There’s a standard conservative view? I think it more likely there is a “Bush loyalist view.”
The “atmosphere of the time” was one of concern about attacks on the homeland. Lacking that excuse, there is no good reason to invade Iraq and dozens not to. Just because the WMD angle was used at the UN doesn’t mean it wasn’t critical to use in the US.
Prior to the invasion, all you have to do is look at Bush’s SotU speech to see what he felt was critical to justifying the war, and it was WMD, WMD, WMD:
That shows that Saddam was a continuing threat to the Kurds. He was not a threat to the US, and that was the criterion for going to war. The laundry list of offenses you quoted from the Joint Resolution were a meaningless preamble that gave reasons why we didn’t like Saddam, not reasons for going to war.
You failed to quote the meat of the resolution — the actual criterion for going to war — which was this:
In other words, the President had to formally declare to Congress, no later than 48 hours after invading, that it was his solemn determination that nothing short of war would remove the threat to the US from Iraq, or force compliance with UN resolutions regarding WMD inspections. Keep that in mind.
In October 2012, when that resolution was passed, those were legitimate concerns. We hadn’t had UN inspectors in Iraq since 1998, and the only prudent course was to assume that Saddam had continued building and stockpiling WMDs. The CIA had satellite photos of sites they concluded were WMD facilities, and they had reports from Iraqi informers that claimed specific knowledge of WMD facilities or stockpiles. That’s why I don’t blame anyone, Dem or Rep, for voting in favor of it.
And wonder of wonders, it worked. Saddam took the resolution seriously, and in November, 2002, UN inspectors entered his country for the first time in 4 years. At first there was the expected foot-dragging, but in every dispute between Iraq and the UN, Saddam backed down. By the time inspections were in full gear, the UN had unprecedented access, including, for the first time, full access to the Presidential palaces, and including unsupervised interviews with Iraqi scientists.
And it didn’t take long to show that our intelligence was wrong. At every site the CIA had identified as an active WMD facility, the UN found nothing. Some of them had obviously been abandoned for years. A site that the CIA had suspected of being a chemical factory didn’t even have running water.
The only weapons the inspectors found that violated UN resolutions were some (conventional) missiles. A UN resolution had prohibited Iraq from having any missiles that flew more than around 93 miles. The inspectors calculated (but did not prove) that the missiles they found could actually fly 111 miles. The Iraqis protested that the missiles would not fly that far once the payload was included, but once again, they backed down, and allowed the UN to destroy the missiles. Incidentally, the distance from Baghdad to Washington, DC is about 8,000 miles.
Note that these were not casual inspections. They were thorough, comprehensive searches by experts in the field. The UN did not give Saddam a schedule, so that he could shuffle his WMDs around. They visited sites with no notice, travelling by helicopter, and used ground-penetrating radar to be sure there were no false walls or hidden chambers.
Hans Blix, the chief UN inspector, presented all this in a report to the Security Council on March 7, 2003. He said that after the initial foot-dragging, the Iraqis had become not only cooperative, but even “proactive” in their cooperation. He said that while there were still some discrepancies, mostly to do with lack of proper documentation for the destruction of WMD stockpiles, that they could probably be cleared up within a few months. He was well aware that the new Iraqi cooperation was due to outside pressure, but he was confident that the continued presence of UN personnel would be sufficient to ensure adequate warning if Saddam should ever decide to resume a WMD program.
So by March, 2003, we knew a lot more than we did in October, 2002. We knew that Saddam had not been building WMDs. We knew that the CIA was wrong, in every case, about the sites it had identified as WMD facilities. We knew that the Iraqi informants (like “Curveball”) had deliberately lied about their knowledge of WMD sites. We knew that Iraq probably had no active WMD facilities or stockpiles, and had not had any for several years. We knew that given just a few more months, the UN inspectors could confirm the loose ends, and make that probability a certainty. And we knew that Saddam was actively cooperating with the UN, and that the continued presence of inspectors had removed any possibility of him resuming a WMD program without our knowledge.
In short, we knew that the inspections were working, and that war was not necessary to the national security of the US.
Bush didn’t care. As noted far, far above, in order to invade, the October 2012 resolution required him to formally declare to Congress that nothing short of war would remove the threat to the US from Saddam Hussein. In light of Blix’s report, that would require a deliberate lie on his part, not just in a speech to idiots who thought war was a glorious adventure, but in a formal letter to Congress.
He formally, deliberately lied. On March 18, 2003, he sent this letter to the Speaker of the House, and the President Pro Tem of the Senate:
The US invaded Iraq the next day. Thousands of US soldiers died, tens of thousands were seriously wounded, and untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died for his blatant lie.
I’m sure there must be a more stupid reason for going to war and killing a million people than not wanting to look bad, but I’m damned if I can think of one.
I’ve spent so much time on this topic, it seems I know it by rote.
Which leads to the same old tired questions:
1-Why would Saddam strike the US knowing they’d be obliterated like mosquitoes within minutes.
2-Better yet, if we were to believe the WMDs, with what delivery methods? Fuckin’ balloons? Jules Verne couldn’t have done better making shit up. Freedom Fries indeed. Dipshits.
I hate to say it, but I agree – plenty of semi-sane conservatives. See Chuck Hagel for a prominent one.
Gah, as a teacher things like this make me shudder. Texas has a law that dictates that all school children across Texas must use the same books. These books are reviewed / accepted / denied by partisan, elected school boards in Texas, which are frequently composed of people with little education themselves who have political agendas, and only scorn for academics in general bc the truth has a liberal bias.
Makers of history books for the whole country therefore write their books in such a way as to be guaranteed acceptance in Texas. It’s by far the largest single market and it has enormous power in dictating what goes into history books. There have been some truly frightening examples of how these books have covered the civil rights movement and other things.
Who knows what sort of zany crap they might put in there to further a political agenda which would then be taught to kids across the nation as Gospel truth.
Well, at least we finally have a thread that will let us debate the Iraq War.
Let’s keep in mind what the OP is asking: What is the conservative view, now, of the Iraq War. I think it remains the standard line that we had faulty intelligence. The quote in the OP about what’s in the textbook is rather “brief”, to say the least, but I don’t think it’s incompatible what that belief. Whether or not we agree with that belief is a different matter.
There is nothing in that article that says Bush deliberately lied to the US about WMDs in Iraq, which was the quote you were responding to and claimed to have proof of:
The link you posted is 3 pages written by some blogger on the Huffington Post about how Bush is a terrible person and twisted the facts in his memoir. Yes, what else is new? Evidence that Bush was a lousy president and twisted the facts in his memoir does not automatically prove your claim that he deliberately lied to the country about WMDs in Iraq.
You have now provided two random articles as cites that do not prove your claim. At least this one actually included the word “Iraq” somewhere on the page. Care to try again?
Regarding me, I was 15 years old during the run-up to Iraq and I honestly don’t remember what I thought.
The only ‘faulty intelligence’ in this case would be your warped mind’s interpretation of the evidence on the ground – the ‘slam dunk,’ proof of said mindset.
As for the rest, I realize you’re being cheeky, John…but for for fuck’s sake, this is NOT a debate.
In my earlier post, I obviously meant October 2002, not October 2012, as the date of the Iraq War authorization.
I was 30 years your elder at the time. Do your own research. You’ll find everything you need to know right here on the Dope – including many, many a post by yours truly.
PS-This one in particular might be of much help: An Homage To Mr. Svinlesha. Likely the most devoted/detailed poster in the whole SDMB in tearing apart each and every single one of Bush’s lies.
Enjoy. I don’t even if I was right from day one.
Exactly. If there were textbooks saying that Bush had knowingly lied to lead America into a war, then I’d agree that that would be a biased and unproven accusation. But, to me, these four items seem pretty objectively true:
- The United States led a coalition in an invasion of Iraq in 2003.
- President Bush was the main advocate for this invasion.
- The main justification for the invasion was that Iraq was currently working on a WMD program.
- No significant current WMD program was found in Iraq after the invasion.
So I’m wondering which of these, if any, are in dispute. Sam Stone seems to be the only poster who’s stepping forward to offer an opposing view and he is disputing the third point.
I really don’t care to revisit all this stuff tonight. You made a specific claim in the third post in this thread, that Bush “most certainly did [deliberately lie regarding the WMDs]”. I read both of the links you produced in support of this claim and neither backed you up. I am not going to dig through a 10-year-old Pit thread of yours that starts with rambling nonsense followed by this:
I was forty-two at the time and, personally, I supported the invasion. I can tell you from my own perspective, that the WMD’s were the main justification given.
This was less than two years after the 9/11 attacks and many people felt that we should be focusing our attention on that struggle rather than getting diverting in Iraq. My opinion, and I think the general opinion, was that Iraq was under control. The sanctions had been in place for over ten years and seemed to be working for the most part.
So I don’t think the Bush administration could have gotten authorization for an invasion based just on claims that a regime change was needed or as retaliation for past attacks made by Iraq. And claims involving terrorism and al Qaeda were double-edged - for every person who saw al Qaeda as a reason to invade Iraq there were other people who saw the ongoing existence of al Qaeda as a reason not to invade Iraq.
So the claims that Iraq was currently working on developing a WMD program and would have one in the near future were the main issue. That was a serious issue that couldn’t be ignored or postponed. That alone justified an invasion of Iraq in 2003 for most people (including myself).
There was a clear divide on the issue. Many people said that the claims were not true - they said that they had looked at the evidence and Iraq did not have any current WMD programs. So it is not true that everyone in 2003 believed that Iraq was working on WMD’s - there were plenty of people who denied this before the invasion.
The Bush administration disagreed. They said that these people had only seen some of the evidence and they were wrong. The Bush administration said it had secret evidence that it had gotten through its intelligence agencies that proved that Iraq had current WMD programs. Obviously they couldn’t show all this secret evidence for security reasons but they said it existed and it was conclusive. So many people (including myself) trusted the Bush administration and believed Iraq was working on WMD’s. So we supported the invasion.
And once we invaded, no WMD programs were found. It turns out the people who said they didn’t exist were right all along.
The Bush administration then began waffling. It claimed that it had never said they had proof, that they had never said there were current WMD programs, and that they had never said WMDs were the main reason for invading. They argued that everyone must have misunderstood what they were saying and they had never technically told any lies. That might be technically true but the Bush administration had made sure it said things in a way that would easily be misunderstood, could see that everyone was misunderstanding what they said, and made no efforts to clear up the misunderstandings. So it appears they wanted to be misunderstood.
If they’d listed 99 Whereas’s instead of only 23, would the War be even more justified?
I’ll save Dopers the tedium of studying the Whereas list.
[ul]
[li] 7 of them refer to the non-existent WMD’s[/li][li] 4 refer to Saddam’s (largely nonexistent) support of terrorism[/li][li] 1 is the attempted assassination against GWB’s father[/li][li] 1 is Saddam’s brutality[/li][li] 1 is thwarting inspections[/li][li] 1 is U.S. Iraq Liberation Act (Public Law 105-338)[/li][li] 1 is GWB’s goal of “peace and security” for the Middle East (how’s that working out for you, big feller?)[/li][li] 7 are boilerplate to justify the other reasons[/li][/ul]
No one who’s learned of the Iraq adventure from any source other than FauxNews can doubt that the WMD “evidence” resulted, not from ordinary ignorance, but from wilful ignorance; cf. Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame.
The only quibble I have is with #3, with I would word:
- The main justification for the invasion was that Iraq was currently working on a WMD program, and that these WMD posed a danger to the US inasmuch as SH might deliberately let them fall into the hands of terrorists to be used in attacks against the US not unlike those of Sept 11, 2001.
::::shrug::::
Presumably, you still are.
lol
This is not true, the Bush administration did not have secret evidence that it relied on. The evidence was provided to all appropriate members of government and they all agreed on it.
“Saddam’s goal … is to achieve the lifting of U.N. sanctions while retaining and enhancing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. We cannot, we must not and we will not let him succeed.” — Madeline Albright, 1998
“(Saddam) will rebuild his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and some day, some way, I am certain he will use that arsenal again, as he has 10 times since 1983″ — National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Feb 18, 1998
“The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retained some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capability. Intelligence reports also indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons, but has not yet achieved nuclear capability.” — Robert Byrd, October 2002
“There’s no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat… Yes, he has chemical and biological weapons. He’s had those for a long time. But the United States right now is on a very much different defensive posture than we were before September 11th of 2001… He is, as far as we know, actively pursuing nuclear capabilities, though he doesn’t have nuclear warheads yet. If he were to acquire nuclear weapons, I think our friends in the region would face greatly increased risks as would we.” — Wesley Clark on September 26, 2002
“I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons…I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out.” — Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Cohen in April of 2003
“Saddam Hussein’s regime represents a grave threat to America and our allies, including our vital ally, Israel. For more than two decades, Saddam Hussein has sought weapons of mass destruction through every available means. We know that he has chemical and biological weapons. He has already used them against his neighbors and his own people, and is trying to build more. We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons, and we know that each day he gets closer to achieving that goal.” — John Edwards, Oct 10, 2002
“In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security.” — Hillary Clinton, October 10, 2002
“Iraq does pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf and we should organize an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.” — Al Gore, 2002
“We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.” — Bob Graham, December 2002
“There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein’s regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed.” — Ted Kennedy, Sept 27, 2002
“The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons. He has had a free hand for 4 years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation.” — John Kerry, October 9, 2002
“As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am keenly aware that the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is an issue of grave importance to all nations. Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.” — Nancy Pelosi, December 16, 1998
“Even today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed. Based on highly credible intelligence, UNSCOM [the U.N. weapons inspectors] suspects that Iraq still has biological agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin, and clostridium perfringens in sufficient quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic missile warheads, as well as the means to continue manufacturing these deadly agents. Iraq probably retains several tons of the highly toxic VX substance, as well as sarin nerve gas and mustard gas. This agent is stored in artillery shells, bombs, and ballistic missile warheads. And Iraq retains significant dual-use industrial infrastructure that can be used to rapidly reconstitute large-scale chemical weapons production.” — Ex-Un Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter in 1998
“If we trust our [intelligence] services, and I do, then we know that there exist weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” Friedbert Pflueger-member of German Parliament after briefing by the BND 2002
"In February 2001, the BND compiled a further report and intelligence chief August Hanning told Spiegel magazine that, “Since the end of the UN inspections [December 1998], we have determined a jump in procurement efforts by Iraq,” adding that Saddam was rebuilding destroyed weapons facilities “partly based on the German industrial standard”.
According to the report:
Iraq has resumed its nuclear program and may be capable of producing an atomic bomb in three years;
Iraq is developing its Al Samoud and Ababil 100/Al Fatah short-range rockets, which can deliver a 300kg payload 150km. Medium-range rockets capable of carrying a warhead 3,000km could be built by 2005 - far enough to reach Europe;
Iraq is capable of manufacturing solid rocket fuel;
A Delhi-based company, blacklisted by the German government because of its alleged role in weapons proliferation, has acted as a buyer on Iraq’s behalf. Deliveries have been made via Malaysia and Dubai. Indian companies have copied German machine tools down to the smallest detail and such equipment has been installed in numerous chemicals projects. [Note that such Indian cooperation with Iraq is something of a tradition: during the Iran-Iraq war India delivered precursors for warfare agents to Iraq - and later was found to have delivered quantities of the same materials to Iran. Baghdad’s middleman at the time, an Iraqi with a German passport, founded a company in Singapore expressly for this purpose.]
Since the departure of the UN inspectors, the number of Iraqi sites involved in chemicals production has increased from 20 to 80. Of that total, a quarter could be involved in weapons production. "
"The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation’s defense. " NY Times -2006
The American Intelligence agencies had evidence they believed showed the Hussein had stockpiles of chemical weapons and was trying to produce nuclear weapons. Everyone who looked at this evidence believed it. The intelligence agencies of Britain, France, Germany, and Israel also believed Iraq had ongoing WMD programs. Iraq’s military leadership believed there were stockplies of chemical weapons until three months before the war. The idea that it was only the Bush administration who believed in the WMD programs were ongoing is demonstrably false. The US spends hundreds of billions of dollars on intelligence agencies, the headof the CIA told Bush that the existence of WMD was a “Slam Dunk”. I guess Bush could have trusted the word of Saddam Hussein over the opinion of his intelligence agencies but that does not seem like reasonable thing to do.