We don’t? There were buildings full of people saying what would happen, what was needed, etc. He just didn’t care to listen.
[sub]God, please find it in your heart to forgive me for what I’m about to do. Amen.[/sub]
I agree with Der Trihs…at least of the following:
These points are enough to make me wonder what’s going on in his head.
I don’t so much hate him as I do feel disappointed.
Ya let me down, George.
I hate him because I worked in one of those buildings, and he didn’t listen.
Why do you think he stopped chasing Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan?
What was there about Iraq?
Please read this speech made by the British Foreign Secretary before the war started. This was a top UK politician who had seen the ‘evidence’.
‘Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.’
'Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam’s ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors? ’
‘Nor is our credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.’
To sum it up in one sentence, because he’s either a liar, a fool, or some mixture of the two.
Was G.W. Bush trying to protect us from terrorism by invading Iraq? Well to be charitable, sorta kinda in the extended sense that he evidently believed that the long-term threat was from anti-western and specifically anti-American factions and regimes in the Islamic Middle East. What has people foaming at the mouth is the stupid/naive/hypocritical/fanatical mindset and decisions by Bush and his administration that led us to the current debacle in Iraq.
Evidently Bush and the factions within his administration and party known as the Neocons believed that the US could “clean up” the Middle East, overthrowing the regimes there and installing democratic, secular, pro-western governments. Iraq got picked on first because it was in the weakest position: it was under sanctions after the first Gulf War, and had previously been active in researching nuclear, biological and chemical weapons (“weapons of mass destruction”). According to -let’s be blunt- the fantasy that Bush & Co. had, US forces would overthrow Saddam Hussein, then “liberate” Iran and Syria, and then maybe even be able to force a permanent peace settlement on the Palestinians.
That Bush believed thiis was doable gets into the entire mindset and ideology of the current Republican administration. Combine an almost messianic sense of self-righteousness with a child’s-fable level understanding of how democracy works, and according to some claimants, an actual philosophy of embracing self-serving lies in the pursuit of a noble goal, and the invasion of Iraq seems like a proving ground for the pro-active ideology of the current leaders of America. Above all else, Bush & Co. seem to subscribe to something like a mockery or parody of truth faith: that if you simply belive something strongly and stubbornly enough, against all evidence, you can make it true.
Tony Blair, presumably, saw the same evidence and disagreed. I refuse to believe that either the Prime Minister or the President deliberately lied about the evidence or their motives. If they were as diabolical as people say, then they would have planted evidence.
I voted for Nader because I agreed with much of what he said and my state was as certain to go Republican as the sun was to rise in the east, plus I didn’t believe that dickweed Bush could possibly win. It didn’t matter how I voted, Indiana was going Republican no matter what.
Damn Electoral College.
Nope, Bush doesn’t get the easy out. Bush is the “decider” remember? The guy that is always talking up Executive Power and how he can do whatever he wants? Well, as Spiderman told us, with great power comes great responsibility. Bush was the guy who took us to war. It doesn’t matter who else was for it or against it - it was his call to make and he’s the one who made it. So when Iraq turns out to be a screw-up, it’s on him.
Did you ever hear this one?
Bush said it in his 2003 SOTU speech. The assertion was false. He knew it was false, He had been told it was false. The CIA told him it was false and asked him to remove it from his speech. He kept it in anyway, knowing it was false. If that’s not lying about the evidence, what is it?
As for motives, and as for what Blair knew, are you familliar with the Downing Street Memos:
This would not have actually been a feasible, logistical possibility, especially if they were trying to do it on the fly. It wasn’t like they ever thought they wouldn’t find anything. I think they were reasonably sure they would find something which could be held up as justification for the war. They kind of got caught with their pants down on that score.
In a nutshell Heckxx, is the type of voter Bush attracted, uneducated about politics and/or world events. These voters also took big gulps of the terrorism kool aide.
Who knew that there were 56 million of them.
From the Downing Street Memos:
“The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran.”
He believed there were WMD.
Or, as it turns out, the average Floridian retirement community.
For the record, the mere existence of a few WMD was never sufficient legal justification itself. Most people thought he still had some leftover shells from the 80’s. The issue was whether Iraq’s WMD capability posed a threat to the US, which it did not and which they admitted in the memo they were having a hard time making a case for.
If you read the whole memo, you’ll also see that WMD were not the actual motivation for Bush’s desire to invade Iraq, but were settled on only as a public justification for regime change. They wanted to knock off Saddam. They needed an excuse. They decided to go with WMD. Keep reading and it says they wanted to demand that Saddam comply with a bunch of inspections specifically in the hope that he would REFUSE and thus bolster their pubkic case for regime change.
You didn’t address the “16 words.” Was that a lie in your mind?
I think the animated critters in Creature Conforts do a god job showing why:
With GWB as the fly, Britney Spears as the spider, Rumsfield as the hound, Powell as the fox, and others commenting on the Iraq war. Just remembering how they lied to us and Bush not getting rid of Rumsfield a long time ago is enough.
Very, very, well said, PunditLisa. I’m quoting your entire post here because I think it bears repeating. You may be a lone voice crying in the wilderness, but at least you are the correct one.
To the OP, “everyone” doesn’t hate Bush, not by a long shot–though you’d never know it by reading GD and Pit threads around here. This board is dominated, in large part, by an extremely vocal coterie of hotheaded, irrational, uberbiased lefties whose point of view and declarations (i.e., Gore “winning” the election only to have it ripped away by the U.S. Supreme Court and bestowed upon Bush, as but one example) should in no way be taken seriously…unless, of course, they should indeed turn out to be the highly gifted mindreaders they so clearly fancy themselves as being.
Bush is basically a good man, who, I hate to say, went about doing the right thing in what has turned out to be the wrong way. It’s really as simple as that. Most of the hatred and venom-spewing that goes on around here would still be going on–and with much the same intensity–even had Iraq been a resounding success, for most around here are as reluctant to admit anything good about Bush as I am to admit anything good about Clinton, Carter and Johnson. 
Again, good on ya, PunditLisa. A superb post!
How can uberbiased lefties be irrational when they were correct about Iraq and predict the results of many other Bush ideas? And I think you missed that **PunditLisa ** in the end realized that George Bush isn’t the man your side thought it voted for.
You show a charming belief in politicians! 
There is no evidence that Blair believed in Iraqi weapons.
Tony Blair was desperately trying to stop Bush invading. Blair travelled round the World trying to get a UN resolution to authorise the war.
'The French are not yet convinced that the UN weapons inspectors have amassed sufficient evidence to justify a war.
Mr Blair made an implicit plea to Mr Chirac to rise to his responsibilities, pointing out that Britain before the second world war had nearly succumbed to appeasement. ’
'Mr Blair came under his strongest attack yet from the Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, who questioned whether intelligence briefings being leaked by the British and the US could be trusted as reliable proof of the need for military action. ’
Blair has been severely damaged by Iraq:
‘Tony Blair seldom enjoys complimentary headlines when it comes to bestowing or receiving honours. It is three years this month since the US Congress awarded him its highest civilian honour: the congressional gold medal. To date, it still hasn’t been collected’
‘Picking up a medal in Washington while British soldiers continue to die in Iraq is unlikely to go down well.’
‘Last December, Blair brushed aside a parliamentary question on the topic, saying he had “one or two other things to do at the moment”. A Downing Street spokesman now confirms there are no current plans to pick it up. Conservative commentators have complained that this is a “snub” to the American people.’
A leading UK weapons expert who helped write the ‘faked’ reports committed suicide:
‘Speaking at a government inquiry into the suicide of David Kelly – the scientist behind the BBC’s allegations the British government had “sexed-up” the Iraq dossier – Blair denied that the Iraqi threat had been exaggerated.’
'In his testimony, Blair insisted his government’s claims that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes were “perfectly justified.” ’
‘But he conceded his government had been under extreme pressure from the public to justify participating in the war, and said he wanted to use the intelligence on Iraq to make “the best case we could have.”
“The clamour for us to produce evidence was very strong,” the prime minister said.’
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20030828/blair_iraq_inquiry_030828?s_name='&no_ads=
'A former head of Downing Street’s in-house intelligence panel last night accused ministers of “overselling” the threat of global terrorism before the Iraq war by bombarding voters with repeated warnings of “imminent terrorist attacks on London” and Heathrow airport.
The charge - made by Sir Rodric Braithwaite, former head of the joint intelligence committee (JIC), on Channel 4 News - is separate from the row over two intelligence dossiers which has led to deadlock between No 10 and the BBC over its claims that they were “sexed up”. ’
Finally there was recently a UK TV program which satirised Blair over Iraq. No legal action has been taken by Blair over this…
‘The Trial of Tony Blair
Biting feature-length satire portraying the private travails of the Prime Minister as he leaves office after more than a decade in power.’
'It is some time in the future. Gordon Brown is moving in. President Clinton is looking for her second term in the White House. And Tony Blair has swapped the corridors of power for carpet swatches in his home in Connaught Square.
But some things don’t change: in Iraq there’s no let-up to the daily death toll and the ex-PM is as obsessed as ever with his legacy. ’
Not trying to be a jerk here, but do you have any kind of cite or rationale why you believe Bush is a good man?
Jimmy Carter is widely viewed as a good man and not such a good President. I for one wouldn’t put Bush in the same league as Carter in terms of “goodness”, would you?
Starving, it was the conservatives who promoted the idea that it’s not enough to say you disagree with someone’s political ideas - they decided that if you disagree with somebody politically, you also need to hate them as a person.
Personally, I never hated Bush as a person. Back in 2000, I figured he was a decent man in his personal life who was woefully incapable of fulfilling the duties of the Presidency. And as it turned out, I was right.
But I’ve found it more difficult as the years have gone by to keep my feelings about Bush unemotional. Because it’s not just some abstract theoretical country he’s screwing up by his incompetence, it’s my country he’s hurting. I don’t think he’s a bad President because I hate him; I hate him because he’s a bad President.
I can’t believe it’s taken so long for anyone to commend Enderw24 on his absolutely fucking brilliant and hilarious post on page 1. Nice job dude!