In this this thread, Beagle dreams of a search engine so that he can go back in time and locate all the stupid things the anti-war crowd said prior to the discovery of “WMD” in Syria (which, it must be admitted, hasn’t happened yet, but will no doubt in the future). The SDMB search engine isn’t working at the moment, but I happen to have a couple of threads bookmarked. So let us grant Beagle his request, and review some of the falsehoods, stupidities, leaps of faulty logic, assertions of smug superiority, ungrounded assumptions, and general SHITE that we have been forced to put up with over the past year and a half.
Having no respect for the dead I’ll go ahead and start with the late, great, lamented december:
I know, this is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. He isn’t even here to defend himself.
Shame. I don’t really care.
Well, I’m so pleased to be of service. I plan to continue making a fuss, but may I ask: where is that “large body of evidence,” again?
Moving forward we come to one of my favorite posters, Sam Stone. I almost hate to do this, Sam, but the fact is, you still have yet to recant. So allow me to share some of your pre-war wisdom:
Yup. Prior to the war I warned you that the Bush administration had failed to present solid evidence to support the claim that Iraq possessed “WMDs.” I’m such a conspiracy buff.
Oh, I love this part. Faced with all that overwhelming evidence (that Sam made up),
Me being so irrational and unreasonable and all.
Astounding, really, that my “hollow, confused” arguments turned out to be correct, while your “rational, reasonable” arguments turned out to be, well…
…hollow and confused?
Here’s another great one:
Before the war, my opposition was either dishonest or unintelligent. After the war, of course, Mr. Stone changed his tune, arguing that all intelligence work is inherently uncertain, and that the US government didn’t have a “crystal ball.” Which is, strangely, one of the points I had been trying to make all along.
Even after the war, Sam had trouble admitting things didn’t quite pan out the way he envisioned them:
Well, yeah…there was a whiff of something in the air, but it sure wasn’t evidence. I should have taken that bet.
Here’s one of my favorites. Remember this one, y’all?
That famous David Kay smile – whatever happened to that smile, I wonder?
And you claimed with absolute certainty, prior to the war, that Iraq possessed “WMDs.” But now, afterwards, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we should be “careful about our claims.” Really, you should consider taking your own advice on occasion:
And indeed, time has told.
I anxiously await the SDMB’s most prominent libertarian to return and make good on this public contractual agreement.
Alright, continuing on to some of our more unsavory files, look! It’s Shodan, the hard-headed, pragmatic conservative!
Indeed – how could I have been so unreasonable?
Yup. That’s me in a nutshell, alright. Breath-takingly stupid… and, unfortunately, also correct in my assessment of the evidence.
What does that make you, I wonder? Stupider than “breath-takingly stupid,” maybe?
Judging from our latest exchanges in GD, Shodan, you’ve learned absolutely nothing from your mistakes.
Oh, and I just love this one:
That one is absolutely priceless – it speaks for itself.
Before, I was in denial because I suspected that Iraq might not have all the “WMDs” Bush claimed it had. Now I’m in denial because I suspect that maybe, just maybe, Bush wasn’t being entirely honest when he made his previous claims. But somehow, I get the feeling that I’m not the one suffering from denial, here….
Finally, here are a couple from the “where are they now” files: first up, Doghouse Reilly. Anyone remember him? He made fun of me because I doubted that Saddam was really capable of wiping out lower Manhattan with a teaspoonful of anthrax.
Well, somebody was dancing around the truth, but it wasn’t me, I’m afraid.
Back in 2002 I was flamed (on another board) for suggesting that Bush would wage a war in Iraq. I was called a Bush hater, hysterical liberal, etc. Funny – once the war was on, nobody bothered to apologize for the name-calling the previous November.
Damn, Mr. S., this thread is like exhuming the six-week-old corpse of a suspected murder victim: probably necessary, but scary and icky. Thanks for undertaking (hee hee) the task, I’d never have had the guts (or the patience).
What scares me the most about this post-mortem is seeing how absolutely, vociferously, vituperatively positive and confident some quite intelligent and reasonable people were (no, not counting december ) about a position that was totally unsupported by adequate evidence. These are almost all conservatives with a strong anti-government streak, but nonetheless they totally bought the government’s line about the dangers of Iraqi WMD.
May I never, never, never get that absolutely convinced that I know what I’m talking about, even if I really want to believe it. I’m gonna go rewrite all my potential posts and put in a lot more "maybe"s.
Those were judgements made given the information available at the time. It wasn’t just my opinion - it was the opinion of the intelligence services of almost every major country. EVERYONE was surprised by the apparent lack of WMD in Iraq. Even Bill Clinton has recently said that he was absolutely certain WMD were in Iraq. So this isn’t just “BUSH LIES!”. There’s something more going on here. Perhaps some systemic failure of the way the U.S. and other countries gather intelligence? Some sort of echo-chamber effect where bad intel bounces around between the intelligence services and feeds on itself? We’ll have to see.
I understand you guys wanting to gloat over this, so have fun. For myself, I modify my opinion as the data change. I still stand by everything I said then, because it was based on the best information I had. Now, of course, my opinion is different. I don’t understand much of the intelligence available at the time. For instance, what happened to those phone intercepts? Unless you think they were faked, they are still damned hard to explain. What was going on there?
Right now, it looks possible that this was an intentional deception on Iraq’s part - maintaining a facade in a mistaken attempt to build stature or a gross misjudging of the U.S. - Saddam may have thought that the threat of WMD would keep the U.S. at bay. It’s hard to say right now.
The other possibility is that Saddam honestly thought that he had these WMD, because his subordinates were blowing sunshine up his ass. It’s said that in the waning days of WWII, Hitler spent much of his time giving orders to divisions that no longer existed, because his generals were scared to tell him the truth.
In any event, we have a condundrum. We have reams of intelligence from many nations which don’t match facts on the ground. We need a serious investigation of this. If the intelligence community is making mistakes of this scope, it has national security implications. There should be a bipartisan congressional commission formed to determine what happened.
And if it turns out that what happened is that bad intelligence was intentionally injected into the intelligence stream by the Bush administration, then heads should roll fast and far.
SS: *EVERYONE was surprised by the apparent lack of WMD in Iraq. *
Er, there were millions of people all over the world, from UN inspectors and CIA officials on down, who were skeptical all along about the WMD claims.
Maybe most of us believed that the inspectors might turn up something, but we never felt that the Administration had made a credible case that Iraq had enough stuff to justify our invading them. Your credulity was by no means universal.
*I still stand by everything I said then, because it was based on the best information I had. *
Including your assertion that anyone who could disagree with your interpretation of the evidence had to be “dishonest” or “unintelligent”?
You know, folks, this isn’t about gloating. This isn’t about “I guessed right and you guessed wrong, ha-ha!” This is about totally natural and justifiable resentment of the level of insult and disparagement that we in the anti-war camp were subjected to, simply for making reasonable objections to the Administration’s propaganda.
I never claimed that no “honest and intelligent” person could possibly believe what Bush was claiming. I never called war supporters “conspiracy theorists” or “reflexively anti-American” or “breathtakingly stupid”.
I don’t think war supporters necessarily have to apologize for being wrong about Iraqi WMD. But damn it all, you sure as hell ought to be apologizing for insulting and heaping scorn on people who were right about it.
Actually, I read the post rather carefully. The thing is that all of these scenarios are starting to sound a lot more like excuses for fucking up, cleverly wrapped in a disguise of theory.
The fact is that someone blew it and thousands of Iraqi citizens are now dead or mutilated because of this (to say nothing of the unexploded cluster bombs that will be killing and crippling people for decades to come (they are still hurting people in Cambodia to this day, did you know))). The fact also is that those of us that were against this war from the beginning were mocked, flamed and had our patriotism questioned and were all but accused of siding with the terrorists. Enough already.
I know that at this point the focus seems to be something along the lines of stating that perhaps there was an intelligence failure, but gee aren’t the Iraqis better off now that we caught Saddam. While it may be true that he was a horrible leader, I wonder if anyone can cite for me how many people he had killed a month and then cite for me how many people we have been killing a month in collateral damage.
I’m a ‘war supporter’ (though from day one I felt possible WMD in Iraq was just icing on the cake), and I think this is a gross generalization of the situation. I saw people on BOTH SIDES trading insults as if they possessed in their hand the concrete data everyone was looking for. I saw both sides acting as if the evidence pointed solely to their position as being correct and there was no other way to interpret it. I myself have been insulted for supporting the war, not on this board but on others and in person. So don’t imply that the anti-war position is all whitewashed and innocent, because that’s simply not true.
Also don’t try to lump a large, diverse set of people of a certain opinion in one large group, because you’re bound to commit multiple fallacies if you do so. Some pro-war people acted like dunderheads, but so did some anti-war people. What’s the saying, there’s a bad egg in every basket?
Pro war massacree? I don’t feel massacreed, Mr. S. Saddam’s in the can, his regime is crushed, and those are good things.
If you’re out to nail GWB for lying, that’s a different thing.
Saddam had billions of dollars in cash at his disposal, large resources of manpower, and over a month’s time while he watched invading armies mass on his borders. Put me in that situation, and I can hide some stuff.
Did he have WMDs and hide them? He didn’t have any and chose to act like he did? Bush did/didn’t deliberately lie? Who knows? I don’t.
The bottom line is my top line: “Saddam’s in the can, his regime is crushed, and those are good things.”
Wah, wah, wah. The most vocal anti-warriors were hardly paragons of politeness and rationality, themselves. Hell, if you were even SLIGHTLY pro-war, you had rabid hate-mongers screaming, “WHERE’RE THE WMD’S?!?!?” even if you never claimed you believed they were there. You were mocked and flamed because your stance boiled down to “I hate Bush, and I got a couple flimsy reasons for it!” rather than “These are the intelligent and rational reasons why we shouldn’t go into Iraq.”
Mmm… this could be considered a hijack… but, considering the title of the thread, it’s an ON-TOPIC hijack, so I’m gonna go ahead and do it.
It’s more than just whether or not there were WMDs. At least, that’s how I feel about it.
Y’see, I don’t wanna live in a dictatorship. I wanna live in a democracy. Or, at the very least, I’ll settle for a republic, where elected officials I vote for make decisions that affect me.
Now, the way they taught ME that this works was that the President had to ask Congress before we went to war. That way, if the President went loony, Congress could stop him before we nuked Vancouver or something.
Our current President has gotten us into not one, but TWO wars – Afghanistan and Iraq – without a declaration of war from Congress.
His reasoning: information that turned out to be faulty, or flat-out untrue.
Of course, he’s the President. He can always swear up and down that HE didn’t know the information wasn’t solid, and he can refuse to show it to us on grounds of “national security” or any number of other reasons.
The result: there is, apparently, nothing stopping George W. Bush from ordering troops into Vancouver if he gets a bug up his butt for some reason, any reason, or no reason.
This is an extremely bad idea.
Now, you will notice that I have expressed my opinions here without calling Bush a liar. For all I know, he isn’t a liar, although I have my doubts about that.
…but here’s the kicker:
My beliefs have not changed. I thought letting the President start wars on his own authority was a rotten idea a year ago, and I think it’s a rotten idea now, for all the same reasons. I would think it’s a rotten idea if he’d found the damn Dr. Strangelove Doomsday Machine buried in the sands south of Baghdad, for potato’s sake, because IT’S AN EXTREMELY BAD IDEA!!!
“You’re either with us or against us.” GEE WHIZ, folks, are these or are these not the words of a frickin’ DEMAGOGUE, or WHAT?
…but a year ago, I was subjected to considerable rudeness, both in person and over the Internet, for expressing this opinion. “Shut The F*ck Up And Get Out Of Our Way, Pansy,” proclaimed jingoists, posters, and emails. "WE’LL Defend America!"
Well, no, actually, you won’t. You will simply invade foreign countries on the say-so of one man who took power under questionable circumstances, and insult and ridicule anyone who dares to disagree, or even ask whether or not we shouldn’t stop and think about this for a minute before swarming into the Middle East, armed with cockeyed intelligence and half-assed plans for what we’re going to do when we get tired of shooting foreigners.
This, too, was an extremely bad idea.
The ONE THING that MIGHT, repeat, MIGHT have justified this idiocy was finding out that, by george, he DID have some weapons of mass destruction squirreled away in there!
…and we’re still waiting. And even if we DO manage to find Saddam’s Q-96 Space Modulator somewhere between now and the election, it won’t change the fact that half a thousand Americans are dead on the say-so of one man, who did not need a Congressional declaration of war to order them to die for him.
So, someone tell me again: what was the justification for the poisonous denunciation of the antiwar faction, again?
M104: *Some pro-war people acted like dunderheads, but so did some anti-war people. *
Then they should apologize for it. I apologize if I came across as saying that all war supporters should be apologizing for the insults and flaming of a few such as Sam and Shodan. People who were reasonable and civil about the issue, on either side, don’t deserve to be trashed simply for being wrong.
JCoM: *Did he have WMDs and hide them? He didn’t have any and chose to act like he did? Bush did/didn’t deliberately lie? Who knows? I don’t.
The bottom line is my top line: “Saddam’s in the can, his regime is crushed, and those are good things.”*
That sounds like you’re determined to focus only on the positive outcomes (and I think we can all agree that those are positive outcomes) while refusing to pay any attention to the negative outcomes or the dangers of starting a war for inadequate reasons.
Over 500 American soldiers have been killed and many more wounded; thousands of Iraqis have been killed; our military is stretched thin; millions of Muslims around the world are enraged with us over what they see as a deliberate anti-Muslim assault on a nation that hadn’t attacked us; millions of Muslims and non-Muslims alike are concluding that our leaders are liars, bullies, and thieves. Those are not “good things”, and sticking your fingers in your ears and chanting “But Saddam’s in the can! Saddam’s in the can!” will not make them go away.
Yeah, it’s called US foreign policy doctrine - you know, that thing called the ‘national interest’. And we pretty much know for sure you just don’t get it Sam Stone, not even the opening riff, let alone the substance.
Hence you just unquestioningly recite and regurgitate neo con speeches like they have actual meaning. You’re a *believer *Sam Stone and, I’m sorry, but in terms of politics you are a genuine fool.
How about focussing on Master Wang-ka’s main point: that the President should not have the sole power to decide when and where a war is fought?
The Constitution deliberately gave the power of the purse and the power to declare war to the Congress, precisely to prevent a situation like Iraq from ever happening.
We should be ashamed of ourselves for letting it happen. We should be further ashamed if this man is re-elected. And we should be debating the steps that need to be taken, including amending the Constitution, to make sure it never happens again.
Well, let’s see: the supposition that Osama Bin Laden was directly responsible for the attack on 9/11 (possible, but far from proven);
The idea that the destruction of Al-Qaida would win the war on terror (not only untrue, but laughable)
The idea that we CAN successfully invade/conquer/pacify all of Afghanistan (depends on your definition. Are we EVER gonna clean ALL those heavily armed crazy people out of their holes? Not likely.)
The idea that Al-Qaida is a centralized organization with a head which can be attacked and eliminated by invading Afghanistan (not only untrue, but if Bush had been listening to his own people, they probably could have told him this.)
The likely truth is this: Bush felt like kicking some immediate ass after 9/11 for political purposes, and Afghanistan offered up some properly undiplomatic, rude, unpleasant Muslims, as well as almost certainly harboring a major terrorist organization (which likely largely scootled across the border into Pakistan the minute we showed up).
But don’t tell ME that invading Afghanistan is gonna win the war on terror. It ain’t.
) about a position that was totally unsupported by adequate evidence. These are almost all conservatives with a strong anti-government streak, but nonetheless they totally bought the government’s line about the dangers of Iraqi WMD.