This may come as a bit of a shock, but the Bush Administration lied to America about Iraq's WMDs
The Senate Select Committee's Report (pdf) on whether and how much Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, et aliud lied, distorted, omitted and exaggerated the threat of Iraqi WMDs in order to strongarm the US into war was released today. Its findings will come as no surprise to those of us who spent the last half decade arguing this stuff, and meanwhile those who denied it all along will keep on denying. But for what it's worth, the picture of the Bush Administration as equal parts incompetence and mendacity has just come 172 pages closer to becoming part of official history.
- Claims by President Bush that Iraq and al Qaida had a partnership "were not substantiated by the intelligence."
- The president and vice president misrepresented what was known about Iraq’s chemical weapons capabiliies.
- Rumsfeld misrepresented what the intelligence community knew when he said Iraq's weapons productions facilities were buried deeply underground.
- Cheney's claim that the intelligence community had confirmed that lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 was not true.
In addition, certain statements that were key to the war argument were directly contradicted by known intelligence at the time: ""Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information," the report concluded."
In other words, Bush and Cheney simply made that crap up about Saddam making nukes in order to hand them over to terrorists. It was truthy stuff, facty as all get out, and a lot of people who should've known better bought it. But we skeptics were dead on. For a consolation prize, we get to clean up the mess.
Now what? Well, since frog-marches probably aren't on the setlist, I'll settle for 50 years of shame and "the inelectible modality of the risible" for Bush Republicans. Who's with me?
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Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
--
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
--
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
--
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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And this is one of them, and it's not just because I'm left-handed. The Phase I report was supported with unanimous consent from all committee members, and both parties had every opportunity to provide input. This one wasn't. The Republicans got shut out of the process, turning this into a politically-timed railroaded report. Captain Ed has other issues on the content.
--"I want America to know that I'm, like, totally ready to lead." -- Paris Hilton
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)Certain subject matters, like the matters covered in phase II, were strictly off limits in phase I as decreed by the republican majority. Bird Dog's comment is revisionist history.
--"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."
- G.W. Bush, 3/13/02
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| parent )Meanwhile the rest of the country has had time to figure out just how full of it this administration was, is, and will continue to be.
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )Check.
--"I want America to know that I'm, like, totally ready to lead." -- Paris Hilton
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| parent )the accusation is the action.
--It's impossible to debate if people simply hold beliefs that have no grounding in reality.
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| parent )and I have to get BD's back on this one. The Democrats are not being helpful by producing an aggressively partisan document that lambasts the Administration while ignoring the failures of Congress during the same period.
It is, of course, more than a little absurd for the Republicans -- who have cheerfully supported the tactics of GWB, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, etc. for so many years -- to complain about railroading and bad faith, but I'll leave that up to their consciences.
--The other day I heard that ignorance and apathy are sweeping the country. I didn't know that, but I don't really care.
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| parent )Why must blind faith in systemic government incompetence and its relentless defense and rationalizing be a selective and partisan issue?
What maintains your faith in the misguided faux wisdom of this neo-con/Wilsonian Foreign Policy Ideology??
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| parent )...two wrongs don't make a right. I've said it multiple times before and I'll say it again: I have no confidence in President Bush or his administration.
--"I want America to know that I'm, like, totally ready to lead." -- Paris Hilton
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| parent )By saying "It's Bush", you necessarily imply that the idea is not at fault but rather the implementer.
Regardless of whether some other president could have "done it better" by some objective or subjective standard, the problem remains that act itself is not a solution to anything and risks more problems.
I wasn't born yesterday, I'm not naive. This episode is just another in a long line of botched and misguided actions which result in new and more complex problems that then require more attention.
The fear and skepticism you have toward impractical and flawed economic policies is EVEN MORE warranted on foreign policy. We cannot pretend that any government leaders can possibly know so much and plan according to those imperfect assessments and get a positive result with no traps....and in far away lands with so much complexity to boot. It's at least as bad as domestic central planning...if not even worse and more dangerous. It's a fool's errand and it's indefensible.
Why can't conservatives see this? WHY?
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| parent )I'd love an official conservative answer to that question myself.
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )But actions speak louder than words.
In countries like Iraq, they hastily applied a "Cliff Notes" version of what they perceive to be the right formula because it has more or less worked here.
The problem is that informal local institutions overrule pre-conceived state institutions.
There's no point in trying to replicate the basic state and official tenets of our economy without seeing how the informal social institutions are set up. And even then, we can't possibly know.
That is not to say that some first principles can't be employed but that doesn't get you very far if the social institutions are not up to par. Rectifying those in a long process that we can't possibly pretend to know how to effectuate...not even local leaders would be very capable...even with pure intentions...let alone us.
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| parent )local history and state institutions, before they went in and generally screwed everything up for generations.
So to add to what you should say, we should only be involved in state building/cultural terraforming when absolutely necessary, i.e. after a war we've entered as a last resort. At least that way when we screw something up, we'll get credit for going the extra mile.
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )that kinda detracts from what I said. I know what you mean but the idea of nation building scares the bejeezus out of me.
To me, nation building is almost never on the table. I have much, much more faith in the possibility of launching a space vehicle that would link up with a potentially earth-threatening asteroid and nudge it onto a safe course to avoid our planet...whether by landing on it and pushing it with thrusters or by drawing it to itself through gravity. It's child's play by comparison. THAT is how hard nation building is....let alone cultural terraforming.
No group of "wise and prudent" leaders is capable of knowing enough to bring such an endeavor to a truly satisfactory fruition.
The examples of Japan, Italy and Germany are actually not applicable as counter examples. They actually support my point since those countries had the informal social institutions that I speak of in place and in tact. "Helping them get back on their feet" is not the same as nation building since they had legs to stand on and were perfectly capable of becoming "liberalised" market-based democracies.
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| parent )I dunno if it sounded like it, but yeah, Japan & Germany were largely intact with populations long trained to cooperate with authority. And if we do any more Marshall Plan type work, it better be because we had absolutely no other choice in the matter.
You can't "give" people democracy. It ain't like donating blood.
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )and clarified.
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| parent )still carrying water for a President who's going down like the Titanic.
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )pusillanimous Democrats like Kerry saying he'd vote for the war resolution, but there had better damned well be some WMDs, y'all couldn't yes-yes that one enough.
A bully is fundamentally a coward, as anyone who's ever fought one can tell you. I've fought my share of them. When anyone dared to contradict Bush or Cheney, they paid for it with their careers. Shalikashvili, Bunnatine Greenhouse, Jay Garner, Valerie Plame's career was collateral damage.
Benjamin B. Ferencz, the lead prosecutor at Nuremberg has called for the authors of the Iraq War to be prosecuted for war crimes.
Now I've called for some rapprochement with the Republicans around here. But you don't want to play ball with us, BD. In the immortal words of Tina Turner, "So we're gonna take the beginning of this song and do it easy... then we're gonna do the finish... rough."
You want to play tough guy, call people pussies? You just keep a nice civil tongue in your head, it's not at all clear who's OK with what when it comes to bad faith around here, especially when it comes to that old logical fallacy of Appeal to Ridicule. Combined with Potty Mouth, you're not endearing yourself to me. Think carefully about what you say, because I've tried being nice, and this song isn't finished yet.
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| parent )...investigation over two years ago, and without the excessive partisanship and rancor, starting here, then here, then here, then here, then here, and finishing here. The Senate Dems could've saved a lot of time and money just buying a subscription.
I'm not really sure why you're so angry at me, at least in this thread. The person who's being inflammatory is Jordan by saying Bush & Co. lied, i.e., the principals were convinced the intelligence was wrong but made their case anyway. That remains unproven. In fact, the Senate Dems were specific in saying that what the principals said were generally substantiated by the intelligence, with the exceptions so noted. Page 29 of the report:
Conclusions 3 through 11 are similar, that their statements were substantiated by the intelligence information, but on some matters they did not talk about the levels of uncertainty of some of the intelligence. This is the "cherry-picking" offense where, if they believed the intelligence (and there is no evidence to suggest that they didn't), then they put the evidence forward.
What has been proven for quite a while was the abysmal intelligence and the abysmal way it was put together by CIA, other intelligence outlets and the Office of Special Plans. It has been my opinion for quite a while that Cheney should not have been 2nd term VP because of his involvement in the OSP, and Rumsfeld should not have been SecDef in the 2nd term. Bush is at fault for keeping them on.
Now I've called for some rapprochement with the Republicans around here. But you don't want to play ball with us, BD.
So this Forvm is your game? Played under your rules? I aimed to be provocative, not uncivil, Blaise.
--"I want America to know that I'm, like, totally ready to lead." -- Paris Hilton
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| parent )in the sky. This has nothing to do with rules. It has everything to do with decorum. Cheap shots are the soup-du-jour when it comes to this sort of thing. The War on Iraq was promulgated by people who were Absolutely Sure there were WMDs. Mushroom clouds and all manner of imaginary monsters in Saddam's closet were as I have described 'em, harum-scarum. Dick Cheney and Richard Armitage should be in jail, right alongside poor old Libby. They threw Libby under the bus.
They threw 4000+ of our servicemen and women under that juggernaut, not to mention all the military careers they wrecked. I knew Shalikasvili, he was an artillery officer, met him at 3ID DIVARTY Kitzingen and on REFORGER 1980. Ruined that man's career.
Now these Bushies could be perhaps forgiven, as we might forgive a SWAT team for executing a search warrant on the wrong address. But if that SWAT team stayed in the house for the next six years, what would we say?
The intelligence information was all wrong. Period. None of it was right. We overthrew Saddam, fine. Staying in Iraq, not fine. Prescriptive wars always end up in this sorry pass. Which prescriptive war ever had a happy ending?
Qui capit, capitur. We break it, we bought it. And you're still saying they're justified, if I read you aright.
I have as much right to be here as you do. I certainly write more copy. I've been pushing up an article a week at least, sometimes more. I'm proud of what I write for Forvm, and I'd like to think I'm earning the respect of my peers here, Conservative and Liberal. I want to make this site a better place: in the existential world of Net Gravitas, we are what we write in the div class="itemtext", not below it.
There's a Greek word, μετάνοια, metanoia, a transformation of the mind. In the Bible, it's translated as repentance. I've decided to be a Liberal who will take Conservatives seriously, afford them the respect they deserve, and if nobody follows my example, I'll go it alone. I don't do it because I'm some great person, but because I suffer from despair, and the road can be a lonely place. I've been on the road for a year, solid. Hotel rooms are starting to look like well-appointed jail cells. I'm not exactly a good person, but I can still write, that part can't be taken from me. My only form of redemption, the one outlet for my despair is these little essays I write.
AFAICT, Forvm has the best signal to noise ratio in this particular genre of political website. There aren't all that many people here, but there are some hideously intelligent people and damned few dummies. I don't make the rules, that's true. But when I write for this place, and put as much effort into this as I do, I feel I have a stake in it. I know others here feel the way I do about Forvm. Other people put their time and effort into it. It's not your Forvm either, BD. So I'd appreciate it if you'd stop the cheap shots, if not for me, for the sake of what this place might be without 'em.
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| parent )I'm all for friendly arguments, Blaise, and sometimes provocative ones. I don't claim any more rights here than you do. And BTW, I respect what you have to say, which is why we've been talking so much the last few days. Putting aside the p-word in the other thread, I thought our back-and-forth about habeas and the MCA was kinda interesting. As for rapprochement, I really don't know what that means. We're just a bunch of guys sitting around in a virtual coffeehouse, talking politics and whatnot, with the three digital baristas strolling around to keep things reasonably civil.
--"I want America to know that I'm, like, totally ready to lead." -- Paris Hilton
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| parent )I have enjoyed our go-rounds as well. When I spoke of damned few dummies on Forvm, you may consider yourself exempted from that Hall of Shame. You know what you're talking about, BD. Even with the regrettable and forgivable exception of the P word episode thrown into the balance pans of the scale, an argument with you is well worth my time and trouble. Your MCA rhetoric was meaty: clearly you're capable of writing substantively and resorting to original sources. I'll shine on a few momentary lapses of the P sort, I'm guilty of 'em, too. The Lord's Prayer and at least four of Christ's parables has an interesting formula for forgiveness of sins: we are forgiven only to the extent we forgive others. One parable, the Man Forgiven Much shows forgiveness retracted for failing to forgive others.
Now this hasn't come to the place where anyone needs forgiveness. Forgiveness is also a tool of condescending one-upsmanship, and I don't indulge in it. Similarly apologies. It's enough to admit I was wrong about something.
Here's a thought. Forvm is one of the few sites of its sort. I get so goddamn sick and tired of empty and facile bickering: the Net is chock-full of partisan ranters who will not do their homework. You do your homework, I do mine: we don't fit that mold. I've already been banned once for jackassery, and I was obliged to rethink my rhetorical stance. This metanoia business is the product of personal humiliation, not personal humility. There's a difference.
Yet I do want this to be a better place, I really do. So, here's a proposition: give me a topic sentence or a debate proposition starting with Resolved and I'll write an article. What say?
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| parent )...instead of Shalikashvili? If not then I totally missed what your refering to. If you have something I'd appreciate a quick summary or a link.
--It's not only redundant, it's also repetitive
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| parent )Shalikashvili, the officer I knew, had retired before the war began. A bit more research, and I find I was ever wronger, Shalikashvili supported the Iraq invasion.
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| parent )Welcome to the club of those who have admitted they were wrong on something posted in the Forvm. I think it's just you and I at the moment. While I certainly respect the admission of error, calling you on it wasn't my intent. I honestly assumed there was a story I wasn't aware of and wanted to know more.
--It's not only redundant, it's also repetitive
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| parent )Blaise has corrected me before ... probably most recently re Qom as an Iranian conservative stronghold (I mistakenly thought it had a more liberal clerical community).
... plus Jordan joined up recently re Hillary's campaign ...
I eat crow fer breakfast round here + wouldn't stop in if the community wasn't a corrective force.
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| parent )I useta tell my kids: here's my promise. If you do something wrong, and tell me about it first, before anyone else, I won't punish you for it. But if you hide it from me, I will.
So one day, I get a telephone call at work. My son, he must have been maybe ten at the time, was sobbing. Took five minutes to get the whole story out of him.
On Saturdays, we'd go down by the Fox River to practice with our slingshots. I bought him a duplicate of my slingshot, a really elegant thing with a forearm brace. I bought packages of steel shot in two calibers at Wal*Mart. At first he was frustrated by his inability to hit anything, but he got better, to the point he could hit pretty much anything he could see.
He was home alone, sick, and heard some noises in the house. Fearful of an intruder, despite being told to never load his slingshot in the house, he armed himself and crept downstairs. Toby the cat rubbed up against his leg, startling him. He released his grip on the taut slingshot and shot out a sliding glass door.
Well, I couldn't punish him, and a few hundred dollars was almost worth it to be able to now tell the tale. He's still a dead shot, a good instinctive shooter with almost any sort of firearm or bow or slingshot.
I'm never afraid to be wrong. Lends credence to other arguments down the road.
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| parent )Would be a good time to step away from the keyboard and enjoy the sunshine outside, I think.
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| parent )I've put up with this about as long as I care to. What should we make of this statement: So you're OK with the railroading and bad faith - check
The fact is: the White House has admitted, long since, no WMDs were ever found in Iraq. Furthermore, the report correctly asserts the WMD rationale was used to justify the war, and postwar intelligence contradicted all the claims. This is nothing but a restatement of the White House's own admission that WMDs were never found.
Is this railroading and bad faith? No it's not. It's a recapitulation, a mere enumeration of the railroading and bad-faith conclusions reached by the White House itself.
I have my own reasons to believe Saddam was a monster. I'm constantly in trouble with the anti-Iraq War camp for telling the godshonest truth: there were good reasons to get rid of Saddam. Unfortunately, Bushco Inc. decided they weren't convincing enough, so they went with harum-scarum. They sent Powell out there to disgrace himself at the UN. They smashed careers, going through flag officers like a man playing solitaire, trying to find a deuce to follow the trey. But like Archie Bunker once said when he was playing solitaire "Twice through the deck -- then you cheat."
War ought to be our very last option. Instead, it was our first. Waging war on false premises, however true other premises might have been, is Bad Business, and someone must be held accountable for it. Sorry isn't enough.
So y'all will excuse me getting just a little annoyed when I read such things. I'm out here saying we shouldn't be vindictive, like the Republicans were to us Democrats. We ought to stop the pendulum from swinging so wildly. We'll need the Republicans: the next few years are going to require all hands on deck.
What do I get in response, from the very people I'm trying to accommodate? So you're OK with the railroading and bad faith - check
Unacceptable.
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| parent )Senate Democrats cherry-picked the evidence to support their conclusions, stove-piping BushLied intel to the committee while ignoring or footnoting evidence that contradicted that view, all in an effort to promote an election-year messaging strategy and stampede the nation into voting a Democrat into the White House and a filibuster-proof majority into the Senate.
Shoulda waited till September to roll this campaign out.
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). . .at least this narrative managed to pass by a party line vote in committee. That's better than the October Surprise conspiracy meme did in the Senate.
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| parent )On the other hand, the report is rather superfluous since most Americans already believe he intentionally misled anyway.
--Steven Palmer Peterson
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| parent ). . .going to change many minds. Kind of like when that picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam back in the eighties is posted somewhere--everyone who sees it already has their mind made up about what the deep meaning--if any--behind it is.
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| parent )Oh, that's right, the majority of America are irrational moonbats. Poor old Jerry Brown -- he just ran for prez in the wrong era!
--Steven Palmer Peterson
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| parent )(Sorry--had to get the horrible image of President Jerry Brown out of my head before dealing with the rest of it)
My point is that a partisan Senate report isn't going to change any minds any more than waving that picture around is. Nothing short of a video of GWB, et al. shouting "we're lying our @$$e$ off about Iraq!" as they bathed in the blood of freshly killed baby seals and spotted owls (or a ginormous bunker full of WMDs hiding under an Al-Queda Iraq hideout that we blow up, for the opposite extreme) is going to change any minds at this point.
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| parent )would get parsed to death by the same people who refuse to admit what's become bleeding obvious to the vast majority of people currently alive.
--Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH
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| parent )Considering that Mugabe still has a base of support in Zimbabwe it's not surprising that GWB still has about 25% support in this country. And note that I am not saying that Bush=Mugabe just that a certain portion of the population will support their favorite political leader no matter how bad their job performance is.
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| parent )I think you're right.
Actually, I think the McClellan book will do more damage. Even though he's a fink, the very fact Bush had a fink doing his spokespersoning for him is going to rub people wrong.
--Steven Palmer Peterson
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| parent )I'm about half way through it and Bush comes off OK. His worst charge against him so far is running his presidency like a permanent campaign.
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4213203/Scott_McClellan_-_What_Happened_(Unabridged)_earReaders
--Nothing resembles virtue more than a great crime. Saint-Just
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| parent )Wherein Moonbat McWacky is Corrected
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| parent )Someone just walked across my grave.
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| parent )