Do you always kick people when they are down?? Naw, I’m just kidding Squink…when I’m wrong I’m wrong.
Ya, it sheds a different light alright on that speech, I’ll definitely grant you that. Maybe Bush did think that exile was a viable option, same as he thought there were WMD…who knows. Seems fairly clear to me now though that it wasn’t. Just a further strike against the administration for me, not that it matters really…I wasn’t voting for Bush anyway. Still, its disappointing that THIS option wasn’t more fully explored. And why didn’t any of the European powers offer to bring him in? Didn’t the Shah of Iran go to France or Spain?? Why not SH then?
XT: The Shah was not a “completely evil dictator”, like S.H., so he probably had lots of exile options. He first went to Morroco, then the US for medical treatment and eventually died, IIRC, in Egypt in 1980. (Khomeni spent his exile in France.)
It doesn’t surprise me that there was no public announcement of countries offering S.H. exile. There would be good reasons for keeping this confidential as long as possible. S.H. wasn’t expecting a lot of bon voyage cards from the Iraqis. He’d want to secret himself away as best he could. With the money he had at his disposal, I’d have a hard time believing he couldbn’t buy himself into some Arab country or other.
Maybe thats true John. I certainly could find no official announcements from any country inviting him in…so that puts it in the realm of pure speculation as to whether or not he had a real offer (that he could trust) from a soveriegn nation. Thats why I conceeded the point…I can prove exactly zip with what I was looking at today. I conceed that there certainly COULD have been countries telling him secretely that he would be welcome there, and he certainly had the money. But if they were unwilling to make official type announcements, I’m not sure how far SH could have trusted them. He wasn’t exactly well loved, and I’m sure he had to be thinking of security too.
How disliked was the Shah though after he was deposed in Iran? I always thought he was fairly unpopular in the ME because of his westernized policies. Both were secular rulers weren’t they? Was the Shah less unpopular in the region than SH was? I thought he was fairly popular with the masses in the ME…especially the militant ones, though I realize that he was also UNPOPULAR with the religious ones for being a secular ruler. Seems a fairly tangled web over there.
This statement only “suggests a certain lack of” memory on your own part. Don’t your remember the last Bush’s ultimatum before the invasion? “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours”, he said, loud and clear. The twists and misinterpretations were made by others.
It was always about taking Saddam (and his party) out of power, the rest was smoke and mirrors. WMD were just a pre-text. And before somebody says something like “a lie is a lie”, I’ll ask, just how exactly was WMD charge a lie?
The fact is everybody believed that Saddam had WMD. Clinton and Gore said that long time ago. Chirac said that long time ago. Hans Blix was looking for them for two years. Kofi Annan personally asked Blix to look for them. Did all these people lied? If they all did, then Bush can’t be singled out. If they didn’t, then Bush didn’t either. To prove that Bush lied, it has to be demonstrated that he knew for sure that WMDs were not there. Nobody yet was able to prove that.
Bush was pushing his own policy, and using WMD charge as one of his strongest weapons. But he didn’t lie.
I was referring to the halfhearted efforts to find a place of exile for him, not the later peremptory demand that he simply leave without a destination plausibly available to him. I do recall the ultimatum, as you’d know from my having posted it above. But yes, the bottom line for Bush was always about removing Saddam, and the rest was just marketing, as Rove and Wolfowitz have essentially admitted already.
Be more careful about who said and believed what, pal. “Everybody” is a bit strong, and the vindicated Scott Ritter for one would argue that he’s somebody. Annan and Blix wanted to find out the facts, sure, as did most of the world, but that does not mean they had prejudged the results of the inspections as you suggest. Other countries’ intelligence may have been, to a large degree, simply predigested US intelligence that had been passed on to them, not independently gathered and considered.
To prove that Bush lied, one only has to show that he did not in fact know what he said he knew. He said the WMD’s were there, in a quantity and condition that made them an imminent threat to US security. He couldn’t have known that because it wasn’t true. In fact, he brushed aside all suggestions that it might not be true, and even any suggestion that he wait for the inspectors to find out. That’s a level of disregard, and even contempt, for fact that is indistinguishable from lying. If you’d like to insist on the point, you may, but it doesn’t affect the result, does it?
Not “everybody” believed that Saddam had WMD. Saddam didn’t believe it. As to whether or not Clinton, Gore, Annan, and Chirac believed it or didn’t believe it is irrelevent. They weren’t in a position to go to war over the issue. Since Clinton is no longer occupying the Oval Office, I am perfectly content if he believes that Invisible Pink Unicorns armed with 1920’s Style Death Rays are flying over the horizon to confiscate all our guns.
No, it is not necessary to prove that Bush “knew for sure”. It is only necessary to point out that he said he was sure when, clearly, he could not have been.
About 50 years ago, we established a point of international law: that aggressive war was a crime against humanity. We tried the men responsible, and hanged several of them to underline our point.
Explain to me, if you can, how a “pre-emptive” war to eliminate a threat that does not exist can be legitimate, when an agressive war is not? Could Hitler have justified his invasion of Poland by saying “Well, gee, I thought they were a threat! My bad, sorry about that, lets forget the whole thing.”
In retrospect, Saddam played this the best he could. He really was doing everything to deprive the West of any reasons to go to war. Extra proof that what the West really wanted was Saddam (and his party) out of Iraq.
Both Clinton & Gore spoke about Saddam’s WMD threat while in office and therefore capable of anything. If Annan and/or Blix would come out and say that they are convinced that all WMD are destroyed, the whole story might have been very different.
Yes, “it is not necessary to prove that Bush “knew for sure”” about absence of WMD in Iraq, if you want to call him a “liar”, TOO. For example, when some scientist stakes his reputation advancing a certain theory, and later is proven to be wrong, nobody calls him a liar, but only a bungler or somesuch. If all the scientist in the world believe the same wrong thing at the time, nobody calls him anything, because his ignorance is shared by everybody else. Liar is one who knows that what he is saying is not true, but says that nevertheless. To call Bush a liar on account of WMD in Iraq requires a proof that he knew about total destruction of those WMDs before the invasion. Everybody in the whole world thought that Iraq had WMDs at that time. Even you thought so.
I issue a formal challenge: provide me with a verifiable link to any of your pre-invasion posts, in which you state that Iraq absolutely doesn’t possess any WMD and Bush knows it for sure, and I will accept you as my intellectual superior, will study all your posts diligently and will never contradict you again. Same challenge is extended to anyone willing and able to take me up on it.
Sorry to disappoint you, but Nurenberg was a farce. Only agressive losers are tried and hanged. That’s how it always was and will remain.
I have nothing to explain, because I never said that Iraqi invasion was legitimate, first of all because I think the whole concept of international law is another farce.
He could and he did and French didn’t buy it and English sided with French and… eventually he lost.
But they did not use the claim that they knew these WMD were there in order to make demands that were impossible for the Iraqis to meet and then to invade when these demands were not met.
Well, Annan and Blix do have this little problem which is that they have something called a conscience which seems to prevent them from saying that they know something for sure when they don’t. This does not seem to be an affliction shared by our President. Both Annan and Blix felt that they needed more time and that the increasing amount of cooperation…some of it even “pro-active” (I think that is the word Blix used)…that they were receiving from the Iraqis justified giving more time.
Would you be happier if we said that Bush was either a liar or was delusional in believing that he knew things that he did not in fact know…Knowing them to the point of taking action that really cannot be justified (at least in the same way) if what he “knew” was false? Either way, he is unfit for the office that he holds.
And, by the way, I don’t think your analogy to a scientist holds very well. A scientist will certainly sometimes believe things that are not correct but a good one will at least acknowledge the things he or she is not certain about. In fact, that is a common complaint about scientists, i.e., that they are always issuing caveats and such. Also, it becomes more incumbent on someone to be careful about what he knows and doesn’t know when he is going to exit the academic realm and take decisive action based on this “knowledge” that will affect the lives of millions of people. I think when someone is in charge of the greatest military machine in the history of mankind, it is very important that they be able to distinguish between what they know and what they think or claim they know.
I’m afraid You are still missing the point, first stated here by xtisme and agreed to by few others, that it was “take out Saddam” operation from the get-go. Bush was neither a “liar” or “delusional”, he was pursuing his policy by all means available, and he was using WMD charge, among others, because it seemed to be the most credible and encountered the least opposition. He was using WMD charge because he believed it to be true, otherwise he would use something else. He was doing all that for very serious reasons, which right now we can only guess (I made few guesses above).
I’m not insisting on any points, but simply trying to figure out what really happened. I don’t find the slogan “Bush lied, people died” very illuminating and satisfying, so I continue to look all around. To go on a limb, I suspect that US army was used again, just like in Kosovo, only much worse, to clean up some big international mess. There might be something behind this whole affair that Righties and Lefties both get completely in reverse. Just call me a conspiracy freak.
Well, we have a rather different conception of veracity. Because if Bush believed the WMD charge but was only using that as a pretext then that must mean he didn’t really believe that Saddam’s having these weapons was any sort of dire threat to us. Yet, he claimed such a threat existed (and, in fact, probably had to make such a claim in order to at least have any amount of cover that he was not openly flouting international law). Furthermore, he was lying about his motives for going to war. And, worse yet, if you are going to use something as a pretext to go to war, it looks a little better if at least that pretext turns out to be true…even if it isn’t the real reason (or a sufficient reason, as many of us argued) to go to war.
Please, if you can find a way to explain this to me that makes Bush not look so bad then please do so. But, I don’t think you’ve succeeded thus far.
No, the principle was not that aggressive war is a crime against humanity; the principle established was that genocide is a crime against humanity. You have heard of the Holocaust, haven’t you? If the US had a policy of executing people that start aggressive wars, then the whole thread never would have come about, since SH would have died a dozen years ago. And then of course there’s the matter of Godwin’s Law.
BTW, can anyone explain just how having Saddam promise to allow inspectors would be a concession? After one has broken one’s promise, how is promising that this time, one really means it, worth anything? We already had one promise to allow inspectors; what good would a second one do?
Are you talking about Saddam throwing the inpectors out? Both Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said this, but they were lying. Surprise, surprise.
Not true. If you trace back the official pronouncement and declarations, beginning with the last ultimatum, they all are very consistent, quite logical and well measured: that’s the main reason I think the whole thing was orchestrated. Everything was made with utmost regard to possible future international precedents. There was a lot of diversion and obfuscation in between at the time, beginning with the “great UN fall-out”, that drove public into frenzy, so when each new move was made, the public immediately misinterpreted it along the lines of Right vs. Left, US vs. “old Europe”, West vs. East, or some other “monumental” struggle and kept happily at each other throats.
He thought he had a sure winning issue with WMD, but Saddam has done him one better on it. Perhaps the miscalculation was made based on Western stereotype that Arabs are compulsive “bazaar men” and will never come completely clean but always hold something back for future advantage.
I am not trying to “find a way to explain … that makes Bush not look so bad”, I am trying to make sense of what happened. I think that in 5 to 10 years we will have comprehensive and disinterested explanations and a lot of people will be very surprised, especially about the role “old Europe”. I suspect that if truth were known right now, great many right-wingers would be a lot less supportive and great many left-wingers a lot less antagonistic toward the whole affair; in short, great many people would be lukewarm and more rational. That’s what politicians of all stripes don’t want: lukewarm and rational electorate. They want us feel Love, feel Hate, screaming insults at each other.
I say, is this your gauntlet? You seem to have dropped it…
As charming as your proposal may be, I must decline. I have never suggested that I am possessed of clairovoyance. As a matter of fact, I was more or less of the mind that it was likely that Saddam had something, but did not believe it justified war.
The Bushiviks maintained publicly and emphaticly that they knew that Saddam was building Da Bomb. Not suspected, not pretty likely, they knew. A lie. Period.
As to whether or not I am your intellectual superior…well, what can one say. I know what a lie is, you apparently do not. Q.E.D.