Funny thing is the Chicken Hawk Kay doesn't even apologize in the article.

Can you spot an apology?
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=a136eb68-224f-4dfd-9762-b62d9915f4b5

Grumpy - the article is a synopsis of various headline or otherwise reporting from selective media outlets...their "Big Stories"

All this and more has already been noted, observed and in many cases already exerpted on the Tyee comment pages. Boring, and old news!

It took Kay three years to figure out this war is wrong? He's not too bright then is he?

I think this will be very useful. It is a very quick summary with helpful links to more information.
Good job.

This may particular article may be "old" news but in the future it should be an outlet for those breaking stories everyone is eager to talk about.

It may help to keep other threads on topic. I'm glad to see it, thanks, Tyee, for providing it.

doh... should read "This particular..."

Damn. Can we get an edit function here? Or at least a spell check? Sometimes I'm just too lazy to do the cut and paste into a text editor.

I wouldn't get too excited about Aspersians such as Jonathan Kay pretending that they think the Iraq war was a mistake.

The Iraq war was faked into existence by the protectors of Israel, and as it has destroyed the place as an immediate threat, it has accomplished exactly what it was supposed to accomplish, and has therefore been a roaring successs. Now if they can only get the place divided into three hostile nations, the congratulatory back slapping will be going on in the secret meeting places of Mossad.

Look for more of the same in Iran, unless the Foleys and Abramoffs have fatally wounded the power of the Wolfowitzes, Pearls and Rumsfelds to get American troops to die on behalf of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, and to incidentally murder five or six hundred thousand Iraqis.

God willing, the bunker busting nukes lined up all in a row for Iran by these same disgusting neocons will be stood down.

Nice, Truman. Yes, we can only dream of more 'Aspersians' casting aspersions. I think the Israeli connexion is a little tendentious however – I suspect that the US would still be in Iraq if Israel were in Arizona – perhaps Florida would be a better choice.

Save for Kim Il-Jong and a scrappy Hezbollah though you're probably right about IRAN.

I see Iraq, as much as anything, as having arisen from the false and too easily 'completed' conquest of Afghanistan.

Hubris builds quickly and dies slowly.

Congress appears out of the loop still but George will definitely be in trouble if the GOP goes down on Nov 7 to the crushing defeat it so richly deserves. Funny how so many of them – GOP legislators and their enablers - have come a cropper of the same sexual peccadilloes and non conforming tendencies they so much hated, feared and hinted at in others.

The window of opportunity is closing, slowly but inexorably.

I think we may get out of this one, just barely, without another massive bloodbath in the Middle East.

kwl, do you really think Jonathan Kay "is not too bright?"

Come on!

Alcibiades wrote: "I see Iraq, as much as anything, as having arising from he false and too easily 'completed' conquest of Afghanistan."

There's only one thing wrong with this, Alcibiades. You're much too intelligent to actually believe it.

Google this: "O'Neill: Bush Planned Iraq Invasion Before 9/11."

"The Bush administration began planning to use U.S. troops to invade Iraq within days after the former Texas governor entered the White House three years ago, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told CBS News' 60 Minutes."

O'Neill: "From the very beginning there was a conviction that Saddam Husein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill told BCS, according to excerpts released Saturday by the network. "For me, the notion of a pre-emption, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a huge leap."

Richard Clarke, in his 60 minute interview said: "They were talking about Iraq on 9/11. They were talking about it on 9/12," Clarke said in the CBS interview that was conducted as part of the promotion for his book.

Read all of Clarke's opinions on the Iraq war for more of the same.

In fact, Alcibiades, as you well know, Bush's private priority as a nation from which to exact revenge after 9/11 was indeed Iraq, not Afghanistan.

I know you're only doing your job, Alcibiades, spreading disinformation, but your claim that the invasion of Iraq arose out of the 'completed conquest of Afghanistan,' is just too silly to be taken at face value.

Mais non, mon ami!

You may well have been right about the planning, undoubtedly you are.

Nightbloom posted that, at a war college somewhere or other, he took a class from an unnamed authority who confirmed/alleged that the US had/has a 'plan' to invade Canada and was, more or less, ready to implement it in November of 1970. That, furthermore, Trudeau knew full well of this 'fact' and it played strongly in his own decision to invoke the War Measures Act and bring helmeted and armed soldiers onto the streets of Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City.

Now this wasn't a big surprise to me because there had been hints of it at the time and other things which pointed in that direction as well.

My only point, above, was to suggest that had Afghanistan not gone so relatively swimmingly for the Americans - after all the Canadian friendly-fire incident was one of the few 'combat related' multiple casualties in the whole little war - that American hubris and self-confidence relative to the upcoming Iraq adventure might have been tempered a bit.

The Administration might have, under such less-than-rosy circumstances actually have listened to advisers like General Shinseki(sp?) and come up with:
a. a better plan, or
b. effected a more thorough vetting of the intelligence, which has, as you so accurately point out proved not to be very intelligent at all.

I suggest that all possible explanations of the disaster which has been unfolding before our eyes need to be taken into consideration, that's all.

As for the Israeli factor, I come down somewhere between Mearsheimer and Walt and Noam Chomsky on the question of who's pulling whose strings.

I think it's almost always unwise to call people and their ideas 'silly' - a bit of advice I'll give you now, for free.

The problem with disrespecting your interlocutor as a debating tactic – given what’s gone down in the past two or three months in the United States (and is currently happening relative to Afghanistan in this country too), ought to be obvious.

Like the interesting case of Conrad Black, it creates enormous future openings for Schadenfreude.

Some things are indeed, silly, Al, and for you to think Iraq was just bravado over Afghanistan definitely qualifies.

Not to mention your claim that Israel being smack dab in the centre of a couple of hundred million people or so who are virtually pissed right off at it....has absolutely nothing to do with the wars the US has waged in the middle east...well...I dunno. You must think people are pretty stupid, I guess.

Try this for some reality:

AIPAC's Overt and Covert Ops by Juan Cole, August 2004.

http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?articleid=4367

Truman:
I would never say that the American Government - as more and more Americans and their civil servants are clustering to repeat to any media source that will listen to them - haven't been both stupid, chauvinistic and incompetent. It probably is also guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.

I would agree with Chomsky that Israeli interests and American interests have been in lock step pretty much all the time (with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter's time in the White House) since the 6-day war. But that’s not what you wrote.

But, what I did write was that if Afghanistan had not been such a cakewalk and had, implicitly, tied up more troops, wasted more materiel and shed more American blood; such an outcome would have had a head-clearing effect upon the hubristic sons of bitches who immediately thereafter convinced their commander in chief that another swimmingly simple exercise in Iraq was just the thing for an encore.

As, metaphorically at least, the Israeli cock-up against Hezbollah seems to have taken the wire edge off the US and Israeli desire to punish Iran for its sins and, in a way, the nuclear jack in the box in Pyongyang has also diminished George Bush's desire to 'go it alone' in the far east.

As a story in the Weekly Standard last week pointed out - the US has already given China a 2nd mortgage on its freedom to move in that area.

The reign of the neoconmen, if we're all really fortunate, may be coming to an end. Like most fashion trends, it'll come to Canada 6 months later.

Glaring contradiction, Alcibiades.

You wrote: "I would agree with Chomsky that Israeli interests and American interests have been in lock step pretty much all the time..."

Then you wrote: "I suspect that the US would still be in Iraq if Israel were in Arizona..."

Israeli interests regarding Saddam was regime change, eh.

Israeli interest regarding Iran is regime change and destruction of its vast current and potential military might and maybe getting some oil.

Imagine what it must be like to be an Israeli living in that beseiged, shall we say, uh...pre-empted, tiny nation. Wouldn't you want to get your constant surrogate soldiers to destroy your enemies, if you were smart enough to sleaze them into it?

US interests in the Persian Gulf predate their interest in Israel. There are two different currents at work in this, and while they do have overlapping concerns the can be drawn in mutually exclusive lines. US interests in the Persian Gulf are largely economic; US interests in Israel are largely political. The Neocons have managed to combine the two into their own world view and so Israel is a beacon of the "Democracy and Freedom" they have given Iraq. Just because they have managed to link Iraq and Israel in some Neocon promotional material does not mean they are actually related: it is a marriage of convenience between mostly exclusive issues.

Any bets on how soon before the next presidential election Donald Rumsfeld will be requested to fall on his sword. Oh, I can't use requested, that's already happened. How about ordered?

Somewhere back in the tyee archives I predicted that the Iraq war would end when a sufficient number of body bags came back and the Americans would suddenly notice that Bush, by way of deficit, had destroyed the American economy. I think I predicted early '07 as the time when the Johnny would come marching home again.

See also: "And Johnny Got A Gun," by Dalton Trumbo.

As for Rumsfeld, I'll go with Jan 14, 07.

I don't think it was a contradiction at all Truman. Gerhardius puts my view as succinctly and well, perhaps better, than I could myself.

From tomorrow's Guardian:

Another conservative voice voiced hid disenchantment with American 'empire' yesterday in the Los Angeles Times.

I'll post it for the interested in the other place.

should he 'his' above not 'hid' - sorry - it's up now for those of you who have the key

Last weeks edition of Frontline on PBS (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/yeariniraq/) explained, again, that the White House policy re. Iraq (removal of Hussein) was formulated by a small group of people. This can be traced back at least 10 years involving these same people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Break).

Afghanistan was not always a priority. Iraq is now a fractured disaster that may please some. Truman Green's assessments may well be right.

"Clean Break" was the Neocons effort to combine US internal political support for Israel with the Neos ongoing desire to export "Democracy and Freedom" to Iraq. The entire document reads like it was written by a bunch of oppourtunists looking to aggrandize their own position through linkage with the Israeli lobby. The document is here:
http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm

The Neocons have no domestic policy as such, aside from believing that he electorate is too stupid to get "it," but want to get people in office who will give them free reign on foreign policy. During the first US/UN war against Iraq, the Neocons were a minor piece of the right wing brain trust, but they had been gaining influence. They were amongst those calling for the coalition forces to push all the way to Baghdad and topple Saddam. The Neocons blamed the UN nature of the operation, preferring a narrow coalition that could have dismissed Arab concerns and been guided exclusively by those in D.C. with a expansionist doctrine. The problem was that the coalition was pretty popular in the US at the time as it was part of the effort to portray George the First as a statesman. The Neocons realised they needed to develop ties to areas of domestic support and they chose the Christian Right and the Israeli lobby.

The Christian Right firmly believes that the US represents the "Highest Good" and love the symbols of the US more than the reality. Their world is one where the US Constitution was put together by a group of uniformly bible thumping God fearing American patriots inspired by God alone and not beholden to any past thinkers. The nature of this special relationship is such that US policy under George II or any right wing nut is inherently good, and is upholding American Ideals. This attitude is not unique to one area of US politics, but it is the Christian Right's understanding and expression of "American Exceptionalism." The Neocons portray themselves as evangelists of American ideals and the chunks of the Republican base eat it up.

I think Bin Laden and his destroying links should have been deleted by the USA with the help of other countries. However, the USA is not a social worker for IRAQ and they should leave IRAQ alone as I am sure the USA would not like IRAQ to enter the states and have them be a social worker for the USA. Social Worker meaning, how to live your life like we do!

Speaking of the National Post's Kay owning up to his mistakes, when is the rest of Canwest's empire going to own up to their "error" regarding the truthiness of global warming?

Not for a while it seems, as I note that the reality has still not percolated into the various editor's, or columnist's, corrupted little minds -yet.

Hmmm!

No BIG STORIES on the weekend I guess.

4000 troops in Oaxaca doesn't make the grade I guess.