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

To: Sam who wrote (119826)	11/17/2003 7:22:57 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

But as far as Nadine's point is concerned--I know it's useless arguing with her, but plenty of people including ex CIA people have chimed in with protests that the Bush admin selected the facts the wanted to believed and dismissed those that contradicted the case they wanted to be true. Even if that's absolutely, positively true, even if the Bush administration was so ideologically blinkered that they cherrypicked all their intelligence information (while I can certainly believe it to some extent, I'm going to have to hear it from someone other than CIA types covering their butts over their own massive intelligence failures in order to really believe it) - it still would not make their intelligence assessments "fabrications". A "fabrication" is something that you make up in order to deceive. If you are using data that you believe is correct to reach a conclusion that you believe is correct, it is not a "fabrication" even if it turns out to be wrong. Much of the opposition seems to be working on the assumption that Bush can never be mistaken. If he says something that turns out not to be true, he must have been lying. Curious how they assume that he's a puppet and omniscient at the same time. Scrappleface is really on to something with their "moronic evil genius" idea.

To: Sam who wrote (119826)	11/18/2003 4:07:22 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 281500

You just had to talk to the people and see how they didn't believe a word of what the government said. It was a little like a structure standing on rust--you know it's going to fall but you don't know when. Seems like the opinion that many people had about Saddam Hussein, or, more currently, the Iranian Ayatollahs. It's what the Saudis and French were trying to feed us after Desert Storm.. "No need to overthrow Saddam, he'll fall on his own".. No.. the reason that the Soviet Union fell is because they could not manage what the Chinese have (thus far) been able to achieve, an adequate transition from communism to capitalism. But that's not to say that with the appropriate amount of coercive repression by the military and KGB that the USSR couldn't have lasted even longer. Hawk