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

To: Cogito who wrote (77215)	6/22/2006 12:19:23 AM
From: Dan B.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 81568

I did pay attention to the rest of the post. I feel it did not clear up what you forthrightly had to say. If one is seeing/thinking "through a fog," or unclearly if you will, but becomes aware of the fog and so then "knows it," I presume one might then either be able to choose the "foggy" thoughts on purpose (a misleading act, as I thought you implied in the first place) or simply be able to avoid the false foggy thoughts and report honestly. At first you said "most of the world was looking into a fog, and all the intelligence agencies...knew that." So again, I felt you implied the "foggy" option was willfully chosen (which would be wrong). Now, you say "intelligence agencies knew that they didn't have good information...they were all looking into a fog." Frankly, it sounds pretty much the same either way until I compare the notions of intelligence "looking into a fog" (i.e. their decision were affected by the fog), and the notion in the first instance that intelligence was well aware of the fog. There is a 180 deg difference here. Still, since in the second instance you substituted "knew they didn't have good information" for "knew" they were in a fog, in this sense, both imply a willingness to act badly despite a better available awareness of the situation. So I'll put it this way. We know they all (intelligence agencies) said they felt Saddam had WMD's. What I know is that this belief as reported the world over, was either stated due to foggy thinking, or it was falsely stated despite an awareness that nothing of the kind was known at all. This second option implies a seemingly unlikely world wide conspiracy to falsely report. The former option implies a seemingly unlikely widespread common fog of delusion among the world's intelligence agencies. I might ask you here to take your pick, and while it's not necessarily an either/or question, for you I think looking at it this way would be instructive. As for me for instance, I see neither as much foggy thinking on the part of the world's intelligence as you suggest existed, nor any conspiracy to report falsely. To the extent that WMD were overestimated, there is no conspiracy inherent in that fact. I feel the intelligence wasn't nearly so wrong as is suggested. No WMD's? Bad intent is the crux of the matter rather than WMD's, in all reality. I know the evidence was compelling, and I know the eventual Dulfer and Kay reports included plenty of information about the activities of Saddam's Iraq which serve to justify our actions there. In fact, we most certainly found stockpiles of material quite convertable to WMD in relatively short order. We most certainly found Saddam continued to seek banned military items (rockets, for instance) even as the final inspections prior to war were on track. Point is, we all know Saddam was a bad, terrorist supporting, American hating, guy, and the evidence from Iraq since our action began, only confirms that fact. Our target then, in the age of 911 style attacks which we are in, was very appropriate. To this day, we have testimony that Arabs trained at a training camp on an airplane fuselage in Iraq, satellite photos confirming that said fuselage existed where the training allegedly occurred, and nothing really which refutes the obvious inference. To this day, nothing renders the possibility that Iraq's contacts with Taliban and Al Qaeda allowed Saddam to obtain inside knowledge of the impending 911 attack, making him an accessory before the fact at the least. Iraq pretty much alone did not condemn 911. Iraq essentially instead wished more of the same on us, and assured all that more of the same was near for us, as if it had inside knowledge indeed. There is no way that liberating Iraq from Saddam was a bad decision, IMHO. For all anyone claims about the dislike between Osama and Saddam, those two had an all too much in common hatred of us, and Saddam supported plenty of terrorists with similar feelings indeed aside from his sketchy if well established dealings with Al Qaeda. Sometimes the left forgets that Al Qaeda was all about bringing diverse Muslim America Haters together the world over. Al Qaeda, spread around the worlds' countries in seperate semi-autonomous groups, is not a bunch of perfect clones, just folks with a hatred of infidels and a murderous will in common. Dan B.