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Did the Bush administration deliberately mislead the public of Saddams WMD'S? (pg. 2)
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| Zombie0915 |
| quote: | Anti-war Ad Says Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Rice "Lied" About Iraq
We find some subtle word-twisting, and place the claims in context.
Summary
An anti-war coalition of mostly liberal groups ran a newspaper ad quoting six alleged lies about Iraq by President Bush and others.
But, like movie blurbs, the quotes sometimes look different when read in full context.
And while much of what the ad calls lies was indeed wrong, there's evidence that the President and his advisers believed the falsehoods at the time.
Analysis
The ad carried a bold-faced headline saying "They Lied," and six brief quotes from Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Rice (now Secretary of State). It also carried a list of American military personnel killed in Iraq, along with the words "They Died."
The ad appeared Sept. 22 in USA Today and more than a dozen other newspapers. The sponsor, "Win Without Wars," is a coalition made up of groups including MoveOn.org Political Action, and using Fenton Communications, the same media consultant used by MoveOn.org.
The brief quotes all seem starkly false in hindsight. But some are a bit too stark – they look a bit different when read in full context. Furthermore, calling them lies suggests Bush and his advisers knew they were wrong at the time. And a bipartisan commission concluded earlier this year that what the Bush administration told the world about Iraqi weapons – while tragically mistaken – was based on faulty intelligence.
"We found the weapons"
Bush is quoted as saying “We found the weapons of mass destruction,” but that's not all he said. The quote is from an interview with Polish television given May 29, 2003 – weeks after the fall of Baghdad, as Bush was starting to face questions about why no Iraqi stores of such weapons had been found.
Reading all of what Bush said makes clear he was referring both to "weapons" and to "manufacturing facilities" and was still clinging to what intelligence officials had told him about Iraqi mobile laboratories that supposedly were used for manufacturing biological weapons.
The full quote:
Q: Weapons of mass destruction haven't been found. So what argument will you use now to justify this war?
Bush, May 29, 2003: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.
In the end, neither weapons nor manufacturing facilities were found. Bush was wrong about the mobile laboratories, of course. He was repeating a claim transmitted to him by the CIA, which based its intelligence reports on an Iraqi source, code-named "Curveball," whom it later determined to be a fabricator. But the CIA didn't formally recall Curveball's reporting until May 2004, according to the report of the bipartisan Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. That CIA reversal came roughly a year after Bush's interview with Polish television.
The intelligence commission, though appointed by Bush, included several Democrats including co-chair Charles Robb, a former senator and governor from Virginia. Lloyd Cutler, former White House counsel to Democratic Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, was "of counsel" to the commission. One of the Republican commissioners was Sen. John McCain, Bush's opponent in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries.
"Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda ties."
The ad quotes Bush as saying, "There's no question Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda ties." Bush said that September 17, 2003, after months of fruitless searching for evidence of WMD's in Iraq.
However, the full quote shows Bush also made clear that he was not claiming that Saddam had any connection to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In fact, he was knocking down a suggestion made four days earlier by Vice President Cheney, who said on NBC's Meet The Press that it is "not surprising that people make that connection" when asked why so many Americans believed Saddam was involved in the attacks.
Bush, Sept. 17, 2003: We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th . What the Vice President said was, is that he has been involved with al Qaeda. And al Sarawak, al Qaeda operative, was in Baghdad. He's the guy that ordered the killing of a U.S. diplomat. He's a man who is still running loose, involved with the poisons network, involved with Ansar al-Islam. There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties.
Since the word "ties" can cover any connection, however weak, Bush was in fact stating the truth. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission later cited reports of several "friendly contacts" between Saddam and Osama bin Laden over the years, and cited one report that in 1999 Iraqi officials offered bin Laden a "safe haven," which bin Laden refused, preferring to remain in Afghanistan. But nothing substantial came of the contacts. The commission said: "The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides' hatred of the United States. But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship."
"We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators"
Cheney is quoted as saying, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, "We will in fact, be greeted as liberators... I think it will go relatively quickly... [in] weeks rather than months."
Those quotes are actually from two separate interviews, and they do give a rosy prediction that failed to include the bloody insurrection and resistance that continues to this day.
The first Cheney quote comes from an NBC Meet the Press interview March 16, 2003. The full quote makes clear – as the ad's blurb does not – that Cheney is stating his own "belief." Thus, the statement would be true if that's what Cheney actually believed at the time.
Cheney, March 16, 2003: Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . . .
Q: If your analysis is not correct, and we're not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?
Cheney: Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. . . . The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.
The second quoted fragment is from another interview the same day on CBS's Face The Nation . The full quote shows Cheney qualified his prediction of quick victory, by saying the "really challenging part" may come in the "aftermath" of a quick military victory. That turned out to be quite accurate.
Cheney, March 16, 2003: I'm confident that our troops will be successful, and I think it'll go relatively quickly, but we can't...
Q: Weeks?
Cheney: ...we can't count on that.
Q: Months?
Cheney: Weeks rather than months. There's always the possibility of--of complications that you can't anticipate, but I'm--I have great confidence in our troops. The men and women who serve in our military today are superb. Our capabilities as a force are the finest the world has ever known. They're very ably led by General Tommy Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld. And so I have great confidence in the conduct of the military campaign. The really challenging part of it to some extent may come in the--in the aftermath once the military segment is over and we move to try and stand up a new government and--and turn over to the Iraqi people the responsibilities to their nation.
US, British and other coalition forces invaded Iraq March 20, and on May 1 the US declared an end to "major combat operations." At that time 139 US armed forces personnel had been killed. But 1773 more died after that, plus five civilian employees of the Defense Department, according to official Pentagon figures as of Sept. 26, 2005. By that measure the "aftermath" has been more than a dozen times deadlier to the US military than the initial combat phase.
"We know where [the WMDs] are."
The ad quotes Defense Secretary Rumsfeld as saying "We know where [the WMDs] are" on March 30, 2003 – at a time when US forces were within 65 miles of Baghdad.
This quote doesn't look much different even in full context. Rumsfeld was reacting to a question about why no weapons of mass destruction had been found, and he said US and coalition forces didn't yet control the areas where weapons "were dispersed."
Q: And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven't found any weapons of mass destruction?
Rumsfeld, May 30, 2003: Not at all. If you think -- let me take that, both pieces -- the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.
Subsequent events have proved Rumsfeld wrong. Whether his statement was a lie or a mistake depends on whether or not he knew at the time that the weapons weren't there.
"[Saddam] is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon."
This quote is from Condoleezza Rice on September 8, 2002, months before the war began, in an interview with CNN. Rice was then Bush's National Security Adviser and later became Secretary of State.
Q: Based on what you know right now, how close is Saddam Hussein's government -- how close is that government to developing a nuclear capability?
Rice, September 8, 2002: You will get different estimates about precisely how close he is. We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. We do know that there have been shipments going into Iran, for instance -- into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to -- high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.
We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon. And we know that when the inspectors assessed this after the Gulf War, he was far, far closer to a crude nuclear device than anybody thought, maybe six months from a crude nuclear device.
The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
What Rice said then is an accurate summation of what the US Intelligence community was saying at the time. Here's what the bipartisan Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction said last March, after a year-long study:
Commission on Intelligence Capabilities, March 31, 2005: On the brink of war, and in front of the whole world, the United States government asserted that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, had biological weapons and mobile biological weapon production facilities, and had stockpiled and was producing chemical weapons. All of this was based on the assessments of the U.S. Intelligence Community. And not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over.
Looking back, it is now clear that much of what is quoted in this ad was, even in context, false or misleading. To say Bush and the others "lied," however, requires evidence that they knew the intelligence they were getting was wrong. The unanimous finding of the Intelligence Commission argues against that idea.
Sources
Interview of the President by TVP, Poland, Office of the White House Press Secretary, 29 May 2003.
Report to the President , Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, 31 March 2005.
Remarks by the President after meeting with Members of the Congressional Conference Committee on Energy Legislation, Office of the White House Press, Secretary 17 Sep 2003.
The 9/11 Commission Report, Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 22 July 2004.
"Interview with Vice President Cheney," Meet the Press, NBC, 13 Mar 2003.
"OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF) U.S. CASUALTY STATUS"
AS OF: Sep 26, 2005, 1000 a.m. EDT, US Department of Defense, 26 Sep 2005.
“Donald Rumsfeld” This Week with George Stephanopoulos, ABC (Transcript) 30 Mar 2003.
"Interview with Condoleezza Rice," CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, 8 Sep 2002.
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from http://factcheck.org/article349.html
Fact check is a really nice site that is not aligned to either party, their research seems to indicate that at the time most intelligence was supporting the idea that saddam had weapons. I think that they were mistaken, and they did not lie on purpose. |
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| Renegade |
| quote: | Originally posted by Zombie0915
Fact check is a really nice site that is not aligned to either party, their research seems to indicate that at the time most intelligence was supporting the idea that saddam had weapons. |
It is indeed a very good site, but this just seems to be one of those occasions where - in aiming to present themselves as a bastion of absolute impartiality - they've failed to really get into the gritty, damning "facts" of the whole ordeal. Sitting in the middle and acknowledging both sides of the argument is fine (to be encouraged, in fact) but I'd still argue that there are cases where one side of the argument is weaker than the other and this should be represented in the analysis, "impartiality" be damned.
From their analysis:
| quote: | "We found the weapons"
[...]
In the end, neither weapons nor manufacturing facilities were found. Bush was wrong about the mobile laboratories, of course. He was repeating a claim transmitted to him by the CIA, which based its intelligence reports on an Iraqi source, code-named "Curveball," whom it later determined to be a fabricator. But the CIA didn't formally recall Curveball's reporting until May 2004, according to the report of the bipartisan Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. That CIA reversal came roughly a year after Bush's interview with Polish television. |
I'd accept this. In a strict, "semantical" sense Bush didn't lie, because he wasn't aware he was wrong when he made the remarks and he may have almost certainly been given some bunk advice on the issue by the CIA. On the other hand, to suggest that what Bush said about the findings being "mobile weapons labs" was justified because the claim wasn't officially dismissed by the CIA until May 2004 misses the point. According to this page, the weapons labs were discovered on April 15th. Within 24 hours, according to a now dead link I posted in this thread, the officer in charge of the team who examined the laboratories said that they were most likely not the WMD labs that Colin Powell talked about in his Feb 5th speech at the UN:
| quote: | | The buried labs U.S. troops found last week were not the mobile chemical and biological weapons labs one U.S. Army general suspected, CNN Correspondent Ryan Chilcote reported Tuesday. The 11 cargo containers were filled with new laboratory equipment apparently intended to make conventional weapons, said Chief Warrant Officer Monte Gonzalez, the head of the team brought in to examine them. |
On the 29th of May, Bush claimed - without qualification - that "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories". On the 8th of June it was revealed that initial analysis by US teams "cast serious doubt" on whether they were actually mobile WMD labs (link). By June 15th, British experts had confirmed this beyond all doubt (link), some 11 months before the final CIA analysis mentioned in the article.
So, as you can see, Bush made the claims as though he was certain that these "mobile labs" were the smoking gun he was looking for, even though there was still no credible evidence to suggest this at the time the statement was made. Indeed, presuming that the officer examining the mobile labs is a credible source, significant doubt had already been placed on the claim before the statement was made. So did did Bush lie? Strictly speaking, no. Did he make an unjustifiable, unproven claim as gospel truth just to futher his own cause? Yes.
| quote: | "Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda ties."
[...]
However, the full quote shows Bush also made clear that he was not claiming that Saddam had any connection to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In fact, he was knocking down a suggestion made four days earlier by Vice President Cheney, who said on NBC's Meet The Press that it is "not surprising that people make that connection" when asked why so many Americans believed Saddam was involved in the attacks.
[...]
Bush, Sept. 17, 2003: [...] There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties.
Since the word "ties" can cover any connection, however weak, Bush was in fact stating the truth. |
I hate to say it, but factcheck seem to be flat-out wrong here. Firstly, the September 11th / Saddam Hussein link is irrelevent. The ad - based on that quote at least - never intended to make it seem as though the administration had fabricated a connection between Saddam and 9/11, because this was a claim that the Bush administration never made (although it was certainly a myth that they were happy to allow to be propogated, it must be said). Secondly to suggest that Bush "was in fact stating the truth" when he said that "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties" is, frankly, ing bull. Pre-war CIA intelligence cast severe doubt on this claim (link). Post-war analysis found that there was never a "collaborative relationship" between Saddam and al Qaeda (link). How was Bush's statement - lie or otherwise - in anyway stating "the truth"?
Again, in their quest for impartiality, they've missed the point: saying "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties" is nowhere near stating the "truth", which would have been something along the lines of "Although there is limited evidence to suggest that there may have been a low-key meeting between a high-level al Qaeda operative and an Iraqi government official in the mid-90s, there is scant evidence to suggest any collaborative relationship between Iraq - much less Saddam Hussein - and the al Qaeda organisation". Bush may not have, in the strictest sense, "lied", but he still made a definitive claim to support his push for war that - based on the intelligence he had then and based on what we know now - he was completely unjustified in making.
| quote: | "We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators"
[...]
The full quote shows Cheney qualified his prediction of quick victory, by saying the "really challenging part" may come in the "aftermath" of a quick military victory. That turned out to be quite accurate. |
His prediction of a "quick victory" - which he "accurately" qualified later on - has nothing to do with it. Have the US been greeted as "liberators" in Iraq, the implication being that they were likely to have been warmly welcomed in the country by its populace?
I admit that it was a pretty stupid quote for the anti-war people to pick on, but it does reflect the misguided belief that members of the Bush administration had prior to the war, that the troops would be welcomed into Bagdad on a sea of rose petals.
| quote: | "We know where [the WMDs] are."
[...]
Subsequent events have proved Rumsfeld wrong. |
Can't disagree with that. :)
| quote: | "[Saddam] is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon."
[...]
Looking back, it is now clear that much of what is quoted in this ad was, even in context, false or misleading. |
Again, no disagreements here. However, again the author of the article seems reticent to point out just how disingenuous the claim by Rice actually was. Even if Iraq was actively seeking out material for a nuclear weapon (which there was never any credible evidence for - I don't have to bring up the Nigerian yellow-cake scandal, do I?) it was fairly clear, even based on pre-war evidence, that he was a long way from building a nuclear weapon (link). Even if Rice wasn't directly "lying" here, she was grossly overstating the threat.
In fact, that's a pretty good way of describing the entire manner in which the Bush administration made their case for war. Whether they lied or not is merely a matter of semantics: what they did do - and I don't think much doubt can be placed on this now - is "cherry-pick" the intelligence, purposely overhype the threat and purposely make definitive claims that were not justified by the intelligence. They may not have "lied", but they sure as did the next best thing... |
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| occrider |
Interesting article:
| quote: |
November 21, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
Forging the Case for War
Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?
by Philip Giraldi
From the beginning, there has been little doubt in the intelligence community that the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame was part of a bigger story. That she was exposed in an attempt to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, is clear, but the drive to demonize Wilson cannot reasonably be attributed only to revenge. Rather, her identification likely grew out of an attempt to cover up the forging of documents alleging that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.
What took place and why will not be known with any certainty until the details of the Fitzgerald investigation are revealed. (As we go to press, Fitzgerald has made no public statement.) But recent revelations in the Italian press, most notably in the pages of La Repubblica, along with information already on the public record, suggest a plausible scenario for the evolution of Plamegate.
Information developed by Italian investigators indicates that the documents were produced in Italy with the connivance of the Italian intelligence service. It also reveals that the introduction of the documents into the American intelligence stream was facilitated by Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), a parallel intelligence center set up in the Pentagon to develop alternative sources of information in support of war against Iraq.
The first suggestion that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium to construct a nuclear weapon came on Oct. 15, 2001, shortly after 9/11, when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his newly appointed chief of the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare (SISMI), Nicolo Pollari, made an official visit to Washington. Berlusconi was eager to make a good impression and signaled his willingness to support the American effort to implicate Saddam Hussein in 9/11. Pollari, in his position for less than three weeks, was likewise keen to establish himself with his American counterparts and was under pressure from Berlusconi to present the U.S. with information that would be vital to the rapidly accelerating War on Terror. Well aware of the Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq, Pollari used his meeting with top CIA officials to provide a SISMI dossier indicating that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Niger. The same intelligence was passed simultaneously to Britain’s MI-6.
But the Italian information was inconclusive and old, some of it dating from the 1980s. The British, the CIA, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research analyzed the intelligence and declared that it was “lacking in detail” and “very limited” in scope.
In February 2002, Pollari and Berlusconi resubmitted their report to Washington with some embellishments, resulting in Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger. Wilson visited Niamey in February 2002 and subsequently reported to the CIA that the information could not be confirmed.
Enter Michael Ledeen, the Office of Special Plans’ man in Rome. Ledeen was paid $30,000 by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in 1978 for a report on terrorism and was well known to senior SISMI officials. Italian sources indicate that Pollari was eager to engage with the Pentagon hardliners, knowing they were at odds with the CIA and the State Department officials who had slighted him. He turned to Ledeen, who quickly established himself as the liaison between SISMI and Feith’s OSP, where he was a consultant. Ledeen, who had personal access to the National Security Council’s Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley and was also a confidant of Vice President Cheney, was well placed to circumvent the obstruction coming from the CIA and State.
The timing, August 2002, was also propitious as the administration was intensifying its efforts to make the case for war. In the same month, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was set up to market the war by providing information to friends in the media. It has subsequently been alleged that false information generated by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress was given to Judith Miller and other journalists through WHIG.
On Sept. 9, 2002, Ledeen set up a secret meeting between Pollari and Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley. Two weeks before the meeting, a group of documents had been offered to journalist Elisabetta Burba of the Italian magazine Panorama for $10,000, but the demand for money was soon dropped and the papers were handed over. The man offering the documents was Rocco Martino, a former SISMI officer who delivered the first WMD dossier to London in October 2002. That Martino quickly dropped his request for money suggests that the approach was a set-up primarily intended to surface the documents.
Panorama, perhaps not coincidentally, is owned by Prime Minister Berlusconi. On Oct. 9, the documents were taken from the magazine to the U.S. Embassy, where they were apparently expected. Instead of going to the CIA Station, which would have been the normal procedure, they were sent straight to Washington where they bypassed the agency’s analysts and went directly to the NSC and the Vice President’s Office.
On Jan. 28, 2003, over the objections of the CIA and State, the famous 16 words about Niger’s uranium were used in President Bush’s State of the Union address justifying an attack on Iraq: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Both the British and American governments had actually obtained the report from the Italians, who had asked that they not be identified as the source. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency also looked at the documents shortly after Bush spoke and pronounced them crude forgeries.
President Bush soon stopped referring to the Niger uranium, but Vice President Cheney continued to insist that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons.
The question remains: who forged the documents? The available evidence suggests that two candidates had access and motive: SISMI and the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.
In January 2001, there was a break-in at the Niger Embassy in Rome. Documents were stolen but no valuables. The break-in was subsequently connected to, among others, Rocco Martino, who later provided the dossier to Panorama. Italian investigators now believe that Martino, with SISMI acquiescence, originally created a Niger dossier in an attempt to sell it to the French, who were managing the uranium concession in Niger and were concerned about unauthorized mining. Martino has since admitted to the Financial Times that both the Italian and American governments were behind the eventual forgery of the full Niger dossier as part of a disinformation operation. The authentic documents that were stolen were bunched with the Niger uranium forgeries, using authentic letterhead and Niger Embassy stamps. By mixing the papers, the stolen documents were intended to establish the authenticity of the forgeries.
At this point, any American connection to the actual forgeries remains unsubstantiated, though the OSP at a minimum connived to circumvent established procedures to present the information directly to receptive policy makers in the White House. But if the OSP is more deeply involved, Michael Ledeen, who denies any connection with the Niger documents, would have been a logical intermediary in co-ordinating the falsification of the documents and their surfacing, as he was both a Pentagon contractor and was frequently in Italy. He could have easily been assisted by ex-CIA friends from Iran-Contra days, including a former Chief of Station from Rome, who, like Ledeen, was also a consultant for the Pentagon and the Iraqi National Congress.
It would have been extremely convenient for the administration, struggling to explain why Iraq was a threat, to be able to produce information from an unimpeachable “foreign intelligence source” to confirm the Iraqi worst-case.
The possible forgery of the information by Defense Department employees would explain the viciousness of the attack on Valerie Plame and her husband. Wilson, when he denounced the forgeries in the New York Times in July 2003, turned an issue in which there was little public interest into something much bigger. The investigation continues, but the campaign against this lone detractor suggests that the administration was concerned about something far weightier than his critical op-ed.
_____________________________________________________
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro Associates, an international security consultancy.
http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_21/feature.html
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| igottaknow |
this hasn't anything to do with my reason but its funny
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| Zombie0915 |
Yeah I think they were definately guilty of selective listening, but then again the other side of the argument is doing the same thing in their quest to argue that Bush was lying.
To me it seems like a genuine mistake that slipped through in the heat of the moment, starting a war is a very stressful thing. They were very motivated to find an open door into fighting the jihad movement and saw Iraq as a strategic point for entry. I can hardly blame them for wanting to fight the jihad and having trouble starting a war against an ideology without first figuring out which country to attack. After Afghanistan Iraq really was the right choice I think, especially if the soldiers are telling the truth. There is no doubt that the start of the fighting and the scandal surrounding it has given the US a black eye though. |
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| ogvh5150 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Zombie0915
To me it seems like a genuine mistake that slipped through in the heat of the moment, starting a war is a very stressful thing. |
The mistake of being stressed into a war over non-existent weapons of mass destruction cost over 2000 in country lives of american soldiers and over 30,000 civilians in Iraq.
The death of one man is a tragedy
The death of millions is a statistic
Joseph Stalin |
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| Spacey Orange |
| quote: | Originally posted by ogvh5150
Did the Bush administration deliberately mislead the public of Saddams WMD'S?
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Deliberate? Probably, but intent is hard to discover.
Mislead? Yes, because he garnered public support using false evidence, made allegations not supported by the facts, and exaggerated. |
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| ierxium |
| Yes... because God told him to. And by God I mean his father. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
would you hype up something like iraq's possession of WMDs to such an extent if you didnt honestly believe they were there? they exaggerated or lied (take your pick) because the bull they were saying was ballpark for what they were expecting to find.
and its not as if saddam was a lovely fellow. its easy to believe poor intel that paints the bad guy *as* the bad guy even when the specifics arent accurate or reliable. |
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| ogvh5150 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Spacey Orange
Deliberate? Probably, but intent is hard to discover.
Mislead? Yes, because he garnered public support using false evidence, made allegations not supported by the facts, and exaggerated. |
"No she was kissing me I wasn't kissing her"
"I promise I'll just put the head in for a minute"
"I didn't inhale"
Bridge for sale between Manhattan and Long Islands.
Slightly Used
Will Finance |
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| Spacey Orange |
| quote: | Originally posted by ogvh5150
"No she was kissing me I wasn't kissing her"
"I promise I'll just put the head in for a minute"
"I didn't inhale"
Bridge for sale between Manhattan and Long Islands.
Slightly Used
Will Finance |
ok... |
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| ogvh5150 |
Things that are said to get you to believe.
Props to Family Feud
In other words people that fall for those lines fell for this one:
We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country
Al Gore
Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us
Dick Cheney
There are a number of terrorist states pursuing weapons of mass destruction -- Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, just to name a few -- but no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq
Donald Rumsfeld
He's a man who has told the world he wouldn't have weapons of mass destruction, yet he does
George W. Bush
Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations
Hillary Clinton |
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