From TIme Magazine: Cheney knew 9 months before.............

[jokerswild]

CIA sources insist the Bush administration was made aware some time before the State of the Union address that the Niger allegation was false. If those prove true, it kicks the jams out from under the administration's claim that the presence of a falsehood in the President's case against Iraq was simply the product of ignorance. And it may be expected that the CIA will more and more sharply signal that it passed its findings up the food chain, because on the basis of Ambassador Wilson's revelations, they'd be left to take the blame if they didn't. Then again, the media may turn its attention to the role of the Vice President's office: After all, Ambassador Wilson claims his inquiry was initiated by a request from Dick Cheney's office to check out the allegation. So presumably, Wilson's findings will have been reported back there. If so, the former ambassador is not the only one who will want to know what they, and other top officials, made of, and more importantly did with his information.

And right now, the game in Washington is to pin the blame for the fact that a fib, conscious or unconscious, made it into the State of the Union address. And in a summer news trough, that's bad news for the White House.

[Chris Alger]

I think the better questions are: "where was Time Magazine and where were the Democrat critics of the White House when the UN inspectors revealed the Nigerian doucuments to be forgeries weeks before the invasion?" The media and the Democrats basically regurgitated the official line with minor qualifications. None of the mainstream organs, and few opposition leaders (notably Sen. Robt. Byrd and Rep. Dennis Kucinich) were willing to state the obvious: the administration has no evidence that Iraq is a threat, and much evidence (the inability of Saddam to even conquor all of Iraq) proves otherwise. Nor is the country that sacrifices the least (among the richest) when it comes to developmental aid plausibly motivated by the cause of "liberation." The war is therefore one of aggression in violation of international laws and norms. Time and the Democrats should have been out trying to point out the Emporer's nakedness and revoke the war resolution and drawing Hitler analogies instead of broadcasting White House propaganda without qualification.

Our system of public information and discussion chillingly failed to raise the degree of skepticism merited by official requests to support mass killing. Partisan "gotchas" and pretenses to having been deceived by third-rate propaganda are poor substitutes.

[Jimbo]

Chris I do believe you are missing the point. Even if we assume 75% of the reasons provided for invading Iraq (although I am not stating that to be the case) were inaccurate we still should have completed the task for many other reasons. How do you miss that little factoid?

[Boris]

Sorry Jimbo. That's BS. If by inaccuracy you mean those things that Bush thought were true but later turned out to be not true, then that's OK. But for Bush to justify the invasion with "facts" that he knew were highly likely to be untrue, well, that's a lie. And if the case against Iraq was so compelling then Bush certainly should not have to lie to make his case. Foreign policy based on lies is bad. You can not defend the President on this issue of lying.

[Chris Alger]

No, that's ridiculous. When confronted with the lie by a person in a trust relationship, the urgent question is why they lied and what they were trying to cover up, not whether "many other reasons" might exist for what happened apart from the lie. For example, the syllogism "Bush lied about the reasons for the war, therefore the issue is whether the war can be justified for other reasons," is analogous to "my spouse lied about her whereabouts last night, therefore the issue is whether she might have been somewhere that wouldn't bother me."

Of course, people like yourself likely imagine that being cuckolded by the Prez is some sort of patriotic duty, as in responding with "how far" when Bush orders you to "bend over."

[Jimbo]

"If by inaccuracy you mean those things that Bush thought were true but later turned out to be not true, then that's OK."

Yes Boris that is what I meant by inaccurate. I certainly would not suggest any President knowingly lie in order to drum up support for a war. However a lie of omission in this case might be acceptable. An example would be if it was projected that we would lose 10,000 soldiers to overthrow Saddam, leaving that information private is OK by me so long as overthrowing Saddam was the best course of action based on our National interest whether that be currently or in the future.

After all public opinion is not always based on the greater good but often is based on an immediate emotion or in the case of some democrats, long term resentment from the 2000 election results. Unfortunately in today's political climate popular public opinion and the accompanying support provided whether factual or emotional is required to be a successful leader.

[Jimbo]

"No, that's ridiculous. When confronted with the lie by a person in a trust relationship, the urgent question is why they lied and what they were trying to cover up, not whether "many other reasons" might exist for what happened apart from the lie. For example, the syllogism "Bush lied about the reasons for the war, therefore the issue is whether the war can be justified for other reasons," is analogous to "my spouse lied about her whereabouts last night, therefore the issue is whether she might have been somewhere that wouldn't bother me." "

You are incorrect, since you will never understand why it is not worth further discussion with you on this subject. Actually your analogy is perfect except it absolutely should matter where she was and why she was there if that fact would not bother you. If I was your spouse I'm sure I would find myself lying my ass off to you daily just to survive in the household.

[ACPlayer]

Now, now. Hundred plus american lives, thousands of Iraqi lives and if the british occu-liberation of the Iraqi's by the brits from the Ottomans in the early 20th century is a guide, decades of US involvement in Iraq leading to a sham democracy. All we have done from the US perspective is get rid of a toothless despot.

I for one am still waiting for the real reason to become obvious as the litany of excuses is peeled away. Hint: consider Wolfowitz's statements/plans/ambitions since early 90s.

[MMMMMM]

That "toothless despot" ground the bones of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in his torture chambers, rape rooms, prisons and mass graves. A few hundred American lives and a few thousand Iraqi lives are a serious price to pay for his removal--but a small price compared to the vast carnage he wreaked on his own people. The human costs of this "war" are almost surely less than the number of Iraqis he would have had tortured and killed in the very next year alone if left to his own conscienceless, sadistic, ruthless devices. That goes as well for his animal offspring Uday and Qusay: rapists, torturers, sadists both. They learned the art of torture directly from their father, who himself had been chief torturer in the state security service before he murdered his way up to greater and better things.

Removal of such an ogre should be cause for celebration--and apparently for most Iraqis it was, notwithstanding the holier-than-thou hands-off approach encouraged by the world's liberals and elitists who though they knew better than anyone else what was best for the Iraqis: if they had had their way, the Ogre of Baghdad and his two half-human sons would be this very moment torturing, murdering, and terrorizing common Iraqi civilians as freely as they would list.

Perspective, perspective please, world. May the world someday learn to weigh relative evils in the balance, and to accurately differentiate betwen modest evils and deep, vast evils.

[jokerswild]

I don't believe amy of your propaganda.

The USA has announced a Shiite majority election victory never will take place. Iran, Russia, and China all stand to gain heavily from a protracted US military involvement.

The ends do not justify the means. It was King George I that made Saddam in the first place. Rumsfield kissed Saddam's ass in the '80's.

King George II is a liar, a cheat, and an idiot. He will go down in history as Cheney's puppet.

[ACPlayer]

if it is now US policy to go after any and all dictators and war lords killing people then sure we commend the policy. If you think this reason had more than a a couple of percent weight in the thinking leading up to the decision, you are surely wrong. You have clearly bought the propoganda sold by the admin hook, line and sinker.

The aftermath appears to be clearly stating that from the US self interest perspective there was no clear, present or imminent, threat from Iraq. There appears to be no Al Qaeda connection. The weapons programs were tiny, if at all, and the old ones were mothballed. Hussein was totally boxed in and no threat (except to the Shia population -- the Kurds were enjoying plenty of freedom in the Northern no fly zone).

[MMMMMM]

Well I think that's all historical fact regarding Saddam and his sons. If you choose not to believe it, that's your privilege.

By the way, aren't you the guy who didn't believe that Stalin and Mao killed scores of millions of their own citizens through purges/executions, engineered famines, and prison camps? Total estimated lives lost due to these atrocities are in the 60-80 million range. These are lives lost internally, not due to war. You can look it up, and add the figures up. Or by chance do I have you mixed up with someone else?

[MMMMMM]

Even if it isn't now policy (or practical, for that matter) to rid the world of all despots, ridding the world of even one despotic regime is still a good thing.

Our motives aren't even the main point, IMO. So what if our motives are less than 100% pure??? Did we do a good thing overall or didn't we? And assuming we did, just why should we have allowed the Butcher of Baghdad any chance to proceed with any WMD programs by staying out of the country? The fact is that any WMD programs he might have had (even lying temporarily dormant) were not a good thing for us, even if the threat to us was very minimal (I believe it was greater, but that's beside the point).

So it was good for the Iraqis to be rid of the Butcher, and it reduced the threat of WMD to us by some unspecified amount (even if the threat was very low it was still not a good thing to have).

Wow. We kill two birds with one stone, help both ourselves and the Iraqi people in one stroke, and people want to gripe over it.

Saddam and the despicable Baath party should have been deposed long ago. Better late than never, I guess.

Another thing that bothers me: people keep impugning our motives in Iraq--which I don't really have a problem with, it's worth taking a critical look--but they then seem to made the leap that if we are somehow not "fit" to be liberators, then the Iraqi people should not have been liberated by us. Well that leap doesn't wash. People under the heel of despotisn need liberators even if the liberators aren't perfect and even if the liberators stand to benefit as well. In other words the motives of the USA have zero to do with whether the Iraqi people needed liberation. They desperately needed liberation, and if that was 100th on our list of reasons to liberate Iraq, it was still first on the the Iraqis' list of things needing to be done.

[jokerswild]

Let's just suppose for a moment that George W. Bush was removed from the White House. Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz and Rove too. What would that leave us with? It would leave us stuck in hugely expensive, Vietnam-like guerrilla wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would leave us with the Patriot Act, Homeland Security and Total Information Awareness snooping into every detail of our lives. It would leave us with a government in violation of the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments to the Constitution. It would leave us with a massive cover-up of US complicity in the attacks of 9/11 that, if fully admitted, would show not intelligence "failures" but intelligence crimes, approved and ordered by the most powerful people in the country. It would leave us with a government that now has the power to compel mass vaccinations on pain of imprisonment or fine, and with no legal ability to sue the vaccine makers who killed our friends or our children. It would leave us with two and half million unemployed; the largest budget deficits in history; more than $3.3 trillion missing from the Department of Defense; and state and local governments broke to the point of having to cut back essential services like sewers, police, and fire. It would leave us with a federal government that had hit the debt ceiling and was unable to borrow any more money. And we would still be facing a looming natural gas crisis of unimagined proportions, and living on a planet that is slowly realizing that it is running out of oil with no "Plan B". Our airports however, would be very safe, and shares of Halliburton, Lockheed and DynCorp would be paying excellent dividends.