You were fine until you tacked this irrelevancy onto your post. It is nothing more than one more attempt to continue your fantasy that Bush has been “given a pass.” Everyone, pro and con, agrees that Bush did just what he wanted to do in starting the war. Those who believe he was justified think that minor details such as the (un)reality of WMDs are irrelevant. Those who think he was not justified already think that his actions were reprehensible. Arguing over Bush getting “a pass” is silly.
My point is mainly about journalists giving Bush a pass. So your response “Everyone, pro and con” is not responsive to what I wrote. Journalists are expected not to be ‘pro or con’ but to be pro-truth and pro-facts.
My citing of Bush’s draft resolution on March 7th through the 10th is a case in point. Bush has left a huge question as to what intelligence he didn’t have on March 7 but did claim to have on March 17. Bush supposedly gave all the intelligence they had to the UNMOVIC and the AIEA in accordance with 1441, but none of it panned out prior to March 7 when Bush proposed to the UNSC that he would in essence allow S.H. to stay in power “IF” the UNSC were declare Iraq ‘IN FULL COMPLIANCE’ by March 17, 2003.
Think about it. If Bush was sitting on intelligence (March 7) that proved that Iraq was hiding WMD from the post-1441 inspectors, he could have shared that with the French and Russians and a few ‘fence sitters’ on the UNSC as well as Dr Blix, which could have provided an incentive that the UNSC to declare Iraq in material breach of 1441 and opened the door for regime change.
I say this is not a silly question at all. I think it is absurd that no journalist that I know of has ever questioned this quite obvious inconsistency coming from the Bush Administration. That is giving Bush a pass in my opinion/ It may not be deliberate and very well may be a passive pass due to journalists seeming lack of curiosity about such things.
I think Bush should be challenged on why he either held back some actionable intel on March 7, but announced he had it on March 17, or he was lying and really had nothing.
You are really fixated on your fantasy. I have not read anything by any journalists who have let Bush off the hook for his actions. (Limbaugh, Krauthammer, Hannity, Beck, etc., are not journalists, that are pundits.)
The fact that you ‘have** not **read anything by any journalists’ shows that you are talking about something other than what I’m talking about. You don’t see what I defined (March 7 Draft Resolution Offer to allow S.H. to stay in power) as a smoldering hot source that that should normally spark journalistic curiosity, by someone such as a Bob Woodward. But it has not. And there many other questions that have not been asked of Bush or Cheney or any of the rest.
Why should Adaher believe it is normal or non-controversial for Bush to have decided ‘its war’ when the UN inspections were merely about a month in, or whatever the rumor that many like Adaher believe to be some sort of verified fact?
Journalists should challenge any thoughts that Bush decided in favor of war without regard to the outcome of the inspections. But they haven’t.
This is indicative of what I’m saying. It is Adaher’s set up for his point that was wrong in the setup and wrong in the fact he was trying to present. But not as wrong if you understand that Adaher was talking about the period prior to 1441.
The French obviously believed Iraq ‘could have’ had something when they voted yes for 1441. But after sixty days after 1441, the French and others came to the fact based realization that Iraq may not have WMD and were ready to be verified in compliance.
The current conversation started with this:
The public record is clear that Bush didn’t decide to invade until after the March 7 offer to let S.H. remain in power.
Had Blix decided to drop his professionalism and just tell Bush and Blair that sure, I will report to the UNSC that Iraq has fully complied… by March 17, 2002. I wonder what Bush would have done then.
I’m pretty sure Blair would have had to bail out if Blix had gone down that route.
But nevertheless there was no deadline for the same thing to happen under 1441.
Has Bush ever been asked by any journalist why he tried to put a deadline into 1441 that matched concern over summer heat affecting a military assault. The decision was supposed to be about the severity of the actual threat, not the convenience of weather for military assault?
I agree T&D that you have not ‘read’ any journalists asking these questions. Just goes to show that it is not my fantasy at all that these questions have never been asked.
Why didn’t Bush at least check into S.H.'s December 2002 offer to let the CIA come in? Why has no that I know of journalist ever pursued that question in any kind of depth. If Bush won’t answer it - pester the hell out of him on the editorial pages of the Washington Post, NY Times on Sixty Minutes. Make a big case of it. Inform the public. Isn’t that a journalists job.
Dude, is one thread not enough for your incessant ramblings?
Interestingly, the Israeli intelligence establishment supported Bush’s assessment; a few months after the war started, Ariel Sharon quietly dismissed the head of the Iraqi Desk of the Mossad and his deputies for incompetence.
As usual, you have invented a scenario that is entirely wrong. The actual events have been documented. You are hoping for some great exposé that will shatter the “illusions” of the American people. The problem is that the American people already know of Bush’s lies, they already hold him responsible for the Iraq war* and, like Reagan’s multiple violations of laws to avoid supporting thugs in Central America, there is nothing to expose–and frankly, the American people would not care if it was “revealed.” The facts are common knowledge among those who paid attention and there is no reason to pretend that it is some dark secret. If the New York Times splashed all your odd claims across the front page for a week, the basic reaction would be a lot of people scratching their heads and asking why the NYT was re-hashing old news. There has been plenty written on the topic, it is just not written in a way that will fulfill your fantasies.
- If you reply with your nonsense about people “blaming the Democrats” I will note that I have already documented, (somewhere in your multiple threads), Senator Clinton’s support for Bush’s actions on the eve of the invasion and Kerry’s remarkable silence on the topic. A number of Democrats DID support Bush and attempts to re-write history to claim that he acted alone are nothing but self-serving revisionist bullshit.
Show me where it has been documented that Bush did not have actional intelligence on March 7th but suddenly had it on March 17th. Or show me where that question about that has been asked by a real journalist.
Real journalists knew and reported that the whole WMD nonsense was invented by the administration. That was increasingly documented throughout the entire period from September 2002 through March 2003. Only you seem to have been fooled by W that there was a change in status.
The invasion date was set by the logistics of getting the troops and weapons in place, not by any presence or absence of a casus belli. Weren’t you paying attention at the time?
I suppose that could be technically true, if the number of real journalists documenting the “nonsense” increased from two to three, out of zillions.
But IMO the vast, vast majority of the mainstream media might as well have been reading press releases authored by the administration. Maybe Amy Goodman was trying to be heard somewhere around channel 700, but the big Sunday morning shows scarcely challenged anything Rice or Cheney said.
You are right that I have conflated two separate trends. From September 2002 through March 2003, the simple reporting of “discoveries” of WMD by the administration combined with their persistent refutation by the claimed sources of such information provided enough information to allow anyone not blinded by Bush’s bluster to recognize that the administration was simply lying, but the general attitude of the media was that of a cheering section.
However, our fantasist wants to pretend that there is still a story to be revealed that would shock the nation regarding Bush’s lies and that story has been told in the ensuing years. From the revelations of Richard Clarke regarding Bush’s monomaniacal efforts to take us to war, through the claims by people such as Nabil Shaath and Mickey Herskowitz that Bush felt he was following God’s orders to invade, through the documentation of the composition of the Office of Special Plans as a small group of publicity flacks posing as intelligence analysts with documentation of how they distorted the intelligence that passed through that office, and revelations from Powell and his assistants regarding the nonsense he spewed at the UN, through the simple reporting during the invasion that U.S. troops never bothered to secure a single “suspected” WMD site, to revelations that Rumsfeld overrode the Joint Chiefs of Staff regarding the number of troops to assign to the invasion, the lies and errors have been documented.
The idea that there is some great revelation out there that would cause the American public to change their opinions regarding the war is nothing but the hopeless fantasy of someone who was fooled into thinking that Hussein was actually a threat and who wants revenge by “exposing” Bush with information that has already been documented.
The Bush clearly did not adhere to the authorization to use force language in the AUMF because he was not enforcing UNSC Resolution 1442 or any other when the attack began.
So when Bush still claims his first choice was peace, he is given a pass to this day.
Only in your weird imagination.
I do not know a single person, regardless whether they opposed or approved of the invasion, then, or believe it was justified or not justified, now, who believes that Bush was trying for peace. Not one person. (Clearly, if there are other people like you in the world, it is not a null set, but as a percentage of U.S. citizens, it would certainly have multiple zeroes between the decimal point and the first useful digit.)
No wonder you are having so much trouble persuading anyone to your odd beliefs when they are clearly not based in reality.
Then you need to get out more. Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld have all been on major media outlets in the past year, either promoting books, or in connection with the Bush library. While they magnanimously admitted that they turned out to be wrong about the presence of WMDs, they spewed the same line of bullshit about EVERYBODY believing, right up to the invasion, that Saddam was concealing WMDs, and that assertion went pretty much unchallenged.
Admittedly, they chose their audiences well, appearing mostly on Fox News shows.
Ah…you do realize that’s not what Tom is getting at, right? You should re-read what he’s saying there because you are not understanding his point, which is about an interpretation of the AUMF, not about ‘EVERYBODY believing, right up to the invasion, that Saddam was concealing WMDs, and that assertion went pretty much unchallenged’.
I defer to your supernatural ability to know what he was getting at, but it’s not what he said.
Here’s what he said:
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
do not know a single person, regardless whether they opposed or approved of the invasion, then, or believe it was justified or not justified, now, who believes that Bush was trying for peace.
[/QUOTE]
It says he doesn’t know a single person who believes that Bush was trying for peace (presumably after we started putting troops on the ground…I admit, that is an intuitive leap I suppose). Where do YOU see anything to the effect of ‘EVERYBODY believing, right up to the invasion, that Saddam was concealing WMDs, and that assertion went pretty much unchallenged’? Perhaps it’s YOU who have supernatural abilities to detect something that doesn’t seem to be there at all.
Good Heavens. I pointed out something I feel he’s overlooking. Obviously, if he overlooked it, it would not be what he was trying to say.
Besides, I’m just tired of the way he treats NFBW like a simpleton. IMO, NFBW is the only sane person in the thread, because everybody else just yawns and says, oh of course we knew that. IMO, a sane and decent person SHOULD be outraged that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are not only not spending the rest of their lives in prison before they burn in hell, but they are actually still honored and respected by a significant number of Americans.
So, you told him he needs to get out more to make a point by quoting him and commenting on something that had nothing to do with what he was saying, and then when I pointed this out you accused me of having to have supernatural powers to read what he DID plainly write but had nothing to do with what you were commenting on. Do I have all that straight? 
As for NFBW being the only sane person in this thread, just going to let that one pass right by. YMMV and all.
I understood perfectly what tomndebb was conveying. It was perfectly clear to me, and it’s also clear that you misunderstood him.
The error that you (in your most recent post) and the other guy who shall not be named are committing is that just because Bush was a terrible president, does not mean that Bush is guilty of every criticism that can be contrived, imagined, or manufactured.
He started an unjustified war that killed almost 5,000 Americans and many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (as best we know), and cost us a trillion dollars: those facts speak for themselves. To state that Bush’s REAL misdeed was to (allegedly) take some liberties with interpreting three or four words in a war resolution is profoundly obtuse and completely offensive to the actual human toll of the war.
It’s akin to arguing that Charles Manson has been “let off the hook” by the American public for what he did to that catchy Beatles song: well, no, because arguing about piddly shit like the meaning of some lyrics is simply unimportant when the heart of the matter is that Manson is infamous for being a murderer, and everyone knows why he’s in prison. In the land of reality, nobody is going to care very much about the harm caused to the Beatles because of Manson’s interpretation of that song.