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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (172563)	10/16/2005 7:48:45 AM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

If so, the information Bush relied upon was from MI6, not the CIA. And to this day, the Brits have not rescinded the validity of their source.. (rumoured to be French intelligence sources since the Niger mines are French operated). It was an obvious forgery. Was it beyond the capability of the CIA to ascertain that it was a forgery. The IAEA figured it out pretty damn quick. The US admits it was a forgery. Are you telling me that the Brits are still claiming that it wasn't a forgery? French intelligence sources? Utterly crap logic. It's no wonder that Rumsfeld thought Saddam had WMD if he used crap logic like that. The source had been previously held to be credible.. passed a poly.. blah, blah.. Partly. Either sometimes he lies and sometimes he doesn't or maybe polys aren't all that reliable. But that said, the stories of some of the suspects seem suspicious as well. Somewhere in between lies the truth. Or a different truth altogether. We have no real way of knowing whether the informant was passing information that he knew we wanted to hear, whether it was a hoax, a disrupted attack, or disinformation. jttmab

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (172563)	10/16/2005 2:16:39 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Hawkmoon, you write: "If so, the information Bush relied upon was from MI6, not the CIA. And to this day, the Brits have not rescinded the validity of their source.. (rumoured to be French intelligence sources since the Niger mines are French operated)." You keep dropping broad hints that your job in Iraq is important. I imagine that means that you're getting paid to think for a living on the ground in Iraq and that you have some importance in our efforts to get it right there. When you make statements like the one above regarding the yellowcake issue, however, I question whether you acquired your position as a result of your abilities or whether you were appointed primarily because you've proven to be a dogmatic Bush policy supporter. It seems that the more we learn about the hiring and promotion policies under this Administration the more certain we can be that cronyism is the rule rather than the exception. A few years back I was amazed to see a special in-depth report on our efforts to organize and empower Iraqi women. The American IN CHARGE of this Iraqi wide effort was a very young 20s year old whose only apparent qualification was that she had worked tirelessly on the Bush/Cheney election campaign. She had no other job experience. The cameras followed her around Iraq (when we could actually travel Iraq) and she looked, acted and responded like a 20 year old who was in way over her head but who, nonetheless, had an amazing ability to think that everything was going to be fine. And she literally gushed about the Bush presidency. Pollyana would have been proud. I've read your posts for several years. My assessment has been that, like that young girl, you've been a huge Bush supporter and you tend to expect the best, changing your expectations only when you HAVE TO. That's a dangerous tendency in a frenetic, liquid and evolving tempest of change like that which undoubtedly exists in Iraq. If you're surrounded by like thinkers with similar predispositions who believe the best and support the leader, that's a formula for disaster. If you're isolated together in the green zone, don't speak the language well and reinforce your views by looking for every fact that supports your preconceived views while looking away from every fact that undermines them, you will collectively make many mistakes and the mistakes will persist for far too many months or years. Throughout those months or years Iraq will continue to suck up American lives, expend America's fortune, divert recourses from potentially successful endeavors and delay the implementation of policies that have a realistic chance of succeeding. In the end we'll be left with parents agonizing over "why?" I hope I'm wrong about the institutional climate in Iraq because the issues are far too important to leave in the hands of civil servants blindly supporting the party line of leaders who've shown themselves in far too many instances to be ignorant, blindly arrogant, and misinformed. Ed