Oh, okay. Still, it was only one reason. The humanitarian reason turned out to be true.
The problem is that the security aspect was the major point and there were no Terrorists and no WMDs. So the other reasons were FALSE. Saying it was humanitarian whilst creating world wide discontent and spreading terrorism isn’t much good.
I think the evidence you refer to. Bush et al set about claiming imminent threat from Iraq on faulty evidence, which was criticized practically right from the start by other people who also had acces to important intelligence – from fellow US politicians to foreign ones, branches of government intelligence, journalists, experts, and so forth. It would seem that, at the very least, there simply did not exist grounds for the remarkable and unwavering certitude with which Bush and Blair set about Iraq on the matter of WMDs. There simply was no immediate threat based on the reliable evidence (unreliable evidence, that’s another story).
Abe:
You still haven’t explained why Blair was “in” on the lying conspiracy and why he would’ve gone along with it. Ditto for the Dems like Lieberman. My point is not whether or not the evidence concerning WMDs was lacking.
Let’s assume, as you say, that there was ample evidence for everyone to see that there was no need to go into Iraq when we did. Explain how it “hangs together” that Blair and the Dems who supported the war were duped.
Did the Congresscritters get to see the evidence for themselves, or were they simply briefed by an Administration official and told what the White House believed? If the latter is the case (and I believe it is), then it’d be easy to bullshit Congress into going along with the war, especially if the skeptics weren’t able to see the evidence firsthand and determine if it was valid or not.
As for Tony Blair, I think he was simply willing to back the United States no matter what it did (riding the coattails of the world’s sole superpower is a safe bet), and probably didn’t question the evidence very hard.
Please provide a quote where President Bush said the threat was “imminent”.
To the contrary, he said in his State of the Union address in January 2003:
That’s a reasonable question, and I’m not really certain. I would assume that Dems like Senator Evan Bayh (member, Armed Services and Intelligence committees) did in fact have the opportunity to scrutinize the evidence. And he conitnues to support the war, without equivocation, today.
When sentiment in his own country was so strongly against the war? Seems like political suicide rather than a safe bet.
Anyway, I could be wrong about this. It’s just that all the conjecture people seem to be making requires, at some point, to believe that there is some sort of conspiracy going on between folks who normally would not be political allies. That’s what doesn’t “hang together” for me. If there is a good explanation that I’m missing, let me know what it is.
There’s two sides to that coin. Senator Levin, for example, was Chairman of the Armed Services Committee and also sat on the Intelligence Committee at the time the war resolution was passed. He voted against it.
Ravenman:
Point noted. But just because everyone isn’t in on the conspiracy theory doesn’t make it less of a conspiracy theory.
So how do you explain the support for the war by Bill Clinton (early on), or by Hillary, or by the numerous senators and Congressmen who have been in office throughout both the Bush administration and Clinton administration? Presumably, they’ve been getting the same briefings for years. At least, I don’t know of anyone who has said that the tone or substance of the national security briefings changed substantially between the Clinton and Bush administrations. Do you know of one?
What supporters of the war HAVE repeatedly said was that they had much of the same evidence for a long time, but what changed was 9/11. After 9/11, the government was predisposed to treating these threats much more seriously than than they did before.
It’s just spin to suggest that the Bush administration made up this evidence, and that the rest of the world was much more skeptical about it. EVERY major intelligence service thought that Saddam had a major stockpile of chemical weapons. Most of them thought he had a serious biological weapons program. There was more disagreement over nuclear weapons programs.
But I think it’s safe to say that when no WMD showed up in Iraq, a whole lot of spooks throughout the world started scratching their heads and going, “what the hell?”
I believe that the briefings the Congress was given were the best, honest assessments of the intelligence community. There may have been some spinning of the danger of some of it, or some selective downplaying of some of the more cautious reports (and exaggeration of the scarier ones), but certainly nothing was made up of whole cloth here. The CIA, NSA, and other agencies were totally flummoxed by the lack of WMD so far.
Assumption yours, Sam. I am not aware of any detailed briefings of Congresscritters on Iraqi WMD capabilities during the Clinton Administration. Similarly, there’s no evidence that Clinton has seen the evidence Bush (supposedly) saw; he could have been offering his support out of trust for a fellow head of state.
And while Bill Clinton might have suspected that Iraq might have WMDs during his time of office, there’s no indication that any signs of an imminent threat appeared during his watch – and given how vigorous Clinton was in combating terrorism during his term of office, I believe he would have taken such information seriously had it appeared.
Well, we both know that the OSP was not established until Donald Rumsfeld was installed as Secretary of Defense, and afterwards cherry-picked Iraqi intel to build a case for war – that would account for the “change in tone” right there. Do you know of any briefings that indicated Iraq posed an imminent WMD threat before the OSP was formed?
In a related vein, it looks like Great Britian had a covert op to create bogus intelligence to help build a case for war for Blair.
I don’t think anyone said the administration made up the evidence – they are saying, however, that the administration re-interpreted the evidence, to trump up the dangers.
Oh, not again, Sam – as the Nigerian yellowcake bruhaha already shows us, the CIA has been saying for a long time that the claims of Iraqi WMD danger has been exaggerated for a long time, and that they were telling the White House about it for months. Your attempt to spin this into “everyone was caught by surprise” fools no one but yourself.
Can you supply a cite backing up your “Same Old Evidence” scenario? Perhaps Powell at the UN telling us that all his satellite photos, vials of bacteria, and communications intercepts were dated, Bush saying that the threat posed by Iraqi UAV’s was a worst case extrapolation from evidence collected in the early nineties?
For your argument to hold water, there must be some pre-war record of high administration officials, publicly stating that most of their case for taking out Saddam was based on outdated intelligence. Of course, even with such evidence, you’d still be stuck trying to explain how 9/11 made it morally OK for the US to attack with an inadeqauate justification.
Without a security clearance, I have no way of knowing exactly what evidence the Intelligence Committee might have seen. I was just trying to point out that whatever evidence they’ve been seeing has been reasonably consistent between the Bush and Clinton administrations. Or if it’s not, I have yet to see anyone claim that the nature of the intelligence changed when Bush came into power.
As for the morality of the war, let me see if I have it straight: If there had been a real thread of WMD, the war would be moral. But going to war to stop the systematic murder of thousands would NOT be moral? Is that what you’re saying?
If so, that’s nuts. That’s saying that the POTENTIAL for thousands of deaths would be a moral reason to go to war, but the ACTUAL slaughter of thousands would not?
So why did we go to war Sam? Was it because we’re the world’s knight in shining armor? That’s NOT the case that was made, and donning it ex post facto when all your other justifications turn to naught is just TACKY.
Sam:
I think a lot of people simply have a problem accepting something that isn’t completely consistent in their eyes. Because Bush didn’t “say exaclty what the cause for war was”, then the war must have been wrong.
As I’ve said in another thread, I’d have much preferred that Bush came out and said something like “Hey, we made a BIG mistake back in '91 by not taking this guy out. He’s still terrorizing his people, and we’re wasting our time tring to contain him. He ain’t going away and he isn’t getting any nicer. So we’re going to go in and finish the job we left unfinished a decade ago.”
But he didn’t. He hemmed and hawed and had such a muddled message that people can’t get passed that to see the taking out of Saddam as, by its very nature, a moral thing.
It’s kind of like when Dad tells us he’s taking us out for pizza, and instead pulls up at the local ice cream parlor. Sure, ice cream is good, but Dad made us sit in the car for half an our discussing the merits of pepperoni vs sausage, when what we should have been talking about was chocolate chip vs butter brickle.
That’s not a very nice thing for a Dad to do, especially when given an honest choice between ice cream and staying home, many of us would have chosen the later.
John: You’re mixing two issues. One issue is whether or not Bush lied. The other was whether or not the war was moral. They are two totally different things.
I’m addressing the morality of the war. I’m having a hard time understanding people who say that the war would have been moral had Saddam been a threat to hurt us, but immoral if our aim was to stop the actual murdering and slaughtering of people en masse. From a moral standpoint, this makes no sense.
Sam: I’m not mixing the issues, I’m saying that other people are mixing those issues. I started this OP saying that I thought the war was moral, and specifically said on the first page that whether or not Bush lied is irrelevant to the morality of the war. Sorry if my post above was confusing.
Oops. hit submit too soon.
I think people are defing the situation thusly:
Lying is immoral.
Bush lied about the war. (debatable, but let’s accept this for now)
Therefore the war is immoral.
Not logically correct. Bush’s lying about the war might be immoral, but it does not follow that the war is immoral because of the lie.
President’s Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly, September 2002.
President Bush outlines Iraqi threat, October 2002.
President Bush’s State of the Union Address, January 2003.