The point, to me, is that we were told by the administration that we were in imminent danger of being attacked by Iraq. We couldn’t even wait a couple more weeks for the UN inspectors to do some more inspections. The British government helped a lot with that assessment with their 45 minute thing (Iraq could attack within 45 minutes). That assessment has now been shown to be of dubious value.
Well, there was no immediate danger and we have invaded an sovereign nation, in contravention of international law, and killed thousands of innocent people. And, what was the stated purpose? To disarm Hussein of the WMDs that we cannot now find.
And, yes, the Iraqi people are undoubtedly better off without Hussein (or will be if we ever get the country running for them again), but, the ends DO NOT justify the means.
Sterra, that alleged Bush quote about God telling him to strike at al-Qaida and Saddam is unlikely to be accurate. Bush and his team have denied it.
Apparently the alleged quote was reported by Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, who does not speak English. So, assuming good faith, Bush said something in English which was translated into Arabic. Abbas reported in Arabic that Bush had made the comment, and it has been translated back into English. Lots of opportunities for inaccuracy to creep in.
I believe Bush’s denial. Note that main stream media have not been reporting this quote.
Um, you are aware that you are quoting from DAVID IRVING’s web site, right? The guy is a Holocaust denier.
In any event, the article you point to claims that Ha’aretz (an Israeli newspaper) was the source of the “God” quote. First of all, I find it funny that Holocaust deniers would quote Israeli newspapers. Secondly, can you actually find the quote in the archives of Ha’aretz? Because I can’t. Remember, Bush supposedly uttered this at the summit with Abbas and Sharon, so it’s recent history. Find me a copy of the original quote and I’ll believe you. Until then, I think it’s more BS hate-mongering.
Here’s how the issue of WMDs will sink the Bush presidency: It won’t be because he lied. It will be because he led the country into an unnecessary war.
Despite what the administration has said, the war isn’t over. In fact, there’s strong evidence that the real war, the guerrilla war, is only just starting. It won’t be over by this fall, and it’s unlikely that it will be over by the 2004 elections. With U.S. troops dying weekly, Bush will have to justify the ongoing sacrifice to the American people.
Now the administration has given three reasons why the war was necessary:
Iraq violated UN resolutions.
The Iraqi people were suffering under the yoke of a cruel tyrant.
Iraq’s WMDs and terrorist connections provided an immediate danger to the United States.
Let’s look at these one at a time.
The UN resolutions? Who cares? Lots of countries flout the UN. Are we going to invade them all?
Humanitarian grounds? A much better case can be made here. The American public tolerated a humanitarian intervention in Bosnia. But humanitarian goodwill is going to dry up if Iraqs keep killing our soldiers. They were supposed to welcome us with flowers, remember? Once it becomes clear that most Iraqis are opposed to the occupation it will be difficult to sustain the humanitarian argument.
It all comes down to WMDs, baby. They were the primary reason for the war. They were the reason that we had to invade quickly. They were a danger so compelling that we had no choice but war. They were the threat to American so dire that it was worth spending $100 billion dollars and hundreds of American lives to counter them.
Only they don’t seem to exist.
It doesn’t really matter if Bush lied or not. He’s the guy in charge. It was his responsibility to make sure that this war advanced U.S. interests. If it turns out that he sent American kids off to die for no good reason, even if it was an honest mistake, he’s going to lose the next election.
This ties into the (missing/nonexistent) WMDs, too, since the Administration insisted that Iraq’s possession of banned WMDs was the grounds to justify “serious consequences” over. Well, it’s one invasion later, and we’ve found no WMDs, no illegal SCUDs, no had-'em-even-though-they-weren’t-allowed-to weapons or any sort.
No UN violations, no US threat… just lots and lots of lovely oil wells, sitting there for American petroleum companies to pluck. And another dead American G.I. every day or two.
Not that you would believe it if the angel Gabriel came down from heaven and wrote it in 10-foot letters of fire, but there you go. I am curious to see what you and december think was actually said, though.
I have no idea. But, I tend to believe Bush’s denial, for several reasons:[ul][]There were more ways for Abbas to be innocently wrong, since his version had to go through two translations.[]The original reporter might have made a mistake.[]The quote is not the kind of thing Bush normally says. E.g., we discussed a comment at a press conference some time ago, where Bush merely said he prayed to God for guidance.[]If Bush was lying, then every American present would have to be in on a conspiracy to lie about the comment. That makes little sense to me. [/ul]
When John Dean gets into the act, you can guess that it’s beginning to get serious:
and
Yadda, yadda, yadda. Frankly, I think there is a snowball’s chance in Hell that such a thing would happen. A Republican Congress performing an impeachment of a Republican President with a general election less than eighteen months away? Ain’t gonna happen unless Bush gets so dirty that he starts to rub off on Congress’ own re-election prospects.
However, it is nice to know that thanks to Newt Gingrich and his clones, the impeachment bar has been lowered to something so low that even Harry Belafonte would have trouble slithering under it. If it happens, it’s going to happen lightning-quick–fast enough to secure a resignation and a new incumbent candidate before campaign season semi-officially kicks off before October.
(I also want to mention that I like Capitol Hill Blue a lot. They often put out some very perceptive reporting that doesn’t break in the Majors for days or weeks. If I remember correctly, they are also a rather staunchly conservative organization.)
So what’s the status of the administration’s statements to the effect that there was other, non-Nigerian, evidence from Africa that supported their claim that Saddam was trying to obtain nuclear materials ? Does the evidence really exist, or were the Bushies just covering up one tall tale with another tall tale ?
On this very point, Talking Points memo blog by Josh Marshall is right on the money.
"Now, there is one small admission here that’s worth noting. Up until now, the White House has often implied that, though Niger-uranium documents were bogus, there was other intelligence that justified the claims about uranium purchases in Africa. Last month, NSC spokesman Sean McCormack said: “Those documents were only one piece of evidence in a larger body of evidence suggesting that Iraq attempted to purchase uranium from Africa. The issue of Iraq’s pursuit of uranium in Africa is supported by multiple sources of intelligence. The other sources of evidence did and do support the president’s statement.”
This was always one of the most intriguing elements of the White House’s defense. Because they seemed to be referring to intelligence so top-secret and rarefied that they couldn’t even share it with the CIA or other members of the intelligence community. It was so top-secret that only the president’s speech writers had sufficiently high security clearances to see it. That was the story on some days. On others, the other intelligence seemed to be the ‘dossier’ published by the British – which of course was based on the same bogus Niger documents. "
I strongly recommend this particular article, and this blog in general.
If Bush denied it I’ll attribute it to mistranslation. December is right when it does sound out of place compared to something Bush would normally say. I just never knew about the denial of it.
I still think all this talk is premature. There’s still something afoot here.
Item: Tommy Franks, who retired yesterday, says that he is still ‘absolutely convinced’ that WMD will be found.
Item: On ‘Meet the Press’ on Sunday, one of the senators who just came back from a fact-finding trip to Iraq (I think it was either Carl Levin or John Warner), said that after being briefed on what the secret special forces teams had been up to, he was fully satisfied that the pre-war intelligence was not over-stated, and he was also convinced that WMD would be found.
Item: Tony Blair is sticking his neck out a mile by forcing a confrontation with the BBC and demanding retractions and apologies, and he is also sticking to his belief that WMD will be found.
Item: Last week there was a news story on MSN in which a Senator on the Intelligence Committee said that they had a ‘smoking gun’, but the information was classified. He hoped that it would be declassified soon. I haven’t been able to find the article since.
None of this is proof of anything, but if I were a Democrat screaming at the Bush administration right now, I’d be a little careful. The Bushies may just be playing out enough rope to let a few people hang themselves. Or perhaps they have evidence they can’t release because it would compromise an ongoing operation or something.
Maybe WMD won’t turn up. But it’s a little too early to say so definitively. I’ll wait until I see a sign that some rats are jumping ship before I’ll throw in the towel. A high-level resignation or two would be a strong indicator that there’s nothing that will save the claims.
SS:Maybe WMD won’t turn up. But it’s a little too early to say so definitively.
I don’t think the question of scandal rests on the question of whether there are any Iraqi WMD whatsoever; the more crucial point is whether the Administration was justified in spreading alarm about severe and imminent danger from Iraqi WMD.
I was anti-war and pro-inspection all the way through, but I would never have bet any money on the claim that there were no forbidden weapons in Iraq. I just did not think a convincing case had been made that any Iraqi weapons posed such a catastrophic threat to us that we needed to invade them immediately to protect ourselves.
And that’s still an extremely important issue, even if some sort of WMD do turn up eventually.
I’ll wait until I see a sign that some rats are jumping ship before I’ll throw in the towel.
“Throw in the towel”? Geez Sam, that sounds as though you’re kind of hoping that Saddam Hussein did have dangerous illegal weapons! Surely, for the sake of basic safety (especially since a number of suspect sites were unsecured and vulnerable during the invasion), you would rather have it turn out that there weren’t any WMD, even at the cost of you and the Coalition having to eat a little crow? I was sure glad that the invasion casualty figures were lower than I had feared and predicted, I’ll tell you that.
One unfortunate aspect of the ongoing search for WMD is that, if they are finally found, it will be assumed that their mere presence in Iraq proves the necessity of the war. On the contrary, it was widely accepted in both pro- and anti-war circles prior to the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom that Iraq probably possessed such weapons (due in no small part to the fact that many anti-war people still trust their government). The chief anti-war argument that I encountered wasn’t that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, but that preventive military action was an inappropriate way of dealing with the situation even if it did.
Of course, it is looking more and more like the Iraq war was a fishing expedition, based at best on hopes and hunches rather than the rock-solid proof that we were all told about. If it actually turns out that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, and that even the most basic and accepted claim of the Bush Administration’s pro-war argument was a sham, then “inappropriate” doesn’t begin to cover it.
Going after Bush, except of course at the ballot box, is the wrong way to approach this.
The Constitution never intended for the title of Commander in Chief to mean that the military could be used at the sole discretion of the President.
As late as World War I, Senator Robert La Folette was able to stop President Woodrow Wilson from staging an undeclared naval war against Germany. A declaration of war was considered to be a prerequisite to that kind of use of the Armed Forces by the President. (This site , see the note for Feb 1917.)
There’s no legal way of reinstituting that kind of ethic, only a societal way that recognizes the spirit as well as the letter of the Constitution. We have, as a people and a government, to realize that the military is to be used only when there is an overwhelming consensus that it is needed. Kind of what I’m sure Colin Powell has in mind when he says that war should be waged only when there is full support for it. As for the authors of the Constitution, they would have been floored by the idea of having a standing army so large that it’s able to invade and conquer foreign countries at the behest of the Executive, without even so much as a call for additional volunteers.
Anyway, no overwhelming consensus existed on Iraq, and not only because of doubts about WMD, as kimstu points out. Bear in mind that we were not attacked by Iraq, so the only way to justify all out war would have been to prove an imminent threat, and of course that goes well, well beyond just finding evidence of a WMD program, and well beyond just finding WMD in some state or other.
It goes without saying that there was no formal declaration of war. Most of us weren’t even alive the last time that was done.
p.s.: kimstu, sadly, it’s too early to say that the final casualty count will be low. It seems definite that Saddam is still alive, and so a long guerrilla war with ever increasing casualties seems inevitable, at least at the moment. I hope that my writing this will make the Gods of War prove me wrong.
I still believe that Iraq had banned WMD. But that doesn’t excuse the exaggerations of the threat to the US from them. december, do you have cite for the WH denial of the Ha’aretz quote about Bush’s divine command to smite AQ and Iraq?
JonBodner, in your opinion, can the deaths of tens of thousands of people be justified by saving the lives of five?
Sorry about the confusion over the Hussein/bin Laden thing. I didn’t realize that you were talking about Hussein giving bin Laden weapons. I thought you were referring to the offers of asylum that Hussein had made after bin Laden was kicked out of Africa and when the Taliban were being pressured by the Saudis to kick him out.
Since you are talking about Hussein being willing to provide AQ w/ banned WMDs then I’d have to agree with you and the CIA. The CIA said that they thought that the probability of Hussein turning over banned WMDs to AQ was very unlikely UNLESS we invaded and Hussein felt that he was in extremis. Then, they said that the probability increased dramatically.
This is one way that the invasion of Iraq made America less safe.
The chairman of the NIC predicts that the invasion of Iraq will provide a windfall of new recruits fo AQ and other international terrorist organisations. This is another way that the invasion of Iraq made America less safe.
We left components for dirty bombs unguarded for weeks while they were looted. Another way that the invasion of Iraq made America less safe.
Many of the suspected sites of banned WMDs were looted before we could get there. Many of the ones where did getthere in time, we couldn’t stay to guard them because we had a war going on. Then when we returned, they were looted. Another way that the invasion of Iraq made America less safe.