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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (71709)	6/11/2008 11:34:43 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 542970

We talked about this a lot. We were on the same page then, and are on the same page now.

To: Rambi who wrote (71709)	6/12/2008 2:29:02 AM
From: Cogito	Respond to of 542970

>>You know what truly amazes me? I am a damn Psych and music and theatre major. I know NOTHING. And I posted this early in 2003- after Bush had made his initial announcement to the UN that we would do this with or without them in the fall of 2002.<< Rambi - It was very clear to you, to me, and to many other people I know, while it was happening in 2002 and early 2003, that the Bush Administration was trying to sell a pre-emptive war in Iraq on, at best, a flimsy pretext. I was talking with a friend about this today, and I realized that one of the big tip-offs to what was happening was the very fact that they had to work so hard to sell the war. They had had no trouble at all getting virtually everyone in the US and abroad to sign up for the invasion of Afghanistan just one year earlier. France and Germany, among many, many other nations, had quickly volunteered to send troops to fight alongside ours. That's because invading Aghanistan made sense, and was clearly justified based on known facts. In the case of Iraq, it wasn't so easy. When everyone didn't just jump right on board the minute Bush announced in July, 2002 that we really had to go oust Saddam right away, the Administration began a PR campaign that was breathtaking in its scope. Week after week, you saw the same faces on all the political talk shows repeating whatever the talking point of the day was. There was the "smoking gun mushroom cloud" one. The "he's ignored the UN for too long" one. The "he gassed his own people" one. And on and on. Always with uncanny coordination, so that every single outlet was covered each week, and whatever that week's theme was, we were all sure to hear it. Moreover, anyone who dared raise a voice in dissent was attacked as being on the side of the terrorists. The press, meanwhile, was mostly repeating everything the administration said as if it was news, without any skepticism at all. They would report that "so and so said they didn't think the claim of a meeting between Mohammed Atta and a representative of the Iraqi government" was true, or some such, but they didn't make any independent effort to determine who was actually telling the truth. Bush's popularity was still very high at that time, and people were certainly still nervous about the possibility of additional dramatic terrorist actions on US soil. Yet many people in the US, and some of our staunchest allies abroad, remained unconvinced that the war was necessary or justified. Not everyone felt that way, of course. I remember speaking with my sister about it. I told her that I felt Bush had simply failed to make the case for invading Iraq. She said she really thought he had made it. So now, in the past two weeks, we have Scott McClellan, Bush's Press Secretary at the time, and the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying that what you and I and many others perceived to be true at the time - that the Bush Administration was engaging in a concerted PR effort to sell a war that the available evidence did not really justify. I consider our view to be vindicated. Others, including several people on this thread, will disagree, of course. But I wonder if they have any arguments that aren't based on dismissing the available evidence based on their view of the motives of those who have presented it. - Allen