Wrong again.
Ahem. I should have said “not merely for being wrong.”
The war debate was never about the existence of WMDs, but on the Bush administration’s rush to go to war unilaterally without giving inspectors time to work and without UN backing.
In fairness the main reason it wasn’t a major thing in the US anyway was because the Admin said they did have actual evidence even the extent that they said they knew where the weapons where. Most people believed that whatever the US admin was it wouldn’t bullshit it’s people so openly. You live and learn I suppose but hey they seem to have got away with it considering it’s looking like they have a good chance at staying in power.
I remember Dominique de Villepin saying many many times that France had not seen any evidence whatsoever to merit a pre-emptive attack.
I should say “the war debate in the media.” Here in the Dope it was pretty much the usual anti-military, anti-American rhetoric. For some folks here, the US can do nothing right. If we exert force, we’re tyrants; if we do nothing, we’re asleep on the watch.
The Bush regime’s lies are gettting thoroughly exposed here, so if the American electorate returns him to power, we will genuinely deserve the scorn of the world as a nation of yahoos.
Unfortunately there has been so much bullshit thrown at your country that real criticisms are lost in the blizzard of idiotic brainless US=Satan shite.
I’d like to know what Bluesman has learned.
Does he think he was deceived in the evidence he saw? Swept along by group-think into thinking that what he saw was strong evidence? Does he feel he did his job well?
Does he still believe that the anti-war protests could not possibly be believed to be “in the interests of anybody but Saddam”? Does he think that because he didn’t have all the facts his opinion was invalid?
Has his confidence in his own judgment been shaken at all? Has he gained even grudging, tentative respect for the opinions of those with whom he strongly disagrees (about this and other things)?
He’s taken a lot of stick and some of it has been over the top IMHO. But he’s paid money to fight ignorance, so I think he should tell us what he has learned from this episode - to show he has honour in admitting he erred (as he claimed all “with eyes to see, mind to comprehend and conscience to admit” would) and to give some hints to the rest of us about how experience has taught him how to reduce the chance of making such errors in the future.
and
Hans Blik, in his new book, would agree that he believed that Hussein was hiding WMD. However, being an intelligent, non-warhawk, he did not support the invasion. Blik found it incomprehensible that the U.S. would invade Iraq with absolutely no evidence, based rather on simple belief and lousy, false intelligence. As he says:
From Clarke’s account, we know that BushCo. had a major hard on for Iraq and was chomping at the bit for any information, however tenuous and ill-based, that would justify an invasion of Iraq. This kind of prejudging and Bush’s need to be a “war president”, led to the current morass that Iraq is currently.
This reliance on “belief” over evidence was a major reason Blik, the international community, and many Americans were, and remain, adamant in our belief that the invasion of Iraq was wrong. Simple “belief” should not be a sufficient basis for the invasion of another country. Airman and gobear were, and remain, free to believe there are WMD in Iraq. But the facts then, and now, show that that belief was unreasonable. I’ll leave it to other more inflammatory posters to debate the merits of chastising a poster for supporting an invasion based on belief over evidence.
As soon as I see an apology from Bluesman, I’ll do that.
I suspect that if Bluesman opened a thread to explain his thoughts about the war and its aftermath, any thoughtful debate would be crowded out by the lunatic fringe’s taunts and personal insults. Why should he expose himself up to being called a war criminal and murderer by the likes of Sailor and Diogenes the Cynic?
No, it is just not true that the world agreed with the US government when it said Saddam was a clear and imminent threat who could launch a terrible attack on the US in less than 45 minutes. The lack of support for the USA in the UN was precisely because of this. Or does anyone believe that France and the rest of the world thought “yeah, we agree with the USA that Saddam is a clear and present danger, that he is an imminent threat, ready to launch bio-chemical and nuclear attacks on the USA at any moment, but we choose to do nothing about it because we all hate the USA”. Gimme a break. Those countries were skeptical and they voiced their skepticism. The USA offered nothing but their word that thay had all that secret evidence. Nobody was convinced the USA was right and that is why nobody (except for the lapdogs for other motives) supported the USA in the UN.
Is it not a fact that Bluesman was an arrogant prick in that thread? That is the fact being discussed here.
That is the whole purpose of this thread. Remember we are in the Pit, not GD. He was an asshole and he is being called an asshole. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Because he made a very large point over being right and insulted people for not taking him at his word. He was wrong in a BIG WAY.
He made a prat out of himself and should say so.
JC: Hell, kids, it was there on my porch that the man first made the claim that he knew about it. He was standing on my side steps and was speaking with Polycarp with me nearby.
Wow. That answers a question I’ve been mulling for a long time. Background: I was solidly opposed to the invasion of Iraq, as proposed by the Administration, from day one. Not because I liked or admired Saddam Hussein, not because I was 100% convinced he couldn’t possibly have dangerous weapons, not even because I felt that any sort of military intervention in Iraq would be unacceptable—but simply because I felt that the Administration had done such a completely shit-poor job of making a case for why we absolutely had to attack Iraq right now. I did not trust them to be honest with us about the motives for invasion or to have a clear grasp of the problems it would cause or a coherent plan for dealing with the problems.
But one of the things that gave me the most pause, during the buildup to the invasion, was reading a post from Polycarp in favor of the war. I’ve developed a lot of respect over the past few years for Poly’s integrity and acumen (at least as manifested on these boards, though to my knowledge we’ve never met IRL), and when he said that he had accepted that we had to go with the invasion because of something he had been told by somebody whom he trusted, that really gave me something to think about. It didn’t ultimately end up persuading me, but it did give me a few sleepless hours.
During the past year, I’ve often wondered what it was that Poly heard then, and what he thinks about the issue now. Now I have some idea, at least about the first part of the question.
This drives home to me how much danger there is in excessive certainty and arrogance about one’s knowledge. It’s not just that you can end up being wrong yourself—that happens to all of us all the time—so much as that you can end up wrongly convincing someone who is sort of a node of trust in the eyes of many other people. It is really easy to propagate ignorance and misinformation that way.
Another thing this says to me is that we must have some serious problems in our intelligence system. Maybe some posters here are right and Bluesman is just a great big etcetera who gets things wrong and is too conceited to admit it, yadda yadda, but if he isn’t, then there are real problems with a system that can deliver so much certainty about so much wrongness to so many smart and analytical people.
And now I’m wondering if we’ve managed to fix that system any or if it’s still operating in the same way. Y’all 'scuse me please while I go hide under the bed awhile…
Yiou are such a fucking liar. How can you be so dishonest? When have I ever called any of the troops “war criminals” or “murderers” you lying piece of shit? Anyone who has read my posts knows I have always said the troops are not responsible for doing their job and I have said exactly that just a few posts up about Bluesman in this thread.
You are truly an asshole. A lying, dishonest, asshole.
See, there’s the crux of the issue right there. The fact that you retain this impression of the pre-war debates on this board makes me strongly believe that you’ve learned fundamentally nothing from the experience of the past two and a half years. I also think that if you’re at all representative of the growing pool of warhawks who feel they were manipulated or deceived by the administration, then this belated realization is also fundamentally worthless in the long run, and will only prove useful in the short run if it’s considered sufficient reason to vote the scum out of office.
It’s not enough to admit you were wrong or acknowledge that you were deceived, and I’ll tell you why. The point is not the correctness of your assumptions regarding Iraq, or even the validity of your conclusions regarding the use of preventive military invasion… the point is the standards to which we as citizens should be held when questioning public decisions of such enormous impact, and the standards to which we may allowably hold our elected officials.
That you believe, in what can only be described as dumbfounding folly, that the bulk of antiwar arguments on this message board consisted of “the usual… anti-American rhetoric” and that it’s proper to refer to “the likes of” the bulk of us who made those antiwar arguments as “lunatic fringe” does not, frankly, inspire confidence that your humility extends beyond an admission of error, or that it will lead to real changes in your thinking (as it probably should when you are fooled so completely by such rank incompetents).
As Kimstu pointed out (in her much gentler way), it’s the system which produced the gross errors of knowledge that must be fixed.
But still, you go on and on about our troops killing thousands of innocent civilians. So you can’t have it both ways.
And your petty insults mean little to me because you are beneath contempt.
Now hold on a second, Gobear, I have never called US troops “murderers and war criminals.” I have been utterly conistent in saying that I believe they are victims of Bush and Co. I think that Bush is a murderer and a war criminal and I think that he sent people to die under false pretenses but I have never said that it was the fault of the soldiers themselves and I have consistently lamented their losses. Please don’t ascribe attitudes to me which I have never expressed. I know you’re smarter than that. anti-war does not equal anti-soldier. For fuck’s sake, I once posted a comment to Airman that I thought he should have been paid more and that I thought he and the rest of the troops had been screwed by Bush.
My problem with Bluesman was not that he went to Iraq or that he supported the war but that he posted arrogant assertions about special knowledge and furthermore that he posted sweepng ad hominems against anyone who dared not simply take his word that Iraq definitely had WMDs. I would like him to simply acknowledge that he was wrong in his assertions. I have no criticism of his involvement in the war but with his attitude towards people who were skeptical about WMDs. If he were to say that he was lied to about the intel, I would take him at his word. The worst criticism I would have of Bluesman is that he was at least a blowhard and possibly a liar. It is possible for a man in a uniform to be either or both of those things, and calling a soldier a blowhard or questioning his honesty is not even close to calling him a murderer or a war criminal. Disagree with me all you want. Vouch for his character all you want. But please don’t preemptively accuse me of harboring attitudes or motives which I have never expressed.
The operative word in the post you’re responding to is today – since highlighting it in italics wasn’t enough for your apparently fading eyesight, I’ve now bolded it for you.
As for the poll you cite, how could I not be aware of it? Soon after it was published, seems like just about every hawk known to mankind was given marching orders to make sure it spread like wildfire. Yet another pathetic attempt to justify the unjustifiable.
Interesting to note that all the attention was focused on the one question that favored the invasion. Because if you take a closer look you’ll find that the USUK occupation forces come in dead last in terms of public trust – and who can blame them for that? Moreover, on the question of the invasion proper there was an almost even split as to whether it was the “right” thing to do and a full 60% of those polled want Iraqis in charge of security – excluding the Puppet Council.
So no, there certainly wasn’t much love lost for the invasion back then amongst the Iraqis. As for now well, take a look at that link and you telll me.
Validity and spin of the poll aside, my original point stands: Iraq has now become a clusterfuck way beyond what it was prior to the illegal and immoral invasion.
Guess we have arrogant pricks like Bluesman and the rest of The True Believers to thank for that.
You said I would hold Bluesman responsible and you know that is a lie. A big lie. A lie obvious to anyone who knows my posts. The fact that I " go on and on about our troops killing thousands of innocent civilians" has nothing to do with whether I hold the troops to be responsible as you implied. Everybody here knows that I don’t.
And yes, I “go on and on” because it’s the truth. Margaret Thatcher one time, when told she was just telling “the same old story” retorted “Yes, the truth is always the sme old story”. The facts in Iraq are always the same old story but I have never held the troops to be responsible for them and your post is clearly a lie and an attempt to smear me but the readers of this thread can see through your dishonesty. I bet not one single person will support your assertion that I blame the troops. You cannot find a single post where I blame the troops. You are a dishonest liar.
Yes, I am convinced the truth means little to you.
Read what’s been posted in this very thread to see what I mean by “anti-American rhetoric.” Sure, there are reasonable posts from you, Yojimbo,, Kimstu, and others, but then there’s the deranged posts of Sailor and Diogenes.
You’re absolutely right, and if you read my response to RevTim, you’ll note that I acknowledged that exact point. I was also at Jonathan Chance’s** that day and had a long talk with Bluesman, upon which I founded my certitude about the WMDs. It concerns me that I believed him so completely because he seemed so intensely convinced that he had info on their location. I can only conclude that he was absolurely sincere and that his info was passed down form hgiher channels to disinform their own intel operators. That’s terrifying to know how our government can deceive the very people it’s supposed to rely on for intelligence on threats to our security.
I’m angry at myself not merely because I was deceived, but that I allowed myself to be hoodwinked by placing such implicit trust in government officials and specious cites of imminent danger.
I’m not sure of what you want from me> I’ve already acknoweldge my error, I’ve admitted that I placed far too much trust in what I was told and faulted myself for not adopting a far aggressive approach in digging up the turht for myself.
What more do you want?
The bulk of antiwar arguments are not “anti-American”, but the loudest ones, the ones that crowd out other discussion, are. Sailor, for all his protestations that he does not blame the troops for our Iraq policy, has not hesitated to accuse them of committing the most hideous crimes. Diogenes also has substituted personal attacks on the pro-war posters for logical argument. Note also the OP’s tenor of bile and vilification. I don’t think I’m off-base in referring to them as the “lunatic fringe.”
As Kimstu pointed out (in her much gentler way), it’s the system which produced the gross errors of knowledge that must be fixed.
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