Arguing with True Believers is always a frustrating exercise. If they do change their minds, it’s usually the result of some epiphany rather than because someone argued with them. Then they become equally obnoxious True Believers for the other side.
If you want to argue, keep your cool, and keep you answers short and factual. Books like Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco and George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate might be good places to start. It seems like most people who have gone from pro-Bush to anti have done so over the Iraq war, and not so much over the war itself, but rather its conduct. Packer himself was initially in favor of the war.
About Bush the man, I’d stay away from charges that he’s evil or whatever. I agree with what Cervaise said, but it’s an opinion, not a fact you can point to. The only thing I’d say is that if he says that Bush is “his kind of guy” or “The kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with” you might point out that Bush is the scion of a family of East Coast elitists and spent his youth at Andover, Harvard, and Yale. (Honestly I’m not sure what’s wrong with that. They’re all good schools. But somehow attending them makes you less “of the people,” whatever than means.) Also ask him what he’s done for the common man. He’s paying just as much in taxes as he would under Democrats, unless he’s very wealthy.
Seriously though, Bush is out January 2009. I’m not sure this is something you want to spend a great deal of energy on. Certainly I wouldn’t risk a good relationship with your Dad over politics you can’t affect anyway. If you do wish to argue, again, keep your cool and let the steady drip of damning facts do their job.
Out of curiosity what does your Dad think of the current crop of Republican candidates?
Fair enough. But isn’t it the same as saying he didn’t *care * if there were WMD’s or not?
When you discuss WMD’s as if they were the central or even sole reason for the invasion.
None of whom, except for Tony the Lapdog’s, concluded that they added up to a “grave and gathering threat” to anyone but themselves.
Please. :rolleyes: I believe he deliberately started the war, actually believing the stories about our being greeted as liberators, with democracy breaking out all over the Middle East, and so forth, which would make the finding OR NOT of WMD’s *irrelevant * PR-wise. The issue would have been overtaken by events. And, in fact, it has - the debate now is what we can still accomplish by still staying there and what kind of clusterfuck Iraq is and will be, not why we went in there 8 Friedman Units ago.
And, if he’d made all that happen, if Iraq had blossomed into color and music just like Pepperland when the Beatles defeated the Blue Meanies, he’d have been right to make that judgment, too. Polk’s warmongering against Mexico and McKinley’s against Spain are in the books as major accomplishments, for instance, but only because they won.
How did ‘the whole world’ become ‘every other western country’ and then ‘other countries?’ That’s a bit of a shift in position, is it not?
I believe he deliberately started the war not giving a fuck. He believed that we would be praised as liberators, that Iraq would convert to democracy, that the rest of the Middle East would fall in line, and that Iraqi oil would pay for it all. He may not be Bond villain evil, but he is a world class stupid, ego maniacal, religious bigot.
No, what I’m saying is that “know” and “believe” have no practical difference in certain circumstances. If Bush believed it a certainty that they’d find WMDs, I don’t see the point in the endless parsing of the words “believed” and “knew.” It doesn’t matter. There is very little that ANYBODY can KNOW for certain. What is the @#$%ing difference between saying I “know” something and saying I “believe something is certain”?
He may have cherry picked facts or overstated his case, but I don’t believe he thought for a second that they weren’t going to come up with a boatload of WMDs, quantity enough for him to say, “See? I told you so.” Turns out he was way wrong.
I don’t think so. But you may be right, he may have had lots of other reasons why he wanted to invade and his belief that WMDs would be found was used as a convenient excuse.
I don’t think I said that.
I’ll concede that. Whether the WMDs constituted a gathering threat was certainly a matter of opinion. Presumably, the existence of WMDs was not (though clearly it turned out otherwise).
Yep, could well be true. WMDs could have been a convenient excuse. I do believe, however, that he did think his “excuse” would hold water–i.e., that they’d actually find some of the damn things.
In some cases, very little. In cases that threaten world peace, I submit that there is a huge @#$%ing difference. Absolutely nothing that he *knew *justified the invasion of Iraq, especially with such urgency. It is incumbent upon the man pulling the trigger that damn sure *knows *it is a bear he has in his sights, and not a dairy cow.
Absolutely not. And before I tried to prove it, I would try to muster up quite a bit more evidence; evidence which, I suspect however, would be unavailable to me. Don’t wanna get inside that head!
That’s fair, and this is where reasonable people can disagree. How much evidence is enough? My only point is that in such matters there is often never “knowing” anything, but that doesn’t mean a leader should never act. Again, that doesn’t mean there can’t be disagreement over when that point is reached.
IOW you can say their intelligence could had thought that there were WMDs, but it was clear to me that the intelligence they had then told them that there were not enough WMD to justify the war. Far from it, the latest data collected then was showing them how wrong the US and England were even on the level of the threat.
It almost did cost him, but in the end he was correct, he was not expecting a PR disaster. Knowing that the executive and other branches of government were under control, the only thing Bush needed to do was feed the fear and there would not be a PR disaster, only by now with the Democrats controlling congress is that we can see the PR disaster having a foundation that can not be ignored.
Looking over the posts, the anti Bush side can be boiled down to though I can’t prove it, Bush lied - Bush knew that the WMD’s didn’t exist.
This has major problems, including, but not limited to, Clinton during his term of office had to go along with Bush’s lie along with a lot of other people, some of them not in this country, some in Iraq itself. There is no way you can prove Bush lied, unlike Clinton, who admitted it.
You are entitled to your feelings, but that’s all you have on this one.
And I don’t care to argue that SH had WMD’s, it’s been done plenty of times.
Because it’s the MIT engineer in him that taught me to want to be right; that it actually mattered if you were right. He does have a problem admitting he’s wrong sometimes, but the principle of investigating to make sure you’re right is strong around these parts. I think it’s the religion and the science/engineering together.
The other small part of it is that I want to show that I’m being right, frankly. I can’t stand the idea of people thinking I’d support any Republican no matter what. Those people mentioned already really gross me out. It really damages my opinion of their opinion.
I’m not saying I’m going to get into a giant argument about it. I don’t see that happening anyway, but I’d like to make my position known in a way that doesn’t immediately fall flat: “W is a doody head who can’t pronounce nuclear.”
Again, I concede that the level of the threat posed is a matter of opinion. But this cite more than suggests that they believed WMDs existed. There is no need to disarm if no arms exist. Biological and chemical info is important only if they contribute to WMDs.
If Elvis doesn’t mind my horning in on his argument:
Pretty much everyone believed Saddam had at least some trivial quantity of bio and/or chem weapons.
Very few countries believed Saddam constituted a “grave and gathering threat” on account of whatever he might have had in that department.
As Elvis said, no attempt was made, in the invasion, to secure Iraq’s supposed WMD sites. This would suggest that either (a) Bush didn’t believe whatever WMDs Saddam had would constitute a threat if they should have fallen into terrorists’ hands, or (b) he conducted a war that was designed to produce the very consequence we were told it was to prevent - to make it possible for Saddam’s WMDs to fall into the hands of terrorists and be used against us.
If (3b) had been true, then everyone who planned this war - Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfie, Feith, etc. - should be impeached, convicted, charged with appropriate criminal offenses or war crimes, convicted, and imprisoned. So we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and go with 3a.
If (3a) was true, then the most likely line of reasoning is that Bush figured we’d find some trivial quantity of bio/chem weapons in Iraq once we beat Saddam, and it could be passed off to the American public with the help of an all-too-gullible press as the WMDs the war was about. Only Saddam screwed him up by destroying essentially everything. Who knew?
The Duelfer report showed 2 things: yes Clinton thought there WMD, but **he bombed the suspected places ** (and got accused of wagging the dog) and it was clear that Saddam took the lesson then, there was then little effort to continue even with the WMD programs, so much so that Colin Powell said circa 2001 that Saddam was no longer a threat.
Nope.
I guess your feelings would be affected by checking the information, we can not have that!
How important is the abortion issue to your dad? Some people will vote for Hitler von Dracula if he’s pro-life. And yes, there are people like that on the pro-choice side.
There was no need for war. And once again I’m not making the point that they did not thought WMD were there but that the intelligence of other countries was not in lockstep with the US.
The alleged level of threat was not there and the cite shows that time was not on Bush’s side (the latest evidence shows that continuing the inspections would had shown that Saddam had even next to nothing), the evidence was showing then that it was a lie to claim there was a reason to do a preemptive strike to deal with that “threat”.
My recollection is that the prevailing wisdom in intelligence circles was that there would be more than trivial quantities. The disarmament underway suggested otherwise, didn’t it?
This is an area where there is certainly room for opinion. Whether WMDs existed was an issue of fact. We see how it played out, but it was an issue of fact nonetheless.
