I realize you addressed this to elucidator, but since when should evidence supporting our invasion of another country be treated as “a surprise?” What is this, my 30th birthday? Hopefully you got a stripper in a cake, too.
Absolutely. Please let me in on some of that action.
It’s late September and I really should be back in the goodwill of the nations of the world.
I’ll take some of that action, Milum. Each of my dimes will say that any September surprise (other than Isabel, of course) will turn out to be the same old BS by the time Dope-A-Ween rolls around. (That’s October 25, JFTR.)
Except for the “we misspoke ourselves earlier when we made all those claims about WMD/the Saddam-bin Laden connection/etc.” surprises. The only thing surprising there is that they’re starting to own up to having baldfacedly lied to us in order to get us into this trackless quagmire.
I’ve got a lot of dimes. Email me with the number of dollars you care to put up.
Damn, Hentor, that was good. If life was fair, you’d get a stripper in a cake as a reward for that one.
But if life was fair, Bush wouldn’t be in the White House. (Guess we can fix that in a year or so, but cleaning up after the elephants is always such a mess.)
ElvisL1ves
[Moderator Hat ON]
Keep it in the Pit, ElvisL1ves. “Admit you’re an ass!” is just calling someone an ass, no matter how you dress it up.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
You mean the ‘quagmire’ when our troops were held up for all of a week at the Karbala Gap? I was actually gonna point that out initially. Seems to me that the ‘quagmire’ claim at that time reinforces the idea that we were expecting a nearly instantaneous win.
I haven’t seen the report; all I know of it is what you’ve said here. But that much of it seems ludicrous to me on the face of it, and I’m familiar with bureaucratic CYA techniques, since I work in that universe now.
What assets did we need? And why weren’t they waiting at nearby US bases, ready to go, on March 20?
Oh, c’mon. Rumsfeld’s plan from the beginning was clearly to get to Baghdad as lightly and rapidly as possible, with an absolute minimum of consolidation and reinforcement. That’s as in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the guy in charge of making the plans.
Yeah, but at first, ‘long’ and ‘difficult’ were clearly intended in terms of months.
Show me one utterance, one quote, from Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfie, Rice, or Powell, from before the war, that says or strongly implies that we’ll have tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for more than two years.
Which is why, before this past week or two, the Administration had only asked for a few billion for Iraqi reconstruction. Every thing that’s happened shows how they’ve been caught by surprise by the degree of difficulty here. Starting with the reality that they never tried to sell this part in advance to the American people. Hell, I was bitching about that back in March, as were the other lefties in this debate at the time: it was clear beforehand that the war would be comparatively easy, and the aftermath was the real deal - and last winter, one practically needed to aim a gun at the Administration’s head to get them to talk about the aftermath in even the most vague terms.
And so we’ve been doing stuff like not letting them hold local elections, but instead starting off with this top-down 25-headed group with Chalabi as one of the heads.
The problem is, what are the legitimate authorities, in a divided nation? You presumably saw my Cheney quote on the previous page. Do we let the Shi’ites run things? The Sunnis? The Kurds? Do we divide Iraq in thirds? (The Turks would love an independent Kurdistan on their border.) The deep problem here is, there’s really no good solution in terms of who to hand this mess over to, either now or in the long run. That’s old news, but the Bushies didn’t read it, including the Veep who said it a dozen years ago.
Sorry. I thought you knew that our folks over there claimed that Baghdad was no more dangerous than any American city. Well, it’s apparently forty times as dangerous. What’s more, it’s considerably more dangerous now than it was a year ago.
And after that, what’s a reasonable timeline for constituting new authority? And why didn’t the Administration warn us in advance that it was going to take that long, with this many troops?
If the issue is whether we’re making life better for Iraqis (which is the only remaining possible justification for this venture) anything that makes them fear going into the street is the concerning issue. That includes rapes and kidnappings and stuff. If we went to war partly because of the repugnance of Saddam’s “rape rooms” (to quote Bush) then the incidence of rape in Iraq now is an issue. If it’s not, then Bush lied to us. Again. Again. Again.
You mean the ‘quagmire’ when our troops were held up for all of a week at the Karbala Gap? I was actually gonna point that out initially. Seems to me that the ‘quagmire’ claim at that time reinforces the idea that we were expecting a nearly instantaneous win.
I haven’t seen the report; all I know of it is what you’ve said here. But that much of it seems ludicrous to me on the face of it, and I’m familiar with bureaucratic CYA techniques, since I work in that universe now.
What assets did we need? And why weren’t they waiting at nearby US bases, ready to go, on March 20?
Oh, c’mon. Rumsfeld’s plan from the beginning was clearly to get to Baghdad as lightly and rapidly as possible, with an absolute minimum of consolidation and reinforcement. That’s as in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the guy in charge of making the plans.
Yeah, but at first, ‘long’ and ‘difficult’ were clearly intended in terms of months.
Show me one utterance, one quote, from Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfie, Rice, or Powell, from before the war, that says or strongly implies that we’ll have tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for more than two years.
Which is why, before this past week or two, the Administration had only asked for a few billion for Iraqi reconstruction. Every thing that’s happened shows how they’ve been caught by surprise by the degree of difficulty here. Starting with the reality that they never tried to sell this part in advance to the American people. Hell, I was bitching about that back in March, as were the other lefties in this debate at the time: it was clear beforehand that the war would be comparatively easy, and the aftermath was the real deal - and last winter, one practically needed to aim a gun at the Administration’s head to get them to talk about the aftermath in even the most vague terms.
And so we’ve been doing stuff like not letting them hold local elections, but instead starting off with this top-down 25-headed group with Chalabi as one of the heads.
The problem is, what are the legitimate authorities, in a divided nation? You presumably saw my Cheney quote on the previous page. Do we let the Shi’ites run things? The Sunnis? The Kurds? Do we divide Iraq in thirds? (The Turks would love an independent Kurdistan on their border.) The deep problem here is, there’s really no good solution in terms of who to hand this mess over to, either now or in the long run. That’s old news, but the Bushies didn’t read it, including the Veep who said it a dozen years ago.
Sorry. I thought you knew that our folks over there claimed that Baghdad was no more dangerous than any American city. Well, it’s apparently forty times as dangerous. What’s more, it’s considerably more dangerous now than it was a year ago.
And after that, what’s a reasonable timeline for constituting new authority? And why didn’t the Administration warn us in advance that it was going to take that long, with this many troops?
If the issue is whether we’re making life better for Iraqis (which is the only remaining possible justification for this venture) anything that makes them fear going into the street is the concerning issue. That includes rapes and kidnappings and stuff. If we went to war partly because of the repugnance of Saddam’s “rape rooms” (to quote Bush) then the incidence of rape in Iraq now is an issue. If it’s not, then Bush lied to us. Again. Again. Again.
Gaudere, my apologies. We have been getting a little feisty on the subject of believing lies and generating new ones, and I went a little too far.
Could be, but only because he’s the only person in the administration other than Bush himself who can’t be fired. If he takes a bullet, the wound cannot be fatal to him. But I’m still convinced that he’s the person in charge there, and would not be likely to take a bullet for Rumsfeld or anyone else.
I read it as a half-baked attempt to put the issue of White House lying about the war behind all of them - if pressed, he can say he already admitted “misspeaking”, and it’s time to move on with the business ahead etc. We all know the words to that song. There will be no bullet-taking in this administration, or in any other that doesn’t think its grip on power is in mortal danger. If Bush is behind in the polls a year from now, that assessment may change, but this specific issue won’t be current anymore.
Uh oh, Cheney’s listed as odd man out again:
Could also be Cheney being “outed” by someone with a grudge against him (take a number and get in back of the line), using the old “unnamed sources telling our reporter” trick to embarrass him and undermine his internal authority. But Cheney can’t be fired, and everyone else in the Executive Branch other than Bush can be.
No surprise to anyone, but the Kaye report has been delayed indefinitely. Here’s the transcript with Condoleezza.
And here’s the relevant quote:
Karl Rove definitely wouldn’t let an inconclusive report come out in a week when four Democratic candidates are tied in the polls with Bush. And for those true believers who think that the administration is not politicizing this, I ask you why they would announce that they were on schedule for a September date as late as Sept. 7, given that they already knew they had “miles of documentation, the hundreds, even thousands of interviews.” Did all that just sneak up on them last week? No, Wesley Clark did.
Adults in charge my ass.
I got a spy at Fox News. Here it is. In 10,000 documents, there are 657 references to “nerve gas”! Thats right! 300 occurances of “nerve”, 357 occurances of “gas”! What more proof do you need?
Clear evidence of a “program”.
It should be pretty apparent to all, even the last-man-to-the-last-bullet-in-the-last-ditch types, just what the Administration is doing now. They are about to enter into the phase of this thing where all concerned deny that it ever happened–weapons of mass destruction? What weapons of mass destruction? We never said that there were weapons of mass destruction. What we said was that Sadam was daydreaming about having nukes and anthrax and nerve gas, but we never said he really had them. Not us. And a fair hunk of the electorate will turn around, bend over any cry out “tell us another story Uncle W.”
The indefinite delay in the release of the Kaye Report means that there is nothing to report. Kaye’s hundreds of forensic seekers after traces of nukes, bios and chemicals found NOTHING. Now the Administration gets to pretend that it isn’t really important that there was nothing found. “Pay no attention,” they will say, “to that man behind the curtain. That’s just Mr. Rumsfeld pulling the levers of power. Has nothing to do with liberating Iraq. Pay no attention. Quick! Look over here. See, we are bringing order out of Middle Eastern disorder.”
You will notice that the rosie predictions that the invasion would pay for its self have gone down the memory hole. I think that the last war that paid for itself was the Opium War in the 19th century when Britain forced China to accept opium from India.
People will forget the reasons we had to invade Iraq contrary to the judgment of most of Europe and without the support or even the grudging agreement of the Security Counsel. People will accept the idea that as the sole remaining global power the US gets to do what it wants without the leave of any other nation or organizations. People sort of like the idea of being the 800 pound gorilla that gets to sleep where ever it wants. They will forget unless they are constantly reminded of what the President said in the State of the Union last year, of what the Secretary of State said to the UN, of what Secretary Rumsfeld, and the Vice-President, and the National Security Advisor, and what Mr. Pearle and Mr. Wolfowitz all had to say about the reasons the United States had to pursue unilateral war for the protection of its vital national interests. There need to be some one on every street corner, in every airport, in every shopping mall parking lot endlessly repeating the mantra “where are the weapons of mass destruction?”
Of course the habitual reactionaries and proto-imperialists down at the drug store coffee bar already have an answer to that question. The WMDs all went to Syria in 1991. How can that be you ask. Ah-ha, they respond, well, they’re not in Iraq so the only other place they could be is Syria. Impeccable reasoning. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/933.htm
What Colin Powell thought before 9/11.
Milum, how many dimes did you put up again?
Anyone else remember the thread with Sam Stone describing his confidence that the September report would be a devastating blow to the critics of the Bush administration? Something about how confident Kay looked? How shiny his teeth were?
I’m surprised with a name like Kay that he can’t dance any better than this. I know what his report says: “I’ve got it! I’ve got it! Hussein put the pellet with the poison in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the white house has the brew that is true!”
Hey, great! That will make a nice reason to attack Syria then.
The ‘no smallpox’ link provided by Squink sheds light on another question: whether we’ve had adequate troop levels in Iraq.
From the initial days of the invasion, we haven’t had enough troops to do the whole WMD hunt properly, whether it’s been insufficient troops to secure prospective WMD sites as we liberated them from Saddam’s control during the invasion, to being able to provide secure transportation to the WMD hunters in the months after Saddam’s statue fell.
I will concede that this says nothing about whether we have enough troops on the ground for the job now, now that the search for WMDs is essentially at an end. But the same people who are telling us now that we don’t need more troops have been telling us all along that we had enough troops. And they were apparently lying then, so why should we trust them now?
They ain’t in Syria either. News You Can Use, bolding added
What comes after “Fool me three times” and up?
Well, the interim report of the Iraq Survey Group was leaked here today - that’s the whole 1,400 scientists who have been ‘combing’ Iraq since the end of the ‘war’. Official report comes out next month. Reads like a US-led fudge but whatever . . .
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3135932.stm
"No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq by the group tasked with looking for them, according to a Bush administration source who has spoken to the BBC.
The source told the presenter of BBC television’s Daily Politics show, Andrew Neil, this was the conclusion of the Iraq Survey Group’s interim report, which the source said was due to be published next month. "