so if we woulda let hans brix have more time to look for weapons, would we have gone to war?

like what if he came back and said "nope, no weapons", how would the iraq situation played out?

11/17/2005 10:39:55 AM

i know im quoting a right wing talking point, but i truly want to know this......if bush is as dumb as you haters think, then how was he able to manipulate intel and fool everyone in this country and the rest of the world, including the previous administartion. i mean all the anti war people now were the same ones who saw the intel, made quotes about removing a saddam with WMD, and now convieniently forget their stories. i mean there are quotes of bill n hillary, kerry, edwards, kennedy etc all saying how dangerous iraq was, and clinton even said this during his time as prez when he bombed iraq....but now it was bush who faked the intel. i mean clinton said iraq had WMDs back when he was prez and bush didnt even have the shit. why cant yall just say the intel was wrong but bush didnt lie about it. its the same intel thats been floating around since the mid 90s.

im not saying i totally agree with the way the war was handled i just dont get the hypocrisy, well actually i do get it and its all just playing politics, but i think its horse shit.

11/17/2005 10:48:39 AM

1) I don't think Bush is dumb, I think it's an act. He wants to come off as an "everyman" so that voters will relate to him.

2) not everyone was fooled by Bush in the US, just congress, and certainly not globally.

3) It can be true that the intel was wrong and Bush lied about it. It's likely that he knew it was suspect but ignored the fact. According to some people, he encouraged intel that would justify a war with Iraq. There's a difference between completely lying about something and finding some half-truth that you know/suspect is a half-truth and pretending it's the actual truth.

11/17/2005 11:04:01 AM

HANS BRIX, OH NO!!!

11/17/2005 11:04:25 AM

Well, let me get to what you said about Bush 1st. I'll say he isn't as dumb as he lets on, but still isn't the brightest bulb on the tree. However, look at the people he's had around him (Powell, Rove, Cheney, etc.) and you can see that he puts people around him that no how to make a case for many parts of his policy. However, after a while, things unravel all over (such as the WMDs, Saddam & 9/11 connection, etc.) on this issue, as well as others.

Now, David Kay said that Clinton's strikes in 1998 were significant due to the fact that it crippled what weapons program that was there. Also, remember that we didn't invade them during that. What would the Republicans had done if Clinton invaded Iraq in 1998? I know they sure as hell wouldn't have agreed with it as the Democrats are not agreeing with it today. Your point about some people saying what they thought of Saddam is valid to a degree. I'll agree it's politics. I was never for the war, and it does annoy me some to see some of these politicians contradict themselves. However, if you see a problem, don't you try to find a way to solve it? Don't you point the problem out to those who don't seem to understand, worry, or care? Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what to do at this time. So, everyone is still just pointing fingers at each other on both sides. Hopefully that will change.

I just want to know, since you were talking about hypocrisy...If these senators came out and said they were wrong, would you see them differently, or still as hypocrites? I'm being serious; not being an ass about it. If Bush came out and said he was wrong, or apologized, I would respect him for doing that (but still disapprove of him).

11/17/2005 11:06:39 AM

i would respect them IF it wasnt just pure politics. but they are not saying they were wrong, they are saying he lied and they were mislead. they are not saying it was their own misjudgement but rather they were conned. i really dont see that. i mean there are checks n balances for this thing. i dont see him being able to manipulate intel on a large enough scale and no one knowing. i mean they havent found any hard core proof about it. hell i admitt i dont like bush, i dont like the way the war is handled and i dont like the way he switched reasons for invasion....but i just dont see him as being able to swindle congress and the senate like that. not to mention the UN. if there was hardcore evidence, which there isnt, id be the first in line askin for his head on a plate. all we have now is just political partisian allegations and namecalling

[Edited on November 17, 2005 at 11:29 AM. Reason : . ]

11/17/2005 11:28:58 AM

I think there's a proof the intelligence has been manipulated. Niger, for one. Cartoons that Powell presented in the UN instead of any real pictures, for another. However, the critics of the administration never had guts to stand up and say: "Saddam doesn't have weapons - I put my reputation on it". And the reason is that truthfully nobody was 100% sure that he didn't have a single trace of a WMD program. And a single evidence, however, small, was all it would have taken to prove such a critic wrong, at least in the court of public opinion.

I think it is wrong to suggest Bush just "lied, lied, lied". But it appears clear to me that he had an agenda to find reasons to go to war with Iraq. And the evidence for WMD was important but secondary. And I think when it comes to a question such as war, the distinction between a reaction to a plausible threat and active attempts to start a war is huge. And to present one as another is equivalent to lying.

But the problem is that he's not being critisized by nuns. He's critisized by people who chose to waive the constitutional right of the Congress to be the deciding party on the issue of starting a war. And they don't really have a moral right to play innocent bystanders. Part of their job is to interfere in these circumstances, which they didn't. So they are to blame, too.

11/17/2005 11:52:42 AM

hey, alot of people still think we found substatial WMDs, or are about to find them.

Lied? No. Was ill-advised? yes. manipulated? yes

did he do any manipulating? probably.

YOU BREAKIN MY BALLS HANS BRIX

[Edited on November 17, 2005 at 12:20 PM. Reason : .]

11/17/2005 12:18:51 PM

Quote :

"so if we woulda let hans brix have more time to look for weapons, would we have gone to war? like what if he came back and said "nope, no weapons", how would the iraq situation played out?"

He wouldn't have said that under any circumstances.

That's not how it worked.

Neither Hans Blix nor any literate lefty ever suggested Saddam had no weapons. If you go back (way back) and dig up the pages-long war threads from '03, you'd see that the UN said in their report that Saddam did possess some illegal weapons. This has since become a cheap talking point by the RNC, but it ignores the basic reality of the weapons inspection regime--i.e. it's not about what he had, so long as they were declared, and in the process of being destroyed.

Saddam did have them, but he was destroying the weapons he wasn't supposed to have, as prescribed by UN Resolution 1441--our pretext for war. Blix said as much in his statements leading up to the invasion.

Put simply, we invaded Iraq because Bush & Co. believed he was hiding weapons from Blix and UNMOVIC; thereby violating UN resolutions requiring him to declare what weapons were in his arsenal. Thus far, a belief wholly unsubstantiated by fact.

The jist of your question though, is what would have happened had Blix come back and told us Saddam was complying with a laundry list of WMD-related UN resolutions.

The answer has already been played out. IOW: Exactly what occurred.

[Edited on November 17, 2005 at 1:50 PM. Reason : ...]

11/17/2005 1:47:05 PM

Quote :

"not everyone was fooled by Bush in the US, just congress, and certainly not globally."

Right, because the numerous world intellegance agencies who agreed that Sadam did have WMD's were fooled by Bush as well.....

11/17/2005 2:16:56 PM

Quote :

"Saddam did have them, but he was destroying [hiding and then transporting] the weapons he wasn't supposed to have [out of the country], as prescribed by [in complete violation of] UN Resolution 1441--our pretext for war."

11/17/2005 2:24:04 PM

Quote :

"But the problem is that he's not being critisized by nuns. He's critisized by people who chose to waive the constitutional right of the Congress to be the deciding party on the issue of starting a war. And they don't really have a moral right to play innocent bystanders. Part of their job is to interfere in these circumstances, which they didn't. So they are to blame, too."

Congress hasn't declared a war since WWII, and it's a damn shame they punt on their duty to act as a buffer on giving the president too much power. Each year the president gains more power, if by proxy than nothing else. This kind of shit just burns my ass.

11/17/2005 2:25:53 PM

^^ Gotta any basis for those claims?

11/17/2005 2:29:07 PM

Gimme 5 minutes.

11/17/2005 2:30:38 PM

^^ the rational explanation for what happened to tons of all sorts of shit that we knew were there, remember we had the receipts, that were unaccounted for by the UN.

more than likely the majority of what he had is now sitting in a syrian warehouse.

11/17/2005 2:32:42 PM

A nice theory, but let's not get salisburyboy-esque. Do you have any proof?

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-03-02-un-wmd_x.htm

Quote :

"U.N.: Iraq had no WMD after 1994 UNITED NATIONS — A report from U.N. weapons inspectors to be released today says they now believe there were no weapons of mass destruction of any significance in Iraq after 1994, according to two U.N. diplomats who have seen the document. The historical review of inspections in Iraq is the first outside study to confirm the recent conclusion by David Kay, the former U.S. chief inspector, that Iraq had no banned weapons before last year's U.S-led invasion. It also goes further than prewar U.N. reports, which said no weapons had been found but noted that Iraq had not fully accounted for weapons it was known to have had at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. The report, to be outlined to the U.N. Security Council as early as Friday, is based on information gathered over more than seven years of U.N. inspections in Iraq before the 2003 war, plus postwar findings discussed publicly by Kay. Kay reported in October that his team found "dozens of WMD-related program activities" that Iraq was required to reveal to U.N. inspectors but did not. However, he said he found no actual WMDs. The study, a quarterly report on Iraq from U.N. inspectors, notes that the U.S. teams' inability to find any weapons after the war mirrors the experience of U.N. inspectors who searched there from November 2002 until March 2003. Many Bush administration officials were harshly critical of the U.N. inspection efforts in the months before the war. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in August 2002 that inspections "will be a sham." The Bush administration also pointedly declined U.N. offers to help in the postwar weapons hunt, preferring instead to use U.S. inspectors and specialists from other coalition countries such as Britain and Australia. But U.N. reports submitted to the Security Council before the war by Hans Blix, former chief U.N. arms inspector, and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency, have been largely validated by U.S. weapons teams. The common findings: Iraq's nuclear weapons program was dormant. No evidence was found to suggest Iraq possessed chemical or biological weapons. U.N. officials believe the weapons were destroyed by U.N. inspectors or Iraqi officials in the years after the 1991 Gulf War. Iraq was attempting to develop missiles capable of exceeding a U.N.-mandated limit of 93 miles. Demetrius Perricos, the acting executive chairman of the U.N. inspection teams, said in an interview that the failure to find banned weapons in Iraq since the war undercuts administration criticism of the U.N.'s search before the war. "You cannot say that only the Americans or the British or the Australians currently inspecting in Iraq are the clever inspectors — and the Americans and the British and the Australians that we had were not," he said."

[Edited on November 17, 2005 at 2:41 PM. Reason : ...]

11/17/2005 2:36:39 PM

Ron Paul's take. That damn commie.

http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2002/tst101402.htm

That pesky Constitution
http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.html

Article 1, Section 8 of that damned document (a hashing of the duties of Congress)

Quote :

"Clause 11: To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; Clause 12: To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; "

And don't start with the War Powers Act unless you show where the constitution was ammended to reflect said act.

11/17/2005 2:38:47 PM

^^ nope.

which is why syria isn't a bombed out hellhole right now, and there's no justification for the mess 'o potamia we're in.

[Edited on November 17, 2005 at 2:41 PM. Reason : *]

11/17/2005 2:40:07 PM

To end my rant, Bush is a damn twat and should be strung up for this mess. Congress needs to swing as well for giving him that much rope.

Fair and balanced.

11/17/2005 2:43:54 PM

Quote :

"but i just dont see him as being able to swindle congress and the senate like that. not to mention the UN. if there was hardcore evidence, which there isn't"

You're right, there isn't any hardcore evidence, and unless Bush Co. screwed up MAJORLY (they would really have to screw up), there never will be. There will always only be circumstantial evidence (of which there's a lot). It would be a pretty big deal if there were hard evidence that Bush directly ordered the manipulation of intelligence info.

As it is now, it seems he relied on intelligence that he may have known was flawed, and pressed the intel agencies for specific evidence (downing st. memos, Powell's statements, and those of his aides). It's easy for me to see congress buying it, because if Bush wasn't bluffing, they would look really bad for opposing him. If he was bluffing, it's just politics as usual.

11/17/2005 5:41:28 PM