Giddy, he had WMD. He didn't want to, but he got rid of it, or buried it somewhere near the Earth's core. He was reluctant to admit he didn't have it due to his neighbor, Iran, who does have WMD and, unlike Saddam, had, and still has a program to develop nuclear weapons. A country that had fought a long and bitter war with Iraq, in which both sides used WMD's. Iraq's military was 1/3 the size it was pre-Gulf War I. His was a secular country, and terrorists were not active in areas he controlled. In Iran, you have a government that actively supports terrorists. We were patrolling huge swaths of Saddam's country, and frequently bombing parts as well. Iran was free to continue it's WMD and atomics programs, despite clearly being a bigger threat than Saddam's Iraq, which begs the question... Why in the hell did we invade Iraq instead of Iran, if WMD and atomics were the thing we feared the most?? Why? Because we have an absolute idiot for President, that's why. Get a clue, buddy. Keep D&D Civil.
OK, strange company you want to keep. I'll include Basso in the role of Shepp. George, bigtexx, T_J and Basso. The right wing stooges.
What a great article. It shines a spotlight on the administrations diversion tactics and renders the whitehouse attack plan seemingly helpless. I would love to see some analysis from the Bush supporter's side about this.
There were discrepancies over materials they had and did not document destroying. That's the way disarmament works. Azadre you can do a bbs search and see all of the debate over the problems with Ritter rather than rehashing it here. But I'm not sure what the point of rehashing this is. It is true that no WMDs were found, but it is also true that there was reasonable belief he did at the time. I think Deckard is being a little generous with Saddam to suggest he refused to allow unhindered inspections for ten years because he was afraid of Iran. I think it IS a bit revisionist to claim now that no one thought he had a WMD program. It is much more accurate to say there were two main schools of thought - (a) he has them and we should continue inspections to find them or (b) he has them and we should intervene.
3.5 years ago I thought Saddam had WMD too but opposed the invasion. To me its always been an argument about costs vs. benefits and the costs at the time were never well spelled out while the benefits seemed to be overly hyped. Every time anyone attempted to address potential problems that might arise, such as an insurgency, conflict between the ethnicities, terrorism and sabotage of the Iraqi infrastructure all of those were dismissed out of hand as the nattering nabovs of negaitvism. Well here we are 3.5 years later and practically almost every problem predicted regarding occupation of Iraq has occured. I don't think the Admin. lied about the reasons for the war. I don't think they were very clear, exageratted and failed to critically assess intel but what I think was worse was that they weren't honest about addressing the potential costs of invasion and occupation. Any good leader plans for a worse case scenario and the leadership and Central command failed to do that and instead bought their own hype that things would go swimmingly in Iraq.
gee, I feel so silent today... --------------------- Decoding Mr. Bush's Denials To avoid having to account for his administration's misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He's tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He's tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he's gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists. Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of the troops in battle today. It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that none of it has been true. • Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had - Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress - and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful. Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president's access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact. It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working - a view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics. The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise. The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer. Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it got those answers. Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was "significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration's "hammering" on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency. Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully reported what they had read. But Vice President Dick Cheney presented the Prague meeting as a fact when even the most supportive analysts considered it highly dubious. The administration has still not acknowledged that tales of Iraq coaching Al Qaeda on chemical warfare were considered false, even at the time they were circulated. Mr. Cheney was not alone. Remember Condoleezza Rice's infamous "mushroom cloud" comment? And Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, when the rich and powerful met in Davos, Switzerland, and he said, "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for nuclear weapons?" Mr. Powell ought to have known the report on "special equipment"' - the aluminum tubes - was false. And the uranium story was four years old. • The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It's obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein's weapons and his terrorist connections. We need to know how that happened and why. Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/opinion/15tue1.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
Unlike many of the *liberals* who now recant their support for the war, I was never bought into the bogus WMD claims, I never believed Saddam had anything to do with 9/11, I never trusted Bush, even during the heydays of building up the war to invade Iraq. I look at the man in the eye. I am able to get a sense of his soul. Simple as that.
Yeah I remember it. That friggin' winter was the harshest in recent years. What we know is after the initial success of the US-British led military campaign in Iraq (e.g., "Shock and Awe", ya know), the anti-war sentiment was quickly subdued. The next big things on people mind were steady ascending of the stock prices as well as sharp declining of gas/oil prices. To hell with innocent Iraqi lives. Apparently things didn't go well as people had wished, so reality sets in. I actually give folks like hayes credit for sticking to their guns.
When people have opium, they wouldn't feel like going out and driving all the time. I know my pothead friends never want to go anywhere. So yes, I'm saying drugs = less oil usage = patriotism.
Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was "significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. This sounds like coercion that Silberman-Robb Commission was tasked to sniff out yet must have missed.
this is pretty hilarious. not sure if this GOP add is runing on TV, or just on the web, but it certainly makes the point. http://www.gop.com/Default.aspx?s=video here's a direct link to the video, which will open WMP: http://media1.streamtoyou.com/rnc/111505.wmv
its surprising that around the same time we were going to war, NKorea was threatening to actually bomb us, the same time we knew they had WMD's and potenitally could reach Cali, but we didnt do anything about it (as in no millitary action) yet with the data coming back from inspections and Iraq not having WMD we decide to invade anyway i dont know why the critics dont bring this up, at least to point out the "right" way of diplomacy, war should always be the last resort im glad Sadam is no longer a dictator but I think there were better oppertunities to dethrone him So when they say Bush is silencing critics, it just means that the critics are not being heard or understood their are so many flaws in this war, the supporters are supporting the war or supporting the troops to come out victorious, that is 2 different things im sure the liberals deep down dont want to lose the war and lose more men but defending the policies of going to war are so weak and they only way to defend it is to say your bringng down the morale of our soldiers? truth will hurt them? then why send them there in the first place under false ideas? should we continue to tell them hey they still have wmd's? they knew before they left, the whole world knew, after the inspections that iraq didnt have weapons, they knew the UN was not going to support, and were going in alone....doesnt that bring down the moral of the troops?
