For about the hundredth time, he had a Congressional declaration of war. The Constitution does not state what form the declaration should take, so it was as much a declaration as the ones that got us into WWII and Vietnam. Congress passed a law allowing military force. Period.
Sam:
Thanks for the level response. I know from experience that it isn’t always pleasant when someone throws your own words back in your face like that.
Still, a contract is a contract. And if you stand by what you’ve posted previously, then you owe us. Three simple words.
I WAS DUPED.
You did say that you would admit that, should Kay fail to produce “compelling evidence of a very sophisticated series of WMD programs, and evidence of the existence of the weapons themselves.” Yet I continue to await the appearance of those three words in one of your posts.
We are in agreement.
**NOTE TO OTHER WAR SUPPORTERS/RIGHT-WINGERS IN THIS THREAD:
SAM STONE NOW BELIEVES IT IS TIME FOR A CONGRESSIONAL INQUIRY INTO THE INTELLIGENCE FAILURE SURROUNDING PRE-WAR CLAIMS OF IRAQ’S POSSESSION OF “WMDs.”**
(Don’t forget, from now on, to include him on your list of “Bush haters/ Bongo mashers.”)
Kimstu:
Thanks. That’s very much of what I was trying to get at.
SPOOFE:
Maybe. This is an open thread. Feel free to provide examples of those sorts of statements from the anti-war side.
For myself, I admit that I might have lost it in frustration once or twice, but on the whole, I’d like to think that I was generally polite and open to debate. I took my opponents seriously, assumed they were well-willing and sincere in their beliefs, and met even the occasionally absurd argument as rationally as I could.
But my patience is wearing thin. And statements like:
…wear it thinner, especially given how profoundly wrong the “pro-war types” were prior to the invasion. And the thing I’m beginning to really wonder is, Why in hell should I – or anyone else, really – take you (and your ilk) seriously, anymore?
Doors, you are absolutely right.
But for some reason, the President did not foresee that when we went storming into Afghanistan, the enemy would go scuttling into Pakistan. Either that, or he considered it irrelevant.
…to which my response is “WTF? And, so, invading Afghanistan accomplished WHAT, exactly?”
Yes, I know. We disrupted the Taliban regime, and temporarily fragmented Al-Qaida, at least until they made it into Pakistan and the hills of Afghanistan and regrouped. I’m just not sure that’s worth what we spent on it all, though… and what we will continue to spend on it in the years to come.
Yes, I know. “We liberated both countries from cruel dictators, yadda yadda yadda.” And we’re going to keep doing this whenever we see cruel dictators? Except, of course, when said cruel dictators adopt pro-American political stances?
:rolleyes:
I beg to differ. The documents in question are wildly different, with substantial differences in wording. There is a difference between a “formal declaration of war, duly examined by Congress” and a “license for the President to pretty much do as he likes, without Congress wasting much time on it.”
Are you proposing that it’s OKAY for Congress to just abdicate responsibility to the President under such circumstances? That you’re COMFORTABLE with one person merrily starting wars wherever he pleases, without much more than a cursory nod to Congress?
It wasn’t a cursory nod. If you’re wanting to place blame for the authorization, you should be looking at the members of Congress. They had the opportunity to vote it down and refused to.
And yes, it is OK for Congress to abdicate responsibility to the President. That’s what a declaration of war does. And as far as declarations go, you seem to be hung up in the wording, when it’s the substance of it that makes it what it is. Who cares if I say “I declare war upon you” before I start blowing up your house as long as I have permission to do so from the proper authorities? It’s a semantic arugment.
-First off, I agree. It’s looking like no such weaponry will indeed be found, and I count myself among those (mildly) surprised.
The problem we (in a general sense) faced, however, is that said weapons (either as finished materials, chemicals used to make them, or programs undertaken with the intent to produce them) DID in fact exist… at least, at one time. As I recall, even Mr. Blix was operating under the knowledge that, for example, X tons of Y chemical used to make Z toxin was known to have been shipped to Iraq through such-and-such a back channel, the question being, where did it go?
And that is what we don’t know. We were apparently operating under the assumption they were simply well hidden (not surprising for a regime with dozens of hidden bunkers and some 1,500 ammo dumps) but now it’s looking like they’re just gone. Does that mean they were destroyed and never documented as such? Still hidden? Stolen by bribed officials and shipped off to parts unknown? Sold to certain other parties, as yet unnamed?
Again, I’m not saying it justified the War, but Hussein was supposed to dispose of the weapons and verify doing so. That was, after all, part of Blix’ teams’ job- to verify the destruction of existing weapons, and account for both those that had already been detroyed and the chemicals and hardware used to create them.
Hussein may well have destroyed them, but he did not document doing so (itself a violation of UN resolution.) It may well turn out that, as noted above, Hussein’s flunkies were feeding him a bunch of stories- see this huge stainless steel vat? Ten tons of Anthrax, your Majesty. No, you don’t want to open that and have a look, now do you? Take my word for it.
(Yes, I realize that’s pure speculation.)
As of the end of '91, he was known to have X amount of such weapons. Through the 90s he was known to have aquired Y amount of further hardware or materials through back channels and dubious means. By 2002, only a fraction of all that was known to have been disposed of, so what happened to all the rest?
-And I’m rather afraid that anyone besides Bush elected in November will inevitably choose the latter. Bush is not what I’d consider an ideal choice, but for better or worse, it’s done, we’re here, we damn well better finish the goddam job. And I very strongly doubt any of the current Democratic canidates have the spine to do so.
The scariest thing about this entire thread is that it simply shows that some folks are still sufficiently dunderheaded enough to believe that George W. Bush wasn’t lying about Iraqi WMDs, even after the dust has been settled, the desert has been combed, and the inspectors having quit in disgust. People this dumb should not be allowed to operate motor vehicles, much less vote on anything beyond “what color should I paint the bedroom walls?”
And, once again, I am reminded of this Terry Pratchett quote:
But by whom? George Bush? Saddam? The intelligence community?
Look, I know you guys want to believe that George Bush and his neocon minions manufactured all this out of whole cloth. But the fact is, EVERYONE thought there were WMD there. My own government in Canada sure did, and we disagreed with the war. France did. Germany did. Russia did. There were disputes about how dangerous they were, and how advanced the nuclear and biological programs were, but no one seriously doubted that they were there. The Clinton administration thought they were there, that’s for sure.
So here we have a situation in which everyone thinks there are WMD, but only Bush thinks it’s a dangerous enough situation to go to war over. But then the war is over, and we turn up NOTHING. It’s a mystery. One which has not been solved.
If it turns out that the whole WMD thing was a facade, a charade put on by Saddam Hussein to gain stature in the middle east or in the mistaken belief that the presence of WMD would deter the U.S., then the blame falls squarely on him. If someone locks himself in a house, and then yells out ,“I’ve got a gun, and I’m going to start killing hostages!”, and a sniper shoots him, who’s fault is it if it turns out the guy was bluffing?
But maybe it’s not the case that Saddam was bluffing. Perhaps he honestly thought he had them, because his own scientists and generals were deceiving him. Again, who is to blame?
It’s also possible that the WMD is in Syria. This seems to me to be a longshot, but then the other possibilities also seem like longshots, so a Bayesian analysis would suggest that this is still a possibility.
I have yet to hear a decent explanation for any of this. If Saddam honestly, truly didn’t have anything to hide, then why did he suffer ten years of sanctions and the eventual overthrow of his regime? Why didn’t he just agree to comply with everything the U.S. wanted?
I’m confident that in the end we’ll figure this all out. What we can’t allow is for the whole issue to get swept under the rug. Even the hard-liners should want an investigation, because it’s critically important that the types of mistakes that may have happened here not be repeated. It’s also important for the U.S. to maintain credibility of its intelligence estimates. So we need to know what happened.
Sam Stone, I gotta tell you something, even if you won’t believe it. Back around this time this year I was in a bar bitching about the upcoming war. One of the guys I was with shook his head and said, “he [the President] is taking a big risk.” Everyone else who was with him nodded.
The reason why I mention this story is that not one of the several guys who agreed with that fellow’s statement will tell me what they do for a living other than that they work “for the Pentagon.”
In retrospect I understand that those guys knew there wasn’t a case yet. They knew that we were going to go into Iraq and make the case after the fact. I think that dramatically contradicts your statement about what intelligence services worldwide thought about those WMDs before the war, but I concede that my story is anecdotal and completely unverifiable.
In the past I’ve stated that the White House has at least acted somewhat honorably by freely conceding that they haven’t yet found those nasty weapons, but another little birdie sang in my ear not too long ago about that. You know who the intelligence services of the world are watching the closest now? Us, the United States. They’re watching the United States like hawks to make sure that we don’t plant the evidence we desperately seek. We won’t get away with it if we try. At this point, they won’t believe us, whatever we do find.
So it’s come to this. Our own allies are looking to drop the boom on the Bush Administration for this magnificent fuck-up, because they trust us not at all to do the right thing anymore. That’s just fucking sad.
I’m still proud to be an American, but I am utterly embarassed about and afraid of my government.
Damn. I say damn.
Why’d you have to go and do that, Sam? I take back all the nice things I just said about you.*
Yeah, in retrospect, there was some minor unpleasantness. But you, sir, are the master of the underhanded insult. For example, in the quotes above you classified me as “irrational,” “unreasonable,” “confused,” “hollow,” “marginalized,” and “dishonest.” All that from just a few randomly selected posts in two threads.
Is there any wonder you evoke a strong reaction in your debating opponents, clinging to obviously illogical arguments, often based on biased or downright false information, and then disparaging the intelligence and integrity of anyone who disagrees with you?
Yeah, so was december. I remember as well the reaction: when Collounsbury was banned, it was lamented, though mostly understood, since no one could deny that he had broken the rules. When december was banned, the board moderators were accused of left-wing partisanship in half a dozen pit threads.
So what the fuck does this have to do with your civility? Or do you mean that I’m somehow responsible for Collounsbury’s foul temperment?
Pathetic, Sam, really. Below you.
No, it was you who were wrong in almost every single instance. Iraqi’s greeting US troops as liberators, remember? Banned weapons falling from the skies like manna, no? 50 Scuds waiting to be discovered? Iraq a jewel of democracy in the Middle East, sound familiar?
What the hell are you talking about “everyone”. That’s because you were utterly blind to any other possible explanation; you swallowed the Bush story hook, line and sinker and put your fingers in your ears from day one.
And what is this Clinton shit still ? Do you not understand or do you not want to understand ? Three words: National Fucking Interest.
Again: It Is Not Always a Party Political Issue.
I’ll try a second point but it’s next to hopeless:
There is one enormous, neon lit sign, approx. 3,000’ by 1,000’ above the whole Iraqi war issue. It’s this for the hard of grasping; if one is interested in discerning the true undercurrents of an Intel influenced political policy, one has to distinguish between raw intelligence data and the *politicisation * (process) that Governments subject that raw intelligence data to; in other words understand, for Gods sake, that the Intelligence community is subject to the Government of the day and not separate from it.
Thus the Intelligence community does as its fucking told so, for example, if its told to keep its mouth shut, it keeps its mouth shut. At least officially.
Here’s a beginning, start joining some dots up:
“*Above all, they were concerned that Downing Street would use the intelligence agencies to justify a pre-emptive strike against Iraq in the face of widespread opposition at home. Downing Street needed intelligence for political reasons.
The intelligence community’s worst fears about this unprecedented use of their information were fully realised. The dossier may have been based on intelligence as Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s communications chief, insisted yesterday; the question was how the words were used and dressed up. *”
Once more with feeling: The politicisation of Intelligence data.
The truth really is not that difficult to discern if you are willing to apply faculties critically. It’s actually not even a party political issue, unless you want it to be.
You may count me among those who fully expected that Iraq had some chemical agents and maybe some biological agents (because both are relatively simple of manufacture) but questioned Iraqi possession or imminent possession of nuclear devices. My objection to the war was based on the absence of a clear and present danger to the United States and on the ability of the international community to contain Saddam with other, less drastic means.
Iraq has been pretty throughly ransacked and Mr. Kaye has resigned, and the searchers have found not even forensic traces of chemical or biological agents, and Mr. Kaye has said that the intelligence about Iraq and WMDs was ambiguous and inconclusive then and that based on what he has seen and knows now he does not think that Saddam had WDMs after the First Gulf War. Mr. Kaye made these statements in an interview on NPR this morning and the same thing has been reported in the general press. Mr. Kaye’s statement seems to be the cause of the Vice-presidents comment earlier this week that he fully expects to find just what Mr. Kaye, the expert who was on the ground, the professional with no political stake in the out come, concludes is not there and never was there. In the face of all this it is beyond my comprehension how those who still insist that there are WMDs and that they will be found or that they have all been smuggled to Syria can maintain that position.
A few of the advocates for the Administration, notably Scylia and Brutus, have both dispensed with the niceties of self-defense and barefaced contend that the war was an exercise in American dominance, like the gym teacher who slaps the biggest kid in the class around to silence the rest (the Big Dawg approach) or have reduced the proposition to: Iraq has oil, America wants oil, America takes oil. Both approaches are reprehensible but refreshing in their candor. These are hardly positions to be maintained by a nation that purports to be guided by the rule of law.
The Administration and others on these boards tell us that the elimination of Saddam and the liberation of Iraq from brutal tyranny alone justifies the war. That may be true if there was an adequate bases for the war in the first place. The elimination of Nazi brutality was surely a good result of The Hitler War but that is not why we went to war. The end of Japanese repression of Southeast Asia and China were good out comes of the war in the Pacific but that was not the reason for America’s entry into that war, Pearl Harbor was. I suppose there were a vast number of people in Sixteenth Century Europe who thought the conversion of the people of the Americas to Christianity was a good thing, but that was not the reason for the Spanish Conquest.
Once it is conceded that there were no WMDs, that Saddam was not complicity in 9/11, that there was no convincing body of intelligence information that Saddam was a material threat, then the removal of Saddam for the benefit of the Iraqi people becomes the rational for the war. In other words, an Administration that decried nation building as a waste of the nation’s resources has expended 200 Billion Dollars and the lives of more than 500 American service members to do what? Engage in nation building?
I like the Big Dawg wants oil theory better. It lacks the hypocrisy of all the other approaches.
You may well have made a most insightful observation there Airman - insofar as, your observation goes a long way towards explaining why (in certain parts of the world) the United States is perceived to be a bully who’s afraid to fight someone her own size.
I’m not saying that such a perception is correct of course - merely that it DOES exist in some regions - and depending on what your agenda is (within those regions), to desribe the US as an international bully is a much easier thing to do when you can point out the differences between how Iraq has been handled, and say, North Korea for example.
Sam:
Well really, Sam, to start with, you duped yourself.
You duped yourself by refusing to review the information from a critical perspective; by assuming as a default position that everything coming out of the White House was true, automatically, and that any other view was, by virtual definition, false. You duped yourself by confusing innuendo and rumor with fact, and by enthusiastically promoting the administration’s propaganda even though it often flew in the face of reason. You duped yourself by choosing to believe those parts of the puzzle that fit with your preconceptions while ignoring or rhetorically downplaying anything that didn’t fit.
Also, you duped yourself by wantonly misstating or overstating the opposing view, such as when you write:
But I know as well that your question is also a broader one. I’d just like to point out that none of your potential answers – George Bush, Saddam, or the intelligence community – necessarily excludes the others. In other words, you could have conceivably been duped by all three.
I think at this point there exists a general consensus, at least among experts, that the discrepancy between pre-war judgements and post-war findings represents a profound failure in intelligence gathering on the part of the US and Britain. So we have that to start with: that the intelligence agencies, for a plethora of reasons, were already overestimating Saddam’s “WMD” capacities. Surely, Saddam’s own actions contributed to that overestimation.
But then we have the issue of politicization as well, which Werewolf mentioned above. That is to say, members of the administration pushed intelligence analysts to produce interpretations of information that supported their presuppositions, or “stove-piped” raw intelligence data – from unreliable sources – around the standard vetting process and directly into the Oval Office. This led to a lot of questionable intelligence being accepted as fact by decision-makers, and compounded the overestimation already present in the intelligence product.
Then, finally, we have wholesale misrepresentations of this information, usually by means of dropping caveats and so forth, so that the already overestimated intelligence appeared even more certain in the public statements made by the administration.
Each of these problems compounded the previous one, leading the intelligence estimate more and more astray. By the time it reached its final destination – the US public – it was completely whacked.
For a balanced, in-depth explication of the above arguments, see this article in The Atlantic.
Highly recommended, even if I don’t completely agree with all of Pollack’s conclusions. But be sure to read the entire article, especially the last half.
I will say this as a war supporter:
The failure to uncover WMDs in Iraq - due either to faulty intelligence or the selective interpretation of intelligence - discredits the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war in my eyes.
The entire doctrine rests on the ability to gather and accurately interpret intelligence on the capabilities of the US’s enemies. The comments by Kay and Powell indicate that the US, for whatever reason, did not have this capability regarding Iraq. This is not altogether surprising, considering how off the intelligence community was on its assessment of the Soviet Union’s capabilities.
I also support a full investigation into this failure.
And while I won’t go so far as to state “Bush lied,” the failure to find WMDs seriously undermines this administration’s credibility, and handcuffs the nation’s ability to take on rogue nations. For that reason, my vote in November is now, once again, in play, because if Bush is unable to confront our enemies due to this failure, then Bush’s value drops considerably in my eyes.
(That’s as close as I’ll come to saying “I WAS DUPED.”) 
With that said, I remain deathly afraid that the Democratic nominee will abandon Iraq to its fate and operate as if we were still living on 9/10/01. There’s no going back to that date, although the left seems to think we can.
Based on a number of reasons - including the failure to find WMDs and how he has conducted the post-war Iraq environment - my support for Bush is eroding. But if the Dems put forward a turd (“cough” Howard Dean “cough”), then I’ll hold my nose and vote for the devil I know. Let’s hope the Dems nominate someone who’s credible to the middle and understands that we’re in a fight for our lives with certain forces of darkness. I’ll start listening to John Kerry.
Sorry, rjung, if that makes me an idiot. And by the way, fuck you very much.
Huh? WTF? Who is this “left” of which you speak? Are you talking about real people or the spectral lefties of your imagination? Or are you trying to sidle up to the insinuation that we of the left are inherently wussies, while the Bushiviks represent the “real men” - stern and hard-headed realists.
Theres a lot of folks dead now who wouldn’t be if it weren’t for GW Bush. There’s some hard-headed realism for you.
Boy. This sucker grew.
Anyway, I’m still on page one, and just to answer grienspace, who helpfully pointed out to me that we also attacked a slew of countries in Europe and the Phillipines after Pearl Harbor:
1 - We were attacked and driven out of the Phillipines by the Japanese. So your statement in re that country is historically inaccurate.
2 - As for the rest of your list, those countries were invaded and occupied by the Germans, who declared war on us shortly after Pearl Harbor, so of course we declared war on them right back. We then liberated those countries from the Germans. We didn’t attack any of those countries, we fought the German occupiers in those countries. Rather an important difference, I would think, given that we were, after all, at war with the Germans. Spain, OTOH, stayed out of the war, and so we stayed out of Spain. FDR didn’t apply Bushivik illogic to decide that he should invade and occupy Spain because after all Franco was a right-wing dictator just like the Axis guys. “Don’t start nothin’, won’t be nothin’.”, to quote one of Libertarian’s favorite sayings.
What’s this doing in the Pit? It’s a thoughtful, reasoned post… is this really the place for it?
Seriously, this is the sort of critical thinking I’d love to see from more Bush supporters (and, to be fair, more Bush detractors too). Instead, what we get more often is the sort of circle-the-wagons, fight-to-the-last-straw sort of defensiveness that Sam Stone has demonstrated in this thread, and in others.
Whether you supported the war initially or not doesn’t even really matter any more… what everyone – everyone – has to admit at this point is that the botched/misinterpreted/misused (not sure which yet) intelligence that led us to wage pre-emptive war on Iraq and potentially on other such “rogue” nations is not sufficient to make a policy of pre-emptive military force. Until our intelligence (or those who present it) is more trustworthy, such a policy is not only unjust, it is immoral.
Your post, GoHeels, was a breath of fresh air at the end of a fairly predictable thread. Thanks.
One of the best OPs I have ever seen... great job !! Congrats.
I do feel sorry for the bashing Sam Stone is taking and some of his comments (in this thread… not in the past) do ring true. Sam, it wasn’t about intelligence or the services that provide them… it was about manipulating numbers and estimates to create a much bigger threat than was ever possible. You duped yourself in a way for sure…
Yes, the anti-war crowd and myself did foresee some disaster “stalingrad” scenarios that didn’t happen or weren’t as big… but then that hardly compares with making up horror stories about 45 min deployable WMDs or Bush talking of huge quantaties of WMD that justified an invasion. Two VERY VERY different things.
The Bush gang made up, cherrypicked or manipulated intelligence in order to get the bleak WMD picture they wanted. I also thought there were WMDs in Iraq... but since the beggining I doubted the figures presented... the sofistication and delivery systems claimed by the Warmongers. After a decade of sanctions I thought Saddam had at best some chemical weapon artillery shells... and the ruins of a formerly secret nuclear program that got nowhere. Seems that Saddam was mostly bluffing about WMDs as a means of appearing more threatning.
During the Cold War the Soviet threat was constantly blown out of proportion to gain more contracts and dollars. Seems that the old ways haven't changed.In support of Master Wang-ka’s thesis, this deserves to be reprinted from the article he cited:
As the article points out, in every instance since Korea the President has deployed forces or at least had them under way to the war zone before asking Congress for any sort of permission, whether you deem that permission a legal declaration or not, thereby presenting the Congress with a fait accompli which challenges them to either agree to the deployment or be called unpatriotic.
The root of the problem is that the President has at his disposal a force large enough not just to defend the country but to invade any country on this planet before anyone can stop him. Until that problem is eliminated, this problem will remain, although the bill offered up by Ron Paul is a start.