The left misfires on the Bush WMD "lies"

[igloo]

The left misfires on the Bush WMD "lies"

WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION?

To the president's opponents, the mother of all Bush "lies" is the administration's case for going to war in Iraq, specifically the president's claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. "So whose books were more cooked — Enron's accounts of its financial doings or the administration's prewar reports on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?" asked Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect, in a column published in the Washington Post. The administration's position, Meyerson concluded, was "as phony a casus belli as the destruction of the Maine in Havana Harbor."

It's an argument that's been heard more and more in recent weeks. "Does it matter that we were misled into war?" asked the New York Times's Paul Krugman. Bush's statements about weapons of mass destruction were "one of the administration's Big Lies of the war on Iraq," wrote The Nation's David Corn. And Democratic senator Robert Byrd has issued almost daily allegations that Bush lied about Iraq.

Such accusations are risky — after all, the search for Iraqi weapons is ongoing, and any day might bring a significant discovery, or evidence that weapons have been destroyed. Still, for the sake of argument, assume there is no discovery. Does that mean Bush was lying?

In the months leading up to the war, there was a bipartisan consensus that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; the real debate was between those who believed that Saddam would have to be disarmed by force and those who wanted to rely on U.N. inspectors to contain him. The world knew from those inspectors that, when last checked, Iraq had large stores of anthrax and nerve gas. The world also knew that before the first Gulf War, Iraq had an aggressive nuclear-weapons program. Last December, there was general agreement that Iraq's 12,000-page declaration of its weapons programs was grossly incomplete. And in January of this year, former Clinton administration officials Kenneth Pollack and Martin Indyk wrote in the New York Times that Iraq "must be made to account for the thousands of tons of chemical precursors, the thousands of liters of biological warfare agents, the thousands of missing chemical munitions, the unaccounted-for Scud missiles, and the weaponized VX poison that the United Nations has itself declared missing."

Such a consensus makes it extremely difficult to argue that the president lied about Iraq and WMD; if the administration's case was a lie, then everybody, including much of the political opposition, was in on it. Just as importantly, if it turns out that prewar estimates of Iraq's capabilities were incorrect, the Bush administration can say — truthfully — that it erred on the side of protecting American national security. One could argue that the White House paid insufficient attention to intelligence indicating a threat to American security before September 11. One could also argue that this administration was therefore determined not to underestimate future threats. "What 9/11 did was teach a generation of policymakers to interpret things in an alarmed rather than a relaxed way," says one former administration official.

Did that make the Iraq campaign a lie? The equivalent of Enron bookkeeping? Only the president's most fevered enemies would try to make that case.

[monicac]

OK listen:

1. A bipartisan lie is still a LIE

2. If there were sufficient WMDs to pose a threat to the US, and we still have not been able to find them, then WHERE THE HELL ARE THEY?

Is this something like the thousands of Iraqi military battalions that just disappeared? Were they looted or something? I can´t believe you are still trying to argue this TIRED and illogical point. Even Bush and Blair have now admitted that oil, among other things, played a "decisive role" in their actions.

[mr mahs]

Originally posted by monicac

OK listen:

1. A bipartisan lie is still a LIE

2. If there were sufficient WMDs to pose a threat to the US, and we still have not been able to find them, then WHERE THE HELL ARE THEY?

Is this something like the thousands of Iraqi military battalions that just disappeared? Were they looted or something? I can´t believe you are still trying to argue this TIRED and illogical point. Even Bush and Blair have now admitted that oil, among other things, played a "decisive role" in their actions.

The 50k+ Iraqi military was obliterated that's what happened to them. Their were reports of Qusay who was in charge of the republican guard was incoherent in his military decisions.. He sent.them towards us to be slaughtered instaed of protecting the ring around bhgdad

[igloo]

Originally posted by monicac

OK listen:

1. A bipartisan lie is still a LIE

2. If there were sufficient WMDs to pose a threat to the US, and we still have not been able to find them, then WHERE THE HELL ARE THEY?

Is this something like the thousands of Iraqi military battalions that just disappeared? Were they looted or something? I can´t believe you are still trying to argue this TIRED and illogical point. Even Bush and Blair have now admitted that oil, among other things, played a "decisive role" in their actions.

You are lost son