One Year Ago

So far, it looks like one year ago we were lied to.

 

"I think if you're gonna make an accusation in the course of a presidential campaign, you ought to back it up with facts,"

Bush during a news conference yesterday with the Netherlands' Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkenende.

 

do you have a link to that speech somewhere?? i was trying to share that with a friend of mine.

 

the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war

 

Wait a minute! This invasion was about bringing freedom and democracy to those Iraqis!

Yeah we might've said something about WMD's and Al Qaeda but this was all about freedom and democracy. We just knew the US public needed a little more convincing.

Remember,

 

I still don't think they lied, I think they had bad intelligence.

Big difference.

DD

 

Huge difference.

CIA Director Tenet: "It is important to underline the word estimate because not everything we analyze can be known to a standard of absolute proof,"

Rumsfeld: `No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.'

Bush Knew Iraq Info Was Dubious

link

Senior administration officials tell CBS News the President’s mistaken claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa was included in his State of the Union address -- despite objections from the CIA.

Traveling with the president in Africa, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Friday said that the CIA had cleared the reference to the attempted uranium purchase.

Before the speech was delivered, the portions dealing with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were checked with the CIA for accuracy, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin.

CIA officials warned members of the President’s National Security Council staff the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa.

The White House officials responded that a paper issued by the British government contained the unequivocal assertion: “Iraq has ... sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” As long as the statement was attributed to British Intelligence, the White House officials argued, it would be factually accurate. The CIA officials dropped their objections and that’s how it was delivered.

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” Mr. Bush said.

The statement was technically correct, since it accurately reflected the British paper. But the bottom line is the White House knowingly included in a presidential address information its own CIA had explicitly warned might not be true.

Today at a press conference during the President’s trip to Africa, Secretary of State Colin Powell portrayed it as an honest mistake.

“There was no effort or attempt on the part of the president or anyone else in the administration to mislead or to deceive the American people,” said Powell.

But eight days after the State of the Union, when Powell addressed the U.N., he deliberately left out any reference to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa.

“I didn’t use the uranium at that point because I didn’t think that was sufficiently strong as evidence to present before the world,” Powell said.

That is exactly what CIA officials told the White House before the State of the Union. The top CIA official, Director George Tenet, was not involved in those discussions and apparently never warned the President he was on thin ice.

Secretary Powell said today he read the State of the Union speech before it was delivered and understood it had been seen and cleared by the intelligence community. But intelligence officials say the director of the CIA never saw the final draft.


Regrading British Reports

Britain Admits That Much of Its Report on Iraq, Cited by Powell As Reason For War, Came From Magazines With Obsolete Data "The British government admitted today that large sections of its most recent report on Iraq, praised by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell as "a fine paper" in his speech to the United Nations on Wednesday, had been lifted from magazines and academic journals.... The document, "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation," was posted on No. 10 Downing Street's Web site on Monday. It was depicted as an up-to-date and unsettling assessment by the British intelligence services of Iraq's security apparatus and its efforts to hide its activities from weapons inspectors and to resist international efforts to force it to disarm. But much of the material actually came, sometimes verbatim, from several nonsecret published articles, according to critics of the government's policy who have studied the documents. These include an article published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs in September 2002, as well as three articles from Jane's Intelligence Review, two of them published in the summer of 1997 and one in November 2002. In some cases, the critics said, parts of the articles — or of summaries posted on the Internet — were paraphrased in the report. In other cases, they were plagiarized — to the extent that even spelling and punctuation errors in the originals were reproduced.... But critics of the government said that not only did the document appear to have been largely cut and pasted together, but also that the articles it relied on were based on information that is, by now, obsolete.... Critics of the British and American policy toward Iraq said the report showed how little concrete evidence the two governments actually have against Iraq, as well as how poor their intelligence sources were. " 02.08.03

 

I don't think they lied either but I don't think bad intelligence is a justifiable excuse either. War is the most serious matter for any government and it is inexcusable that the Admin. wouldn't look at the intel more carefully and skeptically rather than let paranoia and ideology drive their decisions and rhetoric.

Also since I think all of us can agree that the pursuit of Al Qaeda is justified and should be our topmost concernt the invasion of Iraq sidetracked our efforts to pursue Al Qaeda by redirecting specialized resources from Afghanistan to look for non-existant WMD in Iraq, diverting funds and manpower to Iraq than focussing on clearer threats and finally alienating key allies in the hunt for Al Qaeda.

 

Sir,

The question will be decided in about 10 years.

If out of all this mess, we get a stable Secular democratic Iraq, it will have been worth it.

If not, well, then it was a huge miscalculation, probably the biggets blunder by a US president in history.

We shall see.

 

All the more reason that it should have been an action supported, manned, and paid for by the majority of the world instead of the coalition of the willing. Iraq was a political game to try to get Bush re-elected that had nothing to do with 9/11 and will not do anything to reduce terrorism in the long run.

 

Off the Mark on Cost of War, Reception by Iraqis


By Dana Milbank and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A01


A year ago tonight, President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq with a grand vision for change in the Middle East and beyond.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq, his administration predicted, would come at little financial cost and would materially improve the lives of Iraqis. Americans would be greeted as liberators, Bush officials predicted, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein would spread peace and democracy throughout the Middle East.

Things have not worked out that way, for the most part. There is evidence that the economic lives of Iraqis are improving, thanks to an infusion of U.S. and foreign capital. But the administration badly underestimated the financial cost of the occupation and seriously overstated the ease of pacifying Iraq and the warmth of the reception Iraqis would give the U.S. invaders. And while peace and democracy may yet spread through the region, some early signs are that the U.S. action has had the opposite effect.

Much of the focus on prewar expectations vs. postwar reality has been on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. But while that was the central justification for the war in Iraq, the administration also made a wide range of claims about the ease of the invasion and the benefits that would result. Though comparisons between expectations and results are complex, it appears that the administration, based on limited human intelligence and conversations with a small corps of Iraqi exiles, was overly optimistic.

White House officials, who did not respond to requests for information for this report, acknowledge that the financial costs have been greater than expected but say they are pleased with the progress toward democracy, security and prosperity in Iraq.

Bush, who will deliver a speech today outlining the successes of the past year, gave a taste of his themes in an address in Kentucky yesterday to troops just back from Iraq. "A year ago, Iraq was ruled by the whims of one cruel man," Bush said. "Today, Iraq has a new interim law that guarantees basic rights for all: freedom of religion, the right to cast a secret ballot and equality under the law." Iraqis, he said, are "building a country that is strong and free, and America is proud to stand with them."

On April 23, 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, laid out in a televised interview the costs to U.S. taxpayers of rebuilding Iraq. "The American part of this will be $1.7 billion," he said. "We have no plans for any further-on funding for this."

That turned out to be off by orders of magnitude. The administration, which asked Congress for another $20 billion for Iraq reconstruction five months after Natsios made his assertion, has said it expects overall Iraqi reconstruction costs to be as much as $75 billion this year alone.

The transcript of that interview has been pulled from the USAID Web site, the agency said, "to reflect current statements and testimony on Iraq reconstruction." The earlier $1.7 billion figure was "the best estimate available at the time, based on very limited information about the conditions inside of Iraq."

Natsios was far from the only one to offer low-ball figures. Similarly, a report by the White House Office of Management and Budget in late March 2003, said: "Iraq will not require sustained aid." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, in February 2003, dismissed reports that Pentagon budget specialists had put the cost of reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion during the first year -- in retrospect, relatively accurate forecasts. In testimony to Congress on March 27, 2003, Wolfowitz said Iraq "can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." In fact, the administration has already sought more than $150 billion for the Iraq effort.

In its predictions a year ago, the Bush administration similarly underestimated the resistance the United States would face in Iraq. "I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Vice President Cheney said in a March 16 interview.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz derided a general's claim that pacifying Iraq would take several hundred thousand U.S. troops. And Rumsfeld, in February 2003, predicted that the war "could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."

The capture of Iraq did proceed rapidly, allowing Bush to proclaim on May 1 that "major combat operations" were over and to declare "victory" in the "Battle of Iraq."

But those upbeat assertions were undermined by an Iraqi resistance that proved much more difficult. Washington had not counted on the scope, capabilities and endurance of the resistance after formal hostilities had ended -- or that Iraqis might eventually turn on their liberators. By yesterday, 574 American and 100 other coalition troops had died in Iraq. As many as 6,400 Iraqi soldiers are believed to have died in combat, and the insurgency continues to claim the lives of Iraqi civilians.

The "coalition has been unable to ensure a safe and secure environment within critical areas of Iraq," concluded a Council on Foreign Relations task force led by former defense and energy secretary James R. Schlesinger and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Thomas R. Pickering.

"This lack of security has created widespread fear among Iraqis, inhibited growth of private sector economic activity, distorted the initial development of a robust and open civil society, and places important limitations on the normal routines of life for most Iraqis," said its report, "Iraq: One Year After."

Iraqis, who had high expectations that the United States could make them secure, have been disappointed, analysts say.

"Unfortunately, it's been 11 months since the fall of Baghdad, and the U.S. still hasn't fulfilled those expectations of [providing] basic security or services," said Kenneth Pollack, research director of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center and a former National Security Council staff member in the Clinton and current Bush administrations. "At this point, Iraqis are beginning to think that, if those services have not been provided, it may be because we're unable or unwilling to do so."

A poll of Iraqis released this week by ABC News found that 42 percent of Iraqis, and 33 percent of Arab Iraqis, said the war liberated Iraq, but that 41 percent of Iraqis, and 48 percent of Arab Iraqis, said it humiliated the country. The presence of U.S.-led forces in Iraq is opposed by 51 percent of Iraqis.

Administration forecasts that the invasion would improve Iraqis' lives were closer to the mark. On March 17, 2003, Bush promised to help "build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free." Secretary of State Colin L. Powell vowed days later: "We will show the Iraqi people a better life. We'll deal with those segments of the population who have been . . . absolutely brutally deprived for years, and they will start to see a better life very quickly."

Thanks to the massive injection of foreign aid, an important transformation has begun in rebuilding an Iraqi society emaciated by a dozen years of tough economic sanctions and Hussein's preference for personal luxuries over public necessities, analysts say.

Considerable economic activity has resumed in Baghdad and other major cities, while living standards are better than at any time since the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the country's oil revenue is gradually climbing. "What's impressive -- and maybe more credit goes to Iraqis than to us -- is that economic activity has picked up. Clearly, there's money out there. People are going to jobs and working," said Henri Barkey, former State Department expert on Iraq and now chairman of Lehigh University's International Relations Department.

The ABC News poll confirms this. Fifty-six percent of Iraqis said things are better than before the war, and 71 percent expect that their lives will be even better next year.

The administration's forecast that the toppling of Hussein would start a wave of democracy and a disavowal of terrorism in the region has not yet happened. There has been progress; Libya, for example, has since relinquished its nuclear weapons program. But while the administration had often predicted that Hussein's ouster could resolve the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the standoff between the two has worsened.

A poll released this week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that Muslim countries are highly skeptical that the ouster of Hussein will make the Middle East more democratic.

"Iraqi democracy will succeed -- and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation," the president said in October.

But Iraqi democracy has proved messy in the making. Almost immediately, divisions within the Bush administration led to a temporary breakdown over the postwar plan for Iraq. The Pentagon abruptly jettisoned the State Department's plans for assembling a post-Hussein government and started from scratch -- a move from which analysts believe the United States has not recovered.

"Because we didn't have anything concrete to put in place the day after, it left a vacuum," Barkey said. The early chaos led the administration to change course. A plan to hold an Afghan-like national conference to select an interim Iraqi authority was tossed out in favor of appointing a 25-person Iraqi Governing Council, largely exiles and dissidents allied with Washington.

Two transition plans designed by the United States and its allies in the Coalition Provisional Authority were rejected out of hand by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a Shiite cleric virtually unknown before the war. With about four months left before the U.S. occupation is due to end, there is still no plan for how to pick a new government.

"The challenges for U.S. policy in postwar Iraq, given the geopolitical stakes, the threat of ethnic conflict and armed resistance, and the political complexities of administering a legal occupation, were far more formidable than those that confronted U.S. officials in previous cases," from Haiti to the Balkans to East Timor in the 1990s, the Council on Foreign Relations report said.

Still, there is hope that democracy may yet take hold. "Iraqis are engaged in free and vigorous debate about their collective political future and the adoption of a Transitional Administrative Law represents a major success both for U.S. policy and for the people of Iraq," the report concluded.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6338-2004Mar18.html

 

http://www.moveon.org/news/caughtoncamera.html

rumsfeld caught in a big fat lie in a video interview

 

Taken for a Ride
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 19, 2004

Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." So George Bush declared on Sept. 20, 2001. But what was he saying? Surely he didn't mean that everyone was obliged to support all of his policies, that if you opposed him on anything you were aiding terrorists.

Now we know that he meant just that.

A year ago, President Bush, who had a global mandate to pursue the terrorists responsible for 9/11, went after someone else instead. Most Americans, I suspect, still don't realize how badly this apparent exploitation of the world's good will — and the subsequent failure to find weapons of mass destruction — damaged our credibility. They imagine that only the dastardly French, and now maybe the cowardly Spaniards, doubt our word. But yesterday, according to Agence France-Presse, the president of Poland — which has roughly 2,500 soldiers in Iraq — had this to say: "That they deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that's true. We were taken for a ride."

This is the context for last weekend's election upset in Spain, where the Aznar government had taken the country into Iraq against the wishes of 90 percent of the public. Spanish voters weren't intimidated by the terrorist bombings — they turned on a ruling party they didn't trust. When the government rushed to blame the wrong people for the attack, tried to suppress growing evidence to the contrary and used its control over state television and radio both to push its false accusation and to play down antigovernment protests, it reminded people of the broader lies about the war.

By voting for a new government, in other words, the Spaniards were enforcing the accountability that is the essence of democracy. But in the world according to Mr. Bush's supporters, anyone who demands accountability is on the side of the evildoers. According to Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, the Spanish people "had a huge terrorist attack within their country and they chose to change their government and to, in a sense, appease terrorists."

So there you have it. A country's ruling party leads the nation into a war fought on false pretenses, fails to protect the nation from terrorists and engages in a cover-up when a terrorist attack does occur. But its electoral defeat isn't democracy at work; it's a victory for the terrorists.

Notice, by the way, that Spain's prime minister-elect insists that he intends to fight terrorism. He has even said that his country's forces could remain in Iraq if they were placed under U.N. control. So if the Bush administration were really concerned about maintaining a united front against terrorism, all it would have to do is drop its my-way-or-the-highway approach. But it won't.

For these denunciations of Spain, while counterproductive when viewed as foreign policy, serve a crucial domestic purpose: they help re-establish the political climate the Bush administration prefers, in which anyone who opposes any administration policy can be accused of undermining the fight against terrorism.

This week the Bush campaign unveiled an ad accusing John Kerry of, among other things, opposing increases in combat pay because he voted against an $87 billion appropriation for Iraq. Those who have followed this issue were astonished at the ad's sheer up-is-down-ism.

In fact, the Bush administration has done the very thing it falsely accuses Mr. Kerry of doing: it has tried repeatedly to slash combat pay and military benefits, provoking angry articles in The Army Times with headlines like "An Act of `Betrayal.' " Oh, and Mr. Kerry wasn't trying to block funds for Iraq — he was trying to force the administration, which had concealed the cost of the occupation until its tax cut was passed, to roll back part of the tax cut to cover the expense.

But the bigger point is this: in the Bush vision, it was never legitimate to challenge any piece of the administration's policy on Iraq. Before the war, it was your patriotic duty to trust the president's assertions about the case for war. Once we went in and those assertions proved utterly false, it became your patriotic duty to support the troops — a phrase that, to the administration, always means supporting the president. At no point has it been legitimate to hold Mr. Bush accountable. And that's the way he wants it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/opinion/19KRUG.html?hp