Dean's World

A lot of the WMD intelligence certainly turned out to be wrong.

Did Bush lie about what the intelligence actually said?

There is pretty strong evidence that the White House was pushing hard on the intelligence community to allow him to make claims that were not considered reliable by the intelligence community. The famous 16 words is an example of that. The WH kept pushing to put the Niger uranium claim into the state of the union speech and the CIA kept insisting it was not reliable. In the end it was included in the speech, but sourced to the British, who thought the claim was reliable, but had less information than the CIA and had not investigated it as extensively as the CIA.

Were those 16 words a lie? It was true at the time that the British believed the claim, so you can argue it technically was not a lie. This is what the Butler report says. But Bush is not the prime minister of England, and he or his advisors knew that the CIA had more information on this claim than the British and did not believe the claim. While the 16 words may have been technically true, they were not very “truthful” and were designed to mislead and frighten the American people.

But this is all mostly a side show. The big lie was that the Iraq war had anything to do with WMDs. In October 2002 when congress voted to authorize the war, you could argue that there was intelligence, which if true, meant Iraq was a threat to the US. Given the events of 9/11, you could argue we could not risk letting countries like Iraq help terrorists attack the US. By voting to authorize war, congress was giving Bush the authority he needed to threaten Iraq and deal with the perceived threat.

By March 2003 though, the intelligence case that Iraq was a threat was rapidly collapsing. The UN had proven the Niger uranium documents were forgeries, the aluminum tubes were not for centrifuges, and many claims of secret WMD factories were not true. The UN could find no evidence to back up the intelligence claims. It should have been clear to anyone, including Bush, that the intelligence case that Iraqi WMDs were a threat was simply not true. Bush ordered the UN out of Iraq and invaded anyway.

My conclusion is that the Iraq invasion had nothing to do with WMDs. I do not know what the real motives were. If it had been WMDs, Bush would have given the UN inspectors more time. Instead it looked like Bush wanted to get the invasion over with before the UN inspectors completely shredded his whole case for war. This is the big lie.

mikeca, if you don't know what the real motivation was then you either haven't been paying attention or you've already bought into at least some of the anti-war logic. But let me see if I can edumicate you a bit:

First, did Bush lie about what the intelligence actually said? No. How do we know that? Because if he did then so did Bill Clinton, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Al Gore, John Kerry, Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. Ted Kennedy, and Sen. Jay Rockefeller. So what happened? He was working with what he had, the intelligence community may have just failed him - it happens, remember the Bay of Pigs? The truth is that the Dem leadership has jumped on the BUSHLIED bandwagon right now because we have an off year election coming up and they need their base to turn out. Sadly the base of the Democratic party is dominated by anti-war, American hating, Bush-hating, whackjobs who think sitting in a pile of your own shit because you refuse to buy toilet paper from Wal-Mart is some sort of defining moment.

Now about those 16 words. No they were not a lie and Dubya never should have let anyone apologize for them. The fact is that even Joe Wilson's own report - not the editorial in the New York Times, but the actual report doesn't contradict the "16 Words". The Congretional investigation into how the Whitehouse handled the informetion has exonerated the Administration and the Brits STILL stand by their intel reports. So between me and you, after watching the boys at Foggybottom commit clusterfuck after amazingly inept clusterfuck over the last twenty years only to finally see them declare war on their own President, well, I'll take MI6 at their word.

Finally, why the "rush" to go to war? Why not allow Saddam to sit and wait while UN weapons inspectors did their thing? Well I can answer that too. First, it wasn't only about WMD's. In fact if you read the President's State of the Union address he specifically states three reasons for war and WMDs are actually number two. The first reason given was the repression of the Iraqi people, and the third was Saddam's support of terroists. Now I'm sure you're thinking, "Yeah, but why not give the inspectors a little longer? Why not try sanctions some more? Why not ?"

Why? Two reasons, first, we'd already moved over the bulk of our military over there and they'd been there for months getting ready to invade. You can't put troops in a situation like that indefinately, it degrades their combat effectiveness. But let's say you wait three months more to invade - now you've got an army that's less effective than it was before attacking in the hottest part of the Iraqi summer - a full scale assault for four or five weeks in 115 degree weather? We'd lose more men from heatstroke than bullets. Quite simply once they were there they HAD to be used, or we had to pack it up and go home.

Now let's say we do just that, we pack up and go home, what are the results? Disasterous. Arab culture is a face culture. We leave, it doesn't matter what the reason, but we leave after all that bluster and we're pegged as cowards and easy marks. You think 9/11 was bad? Arab terrorists don't lay off countries perceived as weaklings, they ravage them. So for good or bad once we were there we were committed to going. That's my .02 anyway.