Of course, the embargo in the cuban missile crisis worked and the missiles were pulled. If we’d simply invaded Cuba during the crisis…
As for the OP, I know great debates isn’t much fun without inflammatory statements, but must we say things we can’t prove.
Xtisme said it best. Bush had loads of reports stating various things about Iraq. He picked the intel that suited his ideas best and went to war on a really shaky case. Did he know that the claims were bullsh*t? That hasn’t been proven.
Did he put American lives at risk on info he knew was far from rock solid? Yep. Did he set back the war on terror by removing soldiers from said war and creating a terrorist breeding ground. Oh yeah. Does he deserve to have his monkey butt booted out of office for this? Yes.
Has it been conclusively proven that he knew the claims were outright falsehoods and went to war anyways? Not to my standards.
Hate Bush for being an idiot. Hate him for being tremendously incompetent. Just don’t try to make him into some kind of evil warmonger. :rolleyes:
Just pointing my opinion. Bush did not know that his intel was bs. It was suspect due to the conflicting claims and he should’ve waited to find out for sure, but he didn’t know that it was false.
That gives me an opportunity to express once again my own opinion, namely that Bush is a tyrant for reviewing any of the options and weighing anything at all besides whether Saddam was responsible for 9/11. Screw UN resolutions. Screw whether Iraq had WMDs. He wasn’t the only dictator who did, and the US has plenty. An awful lot of time, energy, expense, and lives have been wasted for an unethical invasion. He should have been doing his duty to secure our rights; instead, he has done his best to abridge and trample them. Good riddance to him, and welcome to our next Liar in Chief. […sigh…]
Harborwolf, it’s worse than that. If Bush didn’t know it was BS, it was because he actively avoided considering that it might possibly *be * BS, and denigrated the motives of anyone who tried to tell him. That’s hardly an honest mistake.
I’m not trying to excuse the guy anything. I just think that the assumption that he went to war knowing the info was false and, for all intents and purposes, murdering US troops is an extraordinarily harsh one and not yet supported by any information.
I hate Bush as much as anyone, but he’s not that bad.
My point was that not *caring * about the facts is worse than simply not knowing them, or being excusably mistaken. It may be a harsh judgment on him, but it’s becoming increasingly unavoidable and widespread. And yes, the information we do know, the accounts we’ve been given by an increasing number of people who were there, the factual record we do have outside of that, do support it as the likeliest conclusion.
Unlike you and many others, though, I don’t hate the man. I hate what he’s done, but I *pity * him. The severest scorn goes to those who insist on believing and following him anyway, even knowing what they do now.
"Karl? Karl, its George. Listen, I just saw something on the SDMB, make a great campaign slogan…what?..no, they haven’t banned him yet…No, december is still gone…yeah, unfair, I know, but they’re all…yeah, I know…anyway, saw something make a great campaign theme! Y’ready? “George W. Bush! Not all that bad!”
So, whaddaya think, Karl? What, did I say something funny? Karl, you drunk again?.."
Knowing the info was false is not what it is about. Nobody has said that is the problem. The problem is knowing the info was not certain.
Does this seem like a minor difference? It isn’t. Because imagine if he had said:
“The info is not certain”
then he would have had to continue with the UNMOVIC inspections There would not have been a war when the inspections found there were no weapons. No troops would have died.
Instead he said
“The info is certain”
All the time knowing, as an absolute fact, without the slightest shade of doubt, that the info was instead fragmentary and ambiguous. That is the lie that concerns us. In this deliberately deceitful way he got his war.
Let me put it more clearly - JFK did not blockade Cuba because he thought there were missiles - he did it because he knew there were missiles. I remember listening to the radio about this - and how he had canceled a trip because of a “cold” just before it.
Okay, Voyager. I accept your revision. You know better than anyone else what you were thinking. Now, suppose you had originally written what you just wrote above, “JFK did not blockade Cuba because he thought there were missiles - he did it because he knew there were missiles.”. And suppose that in quoting you, I wrote, “JFK did not blockade Cuba.” Finally, suppose you were an intelligence source on the Cuban missile crisis whom I was (mis)quoting to make point. I would be doing the same thing that the OP’s article did with the CIA report. The dependant clause and follow-up sentence that the article’s quote left out makes it plain that the intelligence believed that Saddam was gearing back up and would have his WMDs ready in a short time. Don’t you agree that — no matter what side of the Bush-was-lying issue you come down on — that sort of tactic is itself a lie, and reasonable people will call it out?
He might have found out if he’d pick up a damn newspaper and read some of the articles about the pre-war skepticism that was flying about. But we’re talking about a guy who doesn’t believe in newspapers, either. :rolleyes:
As I’ve said, I oppose the war on ethical grounds. That is, I oppose it no matter how carefully he might have read the newspaper. For me, it isn’t a matter of intelligence confirming WMDs. So, I’m not defending the invasion, but I am damn sure attacking all this supposing. I mean, you can suppose any which way. You know how it goes. You post something, and someone says, “Hey, you’re not listening to me!” And you rightly respond, “Hey, jackass, just because I came to a different conclusion doesn’t mean I’m not listening to you. Listening to you != agreeing with you.” Right. So, let’s just say that Bush came to the same conclusion you’ve come to — what you would call “thinking it through”. So, since we’re all just supposing, suppose Bush had decided that Clinton overreacted in December of '98, and that Iraq is no threat. Now, suppose Iraq did develop its WMDs and used them to attack, say, Israel, and in so doing killing some Americans. Can you convince me that you would not be pointing out things like Clinton’s warning, the CIA report, and other sources of information and claiming that Bush ignored them? That Americans died needlessly because Bush wouldn’t get off his ass and do something? Because, I mean, you’re not arguing any particular point of ethics. You’re just arguing that Bush should have come to your conclusion.
Nonsense. If I may speak in the collective, we are arguing that no conclusion was possible, given the evidence at hand. That being the case, the only reasonable and rational course of action was to permit the inspections to proceed.
To deny the contradictory evidence without any more foundation in fact than a stubborn reliance on intel already known to be questionable (i.e., Chalabi and the Gang That Couldn’t Spy Straight) was culpable. To insist on a military intervention, with all the ghastly consequences that might, and did, entrail, was culpable. To slander and defame such as Mr. Blix, on the presumption that he was failing to find what was clearly present, was culpable. To slander and defame one’s allies for holding positions and asserting positions that were nothing more than reasonable and prudent, was culpable.
Mr. Bush might be due a reasonable doubt for his defense of being misinformed under circumstances less dire, if thousands of lives were not in the balance. The position of President of the USA is not such a position, if is a position of awesome power, wherein the consequences of failure are horrific. If Mr. Bush was not prepared to assume such a position, and to shoulder the burdens than are inherent to such a position, he should have remained Governor of Texas, where his poor judgement would have less consequence. He did not.
He is demonstrably unfit for the office he was installed into. It is unfortunate that he cannot be practicably removed from that office before January of next year.
First of all, the blame for your interpretation of my quote rests solely on me - it is perfectly reasonable given that I had an implied phrase there.
But I still do not agree with you. The full sentence says that they have no direct evidence, but given Saddam’s history and his all-around nastiness it is reasonable to conclude that he was working on them. That’s a fair statement, warning that it is not a good idea to stop worrying about WMDs because no evidence of them exists yet. The appropriate action, as the world community took, was to look for the evidence through weapons inspections, helped, I freely admit, by US saber-rattling.
The wrong thing to do is to translate that sentence into one saying we know that he has WMDs. We did not know any such thing. Your average Joe, if asked to construct a CIA summary statement that he thinks would inspire Bush’s words, would probably assume that the CIA statement shows direct evidence of WMDs.
The reason I still call it a lie, is this. There were two possible avenue of debate on the war in early 2003. The first one would say that we know Saddam is bad (undisputed) and we believe he has WMDs, or even that he could be developing WMDs. An honest debate would involve asking if there was an immediate threat (no) and what are the criteria for overthrowing a tyrant. That would be a useful debate, which we still should have.
The other, the one Bush took, was to distort the information to make people believe Saddam had weapons, and was an immediate threat. This shut down the first avenue - when someone is pointing a gun at you, it’s not a good time to worry about gun control laws - and set up the environment in which we forgot about Osama.
If Bush had chosen the first path, and we still chose war, I’d disagree but commit. The second argument is indeed predicated on a lie - that the knowledge of WMDs was certain.
I agree in spirit, but what I don’t understand is why others escape your net. Unlike Rjung, you indeed are making an ethical objection, and I applaud that. But interestingly, you use the term “undisputed”. Consider what Senator Hillary Clinton said on October 10, 2002:
“It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capability to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East which, as we know all too well, affects American security. This much is undisputed.” (Emphasis mine.)
Why not give her, and in general all members of Congress charged with oversight and funding of executive agencies, the same stern bashing that you give Bush? I suspect that certain people, if Bush were a Democrat, would be screaming at the Senate Intelligence Committee for failing to ensure the integrity of the agencies that were advising both him and them. But that would not include you, right?
You may “suspect” whatever you bloody well please, Lib. It is entirely possible than only such shining lights as you approve are free from the taint of hypocrisy. This qualifies as evidence of your own faultless perspicacity. And nothing else.
Actually, Luc, your taking my remark personally surprises me, since I seldom see the sort of inconsistencies from you that I outlined. But maybe you’re telling me that I should pay more attention.