What arguments? All that’s left is "Saddam is/was a bad guy, coz, you know, he was just evil.
Everything else, the WMDs, the Al-Qaeda connection, gassing the Kurds, has been shown to be complete bullshit.
All that you’re left with is that Saddam was randomly killing Iraqis that he didn’t like, and having armed goon squads making people disappear. The U.S. is doing a pretty good approximation of Saddam in Iraq. What’s changed for the Iraqi people? Not much. What’s changed for the U.S. people? They’re no safer, a significant number are already dead, billions of dollars have been pissed away, and, arguably, they’re more of a terrorist target than they were before.
It is astounding to me that you seem incapable of seeing the objections of Bush’s critics as anything other than a set of rhetorical ploys, especially when it is obvious that Bush has himself relied on a long string of rhetorical tricks in order to support his case for war. This is not a question of “fall-back positions among the Bush-bash batch,” it is a matter of grave concern: the very real possibility that your president led your nation to war on the basis of misleading, if not downright false, intelligence claims. It is insulting to insinuate that these questions are motivated solely by a desire to “bash Bush,” rather than by the fairly obvious facts of the matter.
If we look at the text of Bush’s State of the Union address, we see that he makes several claims about Iraq’s “WMDs” which, taken together – like links in a chain – support the case for military intervention. Most of these links are misleading (if not downright false) on their face, yet those who criticize the war have thus far only gotten traction on this one issue, probably because it is the most blatant and least equivocal. The claim that Iraq sought to purchase yellowcake from Africa is, in my opinion, a case of Bush simply having too much rope: he finally managed to hang himself, unsurprisingly. But it is only one example of a long line of false or misleading claims spewed out by the White House in the run up to the war. He pushed the envelope, as it were, and he finally got caught.
But let’s look at some of the other claims Bush made during his address:
Okay, I include this statement simply because I want to point out a couple of facts. First off, the 9/11 attacks did not involve nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. They involved a handful of determined, insane men, a little plastic explosives, some box cutters, and a couple of passenger planes. It is also worth keeping in mind that none of those involved in the attacks came from Iraq, and there exists no evidence whatsoever that Iraq was itself involved in the 9/11 debacle. My point is merely that severe danger, the most devastating attack sustained on the continental US in the last 100 years, did not actually involve “WMDs” or “outlaw states” at all. Listening to Bush’s address, one might easily forget that fact.
Moving on, Bush briefly mentions Iran and Korea and then turns to Iraq:
Sure. At the beginning of this Operation Iraqi Freedom Iraq’s military strength was approximately 20% of what it had been before the first Gulf War. It’s entire GDP, growing at a whopping -6%, was approximately a fourth of the US military budget. And now tell me again, in what sense was Iraq a threat to “dominate a vital region” – a region that is in fact clearly dominated by the US – or to the US itself?
Really? And what hard evidence do we have that he continues to “pursue” these weapons? Well, let’s scroll down a bit and inspect the evidence that Bush presents, starting with the last item and moving back up the page:
This claim has been clearly debunked, totally repudiated, since Bush made it, and was in doubt even before his speech. Only blind, rabid right-wing partisans continue to cling to it. From Squink’s link:
…yet Bush chose to include the allegation in his speech anyway, without the slightest hint of equivocation.
In fact, the Iraqi government had been completely forthcoming with regard to the aluminum tubes, producing all the requested information regarding their purchase and use. This fact clearly contradicts Bush’s SOTU claim:
On the contrary. With regard to the tubes, at least, he had credibly explained his activities.
Concerning the next piece of evidence, not to belabor the obvious, but it has been admitted by no less than the director of the CIA himself that the claim should not have been included in the SOTU. And yet partisans like december are still out there defending it. What part of “These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president,” do you not understand yet, december?
Naturally, it is difficult (if not impossible) for the Iraqi government to prove that they did not attempt to purchase yellowcake for Niger, or anywhere else. How do you prove a negative? Have you stopped beating your wife yet? And we still await, with baited breath, the public production any evidence whatsoever to back up this claim coming from the White House.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to disclose facilities that one does not, in fact, possess, much less provide evidence that they have been destroyed. Rack up another misleading statement in Bush’s address. There are no such labs, apparently.
Simply ignoring the question of whether or not the US was within its right to unilaterally attack another nation on the basis that it actually possessed such warheads, we now know – or at least strongly suspect – that this claim of “29,984” chemical munitions is bogus. US forces have turned Iraq inside out searching for these warheads to no avail. In short, we were mislead by Bush’s speech into assuming that Iraq possessed these weapons, although now it appears that it did not.
Finally, there is the issue of Iraq’s possession of material that would enable it to produce as much as “2500 liters of anthrax,” “38000 liters of botulinum,” and “5000 tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent.” It is technically true that these material were “unaccounted for,” but that in no way means that Iraq still possessed them, as we have subsequently seen.
Thus, Bush claims in his State of the Union address that Iraq continues to “pursue” the production of “WMDs,” but is unable to produce a single shred of credible evidence to support this charge; in fact, the further one digs, the more one discovers that the evidence gainsays this claim. Bush further strongly insinuates that Iraq possesses such weapons as well; yet with every passing day, it becomes more and more obvious that this was simply not the case.
In short, it is Bush and his cronies that employ rhetoric, rather than fact, to make their case, and who have fall back positions such as, “Well, sure, our own intelligence services doubted the Niger story, even months before the SOTU, but after all, we did say that our claim was based on British sources – so it is, technically, correct.” Not the other way around. Every link in the chain of Bush’s argument for war, as presented in the SOTU, was based on unsubstantiated, circumstantial hearsay, and most of it was known by Bush’s team to be inconclusive before he ever presented it. This is obvious to anyone with eyes in his or her head, and those who support Bush have been reduced to assuring his critics that “don’t worry, evidence will soon turn up” (but how do you know?), or claiming that the WMD issue was secondary to the liberation of the Iraqi people.
And finally, please allow me to congratulate you on your adroit use of double-think regarding this issue.
George Bush has followed your suggestion, samclem. I will not comment until I see an actual copy of what was just released, but here’s a brief AP article about it.
Of course, conflating yellowcake with weapons-grade fissile material is utter bullshit. To convert the one into the other, Saddam would need several hundred gas centrifuges up and running. That’s what Bush was trying to imply with his very next sentence in the SOTU. With a sequential argument like this you need to take the probability that each of the individual statements are true, and multiply them all to get the probability that the entire argument is correct. Using even the most optimistic assessments, 1X0 is still Zero.
I was being charitable
In respect to the Iraqi’s using those particular components:
U.S. claims off-base on Baghdad nuclear cache
You can get a pretty good idea of the scale of the operation Saddam is purported to have hidden by perusing the Industrias Nuleares Do Brasil enrichment facility website. Note that that facility is designed for production of fuel elements, not the much more highly processed weapons grade material. That’d take a bigger plant, and more centrifuges.
If we allow for the possibility of his obtaining a sufficient supply of weapons grade material from say, russian smugglers, we couldn’t. But that’s NOT what the president trotted in the SOTU. He gave us intel suggesting that Saddam was attempting to secretly perform friggin miracles.
As long as we’re about it, howzabout this from Colin Powells address to the United Nations
"While we were here in this council chamber debating Resolution 1441 last fall, we know, we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq. Most of the launchers and warheads have been hidden in large groves of palm trees and were to be moved every one to four weeks to escape detection.
We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities."
Now, this pretty strongly implies to my mind that we knew where stuff was. After all, we knew what it was, even distinguishing with complete confidence between ordinary rockets that go bang! and rockets stuffed with Bad Mojo. So where’d they go? What happened to them? If we’re so smart we know a chemical warhead from an explosive one, how come we don’t know where they are?
As some of you know, I was pretty much always dead set against this shitstorm. But I expected that at least some, if not most, of the Bushista’s case would be factually correct - it just wasn’t worth going to war over.
But as each and every alleged fact turns to shit before our very eyes, I am stunned to realize…I hadn’t viewed them darkly enough. People to the left of me, whom I sometimes regard as a wee bit hysterical, were right!
What next? A memo from Rove to Cheney cc’d to Rice and Powell saying “It’s all about the oil.”?
So you haven’t seen the maps of Iraqi oil fields that judicial watch pryed out of Cheney’s “Energy policy” yet? Perhaps they’re not quite a smoking gun, but they’re certainly good for a few dark chuckles.
Bush, didn’t Dick explain to you that this isn’t helping?
Come on now. Rice has gotten a doctorate. She has certainly read longer works and understands the value of foonotes.
A long weekend? it’s only 90 pages and the lives of AMerican soldiers are on the line. Who here hasn’t read a lot more than 90 pages in a weekend with only a GPA on the line?
Get the hell out of Saudi Arabia (insert any face-saving option you care to),
Unequivocally secure alternative oil supplies, and
Demonstrably work towards a Palestinian State.
In combination, mutually inclusive. And absolutely everything else is subordinate to those goals, no matter how square the peg or how round the hole. Including Saddam and Iraq.
Well they may have done that 5 years ago, I don’t know. But we all had a lot of ideas five years ago. 9/111 focused the minds like nothing ever before and provided the essential impetus for the leader of a democratic country to instigate war. These were very big strides that wouldn’t have been taken without 9/11, no matter what late-night wanking material Cheney was conjuring up.
Of course there was, and is, a Plan. Part of the ‘don’t care’ manner of this Administration likely comes from their belief that they have no choice so what others say doesn’t matter . . . … .
