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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (437641)	8/4/2003 12:37:18 AM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Neocon, re: "Anyway, again, the public is not terribly interested in where the WMDs are, never have been, so your initial point is doubtful......" I think you're probably right about much of the public, but not the thinking public. Both those for and against the war who follow the facts carefully are engaged on this issue. The polls are skewed by the high number of those polled who think that we've already found wmds, that Saddam used them against our troops and that a terrorist link has already been established. I forget the number but around 20-30% of those asked in recent polls "believe" those "facts." As far as whether the administration relied on the immediacy as opposed to the inevitability of the "threat," I suspect that the use of highly alarming rhetoric to support the thesis that we couldn't afford to wait for the inspection process because of the danger of a catasrophic attack on Americans via Iraqi weapons, speaks volumes about the administrations view of whether an imminent threat of danger was necessary to garner public and legislative support. The imminent threat inferences played on our post 9/11 fears and mobilized that support. Interestingly, the "inevitable threat" argument is not yet supported by the what we've found in Iraq. Certainly Iraq had a nascent weapons program, but I imagine that almost every non-bankrupt nation in the world has a weapons program. Whether that presents an inevitable threat to America represents an intelligence assessment. I'm not too big on the reliability of intelligence assessments. It seems that we've a long history of overestimating the threats as well as the capabilities of nations that we see as enemies. It also appears that we have a history of underestimating the threat of terrorist groups that ARE an imminent and inevitable threat to Americans and American interests. With respect to the Hitler-Stalin analogy, there are other examples of instances where we saw intransigent and inevitable enemies and time and patience saw changes and, eventually, peaceful allies. Increasingly the friends of this administration are floating balloons to test the reaction to the likelihood that much of the pre-war rhetoric will not be proven true. The "they've hidden them-moved them" rationale has now become "they destroyed them immediately before the war-or a few years ago" but didn't tell us because they wanted them as a deterrent to invasion. The Fox commentator that made the latter statement actually said it was yet another tremendous miscalculation on the part of Saddam. She said it with a very smug smile, if I'm any judge of smug. I'd like to see an intelligence assessment of what kind of madman it would take to lead a nation to initiate or assist a terrorist organization in a strike against America. The more successful the strike, the more certain and deadly the reaction and, regardless of the success of the strike, the leaders of the nation would be signing their eventual death warrants. In my opinion it's not nations that we should fear, it's the terrorists we are, after Iraq, painting with heroic strokes for all the angry young men in third worlds to emulate.