Did Bush lie about WMD?

[Orwell]

As much as any I suppose. It isn't my take but hey...

Probably the same reason that modern leaders do anything. They did what they thought would sell best. Remember Bill Clinton conducted regular focus groups to decide how best to spin his policy. It's what they do. I don't like it but there it is.

You get no argument from me! I think US foreign policy has been consistently awful for at least 50 years, and it has essentially stayed the same either with democrats or republicans. Dem. foreign policy is usually hypocritical and misguided, often filled with official good intentions that hide the real agenda; republican foreign policy is about as subtle as a guided missile and much more destructive. The US approach to foreign policy (me first and gimme gimme) isn't that different from the foreign policy of other countries; it's just that the US is much more powerful and clumsier (probably because of it's size and ethnocentrism): the potential to cause damage is much bigger.

 

[Cleon]

Please show how you differentiate a "terrorist" from an "insurgent". You say those names like they are somehow different things.

They are.

A "terrorist" is, by definition, someone who engages in terrorist activities--actions targeting civilians for the purpose of intimidation.

An "insurgent," again by definition, is someone rebelling against authority.

A terrorist is therefore an insurgent, but an insurgent is not necessarily a terrorist.

I think people are losing track of what "terrorist" means. They're using it as a catch-all word to describe "the Enemy," rather than a description of that enemy's actions.

Those who hijacked airplanes on 9/11 were terrorists. Those who blow up public buses are terrorists. Those who invaded a school and killed Russian schoolchildren were terrorists.

Those who blow up American military convoys, fire missiles at US Navy ships, etc., are definitely insurgents--but not, by definition, terrorists.

 

[delphi_ote]

Wrong.Have you ever been confident about something but were wrong?

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." -Cheney

"We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." -Cheney

But nobody believed this before or after the war. Even Rumsfeld denied it:

"I don't know anybody that I can think of who has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons." -Rumsfeld

I think this is evidence that Cheney was using dishonest scare tactics. He wasn't just wrong. He was making up arguments out of whole cloth to sell this war.

Wolfowitz summarized things nicely in Vanity Fair:

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." -Wolfowitz

 

[Cain]

Originally posted by RandFan I started a thread a couple years ago where I admitted that there were many motivations for the war. Do I think that he doesn't care about the Middle East? I've never seen any evidence to the contrary.

What about how the war was conducted? How the U.S. military secured the oil ministry and allowed rioters to destroy Iraq?

That seems to be what presidents do. I don't condone it but I understand it. It's a complex problem that doesn't yeild to simplistic answers. I'll say again, Bush believed the ends justified the means. Perhaps they did.

This justification could be used for anything by anybody. Nixon could say the ends justify the means. Osama Bin Laden could claim the ends justify the means. What exactly are Bush's ends? And again, his means, the means of his administration, are thoroughly dishonest. If you don't think they're dishonest, or only partially dishonest, then you must believe the administration is frighteningly incompetent.

If either explanation obtains (or a combination of both) then we have a very good argument for regime change here at home.

The Republicans are not monolithic and if I remember correctly many Republicans did support him. There are Dem's now who support Bush and Clinton then. There are Dem's now who supported Clinton then but not Bush now.

Hold up a second. I asked that we compare the intensity of support for Clinton's so-called "Humanitarian intervention." Of course, among the diehards there was actually opposition and no support, which is interesting. It's good to know many of Bush's loyal supporters today were so upset about Clinton getting a blowjob that they could not bring themselves to support human rights abroad.

Of course the Democrats do not support Bush bungled invasion, but then Bush never paid much attention to human rights. He used national security as a pretext and then shifted rationales when the WMD did not pan out.

The comparison is instructive, as are Bush's comments on the Rwandan genocide, which I've gone to the bother of looking up:

Q: What about Rwanda, where 600,000 people died in 1994. Was that a mistake not to intervene?

BUSH: I think the administration did the right thing in that case. I do. It was a horrible situation. No one liked to see it on our TV screens, but it’s a case where we need to make sure we’ve got an early warning system in places where there could be a ethnic cleansing and genocide the way we saw it there in Rwanda. And that’s a case were we need to use our influence to have countries in Africa come together and help deal with the situation. The administration made the right decision on training Nigerian troops for situations just such as this in Rwanda. And so I thought they made the right decision not to send U.S. troops into Rwanda.

Now of course Clinton later apologized for his inaction. He spent an hour at a Rwandan airport, gave a speech, "felt" their pain, the whole bit.

 

[Cylinder]

This justification could be used for anything by anybody. Nixon could say the ends justify the means. Osama Bin Laden could claim the ends justify the means. What exactly are Bush's ends? And again, his means, the means of his administration, are thoroughly dishonest. If you don't think they're dishonest, or only partially dishonest, then you must believe the administration is frighteningly incompetent.

If either explanation obtains (or a combination of both) then we have a very good argument for regime change here at home.

Hung around the neck.

 

[a_unique_person]

Could you demonstrate that it is worse? Asside from the insurgents in Iraq which is part of a war I don't see that it is worse. People keep making this claim without any foundation as far as I can tell.

Except for the part that is worse, it's better?

 

[CapelDodger]

What about how the war was conducted? How the U.S. military secured the oil ministry and allowed rioters to destroy Iraq?

The crassness of that should be brought up regularly. Also the fact that plans for reconstruction contracts were so much further advanced than plans for the occupation (if any of the latter existed). That could simply be because Cheney (responsible for the former) is competent and Rumsfeld isn't, but IMO the evidence is overwhelming enough to make it fact. Even if I'm wrong it was still a public relations disaster.

 

[Grammatron]

What about how the war was conducted? How the U.S. military secured the oil ministry and allowed rioters to destroy Iraq?

Your "destroy Iraq" hyperbole aside, what's wrong with that?

 

[CapelDodger]

I argued that Bush knew in February 2003 that there was a good chance Saddam no longer possessed WMD, and that a large part of his Iraq intelligence was wrong. Therefore, I argued that he lied when he continued to claim that there was "no doubt" Saddam had WMD.

I doubt that he lied. Any argument based on the idea that Bush Minor should have known anything given available data assumes a functioning intellect. I see no convincing evidence of one in Bush Minor.

claimee's quote shows that Bush Minor thinks he knows stuff even when he probably hasn't even been told it. He has belief, and it's no lie to speak from your beliefs. Dumb yes, duplicitous no.

Bush is just a poster-boy, to go after him is be diverted from the real targets - Rove, Cheney and their backers, who'll be with us long after Bush Minor goes back to the farm.

 

[CapelDodger]

Your "destroy Iraq" hyperbole aside, what's wrong with that?

"Hyperbole" is such a woody word, I must start using it more often.

What's wrong with securing the oil ministry but not other ministries that might be important in the running of the country, nor museums that academics had been making loud noises about, nor anything else really. Not even all the sites that had been in poor Colin Powell's presentation to the UN. What's wrong with that ...

The war wasn't supposed to be about oil, but there were many, 'Murricans among them, who thought it was. The US administration made a great effort to counter their argument, which does have the benefit of seeming bleedin' obvious. Not a convincing argument to such cognoscenti as ourselves, but Public Relations is about the Public. I've met some of the Public, and it loves the apparently bleedin' obvious. I doubt the Iraqi Public is exceptional.

The politically astute would have taken account of that and spread the protection wider than the oil ministry, particularly to museums, hospitals and such which you could now be referring to as counter-argument to the "what about the oil ministry?" point. Sadly, you have been let down. The silliest thing, of course, is that the oil ministry was of vanishing importance compared to the oil-producing infrastructure. Especially when all Ba'ath party members in the ministry were declared non grata. Even janitors had to be members to work in the oil ministry.

It's all so sad. A whole new benchmark in ineptitude.

 

[Grammatron]

"Hyperbole" is such a woody word, I must start using it more often.

What's wrong with securing the oil ministry but not other ministries that might be important in the running of the country, nor museums that academics had been making loud noises about, nor anything else really. Not even all the sites that had been in poor Colin Powell's presentation to the UN. What's wrong with that ...

The war wasn't supposed to be about oil, but there were many, 'Murricans among them, who thought it was. The US administration made a great effort to counter their argument, which does have the benefit of seeming bleedin' obvious. Not a convincing argument to such cognoscenti as ourselves, but Public Relations is about the Public. I've met some of the Public, and it loves the apparently bleedin' obvious. I doubt the Iraqi Public is exceptional.

The politically astute would have taken account of that and spread the protection wider than the oil ministry, particularly to museums, hospitals and such which you could now be referring to as counter-argument to the "what about the oil ministry?" point. Sadly, you have been let down. The silliest thing, of course, is that the oil ministry was of vanishing importance compared to the oil-producing infrastructure. Especially when all Ba'ath party members in the ministry were declared non grata. Even janitors had to be members to work in the oil ministry.

It's all so sad. A whole new benchmark in ineptitude.

All I recall is media broadcasting the looting of the museum. Have you any links, evidence US and allied forces secured nothing else but oil ministries?

 

[CapelDodger]

You get no argument from me! I think US foreign policy has been consistently awful for at least 50 years, and it has essentially stayed the same either with democrats or republicans.

I'm in very broad agreement, but Clinton did move mountains of "What's it got to do with us?" to bomb Serbia for purely humanitarian reasons. He caught it from right and left for doing so, but the solid, decent middle-ground applauds it. The follow-through is disappointing, but hey, at least the Serbs had the wars brought home to them, after which they stopped launching them.

 

[Bikewer]

As Cleon says, "terrorist" and "insurgent" may be differentiated regarding thier goals , if not thier methods.
Al Qaeda, a terrorist organization, has specific and publically-stated goals, as enumerated by Michael Scheuer in "Imperial Hubris". These goals are trans-national, as he and his organization believes Islam itself is under attack.
Insurgents have specific goals as well, in this case the removal of invading/occupying forces from their country (Us...) and a return to the power base they previously occupied.
These individuals feel free to target Iraqi civilians who they feel are cooperating with the invading forces. There have been news reports lately that the insurgency has on several occasions disputed Al Qaeda actions as being counter-productive to their own goals.

Who is getting "schooled?" The survivors, of course. CIA sources indicate that only a tiny percent of the violence in Iraq is the product of Al Qaeda operatives and operations. They actively recruit the best and brightest. These people are not afraid to die, apparently.

As the author of "Dying to Win" points out, the primary motivation for suicide bombers around the globe is to drive invaders/occupiers from the "homeland". Military and CIA intelligence maintains that the bulk of suicide bombings in Iraq are performed not by native Iraqi insurgents, but by imported "foriegn fighters" who percieve "the homeland" in this case as Islamic lands in general. Again, those cooperating with the invaders are fair game.
As are innocent civilians who elected the officials that are directing the war against Islam. Thus the justification (However twisted this logic might be) for 9/11...

As to Al Qaeda being weakened...Most intelligence authorities I've listened to don't think so. At this point, the organization is greatly decentralized, and removal of particular leaders or cells of little consequence. They seem to have no problem with money, supplies, or organization. Documents from Bin Laden indicate that their agenda is being followed religiously. They have specifically decided not to attempt large-scale attacks against the US, relying instead on attacking the "coalition" of allies and isolating the US as the primary enemy of Islam.
The "coalition of the willing" seems to have shrunk considerably already, and some detractors have referred to the "coalition of those who want more foriegn aid from the US."

The increasing level of violence in Afghanistan is disturbing as well. Scheuer maintains that Afghanistan is already lost, and that a Taliban-style government will be back in power within ten years.

I would add that no one seems to have a good notion of what to do about all this. I listened to a fellow on NPR"s The World today who has a plan to win in Iraq.
It would require almost doubling the troop level, and would take (at his best guess) about ten years.....

 

[CapelDodger]

All I recall is media broadcasting the looting of the museum. Have you any links, evidence US and allied forces secured nothing else but oil ministries?

There was a great deal of comment about it at the time; have you any evidence that other government buildings weren't looted down to their toilet-bowls while US officers told their emedded journalists that looting wasn't their business? It wasn't that long ago, and the point about the oil ministry has been around since the fall of Baghdad. Do you have any counter-examples?

 

[CapelDodger]

As Cleon says, "terrorist" and "insurgent" may be differentiated regarding thier goals , if not thier methods.

Cleon says exactly the opposite, that they are distinguished by their methods. All movements have goals, whatever they are and however fantastical. Terrorism - here I'm expressing what is doctrine to socialists but simply convincing to me - is a strategy of desperation resorted to by losers. Terrorists seeks to undermine a society that they are unable to influence in any other way, in the expectation that they will emerge as winners from the rubble. Their desperation stems from their inability to mobilise more than a tiny fraction of their society to their cause.

Insurgents seek to take over the society they exist in, and must command significant support to even be noticed. They may employ terrorism tactically, to undermine their opposition's claim to competent leadership, but usually at arm's-length.

 

[zenith-nadir]

US administration officials misled the American people regarding the short-term threat of Saddam's WMD. Compounding this fact was that the top intelligence services around the world could not provide accurate info regarding Saddam's WMD programs so no one really knew the truth. Had people realized the difference between this long-term and short-term threat potential I believe they would not have allowed the Bush Administration to mislead them.

It's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, but at the time I believed Powell's presentation at the U.N. and didn't believe he would lie infront of the world. Boy was I wrong.

 

[CapelDodger]

Who is getting "schooled?" The survivors, of course. CIA sources indicate that only a tiny percent of the violence in Iraq is the product of Al Qaeda operatives and operations. They actively recruit the best and brightest. These people are not afraid to die, apparently.

The Brightest and the Best are not grist to the Al-Qaeda mill. By definition. As a long-standing member of the BAB brigade I'm not afraid to die I'm just afraid I'll miss something, which is why I don't intend to die at all.

 

[RandFan]

What about how the war was conducted? How the U.S. military secured the oil ministry and allowed rioters to destroy Iraq?

Assuming this is exactly what happened, and there was a lot of information that turned out wrong, then it is what it is. You only see the very worst possible conclusion as the one that must be correct. I don't. I accept it as a possibility but there are many reasons to conclude we were not there just for the oil. We debated this long and hard and it just doesn't wash. Bush could have made all of his cronies stinking rich for the rest of their lives by cutting a deal with Saddam. They could have even voided the French contracts and given everything to Haliburton. Once you look at all of the evidence it doesn't stack up.

This justification could be used for anything by anybody. Nixon could say the ends justify the means. Osama Bin Laden could claim the ends justify the means.

Well I certainly didn't say I condoned it only that I understood it.

What exactly are Bush's ends? And again, his means, the means of his administration, are thoroughly dishonest. If you don't think they're dishonest, or only partially dishonest, then you must believe the administration is frighteningly incompetent.

No, false dilemma.

If either explanation obtains (or a combination of both) then we have a very good argument for regime change here at home.

Well, you certainly are entitled to come to that conclusion. I don't.

Hold up a second. I asked that we compare the intensity of support for Clinton's so-called "Humanitarian intervention." Of course, among the diehards there was actually opposition and no support, which is interesting. It's good to know many of Bush's loyal supporters today were so upset about Clinton getting a blowjob that they could not bring themselves to support human rights abroad.

I don't get your point.

Of course the Democrats do not support Bush bungled invasion, but then Bush never paid much attention to human rights. He used national security as a pretext and then shifted rationales when the WMD did not pan out.

That is how you see it.

The comparison is instructive, as are Bush's comments on the Rwandan genocide, which I've gone to the bother of looking up:

Now of course Clinton later apologized for his inaction. He spent an hour at a Rwandan airport, gave a speech, "felt" their pain, the whole bit.

How are they instructive? Clinton excoriated Bush Sr. for kowtowing to the Chinese who had an atrocious human rights agenda before he was president and then after he got into office adopted the exact same policy. Why?

You seem to be under the illusion that folks on the left care about human rights and those on the right don't. International relations are far more complicated than that. I would not argue that the Iraq war was simply due to Bush's concern for human rights. I have admitted time and time again that it was not. However I think the situation and stability in the mid-east have always been important and human rights are an issue even when Bush has stated confilicting goals as did Clinton. Perhaps like Clinton Bush will come to regret some of his decisions.

 

[RandFan]

Except for the part that is worse, it's better?

Not how I would charachterize it no.

 

[gnome]

You only see the very worst possible conclusion as the one that must be correct.

I just wanted to throw a bit in here (i've probably said it before)... I don't know about Cain, but noticing that the reasons given were flimsy, I haven't assumed that we were there for the worst reason. My outrage comes because there should BE no ambiguity about the reason--to fail to level with the American people about something as serious as a war justification is to take informed choice out of their hands. In my mind, it's the same as refusing us that choice. To me that is a terrible offense even before one tries to evaluate whether he was wise or unwise to invade Iraq.