[sarcasm]You don’t understand: we used the exact right amount of troops.[/sarcasm]
Anyway, what really bothers me is the way it now looks like intelligence community was pushed into providing a particular spin on intel reports. The larger U.S. intelligence community is already up in arms about this: the one thing you are NOT supposed to do is politicize the intel process, and everyone’s starting to buzz about stories of how that’s exactly what happened.
well, I also read an article of his post 9/11, pre Iraq , where he maintained that we won the Korean war.
His credibility has been slipping in my eyes for some time.
One of the funniest and dopiest comments I’ve heard about a candidate. Ah, but not to worry, they accused him of only looking French.
Anyway - and I thought I said this on page 1 - what any of the Dem candidates must do is establish a platform that solves the problems against which they rail. The public will be much more likely to vote for one of them in a primary if they have beliefs, plans, and ideals instead of “I’m not George.”
If anything, it seems Rumsfeld made a point of reducing the number of U.S. troops to the bare minimum required for taking Baghdad and deposing Saddam - no MP units, no extra troops for securing WMD sites - which gives the lie to any notions that this war was about either the WMDs or the Iraqi people.
We know the Administration wanted Saddam out, but we can only guess as to what their reasons were. It doesn’t matter. I don’t know if it’s specifically illegal for government officials to use the U.S. military to fight their private wars, but it sure is immoral, and that seems to be what’s happened here.
If Bush gets a free pass because his lies were not under oath, isn’t there any way that he could be investigated for something completely different and then while under oath asked questions about intelligence reports on Iraq? But no, that would be a perversion of the legal system that nobody would stoop to.
see, once again - this is what bugs the shit out of me.
yes, the majority of folks in the US polled indicated support for Bush’ plan to invade Iraq, given what was said. Keep in mind, that number kept on rising with the never ending drone of Rumsfeld, Powell, Cheney, Bush drumming it in every chance they got “he’s got WoMD”, the US is in imminent danger of those WoMD, etc. Not ‘we think’ but we know, we merely can’t offer up the proof 'cause it’d put lives at risk or whatever.
and the masses bought it. to the extent that they were calling those who questioned it traitors.
and now, it appears at best, they weren’t sure. Which is still a lie, of massive proportions (remember they knew, not 'we suspect, we believe, but we fucking know)
which means that at great fucking expense (which continues to rise daily and won’t be going away anytime soon), at a point where our own economy was in bad shape, our own workers were being faced w/layoffs, our own cities crying for money, we sent our own people to kill and be killed.
I repeat.
where is the fucking outrage? where are the massive protests on the white house lawn? where’s the congressional uproar at being deceived?
It occurs to me, wring, that while this is now essentually common knowledge to dopers, it might not be that way to Joe American unless and until a major media source does an exposé or whathaveyou. And I think it’s pretty safe to say that they are probably going to wait until they have all their bases covered eight ways 'til Sunday before they even think about running this.
They know, but do they have the information to paint a picture so complete that Joe American believes them? And, more to the point, are they secure enough financially to risk having corporate sponsors abandon them in favor of a more “pro-American” news media station?
I think it’s absolute bullshit that it isn’t front-page news, mind you, but from a point of view of “if we bring this, the backlash against us may be worse than the backlash against the administration”, in addition to the fact that Joe American might not believe the story…I can understand why it isn’t receiving as much air-time, so to speak, as it bloody well should. I disagree with the notion fundamentally, but I understand it.
For example (damn me for thinking about this as the “thank you for posting!” screen comes up), there are sources listed in the article cited in the OP. Are those sources willing to state, for the record, what they heard/believed? I don’t think that, at this juncture, Powell is (of course I don’t have a cite, it’s just a not-unreasonable opinion IMO). And if you have nobody willing to stake their name and who they are to this story when it airs on CNN, for example, then you basically have a lot of “he said/she said”. That’s enough for most news stories(;)), but not one of this magnitude.
“gee, if you knew they were there, why didn’t you send in sufficient troops to safeguard the sites?” etc. Especially the nuclear sites. “gee, if you were really concerned that the materials would fall into ‘wrong hands’, hows come you didn’t guard the sites?” etc.
I find it remarkable that they knew where the WMDs were before the war, when they didn’t have a strong presence in the country, yet somehow don’t know where they are when they control the country.
Yes, it’s big country, but did it get bigger after Saddam was chased out? How did they manage to know where the WMDs were in this big country before? Wasn’t it pretty much as big then as it now?
Patience, wring. It’ll happen. As the body count rises (we’re averaging one dead soldier every fucking day, and I bet that shit is only going to increase), as the Bushies prove incapable of creating any reasonable facsimile of a stable nation, as the months draw on and on without any WMDs, as the pissed off intelligence guys slowly spill their guts to the media . . . it’ll happen.
You’re a piece of shit, George. And you’re a one-termer.
Very droll :D. Too bad Congress didn’t renew the Independent Counsel statute; we could have started with, say, a little nosing around Harken Energy. It wouldn’t have taken more than a few months to get us to an obstruction of justice or perjury allegation involving, if not Harken, some other utterly unrelated matter. If Bush fucks the American public by lying through his teeth to them, is that sex? Paging Mr. Starr!
The economy was very much on Gore’s side in 2000, and he still lost. So the economy is very important, but it isn’t everything.
As of now, the stock market’s been up continuously, pretty much, since the end of Feb. It’s lousy at forecasting recessions, but reasonably reliable at forecasting recoveries, so the chances are better than even that the second half of the year will see a recovery in the economy. Given that Bush will play his jingoism card for all it’s worth, all he’ll need is a stable economy to pull it out: remember, his constituency, the upper half of the middle class, is sitting very contentedly atop a very healthy real estate market where everyone has refinanced and lowered their monthly payments at least once, and feels rich because the theoretical value of their homes is still rising.
People with full stomachs don’t rebel, especially over an abstraction like this. If the economy really goes into the tank between now and the election, this will become a real issue. Otherwise, forget it. Rove knows this, you can bank on that.
The real kick in the nuts for them is going to be if the Bushies try to blame the lack of WMDs on poor intelligence. It sounds like the CIA and the rest of the intel guys were trying to tell the WH all along not to go with that stuff as confirmed and the WH did it any way. I get the impression that the intel guys would say something like, “we’ve got satellite images of this cave south of Kamel Zass, and we think think there might be something in it but we haven’t confirmed that yet, so don’t say anything.”
And the next day Rummy was giving a press conference claiming that “We know that Iraq is stockpiling thousands of gallons of Zyklon-B in caves”
Now are Rummy and the WH going to have the unmitigated sack to say that the intel guys gave them bad information? If they do they might find themselves the subject of some even more embarrasing “leaks” from pissed of CIA guys.
I vividly remember looking at my wife in utter frustration when he lost Tennessee. Couldn’t even carry his home state.
Yes, Florida was a fiasco, but so was Gore’s campaign. You’re supposed to do a wee bit better than a dead heat when you’re riding the crest of the longest period of prosperity ever.