Not at all. The overwhelming majority in the USA did - including on this message board - and the UK was split 50/50 despite Blair’s fabricated ‘dossier’. The section of of the UNSC that was required to pass the Resolution was bought by the USA with grace and favour, no majority of any country or population believed in WMD other than the USA.
You only need to look at the absurdity of the healthcare debate to observe the game is rigged.
Iraq kicked the inspectors out in August 1998. They were let back in in November. Iraq was still not fully cooperative, though. We launched Desert Fox in December, and of course pulled the inspectors out before the air strikes. The inspectors went back in around 2002.
It wouldn’t surprise me of the timing with the Lewinsky scandal, but there was proper motive without it.
What do you mean Saddam was set up by Clinton? Saddam was no spring chicken. In 1998, Saddam was either hiding something, or likely, as we now know, he was intentionally deceiving his capabilities (or lack thereof). It was a game of cat and mouse that went on for 12 years.
Equipo Nizkor - CIA warned Bush of no WMD in Iraq: retired official. Nor are you. There were many in the CIA who told the truth. They were ignored or broomed. Most of the CIA originally told it like it was. But the Cheney babysitting and constant pressure to get whet they wanted ,wore them down. They politicized the CIA. That is a special kind of lie.
No history of this is complete without pointing out that the reason Iraq gave for not cooperating with UNSCOM is that the U.S. and Britain were using it as a spy operation, a claim that was later verified as fact in the American media on the basis of multiple sources in the U.S. government and the U.N. (It was also accepted as fact by Hans Blix in this Fresh Air interview when Blix talks of trying to keep the 2003 inspection regime more professional.)
By the way, this story from a month before the start of the Iraq War is also worth reading. It shows that while it was hard for the inspectors to prove a negative…i.e., that Saddam had no WMD…what they were finding is that the U.S. intelligence of where WMD supposedly were was “garbage”.
It is interesting because what Drumheller has said seems to be at odds with what Paul Pillar has viewed as the failures of the intelligence agencies leading up to the Iraq war. Drumheller was apparently head of European operations at the time. Pillar was head of intelligence analysis for the Near East. Pillar has never said there was a smoking gun witness who disproved the case for war. Instead, Pillar has said that the Administration relied on suspicions of a WMD threat to believe what intelligence they wanted to, and disregard what didn’t fit into their view, that Saddam was a threat and had to be taken out.
What I’m saying is there’s a difference between a zealot on the streetcorner and a faithless televangelist. Both say that Jesus is coming back soon and you better start believing. I wouldn’t say the zealot is lying. YMMV.
The UN didn’t authorise the invasion. The US is a signatory to the UN charter. Ergo the war was illegal.
And the French and Russians I’m sure. There was thinking throughout the 90’s was Saddam needed to be removed and a democratic government installed.
I stated previously the US relied on the authorization from the previous open-ended 1991 resolution. This is tenuous, but it’s the US stance for conforming to the UN principles of requiring authorization for war.
The later resolution (#1441) was unclear whether it’s breach (which the Iraqi’s did) would mean war, or would mean you need to go back and get a new resolution for war. The US/UK did try to get a new clearer resolution, and as you correctly point out, this was was not authorized.
#1441 states (generally): UN finds Iraq in material breach, stemming from the 1991 resolution. UN warned Iraq it would “face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations.”
War is illegal internationally in all circumstances unless the UN authorizes it (tenuous, but arguable), or you fight in self defense or helping someone fight in self defense (somewhat credible in 2003 by way of preventive self defense, not credible today).
Domestically, it was perfectly legal.
Bush spent months trying to get a UN resolution to invade Iraq. When he failed he flip flopped and said he didn’t need authority to invade. The US was a rogue nation against the wishes of the international community, and international law. It wasn’t OK domestically, the US is a signatory to the UN constitution and so the UN constitution is the supreme law of the land in the US. Bush is therefore an international war criminal.
Posted on: Tuesday, March 18, 2003
War looms as Bush issues final warning
By Dana Milbank and Mike Allen
Washington Post
WASHINGTON — President Bush vowed yesterday to attack Iraq with the “full force and might” of the U.S. military if Saddam Hussein does not flee within 48 hours, setting the nation on an almost certain course to war.
Bush delivered the ultimatum hours after his administration earlier in the day admitted failure in its months-long effort to win the blessing of the U.N. Security Council to forcibly disarm the Iraqi leader. The United Nations ordered its inspectors and humanitarian personnel out of Iraq, and Bush urged foreign nationals to leave the country immediately.
[…]
Earlier in the day, British and U.S. diplomats, facing certain defeat on the Security Council, withdrew a resolution that would have cleared the way for war. Though Bush on Sunday vowed another day of “working the phones,” it quickly became clear that as many as 11 of 15 council members remained opposed and the effort was abandoned by 10 a.m.
The withdrawal of the resolution without a vote was a double climb-down for Bush. On Feb. 22, he had predicted victory at the United Nations, and on March 6 he said he wanted a vote regardless of the outcome.
[…]
Bush defiantly asserted a right to attack Iraq, even without sanction from the Security Council. “The United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security,” he said. “The United States and our allies are authorized to use force in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. This is not a question of authority. It is a question of will.”
I supported the invasion in 2003 because my President told me that an enemy had a WMD program and was close to having a nuclear program. He said that this was an extension of the war on terror: If you allow a rogue dictator like Hussien to have these weapons, he will sell them to an Al-Qaeda agent and we will have a dirty bomb explode in NYC. We need to go into Iraq to control these weapons.
And it wasn’t just Bush; I heard Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh say on MSNBC that he would bet the lives of his children that Saddam had these weapons. Jay Rockefeller saw the intelligence and said that he believed that there were WMDs.
The only opposition, at least in this country, was by politicians who believed that we needed to let the inspectors do their job and that force was not necessary yet.
Now, I understand that you can’t prove a negative, but I still haven’t seen where anyone has said that they believed that the fact that he had WMDs was nonsense. Sure, some countries thought that the reports might be overstating the amounts of weapons, and that there was disagreement over whether he was close to nuclear capabilities, but the belief was there and it was universal, as I recall.
And, again, we’re at the crux of the problem. Bush and his administration, were the only ones with all the intelligence and chose to share only that which supported the invasion and hid/ignored all the evidence to the contrary.
The President, as President, has an enormous amount of credibility and respect. People want to trust him, people want to believe he is right. And it was that credibility, that respect, and that trust that made his claims of an imminent threat, believable. Unfortunately for us, it was ONLY those things and not the evidence.
We, as a country, trusted our President, and he proved himself completely unworthy of that. He and his adminstration betrayed the American people.
I know I’ve pointed this out before, why just one post of mine ago, but here it is again: “Again, you seem to misunderstand the entire point. Nobody KNEW he had nothing, just like nobody KNEW he had WMD’s. The entire point is that Bush sold the invasion as if we did know, as if we were sure, Saddam was a imminent threat. It seems to me you’ve shifted the burden from justifying the deaths and dollars that come with an invasion, to proving that countries knew we shouldn’t invade.”
You’ve been provided numerous cites. I suggest you read them. And, again, everyone agreed Saddam MIGHT have had WMD’s. Which is why there were weapon’s inspectors there. Which is why the UN was involved.
But what Bush and his administration did was take that MIGHT that everyone agreed on and turned it into DOES. And he did it with very little, cherry picked and sometimes fraudulent “evidence”. And rather than make a reasoned decision about the MIGHT, and rather than letting the inspectors do their job, he made a decision that cost tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives, tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars, and more. And he took that decision to the American people and misled them into believing that Iraq was an imminent threat.
You had to have had some pretty strong filters in place to think that.
I’ve not seen the slightest shred of evidence that Bush cherry picked anything, let alone lied.
Intelligence gathering is always an uncertain process, and there will virtually always be conflicting opinions which disagree about interpretation of evidence. At some point a decision has to be made, and it will of necessity involve picking one particular viewpoint as the likeliest one. How do you distinguish that from cherry picking?
It’s not enough to show that alternative viewpoints were out there. You need to show that these opinions were the dominant ones, shunted aside by Bush based on his agenda. Otherwise you have nothing.
:rolleyes: Maybe you should try paying attention. Read the thread.
When you consistently refuse to listen to evidence that disagrees with your preconceived notion, and instantly accept without question anything that agrees with said notion, and especially when your associates put pressure on those presenting the evidence to present only evidence that agrees, then you’re at the very least cherry picking.
It has been shown. Try to keep up with the rest of the class.
I thought I remembered Bush saying the the threat was NOT imminent. I looked it up it found where he acknowledges that it was NOT imminent.Here:
(emphasis mine)
I’m no Bush fan, but it seems that the notion that Bush lied by claiming the threat was imminent is either a lie or just a good old fashion mistake.
Except we then have this press conference four months later:
So which is it?
ETA: Focusing on phrases like “imminent threat” is frankly irrelevant. The tone of the speech you quoted is the same: we must act now before it’s too late.
Oh, come on. There are always dissenting voices. President has to choose which ones to go with. Just because he does so doesn’t mean those opinions that his action are in conflict with were “ignored” or “broomed”. If that’s the case then virtually every decision by every president can be painted the same.
When you so cling to certain premises that it causes you to conclude and say things like this—that something that is not a lie is a “special kind of lie”—it’s time to rethink your premises.
No it hasn’t been shown.
Your confusion apparently lies in your inability to distinguish between assertion/opinion and evidence. Try again with that distinction in mind.
To, me that last bit uses the word imminent to mean ‘seconds from happening’. He’s basically saying ‘they can strike at any time, we don’t know when, so we have to get them before they get us’. The ‘they can strike at any time’ bit can also be taken to mean the threat is imminent, for a slightly different usage of the word.
Besides, they didn’t know Saddam had any of the things they were claiming made the threat. He linked the events of 911, which had nothing to do with Saddam or Iraq, and some imagined threat and said that have to get them before they get us. So we get two lies for the price of one.