Yesterday, in response to a post by Glenn Greenwald seeking to compare GOP attacks on Bill Clinton to the current Democratic charges against President Bush over pre-war intelligence, I offered the following rejoinder in Glenn’s comments:
Several things.
1) You forgot to mention that [John] McCain and the Weekly Standard backed Clinton and refused to question his motives—and that many in the GOP excoriated [Dick] Armey.¹
2) The GOP reps you name weren’t making their accusations in the face of a Senate Intelligence Report (and the Robb report) that concluded the intelligence community wasn’t coerced into making their findings, and that their findings supported the President’s case for war.
3) Questioning patriotism only comes into play in those cases where people are pretending to see a scandal and Presidential lies where they in fact [know] differently.
This is placing political opportunism over country and the foreign policy of the CiC, and it is doing so knowingly and in bad faith.
You can pretend there is no difference between the Clinton and Bush scenarios, but [to do so would require] more dissembling and faux outrage.
The more honest of you will admit the differences. The less honest of you can join the ranks of those who are putting your hatred of Bush over the welfare of the troops and the country.
Sorry if you don’t like to hear it, but that’s the way it is. How many Democrats are willing to argue, as the Weekly Standard did, that Bush didn’t “lie” and “mislead us into war” by “manipulating” or “withholding intelligence”?
Harry Reid? Ted Kennedy? Rockefeller? Pelosi? Dean?
Oh, wait—there’s Zell Miller. But he’s not really a Democrat, is he?
Today, Glenn emailed me to let me know he developed his response into a post, which attempts to answer the questions I raised. Writes Greenwald:
Goldstein’s whole argument rests on the question-begging assumption that, unlike the GOP’s attacks on Clinton, the Democrats’ WMD accusations against Bush have been definitively and dispositively disproven—apparently all because a Senate Committee rejected them—such that no person operating in good faith can continue to believe them. Thus, he reasons, since those who are voicing this WMD accusation can’t really believe it, they must be doing it to harm the President and without regard to the damage it does to our war effort, and that is unpatriotic.
Well, yes and no. I do in fact believe that the WMD accusations against Bush have been dispositively disproven, though not simply because the Senate Intelligence Committee rejected them. Bush gets intelligence reports, he doesn’t pore through raw intelligence data, and so his understanding of intelligence comes from his national security analysts. Anyone who thinks Bush looked at his analysts’ reports and rejected them because he wanted to avenge Daddy or enrich his oil buddies is either terribly confused or purposely dishonest—blinded by their hatred for the President. Those who are confused aren’t unpatriotic; they are, however, ignorant on this point, and are earnestly playing the part of useful idiots. Those who do know how intelligence works—and yet continue to suggest that Bush lied or manipulated intelligence in order to take us to war—are more concerned with damaging the Bush presidency than they are with winning the war.
Greenwald continues:
Let’s put to the side the odd notion that when a Senate Committee speaks, it is to be taken as gospel, such that disagreement with its conclusions is proof that one has lost touch with reality. Let us also put to the side the fact that the question which Goldstein seems to believe that Committee answered—i.e., whether the Administration purposely suppressed and manipulated pre-war WMD intelligence in order to create a false and unduly aggressive National Intelligence Estimate to show to Congress—is precisely the issue which the Committee has not yet answered, because its GOP Chairman, Sen. Roberts, blocked Phase II of the Committee’s investigation (the part which was to deal with that question) until Sen. Reid, with his closed-door Senate “stunt,” recently forced that part of the investigation to proceed.
Again, this is both correct and incorrect, insofar as it attempts to lay out my position.
I don’t believe a Senate Intelligence Committee report should be taken as gospel. But I do believe that quarrels with the report should be substantive and backed up by a host of evidence before Senators stand up in front of the media and accuse the Bushies of what amounts to treason. Greenwald hinges his entire argument on Phase II of the Senate Investigation—which he seems to think will answer the unanswered questions about how the administration used intelligence.
But we already know the answer to that: they used the intelligence to make the case for war.
As I’ve argued here before, Phase II of the investigation is to me irrelevant with respect to questions of WMD and Bush’s honesty; phase I found that the intelligence community wasn’t pressured into shaping the pre-war intelligence. Consequently, we can reasonably conclude from the consensus that they stood behind their analyses, and that the President—in acting on those analyses—acted in good faith. How the administration then used that intelligence to market the case for war is, to me, unimportant.
Just to remind you:
A. Allegations of Influence
(U) Committee staff did interview five individuals who had come to the Committee’s attention as possibly having information that intelligence analysts’ assessments had been influenced by policymakers. None of these individuals provided any information to the Committee which showed that policymakers had attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their analysis or that any intelligence analysts changed their intelligence judgments as a result of political pressure. There was also no information provided to the Committee which showed that analysts had conformed their assessments to known Administration policies because they believed those assessments would be more widely read or accepted. The following describes information garnered from those interviews. [See here]
U) Conclusion 83. The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.
(U) Conclusion 84. The Committee found no evidence that the Vice President’s visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, or did pressure analysts to change their assessments [See here]
Greenwald again:
Although that investigation is not yet complete, it simply undeniable that there is ample evidence which, if it does not prove, at least permits the good faith assertion that the Administration knew that many of the pre-war WMD claims which it was unequivocally asserting were, in fact, subject to grave doubt. Much of that evidence has been disclosed for the first time just this past week, which is what is fueling the renewal of this debate.
The notion, then, that this entire issue has already been conclusively resolved in Bush’s favor, such that nobody can reasonably discuss it any longer, is nothing more than self-serving, wishful thinking. There is ample documentary and evidentiary support for the belief that the Administration played fast and loose with the pre-war facts in order to sell the war. The only egregious bad faith argumentation that I can see is coming from those screaming “unpatriotic” in order to stifle the debate and prevent it from occurring.
If, as Greenwald wants to suggest, this debate is being fueled anew by questions over individual pieces of intelligence, then he is simply admitting the fault with his thesis. Intelligence is rarely ever 100% conclusive, and deciding upon the veracity of individual pieces of that intelligence is hardly a science. To use individual pieces of disputed evidence to suggest that the administration was somehow engaged in a conscious plan to “mislead” us into war, then, is the very definition of cherry-picking—particularly when we already know what the consensus was.
And the consensus backed the President’s position and supported the case for war. Further, it was a consensus opinion shared by just about every foreign intelligence agency and previous administrations. And lest we forget, regime change was a legislative imperative.
But back to the “questions” over how the administration used intelligence. As commenter Steve Galbreith points out over at Tom Maguire’s place:
Each U.S. Senator has his or her own staff of experts on a whole host of issues, including WMD and military matters. These members are privy to the intelligence material, the raw stuff.
Senators Daschle, Clinton, Levin, Bayh (and I believe several more) all said that they themselves went to Langley to view the intelligence and to talk to the analysts and to have their experts review things. This wasn’t a question of accepting Bush’s word or judgements.
Seriously, you think the above folks aren’t going to check out the details themselves? And get their own experts to inform them on the matter?
This scenario of a wily Svengali manipulating the Democrats into war needs re-writing. I mean, being dazzled and seduced by the oratory skills of George Bush?
The is precisely on point. Senators had ample opportunity to review the raw intelligence data and draw their own conclusions.
Those who did so and are now walking back their previous support for the war are therefore either being disengenuous and opportunistic (in which case, they are putting partisan political considerations above the the safety of the troops and the security of the country) or else are admitting that they themselves were derelict in their duties, voting for a war they now claim the bulk of the intelligence didn’t support.
To get around this latter charge, Dems are now positing that Bush had more intelligence than they themselves were privy to—and they cite as the source of that hidden (and potentially damaging) evidence the President’s daily briefings, which they now intimate might have undermined the case for war. For his part, the President denies that there was anything in those briefings that disrupted the intelligence consensus.
Which, to those of you who are paying close attention, means that the Democrat’s argument boils down to this: Because Bush is a liar, he is probably lying about what was in those PDBs; and because he is lying about what is in those PDBs, the information therein must have underminded the case for war.
And that, friends, is begging the question.
Greenwald goes on:
The broader and more important point here is that these new GOP patriotism attacks are based upon the transparently false notion that Democrats are attacking Bush in a way that the GOP would never have attacked a Democratic President. After 8 years of the most extreme and virulent attacks by the GOP against President Clinton, that claim is just absurd.
Both sides are equally power hungry. At this point, both will use any tactic, provided it is effective (and regardless of whether it is fair or honest) which can hurt the other side’s standing. Both sides are brimming over with individuals and groups which recognize no constraints whatsoever on the rhetoric they employ, the accusations they make, or the devotion to having their side win.
A litmus test for determining whether someone has relinquished their intellectual honesty and replaced it with partisan blindness is whether they believe that the “other side” is more power-hungry than their side, or whether the “other side” will engage in tactics and attacks which their side is too decent and ethical to consider.
[My emphasis]
While it is certainly true that it’s possible to find partisans of all stripes willing to engage in dubious tactics, it does not follow, therefore, that all charges of wrongdoing are therefore equal—or equally dismissable. Greenwald’s argument here is rank relativism meant to disguise the important differences between attacks on Clinton over Kosovo and the current attacks on Bush, which I outlined in the comment I left on his site. Briefly, many conservatives supported Clinton’s decision; those who didn’t and speculated as to Clinton’s motives may or may not have been wrong (I suspect they were), but the fact is, unless they were acting in bad faith—unless, that is, they knew Clinton to be innocent of those charges but made them anyway—they were simply engaging in vulgar politics. The difference being, there was no Senate investigation into whether or not Clinton was acting on bad faith. Nor, in my opinion, should there have been.
What we are seeing now, however, is a cynical, orchestrated attempt to weaken the President—and importantly, one that is based on what most Congressional Democrats know to be a faulty premise, that Bush either “lied” or “manipulated intelligence” to take us into war.
Glenn Reynolds labeled such behavior unpatriotic. To which I responded, “Glenn touches on an important distinction that we should now be willing to embrace: namely, that though the anti-war position is not inherently unpatriotic, those in the anti-war movement who use lies and misinformation to harm the country are—and political opportunism that relies on revisionist history and the leveling of false charges in order to regain power is indicative of mindset that profoundly cynical and profoundly anti-democratic.”
I’ve heard nothing yet that would disabuse me of that assessment. But I welcome your comments.
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related; a slightly different view here.
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update: Instapundit points out that statements made by John McCain on “Face the Nation” this morning indicate that the pushback by Republicans might not be limited to the Bush-Cheney-Rove axis of perfidy:
SCHIEFFER: President Bush accused his critics of rewriting history last week.
Sen. McCAIN: Yeah.
SCHIEFFER: And in–he said in doing so, the criticisms they were making of his war policy was endangering our troops in Iraq. Do you believe it is unpatriotic to criticize the Iraq policy?
Sen. McCAIN: No, I think it’s a very legitimate aspect of American life to criticize and to disagree and to debate. But I want to say I think it’s a lie to say that the president lied to the American people. I sat on the Robb-Silverman Commission. I saw many, many analysts that came before that committee. I asked every one of them–I said, `Did–were you ever pressured politically or any other way to change your analysis of the situation as you saw?’ Every one of them said no.
[emhasis in the original]
Notes Reynolds: “I think the “Bush lied us into war” meme is in trouble, and the GOP pushback seems to be a general effort, not a one-off. And I also think that the reason that so many antiwar people want to move from discussion of whether specific behavior is unpatriotic, to the strawman question of whether any criticism of the war is unpatriotic (note Schieffer’s question—“Do you believe it is unpatriotic to criticize the Iraq policy?”—and how it differs from what Bush actually said) is because they know they’re on weak ground on the specifics.”
****
¹Kristol and Kagen: “A Republican president should restore American strength, reinvigorate American global leadership, and return American foreign policy to the strong moral and strategic foundations of the Reagan era.
This would be a powerful case for putting a Republican in the White House in 2001—but only if Republicans can plausibly make it. They won’t be able to unless a few party leaders—and in particular key presidential candidates — repudiate much of the Republican talk we’ve heard over the past couple of weeks.
Do Republicans really want to present themselves as the party of callous indifference to human suffering, the party that defends the “sovereign” right of brutal thugs like Slobodan Milosevic to slaughter innocent women and children, the party that won’t lift a finger against aggressive dictators, the party that doesn’t give a fig about what happens in Europe and is willing to abandon U.S. leadership in NATO? Republicans have almost managed to make the feckless Clinton look like a champion of American moral leadership. That’s quite an accomplishment.”
Racist.
To say nothing of the fact that in making this argument the Democratic party really does assert… I wish Saddma Hussein was still in power in Baghdad. I wish the rape rooms were operating at full capacity. I wish desperately that the mass graves were still being filled. I am an opponenet of democracy and never want to see it spread anywhere outside of the United States. My sympthy lies with mass murderers and dicatators everywhere, not only Saddam Hussein but Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe, Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung as well. My protestations of benevolence and kindness are utter horseshit. I fervently that babrarism prevails in this struggle. I hope that American will withdraw from Iraq immediately and that a massacre of millions upon millions will ensue. I am everything I have ever accused the right of being, and worse because I will help said babarism along however I can, so long as I don’t actually have to face any physical danger myself.
I’m confused, corvan. You’re saying tyranny doesn’t work?
tw: leaders. (Indeed)
Last time I heard the reasoning behind Kosovo was genocide.
Apparently when mass graves are they are filled with little brown people they don’t count.
Anty
Well said sir.
I’ll go right past unpatriotic to “aid and comfort to the enemy”.
Tenet (who supposedly saw every bit of intelligence) to Bush: “Slam Dunk, Mr. President”, more than once.
Checkmate!
Jeff,
There’s a third way to consider the issue – namely: Would you done the same thing as Bush did given the information available?
My answer is ‘Y’ep’.
Though I would have had an actual running run-up to the war rather than the ambling, ask-around, check with the UN sort of “run-up” to the war that Bush had.
To his credit, Bush laid out the exact reasons for Iraq in his speechifying. What confusion there is lies in the Democrats inability to think that Bush means what he’s saying.
I think there’s plenty of room to criticize Team Bush over the prosecution of the peace. But the notion of Democralypse Now is a fantasy of the Democrats.
.
correction:
.
The left believes they have established in the minds of the public the perception that the Iraq invasion and removing Saddam was a mistake to begin with, based on deliberate deception, and incompetently run. Actually the public is simply uncertain and tired of the argument.
Now the left is on defense trying to set their perceptions in concrete before thousands of returning active duty and reserve forces start to hammer home the truth. And they will. Success in Iraq will give them the force of credibility with the majority of Americans proud of what has been accomplished and disinclined to believe it was all a lie.
Can we question the reactionary left’s patriotism now?
For instance: we would never lie to the nation and trick them into an unjust war.
What a load of horseshit.
Based on the analysis above, I not only believe the left wants us to fail, they are willing to take steps to achieve failure. Otherwise their campaign will blow back in their faces like the TANG memos.
Part of the issue, Anty, was that when we reached Kosovo, we did not find much in the way of mass graves. The stories about Serbian atrocities in Kosovo turned out to be way exaggerated.
Nonetheless, our intervention there did some good ( good that may have been wasted by incompetent United Nations administration there since – itself an interesting contrast as Iraq is farther along the road to self-governance than Kosovo today ).
No doubt, during the Clinton years there were a lot of people who engaged in Clinton-Derangement-Syndrome induced litanies of conspiracy (Vince Foster) and wagging-the-dog (Kosovo). But this usually came from the fringe and there was always a substantial amount of Republican officials that defended/supported Clinton policies.
BDS, on the otherhand, infects rank-n-file Dems and their officials…from Dean the Scream (“I hate Republicans”) to Uncle Teddy (“Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management”) to … well, what Dem is supporting GW and NOT being ostracized from the Party of the Ass?
It’s simple… say “Bush Lied, People Died” and I DO question your patriotism.
So the argument is, we don’t accept the conclusion of the last Senate hearings that there was no duplicity, and we want to conclusively prove there was by holding … more Senate hearings.
They really didn’t like those first senate hearings, especially since they exposed Joe Wilson as a big fat liar. Maybe this time, they hope the senate won’t smear such a “fine public servant.”
I’m far from the first to have made this point, but it still gets buried by all the noise: The other dishonest premise underlying the left’s obsessive WMD argument is that WMDs were the fundamental selling point for the war in the first place.
I distinctly remember the sensation I had about this time two years ago, as I watched the WMD angle steadily begin to dominate the post-invasion debate. It was one of those frantically-wave-at-the-TV-and-newspaper feelings, like “wait a sec, no, no, that’s not the main reason we invaded Iraq or said we were invading Iraq, hold up!”
But there was apparently no stopping it. From that point on, it’s been this kind of quasi-surreal experience of watching the commentariat get further and further entrenched in some rhetorical funhouse, stuck in a hall of mirrors that keeps it from even catching a glimpse of reality anymore.
Bottom line: The WMD issue never had the prominence, pre-invasion, that the current attention would suggest. And that, more than anything, is what bothers me about the left’s ongoing campaign. There’s this implicit notion that by knocking down the WMD plank, the entire case for war will have been neatly destroyed. That is the historical revisionism everybody should be pissed about.
I’m not claiming that concerns about Saddam’s suspected weaponry were not part of the pre-war public narrative. Of course they were. But they weren’t the end-all-be-all.
Part of me wishes the right wouldn’t even engage the left on the whole thing, in terms of bogging down in the nitty-gritty of “intelligence reports” and “PDBs” and the whole dizzying who-knew-what-when stuff. Fighting it so passionately can only bolster the false impression that this is the crucial point on which the war’s justification hinges. Or, at the very least, I wish those who do counter the left on this front would add a regular disclaimer noting that “Despite the time I’m investing in this debate, I want to emphasize yet again that WMDs were not the main motivation for invading Iraq.”
Well, yes and no. I do in fact believe that the WMD accusations against Bush have been dispositively disproven, though not simply because the Senate Intelligence Committee rejected them. Bush gets intelligence reports, he doesn’t pore through raw intelligence data, and so his understanding of intelligence comes from his national security analysts.
Really? Then why was the intelligence stovepiped past his national security analysts?
“Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.”
[…]
“The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematicâ€â€and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book “The Threatening Storm†generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,†Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.†“
(And on an unrelated matter… Is there something about the Protein Wisdom page coding that trips up the “refresh” functionality in Firefox browsers? Specifically: When refreshing a PW page in Firefox (1.0.7), I am always returned to the top of that page—not to spot I was viewing before the refresh. It can get particularly maddening when trying to keep up with a comments thread. This is the only site on which I’ve encountered this issue with Firefox.)
Phoenician, what doesn’t make sense in the comments you refer are twofold. The first is that for all those claims of “dismantling” filters, there are no specifics and certainly no actual evidence for any attempt to bias the intel. And secondly, is that there isn’t any basis for claiming any particular expertise for any fifty year old CIA process. The CIA was giving us the same intel in the years before the Bush administration supposed interference … and the CIA has been regularly failing throughout the Cold War.
Chris,
The script that loads the comments has an explicit reference to an anchor at the top of the comments. It’s the last, or almost the last, thing the script loads. Opera does the same thing. If IE doesn’t, it’s because IE doesn’t comply with the W3C standards (so what else is new?).
I, too, question the wisdom of the page designer in putting in that “feature”, but it is in fact there on purpose.
Regards,
Ric
PIATR,
One of the things that your analysis misses by a fairly wide mark is that the assertions made by the National Intelligence apparatus during the time when Bush was in office, prior to the war, do not differ substantially in tone or content to estimates generated by the US prior to Bush’s arrival in office, nor do they differ significantly from the estimates generated by other agencies (or for that matter the UN Clusters Working Document).
For your assertion of willing self-deception to have any merit, you would have to first suppose that there was some sort of baseline that was willingly deviated away from. But for that to be true, one would have to assume that the entire US intel community was truthful for years and years until Bush came into office, and then they recieved data (which no other intelligence agency was ever privy to) indicating that magically Hussein had unilaterally disarmed, but then chose not to document his own unilateral disarmement. And the US knowing that, suppressed this information in the hopes that we would then make a case based on WMDs knowing ahead of time that there would be no WMDs to be found, nor would we plant any to justify the war after the fact.
Which is just silly.
Robin,
Phoenician is handwaving frantically and blowing as much smoke as possible, trying to get your eye off the ball.
Take it as a given, for purposes of argument: that the Bush administration deliberately constructed ways around the bureaucracy to get data. It certainly matches his (clearly deserved) contempt for the bureaucratic establishment, which makes it at least credible. But —
So the eff what?
The fact still remains that every other intelligence agency in the world, and every other user of intelligence in the world, came to the exact same set of conclusions and were therefore getting near-identical data.
Wherever Bush and company were getting their information, that information agreed with the information everybody else was getting, including Saddam Hussein. Letting Phoenician and the rest of the chauvinist bigots focus you on process instead of results is letting them get away with their lying revisionism.
Regards,
Ric
Thanks, Ric, for the explanation. But I’m still a bit confused: Are you saying the W3C standards mandate that this particular anchor tag be placed on the page? Or are you saying they dictate this particular behavior by the script/browser?
I think part of what’s confusing me is your final line, where on one hand you question the decision to include the tag, but on the other say that it’s there “on purpose.”
In the Phase I report the d’Emocratic Senators complain about having to ask for and then wait on Intelligence Community reports, which would seem to indicate these were run through the “good filters”. In which case it seems they would have questioned Buchco’s conflicting raw data.
I think the key here is the fact Rockefeller and Co. “inexplicably” had to request the reports. I mean if the spooks were really worth a damn wouldn’t they already know that?
Here’s a nicety from the Deaniac on MtP today:
As I remember it, WMD was settled on as the primary casus belli only to appease the UN, whose assistance we sought in going to war. As I remember it, this was Powell’s doing—Cheney and Rumsfeld did not think we needed or ought to go to the UN. I think they were correct—not from the point of view that seeking UN approval was foolish (as it turned out to be), but from the point of view that the UN Security council included members who were sympathetic to the Hussein regime. The UN’s inherent corruption certainly worked against us; perhaps Cheney and Rumsfeld were cynical enough to see this, where Powell perhaps was not.
But the sole argument against Saddam? Who believes that? Who ever believed that? A dictator like Saddam possesses no legitimacy; I would argue that he could be overthrown at our convenience; certainly the government with which he replaced him is legitimate; it has stood elections.
For me, the greatest casus belli we possessed was Saddam’s steadfast refusal to honor the terms of the 1991 ceasefire. His repeated incidents provoking and shooting at us in the no fly zone, his attempted assassination of President G.H.W. Bush, and his mulish, quixotic refusal to cooperate with the UN inspectors were certainly others. Did he plan 9/11? No, of course not. I’m sure he felt something much more than Schadenfreude when it occurred; he almost certainly cheered it, even as he worried we might blame it on him. But 9/11 meant that we had to worry about him more than ever—it certainly tipped the scales of the judgment against him even in the most timid halls of our government.
I don’t think the war on Saddam was wrong for a minute. In fact, it was long overdue.
All good point.
Still, I really wonder if the Bush admin can punch through the blizzard of chaff put out by the Dems and MSM on this. It’s the Goebbels Doctrine at work as usual.
I’ll add my 2 cents on the Clinton-Bush comparison. How about Clinton’s bombing of Khartoum in August 1998? He bombed a pharmaceutical factory that he claimed was a chemical factory for Al Queda. We know for a fact that’s not true now. So did Clinton lie? (I’ll leave aside some other suspicious things that happened with it, namely that the FBI nor 2 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff weren’t informed before the bombing, as well as the “Wag the Dog” scenario–Clinton had just “confessed” after lying for 8 months about the Monica thing.)
Well? Did Clinton lie? Or did he bomb on the basis of faulty intelligence? I’ve never heard a liberal respond to this point. It seems to me you can’t have it both ways. Clinton was mistaken but Bush lied in regards to intelligence.
But hell, let’s go further. Clinton bombed Iraq, coincidentally a few hours before he was about to be impeached–and ended the bombing, coincidentally a few hours after he was impeached. He claimed he was bombing sites that were producing WMDs.
As to Kosovo, we now know many of the stories of atrocities and mass graves weren’t true. But I don’t hear liberals saying Clinton lied. Or should we go back and impeach Clinton again retroactively for his “lies” regarding Kosovo? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? Or does this standard just apply to Republican presidents?
You miss the point Huck. Clinton did the honorable thing by firing missiles into Iraq and keeping the troops at home. Bush sent our military into harms way instead of following noble Clinton’s lead.
For the Democrats, the only safe way to fight a war is from 30,00 feet or launching missles from the decks of ships. If it requires more than that, it’s not worth it. Diplomacy or law enforcement over all. Our military is to be used as a threat, not actually used.
Mike,
I’m sorry – I must of misheard you. Did you say something about ‘boots on the ground’. I must have had a DNC talking point lodged in my ear.
Let me try that again – OK – much better. It’s only honorable to make a sacrafice if Americans don’t get hurt – or if it makes Bush look bad. Or something.
Also,
for the Reality-Based –
Do you think that Bill Clinton’s prolonged engagement of Iraq through missile strikes for what are essentially the same reasons given by George W. Bush *could possibly have* had the desired effect?
.
Hear, hear, Collosus. I wonder how the naysayers would expect any of the other poignant arguments against Saddam would have flown in the UN, especially since those arguments would fairly apply to all of the other despots we grant false legitimacy to in that broken institution.
Many in the democrat party long ago crossed the line between honorable dissent and dare I say it, treason and sedition. Let’s call it what it really is. It’s about time that they and members of the MSM were called on it.
The present left dominated, BDS riddled reactionaries referred to as the democrat party have long since shown that they are against America in this conflict and actively aid our enemies. Our enemies count on them as a component of their strategy in the PR battle.
This administration is late in beginning its fight against the enemy at home, but better late than never.
Actually, Greenwald, the litmus test for patriotic Americans in time of war is whether something helps us defeat the bad guys and supports our troops. Lying about stuff that happened 3 years ago in order to undermine or bring down a sitting president doesn’t meet that litmus test.
So tell me, what has made you dislike America so much you are willing to undermine the war effort this way? Because I call that unpatriotic.
I’m struck by how remarkably civil Greenwald has been in this debate. It’s nice to finally see the topic discussed without a bunch of hysteria and hyperbole.
Beck,
Here, here!! He definitely gets props for that.
I’m with Chris on this one, The confirmed presence of WMDs (as opposed to future WMD threat, or Saddam’s own failure to disclose as per UNSC resolutions) was never the sole, nor central reason for deposing Saddam. In a rational world such arguments should make the Dem’s accusations entirely moot, and entirely transparent.
However, I also applaud Jeff’s willingness to confront the left on a battleground of their own choosing. Something he does quite successfully. It is an unfortunate consequence of the MSM’s alliance with the Democrat party that their spurious arguments must be refuted at all.
All of this is certainly part and parcel of Bush Derangement Syndrome. My broader concern is: What happens in the not-too-distant future when Bush is no longer around? Will there simply be a great transferrence to another politician or does the left have another phase planned? Will this alliance between the MSM and the hard left morph into something greater?
Chris,
The tag is there “on purpose” because the site designer wanted it that way and put it there. We can question the wisdom of the decision, of course.
The W3C standards say that if the tag is there, what the browser should do is what Firefox and Opera do. They don’t say the tag is required, but it’s allowed and should be obeyed if present.
Regards,
Ric
Did any one, at the time, call Kosovo a wag-the-dog war? I thought that didn’t start till the bombing of the factory in Khartoum and the empty terrorist training camp. Chris Hitchens accused Clinton of going to Kosovo only because Bob Dole made it a campaign issue, but I don’t remember anybody saying it was wag-the-dog. What would it have been distracting from? Monica, et al., were a year plus off.
The best case for the Khartoum/Iraq/Empty-terrorist-camp adventures being wag-the-dog were that they stopped completely after he was acquited. Could be that he let the wag-the-doggers cow him out of continuing. Or it could be he never cared about it in the first place.
Wasn’t it during the Kosovo war that the Chinese embassy was “inadvertantly” bombed? Was that a case of Clinton lying us in to an embassy bombing? Or was it bad intel? Will there be, at some point, any discussion of the benefit of having an intel. agency that can’t read a map, convincingly describe millitary assets of our enemies, adequately investigate charges of uranium shopping, etc., etc., etc.?
Colossus:
Almost correct. The WMD argument was a…
wait for it…
litmus test.
George Bush knew he had lots of opponents and a few genuine enemies. The WMD argument was offered as a way his opponents could put a figleaf over going along—since literally everybody in the world agreed that S. Hussein either had WMD or was desperately attempting to acquire them, a person willing to distinguish between hawks and handsaws could say, “Well, I still hate the bastard, but I’ll go along with it because there’s a real problem. You just wait ‘til the next election, though.” Or equivalent pronouncement.
The argument therefore was designed to separate the opponents, who had different ideas in good faith, from the plain enemies and cynical opportunists, and it worked like a champ. Too bad there are so few in the first category and so many in the second.
He did not, IMO, expect the degree to which the French were compromised by bribery and fear of their restive Muslim minority, nor did he anticipate that the likes of Teddy were prepared to put the whole country in the dumpster to keep G. W. Bush from getting credit for anything good.
In fact, that leads up to the huge mistake Bush made. He expected the liberals to be, well, liberal, and the actual vociferous uprising of reactionary, tribalist, (negative) jingoist, elite chauvinist bigots was well outside the anticipated parameters. It’s well to make such mistakes in order to confront the reality, of course, but I’m not sure it hasn’t gone too far to recover from.
Regards,
Ric
With all their concern about the international community, the Dems haven’t even noticed that the rest of the world lost interest in the ‘no wmd’ issue long ago.
Now the world watches the progress of the Iraqi people, and the cruel slaughter inflicted on them, and others, by al Qaeda.
That’s what matters today.
Lying that Bush misled us into a (senseless, illegal, immoral, whatever) war which has turned into a PR nightmare for al Qaeda shows how out of touch they are.
(’written’: It is written that the Dems will fall flat on their faces…again.)
Ahh, got it, Ric, and thanks again. It drives me nuts every time I visit Protein Wisdom — which is quite frequently, truth be told — but at least I’ve now got the anodyne of an explanation.
And so, to bounce this over Jeff’s way: Were you aware of this issue, and would you be inclined to make the fix? Thanks (and sorry — I know we’re frying other important fish on this thread).
I’ll look into it, but honestly, I have no idea really how to make such a fix. I use Firefox myself and hadn’t really noticed this.
In the sixties and seventies, these Dem liars would have been laughed out of politics. It’s more than a bit scary that this whole ridiculous procedure is given cover by a “press” that sees it’s job as spreading ignorance, rather than fighting it.
Jeff,
It’s not a fix you can or should do; it’s something embedded in the script templates, and you’d need to discuss it with your site designer.
“Delete something and see what happens” can be a fun way to find out how programming works, but it’s not a good thing to do with a live site
Regards,
Ric
The Glittering Eye piece you link to, Jeff, is very good.
On the other hand, when I woke up this morning to Howard Dean on MTP I really felt disheartened.
DR. DEAN: Tim, first of all, I didn’t have–maybe that’s why I was against the war, maybe because I didn’t have access to the corrupted intelligence. The intelligence was corrupted, not just because of the incompetence of the CIA; it was corrupted because it was being changed around before it was presented to Congress. Stuff was taken out and not presented. All of this business about weapons of mass destruction, there was significant and substantial evidence passed from the CIA and the State Department to, perhaps, the office of the vice president–we don’t know just where–in the White House that said, “There is a strong body of opinion that says they don’t have a nuclear program, nor do they have weapons of mass destruction.” And that intelligence was not given to the Congress of the United States.
MR. RUSSERT: It was in the National Intelligence Estimate, as a caveat by the State Department.
DR. DEAN: It was, a very small one, but the actual caveat that the White House got were much, much greater.
—
Add this to repeating the words corrupt! corrupt! corrupt! and it becomes clear we are well on the way to having a fruitful, healthy, honeset national debate about this.
Who cares about unpatriotic? I would settle for un-hyperbolic.
You shouldn’t fix it, Jeff, because I don’t think it’s broken. Where does it say in the W3C standards that an anchor tag has to be obeyed on refresh?
Of course, it’s not just the unanimous conclusions of the Senate Intelligence Cmte (Conclusions 83 and 84), though the fact that Sens. Rockefeller, Levin, Corzine, et al. accepted them is fairly powerful evidence. It’s also the unanimous conclusion of the bipartisan Robb-Silberman Commission (Conclusion 26) to which Sen. McCain referred.
But why stop there? Col. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s right-hand man at the State Department, has said the vice president and the secretary of defense created a “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal” that hijacked U.S. foreign policy. Yet in the same speech, he noted the overwhelming consensus of US and foreign intelligence on the WMD issues.
The latest attack on the Administration is one of “cherry-picking” intelligence, when it is Bush’s critic that are guilty of this. Sen. Levin touts a DIA memo that questioned the reliability of a captured top al Qaeda operative whose allegations became the basis of Bush administration claims that terrorists had been trained in the use of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq, while ignoring that he was one of a dozen sorces for the claim. It’s exactly the sort of behavior Jeff describes.
Karl,
I say again: do not allow the lying […] to suck you into an argument about process. They’ve got lists they’ve been making since the Rockefeller memo, and they’ve talked and wargamed the whole thing. It’s smoke, mirrors, and funny wiggles of the hand—“Look, nothing up my sleeve!” to distract from the weasel leaping out of the underwear.
The bare fact remains, and needs to be repeated and repeated and repeated, just as they’re doing with the accusations. George Bush heard the same things everybody else in the friggin’ world did, and came to the same conclusions as a result. It doesn’t matter if he was getting his data via irregular means—Hell, it doesn’t matter if he was getting it via Ouija board. He was getting the same stuff every politician and every pundit was hearing from every alphabet-soup “intelligence agency” on the friggin’ planet, and that’s what he acted on.
Keep it focused, people.
Regards,
Ric
Bravo, Mr Goldstein!
Hmmmm.
1.
Please tell me Howard Dean isn’t referring to Joe Wilson’s Niger trip.
2. I must say that the very height of credibility are references and quotations of former retired anonymous CIA sources who are willing discuss intelligence “stuff”.
And if included are also some quotations from an “intelligence official”, well.
Can’t argue with that.
Chris, click on the permalink attached to the last comment you’ve read instead of hitting refresh. This will solve your problem.
Thanks, Richard. I’ll give it a go.
After some poking around via Google, I’m starting to suspect the problem lies in one of Alex King’s hacked Word Press-related scripts, which Jeff uses here. That appears to be the one common trait among the problematic sites I’ve been able to turn up.
The longer this “Bush Lied” thing goes on, the more it smacks of going all in on deuces.
I wrote my opinion here. I can’t get a trackback to work, or I would have provided one.
That image is now seared, seared! into my brain.^^
The kernel of truth in the charges leveled by the Bush critics is that there was a conscious attempt by the Administration to use WMD as the main “marketing thrust,” the lowest-common-denominator argument. But the reason for this is that everyone in the whole goddamned world agreed that Saddam had ‘em, and that this was a Bad Thing.
Now we know that he got rid of (or, more likely, stored) the chemical and biological weapons, and that the nuclear thing was just a wet dream. But the Bushies were not in a position to take anything for granted in a post-9/11 world.
Does no one remember that the meme coming out of the anti-war people was to “give the inspections a chance to work”? It was laughable: we’d had an agreement in place for 12 years that was being flouted by a state we were still officially at war with, and our prestige was on the line.
All my liberal friends were chiefly concerned with the idea that people wouldn’t like us if we went ahead with the invasion. I said I didn’t want to be popular: I wanted to be respected. And it’s not the same thing.
Deano, with Jacques Chiraq leaping out of his underwear; quel tableau…
Now let me get this straight. The Dems are claiming that Bush and Cheney (and a few hand picked goons) were the ONLY HUMANS ON THE PLANET THAT KNEW SADDAM HAD NO WMDS?
I think it’s time for Bush (or Cheney) to take on these assholes mano-a-mano. These morons should be taken on BY NAME, and anytime they say ANYTHING, it is time to whip out the Rockefeller memo and read it out loud from start to finish. The MSM is ignoring the memo, but if every Republican in the whole country started answering ALL questions with a reading of this memo, the MSM wouldn’t be able to avoid mentioning it.
Unfortunately, only us poli-junkies know about it, but if more Americans were to learn of it’s existence, I’m pretty sure they’d be quite pissed off.
The truth will out, but only if the truth GETS out.
I like the way you put that first sentence, Lost. Even Saddam seemed to think he had WMDs at the time.
Attila Girl is right, there were many reasons to remove the Hussein regime, but 9/11 was the proximate cause of the invasion of Iraq because it revealed the danger of allowing a virulently anti-American regime, with a long history of aggressive adventurism, contacts with terrorists and pursuit of WMD capability, to remain in power.
Hussein’s Iraq claimed not to possess WMD, but refused to allow that claim to be verified, despite obligations under the 1991 cease-fire. The fact that they apparently did not possess large WMD stocks yet *still* did not cooperate fully with inspections is understandable only if one accepts the conclusions of the Duelfer Report – they very much wanted to reacquire them, and were determined not to surrender what technological capacity they still retained.
It was never a requirement, of either the unanimous UN Security Council Resolution 1441, or the congressional acts authorizing the use of force, that the UN, US or anyone else prove that Iraq was hiding WMD. Hussein was already “on probation” after numerous violations of the 1991 cease-fire.
The situation was instead that Iraq was required to prove they did NOT have WMD. And nobody, not even Chiraq, not even the UN ciphers like Blix and El-Baradei, claims that Hussein met the requirement to do that.
Why is that not the end of the story? 9/11 lowered the threshold for tolerating deception and obfuscation by regimes like Hussein’s Iraq. The whole point was that we *did not* and *could not* know whether Iraq had stocks of WMD unless one of two things happened:
1) Iraq cooperated fully with inspections, or
2) We used force and looked for ourselves
There was ample pre-bellum evidence that Iraq was concealing forbidden WMD activity, and that evidence was largely confirmed by the Duelfer Report. They do not appear to have had large stockpiles, but there was no way for us to know that without either full cooperation or invasion.
The alternative was for the President to say “I don’t know whether Iraq has WMD, and since there is some doubt, I will cross my fingers and hope they don’t.” This point should be part of the Administration’s push-back. It was not the President’s job to give Hussein the benefit of the doubt. The President had to weigh the very real threat to the United States posed by the *lack of sure knowledge* about Hussein’s WMD, and he acted properly in eliminating that threat.
Today, we know for a fact that Iraq has no WMD that could threaten us, and won’t have for the foreseeable future.
“Did any one, at the time, call Kosovo a wag-the-dog war? I thought that didn’t start till the bombing of the factory in Khartoum and the empty terrorist training camp. Chris Hitchens accused Clinton of going to Kosovo only because Bob Dole made it a campaign issue, but I don’t remember anybody saying it was wag-the-dog. What would it have been distracting from? Monica, et al., were a year plus off.”
To be fair, I believe most people when they refer to this mean “Operation Desert Fox,” the bombing efforts against Iraq in retaliation for the exit of the UN inspections team.
“Wasn’t it during the Kosovo war that the Chinese embassy was “inadvertantly†bombed? Was that a case of Clinton lying us in to an embassy bombing? Or was it bad intel? Will there be, at some point, any discussion of the benefit of having an intel. agency that can’t read a map, convincingly describe millitary assets of our enemies, adequately investigate charges of uranium shopping, etc., etc., etc.?”
There’s been suggestions that the Embassy was hit for a reason, specifically that they were giving intel to the Serbs. IIRC, it was the only target specifically added to the list by the CIA.
The fact still remains that every other intelligence agency in the world, and every other user of intelligence in the world, came to the exact same set of conclusions and were therefore getting near-identical data.
Really?
See here:
“Seen from today’s perspective this short paragraph is a strikingly clear template for the future, establishing these points:
1. By mid-July 2002, eight months before the war began, President Bush had decided to invade and occupy Iraq.
2. Bush had decided to “justify” the war “by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.”
3. Already “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
4. Many at the top of the administration did not want to seek approval from the United Nations (going “the UN route”).
5. Few in Washington seemed much interested in the aftermath of the war.”
[…]
“Worse, Saddam frustrated British and American hopes, as articulated by Blair in the July 23 meeting, that he would simply refuse to admit the inspectors and thereby offer the allies an immediate casus belli. Instead, hundreds of inspectors entered Iraq, began to search, and found…nothing. January, which Defence Secretary Hoon had suggested was the “most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin,” came and went, and the inspectors went on searching.
On the Security Council, a majority â€â€led by France, Germany, and Russia â€â€would push for the inspections to run their course. President Jacques Chirac of France later put this argument succinctly in an interview with CBS and CNN just as the war was about to begin:
France is not pacifist. We are not anti-American either. We are not just going to use our veto to nag and annoy the US. But we just feel that there is another option, another way, another more normal way, a less dramatic way than war, and that we have to go through that path. And we should pursue it until we’ve come [to] a dead end, but that isn’t the case.[4]”
Hans Blix’s comments:
“Now that the war has finished, he has made clear his feeling that the US and UK had exaggerated, or “over-interpreted” – as he put it – the case for war.
He expressed his doubts about the UK Government’s famous statement that Saddam Hussein could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes.
He has also spoken of the impression of a culture of spin and hype surrounding George W Bush and Tony Blair. “
Comments from Iraq’s highest level defector:
“Kamel provided the inspection teams with a wealth of information, some of it quite humiliating to the teams (such as how Ekeus’s own translator was actually working for the Iraqi government) and some incredibly useful (such as disclosing the fact that Iraq had a biological warfare program before the Gulf War, in addition to providing locations for facilities and huge amounts of documents).
The defection appears to have had a psychological impact in Baghdad due to uncertainty over what Kamel would reveal: soon afterwards inspectors were invited to visit previously unseen weapons sites and new documents were turned over for examination.
Importantly, Kamel maintained that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction and related programs after the end of the first Gulf War. Britain’s Foreign Office has stated that they disbelieved this claim, however Kamel’s version of events appear to have been borne out in the wake of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.”
< ahref=”http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/new/documents/quarterly_reports/s-2003-580.pdf”>UNMOVIC’s last report</a> prior to pulling out.
Note points 8, 12 & 13 in the Introduction.
I always look to the French to find out what’s “normal.”
Flame on!
And this covers the whole response to your canned talking points denying Bush lied quite nicely:
“No one really knew what Saddam was doing between 1998 and 2002. And US intelligence made a lot of very poor assumptions based on sketchy hints and clues. But the solution, at least the first part of it, was to get inspectors in on the ground and actually find out. That is what President Bush’s very credible threat of force had done by the Fall of 2002. But once there the inspectors began making pretty steady progress in showing that many of our suspicions about reconstituted WMD programs didn’t bear out, the White House response was to begin trying to discredit the inspectors themselves. By early 2003, inspections had shown that there was no serious nuclear weapons effort underway—the only sort of operation which could have represented a serious or imminent threat. From January of 2003 the administration went to work trying to insure that the war could be started before the rationale for war was entirely discredited. They wanted to create fait accomplis, facts on the ground that no subsequent information or developments could alter. The whole thing was a con. It wasn’t about WMD.”
[…]
“In the president’s new angle that his critics are trying to ‘rewrite history’, those critics might want to point out that his charge would be more timely after he stopped putting so much effort into obstructing any independent inquiry that could allow an accurate first draft of the history to be written. In any case, he must sense now that he’s blowing into a fierce wind. The judgment of history hangs over this guy like a sharp, heavy knife. His desperation betrays him. He knows it too.”
Hmm. Do I laugh at the irony of someone claiming I’m using “canned talking points” and then dropping an extended Josh Micah Marshall excerpt in my comments?
…
Yes. Yes I do.
PIATOR –
If you’ll forgive me for digging up a whole raft of primary sources at this hour, I am still quite curious about one set of related points – I’m not looking for a large answer as of now – you can dig up primaries tomorrow as well, if you wish.
If a) pre-Bush intelligence agreed substantially with post-2000 intelligence, b) foreign intelligence agreed, in substance, with US intelligence, c) the UN Clusters Working points to large numbers of unresolved issues, d) the Iraqi commanders themselves were under the impression that Iraq had chemical weapons…
If all these bits are true, I’m not sure how people would make the assertion that Bush knew that there were no WMD, chose to prosecute the war using that as a major argumentation point (rather than something more sure-fire), and then would fail to do anything to mitigate the damage two years on.
Oh, yeah, and by the way, have you heard any follow-up on this?
I always look to the French to find out what’s “normal.â€Â
In 1954, the Algerians launched a guerilla war against the French, who had conquered their land. By 1962 they had driven them out. In the process, France lost a lot of soldiers, tore itself in two internally, and stained its reputation permanently by its embrace of torture and injustice.
They tried to warn you. You didn’t listen.
If you’ll forgive me for digging up a whole raft of primary sources at this hourApologies for posting late. It should read:
If you’ll forgive me for not digging up a whole raft of primary sources at this hou
Oh, yeah, and by the way, have you heard any follow-up on this?
I dismissed it after reading the BBC account, wherein it was mentioned that it wasn’t suitable for dirty bombs. The material was, as the CNN story you link to made clear, radioactive waste – the same stuff the IAEA warned the US to secure.
Iraq had some nuclear facilities; these produce waste. The US removed it from Iraq. End of story.
This isn’t a WMD. Bush lied about the threat of WMDs.
France is not pacifist.
I agree. Duplicitous, cowardly, craven, effete, quisling …
but pacifist?
naw
Just think, even though the [cough] spontaneous [cough] riots by disaffected youths [cough] in France continue despite the dropped coverage by American MSM, at this rate in 20 years we can all vacation in al France
On 9/11 Al Queda attempted to kill 100,000 people in NY and Washington. They succeeded in killing around 3,000.
At the same time Saddam Hussein is paying a bounty of 25,000 to the family of every suicide bomber who blows up Jews.
Saddam Hussein has, in the past, used Chemical and Biological weapons, attempted to build nuclear weapons, attempted to build a gun capable of firing on Israel.
He is conning billions of dollars out of the UN Oil For Terrorism program to be used to jumpt start his WMD programs the minute the UN inspectors are gone again.
On top of that, his WMD programs are probably smuggled into Syria while Bush goes the UN route.
And you, “Phoenician in a time of Romans” thinks Bush lied?
You are a lying treasonous prick who probably gets an erection every time you think about some jew or american murdered by Saddam.
May you rot in hell.
PIATOR,
The 1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium is a weapons precursor and therefore a proscribed item. It’s immediate utility to make a device at the time of removal isn’t really the subject matter. Compliance with treaty was the goal post. So, I mean when it gets down to cases, that was sufficient to demonstrate non-compliance with UN Resolutions, as far as I can tell.
Even the chief weasel himself, Chiraq, admitted in February 2003 that it was “probable” that Iraq had illegal WMD:
If Bush was lying, why would Chiraq (who was taking bribes from Saddam and trying to keep him in power at the time) repeat the same “lie”? Nowhere in the interview does he challenge the hypothesis that Iraq has WMD, he merely argues that removing the regime will have harmful side effects (stopping the flow of money diverted from humanitarian relief to the Iraqi people into his own Swiss bank account, presumably).
—
For some reason, Jeff’s commenting software won’t allow me to insert a hyperlink to the interview in question (time.com is blacklisted?) But it is in the February 24 issue of Time Magazine. The European edition still has the fulltext of the interview available without subscription.
The cached Google page with the interview is here.
I remember a long time ago, it was all about “the burden of proof” is on Saddam. (And he never proved Iraq had come clean.) In fact, it was repeatedly pointed out that there need not be a ‘smoking gun.’
But instead, the media wanted to make this a story like a CSI or cop drama, where the US had to find “evidence” before we could arrest the perp.
Anyone who has read the timeline issued by UNSCOM will immediately agree that Iraq lied and deceived us for as long as possible and then once caught, would make another Full & Final Declaration, etc., etc. One would be very foolish to trust them after 9/11.
I kept waiting for Blix to say, “Yes, they are clean” or “No, they are still hiding a lot.” He never did it. He played both sides off – I guess for his nice salary and CNN perks?
Besides all of this stuff, I think even the most hard left Dem would admit that if we have not gone to war, the sanctions would have been off very soon and Iraq would have re-started all their programs – they might even have begun to export them a la Pakistan’s Khan. Or did we all misunderstand Saddam and actually he was a great guy?
Right, funny how that was lost down the memory hole, isn’t it?
I think it was the Dutch PM or FM who at the time said “It is not time for more inspections with flashlights; it is time for the Iraqis to turn the lights on.”
The whole point of UNSCR 1441 was: no more business as usual. It gave Iraq one “final” chance to come clean. They didn’t take it, because they thought they could ride out the storm as they did in 1998, and keep their illegal activities concealed until sanctions collapsed (as the French and Germans had tried, and would continue to try, to engineer). Unlike 1998, however, there proved to be no riding out the storm, despite the best efforts of Chiraq et al. 9/11 made the risk of accepting Iraqi (and UN) excuses and patiently waiting to see what would happen down the road too high for the US to accept.
In many ways, this whole “BUSH LIED!” fantasy on the Left is reminiscent of their 2000 election obsession, and seems to have largely taken its place in their mythology. Remember that vulgarist Michael Moore completely falsified the history of the Florida election in his film that MSM and political types who should have known better uncritically swooned over. With the election, as in this case, they just kept repeating the same lies over and over until they believed them, and the MSM dutifully played their assigned role by constantly referring to election as “disputed” etc. to glaze the ridiculous and long-debunked charges with some patina of credibility. Particularly rabid/shameless apparatchiks like Paul Krugman are still trafficking in the same falsehoods almost 5 years later, of course.
And why was that?
Does that mean Clinton (Bubba), Gore, Kerry, Albright, Clinton (Herself), Pelosi, Daschle, etc were all lying when they told us he was a WMD threat in 1998, then?
No, it means that in the absence of Iraqi cooperation, we had to assume the worst about their WMD capability, even before, and especially after, 9/11. And especially when there was every reason to believe the worst, based on what we did know, or thought we knew.
I’m still with Jonah Goldberg here – no one has yet explained why the Bush administration would lie (and consequently attempt a deception on a massive scale) regarding WMDs in Iraq, knowing full well as they did so that such lies and deception would be exposed the moment that Iraq fell.
I mean, surely the *reality-based* community would acknowledge that a successful deception operation would require some follow-through here? Maybe apply a little bit of ol’ Occam’s Razor and admit that the facts on the ground are more consistent with the suggestion that the Bush White House is being truthful?
TW “matter” – Does the logical consistency of their allegations matter to these people?
As usual, Ted Kennedy himself is a font of wisdom on this (or any other) point.
Here is what he said on Sept 27, 2002 in a speech at SAIS just before the Senate vote on the war resolution:
But there is a difference between honest public dialogue and partisan appeals. There is a difference between questioning policy and questioning motives.
and
Let me say it plainly: I not only concede, but I am convinced that President Bush believes genuinely in the course he urges upon us.
Evidently, it was only later that the Senator realized how important it was to question the motives of that evil liar, Bush.
Hmm. As usul, Prevuew is fr sisssys.
I posted the assertion that everybody in the world had the same information and came to the same conclusions.
Phoenician then posts a long list of intelligence providers and the information they handed out. I suppose his/her/its intention is to assert that that data was not available to decision makers contemporaneously.
This calls to mind the picture of Bush and Rove, frantically ranging the world suppressing the output of Hans Blix, et. al. Phoenician should apply to FrankJ for a slot on IMAO. It would make a near-perfect In My World episode, and we haven’t had a good one lately. Condi in a Wonder Woman suit, mmm.
Regards,
Ric
RS-
You (and Jonah) are right.
Why would Bush lie, knowing he’d get caught?
Why would Tony Blair go along with it?
Why wouldn’t Bill slip a note under Senator Hillary’s door saying, “Vote no on the war. They’re lying!”?
On another thread, on this very site, PIATOR advises us all that we shouldn’t concern our widdle heads with the prospect of Iranian nukes because there probably isn’t another nation on earth that needs them as much as the Iranians.
Got that, Bushitler fellators? Grok the concept, neo-con chickenhawk warmongers?
All this chit-chat about WMD in Iraq is a smokescreen. PIATOR and his ilk don’t actually care if there were WMD in Iraq and if we found a working nuclear bomb with Saddam’s signature on the delivery mechanism, PIATOR would default to his Iranian position which apparently is “well, the US and Israel have them. Why not demonstrably insane middle eastern strongmen and religious wackjobs? Nazi!”
Yeah, say “sharp, heavy knife” instead of “sword of Damocles”—maybe you can pass it off as an original formulation.
It’s not Bush history will judge harshly, but Copperheads like Josh Micah Marshall, PIATOR and their fellow travellers.
TW:”doubt”, as in on that score I have none.
For anyone that says Bush was determined to go to war, come “hell or high water” can you explain the frantic last minute dealing to let Saddam and his ilk go into exile in an Arab state??
You know that deal that fell through at the last minute…that deal that Saddam agreed to…that deal that would have meant NO WAR. Was that just another Bush/Rove fake out??
John Edwards (D-Loony) mixes up a fresh vat of kool-aid:
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/11/13/051113190851.b2b1492x.html
rubbish! I can’t remember why. will come back when more coherent.
The only really valid question is:
“Since we knew Iraq HAD WMD’s, where did they go?”
Syria? Russia? France?
Didn’t any of you ditch your stash of Penthouse and Playboy (or Playgirl if that’s your thing) when you knew your mother was going to clean your room?
I found melhman’s (mehlman?) comment to russert just prior to dean interesting. Why were the CIA’s assessment paid attention to after all the cases where the CIA failed to correctly assess the situation?
It is sort of an interesting strategy: CIA assessments are mostly wrong, so we can act on them and if they are true, then we take credit, if they are wrong we blame the CIA.
Are we paying $50B a year for the CIA to give the current administration a CYA, especially given Rumsfeld establishing a redundant DIA, which doesn’t seem to be any better at figuring stuff out.
Rumsfeld didn’t establish the DIA, and it isn’t the only redundant agency. Aren’t there, like, 21 seperate intel. agencies? The CIA seems like the one that has the most trouble not leaking. That’s why we end up knowing everything they screw up. The NSA would probably be as big a train wreck if they hired politicians instead of math PhDs, like the CIA does.