Speaking of petulance… But Scylla can say what he likes. I have no ties to his particular evaluation.
Of course he did not exhaust every alternative. But I’m not really interested in parsing every single word like that. This isn’t 7th grade. Most people have no problem understanding that to mean something along the lines of “every reasonable alternative”. We can argue about what is reasonable and what is not. Personally I don’t think he did exhaust every reasonable alternative. And so this is something he and I disagree on.
Since we’re pasing here… There is a lot of ground inbetween those two. I’m suggesting that “I suspect” is way to weak to represent what the adminstration’s position was.
Oh, there’s plenty to go around, no doubt about it. Lots of people who knew better cringed from thier clear duty. But theirs is a guilt of compliance. The impetus, the demand and the direction came straight from the Bushiviks.
Unless, of course, it is your contention that a war-mad Congress intimidated a reluctant GeeDubya into compliance?
Sounds like the President was required to make the determination. It also sounds like in making his determination, he lied about the continuing threat, the UN resolutions and the 9/11 connection.
Sorry, Demo, but that resolution was written by Republican lawyers, there’s enough wriggle room in that for Moby Dick to dance the rhumba.
“his determination”…“adequately”…“is not likely”…
Nope, the spineless wretches that bent over for Tonkin Bay II deserve little in the way of respect. They swallowed a resolution that implied Congressional oversight, but denied any meaningful limitations. Under that resolution, GeeDubya could have nuked Iraq for a month if that was his idea of “adequate”.
Tonkin Bay…war powers resolutions…deja voodoo all over again… Its just like the saying goes, those who will not learn from history condemn the rest of us to repeat it.
Well, let us chose our words carefully here. I’m arguing that the statement made by Bush during his SOTU regarding Iraq’s attempts to acquire “yellowcake” from Africa constitute a blatant attempt on his part to willfully deceive the American public. While you may take solace from the fact that the claim was technically correct, I’m arguing that it was nevertheless known both to him and his advisors that the “yellowcake” claim had no real basis in fact. That statement was a “lie.”
I submit the above as one example among many in which suspicions about Iraq, or unanswered questions regarding the regime’s behavior, were rhetorically transformed into certainties in the public statements made by members of the administration. The difference is not trivial.
To reiterate, I’m not arguing that he knew there were no “WMDs” in Iraq prior to the invasion. I’m saying that he simply didn’t know, really, one way or the other. He sold us a war based on false pretenses, and I strongly suspect that he knew those pretenses were false from the beginning. So he was praying that the survey teams would locate something – anything – that could be retroactively employed to justify the administration’s antecedent claims of complete certainty, and it just didn’t pan out.
Now there’s another point that I’d like to tackle here, if I can. Those who defend Bush want to claim that he based his assessment of the Iraqi threat on faulty intelligence. According to this line of argument, Bush can’t be blamed for believing what his intelligence agencies told him, or if he can, then so can anyone else who ever made a single fallacious statement regarding Iraq’s “WMDs.”
This approach assumes the existence of a sort of water-tight barrier between intelligence gathering activities on the one hand and political actors on the other. In this view agencies like the CIA, NSA, and so on gather raw intelligence information, process it, and present for decision-makers an estimate of what we know, strongly suspect, and don’t know about a given foreign government, for example. In the best case scenario, this process is objective and apolitical. It is argued that decision-makers receive from these agencies an “intelligence product” that they then use as a basis for foreign policy guidelines and initiatives.
Of course, we all know that in the real world things aren’t so simple. Decision-makers and intelligence-gatherers interact with each other in various complex ways. One would hope that those interactions don’t affect the end product, but its probably wise to assume that most intelligence assessments are skewed somewhat by conflicts of interest, bureaucratic power-struggles, political influence, and so forth. But what can we say if these factors achieves a kind of preponderance in a certain direction? If politicians begin to interfere too much with the process of intelligence gathering and interpretation, and to steer it in preferred direction?
Well, there’s a lot of evidence that this is precisely what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war. Specifically, I’m suggesting that certain important political actors – i.e., Cheney and Rumsfeld, most egregiously – either pressured the intelligence community to exaggerate the Iraqi threat, or in various ways attempted to do an end-run around that community and willfully present un-vetted, dubious intelligence information as fact. I don’t know for certain that they did this, but there are very strong grounds for suspicion – starting with the rather spectacular lack of accuracy in the pre-war US intelligence estimate with regard to Iraq.
But watch how they do it. First, they pressure intelligence agencies to produce a certain picture of Iraq’s “WMD” programs, a picture that we know, through media reports, was the source of much controversy within those agencies. Then, having formed an intelligence product more or less of their own design, they set about acting upon it – in this case, invading Iraq. Finally, when it turns out that the intelligence product was entirely wrong, they throw up their hands and say, “Hey, we never said that intelligence gathering is a precise science. Anyway, we only reacted to what those agencies told us about Iraq. And anyway, all the Democrats also believed it, so if we’re lying, they’re lying too.” And so here we sit, arguing about whether or not Bush could have believed in good faith that Iraq possessed “WMDs,” when even the claims that Iraq possessed such weapons were strongly influenced by his administration in the first place.
Pretty nifty, no? Good enough to steal, that.
Submitting the above in the hope that it might receive more than a one-paragraph response from Shodan,
I call bullshit again. Congress authorized this war they and Bush are equally responsible for it.
On a side note, don’t you think that its a little inappropiate to call Bush GeeDubya in Great Debates? Not only does it show you are a partisan hack but in my opinion its an insult and those do not belong in GD.
While I agree with elucidator that those who voted for the war resolution deserve contempt, I do feel obligated to remind him that – as far as I can tell, anyway – the Congresscritters who cast their ayes probably didn’t get to scurtinize the (bullshit) evidence in as much detail as the White House did. Odds are, they were probably bamboozled with a bill of goods from Rumsfeld and Powell and Cheney et al, and voted for the resolution in the mispled belief that the President of the United States wouldn’t be so dang-blasted moronic to lie through his smirk for a war.
Of course, what really gets me are the Apologistas who are insisting – even now, even after the pre-war quotes have been trotted out time and time again – that Bush didn’t lie about Iraq. I knew cognitive dissonance was a powerful disorder, but I had never seen it stretched to the breaking point as it does with these folks…
And yet, the Iraqis seem to have acquired yellowcake from somewhere. So perhaps it is not out of the question that someone could believe in good faith, based on what the British were saying and what everyone else took for granted, that Iraq was attempting to acquire yellowcake from Africa as well.
Then it is wrong to accuse him of lying. Given that he was in agreement with practically everyone else on earth, that Iraq had or wanted to re-acquire WMD, it is difficult to see on what basis you are willing to condemn Bush - as you do here:
In other words, Bush knew that the pretenses were false, but nobody else who shared those same “pretenses” knew. Bush must, therefore, have had access to some information that President Clinton, Al Gore, Hilary, etc., had, so that he knew that the pretence that Iraq had WMD programs was false, but no one else did. What would that information be? Because the British told him that Saddam was trying to get yellowcake?
No.
Since Bill Clinton for one based his military action on belief in the same claims that Bush did - that Iraq was not complying with the inspection regime because Saddam was hiding his WMDs. And thus it is not necessary to be fooled by Dick Cheney to have a strong enough belief in Iraqi WMD to base military action on - Clinton had such a belief, and strongly enough that he bombed Iraq based on it.
Which is why I am careful to include Al Gore and Bill Clinton (and even Hilary, the Co-President) in the list of those who thought Iraq had WMD. They, at least, were not fooled by Bush, since Bush was not President when Clinton bombed Iraq. And therefore, they must have had sources of unbiassed, un-massaged information sufficient to convince them that Iraq was up to something, and something serious enough to warrant bombs and killing.
And therefore I do not see the evidence that says Bush lied. It was apparent to almost everyone throughout the 90s that Iraq was not coming clean about its weapons programs. What is it between January 20, 2001 and the invasion that showed that Iraq did not have WMD, and showed it definitely and clearly enough to convince a reasonable observer that all the previous Democrats were completely (although honestly) mistaken, and so obvious that only a liar could continue to maintain that Iraq had WMD?
I would say that it is the opposite. The only reason that it is now possible to conclude that Iraq’s WMD programs were apparently in abeyance is that Bush invaded. We know what we know now. But it is not possible or reasonable - and no reasonable person knew prior the invasion - to conclude that Saddam had disarmed, or that he was going to comply with the inspection regime as he had promised to do. We only know anything like that now, because Bush invaded, and overthrew the regime, and now we know what Saddam was at some pains to prevent the inspections regime from showing.
Hindsight is 20/20. If anti-war opponents are so sure now that Iraq was definitely disarmed, why did they not say so before the invasion? I heard a lot of “let the inspections work (for another twelve years)”. Work on what? Why call for inspections to continue if you know there is nothing to find?
The consensus was quite clear, on both sides of the aisle and for years before Bush was elected. And until you can show why it is not possible to think that Iraq had WMD before the invasion, it is unfair to accuse Bush of lying about something that everyone else “knew” as well.
Perhaps it came from the Tuwaitha nuclear storage facility, which the coalition of the willing left open to looters in the weeks following the invasion. A somewhat less likely possible is that it came from a Uranium mine in western Iraq.
Regardless of the source, yellowcake is merely the starting material for the an extremely complex and costly enrichment process. Rumsfeld et.al. tried to raise visions of mobile enichment facilities, in the minds of fearful Americans, but such a scheme makes even less sense than positing the existence of mobile automobile assembly plants based on a nation’s importation of taconite pellets. I’d love to see a bessemer converter and rolling mill tucked inside an old VW minibus, but it’s just not technically feasible -nor are mobile uranium enrichment facilities.
Me: “To reiterate, I’m not arguing that he knew there were no “WMDs” in Iraq prior to the invasion.”
Shodan: “Then it is wrong to accuse him of lying.”
I am standing at a door. Behind the door is a room; I have no idea what the room contains, since I the door is stuck and I can’t get it open. Shodan walks up.
Shodan: Dude, what’s in the room?
Me: A camel that juggles cats while singing the National Anthem.
Shodan: (rather skeptically) Hmmm… I find that hard to believe.
Me: Perhaps you do. But it doesn’t matter. The intelligence gathered by myself and other posters here at the SDMB leaves no doubt that that room contains a cat-juggling, National Anthem-singing camel. I would share this intelligence with you, of course, but unfortunately my sources are top-secret and can’t be compromised.
In a pique of disbelieving rage, Shodan rips open the stuck door and peers into the room beyond. It is completely empty.
Shodan: There’s no camel in here!
Me: What’s the difference?
Shodan: Huh?
Me: There’s no difference. There could have been a camel in there…. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you.
So, I put it to you: was it or was it not a lie, that I claimed to possess certain knowledge when, in fact, I really didn’t know at alll?
No. Congress authorized working with the UN to define action, and then to act upon it if necessary. [http://www.c-span.org/resources/pdf/hconres104.pdf]Text.](http://). They did not authorize *this * war. You can, however, fairly argue that they failed to take action against it anyway.
I “keep harping” on starting a war? What else in a leader’s job description is anywhere near as important? Are your priorities that askew? With all due respect, the “harping” is your own, and about the lies, not about the heart of the matter.
John, a similar disbelief applies to you, that anyone could try to dismiss a call for war with your "Of course he did not exhaust every alternative. But I’m not really interested in parsing every single word like that. This isn’t 7th grade. ". No, it’s not 7th grade. It’s sending good people to die. You are looking for ways to excuse starting an aggressive war. That is not what democracy, hell, *civilization * is all about. The cognitive dissonance is still strong in some of you.
No, You keep harping on how going to war constitutes a lie. That is, you keep harping on the possibility that we were tricked into war. There are a plethera of problems with the way this administration conducted the Iraq war. Previous to the war (and starting with the Clinton administration), during the war, and afterwards. Frankly, that they were mistaken, even willingly, about WMDs in Iraq is one of the least of them. I would argue that your continual harping on the “lie” trivializes the other issues which are legitimate and need attention.
Okay, now for a less facetious response to your last post:
I’m at a loss here; are you submitting this report as evidence that Bush didn’t lie? It’s a pretty weak and transparent tactic, in that case.
Wrong, as detailed in my previous post (# 43 in this thread). American intelligence sources did not “take for granted that Iraq was attempting to acquire yellowcake from Africa.” In fact, they believed the exact opposite, that those charges were false, based on forged documents. They had already forced Bush and his team to remove the accusation from a previous speech because it was considered so dubious.
The IAEA also judged the charges to be false prior to the SOTU. In addition, we know that at least some of Bush’s speechwriters, and in all probability Bush himself, were aware that the intelligence reports on the yellowcake acquisition were of doubtful authenticity; and it is a matter of public record that one of Bush’s speechwriters “negotiated” with a CIA intelligence operative until they settled on a formulation that was technically correct, even though it contradicted the consensus of the US and the UN intelligence communities. Finally, we have George Tenet’s admission that claim should never have been included in the SOTU in the first place.
To my knowledge the British report was the sole remaining source of the yellowcake rumor. But did the Bush administration stop to investigate the validity of that source? Did they ask the CIA to review the charge before including it in the SOTU, or ask the British to provide any new evidence to support their claim? Apparently not, since no new evidence has ever been forthcoming, and the entire issue has more or less disappeared down the memory hole since then.
Ignoring the assessment of his own intelligence agencies, as well as those of the UN, Bush chose to rely on one unconfirmed, suspicious report from British intelligence. It strains the imagination to re-construe this chain of events as evidence of “good faith” on the part of the Bush administration, and to do so I note that you blatantly distort the historical record by claiming that “everyone took for granted” the yellowcake story, when they patently did not. I’m surprised you would try to pull such rhetorical shenanigans on your humble debating opponent.
First off, I suspect that many other people who shared those pretenses did indeed know they were false. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and Wolfowitz, to name the major players, all bore false testimony at various times during the run up to the war. In addition, Joe Wilson certainly knew the “yellowcake” claim was false, and testified to that fact; and George Tenet, head of the CIA, has also implied that he knew it to be false by stating that it should never have been in the SOTU to begin with.
Oh, how you weasel. Are we talking about “weapons programs,” or are we talking about the possession of actual weapons – and if the latter, which weapons? Nuclear weapons? Chemical weapons? Biological weapons? Feasible delivery systems? Bush claimed that Iraq had most of the items in that list, and was working tirelessly to acquire those that he lacked (such as nuclear weapons). He claimed to know this for a fact. Those claims were mostly exaggerations or outright lies.
You’ve got Clinton on the brain, you know that?
Anyway, it is possible that they did have that sort of information in 1998. If I recall correctly, the bombings, along with the withdrawal of the UN inspectors, was a response to the Iraq regime’s increasing refusal to comply to UN inspection demands. Was it justified? I doubt it. Is it relevant? Probably not.
You do realize that your argument implies that Clinton and Bush are equally honest, don’t you? If, as many on the right believe, Clinton was a lying swine not above “wagging the dog” to save his own political career, he doesn’t really serve as a particularly useful alibi for your boy, does he?
Sweet Mother of God.
Well, I’ve outlined a great deal of that evidence in my previous post (#43) and this one, regarding the “yellowcake” claim. Perhaps you were care to address that evidence directly?
Come on, Shodan stop playing games with me. As you well know, the problem is not the question of whether or not Iraq possessed “WMD;” the problem is that the Bush administration made many specific claims regarding the sort of “WMD” Iraq supposedly possessed, the acquisitions Iraq had allegedly sought (or acquired) to support those weapons and programs, the threat those weapons posed to American citizens, and so forth. Some of those claims were fairly reasonable extrapolations from the evidence at hand; some were mistaken judgements shared by many other governments and intelligence organs. On the other hand, many of the specific claims made by the Bush administration – claims, unique to that administration, as far as I know – are grotesque exaggerations, bordering on lies, presented publicly as certain knowledge. Those claims included, for example, the accusation that Iraq had “reconstituted” its nuclear program, attempted to obtain “yellowcake” from Africa, imported aluminum tubes suitable for uranium centrifuges, and was six months away from producing a nuclear device; that it had working ties to Al-Qeda, possessed huge stockpiles of chemical munitions, had developed drone aircraft capable of reaching the continental United States as well as mobile biological weapons laboratories, and so forth. The administration also mined statements from inspectors reports, intelligence assessments, and so forth, and routinely dropped the caveated language – modifiers like “probably,” “perhaps,” “possibly,” etc – to exploit them in public statements as if they were undisputed factual evidence. If that isn’t lying, it’s very close to it.
Obviously, to work on answering unanswered questions such as, “Does Iraq still possess chemical or biological weapons?” or “Is Iraq close to acquiring a nuclear weapon?” The inspection process assumes that we don’t know; hence the need for inspections. Those who argued for war, on the other hand, assumed that they did know. Clearly, they were wrong. Some were mislead, but others chose to willfully misconstrue the evidence.
How convenient those letters “W,” “M,” and “D” are for you. But you are once again misconstruing my point. One might very well have suspected with all reason that Iraq possessed, for example, some biological agents. On the other hand, it was not reasonable to suspect that Iraq possessed a thermonuclear weapon capable of reaching the US. But regardless, it is not in the least unfair to accuse Bush (and his administration) of lying about the specific threat Iraq posed, or of making false statements to exaggerate that threat. I have presented many of these statements above and still wait for you to address them.
Finally, please stop reframing my argument or setting up straw men to knock down, and reply directly to my accusations.
Please, pervert, the topic is the war, its unnecessariness, its foolhardiness, and the flouting of the basic rules of civilized conduct that led to it. Lying about the putative facts behind it is just one aspect of all that. You can ignore the lying entirely if you like, and still reach the same conclusions about the war and Bush’s conduct. 'Kay?
No, I am submitting it as evidence that Iraq had, or was trying to obtain, WMD. It is clear that they had some yellowcake from somewhere. And therefore, given Saddam’s history, it is reasonable to assume that he would be trying to get more.
Since this is a reasonable assumption, it is incorrect to accuse Bush of lying.
The Iraqis had yellowcake. They had centrifuge parts. They had nuclear plans. Why is it unreasonable to assume that Saddam, given his history, would try to get more of all of the above, so that he could build more WMD, which he clearly had in the past?
No, they did not. But practically everyone else on earth took it for granted that Saddam wanted to build nuclear weapons. Perhaps the Niger report was false. But, in general, we now know for certain that the Iraqis had a certain amount of yellowcake, and, in order to build nuclear weapons, they would need more. Thus it is neither unreasonable nor a lie to assume that this is what they were up to.
So intelligence reports disagreed. We now know without question that Iraq had a certain amount of yellowcake, and wanted more. Do you really think it was such a blatant lie to report that British intelligence thought that Iraq was trying to get yellowcake from Niger, if they already had some from somewhere and wanted to get more from anywhere, and that therefore Saddam was trying to build nukes? (Rhetorical question. I know you think it is. What I am asserting is that this is not a reasonable assumption.)
No, what “everyone took for granted” - Clinton, Clinton, Gephardt, Gore, Clark, etc. - was that Saddam was trying to rebuild his WMD programs. Sorry if I was unclear.
And what information has become available between 1998 and the invasion of Iraq that would show that Clinton et al. were wrong about their 1998 assumptions? You need to provide this before you want to dismiss the conventional wisdom of the last dozen years and accuse Bush of lying.
Again, I need to be more clear.
I do not believe for a split second what Clinton said about his motives for taking military action against Iraq. It seems rather obvious that he was trying to avoid impeachment, and that he felt the threat of Iraqi WMD was no more imminent in 1998 than in, say, 1997. However, I don’t doubt for a minute that he believed in all sincerity (or as much sincerity as he had available, which wasn’t much) that the threat of Iraqi WMDs was as actual as it was before the Bush invasion. In other words, Clinton lied about his motives, but not about his reasons for choosing that particular target to wag the dog against. He thought the threat was real, but there were other things (impeachment) that triggered the action.
Clinton did the right thing, but for the wrong reasons. If you see what I mean.
Well, there is the problem. As I see it, you are saying, “We now know that Iraq did not have stockpiles of WMD. Therefore, anyone who said before the invasion was lying.” I don’t believe that this is true.
As I see, post 9/11 Bush gave Saddam one last chance to come completely clean about the inspections he had been stalling for the last twelve years. It was universally assumed that Saddam’s reasons for the stalling were not innocent. Saddam failed to cooperate fully and completely with the inspections. Therefore, Bush overthrew him, and removed, once and for all, the threat that everyone assumed Iraq was posing. In other words, Bush did what the inspections had failed to do for twelve years - made it absolutely clear that Iraq was no longer a threat to the region or to anyone else.
I agree in large part with this assessment.
Indeed. And since Saddam failed his last chance at avoiding invasion by cooperating fully with the inspection regime, and chose to try to get away with what he had gotten away with for a dozen years, he was invaded and overthrown. He had every chance in the world, and made it very clear that he wanted to continue as he had done - threatening the world. That we now believe that those threats were bluff is only due to the inspection regime that failed to establish this for a dozen years. I for one shed no tears over the fate of this particularly distasteful tyrant, since it has become very clear that his downfall was a good idea for a whole bunch of reasons.
There were instances where the Bush administraton over-stated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. But the assumption that Iraq posed a threat to the region, had or was trying to get WMDs, had possessed and used WMDs in the past, was an aggressor nation, was involved in the support of terrorism and of terrorists, and was going to continue to pose a threat as long as Saddam was allowed to stall the inspections was both reasonable and nearly universal.
No, the Iraqi yellowcake did not come from Niger (as far as we know). But it came from somewhere. And Saddam had nuclear plans buried in his scientists’ back yard, and nuclear centrifuges, and mobile chemical labs, and plans for illegal missiles, and it was obvious that he had every intention of doing in the future what he had done in the past - threaten the world with WMD. He thought he could get away with it until the world lost interest and lifted the sanctions. Then he could go back to what he wanted all along. But George Bush stopped him. And now Iraq is no longer a threat.
This argument doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Everyone, including Bush, knew that the Iraqi’s had yellowcake stored at their Tuwaitha facility. The UN tagged it and inspected it on a regular basis through the 90’s. Much of the material was surplus left, left without a use since the Israeli’s bombed Iraq’s reactor project back in the 80’s.
If we follow your “reasonable assumption” it is also reasonable to suppose that Bush should have asked for the known reserves of yellowcake be shipped out of Iraq, as a precondition to avoiding war. His failure to ask for that would make war inevitable according to your logic, and give the lie to the president’s claims that he did “everything possible to seek a peaceful solution.”
You’ve got yourself stuck on the horns of a dilemma Shodan and wiggling to shift your weight from one horn to the other isn’t going to let you, or your president off the hook.
If so, your submission fails even in that task. See Squink’s links regarding Iraq’s possession of yellowcake, above. It was well-known that Iraq possessed a large quantity of this material sequestered at Tuwaitha prior to the war. At best, the article highlights the failure of the US military to secure important weapons sites during and after the war (there are good reasons to suspect that the “yellowcake” in your article was looted from an unsecured site). It has no relevance whatsoever to the activities of Hussein’s regime prior to the war, as far as I can see.
In addition, let us once again reiterate: the claim being investigated here is that Iraq had “WMD,” not that it was “trying to obtain” “WMD.” The US did not go to war solely because it suspected that Saddam was trying to obtain banned weapons. It went to war because the current administration claimed to have undisputed evidence and certain knowledge that Iraq had “WMD” as well. Both those claims have turned out to be false, and I’m arguing that an overwhelming array of evidence supports the suspicion that key players in that administration knew they were false from the beginning.
To begin with, Bush did not merely claim that he “assumed” Iraq was trying to acquire more yellowcake from somewhere. That might have been a reasonable assumption (although I doubt it), and it would have been honest as well. Rather, Bush and his staff sought to mislead the American public into believing that this assumption was a fact. To do this, Bush exploited evidence that he almost certainly knew to be dubious, and ignored the assessments of his own intelligence sources, which had already managed to delete the claim from a previous speech and tried in vain to remove it from the SOTU as well.
In addition, Iraq’s possession of fairly large quantity of yellowcake at Tuwaitha, along with its uranium mine, would seem to argue against the expedient of attempting to go abroad, in clear defiance of UN sanctions, and purchase yellowcake from a foreign source. In fact, according to Deputy National Security advisor Steven Hadley, there existed “some weakness in the evidence,” and:
Thus, even Bush’s own advisors do not seem to feel your assumption is particularly “reasonable.”
Yet another strawman!
Again and again we come back to this issue, and again and again you try to put words in my mouth. I’ve never said that it was unreasonable to “assume” that Saddam would try to get “more of the above.” I say that Bush and other members of the administration took these assumptions and presented them to the public as solid, undisputed fact. To claim that you know something as a fact, when in reality you only assume it, is to lie.
Do we know this for a fact? The Deputy National Security Advisor appears to disagree with you. How much yellowcake did Iraq possess at Tuwaitha? How much did they need to build a weapon?
Your next couple of responses also deal with “assumptions.” Again, I say that assuming something to be true is different from stating categorically that it is true. This contrast is particularly glaring when one compares the government’s statements about Iraq prior to the war with the truth discovered afterwards.
On the contrary. I do not think you are sorry about being unclear at all. I think you are being purposefully unclear, in precisely the same manner that the Bush administration strives to be purposefully unclear. That’s why this acronym “WMD” is so useful; when you find that you cannot defend a specific charge made by the administration, you simply fall back to a higher level of generalization.
But we were talking specifically about the yellowcake claim in Bush’s SOTU. You cannot inoculate that specific statement from critical scrutiny by simply taking a step up the chain of induction; that’s the equivalent of putting the horse before the cart. After all, the assertion that Iraq was attempting to acquire yellowcake from Africa was one piece of evidence that it was reconstituting its nuclear program. If that piece of evidence turns out to be false (as it did), the claim that Iraq was actively working to acquire nuclear weapons would be weakened as well.
Let’s look at that argument a little closer. The assertion that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program relied, to my knowledge, on three separate pieces of evidence:[ul]
[li](1) testimony from informants[/li] li Iraq’s attempts to acquire yellowcake from Africa[/li] li Iraq’s purchase and importation of suspicious aluminum tubes.[/ul]Now, we know that over the course of 2002 and 2003, assessments made by US and other intelligence agencies came to the conclusion that (2), above, was false. We know, in fact, that they had come to this conclusion at least two months prior to the SOTU.[/li]
With regard to (3), we know that the agency most qualified to pass judgement on the aluminum tubes, the DOE, did not believe they were appropriate for use as uranium centrifuges. The DOE was one of the two dissenting agencies in the NIE’s final judgement that the tubes were, in fact, intended for such use. (For a long, long, long discussion of the ins and outs of this issue, see this debate between me and Sam Stone.)
At the very least, therefore, we can state that two of the three pieces of evidence possessed by the Bush administration regarding Iraq’s nuclear programs were questionable (I’m being generous here. To be honest, both were highly dubious assertions, IMO.). And that leaves only (1), testimony from informants – that is, rumor and hearsay. Was it on this basis that Cheney could state so categorically:
or:
?
Was this the intelligence Bush referred to when he stated that there could be “no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised”?
How do you explain the divergence between the claims forwarded by the administration prior to the war, and the assessment of the IAEA, whose report on March 7, 2003, states clearly that there was “no indication of resumed nuclear activities…nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any inspected sites,” and “There is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990” ?
First off, for the last fucking time, no I don’t. In this thread I have provided reams of evidence that Bush and his underlings lied in the run up to the war that have nothing whatsoever to do with dismissing “conventional wisdom.”
The fact is, we knew less about what was going on in Iraq in 2002 than we did in 1998. The UN inspectors were, among other things, an invaluable source of information regarding the state of Iraq’s various nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare programs. Without the inspections regime, it has been claimed, US intelligence was “flying on instruments,” and various agencies were forced to guess, on the basis of old intelligence information, what might have happened between 1998 and 2002. Rumsfeld has himself testified before Congress to the fact that the new assessments made by the US intelligence community in 2002 and early 2003 did not rely on the acquisition of new information – rather, they relied on seeing old information “through the prism of 9/11.” We must therefore in all honesty ask ourselves how they could possibly know as undisputed fact things that previously were known only as suspicions, rumors, or assumptions.
Sorry to hop over the rest of your response, but I have to round off. One statement you’ve made in your last reply has jumped out at me, however:
This is the crux of the biscuit, as it were. Let’s talk about those instances: do you have any particular instance in mind? When can one say that an “over-statement has “shaded over,” so to speak, into an outright lie? You write that Saddam “threatened the world.” Is that just an overstatement – or is it a lie?
[QUOTE=Mr. Svinlesha] Let’s look at that argument a little closer. The assertion that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program relied, to my knowledge, on three separate pieces of evidence:[ul]
[li](1) testimony from informants[/li] li Iraq’s attempts to acquire yellowcake from Africa[/li] li Iraq’s purchase and importation of suspicious aluminum tubes.**[/ul]Now, we know that over the course of 2002 and 2003, assessments made by US and other intelligence agencies came to the conclusion that (2), above, was false. We know, in fact, that they had come to this conclusion at least two months prior to the SOTU.[/li][/QUOTE]
Then you’re not reading the intelligence documents that you’re citing as evidence. No one has come to the conclusion afaik that Iraq was not trying to acquire material from Niger. Whether it’s yellowcake or not I don’t know…maybe weapons grade stuff instead which would have considerably shortened the time Iraq needed to produce nuclear weapons. Documents of a sale were determined to be a forgery, yet the British government stands behind its assertion that a third country reported Iraq agents’ procurement attempts. The two things are not interchangeable so there’s no conflict here, and the forged documents had nothing to do with the agencies’ assessments that SH was reconstituting his nuclear program in the first place. Per the NIE.
The IAEA as the watchdog agency is reporting what they themselves see - there’s no indication (at the time) of Iraq trying to import uranium, but now do we give that more weight than the intelligence we’re given? If so, why.