{"id":359,"date":"2004-02-27T22:07:02","date_gmt":"2004-02-27T22:07:02","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:31","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:31","slug":"chickenhawk_again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=359","title":{"rendered":"Chickenhawk Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s the ultimate response to the (sadly not yet dead) ‘chickenhawk<\/a>‘ notion. From Chief Wiggles<\/a>, on his return to the U.S.:<\/p>\n

The vast majority of the military unanimously support the president’s decision to take preemptive action against Saddam Hussein. We agree it was necessary in order to eliminate a serious threat to the stabilization of this region of the world, to free a country of people from bondage and torture, to prevent a continuation of an anti-American sentiment, for that matter anti-Western world policy, with the real potential, if not actual, to create such weapons and aid our enemies in their terrorist activities.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why is it that the people of the US armed forces have not and are not speaking out against the president’s decision, if in fact the WMD issue was the only premise behind making such a decision to go to war? Yes, we believed all along that he had such weapons before, that he had such weapons now, or that he possessed the knowledge and the capability to use, share, or develop such weapons in the future to promote his own anti-American plans. I have said all along that Saddam’s only real weapon against us was to hide everything so well that we would never find such evidence of their existence, in hopes that by doing so he would create a back lash of political opposition for the president. <\/p>\n

To give you my opinion, the fact of the matter is that the WMD issue has never been a major deal for any of us in the military, at least from all that I have spoken with. Yes, it was important, but not a do or die situation, as is portrayed by the president’s political rivals. Our success here in Iraq did not and has never swung on the hinge of finding or not finding the weapons of mass destruction. There are far too many other pertinent and relevant variables that make this a much too complicated scenario to lump into my nice little nutshell we call WMD. <\/p>\n

In this convoluted, intertwined every changing world environment, we have to rely on what we consider to be reliable and trustworthy intelligence, while understanding our own human limitations to correctly gather and interpret that same intelligence. We believed they existed and believe there is evidence of an existing program, either actual or potential.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, if you oppose the war – is this<\/i><\/b> really the guy who (along with his peers) you want to make the war\/no war decision?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s the ultimate response to the (sadly not yet dead) ‘chickenhawk’ notion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}