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

To: mistermj who wrote (214567)	1/25/2007 10:34:16 AM
From: GST	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The threat was a complete lie. We did NOT invade Iraq because Saddam was a threat. There was NO THREAT. There was instead an ideological rationale for war -- but of course you can't go to Congress and say "on ideological grounds we are going to invade another country". So every effort had to be made to make it appear there was a threat -- this is outright deception. Pure unadulterated deception. At best you can argue that Bush was not let in on the plan that Cheney crafted, and lacked the competence to understand what he was doing. We might never know where incompetence ended and the lying began. What is almost certain is that Bush lacked the capacity to create the lie -- he simply became the hand puppet of the lie. But make no mistake -- the lie of the "Iraqi threat" paved the way for the worst set of decisions we have seen in the US. It cost us the war on terror and we are never likely to fully recover from this tragic deception.

To: mistermj who wrote (214567)	1/25/2007 11:17:24 AM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The big lie, as explained by a Repulican, Hagel <But that should also have triggered alarm bells about what they really wanted to do. -- Well, it did. I’m not defending our votes; I’m just giving a little history of how this happened. You have to remember the context of when that resolution was passed. This was about a year after September 11. The country was still truly off balance. So the president comes out talking about “weapons of mass destruction” that this “madman dictator” Saddam Hussein has, and “our intelligence shows he’s got it,” and “he’s capable of weaponizing,” and so on. And producing a National Intelligence Estimate that turned out to be doctored. -- Oh yeah. All this stuff was doctored. Absolutely. But that’s what we were presented with. And I’m not dismissing our responsibility to look into the thing, because there were senators who said, “I don’t believe them.” But I was told by the president—we all were—that he would exhaust every diplomatic effort. You were told that personally? -- I remember specifically bringing it up with the president. I said, “This has to be like your father did it in 1991. We had every Middle East nation except one with us in 1991. The United Nations was with us.” Did he give you that assurance, that he would do the same thing as his father? -- Yep. He said, “That’s what we’re going to do.” But the more I look back on this, the more I think that the administration knew there was some real hard question whether he really had any WMD. In January of 2003, if you recall, the inspectors at the IAEA, who knew more about what Saddam had than anybody, said, “Give us two more months before you go to war, because we don’t think there’s anything in there.” They were the only ones in Iraq. We hadn’t been in there. We didn’t know what the hell was in there. And the president wouldn’t do it! So to answer your question—Do I regret that vote? Yes, I do regret that vote. And you feel like you were misled? I asked tough questions of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld before the war: How are you going to govern? Who’s going to govern? Where is the money coming from? What are you going to do with their army? How will you secure their borders? And I was assured every time I asked, “Senator, don’t worry, we’ve got task forces on that, they’ve been working, they’re coordinated,” and so on. Do you think they knew that was false? Oh, I eventually was sure they knew. Even before we actually invaded, I had a pretty clear sense of it—that this administration was hell-bent on going to war in Iraq. Even if it meant deceiving Congress? That’s right.> Message 23217279