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

To: geode00 who wrote (198547)	8/22/2006 2:51:00 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Bush's statements were not along the lines of saying that a horse was a zebra, they were more like saying the zebra has black stripes when for some reason this particular zebra has stripes that are only dark gray. I think its fairly clear he was the victim of "confirmation bias", he believed Iraq had a major ongoing WMD program and so he looked at evidence through the distortion provided by that belief. It wasn't a totally irrational belief,(even if in hindsight it was apparently a false belief) there where sources that said Iraq had a major ongoing WMD program, they used to have such a program, they played games with the inspectors that made it seem like they where hiding such a program, and apparently senior members of the Iraqi military command structure though that such weapons were available to Saddam. In many cases its the cover up not the crime that gets people in trouble. In Saddam's case he continued the cover up even though he apparently was no longer committing the main crime. Perhaps he thought that if he didn't have the program he wouldn't face invasion but if people believed he did they would be deterred by the belief that he had such a program, or perhaps acting like he still had such a program stroked his ego somehow. Who knows I'm not Saddam's therapist, but he did give people a lot of reason to believe that he had an ongoing WMD program. Clinton OTOH clearly lied under oath. He didn't just testify that he didn't have sex with Lewinsky, he testified that he had never been alone with her. It can be reasonably argued that he shouldn't have had to testify under oath about this relationship. It can be argued that the law that compelled him to testify was a bad law. OTOH Clinton signed it in to law. If its good enough for Clinton to force on others, its good enough to apply to him.