But absence of evidence is absence of justification for the position that Iraq not only had WMDs, but was only a short time away from being able to use them effectively against the US.
But we stated that we knew what Iraq had. Why do we need to search if that knowledge was genuine?
** If the Administration didn’t in fact possess the knowledge they claimed, then they lied, even if it later becomes clear that some of their claims were true only by happenstance.
Filtered through your radical prisms, I’m sure you think the Administration’s current stance is reasonable. Everyone living on planet Earth can see that their claims have little to no substance.
Other than puffery by GW and sycophants what is the evidence that this is true?
It seems questionable in view of reports like this which contains the following"
" … with the slow buildup of a national Afghan army, an inadequate U.S. and coalition presence and poor progress on reconstruction projects, Afghanistan is spiraling out of control and risks becoming a ‘narco-mafia’ state, some humanitarian agencies warn.
Already the signs are there — a boom in opium production, rampant banditry and huge swaths of territory unsafe for Western aid workers. The central government has almost no power over regional warlords who control roads and extort money from truck drivers, choking commerce and trade."
Hmm, where have we seen this before? ad hoc shifting of the goals of a military venture after it fails to achieve its previously stated goals. Yes, I think I’ve heard that somewhere before. I didn’t know we went to Afghanistan to make life better for those poor Afghanis. I could have sworn we didn’t really give a shit about them or their brutal treatment under the Taleban before 9/11. Certainly not enough of a shit to devote troops to them as we are now. So what was our motivation? Get Bin Laden and eliminate Al Queda if I’m remembering correctly. Done either of those yet? We didn’t even give a shit about the Taleban until they stood in between us and Bin Laden. Hell if they’d been willing to hand him over we’d have left them in power. So now we’re claiming success because we toppled(sorta) the Taleban. Claims of success are also based on the conditions for the average Afghani as compared to pre-war conditions. Very nice. Of course we are now pouring massive amounts of international monies and administrative aid into the country. I’d guess that little effort has helped bring about our triumph as humanitarian saviors of the oppressed Afghani people. Their standard of life has shifted up a notch, at least in the short term. Very nice. Still, life for the average Afghani is at a very poor standard of living, something like 70% are malnourished according to the latest estimates from the UN, and self-sufficiency is still a distant speck on the horizon.
So, we (arguably) accomplished goals we didn’t set out to accomplish and that we didn’t give a shit about accomplishing except as incidentals on our way to our real goal. Our real goal has still not materialized and the incidentals are becoming a real headache with the potential to become very serious disasters.
You neocon types sure seem to like that word, “prism.”
Gotta poem for ya. Well ole Rummy, he looked through his prism,
But discovered it was all full of jissom.
So he turned a blind eye
And decided to lie,
Thinking, “Who cares if it causes a schism?”
(If I can’t get them to respond to reasoned arguments, maybe I can goad them into responding to bad poetry.)
As you say, Osama hasn’t been found. However, I’m not sure that we and others really are “pouring massive amounts of international monies and administrative aid into the country.” or that their standard of life really has shifted up a notch.
I think the country has been disrupted, we have an inadequate security force with personnel who must feel like lost sheep in the tall weeds, and our political attention has shifted elsewhere.
I agree that the Afghanistan thing hasn’t been a sucess in the original stated aims and I don’t think it is turning out to be a success in the modified aims of establishing a stable and effective elected government either.
This seems to be rather typical of GW’s projects. They are grandiose at the beginning but unsupportable in the long haul. I wonder what page of the paper Iraq will be on a year from now.
Actually, I think I figured out the master plan today, and part of it is the answer to which page Iraq will be on a year from now:
Kay has that feces eating grin on his face 'cause in about six months or so they’re going to come up with incontrovertible proof that the WMDs have been moved to either Syria or Iran. Syria’s more plausible, but plausibility doesn’t seem to be their main concern.
Anyways, they’ll issue an ultimatum, get a war going a couple/three months later, and get themselves a nice jingoistic push going into the election.
Of course, if Bush is re-elected on these terms, he’ll have to deal with:
1 - an all-out war with the Moslem world,
2 - sky-high deficits caused by his reckless spending on his adventures and his general militarism,
3 - a crashing dollar caused by #2, leading to
4 - sky-high interest rates and a cratering economy.
That oughtta be enough to keep the White House in Democratic hands for the next half century after he leaves or is impeached. Whether I or anyone of the rest of us will be alive to see this is an open question, but then our safety counts for nothing anyway, in the grand Bush scheme of things.
Iraq, btw, will be on page four or higher in the NY Times, and someplace equivalent in the paper of your choice. The soldiers dying for all of this? They’ll be filler items at the bottom of the articles about the important stuff.
So let me get this straight… David Kay is a Bush operative busy fabricating evidence that Syria or Iran has the WMD, all so Bush can start a war, destroy the economy, and therefore get elected next time around. Is that about it?
Let me know when you want to actually start having serious discussions again, because these wild conspiracy theories are getting rather tedious.
Well, it’s hard to be serious when Condoleeza Rice cites (The News Hour) centrifuge parts buried in a garden for 13 years; metal tubes long since discredited as anything sinister; and others proudly point to file cabinets with documents in them, all of which is presented evidence of such a clear and imminent menace to our security as to justify a preemptive attack on another country.
You want tedious? The continued statements by GW (et al) that, although several thousands of searchers have been unable to find materiel whose location we claimed to know, he (they) are still sure that Sadaam had a “nuclear weapons program” so well advanced as to be an immediate menace. Now that’s tedious.
So, what is the justification du jour? Rescuing people from a bad guy or an imminent threat to US security from: A) Weapons of mass destruction? B) Cooperation between Saddam and Al Qaeda? C) Saddam’s long lasting defiance of UN resolutions? D) Something as yet not thought of?
All of the above? Some of the Above? None of the above?
And, of course, GW is going to keep us and our over-taxed military pretty busy if we intend to prevent future misdeeds. Or now that Saddam is gone will such misdeeds stop?
Well, for months rumors that the administration was “cooking the books” regarding its intelligence on Iraqi weapons have circulated in the press. Administration officials have made dozens of false or misleading statements, as the historical record clearly shows. We know that Rumsfeld set up his own intelligence organization, one broadly accused of manufacturing intelligence that supported the government’s case for war. Finally, the entire anti-war movement was predicated on the fact that the administration was unable to present even a modicum of unambiguous evidence that the Iraqi regime had these weapons or was plotting to use them against US targets, despite the chicken-hawks shrill, near-hysterical protests to the contrary.
So no, I don’t find this particular puzzle all that terribly difficult to solve: they lied to us.
No indeed, although at this point I’m not sure we even know that.
However, absence of evidence is evidence that many of the assertions made by the administration prior to the war were lies. Lies so flagrant that I can’t really see how anybody could still be defending them. They repeatedly claimed they knew, with certainty, things that they did not know at all.
Back then, you defended those claims, and ruthlessly lambasted those who doubted them:
or
or:
Now, instead, you hedge:
Before the war: our intelligence information is so clear-cut and reliable that no reasonable person can doubt it.
After the war: Intelligence is never 100% reliable. We don’t have a crystal ball. We have maybe 10%, maybe 20%, of the picture, and then we connect the dots. Nevertheless, one is always justified in going to war even on the basis of “murky” intelligence estimates. Sorry, by the way, that we forgot to mention that our intelligence was “murky.”
No indeed, it does not. In fact, I suspect that’s what the administration is desperately hoping for at this point.
But as I’ve already pointed out, even if the administration lucks out on this Easter egg hunt, it means little. The current lack of evidence clearly reveals that, prior to the invasion, the administration willfully overstated the case for war. None of the information they claimed to have regarding “WMDs” has panned out – obviously, because none of that pre-war intelligence has led them to so much as a mason jar of jissom, yet. They’re batting zero.
I ask the reader to pause and reflect upon that fact for a moment.
You see, this is already off to a bad start. The very idea that the Iraqi government would share information on sensitive/banned weapon systems, or “give them” to a regional power rival, is really far-fetched to all but the neo-con artists’ conspiracy cabal. And the Syrian government would have to be extremely idiotic to get involved with a hot-button issue like chemical/biological weapons with the US breathing down Iraq’s neck.
But again: the administration did not have access to these documents before the war, so the documents have no bearing on the claims for certain knowledge they made then.
My, my, Sam how patient you’ve become since the war ended!
Imagine if you had been that cautious in evaluating the evidence before it started –
Oh, but wait. That would have probably meant opposing military action, giving the inspectors more time, etc.
One of the stated goals was to make Afghanistan a place that was no longer hospitable to terrorists. From what I’ve seen most of Afghanistan seems to still be a place that could/would harbor al Qaeda.
My position is, “Well, maybe we should wait until we see what’s there before declaring we must go to war immediately, world opion and subsequent costs and consequences be damned .”
To me, this seems like the prudent course of action. If you nad the Pres Admin think that’s a crazy notion, that’s a dangerous prospect to the national security of the US.
If you read speeches by Bush and his administration, you will find that they offered a substantial list of reasons, including humanitarian concerns. You will find that Saddam’s* failure to give up of WMD programs* was prominantly on the list, as was the risk that Saddam might cooperate with al Qaeda or other terrorists by providing WMDs to them. You will find that Bush did NOT claim that Saddam had a role in the 9/11 attacks.
Mr. Svinlesha, I am in awe of your superhuman patience with our interlocutor. Thanks for buttressing a point I’ve been trying to get across to him in the Pit.
I had said on several pre-Iraq-war threads that there were so many “goals” for the war being run up the flagpole by the Rove administration that, whatever happened, there’d be one available to match it so they could declare victory. Sam has done a fine job of illustrating that very tactic, except in regard to the Afghanistan operation that wasn’t even all that seriously doubted at the time by anyone.
**december, ** the “humanitarian concerns” far predated the current administration, but I find it difficult to believe that humanitarian concerns alone would have led the U.S. to do anything at all. Pure P.R. varnish.
You appear to have assumed that If a reason for war doesn’t justify action on its own, then it’s inconsequential. I don’t buy that way of thinking. We have to view the risks and concerns in combination.
Ah, but you see, more than just war must be justified. The manner in which we went to war must be justified. W/o the threat to the US, all that you have is a case to take to the UNSC for them to act on. It was the threat to the US that justified the actions that we took. While the various reasons tossed around may or may not be ample justifications for war in and of themselves or taken in concert, the sole reason given as to why we couldn’t wait for UNSC cooperation was that there was a threat to the US that was immanent enough that we couldn’t wait any longer than we did.
So the threat to the US is what was used to sell the war to the American public and Congress. Crucial to that threat were two things, banned weapons and the likelihood that hussein would share them w/ international terrorists who’d launch an attack against the US. Sans the banned weapons, the war was sold on a “misrepresentation.” With the banned weapons BUT sans the likelihood of terrorsistic cooperation, the war was sold on misrepresentations. Given that the CIA already’s on record as saying that it was very unlikely that Hussein would’ve launched an attack on the US or aided terrorists in launching an attack on the US, esp. w/ banned weapons, the finding of banned weapons is essential to even pretending to make the case that we were justified in going to war the way that we did.
I don’t at all think that human rights are inconsequential, but then I’m not creating or implementing U.S. foreign or military policy. It just irks me that they were used as a selling point for the war, when I think the Bush administration doesn’t really give a rat’s ass about human rights. I loathe hypocrisy.
Also, what SimonX said. If the need for war was based even in part on an “imminent threat,” somehow the threat seems less imminent when the activities mentioned as justification for war have been going on for decades.
