1. invade a country that wasn't harboring or helping international terrorists;
2. invade a country that had no WMDs;
3. invade that country without explicit international approval;
4. invade with far fewer troops than needed for victory;
5. lay off the country's army;
6. banish all members of the ruling party.

No President but GW Bush would have made all six of those mistakes because we have never had a President so stupid, ignorant, and immature. And scoffing at me won't make GW Bush right about Iraq.

I mean realistically, what would happen?

The fact is that the stupidest man to ever be the American President, a man you favored over Gore, has made the biggest mistake in the history of our country. If you believe otherwise, then maybe you really do believe GW Bush's claim that his generals never asked for more troops.

Where have you been? If anything good comes from Bush's reign he will take credit for that, everything else is Clinton's fault.

You forgot to say in my opinion because the facts are far different, than you seem to believe, on all six points LOL

mike hunt

People know the difference between fact an opinion and don't need each to be explicitly labelled for them.

It's a fact that, since the end of Gulf War I, Saddam wasn't helping international terrorists, and the only WMDs there were leftover scraps that even he didn't know about. The fact that the Iraq Survey Group has come up empty in its $600 million seach for WMDs is why GW Bush hasn't been crowing about finding WMDs, and only once, around May,

2003, in a televised interview, did he say that WMDs had been found, something he soon semi-retracted.

But let's assume that Saddam did have WMDs and was buddies with bin Laden. Was it still smart to invade Iraq with only 140,000 soldiers and lay off the Iraqi military and civilian government?

You are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts. You may believe that to be fact but the intelligence agencies of every major county thought otherwise. As did the UN, when it unanimously past resolution after resolution in an effort to force Iraq to comply, after twelve years, with the first gulf war ceasefire and account for and destroy the WMDS that Iraq listed that they had as part of the agreement.

As to the number of troops needed, I would not know I have never bee a General. Apparently the American Generals thought the number of troop was sufficient, because that is what they asked for in way of troops. As to the Iraqis troops, there were none to be found they all took off their uniforms and ran away. LOL

mike hunt

You're using that quote from Patrick Moynahan the way some people use the term "junk science" to defend junk science. I gave the facts, but you won't accept them.

Our own CIA thought that Saddam posed no threat, and Colin Powell considered Saddam to be "under control". When Powell gave his presentation to the UN in late 2002, didn't you get the impression that the administration's arguments for invasion weren't exactly solid? Because until then, I had been in favor of the invasion -- after all, what US President would call for war unless it was absolutely essential and there was rock-solid proof? Powell is embarassed of his presentation and considers it a low point in his career. Why would he feel that way if he had told only the truth?

And it turned out that Saddam had largely complied with the orders to disarm, and all his huffing and puffling was just a fake front to impress his fellow Middle Eastern madmen.

The UN authorized the use of force to back the inspection process, not to invade Iraq. A resolution for invasion didn't come to a vote because the US withdrew it first, knowing it would be rejected.

It's pretty obvious that you need a lot more troops to invade a country with 160,000 square miles and 20 million people (Iraq) than a country with 8,000 square miles and only a million people (Kuwait). That works out to 30 soldiers per square mile for Kuwait, verses only 1 solder per square mile for Iraq..

You know very well that the generals wanted more troops but were turned down because Rumsfeld was obsessed with proving that his "transformation" doctrine would let the US project power with far fewer troops than any other military would need for the same mission. Even General Tommy Franks, who still defends the administration on the war, gave a very, very meek defense of the the small troop force, saying that Rumsfeld had the military look at the mission in new and different ways each time they studied it. Translation: Rumsfeld pressured them like crazy to cut down on troop level requests. If the military had been satisfied with the troop levels, would the Army Chief of Staff have said, at his retirement/firing ceremony, "We need more troops"? There are also rumors that the upper ranks were dissatisfied with the way the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Meyers, didn't stand up to Rumsfeld, and some said that if Powell had been in his place he would have pushed for a force of 500,000 soldiers.

OTOH, how many upper-level officers, those with experience in combat and strategic planning, thought that we had sent in too many soldiers, as opposed to too few? There was a colonel who wanted to send in only

75,000, as mentioned in a Frontline documentary, possibly this one:

or this one:

But he wanted to keep the Iraqi military in place. My point is, if half the miltiary wanted a smaller invasion force and half wanted a larger one, then maybe the 140,000 chosen was the right size, but in reality the vast majority of military planners wanted a far larger force.

If there were no Iraqi soldiers, then why were we able to "lay off"

500,000 of them soon after "Mission Accomplished", through CPA Order #2? And before they were laid off, why did Iraqi soldiers offer to send 10,000 of their own to help the Americans when we were having problems finding the enemy? This was even mentioned in another PBS Frontline documentary, "The Lost Year in Iraq", which was recently aired again. The whole thing can be viewed online at