I don't understand this post. Bush and his team initiated a war whose total cost is expected to reach $1 trillion in dollars and tens of thousands of lives and created a new center for world terrorism. They were in charge. It was not the responsibility of Kerry, or Kennedy, or Clinton, to analyze the intelligence and make the decision. It was that of Bush and his administration.
In making such a grave decision, they needed to take into account not only the thrust of the intelligence, but the risk of it being wrong and the potential downside of their actions. In this, they failed miserably.
It's misrepresentation of this highest order to say that Clinton "lied" about Iraq. Please re-read what he said. He simply said that he believed that Iraq represented a threat and that the inspections should have been carried out forecefully. In fact, they were being carried out. Saddam was not preventing them; he was cooperating with them--as of course he would, since, as we now know, he had no weapons to hide in the first place. Go back and read what Hans Blix said at the time--the inspections should have been allowed to continue. That would have resulted in a true conclusion, that there were no weapons. Then we would have been spared this entire mess. Instead, Bush short-circuited the process that was working.
I'm really tired of hearing that Kerry or Blair agreed with the assessment about weapons, and that that justifies the entire decision to go to war. First, at least in the case of Congress, its judgments were based on partial and biased information, as we now know. And it bears repeating that they did not vote to go to war--they voted to authorize it as a last resort. In the case of Blair, we also now know that he apparently disagreed with the decision to go in and tried to stop, or at least slow down, the march to war.
Bush is the President. He's in charge. He has the responsbility. He made the wrong decision. In a management environment, he would have simply been fired long ago for such an appalling mistake. Fortunately, the American people have now in essence fired him in the sense that far less than half support him, meaning that thankfully all the rest of his abysmally misguided policies regarding not only foreign affairs but also taxes and the environment will now not be carried out; they will fire him again in November 2006 when they elect a Democratic House and Senate; and then they will fire him again in November 2008 when the reject whatever lame successor his party comes up with.
-- Bob M.
Fri Nov 18, 02:08:00 PM 2005
The New York Times says Bush lied about Iraq: It's hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working
I just looked up on Factiva to see what Bill Clinton thought: YOU KNOW, I HAVE REPEATEDLY DEFENDED President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over. I don't believe he went in there for oil. We didn't go in there for imperialist or financial reasons. We went in there because he bought the Wolfowitz-Cheney analysis that the Iraqis would be better off, we could shake up the authoritarian Arab regimes in the Middle East, and our leverage to make peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would be increased. At the moment the U.N. inspectors were kicked out in '98, this is the proper language: there were substantial quantities of botulinum and aflatoxin, as I recall, some bioagents, I believe there were those, and VX and ricin, chemical agents, unaccounted for. Keep in mind, that's all we ever had to work on. We also thought there were a few missiles, some warheads, and maybe a very limited amount of nuclear laboratory capacity. After 9/11, let's be fair here, if you had been President, you'd think, Well, this fellow bin Laden just turned these three airplanes full of fuel into weapons of mass destruction, right? Arguably they were super-powerful chemical weapons. Think about it that way. So, you're sitting there as President, you're reeling in the aftermath of this, so, yeah, you want to go get bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that. But you also have to say, Well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I've got to do that. That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for. So I thought the President had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, "Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process." You couldn't responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks. I never really thought he'd [use them]. What I was far more worried about was that he'd sell this stuff or give it away. Same thing I've always been worried about North Korea's nuclear and missile capacity. I don't expect North Korea to bomb South Korea, because they know it would be the end of their country. But if you can't feed yourself, the temptation to sell this stuff is overwhelming. So that's why I thought Bush did the right thing to go back. When you're the President, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for. Time, 6/28/2004
posted by Richard Sprague at 6:24 AM on Nov 18, 2005
"Bill Clinton lied about Iraq too"
1 Comment -
I don't understand this post. Bush and his team initiated a war whose total cost is expected to reach $1 trillion in dollars and tens of thousands of lives and created a new center for world terrorism. They were in charge. It was not the responsibility of Kerry, or Kennedy, or Clinton, to analyze the intelligence and make the decision. It was that of Bush and his administration.
In making such a grave decision, they needed to take into account not only the thrust of the intelligence, but the risk of it being wrong and the potential downside of their actions. In this, they failed miserably.
It's misrepresentation of this highest order to say that Clinton "lied" about Iraq. Please re-read what he said. He simply said that he believed that Iraq represented a threat and that the inspections should have been carried out forecefully. In fact, they were being carried out. Saddam was not preventing them; he was cooperating with them--as of course he would, since, as we now know, he had no weapons to hide in the first place. Go back and read what Hans Blix said at the time--the inspections should have been allowed to continue. That would have resulted in a true conclusion, that there were no weapons. Then we would have been spared this entire mess. Instead, Bush short-circuited the process that was working.
I'm really tired of hearing that Kerry or Blair agreed with the assessment about weapons, and that that justifies the entire decision to go to war. First, at least in the case of Congress, its judgments were based on partial and biased information, as we now know. And it bears repeating that they did not vote to go to war--they voted to authorize it as a last resort. In the case of Blair, we also now know that he apparently disagreed with the decision to go in and tried to stop, or at least slow down, the march to war.
Bush is the President. He's in charge. He has the responsbility. He made the wrong decision. In a management environment, he would have simply been fired long ago for such an appalling mistake. Fortunately, the American people have now in essence fired him in the sense that far less than half support him, meaning that thankfully all the rest of his abysmally misguided policies regarding not only foreign affairs but also taxes and the environment will now not be carried out; they will fire him again in November 2006 when they elect a Democratic House and Senate; and then they will fire him again in November 2008 when the reject whatever lame successor his party comes up with.
--
Bob M.
Fri Nov 18, 02:08:00 PM 2005