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

To: Neocon who wrote (531365)	1/28/2004 1:52:04 PM
From: CYBERKEN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Save the effort. In 1970, US forces invaded Cambodia and destroyed enough North Vietnamese (i.e., Soviet) ammunition, arms, and supplies to prevent the enemy from launching major offensive action for 2 years. The revisionist left has simply refused to recognize that reality since the day it happened, and-for most of 3 decades-almost made the concept of the "illegal expansion of the war" established fact. They have failed-as most of their propaganda has failed-as they became more transparent. It isn't ABOUT the realities of THIS war for the left-any more than was was ABOUT the realities of THAT war. They are focused on an American DEFEAT-and they can't GET one unless they destroy George Bush first...

To: Neocon who wrote (531365)	1/28/2004 2:14:46 PM
From: PartyTime	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Nice try! >>> The UN Security Council never voted, due to the promise of a French veto. It was widely reported that we had the votes, until France hardened its position.<<< We did not have the votes! Of the Big Five we had only the support of Britian. And France didn't harden its position. It's positions was firm from the beginning. And Russia and China were in agreement with the French position, as was Germany which was charing the Security Council during much of the debate. Chile was sort of on the US side, but even its support wanned when it was discovered that the US had been spying on UN Security Council member homes and offices. The female Chilean representative didn't like this a bit! >>>In any event, the UN is incapable of enforcing its resolutions without the United States, and was clearly depending upon the United States to maintain containment. Thus, it made sense for us to decide when and how to fight.<<< Sounds like a bully call to me. Not only did you leave out the fact that Hans Blix wanted more time and the UN Security Council wanted to give him more time, but you're also leaving out the fact that Blix was investigating the very site that Saddam's son-in-law claimed that the WMD was destroyed and buried. The UN inspectors were trying to determine the best methodology for testing that site, at the time Bush decided to invade. Had Bush waited, he would have lost his justification for invading due to what Blix might have discovered. So, fundamentally, to Bush, it didn't matter what the UN thought. Bush wanted this war and he manufactured the reasons for this war. Evidence of wanting to invade Iraq has been part of the Bush braintrust for a long time, pre-9/11 even. >>>But the main thing is, did Iraq constitute a threat in the context of the war on terrorism, that is, did it have the capacity to supply terrorists with biological or chemical agents to use against Western targets, particularly America? The answer is clearly yes, based on what Kay found, in terms of the maintenance of R&D and the conservation of strains of bacteria that could be weaponized.<<< Hey, Chile and Argentina have the capacity to supply terrorists with biological and chemical agents. Just about any university science lab anywhere can do this. You also leave out the degradation factor of the WMD the US helped provide Iraq back in the 80s. Relative to "conservation of strains of bacteria" Kay is on record as saying not even small stockpiles were known to exist throughout the 90s. Kay point bland said that the UN weapons inspectors were very good and did their job ridding Iraq of what you're claiming were a threat to the US. Kay also described that it was the step-by-step investigation into how such weapons could possibly be created, i.e., the scientists themselves, that led him to conclude no such weapons or programs existed or came into existence after it was reported they were destroyed. In fact, former chief UN weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus, in a speech at Harvard, championed the success of the weapons inspectors for destroying what Iraq had. >>>In addition, it is now established that there were links between Iraq and Al- Qaida, we just don't know how tight they were.<<< Please show such links, and ones that have been accepted as credible by governments, not by politicians or slanted analysts. On the other hand, you probably believed the links showing Iraq tried to buy yellow cake from Niger were true also. >>>Finally, we intervened in Serbia without UN mandate to forestall suspected genocide against the Kosovans, and in Iraq, there was clearly a brutal regime that was capable of genocide. We had every reason to resolve a situation that was dangerous to let fester and where his own country would clearly be better off with the fall of Saddam.<<< NATO was involved in all of that. Neither NATO nor the UN was involved in the US unilateral action, its illegal preemptive invasion of Iraq based on reasons we today learn--which I knew then--were false. How do I know what I write about above? Read through some of this: [NOTE: The below links included in the below references are old dating back to pre-war, so some of them don't work--but many of them do--enough to show Bush's war was wrong.] Message 18725918 Message 18725992 Message 18725935 Message 18725953 Message 18725986

To: Neocon who wrote (531365)	1/28/2004 2:16:30 PM
From: PartyTime	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

The Big Lie by Russ Baker [Posted March 20, 2003] How bad can things get, how fast? Are we already at the point where literally nothing can derail the war machine? That's exactly what some powerful media outlets seem to have decided, with predictable effects on public opinion and policy. In its March 3 issue, Newsweek disclosed that the Bush Administration had deliberately suppressed information exculpating Iraq--information from the same reliable source previously cited by the Administration as confirming that Iraq had developed weapons of mass destruction since the 1991 Gulf War. As damning as this disclosure was, Newsweek chose to underplay it, perhaps out of a belief that the Bush Administration's Big Lie techniques have become so pervasive that another instance of tendentious truth-twisting is no longer front-page news. Here's the background: In the summer of 1995 Saddam's then-son-in-law, Lieut. Gen. Hussein Kamel, former minister of Iraq's military industry and the person in charge of its nuclear/chemical/biological programs, defected and provided what was deemed scrupulously accurate, detailed accounts of those weapons. Kamel's information has been cited as central evidence and a key reason for attacking Iraq. In his February 5 presentation to the UN Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law." But Newsweek's John Barry revealed that the Administration had excised a central component of Kamel's testimony--that he had personal knowledge that Iraq had "destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them." To be sure, Kamel said, Iraq had not abandoned its WMD ambitions, had retained the design and engineering details, and was likely to return to production given an opportunity. But his last information was that Iraq's VX arsenal no longer existed. According to the story, UN inspectors had reasons to hush up this revelation, as they were trying to bluff Saddam into revealing more. But what is Powell's excuse for using only half of Kamel's claim? And why did Newsweek and the rest of the American media make so little of this major story? Newsweek chose to run a short, 500-word item in its "Periscope" section rather than put the story on the cover or make it the focal point of a longer article showing that the Bush Administration is rushing to war for no reason at all. I was curious why Newsweek did not think this warranted a more muscular presentation. Communications director Ken Weine argued that the mag breaks many of its best stories in short sections like "Periscope," citing as an example a brief piece two years ago showing that Sony had fabricated print movie reviews, a piece, he noted, that garnered worldwide attention. But fake movie reviews flacking dubious entertainment and fake missile reviews flacking a war in which thousands may die are two different things entirely, and it is a sad comment on the media that such comparisons would even be made. Newsweek, and Barry in particular, deserve kudos for bringing this important item to the public's attention at all. But if Newsweek's editors had the guts to put something like this on the cover, with the kind of dramatic headline they use for lesser subjects, they could really affect the debate. Instead, that issue of Newsweek featured a cover story on the African-American gender gap in jobs, education and other areas--a worthy story, but nothing that could not have waited a week. For what it's worth, one insider explained that Newsweek has changed and no longer tries to shake the earth on major issues of the day, preferring to tweak the zeitgeist on softer things or muse elegantly about the "big picture" behind the details. Perhaps it's not surprising that other media failed to pick up on the Kamel story: The big papers and magazines hate to acknowledge they've been scooped by competitors. Of course, you might think they'd want to outdo Newsweek with some hard-hitting inquiries of their own. You'd be wrong. It's not that the American media have ignored Iraq--obviously, it's been a near-obsession. But in the absence of intrepid investigative reporting and editorial courage, they smothered the audience in inconsequential material about the most consequential of topics. The Hussein Kamel revelation is probably the biggest Iraq story to get punted, but it isn't the only significant example. It's worth noting that British revelations that the National Security Agency spied on diplomats representing UN Security Council members during the Iraq deliberations got a small mention in the Washington Post and prompted no questions at Bush's press conference. Another revelation, that a British government employee was arrested for allegedly leaking this information, which Daniel Ellsberg says is more timely and potentially more important than his own Pentagon Papers in informing the public, again got little notice in this country. And the unprecedented resignations of two career US diplomats over Iraq policy hasn't generated any noteworthy examinations of how people inside the government really feel about the race to hostilities. Cumulatively, Barry's item on Kamel, the revelation that Colin Powell was citing a graduate student's thesis as British "intelligence" and a new revelation that more British "evidence" of Iraqi nuclear arms development cited by the Administration was (according to weapons inspectors themselves) fabricated suggest that a monstrous Big Lie is in process--an effort to construct falsified evidence and to trick this country and the world. How's that for zeitgeist material, Newsweek? thenation.com