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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (182500)	2/12/2004 4:59:47 PM
From: mph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575775

I guess I can agree up until this point....it may be used for political gain, this is normal and bidirectional, but the issue is very tangible....this adminstration has published a doctrine of pre-emption - the subject of much debate and the cause of a great deal of animosity, at home and abroad. That is the self granting of the right to attack another country on the presumption of a threat. At a minimum fairness would say that you act on bullet proof knowledge. To understand now that there are no WMDs -the reason bush touted for war, that the war may have been marketed to the american public, that we may have made serious mistakes, who made them, under what circumstances, what failures...all of these are crucial issues that need to be understood in their infinitesimal detail because the stakes are too high, people get killed, lose kin, come home maimed, their lives are forever changed...if in the process certain folks pay a political price, this is far less important than getting to the bottom of the matter. I'm glad that we have at least some points of agreement. Note that the preemption doctrine was specifically embraced by virtue of the vote to authorize the President to go forward. That is the only way to rationally evaluate that vote. If the notion of preemptive strike under any circumstances were not embraced, the vote would have been "no." As for the intelligence, that is a separate matter. It sounds like you want an investigation to "get to the bottom of it." My reaction is "have at it." If there was an intelligence failure, it appears to have been of long standing duration, and likely attributable, at least in part, to our decisions to restrict CIA intelligence gathering activities. Correction of such deficits is important to our continued security. The other outcome, and the one evidently hoped for by Bush opponents, is that the President lied or is just plain stupid. If the latter, he's not the only one mislead by the intelligence. There's plenty of blame to go around on that score. If the former, I would imagine it would be very tough to prove. I'll give you the perspective of a trial lawyer. A plaintiff must prove his version of the facts. If he fails to do so, he should lose. While defendants, in general, don't have to prove anything (since the burden of proof, at least initially, is on the plaintiff), if you don't have an explanation for why something happened, which was not related to the defendant, there is a practical problem at trial. At bottom, a jury needs to be satisfied that they understand what DID happen and that it makes sense. Here, let's say that Bush lied. Why exactly did he do that? You hear all kinds of allegations but none that pass muster when critically evaluated. In other words, there has to be a really rational explanation for why a sitting President would deliberately dupe the American public, commit the lives and limbs of our military, and cost the country potentially billions of dollars. Was it to win a popularity contest? If he knew the intelligence was false, he had to also know that no WMD's would be found and that there would be an uproar. Does that make any sense to you? It's also an horrendous allegation to be made against any sitting President, regardless of political persuasion. The allegation also necessarily assumes that Tony Blair was "in" on the deliberate deception, and that all of the countries who joined the coalition were all equally stupid, corrupt or duped. You also hear all about oil as being the real reason for the war. You mean everybody involved had that goal? And exactly how did they all benefit? IMO, conspiracy theories have a way of becoming complex when spun out to their logical conclusions. I'm certainly not satisfied. The witchhunt will likely continue. It will be interesting to see how much political hay the Bush opponents will really get out of it. After all, a whole slug of them went on record, repeatedly, about Saddam, his WMD's, and the threat he posed to the world. Seems to me that what changed the tune is politics---pure and simple. JMO.