Democrats & Liberals Archives

Steven:

What you are reading from is an act of Congress, after Congress reviewed the information from our intelligence agencies as well as the intelligence agencies around the world, including Germany, France, Israel etc.

The issues here are extremely serious. Where did the WMD which were there in the early 90’s go? How did the world intelligence community get it sooooooo wrong???? Wrong enough to convince both political parties as well as President Bush to go to war???

Why did Kerry vote for this resolution??? Any ideas?? Didn’t Senator Kerry review the intelligence himself?

Craig

What is scarey is that the same people who were wrong about the fall of the Soviet Union, (didn’t predict it), who were wrong about WMD in 91 (underestimated them, who were wrong about WMD in 2003 (said they were in Iraq), now don’t have a clue as to where they are.

Now think about this before you go into political hype. Democrats in particular believe that they were never there and that Bush mislead the country. Based on what? Based on the same people who said they were there in the first place telling us that. The very truth is that after all of these billions of dollars we have spent on intelligence we don’t know.

What we do know is that Iraq had WMD in the nineties and that we have no proof that they were ever destroyed. We have to assume that we cannot trust our intelligence agencies. We have to assume that we just don’t know what happened to those weapons. That is very very scarey.

Now, we are trusting that Saddam destroyed them. How smart is that???? My point is that we live in a dangerous world, and we are flying in the dark on this one. There are two possibilities, either Saddam destroyed the weapons and our intelligence community can’t prove it, or Saddam moved them to another location/hide them and out intelligence community doesn’t have the foggiest notion where they are. Which guess without knowledge should we base our future on??

Craig

Fair questions, Stephen, but the “mask and costume” rhetoric is a bit over the top since as Craig points out we had every reason to believe WMDs were there (along with everybody else in the world) and I haven’t heard anyone with actual insider’s info, not even Richard Clarke, allege that anybody in the administration made the whole story up. In fact, Clarke made several statments during the build-up to war opining that Iraq had WMDS. Even Clinton—to this day—insists that he saw very convincing evidence. Do you think Bush somehow pulled the wool over Clinton’s eyes too, before he was even president. And if it was all a lie, what was Bush’s possible motivation for lying? What in the world did he have to gain (please don’t say oil, an idea so discredited at this point to be laughable considering the expense we’re going to build an oil industry in Iraq for their own profit).

Stephen:

I noted from your post that the Joint Authorization you quoted from discusses issues in the following order:

1)The cease fire agreement that Iraq agreed to
2)That inspectors and intelligence agencies have in fact found WMD’s and plans in Iraq at different times
3) That Iraq thwarted inspection efforts, in violation of the cease fire agreement they signed
4)That Iraq was found to be in material breach of their agreements

Then in paragraph 5, the threat caused by Iraq’s current weapons and programs, and in paragraph 6, the support of terrorism and the allowing of Al Queda members to live in Iraq.

Please note that WMD’s were not mentioned until paragraph 6, and that they were PART of the equation, albeit one that the administration pushed too heavily in my opinion. The resolution does not appear to connect Iraq with 911, other than to conclude that Iraq was harboring Al Queda members along with other terrorists (one of whom we know to be Abu Nidal, who killed Leon Klinghoffer.

It is important to recognize, as I suspect you do, that WMD’s were not the only issue in the resolution, though the press seems to focus on them as the sole issue. Were they the only issue, I too would be angry about the war. The other justifications fit, and in my mind, are enough reason to justify what we have done.

Craig

First, let me provide you with the full text of the Authorization for the use of force in Iraq.

Let’s start with the raw intelligence. What could be the cause of the discrepancies? The undocumented destruction of WMDs, hastily achieved at some point is one possibility. Others include fraud by the scientists as to the progress of their work, and fraud on the part of an emasculated Saddam, looking to conceal his weakened status. Whatever’s the case, a worse case scenario was assumed.

What I think the overseas agencies agreed on was that Saddam was hiding something, and that inspectors need to sent in to determine what. What’s important, though, is that nobody identified positively any actual WMDs, or claimed that was represented in the discrepancies was actually there to be found. So how wrong was the rest of the intelligence community? A little, but not as much as we were. And no matter what kind of company we had, it constitutes an intelligence failure for us, because we are not without the means to take a fresh look at the intelligence.

Enter the OSP. The Office of Special plans was more or less a B-team in intelligence and military terms charged with finding proof of such things, and of terrorists Lo and Behold, they found it. But as Powell is saying today, the proof was not entirely dependable. They went in looking to prove a conclusion they had already come to, and any scrap of evidence that would make it a “possibility” that these things were true was brought on board.

We have later learned (that is, the public) that much of the evidence was either inconclusive or untrustworthy. Additionally we learned that much of the intelligence was knowingly gather from a group that had a vested interest in regime change, headed by a fellow not exactly known for his scrupulous behavior

It was this intelligence that would be passed on to the senators and representatives in Congress. The OSP shaped the intelligence. How much is what we must find out. Did they knowingly included inaccurate or false evidence in the case that was made to the congress for war? Or: What did they know, and when did they know it?

Because the OSP was created deliberately in order to get a second opinion on Iraq, and make the public and federal cases for action there, two possibilities arise. One is that in their opinion, information about Iraq was flawed, and they were simply seeking to redress the problem. Legal, if a bit vulnerable to ego-driven failures to catch one’s mistakes. The other possibility is that the OSP did what it did with knowledge that the facts did not supporting the case they were making, and that new “facts” were needed to get us into Iraq.

The necessity of Congress’s reliance on information gained by the executive branch means that Senator Kerry and others were relying on Bush’s people to get it right. I don’t believe that Kerry was in a position to gain intelligence information through other means. He had to take what he was getting, and legislate based on that. Both political parties got it wrong more or less as a result of that intelligence. So the failure cannot be termed legislative. It must be, by nature, a problem in the executive Branch.

Bush’s repsonsibility, in other words. The question is, did they know how thin the intelligence really was? Were they holding on to rickety theories like the Ramzi Yousef double? Were they decieving themselves first? Incompetence, plain and simple. If they knew, though, then it’s deception. Deception of this kind is not only wrong, but illegal, as well as impeachable, if the president was involved. To knowingly deceive Congress in seeking a war would be an impeachable offense, as John Dean pointed out in the NOW with Bill Moyers interview that served as the starting point for this article.

It should interest you to know that another act of congress was referenced in the list of justifications for the statutory authority that Bush was given to invade Iraq:

Whereas the President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States, as Congress recognized in the joint resolution on Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40);

In short, that resolution mentioned in the paragraph above is the one that enables Bush to go after those who are responsible for 9/11 or those who aid and harbor them.

One problem: Bush is on the record as saying Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

What is scarey is that the same people who were wrong about the fall of the Soviet Union, (didn’t predict it), who were wrong about WMD in 91 (underestimated them, who were wrong about WMD in 2003 (said they were in Iraq), now don’t have a clue as to where they are.

What if they are telling us this because there is proof that they no longer exist? With the Ba’ath regime fallen, they no longer have any sound reason to decieve the inspectors. There’s no Saddam up there in Baghdad to have them shot if they didn’t lie. Nobody’s perfect, but if there is better evidence for the absence of weapons than the presence, then that’s the better conclusion to come to. We’ve had over a year to search, and my feeling is, the search hasn’t been random. They’ve followed the leads and found nothing.

What we do know is that Iraq had WMD in the nineties and that we have no proof that they were ever destroyed. We have to assume that we cannot trust our intelligence agencies. We have to assume that we just don’t know what happened to those weapons. That is very very scarey.

No, we shouldn’t be assuming they were there. That assumption is why we’re now throwing our hands up in Iraq wondering why we went there in the first place. We knew Saddam had these things early on in the 90’s, but we also know that the inspectors destroyed much of that.

We don’t know exactly what happened to them. We may never know. But we shouldn’t simply assume that our case is solid in the absence of evidence. To do so as indefinitely as you suggest is to invite a second embarrassment like this one. Either we find where they are based on the facts, or we admit we were wrong. If intelligence should indicate otherwise in the future, then it will be justifiable to restart things.

Martin-

We don’t have every reason to believe they are there. We have quite substantial reasons to believe that they weren’t. We don’t know when or if they were moved, but they are not where they were supposed to be. We have a strong suspicion that they were destroyed, but that documentation of this destruction simply wasn’t made. But that too is uncertain. What is clear, is that these weapons aren’t there, aren’t in the places we thought they would be, and after a year of trying to track them down, we still have nothing. Something would show up, given enough time.

I am not alleging that the WMD issue was completely made up, but that we are most likely mistaken to have assumed Iraq had those weapons short of hard evidence. The CIA has been given extraordinary new powers to deal with terrorism and rogue nations. Bush could have called upon the CIA to go out there and verify the presence of the weapons. It could have taken a little time, but if Bush had paid attention to the evidence, he might have recognized that he had that time. Iraq should stand as an object lesson in the dangers of fallacious thinking, and unchecked intelligence. As for the reasons, those reasons, I think, are fairly obvious, even somewhat tragically admirable.

Bush may very well have thought that by lowering the threshold of the evidence required for action that he was making the intelligence system more efficient, rather than less, as it’s turned out. He may, even, have unfortunately believed his War in Iraq was so important, that a deception here or there was permissable to send us into war.

Joebagofdonuts-
Around seventy percent of the paragraphs listing the justifications for the authorization of force explicitly mentioned terrorists or WMDs. I merely made excerpts of the ones that most clearly spoke of them. I will not deny that a large part of it is also devoted to the issue of Saddam’s tyrrany and past untrustworthiness.

But still, the bulk of our justification rests on the very things we have not found. Even the harboring of terrorists is uncertain, considering we didn’t find them in our invasion, and the fact that the very Abu Nidal you mention ends up dead in his hotel room with a couple of bullets in his head. Suicide they say.

Fact is, The Terrorists and the WMD form the backbone of the justification to use force. They formed the compelling reason above the insufficient ones that kept us out of Iraq before, to lead us there, and to convince otherwise uncooperative members of the legislature that such action was necessary.

We knew Saddam had these things early on in the 90’s, but we also know that the inspectors destroyed much of that.

Don’t forget that Clinton pulled the inspectors out in ‘98 and then bombed the crap out of all suspected WMD sites. That probably made it a little difficult to accurately document their destruction.

What troubles me is that the administration “knew” where the WMDs were hidden, but there was no plan to secure or inspect those sites during the invasion. By the time inspectors got to the sites (weeks later, in some cases), many were burned and looted. If there was WMD there, it’s long gone.

It seems pretty irresponsible to invade Iraq because Saddam “might” give WMDs to terrorists, but then have no plan to insure the WMDs are secured.

Obfuscation of an issue like this is an interesting approach for a group of self proclaimed patriots like the Bush Administration. Craig first, Your Question about Kerry is indicative of something I read in almost all of your comments your disregard for the principle of first causes. If a series of events is started by an action, the initiator of that action is responsible for the events directly caused by their action. In this case the Administration had clearly been warned about the uncertain nature of the intelligence they used to justify war with Iraq. Why should Kerry or any one else have doubted their veracity when the Administration withheld the information about those uncertainties from him and the rest of Congress?

Second Martin
The issue of where the Lost WMD have gone is interesting until you read about that issue in Scott Ritter’s book in which he eliminates that problem. Any weapons using either biological or chemical materials would have been so degraded by time as to be useless by 2003. It is amply clear that there were no nuclear weapons or even their precursors built in Iraq after 1992 and they did not exist before the first Gulf war. So wasting effort and time on those issues is only more obfuscation and obscuration of the fact that Cheney and Wolfowitz manipulated the intelligence community, Bush lied on that basis, Powell lied, Rumsfield lied and Congress acted on those lies. The people in the intelligence community that have come foreward to talk about the manipulation of intelligence in this case number more than twenty today and more are coming foreward every day.

Good luck obscuring all of their statements.
henri

Stephen:

From what I understand, the evidence that WMD were there after the first war in Iraq is irrefutable. The UN inspectors had clear access. They monitored unitil thown out, the destruction of these weapons. This process was incompete when the UN inspectors were thrown out.

The truth as I know it today is that we do not know what happened to these weapons. I am trying not to lean to the left or right here, but making a point we should all agree on, which is, “What in the H@ll are we paying these billions of dollars in intelligence for? The left thinks they were never there or were destroyed. The right thinks they might be in Syria. None of us has a clue. All we know is that they were there and now they are gone. Which ever side of the arguement you are on, our arguements are based on blind speculation.

I cannot think of another logical option than that they were destroyed, are still in Iraq and are hidden, or were moved somewhere else. The world needs to know that answer. The people who know that answer should still be there in Iraq.

As for the foreign intelligence networks, I heard a piece just yesterday on PBS radio (not part of the republican attack machine), where they discussed intelligence. They basically said that german, french, israeli and us intelligence all agreed that Iraq had these weapons before the war.

The point of the piece was about how inbred the intelligence community is. They (the intelligence community) had been wrong in the first war in Iraq by underestimating WMD. So now of course they were wrong the other way.

My basic point is that “intelligence” is a oxymoron. They look more like the gang that can’t shoot straight.

I think Congress (including Senator Kerry), and the President, believed this faulty intelligence and lead us into war. If we don’t correct this problem, some day a future president will lead our country into a battle where they will be slaughtered, because they will underestimate the strength of the enemy.

The vote in Congress is done. Now it is our turn to vote on faulty intelligence. Our representatives sent us to war on hogwash. So as we vote for president, which hogwash are you going to base you vote on?

Craig

The left thinks they were never there or were destroyed. The right thinks they might be in Syria. None of us has a clue.

There are ways to follow up on each theory, to work out what the signs of each different event might be. Get people in the Syria or Iran. Get people into those facilities you think they might be hiding them in. The Iraqi WMDs would most likely have some sort of identifying marks or characteristics that could distinguish them as Iraqi WMDs, or differentiate them from Syrian or Iranian Armaments of that sort, if necessary. See if they’re there, and then you will know what happened with some degree of certainty.

Otherwise, it’s unfounded speculation, and worse, if untrue, it’s a an attempt at distracting people from a serious policy mistake. We must start from the assumption of their non-existence, then look for evidence to disprove that.

As for your points on intelligence, I think you perhaps misunderstand the nature of the beast. There is a sort of market for information, if you will, intelligence passed back and forth according to its value.

You may fault the OSP for the faulty information during the Iraq war. We had information that basically show Saddam was contained and his WMDs mostly destroyed in one way or another, that he was at best a stingy supporter of terrorism if one at all. That information was ignored by the NeoCons in favor of information that favored their version of the situation. It’s an almost Characteristic flaw of the group: so zealous on their issues that they must do all they can to prove themselves right, even if it means taking shortcuts to get the conclusion they think true.

Because, as I said, the legislature requires the executive branch’s help in gathering and analyzing the information, there’s not much that can be done to resolve the intelligence problem at their level besides a more skeptical and demanding attitude towards the intelligence community.

As for what hogwash I’m going to vote for, that’s pretty simple. Whoever has their act better together has my vote. Seeing how Bush has put policy at the mercy of his ideology so many times, I don’t see how I can really be convinced that any vote for him would be good for my nation’s health, or my own.

> What in the world did he have to gain (please
> don’t say oil, an idea so discredited at this
> point to be laughable

It’s not that silly if you think about it in terms other than personal profit.

The United States has a vested interest in protecting and even controlling the world’s supply of oil. By establishing a vassal state in Iraq, or at least by crippling an uncooperative regime there, Bush and his crew hoped to gain some sort of control of or influence over that oil supply, not only in Iraq but throughout the Middle East.

That’s not so silly at all.

-Cf

Steven:

“We must start from an assumption of their nonexistance”

Read that over. Do you really want to stick with that?

We KNOW they existed at one time. Assume makes a what out of you and me? You want to ASSUME Saddam destroyed them without records. These are weapons that if you are incorrect, could be given to terrorists and strike the U.S.

Hmmmmmm.

I really want you to think this position over very very carefully. It looks pretty dangerous to me.

With all do respect, I would suggest that the left is doing exactly that only in reverse right now. There is a strong desire to show that Bush knew ahead of time about 9/11, and that he mislead the country on Iraq. They are looking at only the information that points to that end with an intent of defeating Bush. In otherwards Bush is the left’s Saddam Hussain. Every single logic process that the left is accusing Bush of having against Iraq, I see the left using against Bush!!!!

The left is over reading the data, with the end result that two wrongs might make a right.

The truth is that you cannot show or prove that the weapons were destroyed. In your own arguement you state it is an ASSUMPTION. The intelligence community ASSUMED Saddam was hidding the weapons because they were unaccounted for.

If we use this logic process of acting on assumption instead of knowledge we will never get any where. The left cannot prosper by repeating the error of the right and basing their positions on assumptions and not hard data.

Just today, in the news Colin Powell is eating his words about the two trailers. Evidently the intelligence was WRONG. Why would we believe that the current version is correct?

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and in fact are dangerous,

Craig

> Just today, in the news Colin Powell is eating
> his words about the two trailers. Evidently the
> intelligence was WRONG. Why would we believe
> that the current version is correct?

Indeed. Someone within the intelligence community, or indeed within the Bush administration itself, lied to Colin Powell. I hope we find out who it was.

The only way we’re going to know what version of intelligence to believe is to vote the whole lying and/or incompetent bunch of them out of office.

-Cf

Christopher:

Including Kerry!!

Craig

(He voted for the resolution too!!)

Craig, that is not fair! Kerry voted for the resolution, but he did not vote for the invasion. There’s a difference.

I opposed the Iraq resolution because it was an abdication of power from the Congress to the President. As bad as it was, it was not a declaration of war. That is, a vote for the resolution was not a vote for the war. The resolution doesn’t say “We declare war on Iraq”.

It says that the President has the power to invade Iraq if he thinks it’s necessary. The resolution leaves the final determination of this necessity to the President himself.

The idea was that the President would use this power as leverage to get Iraq to comply with the inspections. It wasn’t a blank check to invade Iraq even as the inspections were improving.

It was also intended to allow the President to use military force to stop an imminent threat from WMDs. The Administration had access to way more information than any Senators ever did. Kerry and the other Senators knew this. They were given the impression by the President and his intelligence officials that there very well could be an imminent threat, and that waiting for an official Congressional declaration of war might take too long as the situation got overheated. So, Congress put their trust in the President by passing the resolution.

And the President went right ahead and violated that trust. He had no intention of negoatiating or anything. He should have just asked for a declaration of war, but instead he asked for a fig leaf to make it merely look as if he intended to try diplomatic means.

So yes, I blame Kerry. I blame him for being a sucker. But he’s no more a sucker than you or the other millions of Americans who were also lied to by the President and his phony-intelligence salesmanship.

-Cf

Mr.Kerry had enough information to authorize war. If he voted to authorize war without enough information then he doesn’t deserve to be a Senator much less president.

Then that is what you should blame President Bush for.

The Senate is responsible to check into matters BEFORE they vote on them. Kerry is 100% responsible for his vote with NO excuse.

To mislead Congress on a matter of war would be an impeachable offense. Kerry is not demanding that the house draw up articles of impeachment.
Why not?? If Kerry is sooooo pure on this, then where is the impeachment? THEE reason for that is that Kerry voted for the resolution based on intelligence information he felt was substantial.

It would be interesting to go back and read the Congressional record to find the outrage from Democrats over how thin the intelligence was.

CH

Christopher, if Kerry and millions of others including you and me were deceived, why is George Bush the only person who was NOT deceived and was therefore lying? I’m really curious. It seems like an important point, but nobody’s ever really explained it. Perhaps it could be answered that well, the president has the best intelligence available and SHOULD know the truth—I can agree with that, but what if he doesn’t? Then the problem is with our intelligence services, no? George Bush believed exactly what Bill Clinton did, based on access to the same resources. Was Clinton lying too?

We can—and should—have a debate about what action should have been taken in response to the facts as they were understood by a great many people in government, Democrat and Republican alike(and as I understand it, George Tenent, a Democrat appointee, is STILL defending the evidence). But lying? A disagreement over facts is not lying.

Craig, you are speaking as if we shouldn’t be concerned that there was an intelligence failure of this magnitude on Bush’s watch. Instead of quick, thorough explanations of the mistakes, what we get instead is continual stalling and doubletalk from them.

But what is the right answer? That which is best supported by the facts. The fact is, now, that we have no WMDs to show for our months of searching. The assumption I offer is simply the easiest to start from given the evidence.

That sentiment carries over into my strong dislike for Bush. I’ve never been fond of him, but there were points when I thought he’d just be a lame duck of a president. But as more evidence has mounted as to what in particular went wrong with 9/11 and the War on Terror, I’ve come to view him as much more dangerous of a screw up.

Mr. Kerry, and many others of the congress had no independent means of factchecking Bush’s intelligence. Besides, it wasn’t their job. Bush and his people made sure that his presentation made their case, having the OSP take care of it. Bush made sure that his case was persuasive, even if his factual standards bordered that of Paul Bunyan stories. The administration got what they wanted. Now, unfortunately, we have to go look and see what we really have.

As for impeachment, I’d have to tell you that in order to get Bush impeached, you would have have the Republicans do it. They hold the majorities in the House and Senate. So I’m not holding my breath.

A disagreement over facts is not lying.

It can be, if one knows better.

The answer to your primary question is that Bush has executive power. He can control the distribution of sensitive information, he can give orders to his staff, he can do any of other things to regulate information to the outside world. While it’s easy to claim Bush was as surprised as everybody else, he did create the OSP in oder to circumvent the defense establishment that wasn’t making him the case he wanted. Whether it was stubborn ideology or dishonesty, he still brought this on himselves in many ways.

Impeachment now? For believing there were WMD in Iraq? I guess we’ll have to impeach everybody in Congress now. Is it possible to retroactively impeach Clinton, who also believed it, whose appointed CIA chief was the primary agent behind the intelligence? Oh yeah, Clinton was already impeached. And now we’ve learned that he turned down Sudan’s offer of Bin Laden during Feb 96, just as things were heating up with Lewsinsky. I guess Bill Clinton just had other things on his mind (and on his lap).

Stephen, what do intelligence failures about WMD have to do with “distribution of sensitive information?” The problem is with what was flowing in, not what with what was flowing out—what is it you’re trying to say?

You’ve skipped several steps in any logical progression that could lead to this being a matter of either “ideology or dishonesty.” How does ideology, rather than faulty intelligence (if that’s what we really have here) conjure weapons of mass destruction? Was it George W. Bush’s ideology or dishonesty that gassed the Kurds? Was it dishonesty on the part of anybody but Saddam Hussein that kicked weapons inspectors out of Iraq and didn’t let them back in until George Bush (and no Democrat alive) offered a credible threat of enforcement? The biggest problem Democrats face in this debate is that straw men don’t rewrite history.

Senator Feinstein sent me a letter saying she voted for the authorization because she was shown intelligence that was described as fact. Kerry came out with the same story.

CIA chief Tenet then came out and said the intelligence he gave the administration had caveats and never described the data as fact.

Why wasn’t Congress shown the complete analysis?

The willful withholding of that information might be grounds for impeachment.

Lee, so why is that excuse good enough for Feinstein but not Bush? Bush was also shown information introduced to him as factual, and that’s what he based decisions on. A bit of a double standard for Democrats here?

Stephen:

Pardon me, but that is exactly and constitutionally their job. That is exactly the point of the War Powers act. Had congress not authorized this war it wouldn’t have happened. When Congress authorized the war Bush had ever right to believe he had Congress behind him in it.

So if it isn’t Congress’s job to check and balance the president’s power before going to war whose job would it be then???

Stephen our very system demands that Congress get answers and not authorize the president until they are satisfied.

Craig

I find it disingenuous to state that everyone knew there were weapons of mass destruction.

I recall clearly that the claims made by the Bush Administration were refuted by numerous news reports at the time of Powell’s speech to the U.N.

The truth is that Saddam enforced a closed society in which noone knew for sure what was happening.

I think it is fairly clear at this time that Bush “tweaked” the data to shore up his decision to invade. Was the invasion justified? Based on WMD, probably not. To end the standoff since the Gulf War? Maybe. To remove a tyrant? I doubt that Sadam is the only or worst tyrant in power today.

If you feel lied to, don’t vote for Bush. John Kerry like every other senator has to vote on complex bills that are structured to combine opposing values to satisfy broad agenda. We really don’t know how he will act as President.

The policy put forward by the neocons to introduce democracy in the middle east sounds admirable, but is it workable? Is that the real policy or is it simply to intimidate the region, in the hopes of encouraging regimes to comply with our needs for Oil? What would happen if oil suddenly rose to $100 a barrel?

What would America do then?

> so why is that excuse good enough for Feinstein
> but not Bush? Bush was also shown information
> introduced to him as factual, and that’s what
> he based decisions on. A bit of a double
> standard for Democrats here?

This is a great question, let’s look into it.

It should first be said that the question presupposes that Bush was shown the same information that was shown to Congressional leaders. I am not sure that this is true. In fact, I very much doubt it is true: I think that the President asked his advisors (or at the very least he accepted and signed off on a proposal from his advisors) to exclusively show the evidence that supported the case for war to Congressional leaders, and to hide the information that undermined their case for war.

But okay, let’s assume that your presumption is true. Let’s assume that the President and John Kerry both saw the exact same intelligence, and that they both came to similar conclusions based on that intelligence.

If this is true (that is, if Bush is innocent of misrepresentation and innocent of making a bad decision about the invasion) then it looks like a large number of Bush’s closest advisors were using faulty and/or false information in presenting their deceptive recommendations to both the President and to Congress.

Okay, let’s be even more generous and assume that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Pearle, Wolfowitz, Rice, etc were all not lying. Let’s assume that they all thought that their information was correct. In other words, let’s assume that they were deliberately deceived by people a layer beneath them. Or maybe two layers beneath them.

The further down this ladder we go, the greater the number of people had to have been involved in the deception. A good leader at any level would double and triple corroborate intelligence before giving a recommendation that would lead our country to war, right? I mean, Tenet wouldn’t give information to Colin Powell unless it had been triple-checked, right? (Oops).

So either (a) there is a massive conspiracy within several intelligence agencies to trick our senior leadership (in two branches of government!) into entering a war unnecessarily, or (b) the senior leadership of the executive branch is lying to us, or (c) the President himself is lying to us. In any case, it makes the Bush Administration seem pretty unqualified to lead.

How far down are we going to go before someone takes responsibility, either for being fooled, or for lying to us? If they won’t admit to deception, won’t they at least admit to having made an intelligence-based mistake on par with the Bay of Pigs or the sinking of the Maine?

No, instead the administration simply makes up another reason why we invaded Iraq, after the fact, as if all that stuff they showed America and the Congress didn’t matter. I don’t think the American people, and certainly not the Congress, would have approved a plan to just go and liberate Iraq. The WMD issue was the key, plain and simple.

I can’t beleive that America isn’t enraged about how, after the massive intelligence failure of 9/11, we immediately followed it up with another intelligence failure of historic magnitude. Doesn’t that make you mad? Do the ends (the defeat of Saddam and the ongoing occupation) justify the means (bald deception)?

-Cf

Bush would not be impeached for just believing they were there. We both know that would be silly. No, what would be impeachable would be if Bush knowingly used false information in his case against Iraq. That would be basically lying to congress on matters of national security, which would qualify as a high crime and misdemeanor. If hasn’t done that then he’s got no problem, as far as impeachment goes.

As for the Sudan offer I think there are real issues about that. Even this story that confirms the bare outlines of what you say went on still adds on layers of complexity. Both suggest that the Clinton Administration was taking a seriously hardline policy towards Sudan, and a seriously skeptical approach towards the claims of a nation that professed to be turning against terrorism, yet didn’t change it’s behavior all that much.

In the pre 9/11 days, when even Reagan and Bush I failed to retaliate for hundreds killed in terrorist attacks, Clinton’s policies were not abnormal. Only in 20/20 hindsight do the consequences become obvious. Might as well fault Hoover for not having an covert American agent kill Hitler. Anyways, I really wonder why you’d want to take the side of those who wanted to make deals with the radical government of Sudan and who ignored the nation’s continued terrorism activities.

Stephen, what do intelligence failures about WMD have to do with “distribution of sensitive information?” The problem is with what was flowing in, not what with what was flowing out—what is it you’re trying to say?

The problem relates to the OSP entire system for taking in, processing and putting out the information. In part, this starts with ideology, with a group of hardline defense policy hawks- the Neoconservatives.

Every times somebody contradicts part of their central foreign policy dogma, they use their power to whip together some ad hoc committee to do some “real” analysis. The Modus Operandi typical to this is a loosening of the language, considering possibilities rather than likelihoods, cherrypicking of intelligence, and conclusions that always conveniently contradict whatever non-alarmist position the bipartisan committee usually came up with.

If a report says the Soviet Union is beginning to collapse under it’s own weight (a conclusion that many sovietologists were putting forward in the seventies) Then somebody, say like Richard Perle, will form a B-team, and look into the evidence. Lo and behold, their findings are that the Soviets are a bigger threat than the other commission found them to be. Then you have Missile defense. One commission will say that a missile threat from rogue countries is at best fifteen years ahead. Lo and Behold, the Rumsfeld commission comes along, and it’s five. To get that, of course, they have to change a great number of unlikelies to perhapses and possibilities. And they have to grab onto a North Korean ICBM prototype so faultily made it explodes on the second stage.

And now Iraq. According to the book The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind, Bush knew next to nothing about foreign policy when he governor, and looking to be president in 2000, his father invited some people over to tutor him in foreign policy. This was 1998, and and among the people who participated, were Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, among others. Now, while this speaks to foresight on the part of Bush about not going into an election unprepared, it also means that the people who are executing his policy are the ones who taught him what kind of policies were good in the first place.

Because of the inevitable assymmetry in the security clearances, congress almost always know less than the intelligence community. Usually that’s not a problem. Those who need the information are given the information necessary. Senators and Reps get their briefings, behind closed doors if necessary, but that’s about all they can hope for. They may have contacts outside of formal channels but that skirts the edge of legality, if not crosses over it, if sensitive info is involved.

So, if we have the ideological resistance to reassuring analyses of perceived threats, combined with a foreign policy staff largely of that mindset, and we combine it with a bureacratic reshuffle that allows them a dedicated office to researching and building cases on what those people consider threats. Then we add secrecy laws and the reliance of the Congress that the Pentagon and Intelligence community are telling them the truth and giving them Golddust and not Chickenfeed.

I want you to notice something. At this point, even if there has been no deception there is already a situation where the checks and balances intend to prevent such cascades of bad assumptions and worse analysis have already been erode away. We have an inexperienced president who has basically hired his teachers to run his foreign policy. We have a Pentagon that has been rearranged to suit the aims, methods and views of this faction that has gotten in good with the president. Add to that a catastrophic event that politically legitimizes action based on alarmist analysis.

Boom, the perfect storm strikes, and the heretofore only bothersome excesses of a foreign policy faction become lethal. People ask the right questions, but those people are shut out, shut up, or simply get rank pulled on them. One front of ignorance collides with another, and over a hundred thousand troops get put into a conflict whose basic assumptions are lethally unrealistic. People got killed because they did not know what was right to expect from the population, and from Saddam’s soldiers and paramilitary.

If Bush or any of his people knew they were doing more than “correcting” what they saw as bad intelligence, if it turns out, that they at any point recognized that the data they were using to support the war was false, then it’s not merely a case of bias shaping one’s assumptions, the whole thing goes from a display of incompetence to one of a lethal abuse of power, not to mention criminal behavior.

If the facts that come out reveal one or the other possibility to be the case, it won’t be a case of straw men rewriting history, but of the weight of the facts erasing a false, inaccurate version of it, and replacing it with a narrative more in tune with the facts. The Democrats might benefit from that, but they could only have done so because Bush gave them the opportunity.

> So if it isn’t Congress’s job to check and
> balance the president’s power before going to
> war whose job would it be then???

Are you suggesting that if Bush and his team lied to Congress, you would still hold Congress culpable?

I ask because I am sure that you know that, ultimately, Bush controls all intelligence information. Congress doesn’t get first peek at the intelligence reports, and Congress doesn’t control who gets to see what information. All intelligence information that is shared with Congress is 100% at the discretion of the President, and it’s not uncommon for the President to only share information with certain members of Congress and not others.

(Which makes me wonder how many members of Congress were actually told by the Administration that the information they were presenting to the world was weak and/or false.)

-Cf

Stephen:

I agree with part of your analysis. Ideology plays a part in every President. I am sure for instance that Bush’s ideology played as much a part of his foreign policy as Clinton did.

The part I think I would add to your most recent post is what one might call “fighting the previous war”. In 1991 the intelligence community underestimated the WMD that Iraq had. They were “surprized” by the Iraqi program.

Now in 2004 we are surprized again. We do not know if the Iraqi’s have hidden the weapons well, have destroyed them without documentation or have moved them to another place.

You are still making an assumption that Saddam (after all of his record of human rights violation) on his own destroyed all of these weapons. I really think that is a dangerous and illogical conclution based on what we know.

Instead of going down the road on conservatives being desceptive, I think a more logical road would be incompetance on the part of government both Democrat and Republican.

The model you are using is a more dangerous model. The chances of the Democrats supporting another adventure is very low regardless of who is president. The proof that congress will require has gone up very high because of this. Congress will look at intelligence with a skeptical eye in the future.

I think using intelligence blundering as a driver for improving of the future is much more sound. It certainly explains why the Germans and the French as well as the Israeli’s agreed there were WMD in Iraq, and why they were all wrong.

It also allows us to try to figure out what happened to the WMD in Iraq instead of just blaming Bush and putting in Kerry.

The driver that Bush mislead the country has some very serious flaws to it, and I do not think will be upheld by history.

Craig

Christopher:

You said:

“Are you suggesting that if Bush and his team lied to Congress, you would still hold Congress culpable?”

I sure wouldn’t. I would hold Bush impeachable.

CH

Craig, so you think that Bush and Congressional leaders saw the exact same intelligence? That Bush didn’t hide anything from Congress, such as the deep concerns, caveats, doubts, and reservations from within the intelligence community about the quality of the intelligence being presented?

If so, then at which level in the intelligence ladder, then, was the false information inserted (or the counter-evidence deleted)? Was it within Bush’s Cabinet? Was there a plot in the OSP to manipulate the President’s policy choices? Did senior CIA or DOD intelligence officers have an agenda to cause an invasion of Iraq at all costs? Was it an organized conspiracy by Chalabi and the INC to trick America?

-Cf

Christopher, nice smoke-screen. What false intelligence was “inserted” and what counter-evidence was “deleted” You’re trying to obscure the issue—the overriding consensus among all intelligence agencies (a few objectors here and there notwithstanding) is what both Bush and Congress recieved. This is a fact.

I’m speaking of false intelligence such as the tall tale that was told to Colin Powell (LA Times) about how the information about the now-infamous trailers was corroborated by at least three or four different reliable sources, when in fact it was only one source of very dubious credibility (the brother of a close aide to Ahmed Chalabi). Where in the chain of intelligence were the other two or three sources inserted or invented? At which point were the doubts about the single source’s credibility deleted? Was it far down the chain at the operative level, or was it at a senior level? Did someone directly lie to Colin Powell? Or did someone lie to the person who briefed Colin Powell? Did Colin Powell lie?

The allegations of intelligence manipulation, whether intentional or not, are plentiful. You have absolutely no justification for your allegation that “the overriding consensus among all intelligence agencies (a few objectors here and there notwithstanding) is what both Bush and Congress recieved” when so much of the intelligence community was systematically diregarded and/or taken out of the loop entirely.

The story, which has been emerging steadily from the very early stages of the runup to the war, is that intelligence leaders (or even their Cabinet-level bosses) manipulated the various contradictory intelligence items they had at their disposal, accentuating the information that would support an invasion, and obscuring or ignoring the information that didn’t support it. This is hardly a crackpot theory (NY Times). The information presented by Colin Powell and George Tenet did not represent the actual “consensus” of the intelligence community. In many cases, key intelligence was based on bogus and false reports from Iraqi defectors or people with ulterior agendas. Often such intelligence was given undue credibility by senior intelligence or administration officials because they corresponded with Bush’s political goals.

In fact, under Administration directives, much of the information used by the Administration to justify the war wasn’t vetted by intelligence experts at all, instead going unfiltered straight to the President’s inner circle. You should read this excellent article (The New Yorker) about the administration’s extensive use of “stovepiping”, the practice of putting raw intelligence in front of propaganda-hungry senior Administration officials for direct ‘analysis’ and ‘interpretation’ - instead of first putting such intelligence in front of experienced intelligence experts who can better judge the quality and integrity of the information.

This stovepiping thing is insidious: If due diligence was circumvented under direct administration orders, then it’s solely the administration’s fault if false or manipulated information was presented to the American people and to Congress - even if the administration didn’t actually manipulate the information. Negligence doesn’t make them innocent.

If you’re skeptical about my link sources above, perhaps it would help to know that even the Washington Times is concerned about this problem!

-Cf

the overriding consensus among all intelligence agencies (a few objectors here and there notwithstanding) is what both Bush and Congress recieved.

That’s not true, Martin.

According to George Tenet, the Director of the CIA, all the intelligence he showed Bush had “qualifiers and caveats”. According to Congress, they saw intelligence without any qualifiers or caveats, presented as if it were fact.

At what point, and by whose orders, were the qualifiers and caveats removed before they were shown to Congress?

You are still making an assumption that Saddam (after all of his record of human rights violation) on his own destroyed all of these weapons.

Not at all. Maybe he did so on some of them, but I think that story out there about storage sites getting hit and destroyed during 1998’s Operation Desert Fox shows that we may have gotten lucky and disarmed him of much of what he still had left.

Instead of going down the road on conservatives being desceptive, I think a more logical road would be incompetance on the part of government both Democrat and Republican.

Unfortunately, the facts are clear. The Democrats, when they had power, did not manipulate the system like the Republicans did when they got in. It’s not that Republicans in general are vulnerable to this, rather that a faction among your people were given power over everybody else, including Republicans who would have let the process be.

The argument is not whether Saddam was being an obstructionist, or whether he had WMDs. I’m sure everybody was certain he was the first, and had the second. Maybe Saddam didn’t even know he was at a loss for weapons.

But the case the Administration made went above and beyond simple obstruction and possession of banned weapons. They gave the impression that a vast infrastructure for manufacture and development was in operation, rebuilt after the ‘98 inspector pullout. They assumed that everything that wasn’t accounted for was there, and that the Nuclear program was reborn.

And that wasn’t enough. Iraq was claimed to be an Al Quaeda haven, a harborer of terrorist and therefore co-conspirator in 9/11. Then the Adminstration took the justified claims that Al Quaeda was after WMDs, and conflated the two. “The next smoking gun may come in the form of a mushroom cloud over one of our cities”, he said. The administration did not just paint a picture of Saddam breaking UN resolutions, or appearing to, they quite intentionally painted a picture of apocalyptic threat waiting to happen. This is what sent us on a course of invasion.

The OSP was a creation of the Bush White House, a result of what his Neoconservative tutors saw as the need to bypass the parts of the establishment that consistently disagreed with their worst case scenario-centered thinking. They deliberately politicized the intelligence process, forcing it to bow down to the wishes of their faction’s foreign policy dogma.

In the end then, the existence or non-existance of WMDs is secondary, though still important. The primary issue is the reckless politicizing of or defense and intelligence policies, which has now led us into the bloodiest military campaign this country has seen since Vietnam, a campaign that no one can now justify on the original premises.

Kerry will have no free rides. He will be forced to deal with the aftermath of Bush’s foreign policy, the still weak economy, a Congress and Senate in political opposition to him, and the ever-present issue of homeland security and terrorism.

And of course, there will all those people who wish that Bush was still in office. But I’d rather have Kerry in office, than any more errors of the kind this administration has seemed to make as matter of habit.

Christopher:

You said:

“So you think that Bush and Congressional leaders saw the exact same intelligence?”

I doubt that occured. What I am saying is that Congress had a constitutional requirement to makes sure the Whitehouse had done it’s homework before the war. They were obviously convinced of the Intelligence that they saw as well. And why not? At that time the case was overwelming with a great deal of support from overseas etc.

I think when the dust settles what history will record is that we had a major intelligence problem that is world wide.

It is still should be very unsettling to the left to be basing your arguement about WMD to the assumption that Saddam voluntarily destroyed these weapons. THEE point that the left and right should agree on for the sake of the country and our common defense is the need for better intelligence. What happened to the WMDs in Iraq is anyone’s guess. In a desire to bulster Kerry’s election chances the left is assuming something without knowledge. That assumption is dangerous and totally without facts to back it up.

We all need to unite and demand answers. We need another commission like the one on 9/11 to explain how such a huge mistake in intelligence happened.

CH

So let’s say we all agree that in 1991 Saddam still had a ton of WMDs. Okay, I’ll buy that.

By 2002 he had them for over a decade. They’d been degrading a little, and he’s had to keep them kinda on the down-low, and his air force was gone, so his overall capability is a bit weaker than it once was. But the WMDs were still there, and so were the scientists. Okay, I’ll accept that.

Between 1991, when Saddam’s chemical arsenal was probably at its peak, to 2003, when the invasion occurred, Saddam never once used those weapons, or even tested them (if they still existed at all). And then by late 2003, all eyes were on Iraq. Saddam was under the UN microscope. INspections were resuming - with vigor, thanks to the renewed pressure and the leadership from the USA - but they were not finding much.

But would Saddam attack now?

A sudden burst of intelligence, apparently only unearthed during the year following September 11, 2001, suddenly showed the world that Saddam wasn’t actually a fully contained and neutralized threat at all! That in fact he was a great and immenent threat not only to stability in the Middle East, but to the life and limb of the American people.

It turns out, however, that all the fears of the above paragraph, many of which I shared in early 2003, were in fact based on untruths (lies, errors, whatever), and that Saddam was exactly what we knew he was before 9/11 - a potential threat that was being successfully contained — hardly a threat to the American people.

There are many, including some on this list, who would argue that “even if Saddam only had those few weapons that we’ve found already (i.e., the “WMD program related activities”), or even only those weapons that are still unaccounted for, then we would still have been justified in invading Iraq. In other words, that the same weapons, or fewer, that had been successfully contained for the last decade were now to be considered worthy of an unprecedented pre-emptive, near-unilateral invasion that would almost certainly further distance America not only from our enemies, but from some of our closest allies - and embroil our soldiers in a long, expensive, and deadly occupation.

But the existing policy towards Iraq was working. Iraq was not a threat, even in any realistic worst-case scenario. Only with the concoction of false information about nuclear capabilities, 45-minute delivery times, and Al Qaeda connections could you consider Saddam a threat worthy of the action we took.

It was an adventure, pure and simple. The American people didn’t want an adventure, and neither did Congress. We wanted a mission of self-defense, which is what Bush presented the invasion as.

The invasion was unnecessary.

-Cf

The foundation for much of what I read here is simply untrue. Then arguments are built upon this. Lets look closer:

Our intelligence community provided bad information. Wrong.

We know on numerous occasions that information from the intelligence community that was HIGHLY qualified (mobile weapons labs, Al Queida connections, African uranium) was then quickly reported by the Administration as FACT.

The world intelligence community believed there were WMD’s in Iraq. Wrong.

By far, the majoriy of the world believed no such thing.

We had no idea if they still had WMD’s in these recent years. Wrong.

The UN inspectors had, by the time of war, inspected over 200 sites, with the greatest potential for WMD’s and found little if nothing.

Our weapons inspectors were “thrown out” during the first round of inspections, post Gulf I. Wrong.

Granted, there was way too much obsfucation by Iraq…but in point of fact we pulled out.

We believed there was a connection between Osama and Iraq. Wrong.

The world intelligence community was quite united here as these two were well known to be enemies of long standing. Collaboration between Osama and Sadam was less likely than Sadam making a state visit to the White house.

Our Administration simply conveyed what they learned from the intelligence community and did not decieve us. Wrong.

There is a congressional report that compares known intelligence information and statements made by the administration at the time. There are literally hundereds of instances where key information was omitted, outright misstatements made and absolute certainty portrayed where little existed. See http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdfs_108_2/pdfs_inves/pdf_admin_iraq_on_the_record_rep.pdf

Once we strip away these false assumptions our little adventure can be seen for what it was, an ideological driven colonization of another country.

Thanks George.

Our weapons inspectors were “thrown out” during the first round of inspections, post Gulf I. Wrong.

I’d just like to add that they were pulled out so that the US and Britain could bomb the crap out of all suspected Iraqi WMD sites.

THEE point that the left and right should agree on for the sake of the country and our common defense is the need for better intelligence.

CH, you are too right about that. The first place to start is Cheney’s OSP. Is it even legal for the Vice President to have a private intelligence service? Beyond that, if the OSP analysts knowingly presented false or misleading intelligence to Congress and the President as fact, then I want to see some prosecutions.

If the President and/or VP knew the evidence was bad, but used it to back up their case againt Iraq anyhow… Well that’s something that needs to be looked into.

Lee,

I stand corrected on the inspector pull-out. However…

“If the President and/or VP Knew the evidence was bad…”

These are a matter of record… Rumey, Rice, Bush all knew Here is just Cheney’s contribution

“we do know, with absolute certainty, that
he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs … to build a nuclear weapon”

and his statement on October 10, 2003, that
Saddam Hussein

“had an established relationship with al Qaeda.”

The intelligence community has equally documented their caveats and qualifiers…upon which these statments of certainty were made.

If this isn’t outright deception, what would you call it?

Hmmmm. Methinks you all are kinda full of it. There is nothing in the resolution about stockpiles, only capability. And Kaye showed he still had that. And, in fact, in Kaye’s latest report he said he thought the regime was even more dangerous than originally thought. Talk about intelligence failures.

You guys really have blinkers on.

Syl:

Capability = Stockpiles. There’s no difference. If he didn’t have “stockpiles”, then he didn’t have “capability”.

The resolution was designed to give the President the power to attack Saddam if he was a threat. That is, if Saddam had the capability of using chemical or biological weapons. He could hardly have such capability if he didn’t actually have stockpiles of weapons, right?

-Cf

Huh? Stockpiles only matter if we considered him an imminent threat. We did not. When we actually moved our troops, then there was the worry he’d use chemical weapons on them.

The point was the nexus between terrorists and wmd. And for that, a little vial of that Crimean hemorrhagic fever thing Kaye found was enough.

Believed existing stockpiles of wmd fit in very well with the U.N. resolutions and breach of the ceasefire…the case that was made with the U.N. But stockpiles already in existence make no difference to terrorists if he has the capacity to make more…and he most likely would have.

Remember, there was a big push to lift the sanctions…to let Saddam out of his box. And it was costing us close to 15 billion a year to keep him contained (including our troops in Saudi and Kuwait).

> Stockpiles only matter if we considered him an
> imminent threat. We did not.

Huh?! Either (1) you’re rewriting history, (b) you weren’t paying attention in 2003, or (c) you are using the word “we” to describe Bush’s inner circle in contrast to the rest of us (“us” being the rest of America).

If Saddam wasn’t considered an imminent threat by the majority of the American people and by Congress, then the war would not have happened. As far as I am concerned, this is non-controversial at all. Most Republicans and the Administration itself still argues that Saddam was a threat, although they now downplay (very unconvincingly) the “imminentness” of it.

> a little vial of that Crimean hemorrhagic
> fever thing Kaye found was enough.

Not to me it isn’t. You are looking for any little justification you can to “technically” permit an invasion to conquer Iraq and overthrow Saddam. A few vials of whatever isn’t enough in my book, no matter what any resolution says. What would have justified the invasion would have to have been proof that Saddam was either (a) in posession of massive amounts of weapons that he could actually use offensively or even defensively, or (b) he was sharing his weapons with terrorists. Neither has even remotely been proven - or even seriously suggested by the administration since the end of the war.

> But stockpiles already in existence make no
> difference to terrorists if he has the
> capacity to make more…and he most likely
> would have.

Yes, he probably “would have” resumed WMD research and manufacture if we had stopped the inspections, repealed the sanctions and the no-fly zones, and left him completely alone. He maintained just enough “capacity to make more” so that, if the inspections stopped, he could probably have resumed. Yes, he was breaking the rules and had evil plans. But he was contained. The new inspections were working - and I give Bush credit for that, I really do - and the invasion was unneccessary. Saddam wasn’t a threat to anybody, and his “capacity” such as it was was decreasing.

What scares me now about the stupidity and recklessness of this war is this: If Saddam actually had a big WMD program, it would most likely be in the hands of terrorists and Iraqi insurgents right now, just like, apparently, the rest of his arsenal is. Think about that.

> Remember, there was a big push to lift the
> sanctions…to let Saddam out of his box.

You just made that up, didn’t you?

-Cf

Christopher Fahey:

The reason you think the administration claimed the threat was ‘imminent’ is that newspaper headlines (ie, the LATimes the day after the SOTU) said so. Not to mention dozens of public figures (not the Bush administration) and news articles used the word ‘imminent’ constantly. The word became part of the public memory.

http://mysite.verizon.net/res1uo0x/id40.html

The MoveOn video is all they can find? That Rumsfeld felt nuclear capability was nearer than 5-7 years out means ‘imminent’? It is unfortunate he used the word ‘immediate’. But, really, that’s all?

The truth is ‘imminent’ is all that the anti-war types can hang their hat on so they refuse to let go because it ties in with wmd. What if the threat HAD been imminent? Would the anti-war types have gone along then? Saddam’s regime itself was a danger and perceived to be a gathering threat. The point was pre-emption, not imminence, which is actually a harder pill to swallow because we were willing to go to
war WITHOUT an imminent threat. Now THAT is what you should be decrying…not the fact that Saddam was NOT an imminent threat.

And, I’m sorry, but there would never have been PROOF enough of anything to satisfy anti-war types. PROOF was impossible without the actual overthrow of Saddam. The inspectors certainly couldn’t have given us PROOF of anything. I mean, what may be ten miles away that Saddam does not let them see?

And how would we get PROOF that Saddam had passed vials of something to Al Qaeda or a similar group? Huh? I mean, if terrorists actually USED something on us, then we could probably figure out where it came from too late. Maybe. Maybe not…we still don’t know where the anthrax came from do we?

Demanding absolute PROOF as a standard for war is just a means of assuring there never is war under any circumstances.

What we know AFTER we deposed him is not the same as what we knew BEFORE. Kaye did say Saddam’s regime was even more dangerous than we suspected. Just not in the way we thought. If you wish to use what we know now, as opposed to then, you must acknowledge everything we know now, not just the lack of stockpiles.

I too was concerned about Saddam passing stuff to terrorists as war came closer, but I figured he’d rather keep it for himself at that point.

As for a push to lift the sanctions, I am not making that up.

Actually there had been a push to lift the sanctions for years. Reason had a discussion of the ongoing battle in March 2002 pro and con:

http://reason.com/0203/fe.mw.the.shtml

> The reason you think the administration claimed
> the threat was ‘imminent’ is that newspaper
> headlines (ie, the LATimes the day after the
> SOTU) said so.

The press was summarizing the Administration’s statements in a wholly fair way. When the administration was dropping terms like “within 45 minutes” and “mushroom cloud”, it was pretty obvious to me and to anyone paying attention that they were very clearly suggesting that Iraq had the capability of attacking us at any moment.

We can quibble over the details of what words they did and didn’t use, but I think it’s pretty clear that the American people believed that somehow in late 2002 the US intelligence community had come to the realization, suddenly, that the threat from Iraq was exponentially bigger than anyone had ever imagined before. And that if we didn’t put an end to the Iraqi regime ASAP, then we (or our “interests”) would almost certainly find ourselves on the receiving end of a WMD attack courtesy of Saddam Hussein at any moment.

But lets say that the administration isn’t responsible for this misconception by the American people. Even if the administration didn’t deliberately give the American people this impression, can the administration be blamed for this misconception. IMHO, they can. They relied on these fears to support their war, instead of making sure the American people really understood what we were doing.

And that’s me being charitable. Ultimately, I think that they lied and exaggerated the WMD threat to make it seem imminent, immediate, likely, active, whatever word you want to use.

I think that if the American people were told that the mission was simply to free the Iraqi people, then there would have been very little support for the war.

Regarding the sanctions, heck, I stand corrected. I thought you were suggesting that the push to lift them was being raised by mainstream opponents of the Bush Administration. Thanks for providing the Reason.com link, which clarifies that the anti-sanction movement was primarily championed by intifada-supporting professor Edward Said, “people’s historian” Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, a man who has rarely met a foreign policy he couldn’t describe as “genocide.” As a mainstream liberal and a supporter of mainstream liberals like Clinton, Gore, and now Kerry, I was pretty unfamiliar with the details of those arguments.

-Cf

Sorry, been busy as of late…

Interesting note from President Bush before the press corps last night, he mentioned the ability of the fallen regime in Iraq to produce WMD. Not one reporter questioned ‘the ability to produce,’. Had he misstated this, the reporters would have been all over it.

Paragraph 2 in Congresses ‘Joint Resolution,’…

Whereas after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, Iraq entered into a United Nations sponsored cease-fire agreement pursuant to which Iraq unequivocally agreed, among other things, to eliminate its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs and the means to deliver and develop them, and to end its support for international terrorism;

“The means to deliver and develop them”

From President Bush, last night…

“I thought it was very interesting that Charlie Duelfer, who just came back — he’s the head of the Iraqi Survey Group — reported some interesting findings from his recent tour there. And one of the things was, he was amazed at how deceptive the Iraqis had been toward UNMOVIC and UNSCOM; deceptive in hiding things. We knew they were hiding things — a country that hides something is a country that is afraid of getting caught. And that was part of our calculation. Charlie confirmed that. He also confirmed that Saddam had a — the ability to produce biological and chemical weapons. In other words, he was a danger. He had long-range missiles that were undeclared to the United Nations; he was a danger. And so we dealt with him.”

Hmmmm…
Connection?
Justification?
Sounds like it to me.

A little trouble with that Alex. Whereas clauses, though informative as to the cause, say very little about the legality of what is done within them.

Skip down a few paragraphs, and you find that the president is required to make a determination, basically a report to congress on how he had no choice about going to war to enforce the UN resolutions, and to fight terrorism.

If he didn’t truthfully represent the causes for war and the impossibility of confronting whatever threat was there, if there wasn’t a threat to begin with, there is no justification, legally speaking for going to war.