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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FaultLine who wrote (119007)	11/8/2003 10:56:15 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Andrew Sullivan on "imminent threat" MARSHALL COMES UP EMPTY: Desperate to prove the notion that the administration did too call the threat from Saddam "imminent," Josh Marshall, becoming ever more stridently anti-Bush, came up with a contest. He asked his readers to send in the best administration "imminent threat" quote. talkingpointsmemo.com Well, you can judge for yourself. But, to my mind, he comes up completely empty. No administration official used that term. None. The best Marshall can come up with are reporters' off-the-cuff formulations in questions to Ari Fleischer which evinced the response "yes." He links to Rumsfeld testimony in which the secretary of defense specifically spells out the core of the administration's case: So we are on notice: An attack very likely will be attempted. The only question is when, and by what technique. It could be months; it could be a year; it could be years. But it will happen, and each of us need to pause and think about that. If the worst were to happen, not one of us here today would be able to honestly say that it was a surprise, because it will not be a surprise. So we have no administration reference to an "imminent threat" and a chief spokesman saying that the threat could be as much as years away and, at the least, months. We have the president himself saying explicitly that "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." THE DEEPER ISSUE: We can fight over words in this way, but the fundamental reality also undermines Marshall's case. The point about 9/11 is that it showed that we were in a new world where we could be attacked by shadowy groups with little warning. The point about Saddam is that he was a sworn enemy of the U.S., had been known to develop an arsenal of WMDs, was in a position to arm terrorists in a devastating way, and any president had to weigh the risk of him staying in power in that new climate. The actual threat hangs over us all the time. It is unlike previous threats from foreign powers. It is accountable to no rules and no ethics. We know it will give us no formal warning. But we cannot know it is "imminent". If we had such proof - that the U.S. was under an imminent threat of attack - there would have been no debate at all. Of course a country has the right to defend itself when it is faced with an imminent threat. The debate is over how seriously to take the threat we now face. The strongest argument of the anti-war crowd is that we now know that the WMD threat from Saddam was much less than almost everyone (including most of them) believed. They're right - at least from the evidence so far. But that doesn't resolve the question of what we should have done before the war, when we had limited knowledge and information. Josh implies we should have risked it, and kept Saddam in power, with fingers crossed. But then Josh wasn't president. He wasn't responsible for guessing wrong. The question we have to answer is a relatively simple one: do we want a president who will veer on the optimistic side when it comes to Islamist terror, or do we want a president that will veer on the side of caution and aggression? Do we want one who will hope for the best or one who will act, assuming the worst? I thought 9/11 ended that debate. It clearly hasn't. But it's the central debate of the coming election. andrewsullivan.com

To: FaultLine who wrote (119007)	11/9/2003 12:45:21 AM
From: KLP	Respond to of 281500

And what you're proposing is that we parse the meaning of words which are not "imminent" to decide how closely they approximate "imminent". Ahhhhhh, wait for awhile...pretty soon, "it" or "something" will come to you. Probably the Saudi's have a better understanding of 'imminent' tonight. Unfortunately, they didn't listen to the US warnings.

To: FaultLine who wrote (119007)	11/9/2003 1:23:37 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 281500

How about if we decide any bets made on the thread, arbitrated/decided by you, you get 15% of the purse? PS - If the decision goes against me, I'll appeal to SI Bob, and then (if he doesn't see things correctly), I'll sue him, you, all the thread regulars, SI, and Gore (for inventing the internet). Have a nice day.

To: FaultLine who wrote (119007)	11/9/2003 10:05:29 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Cheney’s Long Path to War ________________________________ The Hard Sell: He sifted intel. He brooded about threats. And he wanted Saddam gone. The inside story of how Vice President Cheney bought into shady assumptions and helped persuade a nation to invade Iraq NEWSWEEK msnbc.com Nov. 17 issue — Every Thursday, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have lunch together in a small dining room off the Oval Office. They eat alone; no aides are present. They have no fixed agenda, but it’s a safe assumption that they often talk about intelligence—about what the United States knows, or doesn’t know, about the terrorist threat. THE PRESIDENT RESPECTS Cheney’s judgment, say White House aides, and values the veep’s long experience in the intelligence community (as President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, as a member of the House Intelligence Committee in the 1980s and as secretary of Defense in the George H.W. Bush administration). As vice president, Cheney is free to roam about the various agencies, quizzing analysts and top spooks about terrorists and their global connections. “This is a very important area. It’s the one the president asked me to work on ... I ask a lot of hard questions,” Cheney told NBC’s Tim Russert last September. “That’s my job.” Of all the president’s advisers, Cheney has consistently taken the most dire view of the terrorist threat. On Iraq, Bush was the decision maker. But more than any adviser, Cheney was the one to make the case to the president that war against Iraq was an urgent necessity. Beginning in the late summer of 2002, he persistently warned that Saddam was stocking up on chemical and biological weapons, and last March, on the eve of the invasion, he declared that “we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.” (Cheney later said that he meant “program,” not “weapons.” He also said, a bit optimistically, “I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.”) After seven months, investigators are still looking for that arsenal of WMD. Cheney has repeatedly suggested that Baghdad has ties to Al Qaeda. He has pointedly refused to rule out suggestions that Iraq was somehow to blame for the 9/11 attacks and may even have played a role in the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The CIA and FBI, as well as a congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks, have dismissed this conspiracy theory. Still, as recently as Sept. 14, Cheney continued to leave the door open to Iraqi complicity. He brought up a report—widely discredited by U.S. intelligence officials—that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. And he described Iraq as “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11.” A few days later, a somewhat sheepish President Bush publicly corrected the vice president. There was no evidence, Bush admitted, to suggest that the Iraqis were behind 9/11. Cheney has long been regarded as a Washington wise man. He has a dry, deliberate manner; a penetrating, if somewhat wintry, wit, and a historian’s long-view sensibility. He is far to the right politically, but in no way wild-eyed; in private conversation he seems moderate, thoughtful, cautious. Yet when it comes to terrorist plots, he seems to have given credence to the views of some fairly flaky ideologues and charlatans. Writing recently in The New Yorker, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh alleged that Cheney had, in effect, become the dupe of a cabal of neoconservative full-mooners, the Pentagon’s mysteriously named Office of Special Plans and the patsy of an alleged bank swindler and would-be ruler of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi. ...continued at: msnbc.com

To: FaultLine who wrote (119007)	11/9/2003 10:35:27 AM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The importance of the word "imminent" is that self-defense can only be invoked as a justification for war if the threat is "imminent". If Bush did not think Iraq to be an "imminent" threat then there was no case for war. As we know now, there was no case for war because there was no "imminent" threat. Whether or not Bush did or did not use this word, he certainly used the word "threat" often enough. If Bush supporters now want to say that the threat was never sufficient to justify going to war, I will take that as an admission of guilt for starting a war without justification.