Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

Your premise is wrong. Powell did not present “faulty intelligence” to the U.N. If you saw the presentation, like I did, you’ll remember that the majority of the “faulty intelligence” that Powell showed were PHOTOGRAPHS. How can a photograph be faulty? The problem with Powell’s presentation was not the validity of the intelligence but the conclusions that were made by our intelligence people.

Of course, that’s if you believe that Iraq had no WMD in 2002. The Dalfur report said that although Iraq had not amassed a huge inventory of WMD—because Saddam was trying to get the sanctions lifted—Saddam was secretly building and maintaining WMD development systems so that as soon as the sanctions were lifted, WMD could be built very quickly. The report said that several chemical and biological weapons could be stockpiled in dangerous amounts within one year.

Add to that the fact that the latest intelligence out of Europe suggests that Russian special forces worked with Iraqi Republican Guard in the weeks leading up to the war to secretly traffic those non-existent WMD across the Syrian border. Why would they do this? The European intelligence community is convinced that most of Saddam’s modern WMD capacity was developed with RUSSIAN technology, which would be a violation of a whole bunch of international laws, starting with the sanctions.

If you’re going to publish a believable blog, you need to do your research. It’s obvious that all of your speculation about the Bush administration is based on mere headlines. There is valid research material out there if you’re looking for the truth. But the NY Times, Washington Post, and CNN aren’t going to give it to you.

After reading your comment, I spent about 5 seconds on Google, and found this MSNBC article about a Powell appearance on “Meet The Press” in which the Secretary Of State laments that some of the intelligence that formed the basis of his UN presentation was “not accurate.” That fits my definition of “faulty intelligence.” (I think that fits just about any reasonable person’s definition of “faulty intelligence.” Moreover, in that “Meet The Press” appearance, the intelligence that Powell admitted was faulty specifically involved the perceived threat that Saddam Hussein was secretly maintaining mobile WMD-development labs. Do you consider that research? Or do you also lump MSNBC in your inaccurate generalization about the New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, in which you indicate that the mainstream media never tells the truth?

Joe

On a point of order

How come you are in the red column if you don’t support Bush now, didn’t support him in the election and don’t seem to plan to support Republican policies in the future?

You may have registered as a Republican, but your conversion was evidently never sincere or considered. It is bad enough when so many third party columns shill for the Dems. You have a right to your opinions, but please express them where they belong.

On your point re Iran, the Bush administration is letting the Euros take the lead and the Iranians are not hiding the fact that they are in the nuke business; they only dispute how much.

As for the CIA, I find this a very interesting reversal. For years, liberals have accused the CIA of being a rouge organization and saying it has to be shook up. Liberals accused the CIA of overestimating the Soviet threat, totally missing the Pakistani nuclear program, not understanding bin Laden, and those are only the things I can think of just sitting here. The CIA was also the source of the intelligence that Bush & Co used to advocate the Iraq war. You may recall that CIA director Tenet called the case against Iraq a slam-dunk. You would guess that liberals would support major changes at such a flawed organization. It would be negligent of the Bush administration not to attack some of the entrenched bureaucrats at Langley, who provided such flawed intelligence for such a long time. Maybe this was something long overdue.

Jack-
He’s a conservative moderate. Do you really want to test how far these people can be pushed before they go our way? From the column he’s posting in, it’s obvious he still thinks there’s something wrong with the Democrats, so cut him a break.

Frankly, I’m close enough to center that I’d have supported Bush if he had stayed on mission as much as he did on message. I don’t mind good old fashion conservatives. What I mind are all the thinktank indoctrinated, Rush Limbaugh quoting jerks who take every opportunity to bully and berate people for not practicing an extreme, inflexible version of Conservatism.

Sooner or later, All that is going to choke the life out of the party.

As for the CIA, I think you need to better understand your history. It was Richard Perle and the Neocons who painted a scary picture of Soviet Capabilities that the Sovietologists disputed. Of course, they were only taking another look at the data, drawing new points from that. Nobody on either side did much to improve the piss-poor Human intelligence situation. On Bin Laden, about the time he was becoming a threat, you conservatives were screaming bloody murder about SDI and Iraq. You even summoned up Rumsfeld to head a commission saying that the Axis of Evil would soon have missile capability to strike us.

There is plenty of evidence to indicate that Bush and Cheney were not passive victims of an irresponsible agency, but active participation in the politicization of intelligence, and by that their own deception by those seeking to please them and others seeking to get their agenda executed. Further firings of liberals in the agency is just more of the same of that.

You guys need to define truth by more than just a party standard. It would trully save America much heartache and bloodshed.

Jack,
How come it’s ok for you to post in all columns from the far left one on Weblog to the far right one but Joe should know his place and stick with his kind? Ever heard of Zell Miller? He didn’t support Dems in the election, doesn’t seem to support them now and I’ll bet he’s a good guy in your eyes because of his outbursts. If I’m wrong, please enlighten me.

This first post of mine is in the right column only because I am a registered Republican. the main reasons that I changed my registration to Republican in the fall of 2001 were a knee-jerk reaction to the terrorist attacks (I was upset that Clinton had not finished off bin Laden when he had the chance) and the realization that the only way for my vote to matter much in the ultra-red county where I live within a blue state that has a late presidential primary is to vote in the Republican primary. I recently came to a realization that this logic is flawed - a result of my change of heart from Bush to Kerry in the presidential election, as well as in response to being asked my affiliation when I asked to participate in this weblog - so now I am in the process of changing my registration to Democrat. So I will be moved to the left column any day now. All that said, I find it interesting that in response to my post that in part questions the Bush Administration’s narrow-minded effort to quash dissenting opinion within the federal government a Republican commenter is essentially saying “It’s our party, love it or leave it.” My response to that is, OK, I’m gone.

People are ‘afraid’ of Bush and what he is going to do. He is not the only one who has a say. He has to get approval of others. Which he has.

The thing that bothers me right now is that most people that are being appointed right now are from Texas. Not that Texas is a bad place, but aren’t there capable people elsewhere?
Bush is surrounding himself with loyal friends. I just hope these friends can tell him he is mistaken, or that he better reconsider, or he needs to take another look, before he puts his foot down on anything that will effect ALL of US.

Bush (the U.S.) invaded Iraq and took out Saddam Hussein.
The idea of making the Middle East more safe and secure and free of evil dictators was a good one in my opinion, but, was this the right decision to go so far as to remove Saddam in the way we did?
Some of us claim we know if it was right or wrong.

Is this why Kerry said, “It depends on the outcome.”
Kerry knew Saddam had to go. He knew he voted for the war. He knew he, like the rest of us, did not want our people or innocent Iraqi’s do die. He also knew something had to be done about the Middle East. The things that were being done were not working.
For years our government knew Saddam had to go. Nobody was really doing anything about it. Was the hope that he would die? That one of his own people would kill him? Then what? His sons would have ruled? Which one? Whichever one survived the fight between them for the rule of Iraq?

What bothers me the most about the people who are positive the Iraq War was a mistake is that they give no alternatives.
The UN sanctions were not the alternative. We know there were too many problems that resulted from those.
Lifting the sanctions could have made things worse. Were we to wait until we knew for sure (which we thought we did) that Saddam had those weapons to use against our troops?
Our troops went in prepared for chemical and biological attacks. Why? Just to make it look more convincing at home? I doubt it.

Now for Iran…

We are getting information about Iran’s nuclear program. Where is it coming from? Dissidents. Isn’t that where we got a lot of info about Iraq?

Hmmmm… glad I don’t have to make the decisions.

We need to finish what was started in Iraq and get out.
Keep an eye on Iran and N. Korea. Deal with them accordingly. Hopefully without our invading either of them.
What is Putin up to?
While all this is going on we have to work on solving the problem of the need for so much oil. We need to stop pumping so much money into the oil producing nations. Let their people revolt because they need jobs to survive and make it so those governments actually have to run their countries and please their people.
Then they can hate the U.S. for not buying MORE oil to support them.
What would happen in the Middle East if we needed half the oil we do now?
GM announced it will have an affordable hydrogen powered car by 2010. Not soon enough for me. Hope it runs on salt water.
I also hope that engines are produced to replace the ones we have, or adjustments can be made for better mileage, so that all these vehicles will not end up in a junk pile somewhere.

Joe,
You are not the ONLY Republican that does not tow the party line. I have been told I sound more like a Democrat on certain issues. I would rather stay closer to center from the right though.

Joe

I was not saying that you should love or leave the party, nor was I disputing your right to post a column. I was saying that your column was more appropriately on the blue side. I have voted Democrat in the recent past and could envision supporting Democrats again in the future, but now I am supporting President Bush and the Republican agenda. That is why I write columns here and only comment on the blue and green.

Republicans can have differences with their party (as do Democrats), but you say you were a Democrat until 2001. Presumably you voted Democratic before then. You became a Republican in 2001, but decided not to vote for the Republican nominee in 2004. You may have never voted for a Republican candidate for president. I don’t know if you love the party, but you have already left it and were probably never really part of it.

My toleration of dissent does not extend to consistently supporting the other side. And before I am attacked by the pseudo tolerant left, I don’t recall any columns on the blue side that advocated the election of George W. Bush and don’t expect to read any that say, “yes, we were wrong to support Kerry, because Bush is doing such a good job.” That would be the equivalent of what you wrote on the red side.

Re CIA

I have supported the CIA about as consistently as liberals have opposed it and I recognize that intelligence is always uncertain. But if (as Bush opponents do) you strongly criticize the intelligence that went into the Iraq decision, you have to look to where most of that intelligence originated. Tenet called the case against Iraq a SLAM DUNK. You can’t get more certain than that. If the CIA was wrong, it was a failure of intelligence; if the DEMOCRATIC head of the CIA just told Bush what he wanted to hear, it is even worse. In either case, a shakeup is in order.

Ha Ha Ha Ha.

So the RUSSIANS moved Iraqs WMD to Syria? That’s nice. Nice of Russia, who are attacking Chechnya, to give a TERRORIST Country WMD Technology. Nice.

The Neocons created their own Intelligence Unit based in the Pentagon to cherrypick the data. Cheney himself did it.

Just curious. If you think CNN, NY Times, etc. give no accurate information, where DO you get your News?

Aldous.

Jack-
Your president’s one state election victory should be a warning to you as to the price of beating up on your moderates. Reagan almost swept the country for his second term. Bush once again only won the electoral count by one state.

Has it occurred to you that if Bush had acted with greater wisdom, Joe might have become a long-time, if not lifelong Republican? Such is the way political loyalties are earned and burned, in historical terms.

Loyalty cannot be demanded by politicians in a Democracy. We are loyal to these people to the extent that they are loyal to us. If a politician demands something of us we cannot give, like approval to an approach to a war our gut tells us is failing, then we simply go elsewhere.

On the CIA: Well, let’s look at where than intelligence originated: A lot of times, exiles, dissidents, and other people with agendas and vested interests in having us attack. Now, you had people who, analyzing that information, pointed this out to Bush and the rest. Problem is, Chalabi was in good with a lot of the people in the Civilian upper echelons of the Pentagon, and with Dick Cheney. There was also the “incestuous amplification” that Senator Bob Graham spoke of, where one report was repeated and repeated by others and made to seem like a chorus of voices instead of one, unverified report.

According to what I read, the DOD and White House Officials bypassed much of the intelligence establishment designed to filter out the B.S. and simply put together their own case. Now you talk about George W. Bush and the slam dunk issue with George Tenet as if somehow Tenet made Bush decide to take poor evidence and act on it. Trouble is, Bush had to decide to do that. He had to tell people, go and make a better case out of this. He had to decide whether he would dial up or dial down military presence in the middle east. There are any number of decisions a wiser leader would have made differently, especially if we were the ones to attack first.

Colin Powell actually had to edit out huge amounts of reports from the one he was given, because they were single source. So much of the data was based on very thin reporting, on presumptions and assumptions that were not supportable on the facts. Your own Senate Intelligence committee would have to come to that conclusion, even as it worked so hard to make sure the president would not be blamed. In the end, only the rocketry portion of those charges would be vindicated.

Tenet was right to resign. He did mess up. The way he messed up was by not standing up and saying that in the wake of 9/11 it was more important than ever that we act on well founded intelligence.

As for pictures and how such information could be deceptive, there is a passage that sums up the fallacy in that thinking fairly well on page 298 of Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack:

There was no way to interrogate a satellite dot-Hey, what does that dot really mean? What’s in that truck?-or fully penetrate the meaning of translated words in an intercept.

The more Powell dug, the more he realized that the human sources were few and far between on Iraq’s WMD. It was not a pretty picture.

While Powell’s doubts were assuaged by assumptions we all made about Saddam and WMD, there was nonetheless a good reason to go beyond photographs and transcripts.

Words and images can be deceptive out of their proper context, especially if people want to be told something, want to see something. A person looking at a satellite photo cannot determine the contents of a truck, only that there is a truck, and it’s heading in a certain direction. Such material can bring you signs of activity, but only certain signs. Other methods, other spycraft must be brought into play, if we are to get a truer picture of things. We need more proximate knowledge of what’s happening on the ground, who’s talking to who, who’s plotting what, and who’s winning the power struggles. A Satellite photo can only give you a piece of a larger puzzle. for other parts of that big picture, we need to better employ other methods.

Stephen

OUR president’s victory was not just in one state. He won a majority of all the votes in the country – something no Democrat has been able to do since 1976 and he increased his party’s representation in the Congress, something no president has achieved since 1936. What lesson do you think we should take from that? You compare this election to Reagan’s victory in 1984. Reagan crushed Mondale like a bug on a windshield. The Democrats in 1984 took the same lesson from that as they seemed to have in 2004 – our message is okay, it is just that people don’t get it? In fact that should be the Democratic motto to the electorate – “Do I have to explain this twice?”

Your premise is wrong. Powell did not present “faulty intelligence” to the U.N. If you saw the presentation, like I did, you’ll remember that the majority of the “faulty intelligence” that Powell showed were PHOTOGRAPHS. How can a photograph be faulty? The problem with Powell’s presentation was not the validity of the intelligence but the conclusions that were made by our intelligence people.

I remember Powell’s UN presentation quite clearly: He stated that the fact that there were trucks evident in a sattelite photo was proof that WMD production was going on. Even leaving aside my own skepticism and the UN’s obvious disbelief, Powell didn’t seem to have much faith in his own words.

Okay, so we won’t call it “faulty intelligence.” How about “faulty logic?” And to try to put this at the feet of the intelligence agencies — nope, not gonna fly. The CIA didn’t push the country into a war. Bush isn’t going to sidestep that one no matter how good his footwork gets.

OUR president?s victory was not just in one state.

I think Stephen’s right. Kerry lost the election by 130,000 votes in Ohio.

I find it interesting that in response to my post that in part questions the Bush Administration’s narrow-minded effort to quash dissenting opinion within the federal government a Republican commenter is essentially saying “It’s our party, love it or leave it.” My response to that is, OK, I’m gone.

Welcome back Joe, we’re glad to have you. Question whatever you want, that’s what keeps us strong and relevant.