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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (77119)	6/14/2006 7:14:19 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

>>No, I think you should acquaint yourself with the constraints of diplomatic language. Bush was not only talking to the US and Saddam. He was also trying to pry some cooperation out of the UNSC, which was full of Saddam's payees, and trying to avoid giving the Euro-left even more ammo to hit him with. Bush has to operate in the real world of diplomacy. As the old saw goes, a diplomat is a man who is paid to lie for his country. Now, if Bush hadn't listened to Tony Blair, and had not gone the UN route, and had gone to war in 2002, then I expect the language would have been blunter and more to your liking. But as things stand, these charges of Bush lied! not only don't strike me as valid, they come across as rather childish, like a teenager accusing everybody of being a hypocrite for following social conventions.<< Nadine - Again, I submit that Bush didn't even really try to avoid war, and never meant to. His posturing, both before and after the fact, about seeking international consensus, and about exhausting all other avenues before going to war might be just an effect of the "constraints of diplomatic language". (With which I am familiar, thank you.) But I have a real problem with the FACT of his failure to exhaust all other avenues before taking us into an ill-conceived and dishonestly justified war. I see the whole package of the administration's behavior as intentionally deceptive, and I consider intentional deception to be lying. Re-read Bush's State of the Union address from 2003. Note the great care with which he presents his case for the threat Saddam poses, saying things like "Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands. He's not accounted for these materials. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them." This is very craftily worded. He doesn't actually say that Saddam had tons of nerve gas. Just that we estimate he had the raw materials to produce it. So there's still plausible denyability here, though how Saddam is supposed to prove he destroyed something we can't even be sure he ever had, I have no idea. But then Bush went that extra mile. He said, "Year after year, Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction. But why? The only possible explanation, the only possible use he could have for those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate, or attack." We now know that any evidence to support such a statement was subject to a great deal of doubt, even at that time. It was by no means the certainty that paragraph makes it out to be. We also know now that it turned out to have been flat-out wrong. Lying, I call it. Very careful, very crafty lying. You may call me childish if you want to, but I expect more from my President than systematic deception. - Allen