Pick a country. Any country. Now invade it and occupy it. There will, of course, be resistance to the occupation. That resistance will take the form of “asymmetrical warfare”* (or “warfair” according to one of the bigger morons on the board).
Voila! You’re now fighting terrorists and your invasion is justified thanks to the War On Terror.
Apparently, the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism** flopped shortly after the birthin’. I guess the Bush Admin misoverestimated their base’s attention span.
I agree that McClellan has got to go, though. He’s not even fun to watch the way Ari was. Scotty-boy spends most of his time looking like a cornered, wounded animal.
-Joe
*Remember that term? Another one of those “fuck, nobody was stupid enough to buy it, guess we should stop using it” ideas.
That’s an easy one. Foreign terrorists went into Iraq, and killed between twenty-five and thirty-thousand people there, so the “broader war on terrorism” includes hunting down these terrorists.
A forest is plagued with numerous small fires. The decision is made to fight them thusly: Go to the middle of the forest. Start a bonfire. Pour gasoline on it. Repeat as necessary.
While I (obviously) oppose the policies that the administration has pursued, it should be noted, in fairness, that the invasion of Iraq was always explained in terms of the “war on terrorism.” The claims made before the invasion were that Hussein actively supported terrorism (a series of lies including falsely accusing Zarqawi of being a member of al Qaida so as to pretend that Huissein was “working with” al Qaida when Zarqawi went to Iraq for medical treatment and accusing Hussein of harboring al Qaida terrorist camps when thosae camps (which were in Iraq) were actually in the northern protected zone where the U.S. Air Force prevented the Iraq army from attacking them).
In this single regard, the administration has been consistent. They have always pretended that the invasionm of Iraq had some vague relationship to a war on terror. The fact that the invasion encouraged resistance and recruited more members for both terrorist and insurgent groups from outside Iraq was simply gravy for the administration which can now point to the more active terrorism that they encouraged as a sign that we need to fight it in Iraq.
This has occured to me. And I’ve seen other boards that aren’t F.R. full of people for whom this would make perfect sense. People are strange.
I think he goes home, curls up in front of the television with a bottle of Jack Daniels and cries himself to sleep.
But I admire his stamina. I would have cracked long ago. “I know! I know this is all bullshit! But they make me say these things! They won’t let me give real answers! [sub]Help me![/sub]”
Although Franklin Roosevelt would be accurate. The board full of people who would buy such guff is, in fact, neither Free Republic nor Franklin Roosevelt.
Checking back, it looks like the blogsters (the more serious ones show more responsability than the mainstream media) are reporting a correction: it seems the greetings are sometimes used by the ones the letter addresses. However, the doubts now come from a bit somehow previously ignored and it showed to be embarasing to Negroponte and the administration:
Oh yes unclear. :rolleyes: I have seen this movie before, all the Bush apologists swallow the information and then when the correction appears on page 18, it is ignored.
While it may turn that this letter came indeed from Al-qaeda, it is significant to notice that it’s importance and accuracy was increased for propaganda purposes, this conclusion is reached because this administration has done this many times before.
The argument happens in that thread primarily from posts 158-171. A summary:
-A lie consists of the statement of a falsehood with an intent to deceive.
-Bush stated that “according to a 1998 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iraq was within six months of developing nuclear weapons. A spokesperson for the IEAE denied that any such report existed. When asked for clarification, a White House spokesperson said that the report was from 1991, not 1998. Again, the IEAE denied that it had issued such a report.” We’ve got our statement of a falsehood.
-The president was offering this misstatement as part of a campaign to convince the public that the evidence was unambiguous that Iraq was developing WMDs. In reality, many experts within the Executive branch doubted the evidence:
We’ve got our intent to deceive.
A falsehood uttered with an intent to deceive is a lie. As Bricker stated in this thread, “The only saving grace here will be if there WAS a report after all. Absent that,” he concluded, “I concede this was a lie.”
For my part, this is far too much niggling. The attempt to deceive is the morally relevant portion of a lie; even if someone manages to deceive through speaking only the truth, they’re as bad as someone who lies. But some folks grant more ethical leeway to politicians and other advocates than I do; even they should admit that Bush lied about the evidence leading up to war.
Some of us have been calling Bush a liar all along, with cites, references, quotes and government documentation. Others just stick their heads up their asses and go LALALALALALALALALA.
Relatively minor point of clarification. It is not necessarily a US forgery (if forgery it be, which seems increasingly likely…).
In the practice of deception, disinformation, and bullshit nothing is easier to sell than “information” that fits neatly within the desires and preconceptions of the target. The more Iraq evolves to a client-state, the more powerful Iraqis with a vested interest in keeping America right where it is. People, for instance, standing outside with large buckets while the sky opens up and rains money.
Ali Mustache Al-Suckup: Look here, my American friend, (May the Prophet keep you safe from pork rinds!). Here we have intercepted intelligence, from one of our super-duper secret agents! Boy, we are doing a great job (give us some more money), our agents have penetrated the very clandestine center of AlQ operations (though we could do better if we had some more money). We have obtained this super-secret letter from two of the very tippy tip top AlQ leaders! No, we don’t know where they are. (Maybe if we had more money?)
Lt. Shiesskopf (Intelligence, US Army): Clearly, this is solid gold! No question about it, we have this verified from a number of entirely reliable sources…
I strongly suspect that the example I gave is not the only example of an Administration lie. It is, however, an example that’s easily cited and is pretty airtight, so I think it’s a useful one to demonstrate that, at least once in the buildup for the war, the Administration told an outright lie in an effort to convince the public that their case for war was better than it really was. Saying, “They lied once, and here are strong cites to this effect” will, I hope, prove more convincing than saying, “They lied a whole bunch of times, and if you can’t see that, you’re stupid.”