From: "Alex Gogan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>Lying to the world was not the answer. Open minded people across the world knew that there was no >>weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
On 11/6/05, Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Let me focus on that point for one post. It is fair to make that statement > now, with all the evidence that we have after the war. That statement was > not true before the war. His statement was true, *if* you did not only depend on American mass media. I knew the administration's case was repeated lies and exaggerations because I was looking for the answers and found them in foreign, mainly UK, NZ, and Canadian, sources. I wasn't depending on the American media which was acting like the yellow press in 1898. > > It can be seen in two parts. First, it was clear that Hussein had and used > weapons of mass destruction before the first Gulf war. He used them > against the Kurds and against the Iranians. Partially true, the CIA and others concluded it was actually Iran who used gas against the Kurds because of the type of gas used. It made a good story that Saddam had used it and has been repeated so much I doubt many in in the U.S. know that this is disputed. > > Second, after the first Gulf war, inspectors found evidence of a range of > WMD programs. IIRC, this included evidence of a nuclear program that took > them several years to find. Hussein was playing a game of cat and mouse > with the inspectors, basically, throught the interwar period. Yes, but mark that date - they found evidence of programs from before Gulf War I, but had reliable information it was nearly all destroyed after the War as the agreement called for. The inspectors were still there because of the difference between "all" and 'nearly all" and poor paperwork. As well as paranoia by the US Cheney clones - if a facility by running 24 hours a day by slightly over stated capacity could have produced 150 tons instead of their reported 21 tons where was this missing mythical production! > Inspectors were effectively stopped from doing their work in '98...so > Clinton bombed suspicious facilities. It is/was hard to fathom why a > leader who had nothing to hide would accept bombings instead of simply > showing that he had nothing to hide. I think you have a misguided perception of this event. Clinton forced the inspectors to withdraw and Saddam couldn't do anything about it. > > Inspectors came back in before Gulf War II. They didn't find anything of > substance, but they were involved in a game of cat and mouse with > Hussein...just as they were after Gulf War I. It seemed reasonable to > assume that Hussein would not risk a war that he was sure to lose by not > following the South Africa model of full and complete disclosure. It was > agreed by all that he was acting in a manner that was inconsistant with a > willingness cooperate fully. It was agreed by nearly all media in the United States but not by the UN inspectors or the rest of the world. It was not the pure self-interest of other states that prevented the US from getting a case against Saddam at the UN. The evidence wasn't there and if the US really wanted the answers the proper procedure, which was supported, was more aggressive, intensive inspections. Bush wanted none of that which somewhat weakens the argument that Bush was simply mistaken. > > So, given that, the highest probability was that he, indeed, had WMD. So, a > reasonable person, at the time, would agree with Bush that Hussein had WMD. If people only followed the events the Conservative American Mainstream Media was reporting they could say it was possible he had WMDs but even this is overstating the case. Chemical and biological weapons are unreliable weapons and are less of a military threat than a half-way decent army. After a massive military defeat and ten years of sanctions Saddam had a miserable Army. And no one except for Cheney and his gang believed he had a nuclear program much less nuclear weapons. Iraq was attacked because it was weak, not because it was a threat. > > Indeed, before the war, at a meeting of European countries, Blair asked > from the podium if anyone thought that Hussein did not have WMD. Everyone > there had their own intelligence service, and IIRC, they were available at > the time because it was a security meeting. No one would state that they > didn't think so....as Blair knew. From intelligence sharing, the consensus > was that Hussein did have WMD. A link to this would be nice because I have several that say the Russians, Germans and the French thought otherwise. Of course, part of this is podium hyperbole - many believed there were small quantities of gas artillery shells around which would count as a WMD. This could be parsing the meaning of "mass destruction." > > Indeed, Bush's famous false statement based on forged documents....was that > the British knew about attempts to get uranium. How did the British > "know". It's simple: French intelligence informed them. Thus, one of the > leading countries arguing against the war was the source of the most > infamous mistatement by Bush. The UK to this day refuses to state where this intel came from and pretty much everyone agrees the ultimate source is the forgeries in Italy. Speaking of forgeries - what was asst. NSA Hadley doing there at that time and refusing to report his contacts to the CIA? > > I'd submit that Bush didn't lie in the sense that he knew X was true, but > said Y. He stated the truth, as he saw it. There was a belief, in the > administration, that the CIA had a tremendous bias towards equivicating on > data. They missed the fall of the Berlin wall. They missed India's and > Pakistan's atomic bombs. From the administration's point of view, there > were a lot of "nervous Nellies" in the CIA, unwilling to draw reasonable > conclusions. The Cheney group, the WHIG group, and the Rendon PR agency were all working on selling a war Lies or truth didn't matter. The more threatening sounding the better. Rather Bush knew he was wrong and/or lying is unclear, he does not admit to mistakes or lies. We were misled into war by people to whom the actual truth of things didn't matter is a better way of putting it. Take, for example, the big yellowcake issue. This was seized upon as something to scare the American people as "the only warning we would get was a mushroom cloud." Disregarding everything else, yellowcake was a non-issue. Saddam already had 500 tons of the stuff and we and the UN inspectors didn't care. Yellowcake uranium only becomes weapons grade after over a year of processing in very expensive and hard to conceal extensive nuclear weapon facilities. The UN inspectors left Saddam's yellowcake in the cans it came in and checked to see if they were still there once a year. Now Cheney was repeatedly lying. He even has been forced to admit to several. A tremendous amount of pressure was put on CIA analysts, as some have stated, to agree with Cheney. Cheney and Rumsfeld were part of the group going back to Reagan who always took the worst case scenarios and exaggerated that. Cheney had produced a separate paper on the Russian nuclear threat because they didn't believe the CIA which was laughed away while Reagan's was in office. It later turned out the CIA had overestimated the Russian numbers. And Cheney and the warhawks thought those were too low. Did they believe the CIA on Iraq? With Cheney who can say but experienced news reporters and Washington analysts should have had their doubts about Cheney and Rumsfeld and the pro-war gang more publicized given their previous exaggerations. Some in the CIA foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall, some analysts pointed to likely nuclear weapons production by India and Pakistan. There is a political layer at the top of the CIA that establishes conventional wisdom in tune with the politics of the time. > > We know that this isn't true. At the time, I faulted Bush for going from > "have significant evidence for" to "knowing." I faulted him for > overstating the immediacy of the problem. It's a difficulty I've seen in > management at companies that I've worked for...they organize the data > around what they already "know." One of the reasons I am focusing on this > is that our best hope for staying out of this type of trap, whatever our > viewpoints are, is to use as much rigor as we can to determine the > facts....and then apply models to those facts. > Bush is the bad CEO president - he provides goals and does PR and has no idea of the real issues. He is only responsive to his board of directors - the big GOP contributors. > >This was more a politically expedient war to bolster the US economy (more > people employed and more >wealth created and maintained in the US through > defence contracts than any other country on the planet). > > The general consensus among ecconomists that I've seen is that, given the > deficits, the war was a net drag on the ecconomy. Clearly, spending the > same money on infrastructure would pay far better dividends than buying > things that get blown up. The people pushing this war don't care much about the American economy as a whole - their biggest friends are in the defense-and oil related industries. This is a profiteers war. We now spend much more than the rest of the world put together on defense. Defense, like insurance and security and lawyers, is not a wealth producing sector for the American people as a whole. They are big political contributor sectors. > > I'll go ahead and discuss your second point later. But, I wanted to do > this based on a set of understandings. If you have data to counter my > arguements, I'd be interested in seeing it....for the reasons I've listed > above. > > Dan M. -- Gary Denton http://www.apollocon.org June 23-25, 2006 "The budget should be balanced; the treasury should be refilled; public debt should be reduced; and the arrogance of public officials should be controlled." -Cicero. 106-43 B.C. Easter Lemming Liberal News Digest - http://elemming2.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
