The Congressional stamp only came down with such authority because the stampers believed there was a actual, dire threat to the US at hand. There are lots of effective ways to punish other governments without a full scale invasion by the US military. The overriding rationale presented for the necessity to go in and remove Saddam was to remove the threat of the WMDs. Without the threat of potential imminent nuclear engagement with Iraq being presented as a virtual fact there would have been many other options on the table short of invasion.
Yes, Astro, and that was my original point.
The Second Iraq war was driven by ill-consider intelligence and political power-mongering.
I consider the entire lead-up to the invasion to be driven by Cheney and Bush and darn the data.
Bush wanted to avenge his father, and Cheney needed to make more money.
How, the heck could we have voted for these guys?
Really?
Operation Snow White has got to be up there on the list of conspiracies.
I don’t really believe that the push to war in Iraq meets the definition of conspiracy–although criminal acts were committed along the way. As to some of the points being discussed here:
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People of good faith–Democrats included–thought there was a case for war. That was what they’d been shown–not the massive ambiguity and counterevidence.
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Many Democrats and Republicans were skeptical of the case, but chose to give teh Bush/Cheney admin the benefit of the doubt.
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Some of the members of Congress who’d seen the most evidence–members of the intelligence committees, the Gang of 8–were the most skeptical, but could not fully engage in public debate because they were sworn to secrecy about what they’d been shown.
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Democrats were appropriately scared of being smeared as “soft” by the Republicans–see the Republican ads in the re-election campaign of Max Cleland.
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9/11 was less than a year and a half in the rearview mirror. People were scared, including Congress.
Not to defend Congress too much, it’s an institution that is always willing to shirk its responsibilities. But it’s far too simple to say that Congress could have stopped the Iraq war.
They only had no nuclear weapons.
This is from the 90s but it is still after the Gulf War:
This is from 2004:
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2004_hr/100604duelfer.pdf (PDF)
There is no doubt they had WMDs at one time and even up to and after invasion in 2003. The only debate is if they had enough for it to be significant.
The poster child for an elaborate true conspiracy is the Dreyfus Affair.
You had plotters in the French military framing an innocent man, and later the French military establishment covering up the crime and enabling the guilty to go unpunished. Add to that a determined effort by conspiracy theorists and journalists to uncover the truth and succeeding.
If you improperly define any secret government/military operation as a “conspiracy”, then the Normandy Invasion probably beats anything previously posted here.
This is a GD discussion at this point so out of respect for GQ I won’t argue this (importance of WMD in getting AUMF passed) any further in this thread.
From a factual perspective though, I think it would be hard to call an administration cherry picking evidence to be akin to a conspiracy. Some definition of a conspiracy might be useful in general, really.
The common definition is (as Loach posted) two or more people plotting to commit a crime. Technically I don’t think the administration has a legal “full disclosure of all intelligence we receive” requirement, even when presenting information to congress. The closest Bush administration officials may have come to committing a crime in regard to WMD is if someone testified before Congress something that the individual knew to be false (perjury before Congress.) I’m not sure there is any clear cut evidence that actually happened, at least not sufficient to convict someone of perjury. There is a difference between saying something you know is false and saying something that some intelligence supports while other intelligence refutes. Especially since any trial would require a jury to examine the credibility of both sets of intelligence, it’s an iffy area because you can always make the argument you think one piece of intelligence is better than another and it is unlikely we’re going to start sending people to prison for making decisions between multiple sources of intelligence. Finally, even if we could establish perjury had happened I don’t know that it was planned conspiracy. I think in the run up to the Iraq war there were several different bases of power in the executive that all wanted war for different reasons, along with lots of groupthink and preconceptions about what was true and a desire to only look at evidence that confirmed those preconceptions. That sounds shitty government but it’s not the same thing as a conspiracy.
I don’t disagree. My original post in this thread also questioned whether this confluence of interests really qualified as a 'conspiracy". Short of Chalabi and his sponsored defectors telling outright lies, most other participants in the scrum thought they were doing the right thing. I am convinced that Cheney, to this day, thinks he saved the western world by his efforts to push the invasion of Iraq.
[Moderating]
In order not to derail the broader discussion, I think it would be best to request that that further discussion of the lead-up to the Iraq War and the presence of WMD to a new thread in Great Debates. While noting that it has been nominated as a candidate conspiracy for this thread, it has been discussed at great length elsewhere on the board.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Pretext for Invasion of Poland?
As in its not simply a military strategem, but was a political excuse for war based entirely on lies.
Otara
The Perfect Master takes a somewhat different view: Did General Motors destroy the LA mass transit system? - The Straight Dope
If not the largest, perhaps the greatest impact in the Renaissance, had it succeeded.
But, but it was the Zionists! And the Jews!! It must be huge. And evil.
Of course, issuing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a conspiracy.
nm
If you read the wiki article you’ll see there’s a lot of questions about this conspiracy. There’s some evidence of a conspiracy at GM, but it seems more a conspiracy along the lines of Tom Sawyer’s fence.
Santa Claus.
It involves hundreds of millions of people across several generations.
After reading the thread and thinking about it, I agree its got to be the Holocaust.
Watergate itself not so much, but often conflated with it are the Pentagon Papers revelations about the true history of US involvement in Vietnam, and the Rockerfeller Commission’s revelations about the illegal activities of the CIA. Americans had always considred themselves the “good guys” of the world, and it was stunning to discover that for twenty years or more the US government had been secretly assassinating leaders, overthrowing democratic governments for flirting with socialism, spying on dissident US citizens, using human guinea pigs in mind-control experiments, and in general being above the rule of law.
Not quite on the scale of the others here, but here’s one I thought would be bigger; Donaghy and the NBA.
It seemed there was always a conspiracy about bigger and popular NBA teams getting far in the playoffs. The referees would help out to ensure the NBA and the networks would get higher ratings. It came to a head in the 2002 Lakers-Kings playoff game, where LA had something like 18 more free throws.
Then it turns out the conspiracy was TRUE! :eek: A ref did influence games unfairly. This potentially had huge reprecussions for the NBA and sports in general. Yet, the story just went away.
The NBA and its fans seemed content it was a lone rogue ref gambling on games.