Bush & Saddam Should Stand Trial

FreeChile said:
It is possible to mislead people without lying to them--especially if people are afraid and gullible. Look at any of the skeptic sites on the techniques of the psychics to learn more about that. It is also possible to mislead or misguide oneself and those who follow you. Many cults exist showing that this is so.
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BS

Show me how they have mislead the American people into believing Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.
 
FreeChile said:
It is possible to mislead people without lying to them--especially if people are afraid and gullible. Look at any of the skeptic sites on the techniques of the psychics to learn more about that. It is also possible to mislead or misguide oneself and those who follow you. Many cults exist showing that this is so.
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The frequent presentation of the song "Have you Forgotten" on certain media outlets in the run up to the Iraq war was a deliberate attempt, IMO, to juxtapose WTC on the Iraq War puclicity campaign. The excuse given in a recent discussion of VP Cheney's consistent position was "if there is a 1 in a 100 chance he's )Saddam) got some WMD to hand off to a trouble maker, we can't wait until he does so, we have to do something about it ahead of time." Forget where I saw that, but it was less than a month ago.

Consider that Saddam Hussein was behind a failed car bomb assassination of GHW Bush.

If he would try that, in 1993, before the sanctions really squoze his nuts financially, what wouldn't he try? Good idea or bad, Saddam sure gave the impression to a lot of people that there wasn't much he wouldn't do.

DR
 
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FreeChile said:
It is possible to mislead people without lying to them--especially if people are afraid and gullible.
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Where did you even get the idea that anyone thought Saddam was behind 9/11 because of anything Bush said or did? Isn't that really just an assumption on your part? What we DO know, however, is that the day after 9/11, a very large majority (over 70%, IIRC) of Americans thought it likely that Saddam was involved in 9/11, before the administration had made any claims about responsibility at all. People came to their own conclusions. That number has gone down consistently over time, including during the leadup to the Iraq war.
 
FreeChile said:
Islamism is a very general word. It is akin to saying Jews or Christians;
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No it is not. I've explained this a number of times before, in language I thought was clear enough, but evidently it either was not, or people simply choose to disregard the distinction. Here, I'm going to make it as easy as I possibly can, and if people still act like they think I mean one when I mean the other, it's either because of simple pigheadedness or rank stupidity. Analogies:
  • When I say "Islam," that's the equivalent of "Christianity," i.e., the faith as a whole, not as a part. All Shiites are Muslims, but not all Muslims are Shiites. All Presbyterians are Christians, but not all Christians are Presbyterians.
  • "Muslim" corresponds to "Christian," i.e., any follower of the faith, without regard to denomination or sect. When I say, "He's a Christian," you don't know if he's a Southern Baptist or an Episcopalian. And when I say someone is a Muslim, I am not saying whether he is a Sunni or a Shiite.
  • "Islamism" corresponds to "violent fundamentalist Christianity," i.e. a violent subset of the larger faith, based on a rigid reading of the faith's primary scriptures.
  • "Islamist" corresponds to "violent fundamentalist Christian," i.e., someone who subscribes to the teachings of that violent subset of the larger faith.
You can quibble with me on some of the details (yeah, I know about how the Islamists want sha'aria law imposed under the new caliphate), but those are essentially the distinctions I use when I write.

Note I don't show any Muslim equivalent of "fundamentalist Christian." That's because AFAIK, there is no such thing as a non-violent fundamentalist Muslim (strict adherence to Muhammad's teachings requires killing people for a lot of things, while Jesus never required anyone to kill anyone for any reason), but there are non-violent fundamentalist Christians, the Jehovah's Witnesses who come knocking at your door being one example.

So, no, Islamism is not "a very general word." It's quite a specific word, directly related to "Islamist," which has become the one-word description of choice for a violent fundamentalist Muslim. Just as when I say "Christians," you don't think I mean "Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church," or vice versa, when I say "Muslims," you shouldn't think I mean "Islamists," or vice versa. I try to be very careful which terms I use, because distinctions matter. All Islamists want me dead; not all Muslims do.

Why are you concerned about a peaceful world 100 years from now?
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Congratulations on winning the Stupid Question of the Day Award. The day isn't over yet, but I'm quite confident no one is going to challenge that one.
 
Rob Lister said:
And yet the analogy seems to hold perfectly. Perhaps you should look up the definition.
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It is nothing like the present. The analogy is used constantly, yet it doesn't fit at all. Al Qaeda does not function like Nazi Germany at all. Hitler had armies marching past him, in the centre of an advanced industrial country, Osama is holed up in a cave in the mountains.
 
Rob Lister said:
And yet the analogy seems to hold perfectly. Perhaps you should look up the definition.
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Hi

It is 2006. War, and the politics it springs from, is bit different now in method, though not in aim, which is the same as it ever was:

get what you want from someone else,
however you can,
by hook or by crook.

DR
 
Mephisto, for the third time, will you answer for this lie you wrote?:

Mephisto said:
Secondly, the American people were mislead by the Bush administration that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.
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When did the Bush administration ever say or imply that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11?
 
This was from an interview that Brian Williams did with Bush a couple of days ago. Brian asks him about whether the war in Iraq was wrong, and his first repsonse brings up 9/11. He said that the war, the Iraq war, came to our shores, that our policy of hoping for calm led to the 9/11 attack. He certainly seems to be connecting the two with that statement.

Then Brian quickly reminded him that those weren't Iraqis, and Bush was clearly caught off guard (at least it seemed to me). He stammered a bit and said what you can read below where he quickly back-tracked. The flow of the transcription doesn't do justice to the nature of his tone. Then again, I am hardly an unbiased interpreter of body language when it comes to Bush.

WILLIAMS: When you take a tour of the world, a lot of Americans e-mail me with their fears that, some days they just wake up and it just feels like the end of the world is near. And you go from North Korea to Iran, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, and you look at how things have changed, how Americans are viewed overseas, if that is important to you. Do you have any moments of doubt that we fought a wrong war? Or that there's something wrong with the perception of America overseas?

BUSH: Well those are two different questions, did we fight the wrong war, and absolutely -- I have no doubt -- the war came to our shores, remember that. We had a foreign policy that basically said, let's hope calm works. And we were attacked.

WILLIAMS: But those weren't Iraqis.

BUSH : They weren’t, no, I agree, they weren't Iraqis, nor did I ever say Iraq ordered that attack, but they're a part of, Iraq is part of the struggle against the terrorists. Now in terms of image, of course I worry about American image. We are great at TV, and yet we are getting crushed on the PR front. I personally do not believe that Saddam Hussein picked up the phone and said, “al-Qaida, attack America.”
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His first inclination did seem to be to use 9/11 to justify the war, but that is, admittedly, just my humble opinion.
 
Sure, they used 9/11 to justify attacking Iraq, no doubt about it. They believe it is a part of the war on terror. But as far as I know, they never said Iraq was responsible for 9/11.
 
Pardalis said:
Sure, they used 9/11 to justify attacking Iraq, no doubt about it. They believe it is a part of the war on terror. But as far as I know, they never said Iraq was responsible for 9/11.
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I haven't heard them do that either, but I do think that he continues to reinforce a connection. Some people will inevitably translate that into cause and effect (or at least I suspect that he hopes that they do). Fortunately, I think at this point, they are in the minority.

This was an interesting article from 2003 about this tactic. The reason why I chose something that old? I thought that this was an interestingly prophetic statement:
In the end, will it matter if some Americans have meshed together Sept. 11 and Iraq? If the US and its allies go to war against Iraq, and it goes well, then the Bush administration is likely not to face questions about the way it sold the war. But if war and its aftermath go badly, then the administration could be under fire.
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The Impact of Bush Linking 9/11 and Iraq
 
 
Mephisto said:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3119676.stm

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/zunes.php?articleid=3783

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2006/aug/28/cheney_again_links_iraq_and_9_11

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=21288

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/01/bushs_terror_tales.php
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Do you have anything tangible? I see nothing here that says that the Bush administration said Iraq was behind 9/11.

Your only un-biased source says:

Mr Bush has never directly accused the former Iraqi leader of having a hand in the attacks on New York and Washington
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ETA: Thanks anyway for answering my question.
 
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