Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
How some of these people can even show their faces in public is beyond me.
* Update * Oooh, here's an excellent video which makes an even stronger case. Will these buttheads ever come clean and stop lying? I'm sorry, but saying the President lied is a lie. It's offensive and it's nasty and it's utterly uncalled for. (Via Instapundit.)
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Dems had a choice: oppose the war or support it -- based on the best information available at the time.
Most chose to support it -- when it mattered. (Myself, I opposed it, but Who cares?)
Now, the steady stream of whining and lying ("we supported it only because Bush mislead us!") is bogus.
It is effective, though. It dents up Bush politically, which I kinda like, but, alas it is ill-gotten political gain, in my view.
Hank Barnes
Just remember: what goes around, comes around.
Which is why I oppose this kind of crap no matter who spews it. All we end up with is more pollution.
Seriously...I don't get it. What's the big deal? Why are they getting on this bandwagon now?
Nevertheless, it is clear in retrospect that *everyone* - the democrats in the congress, the President and his top advisors, everyone - was making their decisions based on ... inaccurate information.
It pisses me off that neither the leadership of the Congress, nor the President, have seen fit to engage in an investigation of how it is that *everyone in government* came to fall under the spell of bad data, where that bad data came from, and how we can do better in the future.
Knowing today how wrong we all were about the Iraqi WMDs leaves me *very, very worried* about how wrong we are about other things.
Sheer political cowardice is what it is.
lyingdeception.It is true that almost everyone thought Saddam was an evil person, who could not be trusted. Everyone thought Saddam wanted nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and would probably start working on them again if the UN sanctions were ever lifted. They were probably right about that.
Most people also thought Iraq still had some chemical artillery shells, and perhaps some short or medium range missiles with chemical warheads. Most people were ready to believe that after 1998, when the UN inspectors were kicked out, Iraq probably restarted research on biological weapons.
Only a few people believed that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program, although the Bush administration kept playing this point up and tried to keep the intelligence that suggested it was not true hidden. This is because the chemical and biological weapons that everyone thought Iraq had or might be working on were hardly a threat to the US. In fact chemical and biological weapons, while clearly banned weapons, are not usually considered WMDs. They need the nuclear weapons threat to scare the American people enough to support an invasion.
The weakest piece of the main argument was that Iraq might give its so called WMDs to terrorists to use against the US. This claim was almost fabricated out of thin air or perhaps the fantasies and conspiracy theories of Laurie Mylroie. The Bush administration tried to hide the intelligence that showed this was a baseless claim.
By March 2003 when Bush decided to invade Iraq, the whole WMD case for the war was already collapsing. The UN inspectors had clearly shown that Iraq had no active nuclear program and all the intelligence that suggested it was forged or just plain wrong. It almost looked like Bush ordered the UN out of Iraq and started the invasion because he was afraid that the UN would show that in fact Iraq had no WMDs and then he wouldn’t have a reason to invade anymore.
In the aftermath of 9/11 the American people were frightened. The administration cleverly talked about 9/11 and Iraq together until 70% of the American public believed that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. They rarely actually claimed the Saddam was in some way responsible for 9/11. Cheney did make this claim a few times, and he was clearly lying when he did it. It was a truly masterful job of deceiving the American people.
Is anyone surprised that they are now trying to deceive us again about how they deceived us before the war?
There are people who are being slaughtered by their cruel and unusual leaders everyday. Why didn't we go to Rwanda? Rwanda doesn’t have oil. If they did we would have 'liberated' them too. I am not saying that we won't liberate Iraq. We will. But anyone who doesn’t think that the Bush's previous scraps with Saddam, and the fact that there's a lot of oil there weren't ulterior motives for striking there so soon after Afghanistan, is naive.
Aside from all of that, there was no unmistakably powerful evidence we needed to invade and the Authorization of force was granted because of panic and stupidity. Now they are going with "Bush lied, people died!” We expect you to be more critical, Dems. Oh by the way thanks for not reading a @#$%ing thing about the "Patriot Act" before you green lighted that thing. Thanks for doing your job as screw-ups. You failed your voters and now you are passing the buck. The Democratic Party is a worthless dying shell that needs to reform or die off like the useless thing it is.
Now that I have spewed all that vitriol, Iraq will be Democratic! That's a good thing. Aside from all of that it's still a good thing and people should be happy for the Iraqi people and their trials that get them one step further away from a dictatorship. There are a lot of non-Bush supporters for many reasons. However, I will say this, if he installs Democracy successfully into Iraq and it holds. If this is a lynch pin event that turns the Middle East towards a non-secularist democratic society, then he will have accomplished something that no other President has even accomplished. This will ultimately prove my theory that money is the greatest motivator of all to boot :)
"Just think about former Florida Senator Bob Graham. He was a fairly conservative Democrat and he served on the Intelligence Committee. He saw the initial classified NIEs and he saw the later de-classified NIEs. He was so outraged at the Administration's marginalization of very serious objections in the classified version that he voted against the Iraq war resolution. He also used the experience as the sole raison d'etre for his Presidential campaign"
What I find rather interesting is that Mr. Graham seems to have had access to not only the "estimate" if you will, but also the "margin of error" about that estimate. It sort of casts doubt on anyone who says they were *not* aware of the unreliability of the estimates. Does anyone have any corroborating links?
Well, they ARE senators. I mean, they shrivel up and die without public exposure.
(I will tactfully avoid mentioning worse things in Ted Kennedy's past)
Jared: Wrong you are. There remains signigifcant evidence that Saddam tried to buy uranium in Africa. Indeed, British Intelligence and others still stand by that claim. It was never a lie. Wrong perhaps, but to this day we can't even say that.
As for there being other nations we could have invaded: Jared, the oil doesn't have jack shit to do with it because if we wanted his oil we would have bought it from him. Iraq supplies perhaps 3% of our total oil here in the US comes from there anyway. We had well over a dozen reasons for going, all of which were spelled out clearly by the administration and argued strongly not just by them but but many members of both parties in Congress. Read the declaration of war against Saddam if you want to be reminded of all the arguments.
Personally I don't see how we could possibly think we'd be in a better position in the war on terror with Saddam still there. I can see why a few would disagree with that but I also think it's not relevant: we're there now, and need to finish business.
What evidence was there for the purchase of uranium from Africa? How would he buy it without world knowledge? Niger's uranium business consists of two mines, Somair and Cominak, which are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests. If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, because the two mines are closely regulated, quasi-governmental entities, selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president.
An analyst was sent from the White House to confirm the findings that the "Intelligence" reported. He could not confirm them. Save that he may have "sought" uranium. So Saddam 'sought" uranium, but ended up with a whole lot of nothing. Threat level for WMD = 0. It's bunk. Of course he was looking for it. That's not the same as having it.
Maybe he smuggled it in past our Military occupied bases, our no fly zones and we didn't manage to find a ship somewhere going overseas with oh.. say 500 tons of Uranium? Even if he had purchased it we would have known about it very soon and probably would have confiscated it.
There were dubious ties made to Al-Qaeda. Saddam was publicly declared an infidel by Bin-Laden. He called on Iraqis to rise up and oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who is a secular leader. The factions we are fighting now in Iraq kill each other as much as they try and kill us. They are not trying to restore Baathi power.
I'm sorry I'm not saying that we wouldn't have gone to war with Saddam anyway, we would have eventually. I'm not saying that the war is wrong. I am saying that skeptics have always question the evidence brought to us, and a lot of them considered it bunk. Probably because it is bunk. I was also saying that the Dems are passing the buck and instead of addressing their own shortcomings and lack of ability to critically anywise evidence or a bill, they are saying "Bush Lied". I honestly don't know which party infuriates me more at present.
Moreover, the truth is that oil is a fungible commodity sold on a world market. It wasn't "our" oil then and it's not ours now. The only way in which oil was part of this equation is that it gave that monster money and power. Our desire for Iraqi oil is miniscule. Even today, years later, the U.S. gets barely 3% of its oil from Iraq. You really think we went to war for that? Bull. Yes, some of our companies might profit. But it's paranoid in the extreme to say we went to war for that purpose.
Oil gave Saddam money and power. He wouldn't have been a threat otherwise.
As for Saddam's attempting to buy uranium in Africa: see this lengthy analysis by Factcheck.org. Those people are quite non-partisan and responsible. Face it dude: the big liar on yellowcake in Niger is JOE WILSON, not the President.
Here, by the way, again, is the war declaration against Saddam which gives all our reasons for going. I suggest reading them and pointing to the ones you disagree with. The only one apparently is WMDs. Great. There are a dozen others. You disagree with all of them too?
And let's look at that: pretend for a minute it's 2002 and we're pretty sure Saddam has WMD stockpiles, that he will build up those stockpiles if given a chance, and we know for a fact that he's funding terrorist activity in Palestine. There were proven ties to other terrorists.
In what sense can you really say we would be safer or better off today if Saddam was still in power, still funding terrorists, still defying weapons inspectors? It defies belief--to me--that anyone can honestly think that. I don't even get the thinking.
I also have to ask: we had over TEN YEARS of keeping Saddam "in a box." How many more years should we have kept that up? We had an entire year of debate in this country on this topic, in which more than a dozen reasons were given for going. Then Congress, after extensive debate, voted to declare war.
Read that resolution again. It shows all the reasons we were given, all the things we debated in this country for a whole year in congress, on television, in newspapers, in blogs... it was all there. It's horrible revisionist history to state that it was "just WMDs." That was the primary focus of Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N., which was done AFTER WE DECLARED WAR, and was to try to convince the Security Council to come aboard and help. Which, a majority of them wanted to--the French and Russians just vetoed it.
Wouldn't it be more prudent now to think about how we can help win over there, rather than these phony recriminations about "lies?"
He didn't lie, because the information that it was bunk came out later after he believed this to be true. Bush said he sought Uranium and that was proven. I am not saying he lied, quite the contrary. I don't know where you are getting this conjecture. What I am saying though, is that all of these insane claims came through and no one thought to check their authenticity until after an invasion.
I am saying that the Democrats are trying to blame the Republicans for legislation they agreed to based on shoddy evidence. Dean you keep insisting that I am using phony recriminations about "lies". I never said that. I didn't even say Bush lied and I don't know where you are getting that from. I am saying that the WMD evidence is bunk. It is, sorry.
Furthermore, I have read the authorization for use of force and the term "Weapons of Mass Destruction" comes up too many times for me to bother to count. Al-Qaeda comes up a few times. The only things on the list not connected with these claims are:
The attempted assassination of former President Bush, which is a pretty good reason.
The violation of the cease fire agreement by stalling the UN inspectors. Which in theory is loosely connected but I let that slide because he should have let them in.
Of course brutally oppressing his people and refusing to release Non-Iraqi citizens that were wrongfully captured and detained. That's a good reason too.
Other than that, the argument is weapons of mass destruction all the way.
As far as Saddam offering us Oil if we lift the sanctions and remove the no-fly zones, do you really believe that he thought we would actually do that? Offer terms they cannot accept so it is they who look hostile, not you. It is an old political posturing tactic. He wasn't offering a deal. There was never going to be a deal. You assume again that I am saying the war is all about oil. I again, didn't say that either. I do insist though that is a factor in the decision making. Now that an evil dictator is out of power we can think about offering the fledgling nation some trade to get their economy going, and make ourselves richer and them richer.
I will retract and apologize for everything I just said if Oil Companies are not drilling there after the war and selling Oil to Americans and other people. You may not think that it is a motivation, but it is a very good motivation and valid. Think about it, why would we want to buy Oil from a writhing massive human rights violation, when we can do our business with a new democracy? Wouldn't this put pressure on the Saudis a little? Couldn't we use that as leverage?
You keep saying that I am accusing Bush of being a liar and that we were better off not going to war. I haven't said that. I think you think I am coming from the left and are assuming that I am trying to imply that somehow. I am not. All I am saying is that the evidence is bunk, and that for the Democrats to blame Bush for their mistake is dishonest.