RE: "Was clinton lying about the WMDs?"
Maybe he had that opinion and maybe he didn't, who knows. There has always been a lot of saber rattling among nations. It's a big step, however, to move from saber rattling to a full scale invasion in contravention of international law.
What is your point? Are you trying to say that Bush didn't lie about the wmds, didn't exxagerate the intelligence, or was duped by our own errors in intelligence? If so, what does that have to do with what Clinton said, believed, or didn't believe based upon Iraq kicking out weapons inspectors a half-decade ago? We had another 5 years of intelligence, we'd bombed the holy crap out of all suspected sites in 1998, we'd had the benefit of U.N. weapons inspectors reentering Iraq with good access to any site we wanted them to explore and our own intelligence was disputing the portrait that the Bush admin wanted to paint of the imminence and extent of the wmd and "terrorist sponsorship" danger of Iraq.
Don't hide the real issues behind some smokescreen of "maybe they were wrong too." The question is what did the Bush people know when they tried, and partially succeeded, in scaring the socks off the American public and the world.
I noted that jlallen, I beieve, got patted on the back for saying that intelligence agencies around the world said that Iraq had wmds. I wonder who told us that? Could it have been Britain and the U.S.? Did they tell us that those weapons were massive in scope, capable of delivery to our country, an imminent threat? Who's fooling whom? Shallow thinking won't solve these issues and, for once, Watson is right when he infers that jlallen's style of posting; unsupported, conclusionary one-liners won't further the debate. |
