Say Anything Blog

Once again, Rob, you demonstate the unsophisticated duality of your thinking.

This is not an “either/or” situation.
Intelligence failures and White House duplicity are NOT MUTUAL EXCLUSIVES.

The intelligence communinity fucked up AND the Bush regime lied.

The Bush administration was talking about
invading Iraq as soon as they came into office.When 9/11 occured Rumsfield was talking about bombing Iraq, though everyone Knew it was Ossama. Afghanistan as Rummy said had no good targets to bomb. The admininistration did not like the CIA and FBI intelligence, so they set up their own intelligence unit in the Pentagon , the Office of Special Plans , which latched on to any wild story and preached it as scripture and verse to the gospel of invasion.

Woof,

Were you typing that with or without your tinfoil hat on?

Don,

You do know what the definition of a ‘lie’ is, don’t you?

"an intentionally false statement.”

Woof says:
“The admininistration did not like the CIA and FBI intelligence, so they set up their own intelligence unit in the Pentagon”

The report said that ALL agencies got it wrong… read the frickin’ story.

Don - So the agencies were giving the senior administration bad information, the administration KNEW the data was wrong, but pretended to believe it anyway and then lied about it?

In the intelligence business you rarely know things to an absolute certainly.  The more repressive a regime, the less absolute your intelligence, especially if there is a lack of human (locals on the ground) intelligence.

I, too, think we were just looking for reasons to invade Iraq, and I’m glad we did.  History will tell us if it was a smart move.  In order to correctly say Bush lied you have to believe one of two things.  Either,

1 - The intelligence community (not just ours, but also those of some other nations) cooked the books for the administration so that Bush could say something he knew was patently false, or

2 - The intelligence community provided their best estimate (which turned out to be wrong), Bush somehow knew the estimates were wrong, and said something he knew was patently false.

Mule Load, I find either one of those conditions very easy to believe. However, you’re ignoring at least one other possibility:

3 - that the Bush regime had made the decision to invade Iraq back in 2000; toward that end they accepted/released evidence to bolster their patently false public reasons, while suppressing/ignoring evidence that their public reasons were patently false.

It takes a huge leap of faith to believe what Don just posted.

It takes a huge leap of faith to believe what Don just posted.

It takes a huge leap of faith to believe anything Don posts.

Wow Don and WOOF, did it hurt when you became severed from reality?

Seriously, why is it so much easier for you to believe that, somehow, Bush knew there were no WMD while the world’s intelligence community was completely bamboozled? How would Bush have known this fact...from intelligence reports...but weren’t the intelligence reports wrong? Wow, how do you reconcile your beliefs with all the available evidence?

Of course there were war plans. Every president has war plans out the wazoo, it’s part of the job. Clinton had plans too. Al Gore would have had plans. Some plans get used, some don’t. This is really basic stuff.

The people who bought into the obviously fraudulent propoganda promoted by the Bush administration to incite the nation to war
are now saying everybody was bamboozled
by faulty intelligence.
You were bamboozled. The rest of the world said no thanks to the intelligence and invasion.

Will you be collecting tolls on that bridge you bought in Brooklyn?

Dear WOOF, a long response to you. I hope you take the time to get through it and consider some of what I have to say:

Some of us paid scrupulous attention when Bush spoke, thanks. Those of us who did pay attention, understand that there were other reasons listed as well. Granted, WMD got the most press, but that still doesn’t make it the only reason.

Anyway, Saddam played a game of bluff with the UN inspectors by impedeing their progress. It turns out for him to have been a bad wager to make.

I’ve been an ardent proponent of regime change since back in ‘91 when I saw first hand the reality of Saddam’s regime. The argument that the Iraqis should have deposed Saddam themselves has no standing with me, people who argue that have NO idea how utterly ruthless and depraved that regime was, and how utterly repressed the Iraqis were.

The regime was brutal: I got to stand by and watch the Shia uprising get crushed and the southern cities go up in smoke. I got to see the streams of refugees: men, women, and children pour out of Iraq after the cease-fire as they tried to escape Saddam’s torture, rape, and murder squads.

The regime was criminal: I saw hundreds of trucks full of stolen goods on the highway to Baghdad outside of Kuwait City.

The regime was reckless: I got to camp out among the burning oilfields and breathe the poisoned air. I saw the wildlife covered in oil and dying as a result of the pipelines Saddam ordered blown. I saw the marshes that Saddam ordered drained to make his genocide of the marsh Arabs easier.

There is NO WAY, having seen these things with my own eyes, that I could have opposed this war. Deposing Saddam and dismantling his regime was the morally right thing to do.

WOOF, did you know that Baathism was based on Naziism? Well, it was. Did you know that both Naziism and Baathism are not right-wing ideologies, but rather are socialist ideologies? Well, they are.

I don’t know about your life, so I could be wrong, but let me tell you the picture your posts paint. I see a young person absolutely beholden to leftist propaganda. I think that you have not interacted much, if any, with the downtrodden masses you presume to know the answers for. Maybe you have a Che Guevara t-shirt in your closet, or a copy of the Communist Maifesto on your bookshelf, or a poster of Mao on your wall. You say the things you say not because you have thought deeply into them, but because it’s what everyone in your social circles say. Please, do tell me if I’m even a little off base.

So be as anti-war as you want WOOF.  But the socialist, anti-American Kool-aide that you’re drinking packs a hell of a hangover. The historic price of non-intervention has always been the blood of innocent people and a dimming of the human spirit.

Evil exists, WOOF. I’ve seen it.

Seth:  Good post.

I will mention that one can also see from Bush’s 2002 speech to Congress that he didn’t see the war---nor portray it to the American public---just terms of WMD:

America believes that all people are entitled to hope and human rights, to the non-negotiable demands of human dignity. People everywhere prefer freedom to slavery; prosperity to squalor; self-government to the rule of terror and torture. America is a friend to the people of Iraq. Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women and children. The oppression of Kurds, Assyrians, Turkomans, Shi’a, Sunnis and others will be lifted. The long captivity of Iraq will end, and an era of new hope will begin.

Iraq is a land rich in culture, resources, and talent. Freed from the weight of oppression, Iraq’s people will be Iraq is a land rich in culture, resources, and talent. Freed from the weight of oppression, Iraq’s people will be able to share in the progress and prosperity of our time. If military action is necessary, the United States and our allies will help the Iraqi people rebuild their economy, and create the institutions of liberty in a unified Iraq at peace with its neighbors.

Good post Seth , but it references 1991 Iraq, not the present. Just war opposed to war of aggression. Iraq was was a beaten down state under sanctions unable to fly it’s own planes, stripped of a third of its land (Kurdish Provinces), with a President who could not sleep in the same bed twice. They were no threat to us. The intelligence agencies knew it. 

All brutal regimes have much in common. The third Reich was fascist not socialist. Saddam’s Iraq more a cult of personality military dictatorship.

The administration screamed 9/11 9/11 9/11 Saddam Saddam Saddam WMD WMD WMD. Now its Democracy.  I am not about to accept a bunch of lies as justification for war. I am not about to believe we are occupying Iraq for charitable reasons. You think this war is justified for some greater good no matter the propaganda, I question that.
As for me , I am probably older than you and have been a soldier and a policeman. I have no Che memorabilia.

WOOF says, “I am not about to accept a bunch of lies as justification for war.”

What lies?  This is where your argument breaks down.

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”—President Bush, Jan.28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.

“We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.”—Vice President Cheney on March 16, 2003 on “Meet the Press.”

[The CIA possesses] solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade.”—CIA Director George Tenet in a written statement released Oct. 7, 2002 and echoed in that evening’s speech by President Bush.

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”—President Bush, Jan.28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.

None of those are lies WOOF.

They must be fantasies then.
Marines with sucking chest wounds fantasies.

WOOF: as I said, it’s the image that your posts painted, I admitted I could have been wrong.

As for your statements that that was only 1991 Iraq, you couldn’t be more wrong. The same regime was in charge after 1991, the very same group of thugs. They were just as brutal before, during, and after the 1991 war. The war in 1991 did not end the true evil that existed in that country.

No threat to us? Perhaps, perhaps not. If by ‘no threat’ you mean everyone except the fine American pilots enforcing the sanctions, then maybe you’re right. Maybe, but only if you ignore all the clear signs and statements emanating from that crner of the world that we had a mortal enemy in the persona of Saddam.

But that just simply doesn’t matter to me WOOF. It was a morally right war; it is the absolute height of selfishness to believe that the suffering of Iraqis simply was unimportant. We could deal with it and did, and good on George Bush for having the moral clarity to have done so.

You say: “All brutal regimes have much in common. The third Reich was fascist not socialist. Saddam’s Iraq more a cult of personality military dictatorship.”

Naziism was fascism, that’s true. Do you know what fascism was, politically speaking? ANSWER: fascism is nationalist socialism. Are you also arguing that Hitler’s Germany wasn’t a cult of personality military dictatorship? Oh, come on now!

The administration said a lot of things, WOOF. And for those of us listening, he talked about the freedom of the Iraqi people all along. It was always one of the stated reason to overthrow Saddam.