I’ve noticed a recent turning point in the media where it seems suddenly ok to question Bush on WMDs. For example
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_2518.shtml
Where a guy who was a CIA advisor to Bush accuses him of lying. A few days ago it was a diplomat in Niger implying that Bush was lying. I think that we are going to see a lot more of this in the near future and that Republicans will soon turn on Bush.
As I understand it, Watergate took somewhere around a year to develop enough steam to become the scandal that it became.
I have doubts that this will become a scandal along the same lines as Watergate. At least not in the present. Maybe in history books.
A better question is:
Will the scandal of Democratic disdain for the risk of Iraqi WMDs hurt them as much as the Watergate scandal hurt the Republicans?
Well, at least you’re consistent, december.
Would you care to present the evidence that demonstrates that we were at risk of Iraqi WMDs?
december: WTF? That is the worst hijack attempt ever.
As for the WMD gate blowing up in the Bush administration’s face, it will never happen until some form of “Deep Throat” reappears.
It is pretty safe to say that there are mounds of material that the administration does not want the public to ever get their hands on. Being that Bush likes to classify things even after they were released to the public, it will take an inside mole to bring anything damning to light.
As for the likelihood of the reappearance of Deep Throat, I find it a long shot. After all, releasing classified material to the public in a time of war could be treason.
A better analogy might be the Tonkin Gulf incident. That too was pretty well known to be somewhere along the spectrum from self-delusion to simple lying, too, but was still forgiven by people who just wanted to wade in and kick some ass whatever the excuse.
Ever since Watergate, which was the name of the hotel that was broken into, every comparable political scandal in washington has a “gate” in the end. China-gate, Monica-gate, Whitewater-gate, travelgate, Taiwan-gate…
So what will they call this…?
Iraqi-gate
WMD-gate
CIA-gate
wupsie-gate
Unless some massive, underground, doomsday WMD is found in Iraq, with a readout saying “Uber-WMD ready to vaporize USA. Fire? [ok][cancel]”, in what possible way could the Democrats disdain for that (non-existent) threat hurt them?
I don’t understand how, with what is being alleged at this point, there could be a scandal on the scale of Watergate. What crime are Bush and the members of his administration accused of?
It’s less a matter of ‘a turning point’ in media coverage as it is this is one of the first items that has gained what we call traction.
(FTR, I speak as a long time publishing executive in Washington, DC and 2 year member of the White House Press Corps…though a very very very junior one. Sam Donaldson, I ain’t.)
For a story to be picked up and become national (a ‘scandal’ if you will) it requires a few things.
Let #2 and #3 cycle a few times and BINGO: media circus and CNN goes live!
However, let any of those steps short circuit in the first few go-rounds and the story fizzles.
So what we’re seeing here is the first bit of evidence that begins to capture the attention of the reading public, nothing more.
Let it go a few more cycles and we’ll see rude and agressive questions asked of senior officials (with that ‘I don’t believe you’ tone). Denials and attempts to deflect on the part of the administration and increased coverage of the issue.
Um, Pentagon Papers? During a little war we like to call Vietnam?
Fact is, there is no scandal here at all. Every intelligence agency on the planet, including the French, German, and Iranian intelligence agencies belived Saddam had WMD. Clinton launched cruise missiles into Iraq in 1998 over this. The UN resolution 1441 takes it as a given that Saddam is in violation of the demands that he disarm. If you think that the French, Germans, Iranians, Bill Clinton, and the UN are just minions of George W. Bush and his roving gang of Neo-Zionist-Oil-War-Mongers, I don’t think we can have a rational discussion.
There are two important details here. First of all, we aren’t talking about HUGE quantities of material. All of the bio/chem WMD that Saddam allegedly produced would fit in a triple-trailer. That doesn’t make it a trivial risk, as it only takes a drop of VX to kill a person. Iraq is a country the size of California. There’s lots of room to hide things.
Secondly, the delivery mechanism isn’t going to be some James Bond villian-esqe mega bomb. It is going to be a terrorist with a water bottle full of Sarin or a few envelopes of anthrax. When the al Qaeda in US custody denied links between themselves and Saddam, what they said was that post-1998, Saddam offered them anything they wanted. Bin Laden turned down Saddam, since he didn’t want to be beholden to a man he considered as bad as an infidel.
But that was then. Bin Laden is almost certainly worm food (all he needs to do is take a picture of himself with a newspaper, rather than send out these scratchy audiotapes. Why hasn’t he?). Al Qaeda is being hunted. Would they accept Saddam’s offer now? I think they very well might. And even if it isn’t Al Qaeda, Saddam certainly had other terror groups (or just members of his Ba’ath party) who would be more than happy to poison America.
Where do I think the WMD are? Either buried in Lebanon or Syria, or in the hands of terrorists. People who are trying to make political hay out of this are endangering all of us, as those weapons are almost certainly out there. Not knowing where they are is very scary indeed.
I think that one of the main reasons Republicans will turn on Bush is because of the Iraq war. Right now the Iraqi people are contenting themselves with looking the other way when a small group attacks Americans and then doing things like dancing on the charred wreckage of American vehicles. If things continue like they are now “it was for the Iraqi people” wont be a very good reason.
Likewise the excuse “The WMDS were there, but Bush just never managed to do anything about them and they are in the hands of terrorists now” wont help Republicans either.
I came in to post what MrTuffPaws said. The public facts aren’t enough, there needs to be an inside source that reveals explicit lying or a cover-up, like Deep Throat.
The potential scandal, as I see it, isn’t the WMDs so much as the presentation of the threat of Iraq to the US.
W/o the Hussein-bin Laden alliance, we’re left with having to show that the US military wasn’t a deterrent to Iraq launching an attack on the US.
Cite please.
How much of threat is this? Would a few envelopes of anthrax kill as many people as we lost in the invasion already? Last time the envelopes of anthrax made the rounds, 5(?) people died.
Sorry, this wouldn’t come close to justifying the hundreds of deaths of American and British soldiers, let alone the umpteen thousands of Iraqi deaths that have come about from the war.
Apparently, anyone with some know-how, a garage and several thousands of dollars can produce weapons grade anthrax. At least according to the FBI. It’s not sufficient grounds for an invasion.
They’d be tent-mates on the run? That’s not a very smart sounding idea. I can’t believe that you’d even think that’s a possibility. Am i being whooshed?
Yet he hadn’t engaged in any terroristic acts against Western targets for more than a decade. The idea that hussein would engage in an act of terrorism that could’ve been traced back to him, (eg Iraqi Baathists), requires one to believe that US military might serves no deterrent purpose. That’s hard to believe.
Howdya figger?
It would seem that they might be providing additional incentive for the CiC to add to th eefforts to find the banned WMDs.
The invasion left dangerous sites unsecured for weeks. That seems dangerous to me.
It seems more like an increasingly public finger-pointing exercise between the CIA and the Bush administration than an actual “- gate” with someone going off to jail. Was WMD intelligence a failure at the source (the republican talking head stance), a failure at the political level (the retired intelligence community stance), or both?
Regarding things for Republicans to get mad at Bush about, I think his lying to the country about Iraq’s uranium purchase will be small potatos compared to his support for Medicare prescription drug coverage.
Could you provide a specific citation to the Congressional act that declares a formal and legal state of war?
/em Gets out his hip wades to wade through the increasing political bullshit.
Some of you folks need to get a grip, and you know, tune into the real world. Iraq-gate? Come ON guys. To compare this to Watergate is just criminally stupid IMO.
I can’t believe I’m even getting in this, as I can’t stand ole GW OR his administration. However, much as I’d loved to see him trashed, I also have full use of my frigging memory, and I seem to recall that EVERYONE fucking thought that Saddam had the god damn thing!! I didn’t hear you people whinning about all this BEFORE the invasion. I didn’t hear the French or Germans or ANYONE ELSE (except the Iraqis) protesting that Saddam DIDN’T have the things. Even the UN teams THOUGHT that he had some things out there. If someone knows of a country, head of state, etc etc, that KNEW that Saddam didn’t have them, please provide some cites for said protest well in advance of the invasion.
Personally I think ole GW and his merry men were just WRONG (and they aren’t alone in being wrong either). But they launched an invasion based on bad data, and doing so, they fucked up…royally. I think that they will pay for it too come next election (personally I’ll vote for Mickey Mouse before GW…which will probably be my choice too). If you want to nail him/them for being stupid, for being wrong, or for exagerating what ‘evidence’ they had, cool…I’m with you. But to say that he knowingly and deliberately mislead the American people and the world, KNOWING that Iraq DIDN’T have ANY WMD, and knowing that HE’D BE CAUGHT FOR IT (which is the only way there would be a scandle like Watergate)??? Bullshit. If this is the case then GW is MUCH stupider (and more importantly his STAFF is) than I can credit. I see NO logical reason for him to lie, knowing he’d be eventually caught. I DO see reasons for him to exagerate his evidence, or to look at said evidence in a biased way. He actually thought that they would find said WMD, and is probably in a state of shock that they haven’t yet.
To me, this whole stupid comparison of the current events with Watergate smacks (and STINKS) of another round of political hay making and bullshit.
/em Appologizes for the harsh language.
I now return you to your already scheduled endless rant…
-XT
Of course it wasn’t. That’s the nature of assymetric warfare. Large armies are only threatening if you can prove where the attack came from. You also can’t defend against attack in a civilian area with these sorts of weapons.
Ah. My mistake. I misremembered a couple of things that I read. The amount of ANTHRAX isn’t very big, about 8,500 liters (a 12x8 U-haul trailer’s worth):
http://nuclearno.com/text.asp?6165
The CIA suspected that Iraq had 100-500 Metric Tons of chemical weapons:
http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/Iraq_Oct_2002.htm
But that isn’t a very large amount of stuff, in a country that size, which had 5 years to hide the stuff.
Go to www.iraqwatch.org for lots of information on what Iraq is thought to have in the way of WMD.
The simple fact is that when Democrats were in power, they said that Iraq had WMD, using the same data that Bush used. Now that Republicans are in power, the Democrats are questioning the data. The scandal is the Democrat’s behavior, not the as-yet-unfound weapons.
True. However, I can think of a few dozen ways to spread bio and chem agents. Get a dozen or so people doing this across the US, and watch hysteria ensue.
In your opinion.
Untrue. The person who it seems the FBI suspects has a history of working with anthrax. I have yet to hear the FBI make the claim you just made. Would you like to provide a cite?
What the heck does whooshed mean?
I don’t think that Saddam is going to personally hand stuff to bin Laden. That’s what lieutenants are for. There were plenty of reports of Arabs entering Iraq to fight for Saddam. There were terrorists who had headquarters in Baghdad. Do you think that any of them might be willing to spread death in the US?
You mean a guy like Saddam who has lost power wouldn’t seek revenge? I find THAT hard to believe.
Because if the goal is to hound Bush out of office (that idiot Ted Rall keeps calling for Bush’s impeachment, never mind that that would put Cheney in charge), the presumption is that whomever will follow Bush wouldn’t bother looking, since the WMD “obviously” don’t exist.
And on this, I completely agree. I hope that we can find anything that was moved.
xtisme there is one reason why Bush would do that in spite of everything. For example
http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/03/06/Bush_God.html
Also try the article I posted in the OP. Bush did think that he would find WMDS and is in a state of shock that they haven’t yet. That doesn’t mean that the intelligence before the war supported his conclusion.
To make another historical comparison it is like how the Spanish thought that god would grant them a miracle when they attacked the English back when Elizabeth was queen.
xtisme, the problem that so many people have with Bush’s war is that he came right out and said that he definitely had evidence of weapons of mass destruction, that he knew just where they were. He said so, too: just where they were. All he offered as evidence to the public before declaring war were the forged Niger documents, which have been proven to be cheap, obvious forgeries. Furthermore, intelligence largely recommended that there’s no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The UN teams figured they would find something, but they hadn’t found anything yet. Most people figured they’d find something, but no one had found anything yet—except for George W. Bush and Tony Blair, who were announcing to the world that they knew just where they were. I figured Saddam would have some such weapons, but I never said he had them for sure. Of course, I didn’t have an intelligence agency working for me. Plus, understanding the rule of law, I thought war was not justified because we hadn’t found any proof yet. Just like you don’t give someone a prison sentence before you can prove their guilt, you don’t go to war with a country before you can prove its guilt.
Saddam was complying with the UN weapons inspectors, who found nothing. No one has found anything now that Iraq’s been conq— er, liberated. We went to war with no justification. Remember all those protests? They weren’t protests to assert Saddam’s innocence; they were protests against the starting of a war that had no justification. Most of the people at those protest marches—myself included—thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. We were just holding out for proof, which the Bush and Blair administrations weren’t providing.
This is not “political bullshit” (though in the interest of full disclosure, George W. Bush makes me violently ill, to put it mildly.) These are genuine concerns. Did Bush genuinely mislead the people? Maybe, maybe not. But I’d say a screw-up of this proportion does warrant a congressional investigation, at least.