Bush revives "revisionist history"

[bascule]

I love Slate... so poignant and witty...

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2130295?nav=nw

 

President George W. Bush has suddenly shifted rhetoric on the war in Iraq. Until recently, the administration's line was basically, "Everything we are saying and doing is right." It was a line that held him in good stead, especially with his base, which admired his constancy above all else. Now, though, as his policies are failing and even his base has begun to abandon him, a new line is being trotted out: "Yes, we were wrong about some things, but everybody else was wrong, too, so get over it."

 

Quite apart from the political motives behind the move, does Bush have a point? Did everybody believe, in the run-up to the war, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction? And are Bush's Democratic critics, therefore, hypocritically rewriting history when they now protest that the president misled them—and the rest of us—into war by manipulating intelligence data?

 

President Bush made this claim—and thus inaugurated the new line of counterattack—at a Veterans Day speech last Friday before a guaranteed-to-cheer crowd at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania, one of the few American military bases that no sitting president had ever visited. (The White House transcript of the 50-minute speech notes a breathtaking 47 interruptions for applause.)

 

As with many of the president's carefully worded speeches on the subject, this one contains fragments of truth—for instance, nearly everyone, including the war's opponents, did think back in the fall of 2002 that Saddam had WMDs—but they serve only to disguise the larger falsehoods and deceptions.

 

Let's go to the transcript:

 

Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

 

This is not true. Two bipartisan panels have examined the question of how the intelligence on Iraq's WMDs turned out so wrong. Both deliberately skirted the issue of why. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence deferred the second part of its probe—dealing with whether officials oversimplified or distorted the conclusions reached by the various intelligence agencies—until after the 2004 election, and its Republican chairman has done little to revive the issue since. Judge Laurence Silberman, who chaired a presidential commission on WMDs, said, when he released the 601-page report last March, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

 

There's something misleading about Bush's wording on this point, as well: The investigation "found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments." The controversy concerns pressure from the White House and the secretary of defense to form the judgments—that is, to make sure the agencies reached specific judgments—not to change them afterward.

 

They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein.

 

This is an intriguingly ambiguous statement. What does he mean by "our assessment of Saddam Hussein"? Of the man—his motives, intentions, wishes, fantasies? In which case, he's right. Most of the world's intelligence agencies figured Saddam Hussein would like to have weapons of mass destruction. If he means an assessment of Saddam Hussein's capabilities, though, he's wrong: Several countries' spy agencies never bought the notion that Saddam had such weapons or the means to produce them in the near future.

 

They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing the development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.

 

This, too, is misleading. These resolutions called on Saddam to declare the state of his WMD arsenal and, if he claimed there was no such thing, to produce records documenting its destruction. The resolutions never claimed—or had the intention of claiming—that he had such weapons.

 

Saddam did demonstrably have chemical-weapons facilities when the U.N. Security Council started drafting these resolutions. But, as noted by former weapons inspector David Kay (but unnoted in President Bush's speech), President Bill Clinton's 1998 airstrikes destroyed the last of these facilities.

 

[M]any of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security."

 

Bush's opponent, Sen. John Kerry, did utter these words, possibly to his later regret. Still the key phrase is "to use force if necessary." Kerry has since said—as have many other Democrats who voted as he did—that they assumed the president wouldn't use force unless it really was necessary to do so, or unless the intelligence he cited was unambiguous and the threat he envisioned was fairly imminent. This, Bush never did.

 

That's why more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate—who had access to the same intelligence—voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

 

This is the crucial point: these Democrats did not have "access to the same intelligence." The White House did send Congress a classified National Intelligence Estimate, at nearly 100 pages long, as well as a much shorter executive summary. It could have been (and no doubt was) predicted that very few lawmakers would take the time to read the whole document. The executive summary painted the findings in overly stark terms. And even the NIE did not cite the many dissenting views within the intelligence community. The most thorough legislators, for instance, were not aware until much later of the Energy Department's doubts that Iraq's aluminum tubes were designed for atomic centrifuges—or of the dissent about "mobile biological weapons labs" from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

 

Intelligence estimates are unwieldy documents, often studded with dissenting footnotes. Legislators and analysts with limited security clearances have often thought they had "access to intelligence," but unless they could see the footnotes, they didn't.

 

For instance, in the late 1950s, many senators thought President Dwight Eisenhower was either a knave or a fool for denying the existence of a "missile gap." U.S. Air Force Intelligence estimates—leaked to the press and supplied to the Air Force's allies on Capitol Hill—indicated that the Soviet Union would have at least 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles by 1962, far more than the U.S. arsenal. What the "missile gap" hawks didn't know—and Eisenhower did—was that the Central Intelligence Agency had recently acquired new evidence indicating that the Soviets couldn't possibly have more than 50 ICBMs by then—fewer than we would. (As it turned out, photoreconnaissance satellites, which were secretly launched in 1960, revealed that even that number was too high; the Soviets had only a couple of dozen ICBMs.)

 

So, yes, nearly everyone thought Saddam was building WMDs, just as everyone back in the late '50s thought Nikita Khrushchev was building hundreds of ICBMs. In Saddam's case, many of us outsiders (I include myself among them) figured he'd had biological and chemical weapons before; producing such weapons isn't rocket science; U.N. inspectors had been booted out of Iraq a few years earlier; why wouldn't he have them now?

 

What we didn't know—and what the Democrats in Congress didn't know either—was that many insiders did have reasons to conclude otherwise. There is also now much reason to believe that top officials—especially Vice President Dick Cheney and the undersecretaries surrounding Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon—worked hard to keep those conclusions trapped inside.

 

President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said today that the arguments over how and why the war began are irrelevant. "We need to put this debate behind us," he said. But the truth is, no debate could be more relevant now. As the war in Iraq enters yet another crucial phase—with elections scheduled next month and Congress finally taking up the issue of whether to send more troops or start pulling them out—we need to know whether the people running the executive branch can be trusted, and the sad truth is that they cannot be.

[bascule]

I'm afraid I don't understand this whole "timelines" argument. Do you think the terrorists will respect our timelines?

 

No. Do you think we can maintain our current level of military involvement indefinitely?

 

Furthermore, the US Senate just voted 79-19 to demand regular reports from the White House on progress towards a phased pullout of troops from Iraq.

 

I guess 79 of our US senators understand the need for a withdrawal timeline...

[PerpetualYnquisitive]

Not only is Bush wrong' date=' but it's unfortunate that he has to be corrected by a real national disgrace like Kennedy.

 

I guess the president has forgotten that he only introduced the WMD charge after it was clear that the American public was not behind invading Iraq based solely on a loose, largely unsubstantiated connection with Al Qaeda and 9/11. (A connection which later proved to be correct with regard to Al Qaeda, but incorrect with regard to 9/11.) That according to strongly independent and demonstrably objective journalists like Bob Woodward and Judith Miller.

 

So who's being the revisionist here, really?[/quote']

 

I have found a link between the destruction of the WTC towers and Saddam Hussein;

 

Ironically, it's from "Armageddon", near the beginning of the movie, there are the scenes showing Manhattan being hit by a meteor shower.

 

On of these scenes shows an impact into one of the WTC towers. While this meteor shower is happening, Stu the cabbie (Mark Currie) says, "Saddam Hussein is bombing us! We're at war!"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120591/fullcredits

 

Here is a screenie from the DVD taken at 8:58 (8 minutes 58 seconds).

[Pangloss]

LOL! Nice one, PY.

 

No. Do you think we can maintain our current level of military involvement indefinitely?

 

It's a valid question, but nobody's saying they're going to stay forever. The problem is that the moment you set a timeline we lose. It's guaranteed. If we don't set a timeline, we have a chance. If we set a timeline, we might as well go home now. It's that simple.

 

So why not call a spade a spade, and just say "bring the boys home" if that's what you want, and forget all this hypocritical timeline nonsense?

[Pangloss]

Hey bascule, here's a little counterpoint for you from Norman Podhoretz, one of the leaders of the neo-conservative movement. I don't happen to agree with him on a lot of things, but he makes a compelling argument on a number of points.

 

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007540

 

Who Is Lying About Iraq?

A campaign of distortion aims to discredit the liberation.

 

BY NORMAN PODHORETZ

Monday, November 14, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

 

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

 

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

 

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.

 

The main "lie" that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary "lie" that Iraq under Saddam's regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even "imminent") possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked.

 

This entire scenario of purported deceit was given a new lease on life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby stands accused of making false statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration had "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The supposed purpose of leaking this classified information to the press was to retaliate against Mr. Wilson for having "debunked" (in his words) "the lies that led to war."

 

Now, as it happens, Mr. Libby was not charged with having outed Ms. Plame but only with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that she worked for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who brought the indictment against him, made a point of emphasizing that "this indictment is not about the war":

 

This indictment is not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.

 

This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person--a person, Mr. Libby--lied or not.

 

No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for a host of other opponents of the war in insisting:

 

This case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president.

 

Yet even stipulating--which I do only for the sake of argument--that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Mr. Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Mr. Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.

 

How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Mr. Tenet had the backing of all 15 agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions."

 

The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and--yes--France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix--who headed the U.N. team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past--lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:

 

The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km [105 miles] southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

 

Mr. Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.

 

So, once again, did the British, the French and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the U.N. in the period leading up to the invasion. Mr. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as secretary of state. But Mr. Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:

 

I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [but] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP--Ammunition Supply Point--with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.

 

Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Mr. Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, was convinced:

 

People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.

 

In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about:

 

Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.

 

But, according to Wilkerson:

 

The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this rpm, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?

 

In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Mr. Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.

 

Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written:

 

I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).

 

No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material." (Hard as it is to believe, let alone to reconcile with his general position, Joseph C. Wilson IV, in a speech he delivered three months after the invasion at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, offhandedly made the following remark: "I remain of the view that we will find biological and chemical weapons and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam's regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons.")

 

But the consensus on which Mr. Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Bill Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:

 

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

 

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:

 

Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

 

Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:

 

He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.

 

Finally, Mr. Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

 

Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Mr. Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President "to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs."

 

Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:

 

Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

 

This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Mr. Bush succeeded Mr. Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new president, a group of senators led by Bob Graham declared:

 

There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.

 

Sen. Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Mr. Bush's benefit what he had told Mr. Clinton some years earlier:

 

Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.

 

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:

 

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.

 

Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:

 

There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.

 

Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:

 

We know that [saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

 

And here is Mr. Gore again, in that same year:

 

Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.

 

Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:

 

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force--if necessary--to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.

 

Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Mr. Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:

 

Kennedy: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."

 

Byrd: "The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons."

 

Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that "without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again."

 

The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was "hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation."

 

So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with this admonition:

 

Of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous--or more urgent--than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.

 

All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Mr. Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Mr. Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the 16 resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?

 

Another fallback charge is that Mr. Bush, operating mainly through Mr. Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.

 

The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."

 

Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Mr. Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Mr. Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war. Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Mr. Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:

 

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

 

What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as Mr. Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."

 

Which brings us to Joseph C. Wilson, IV and what to my mind wins the palm for the most disgraceful instance of all.

 

The story begins with the notorious 16 words inserted--after, be it noted, much vetting by the CIA and the State Department--into Bush's 2003 State of the Union address:

 

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

 

This is the "lie" Mr. Wilson bragged of having "debunked" after being sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to check out the intelligence it had received to that effect. Mr. Wilson would later angrily deny that his wife had recommended him for this mission, and would do his best to spread the impression that choosing him had been the vice president's idea. But Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, through whom Mr. Wilson first planted this impression, was eventually forced to admit that "Cheney apparently didn't know that Wilson had been dispatched." (By the time Mr. Kristof grudgingly issued this retraction, Mr. Wilson himself, in characteristically shameless fashion, was denying that he had ever "said the vice president sent me or ordered me sent.") And as for his wife's supposed nonrole in his mission, here is what Valerie Plame Wilson wrote in a memo to her boss at the CIA:

 

My husband has good relations with the PM [the prime minister of Niger] and the former minister of mines . . ., both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.

 

More than a year after his return, with the help of Mr. Kristof, and also Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and then through an op-ed piece in the Times under his own name, Mr. Wilson succeeded, probably beyond his wildest dreams, in setting off a political firestorm.

 

In response, the White House, no doubt hoping to prevent his allegation about the 16 words from becoming a proxy for the charge that (in Mr. Wilson's latest iteration of it) "lies and disinformation [were] used to justify the invasion of Iraq," eventually acknowledged that the president's statement "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address." As might have been expected, however, this panicky response served to make things worse rather than better. And yet it was totally unnecessary--for the maddeningly simple reason that every single one of the 16 words at issue was true.

 

That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Furthermore--and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that this assurance has now been discredited--Britain's independent Butler commission concluded that it was "well-founded." The relevant passage is worth quoting at length:

 

a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.

 

b. The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.

 

c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British government did not claim this.

 

As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Mr. Wilson himself, far from challenging the British report when he was "debriefed" on his return from Niger (although challenging it is what he now never stops doing), actually strengthened the CIA's belief in its accuracy. From the Senate Intelligence Committee report:

 

He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the report [by Mr. Wilson] was that Niger officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium.

 

And again:

 

The report on [Mr. Wilson's] trip to Niger . . . did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal.

 

This passage goes on to note that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research--which (as we have already seen) did not believe that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons--found support in Mr. Wilson's report for its "assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq." But if so, this, as the Butler report quoted above points out, would not mean that Iraq had not tried to buy it--which was the only claim made by British intelligence and then by Mr. Bush in the famous 16 words.

 

The liar here, then, was not Mr. Bush but Mr. Wilson. And Mr. Wilson also lied when he told the Washington Post that he had unmasked as forgeries certain documents given to American intelligence (by whom it is not yet clear) that supposedly contained additional evidence of Saddam's efforts to buy uranium from Niger. The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according to the Butler report:

 

The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine [that assessment].

 

More damning yet to Mr. Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:

 

[Mr. Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article . . . which said, "among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.' " Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.

 

To top all this off, just as Mr. Cheney had nothing to do with the choice of Mr. Wilson for the mission to Niger, neither was it true that, as Mr. Wilson "confirmed" for a credulous New Republic reporter, "the CIA circulated [his] report to the Vice President's office," thereby supposedly proving that Cheney and his staff "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie." Yet--the mind reels--if Mr. Cheney had actually been briefed on Mr. Wilson's oral report to the CIA (which he was not), he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

 

So much for the author of the best-selling and much-acclaimed book whose title alone--"The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity"--has set a new record for chutzpah.

 

But there is worse. In his press conference on the indictment against Mr. Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that lying to federal investigators is a serious crime both because it is itself against the law and because, by sending them on endless wild-goose chases, it constitutes the even more serious crime of obstruction of justice. By those standards, Mr. Wilson--who has repeatedly made false statements about every aspect of his mission to Niger, including whose idea it was to send him and what he told the CIA upon his return; who was then shown up by the Senate Intelligence Committee as having lied about the forged documents; and whose mendacity has sent the whole country into a wild-goose chase after allegations that, the more they are refuted, the more they keep being repeated--is himself an excellent candidate for criminal prosecution.

 

And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq--the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy--have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American ideals.

[john5746]

- Train the Iraqi army and police forces to the point of being self-sufficient

 

This should be job one. I wonder how many people in Iraq are actively involved in this? Can they do this and fight the terrorists at the same time?

They should be able to, IMO. They probably keep statistics on how many are trained, etc. They can probably even forecast how many they will have trained in a year. I hope they are "training the trainer" and will leave excellent officers behind who can continue training.

 

- Continue working on the infrastructure

 

This is secondary and the terrorists make this more difficult. The Iraqies should lead on this. We probably will overdo it, thinking they need the same technology we have in the US. We are worried about spending too much in New Orleans, I wonder how much Haliburton is making over there that really isn't necessary.

 

- Once these goals are met, begin pulling out our troops

 

How will we do this? I think we should leave one city at a time in Iraqi control and pull out that way. Maybe leave the Sunni areas for last. You don't just wait till the end and say, OK we are done time to leave.

 

A timeline is necessary. You set a schedule, try to meet the deadlines, and change the schedule as problems occur. This is how most functional people operate. They don't have to say we will withdraw at this date. Just say how many they need to train, how many they can train/month. How they plan to put the Iraqi's in charge - phases, etc.

 

Right know its whenever they feel like it. Why trust Bush on this and not on Harriet? He has shown himself to be a weak leader. He let his VP run over him and his Secretary of State, he was asleep with Katrina, he blew it on Harriet. We have to reign in this guy for his own good and ours.

 

Both parties, especially the Democrats need to forget about the past. We are in Iraq and need to make the best of it. But trusting Bush to get it done, well - WE WON'T BE FOOLED AGAIN.

[Pangloss]

Right know its whenever they feel like it. Why trust Bush on this and not on Harriet? He has shown himself to be a weak leader. He let his VP run over him and his Secretary of State' date=' he was asleep with Katrina, he blew it on Harriet. We have to reign in this guy for his own good and ours.

 

Both parties, especially the Democrats need to forget about the past. We are in Iraq and need to make the best of it. But trusting Bush to get it done, well - WE WON'T BE FOOLED AGAIN.[/quote']

 

So much for tetra's charge that we've all become a bunch of left-bashers around here. (chuckle)

[cosine]

<snipped a few times for brevity of quote and directness of response>

 

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007540

 

Who Is Lying About Iraq?

A campaign of distortion aims to discredit the liberation.

 

BY NORMAN PODHORETZ

Monday' date=' November 14, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

 

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

 

<snip>

 

Yet even stipulating--which I do only for the sake of argument--that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Mr. Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Mr. Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.

 

How indeed could it have been otherwise?...

<snip>

[/quote']

 

Talk about long-winded...

Anyway, I would disagree, and even go as far as saying that they were not only lying, but KNEW they were lying. Here is what Colin Powell said on Febuary 24, 2001, at a press conference at Cairo:

 

"We will always try to consult with our friends in the region so that they are not surprised and do everything we can to explain the purpose of our responses. We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime's ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue."

 

Unfortunantely, The State Department no longer hosts the transcript on their website, but luckily here is a mirror-site with the whole transcript of the conference: http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/powell-cairo.htm

[Pangloss]

Right, but that was a month after they took office, and long before the non-cooperation rulings by the UN. At that time Iraq was not in compliance, but they had started cooperating again and the inspectors weren't finding anything. But after that they began failing to cooperate again, and the inspectors began to have second thoughts about what Iraq did or did not have. By 2003 the investigators could not certify Iraq free of WMDs, and Blix himself, even though he was opposed to the war, expressed concerns about what Iraq might have.

 

More to the point, various intelligence services around the world were by 2002/3 reporting information that suggested that they had WMDs.

 

So that's an interesting point, but it doesn't make anything like a reasonable case for "lies".

[cosine]

Right' date=' but that was a month after they took office, and long before the non-cooperation rulings by the UN. At that time Iraq was not in compliance, but they had started cooperating again and the inspectors weren't finding anything. But after that they began failing to cooperate again, and the inspectors began to have second thoughts about what Iraq did or did not have. By 2003 the investigators could not certify Iraq free of WMDs, and Blix himself, even though he was opposed to the war, expressed concerns about what Iraq might have.

 

More to the point, various intelligence services around the world were by 2002/3 reporting information that suggested that they had WMDs.

 

So that's an interesting point, but it doesn't make anything like a reasonable case for "lies".[/quote']

 

Bush had knowledge that Hussein did not have any WMD's after the second weapons inspection, which was when, late '01 and early '02? later? And then all of a sudden Hussein had a full fledged WMD program by March 24, or 2003? Well, Bush was so sure of it that he told us he was sure, and he was so sure that he brought us to war. But we know now that at best he had no idea what he was doing, and not even at worst, but somewhere in the middle, he was plain lying.

 

I would go towards the latter, check out this brief quote of minutes of a secret meeting of top UK advisors on July 23, 2002:

 

"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

 

C, by the way, refers to Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British Intelligence. But don't take my word for it, you can read it for yourself (it was leaked to the press in May, 2005): http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html

 

And, by the way, here is another quote from the same memo, which explicitly mentions WMDs:

 

"The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force."

[Pangloss]

Well first of all, you're more or less preaching to the choir here, so I don't know that I'm the best person to answer these questions. But this claim, as with your point about the atomic bombs in the other thread, is similarly refutable.

 

My personal opinion is that the evidence of WMDs was marginal and circumstantial, and the administration, upon realizing that the terrorism/9-11 angle was going to be insufficient to bring the country to war, decided that WMDs constituted a more powerful motivator. That's deceptive, but it's not the same thing as a "lie". We were sold a bag of goods, Madison Avenue style, and we bought it, hook, line, but no sinker (not everyone was convinced, but not enough people disagreed to stop it).

 

This is different from saying that we were LIED to. And frankly I think the problem here is that we as Americans are unwilling to own up to our own responsibility for this mess. It's too easy to dump it all in George Bush's lap. Who are the real fools here?

 

At any rate, Anendberg Factcheck did a specific piece on this just yesterday which demonstrates why the "Bush lied" point is so fully refutable.

 

http://www.factcheck.org/article358.html

 

A couple of particularly relevent quotes from their piece:

 

Neither side is giving the whole story in this continuing dispute.

 

The President's main point is correct: the CIA and most other US intelligence agencies believed before the war that Saddam had stocks of biological and chemical weapons, was actively working on nuclear weapons and "probably" would have a nuclear weapon before the end of this decade. That faulty intelligence was shared with Congress – along with multiple mentions of some doubts within the intelligence community – in a formal National Intelligence Estimate just prior to the Senate and House votes to authorize the use of force against Iraq.

 

No hard evidence has surfaced to support claims that Bush somehow manipulated the findings of intelligence analysts. In fact, two bipartisan investigations probed for such evidence and said they found none. So Dean's claim that intelligence was "corrupted" is unsupported.

 

But while official investigators have found no evidence that Bush manipulated intelligence, they never took up the question of whether the President and his top aides manipulated the public , something Bush also denies.

 

In fact, before the war Bush and others often downplayed or omitted any mention of doubts about Saddam's nuclear program. They said Saddam might give chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons to terrorists, although their own intelligence experts said that was unlikely. Bush also repeatedly claimed Iraq had trained al Qaeda terrorists in the use of poison gas, a story doubted at the time by Pentagon intelligence analysts. The claim later was called a lie by the al Qaeda detainee who originally told it to his US interrogators.

 

Whether or not Bush was aware of the Pentagon's doubts is not yet clear.

 

I highly recommend that all "Bush lied" proponents read that factcheck in detail. It forms a nice basis/beginning point for further debate, with extensive sources and much more specific points than what I quoted above.

[Mokele]

This is different from saying that we were LIED to. And frankly I think the problem here is that we as Americans are unwilling to own up to our own responsibility for this mess. It's too easy to dump it all in George Bush's lap. Who are the real fools here?

 

While there's a technical difference between the above and the concpet of Shrub just making stuff up, I'm not entirely sure there's a moral difference. Whether you're telling people things you know are false or just giving the information a slight spin, you're still presenting the information in a biased manner that's specifically designed to manipulate opinions based on something other than the intrinsic strengths of the arguement. If I were to publish totally fabricated data, or to publish "cherry-picked" data from a genuine data set, either would be intellectually dishonest and result in me working as a janitor for the rest of my life.

 

And, while I would agree about owning up to the responsibility of having fallen for it, I'm not sure your analogy is valid; we have good reason to expect a street vendor to try to cheat us in order to get our money, but to expect *any* branch of government to spin (or otherwise present in a biased manner) information to lead us to war? If we, as citizens, need to take that kind of attitude about the government, then IMHO it's time for an outright rebellion; burn it to the ground (metaphoricly) and start over, because any government whose de facto motto is 'caveat emptor' is clearly too corrupt and twisted to be salvaged. (Not that I have any plans or anything, but FYI, be on the lookout for roving armies of killer squid robots...)

 

My point is, we shouldn't *expect* to be fooled by *any* part of our government, and that things have gotten so bad that we need to is, IMHO, a very, *very* bad sign of where we're going both as a country and a society.

 

Mokele

[cosine]

Well first of all, you're more or less preaching to the choir here, so I don't know that I'm the best person to answer these questions. But this claim, as with your point about the atomic bombs in the other thread, is similarly refutable.

 

My point about atomic bombs in another thread? I checked my posts in my profile and didn't find anything like that.....?

 

My personal opinion is that the evidence of WMDs was marginal and circumstantial' date=' and the administration, upon realizing that the terrorism/9-11 angle was going to be insufficient to bring the country to war, decided that WMDs constituted a more powerful motivator. That's deceptive, but it's not the same thing as a "lie". We were sold a bag of goods, Madison Avenue style, and we bought it, hook, line, but no sinker (not everyone was convinced, but not enough people disagreed to stop it).

 

This is different from saying that we were LIED to. And frankly I think the problem here is that we as Americans are unwilling to own up to our own responsibility for this mess. It's too easy to dump it all in George Bush's lap. Who are the [i']real[/i] fools here?

 

Are you calling us fools for expecting the president to not lie to us? Mokele expressed this point in a larger context and very well.

 

At any rate' date=' Anendberg Factcheck did a specific piece on this just yesterday which demonstrates why the "Bush lied" point is so fully refutable.

 

http://www.factcheck.org/article358.html

 

A couple of particularly relevent quotes from their piece:

 

 

 

I highly recommend that all "Bush lied" proponents read that factcheck in detail. It forms a nice basis/beginning point for further debate, with [i']extensive[/i] sources and much more specific points than what I quoted above.

 

Is your arguement has become that since the Bush administration was able to trick us, we can only blame ourselves? The article you cite explains how any possible evidence was weak if not retracted. What about the direct quotes from White House Administration I posted? Did you read them? How are they "preaching to the choir"? I dug up direct quotes to illustrate how they are not biased. What is your arguement against the administration's own words?

[Pangloss]

My point about atomic bombs in another thread? I checked my posts in my profile and didn't find anything like that.....?

 

I thought you posted something in support of Tiger's Eye's comments on the atomic bomb' date=' but looking back at the thread I don't see it now. Sorry for the confusion. I wonder if I just shorted neurons and confused you with Tiger's Eye completely. If so I apologize for that error instead.

 

 

Are you calling us fools for expecting the president to not lie to us? Mokele expressed this point in a larger context and very well.

 

I thought he had a nice post there as well, but no that's not what I'm saying. There is both a technical and a moral difference.

 

The job of the administration is to pursue agendas based on what they perceive the people elected them to do. When they put forth their plan, they have to, and we need them to, explain to us what the salient points are, especially if they may not be immediately obvious. Explaining to us, for example, why we may need to pay higher taxes -- what it is that we're going to get out of that -- so that we don't simply look at it, say "like hell" and vote against it. (That's a simplistic example that really applies more to local politics, where we actually do vote on tax increases, but the same basic idea applies at the highest levels.)

 

That doesn't mean we want them to lie. It means we want them to tell us what it is that they think is important, and why. Sure, we also want the basic facts, and we want them clearly laid out. But we also want the President's opinion. What does he think we should do? Why does he think we should do it? Why is that more important than this other thing over here?

 

What I believe happened with Iraq is that they got carried away while going through that process. Understand, this is a big part of the job, so it's not like we're talking about anything unusual here.

 

Where I fault them is that they should have known better. When it became clear that the American people were not going to support a "solo" war in Iraq on terrorism grounds, and they couldn't get the support from the UN/"world opinion", they should have stopped. They chose not to, and at that point they changed their message, and crossed a very narrow but very important line.

 

And we let them do it. We're not calling them on the carpet for it, even now. The complaint today is that they lied to us about the existince of WMDs. Apparently we're not capable of considering that we were simply oversold a package of goods, and fell for it.

 

We went to the auto dealer to buy Ford Explorer, and came home in a Ferrari, and now the wife is standing in the doorway with the kids demanding to know what the hell we think we're doing. And all we can do is stare at the ground and mumble something about the color red.

[bascule]

I highly recommend that all "Bush lied" proponents read that factcheck in detail. It forms a nice basis/beginning point for further debate, with extensive sources and much more specific points than what I quoted above.

 

I hit ^F, looked for "Niger" or "Africa," and found nothing.

 

That was a lie. Tenet took the blame for it. I guess that's why they're ignoring it now.

 

However, Joseph Wilson reported directly to the State Department, with some pretty damning evidence that the British documents were forgeries.

 

The fact that the CIA, State Department, and Department of Defense all had information discrediting the Nigerian yellowcake and the fact that this still wound up in the President's State of Union Address means either the administration was grossly incompetent or they lied...

[cosine]

I thought you posted something in support of Tiger's Eye's comments on the atomic bomb, but looking back at the thread I don't see it now. Sorry for the confusion. I wonder if I just shorted neurons and confused you with Tiger's Eye completely. If so I apologize for that error instead.

 

No problem, I was almost hoping I had said something interesting enough to be cited by another thread.

 

<snipped for brevity>

Where I fault them is that they should have known better. When it became clear that the American people were not going to support a "solo" war in Iraq on terrorism grounds' date=' and they couldn't get the support from the UN/"world opinion", they should have stopped. They chose not to, and at that point they changed their message, and crossed a very narrow but very important line.

 

And we let them do it. We're not calling them on the carpet for it, even now. The complaint today is that they lied to us about the existince of WMDs. Apparently we're not capable of considering that we were simply oversold a package of goods, and fell for it.

 

[b']We went to the auto dealer to buy Ford Explorer, and came home in a Ferrari, and now the wife is standing in the doorway with the kids demanding to know what the hell we think we're doing. And all we can do is stare at the ground and mumble something about the color red.[/b]

 

First of all, analogies are attempts to find isomorphisms... however they are frequently false isomorphisms. I really don't see how your analogies are applying or what they even mean.

 

And you admit that they crossed a line in their attempts to bring us into war. What distinctions are you arguing for exactly?

[Pangloss]

I don't agree that analogies are attempts to find isomorphisms. I agree that that CAN happen, but the implication that they're always a logical fallacy is not fair. They can also be a valid tool for giving an example for one's position, without necessarily suggesting that the comparison is direct and perfect. (I'm interested in discussing that further, but we might want a separate thread for it. I think others might be interested in that discussion as well, if you don't mind starting it.)

 

I have myself questioned whether I am putting too fine a point on this issue. It's not my intent to split hairs, but to try to find those elusive root causes. I'm suggesting that the problem is deeper and less fully appreciated than the Michael Moore's and Al Franken's would have us believe.

 

Rather than answer your question directly (which I feel I've already done, though I apologize if I've not been able to do so satisfactorily, and promise to elaborate further, as opportunity, and my limited intelligence, permit), let me instead elaborate further on what I feel is the problem.

 

We're really good at swinging the pendulum back and forth. Some of the demands coming out of mainstream Democrats' mouths right now strike me as not a means to and end of Iraq, but rather a means to an end of George Bush. It's not enough to show that we made a mistake, they must insist that we were lied to.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it's not important that we might have been lied to. What I'm saying is that we've beaten ourselves senseless over this issue, and sufficient proof has not surfaced to satisfy any independent source or investigation. So isn't it time to turn our attention to a larger issue?

 

And if we don't, aren't we just going to keep repeating this same mistake, over and over and over again? How has the Bush presidency been any less pointlessly contentious than the Clinton administration? Hasn't it been even MORE so? In my view this has made us a weaker nation, less united, less powerful, less able to steer itself into the 21st century.

[Pangloss]

I hit ^F' date=' looked for "Niger" or "Africa," and found nothing.

[/quote']

 

Well you just missed it, then. Allow me to direct your attention to the relevent passage from the article:

 

That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Furthermore--and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that this assurance has now been discredited--Britain's independent Butler commission concluded that it was "well-founded." The relevant passage is worth quoting at length:

 

a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.

 

b. The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.

 

c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British government did not claim this.

 

As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Mr. Wilson himself, far from challenging the British report when he was "debriefed" on his return from Niger (although challenging it is what he now never stops doing), actually strengthened the CIA's belief in its accuracy. From the Senate Intelligence Committee report:

 

He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the report [by Mr. Wilson] was that Niger officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium.

 

And again:

 

The report on [Mr. Wilson's] trip to Niger . . . did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal.

 

This passage goes on to note that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research--which (as we have already seen) did not believe that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons--found support in Mr. Wilson's report for its "assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq." But if so, this, as the Butler report quoted above points out, would not mean that Iraq had not tried to buy it--which was the only claim made by British intelligence and then by Mr. Bush in the famous 16 words.

 

The liar here, then, was not Mr. Bush but Mr. Wilson. And Mr. Wilson also lied when he told the Washington Post that he had unmasked as forgeries certain documents given to American intelligence (by whom it is not yet clear) that supposedly contained additional evidence of Saddam's efforts to buy uranium from Niger. The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according to the Butler report:

 

The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine [that assessment].

 

More damning yet to Mr. Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:

 

[Mr. Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article . . . which said, "among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.' " Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.

 

To top all this off, just as Mr. Cheney had nothing to do with the choice of Mr. Wilson for the mission to Niger, neither was it true that, as Mr. Wilson "confirmed" for a credulous New Republic reporter, "the CIA circulated [his] report to the Vice President's office," thereby supposedly proving that Cheney and his staff "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie." Yet--the mind reels--if Mr. Cheney had actually been briefed on Mr. Wilson's oral report to the CIA (which he was not), he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

 

So much for the author of the best-selling and much-acclaimed book whose title alone--"The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity"--has set a new record for chutzpah.

[Pangloss]

He makes a damning case against Wilson, and while I agree that his motivation is partisan, you have to prove that he's wrong before you can go and make factual statements like you've been doing.

 

Returning to your quote:

 

That was a lie. Tenet took the blame for it. I guess that's why they're ignoring it now.

 

However' date=' Joseph Wilson reported directly to the State Department, with some pretty damning evidence that the British documents were forgeries.

 

The fact that the CIA, State Department, and Department of Defense all had information discrediting the Nigerian yellowcake and the fact that this still wound up in the President's State of Union Address means either the administration was grossly incompetent or they lied...[/quote']

 

And if you could prove that, you'd be on the 6 o'clock news this very evening.

[bascule]

Well you just missed it, then. Allow me to direct your attention to the relevent passage from the article:

 

I was referring to the factcheck.org article (as I still have a glimmer of respect for factcheck.org), not the neocon drivel you posted. Please see the context of what you were quoting.

 

He makes a damning case against Wilson, and while I agree that his motivation is partisan, you have to prove that he's wrong before you can go and make factual statements like you've been doing.

 

I'd rather not. Have fun believing what you do, which is apparently that this guy (and Bush) are telling the truth and that everyone else is lying...

[Pangloss]

Please inform me of the context you're replying to, and I'll be happy to do that. Sorry for any confusion I may have caused on my part.

 

Bascule, what I believe or not believe is not at issue, and I don't believe I have accused anyone of lying. I'm not the one making definitive statements. I'm the one keeping an open mind.

 

Person A: Soandso lied.

Person B: Well he might have. What's your proof?

Person A: It says so here in these articles.

Person B: But these articles are refuted by these other articles.

Person A: Those articles are wrong, and the first ones are right. You're just a parrot for Soandso, who is a liar.

Person B: Um, okay....

 

Guess which of us is which?

[bascule]

Guess which of us is which?

 

Looks like a strawman to me...

 

And Joseph Wilson aside, what about the conclusions of Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr.?

[cosine]

I don't agree that analogies are attempts to find isomorphisms. I agree that that CAN happen' date=' but the implication that they're always a logical fallacy is not fair. They can also be a valid tool for giving an example for one's position, without necessarily suggesting that the comparison is direct and perfect. (I'm interested in discussing that further, but we might want a separate thread for it. I think others might be interested in that discussion as well, if you don't mind starting it.)

<snipped for revelence of reply>[/quote']

 

Done and done, its in the general sciences forum:

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=16587

[Pangloss]

It's not a strawman, it's an accurate summary of this discussion.

 

What about General Fulford? He said there was little chance of diversion, but "little" is not the same thing as "none", so doesn't that feed directly into my point that it's exaggeration and not outright lying that we're talking about here?

[padren]

Sorry to jump in with something that was mentioned earlier in this thread (I am enjoying this discussion, but I don't have enough facts to comment on the intelligence sources) regarding the case for timelines and blame level on congress.

 

First, with timelines, they are important not because we need to pull out by those dates, but because we have to pull out by those dates if the administration actually has a clue what they are doing.

 

The problem is the administration is executing the war with absolutely no quality assurance or accountability whatsoever. If the administration can say they have x,y,z goals, and their plans are to achieve them on such a timeline, then if they fail its more than justified to replace them with people who can execute the war far better.

 

This would improve our ability to win in Iraq, not lessen it. If they meet most of the plan on schedule, but are delayed on others due to unforeseen events, then maybe they get a C+ and not an A. However, if a timeline is drafted and they show continuing incompetence, in only will help the troops and objectives to shake up the leadership.

 

 

 

Secondarily, I think members of congress are to blame for something, but it actually isn't the same thing Bush is to blame for.

 

Many of us were not sold on the Iraq war - mostly democrat voters - back when it was sold to congress. What we saw, was not congress being convinced of the threat, but (at least the dems) congress being convienced it would be politically uncomfortable to oppose it and instead got on the bandwagon to come across as patriots.

To many, this is blame for the war on congress for their cowardace, instead of poor intelligence. This is independant of course of the blame on Bush for doing what he and the administration did.

 

 

I'd like to make one observation about the argument regard the intelligence that congress had:

 

Not the entire congress supported the war, some opposed it. Would they, in their hopes to sway the others, not voice the information regarding the intelligence faults if they did have access to that information?

 

I would think they'd argue with the best information they had access to, and I only recall (my memory is sketchy) that there was lots of talk about inconclusive evidence, but not the presentation of damning evidence to the contrary.