>There haven't been any false pretenses, in my view. I know, WMD. But there really isn't much evidence there were any "false pretenses" involved. In reality, they should have made the case for what it is -- we need a democracy in the center of the Middle East to eliminate anti-Americanism in the region, which is what we're doing. Unfortunately, it had to get worse before it could get better.
Actually, if you go back to my posts from right before the war, you'd find that I agreed with you, and still do, to some extent.
The "false pretenses" were not the WMD (in my mind, anyway -- I thought they were there too, I just didn't think we were ever going to get hit by Saddam -- guess I was wrong too). The false pretenses were that the reconstruction would be easy and cheap, and the Al-Qaida connection. The people around Bush who were predicting costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars and ethnic strife ended up "resigning" (Larry Lindsey, Paul O'Neill) or getting some pretty nasty treatment (Eric Shinseki), which the people who were predicting this to be easy (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith) are still around.
The question is: If the American people and Congress had been told the truth (at least as I saw it before the war and as it has turned out to be), which is that the Iraqis would not all welcome us as liberators (though it seems like around half have), that 135,000 troops would not be enough (didn't Rumsfeld originally ask for only 95,000?), that we'd be there for years, it would cost over a quarter of a trillion dollars, that we would still have 20+ troops dying and 100+ troops being injured per week over a year after the war started, AND that Saddam had NO links to 9/11, would Congress have still approved this war so overwhelmingly?
If not, we went to war under false pretenses.
And, it continues... why isn't the $50-$70 billion that the administration needs for Iraq for next year not in the budget and not being requested until AFTER the election?
-Z |
