Team Bush and "Best Info Available @ the Time"

Great Debates
41

Trust has nothing to do with it. It’s quite the wrong word in this situation.
The question is, are there any reasons to believe that Hussein changed in the twenty four hours between 9-10 and 9-12?
Why would the calculus suddenly become that he was willing to see himself deposed and/or killed and have his country destroyed?

Unlikely applies to quite a number of nations. If it’s not good enough, we should also attack them too. Some of these countries who’re unlikely to attack the US actually do have ties to international terrorist organizations (al Qaeda among others) and actually do sponsor terrorism and actually do have chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
Where do you suggest that we draw the line if not at unlikely? We can’t draw the line at ‘impossible’.

In any case the issue is, “Why, when the consensus was that such an attack from Iraq was unlikely, was Team Bush portraying it as a impending inevitability?”

42

Nothing.

It doesn’t have to.

True, but not rellevant. There are a miriad of other factors which make each of those nations unique. That the US is no longer to tollerate the same risks it did before 9-11 is only one of them.

Oh. That is a different question altogether. I would suggest that much more uncooperation with international agencies has to be factored in. Shooting at American military planes might factor in. Unlikely means different things when applied to different nations. Especially when you consider what would push the nation from unlikely to likely. As I recall (please correct me) the intelligence report you are refering to did indicate that Sadam might use extra conventional means if he thought he was being attacked. Did it mention what they thought the fallout of an “oil for food” type scandal might be? If Sadam thought it was now going to be decades before he could lift the sanction regime?

Well, now, that would certainly have been wrong. I guess I missed the quote in which an administration official said that Iraq was going to attack us inevitably. I recall “growing threat” and “can’t let the first evidence be a mushroom cloud” type rhetoric. Which were certainly hyperbolic. But were they “inevitable”?

You see, again, I don’t think it is necessary to portray Bush and his administration in this way. It is not necessary to conclude that they were mongongo monkey nuts* for war just as it is unecessary to assume Sadam had gone mongongo monkey nuts. All that is necessary is to note that Iraq and America had been butting heads in a semi peaceful way for a long time. 9-11 changed the Bush administration’s tolerance for this arrangement. I think the tolerance for Sadam had been degrading considerably since before Bush came to office. Our experience during 9-11 just pushed it over the top.

*Absolutely lovely phrase. What would you make of a politician who was mongongo monkey nuts for not-lies?

43

I agree, but not for the reasons you’re thinking of

I agree again, and again believe this will be the result of the diligent revisionism we’re seeing today on this very board

. Certainly an enemy of Kuwait, and he definitely hated our guts, but, as enemies go…feh. Soviet Russia, now there’s an enemy…

…And now he’s under arrest, so I say let the trial begin ASAP; I mean the government must have scads of information about this assasination attempt and Hussein’s role. Funny that no one seems so eager to try him for it.

Oh…puleeeze… This is too pathetic to comment on.

…which puts him in the company of scores of scumbags whose countries we have not invaded

…That …Poseur!!!

This explains our intense involvement in Rwanda and Darfur

And you get a dog’s lunch of half-baked back-pedalling of astounding paucity.

Back to the OP; as has been pointed out, the administration didn’t suffer from a dearth of good information…there were mounds of it from the people who were there, looking for them, indicating that there were no WMD. There were also mounds of bad information…some of it already flagged as being of questionable validity. The problem is that the administration chose the wrong mound.

44

You are correct. I should have said that Blix was saying that no WMD had been found so far or words to that effect. Sorry. And I was over hasty in reading your post and missed your calling GW incopetent. We seem to be generally in agreement on that at least.

45

No one said anything about trust. No-fly zones aren’t trust. Inspections aren’t trust. Sanctions aren’t trust. Hans Blix is not trust. David Kay was not trust. All of your exported oil going through a third party which restricts what you can buy with the funds to food, medicine, and other basic needs is certainly not indicating trust.

Hans Blix’s report on the eve of war didn’t show trust.

This “work programme” he mentions, and which was mandated in 1999 as an ongoing inspections effort, certainly doesn’t indicate “trust”. Aerial surveillance, reports from governments and suppliers, sampling of Iraqi chemical and biological lab products/stores, checking of road traffic, etc. These are not what you do when you trust someone.

Yet, yes. I could have slept well at night knowing this was the relationship we had with Hussein. Contained, inspected, sanctioned. Toothless.

Enjoy,
Steven

46

So if Hussein’s not going to attack, whence the danger? No danger, no war.

Team Bush is actually a bit wider of a group of folks than those who are technically ‘administration officials’. Team Bush includes folks like that Dick Perle who, although an informal advisor of the Prez’s and listed as an appointee of an advisory committee was technically not actually an employee or else he’d be in jail now. (Good thing for him that he didn’t clock in for the required six days of work.) It also includes various attack-Iraq-Bush-backers on Capitol Hill, civilian members of the Pentagon such as Feith, Wolfowitz etc. and others who, though close to the Admin are not technically members of it.
But in any case, the notion of ‘pre-emptive’ by definition pre-supposes that an attack is nigh. And, even the more accurate descriptor ‘preventive war’ is based on the concept that war is inevitable and that it is better to fight now while the costs are low rather than later when the costs are high. The only question left really is the timing.

I propose that rather than wrangle with the definition of “is,” or ask for or offer a concession, I’ll merely change the language to suit:

"Why, when the consensus was that such an attack from Iraq was unlikely, was Team Bush portraying it as something other than unlikely?"

Because the Bush Admin’s intolerance is hardly sufficient to send a nation to war I say that it’s not “all that is necessary”.

Which one from where and which time period?

47

::Scott limps away, minus a shoe. Obviously, since he has not been seen to have thrown a shoe, he either has very bad aim, or it happened in another thread.::

48

Forgive me, but the assumption for the purpose of that last post was that his posession of WMD were not questioned. I’m glad that you would have been willing to sleep trusting in the sanctions to keep Sadam tame. Others could not. That’s all I’m saying.

49

Probably because Hussein was not responsible for any assassination attempt on George H. W. Bush’s life; it was a hoax apparently set up by the Kuwaitis to draw the US closer to them, as Seymour Hirsch debunks here.

Not that it’ll stop duffer from spreading that mistruth in the future, I’m sure…

50

Ah, but no one said he was not going to attack. We just agreed that he did not have to become sanguine about the utter destruction of Iraq. What if he bacame convinced he could get away with it? It would only take a few months*.

[QUOTE]
**“Why, when the consensus was that such an attack from Iraq was unlikely, was Team Bush portraying it as something other than unlikely?”**Well, I’m not sure they did this either. Really, they simply said that the level of “unlikely” was not unlikely enough. Didn’t they simply portray Iraq as a threat?

Yes, but this is a misreading of what I said. I was talking about the continued degradation of American tolerence for Sadam as a larger trend. My point was that 9-11 did not have to be some earth shattering paridigm shifting event. By the time Bush came into office there were substantial blocks who had had enough of Sadam Hussein. I did not mean that such intolerence was all that is necessary for the US to go to war. I simply meant that it is all that is necessary to understand the shift in policy which occured following 9-11. Obviously more things are necessary to go to war than that Bush is pissed at a country’s leader. :wink:

I wasn’t thinking of any one in particular. Just trying to put some newspeak into a cute question.

*I know, as it turned out, he’d have to become convinced he could get away with it for longer than that. But if we accept the he had WMD stockpiles, he would only have to become convinced that he could get away with an attack against the US for a few months to plan and pull one off.

51

Why are we spending our time on hypotheticals? And why extremely unlikely “black-and-white” type hypotheticals at that? The question of WMD was always a spectrum with confidence levels and variances. There was doubt that Saddam had been completely disarmed. Hans Blix noted that “There are unresolved disarmament issues.” This is emphatically not the same as Bush’s statements.

As has been pointed out, you’re never going to get to absolute perfect knowledge of what is going on in your neighbor’s house, so reasonable steps to protect yourself against whatever he may or may not have is the best you can do in the real world.

Beyond the questions of what he has and how much of it he has are further questions. Why should these worries about what he may have provoke aggressive war? Surely a few American’s losing sleep is not worth 1000+ American lives and ten times that number or more Iraqi lives? What got us to this point was the Administration’s statements causing even more Americans lose sleep over Hussein’s WMD. I’m arguing that they had no solid grounds on which to base these statements and that they knew the grounds were not solid. For some reason they pushed ahead anyway. They formed special teams like the OSP and PTEG to push ahead. Whenever someone contradicted what they said, the slandered that person. The French, who had a far more fact-based assessment of the situation, became the enemy. Hans Blix was portrayed as some sort of idealogue who hated the US and UK. Hell, the CANADIANS refused to sign on for the war because they didn’t believe the evidence Washington had shown them. The only nation which was with the US on the grounds of the WMD evidence was the UK and there was doubt there to the point where senior cabinet members(Robin Cook) were resigning in protest.

How, just how does discussion of hypotheticals where Saddam’s posession of WMD was unquestioned give us ANY insight into the situation as it was pre-war? There were questions. My god there were questions! There were resignations because the questions were being ignored. Allies which have stood by us for over a century were not willing to sign off on our interpretation of the evidence.

So why are we spending our time on hypotheticals where “Saddam has WMD”(with the implied “of sufficient quantity and quality to execute at least one mid to large scale(between OKC and 9/11) attack” because policing the world to the point where threats below that scale don’t exist is economically impossible) is an unquestioned assumption? It seems to me that failure to question this assumption is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.

Enjoy,
Steven

52

You know, I hereby propose a theory of how Saddam most likely had no WMDs, based in no way on documents people seem to be ignoring the contents of.
As seen in my thread, entitled, "[URL= http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=307427&highlight=batman Holy…crap, Batman, It’s the Giant Iraqi SpaceGun
", Saddam had, not the past tense, had started to assemble a “SuperGun” back in the late 80s, early 90s. It was designed by Gerald Bull, E.G.,C.(Evil Genius, Canadian) It was destroyed by the combined work of the English and Israeli governments. (I might be giving the English too much credit.)

Now, if Saddam had any WMD after wards, don’t you think the Israelis would have acted on it? (Note: Scott doesn’t actually know much about how actively the Israeli handle situations today. All his knowledge is based on seeing some documentaries of anti-terrorist actions from the 70s.) Oh, and before Igo, I want to giggle at the words, “Supergun” one lasst time. :smiley: The name sounds so silly!

53

:smack: Holy…crap, Batman, It’s the Giant Iraqi SpaceGun :smack:

54

Is there any evidence that he had reached such a conclusion? Or is this one of those, “If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs - if we had eggs,” sort of things?

Second, he would have “to get away with it” forever, not just a few months. We weren’t afraid to confront Hussein when he had banned weapons before.

But without any evidence that he was thinking he could get away with it, the US intelligence community’s assessment that such an attack from Iraq was unlikely still stands.

If you’d rather, I can dredge up quotes and we can hash through various parsings, or you can find definitions of “preemptive war” that involve unlikely threats. (Unless you’d like to contend that there was no “doctrine of preemption” )

I was just pointing out that the practice is ancient.

That was my fault.
I couldn’t think of how else to get across the mesage that I was talking about something else. I did try other things first though.

55

This is more or less what I’m trying to say.

I hoped it would allow the focus to be shifted to the subject to the actual likelihood of Hussein launching an attack vs the representation of the likelihood as presented to the electorate.

56

No, you are missing my point. It seems like you insist on viewing the conflict from the Iraqi point of view. From there, it is perfectly reasonable that of course he would have had to get away with such a WMD attack forever. But from the other side, we would only have to hypothosize Saddam becoming convinced for a few months. Long enough to plan and execute such an attack. It was the risk to America I was trying to get at. From the perspective, it is somewhat irrelevant that Iraq would have ended up as a glass desert.

I agree that the intelligence community thought an attack from Iraq was unlikely. But didn’t that assessment contain the proviso that Saddam was not attacked?

Well, we could start with yours.

*#

  1. Relating to or constituting a military strike made so as to gain the advantage when an enemy strike is believed to be imminent: a preemptive nuclear attack.
  2. Undertaken or initiated to deter or prevent an anticipated, usually unpleasant situation or occurrence: The two companies organized a preemptive alliance against a possible takeover by another firm.*

It certainly contains the word “imminent” which was your point. It also suggests that preemptive action is taken to affect “antiipated” situations. Not exactly the enemy at the gates sort of meaning that “imminent” has.

If I am not mistaken, the only thing the Bush doctrine added to all this is the proposition that international non state terrorism in conjunction with WMD production efforts if of sufficient concern to the United States that “imminent” aught to be replaced with a more reasonable term. That we should not have to wait for definitive confirmation that the madman’s finger is 2 inches away from the button before we act.

I really don’t see this as a radical departure from the principle of pre emptive war*. 20 years ago a country had to have an extensive industrial complex devoted to the production and maintenance of WMD capable delivery systems. It was not enough for a country to have a truck full of weapons grade nerve gas. They had to have planes or missiles capable of extended travel in order to be a credible threat to the United States. What 9-11 taught us is that relying on this sort of delivery system (in the hands of our enemies) before we act is foolish.

Now. One could certainly disagree with this sentiment. But is it really so hard to see the logic of it? If not, is it really impossible to see the structure of the thought process involved?

*While at the same time I do indeed recognize that it is definately a radical departure from the letter, so to speak, of the international consensus that pre-emptive war is only allowed in the face of a clear, imminent, and widely accepted threat.

57

Are we then to redefine “imminent threat” to include any possibility of threat, however remote? Deterrence worked well enough with an avowed enemy, an enemy with some actual capacity to wreak havoc, until St. Ronnie of Bakersfield arose to crush the Soviet dragon with the force of his towering intellect.

Has it escaped friend Pervert’s attention that we are not beloved of the nations? Indeed, have we not sacrificied a large quantity of our international repute and respect in order to remove a threat that existed only in the fevered imagination of our Fearless Misleader and his myopic minions? As much as I admire the romantic image of the Cowboy, strapping on his six-shooters to gun down the school marm, I am mindful that most of those guys ended up getting shot.

We have sacrificed another crucial intangible: our status as a nation that can be trusted to negotiate.

Take, for example, the Cuban Missile Crisis. History from the Soviet side records that there was debate on our adversary’s side, whether to strike first in order to forestall or at least lessen the impact of an American attack. (History shows that such madness is not uncommon in times of crisis). But the balance was tipped because the Russians knew that the Americans did not want war, would seek and accept a reasonable compromise, that negotiation remained a viable alternative to nuclear holocaust.

But that has been seriously compromised. Now, if we come to a crisis with a potential enemy, he has before him the example of Iraq. How we rushed to war regardless of intelligence to the contrary, how reason and negotiation were brusquely brushed aside in our eagerness for bloodshed.

This cannot help but strengthen the case for war, we now have a reputation as a nation that shoots first and asks questions later…much, much later. If we had done this in the face of an actual threat it would have been bad enough, in the face of an empty chimera it is far worse.

I pray for my country that such consequences do not arise, with the sombre knowledge that we no longer deserve such a dispensation. For all his moral foulness, it was not Saddam who let slip the dogs of war, but we. Every innocent death is ours and ours alone, we were wrong, we had reason to know we were wrong, and we did it anyway.

58

For anyone with an hour to spare:

Why We Fight

59

No, of course not. I really don’t think that anyone has suggested this.

Yes, it did. Are you suggesting that it will work with all enemies for all time? :wink:

No. Has it escaped your attention that this is not new?

<transliterating the rhetoric>Possibly. There do not seem to be that many traditionaly allies doing anyting substantially different than they were before the war. Has anyone pulled out of NATO? Have there been calls for the US to withdraw? I’m not trying to deny that many people are pissed at America. Just draw attention to the possibility that the amount of international respect lost may not be catastrophic.

Sometimes your humor goes over my head. Who is supposed to be the school marm in this analogy?

Damaged, perhaps. Sacrificed implies that it is gone. I’m not at all sure this is true.

Yes, and similar cool heads prevailed here. Can you guarantee, for instance, that such cool heads would have prevailed around Saddam for the next 20 years, say? Can you further gurantee that such heads would prevail arounn any of Saddam’s successors for the next 60 years, say?

I’m not trying to say that an attack from Iraq was inevitiable. But you seem to be implying that it was impossible.

Now, this sounds more reasonable. And as you so rightly pointed out they also have the Cuban missile crisis as a guide.

But this goes far far too far. You are now saying that Saddam had no responsibility for the situation his country was in early in this centruy. I can accept completely that we might even bear the lions share of the responsibility, but it seem silly to imply that America is poised to invade any and every country at the drop of a hat. The bugger had more than 12 years to clean up his act. I don’t know how you define patience, but 12 years seems like quite a bit of it.

I know liberals like to say that individuals don’t bear responsibility for situations they find themselves in (despite good evidence that choices they made earlier led to said situations). But this seems to go a bit far.

60

Does cooler heads in your worldview equate to a pre-emptive invasion? Yeah, we didn’t nuke them, if that is what you mean.

In fact, our credible deterrence was far stronger before the war than int was in 1962. Recall that we had just successfully invaded Afghanistan (absolutely justified) and drove out the Taliban. Do you think there is a possibility that Saddam could have doubted we’d do the same to him at the slightest provocation? I’d say the chances of Saddam attacking were considerably lower than pre-9/11.

What was this attack going to look like, anyway? A car bomb? The specter of mushroom clouds used before the war made it sound as if we were being protected from a major attack with hundreds of thousands dead. Was there any intelligence, credible or not, for such a possibility? Not just for the existence of WMDs. but for an attack.

Also, was there evidence that Saddam was crazy? Evil, yes, but crazy? The attack on Kuwait was based on a misreading of US policy, and while a big mistake was not insane.

BTW, I disagree that Team Bush was incompetent. That assumes he was trying to do what was best for the US, as opposed to getting revenge and/or trying out theories on changing the ME. They lied quite skillfully, and moved support behind a war that would not have been supported if the truth were told. The news media, there was incompetence. But not the White House.