Dems on WMD

Great Debates
1

Here is a link to a lengthy list of very forceful and seemingly authoritative statements that Democrat politicians made leading up to the the war:

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=9027

They argue now that they were made out of ignorance and even worse, were made knowing only the information that the administration wanted to give them.

My question is should they have any credibility now? If not, would you agree that they are getting more credibility now than they deserve by some supposedly fair or balanced folks in the media.

Sen. Rockefeller said this weekend that he knew within 2 days of 9/11 that Bush had already made up his mind to invade Iraq and told certain foreign leaders(Cites/quotes available on request but I’d like to think that most here have already seen that reported. If not I wonder why?)

Anyway, putting the issue of “leaking” aside, shouldn’t he have been extremely skeptical of the information given him? And don’t you think he would have conveyed this to his fellow Dem congress people?

2

I’m trying really hard to figure out what you’re asking. It seems that you want to make the case that even if the Dems were not given full information in the lead up to the Iraq invasion (up to March 2003; none of the quotes in the linked article are later than early October, 2002), their ignorance of facts not in evidence somehow makes their current criticisms hypocritical, thus exhibiting suspect motivations. Is that right?

If you don’t mind, I’d like a cite (just a link to a transcript, no need to go overboard) of Senator Rockefeller’s statement. You see, I get most of my current events news from the Dope (which I find much more thorough and better presented than other news sources), so I’ve missed it.

At any rate, I think your second to last question can be rephrased, less charitably, as: “Shouldn’t Senator Rockefeller have expected the Bush administration to lie to him?” Would that be accurate, albeit spun a different way? If the answer is “no”, doesn’t that make the last question kind of silly?

3

Here’s a link to the transcript of Rockefeller’s interview.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,175433,00.html

I asked a number of questions relative to:

a)Democrat politicians
b) their claims of ignorance or that they are victims of knowing deception re WMD and
c)the credibility they get when they are quoted or shown on media outlets claiming such.

Take your pick but if you get your news from the SDMB then you’re probably not in position to assess how the media as a whole has presented their (Dem politicians) claims. No offense intended to anyone and I’m not suggesting that I come here without bias either.

Chuck
That’s my agenda. What’s yours?

4

Of course, the fact that one Republican publication has tried to spin this out one more time should be nothing new.

We have addressed the issues behind these questions recently, particularly in threads such as My disgust with politics, and Which leading Democrats also thought Saddam had WMD programs?.

The point is that up until the fall of 2002, Hussein ran a successful bluff that he was secretly hiding WoMD. At that time, Bush successfully got the Congress to authorize him to use force, if necessary, to ensure that Iraq did not have or use such weapons. Bush also went to the UN to seek support for an invasion, if necessary. The UN did not go along with the invasion idea, but did support re-introducing the weapons inspectors whom Hussein allowed back into the country with fewer restrictions than he had imposed in the 1990s. From the point where the inspectors went back in (and the Bush administration began overstating the “evidence” and lying about connections with al Qaida), until the invasion, the evidence grew that Hussein’s earlier possession of WoMD was no longer true.

Pointing to things that were widely believed prior to the autumn of 2002 and ignoring the facts as they emerged in the late autumn and winter of 2002-2003 is simply a dishonest manipulation of the facts.

Now, I expect the Spectator to do this–spinning the information for partisan purposes is their job–but I would hope that people who can actually read the sources and look at the dates can recognize the dishonesty in the remarks by the president and that magazine.

5

The cite does not appear to support the claim that ‘Rockefeller knew within 2 days.’ In fact Rockefeller says something quite different.

It accordingly appears that the correct timeline is:

  1. President is briefed. (2001):

  2. Rockefeller and SIC briefed on the NIE by the administration. (2001-2002):

  3. Rockefeller travels to MENA and opines to various govt’s there that President Bush has made up his mind. (Oct 2002):

  4. Rockefeller opines during the Fox interview that the President had probably made up his mind within 2 days of 9 Sept 2001, but gives no indication of when he, Rockefeller, formed this opinion. (Nov 2005)

So the OP arises from a simple error of reading. The timeline has been misread such that (1) and (4) appear to occur at the same time.

6

Those are their word with dates. The spin is actually minimal. Is *ad hominem * the correct phrase?

So that answers it? Seriously, must I read pages of posts and then add to it if they happen to still be on topic? For that matter, maybe I did.

That’s your point … I was suggesting that the Dem politicians are being disingenuous. Maybe that goes without saying. So then maybe we’ve pinpointed the debate: Is the media (no adjectives used) giving more credibility to the Dem protestations than it should?

Maybe you’d be willing to list out all of the partisan media sources on either side for us so we can all agree not to use them?

Chuck
That’s my agenda. What’s yours?

7

Thanks for the link. And yes, I think it’s fair to say that I’m not in a good position to assess how the media, as a whole, is doing. But then, your questions, as originally presented, only touch on the media tangentially; the main focus seems to me to be the credibility of the Dems. As far as my own biases, I delight in seeing the Bush administration being taken to task, which should have been done much earlier and much more forcefully. At the same time, even though I feel that the Bush admin is worse than the Dems, I’m not willing to disregard Dem failings. In other words, I attempt to look at things honestly, hence my questions about the OP. I believe I was extremely fair, pointing out that I was purposely casting a certain light when I did so and asking, honestly, what you were trying to get at.

At any rate, I quoted all five questions you posed, one of which is rhetorical and regards the necessity for a citation. For the last two, I rephrased one which, given a “no” response, renders the other meaningless. When phrased as “Should Senator Rockefeller have expected Bush to lie to him?” (which again, is purposely spun, but an accurate rephrasing, I think), I think the answer is obviously “no”. YMMV.

As to the other two questions, a lot happened between October 2002 and March 2003. Without addressing that time period, I can’t see the Spectator piece as anything but slanted and hence, not damaging to the issue of Dem credibility about this.

It’s still not really clear to me what exactly you’re asking; when I ask “Do I have that right?”, I really mean “Do I have that right?”. On preview, it seems that others understood the OP the way I did and have already addressed it.

8

How is it that Republicans and their apologists can lie so expertly and transparently, and yet no feel a twinge of… I dunno: the ridiculous? Suddenly the entire argument about going to war post 2002 seems to have vanished into the smoke. On these boards in particular, we had tons of heated arguments about it. All over the place, people viciously attacked the character of Democrats and people like Hans Blix, who raised serious doubts about the existence of WMD, all post 2002, before going to war. Republican pundits got lots and lots of anti-Democrat mileage out of it.

But now, suddenly, none of that ever happened. Instead, Democrats were with the President on WMD, and have only recently changed their story.

The whole thing would be laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic.

9

Further thoughts, now that the gravamen of the OP has been disposed of. One must admire the discipline of the GOP for the co-ordinated way in which there has been a push on several fronts, each deploying the same artillery. To wit, the everyone believed it too approach. I do.

How widely has this push been co-ordinated exactly? Certainly it is evident in the tame media. Does it extend to message boards? On this and others I frequent a number of members quite new to posting have more or less simultaneously launched the very same propositions.

Lastly, one should judge to OP harshly for misreading Sen Rockefeller’s position. Recall that misrepresenting the position of the good Senator and his colleagues is the raison d’etre of FoxNews.

10

According to the transcript he said his trip was in January of 2002 so apparently he had formed his opinion well before 10/10/02 when he gave his “imminent” speech. Plenty of time for the chairman to get all of the pertinent info and convey it to his colleagues!

11

Except that the info made available to Rockefeller was only that which supported the President’s determination to invade. The pertinent info was withheld and only became available well after the invasion.

To wit: that the President has made up his mind not only independently of the Security Intelligence but as it turned out in contradiction to it.

12

In sum:

Yes, I think it is in this case, but only if one thinks that Republicans in general (in this case) are not coordinating thier argument.

Yes and no, respectively. You don’t have to read the posts, but doing so would provide answers.

No, no evidence of such has been presented.

No, they’ll be addressed as they come up.

13

Can someone educate us all on exactly what information Senator Rockefeller, as the ranking member not the “chairman” as I stated incorrectly, had at his disposal on 10/10/02? My understanding is that he had information prepared for him by intelligence agencies that was not easily filtered by Bush or anyone close to him.

Gotta go do some work (not slinking away).

14

This is what Rockefeller was about in January 2002:

15

The Specatator article listed most of the dates, but not all of them. Note that the dates they bothered to provide supported my point. Their spin is the choice to leave out the dates when Blix and his teams began reporting that they were not finding any evidence of WoMDs (subsequent to the collected quotations) and the egregious falsehoods regarding yellow cake, centrifuge cylinders, and al Qaida connections, all of which were throroughly debunked subsequent to the collected quotations.

If you are not willing to read a couple of pages that have already been posted, with citations, regarding the issue, then I am not sure that you are actually seeking an answer so much as trying to provide your own spin, free of the restrictions of facts.

I am sure that there is disingenuousness among the Democrats just as there is among the Republicans. Is that your only point? In this case, the Democrat spin has more factual support than the outright lies of the recent presidential speech.

As to the partisanship of the media: I did not say that the Specatator lied; I noted that the article was intended to spin the discussion (by avoiding the date issue and sequence of events that I have already pointed out). This does not condemn the Spectator as a disseminator of falsehoods, it exonerates them as simply doing their job–noting, of course, that once we recognize what they are doing, we can seek out the facts and the chronology and move forward without their spin.

16

Ain’t it a grand damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t? In 2002, the Dems were split on whether to give Bush the authority to go to war, and on the wisdom of invading Iraq.

Back then, the Rethugs could publicly savage the ones that were agin it, and now they’re turning around and dumping on the ones who were for it.

Kinda like the inspections, come to think of it: if WMDs were found, we had to go to war because Saddam would surely have more of them. And if they weren’t, then he was disingeniously hiding them from us, so we’d have to go to war to flush them out.

Yeah, it would all be pathetic, if it hadn’t cost 2000 American lives, and who knows how many tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. Maybe ‘atrocity’ is a better word.

17

Actually, it is much more important than simply that they weren’t finding WMDs, since absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, although the inspections this time were unrestricted and intrusive enough that it was hard to imagine where they could be hidden. Still, for the true believers, this just meant Saddam might be hiding them real well. However, the important thing was that the inspections were showing that the evidence that we thought we had of Saddam’s WMDs was simply wrong, i.e., that our “intelligence” was “garbage”.

But, hey, What the …, let’s for the sake of your argument (and against all evidence) say that pretty much everybody in March 2003 thought that Saddam had WMD and that they posed a great threat to us in particular because he might give them to terrorists (despite the CIA’s assessment that this was very unlikely). Now, explain to us in what way then was the Bush Administration not mind-numbingly negligent and incompetent in planning the invasion in such a way that the potential WMD were left open to be looted so that the WMDs, had they existed, would most likely have ended up in the hands of terrorists.

It is impossible to overstress this point. Among other things, those of us questioning the necessity of the war on this Board back in early 2003 had to endure a couple of posters who were in the military and who were telling us if we only knew what they knew (but couldn’t tell us) we wouldn’t be saying what we were saying. Do you know how hard it is to argue against people claiming to have privileged information?

As for the Democrats as a whole, I do think that too many of them caved and voted for the resolution in October 2002. However, one has to recognize the context in which that resolution was pushed. It was argued that the resolution was necessary in order to force Saddam to open up his country to inspections so that we could determine what he had. So, to vote against the resolution was billed not only as a vote not to go to war against Iraq but a vote not to give the President the muscle to force Saddam to submit to inspections of what he did have. In other words, a vote against the resolution was much akin to saying, “I am so confident that Saddam does not pose a threat to us that I don’t even think we have to use this threat of force to get him to let the inspectors back in.” (Or, alternatively…and more to my own thinking…“Although I do not trust Saddam, I do think he is largely contained and I don’t trust Bush either.”) Even so, it is worth noting that while a majority of the Democrats in the Senate supported the resolution, 5 of the 9 Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee voted against it and a majority of the Democrats in the House voted against it.

In other words, there is still a world of difference between Bush’s position and the position of the Democrats that he is now disingenuously claiming were seeing things much the same way as he was.

It seems rather doubtful that you would have started this OP if you had read those other threads. And, yes, it is generally not considered good form to make everyone repeat their arguments all over again just because you can’t be bothered to read what they wrote before. (I’ll admit that it is hard to search and find relevant threads sometimes so we are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt in starting this thread, but now that you have been clearly directed to those other threads, there is no excuse for you not to read them.)

18

The list is divided into quotes ca. 1998, and quotes ca. 2002.

Let’s talk about the 1998 quotes.

  1. There’s a big difference between a politician being sure enough of something to make a speech about it, or even bomb a few prospective WMD sites over it, and being sure enough of something to go to war over it.

  2. At the end of 1998, the Clinton Administration did in fact bomb a number of prospective WMD sites - a bombing ridiculed by Republicans at the time, btw. (Apparently they thought this was a mere distraction from more substantive matters. :rolleyes:) This apparently more or less ended Saddam’s WMD program.

  3. Of course, we had no way of conclusively knowing that it had done so. Hence Clinton Administration officials in 1999, Bush Administration officials in 2002, and Democratic Congresspersons in 2002 couldn’t rely on the hoped-for success of the 1998 bombing. But see Point #1.

IMHO, that the Spectator overlooks Point #1 entirely tells me what I need to know about their intellectual honesty.

19

Didn’t the Washington Post report just a few days ago that only about six Senators were given clearance to view more than the basics? This was classified information they were not allowed to share. I can’t find a link at the moment.

“The President lied to you before. How can we trust you now?” I don’t understand why this is supposed to hurt their credibility.

Why

I guess he thought the government really had a case, but yes, he should’ve been more skeptical. They all should’ve.

20

Did anyone see this political cartoon a few days ago: Bush, dressed as a scout leader, is walking into a swamp, followed by scouts (Congress). The caption reads: I didn’t mislead, you misfollowed.

Here’s the thing, and it’s been this way from the beginning: Americans are largely going to be for the war or aganist the war depending on how well the war is going. If Iraq were more stable, and we were pulling troops out now, the polls would be quite different than they are. But Iraq ISN’T more stable, and we’re NOT pulling troops out. Bush has no one but himself to blame for that, and turning public opinion around is going to be next to impossible.

Yes, the quotes from Kerry, HRC, etc back in Oct '02 look wildly hawkish in hindsight. Yes, Bush can point to them and say that he wasn’t the only one who saw S.H. as a threat. But as the war goes, so goes public sentitment. Sure, some of the Dems look disingenuous as they now say “If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have voted as I did.” Well, what they* know now has less to do with intelligence data and more to do with public opinion poll data. But in politics, that’s the way the game is played. Surely the Republicans know that better than anyone.

The glimmer of hope that the Pubs have on Iraq is if Congressional leaders (of both parties) can agree to pressure Bush to set some sort of timetable to BEGIN troop draw-downs. It doesn’t have to be a timetable for complete withdrawl, but at least to begin the process. The latest Senate measure falls short of that requirement, solely because the Pubs didn’t want it in there. Frankly, I think the Iraqi government needs that added pressure to get its act together and to quit using us as a crutch.

Still, it will be interesting to see how Hillary plays these cards. She was one of the strongest hawks on the Democrtic side, and has yet to renounce her vote from Oct '02. I doubt she will go that far. No need to really, at least not until the presidential primaries and she gets asked that question directly (assuming she chooses to run). Better to wait and see how things play out between now and then.

Bottom line, though, Bush led us into this war, and he has to take FULL responsibility. If the situtation in Iraq were better, and public sentiment in favor of the war was strong, you can bet your life he’d be downplaying the Democtrats’ role in the decision, and crowing about how brave and wise he was to overcome the voices of opposition.

*Not to paint with too broad a brush, this obviously doesn’t apply to the many Dems who were against the war all along.