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(1 of 33)
The Painful and Public Death of the Bush Doctrine of Pre-emptive War: Intel was WRONG.
Jul 9, 2004 5:42 PM
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In retrospect, the Iraq war need never have been fought, as shown by a scathing Senate Report that shows how false the pre-war WMD amd Al Qaeda connection blatherware really was.
Just Consider that for a moment.
Thousands dead, maimed, wounded, our military resources wasted, billions and billions of billions of dollars down the drain, our international standing ruined, Abu Ghraib, Al Qaeda and terrorism strenghtened, anti-America hatred exploding, and Bin Laden still at large with only 30,000 troops after him.
All this could have been different, if we had just avoided the pre-war hysteria, not presented false claims to the American people and the world and stayed with the rational, tough, and effective UN inspections. Indeed, the UN inspectors are the ONLY people who have uncovered banned weapons and destroyed them in Iraq over the last 14 years.
We should have let them do their job.
The Bush administration demanded and cherry picked the intel they needed to fake us into war, based on the dreadful, illegal and immoral idea of "pre-emptive war." Kind of like the police arresting innocent people for "future crimes."
Well, this doctrine is Dead, Defunct, Discredited. R.I.P. It's first use as a doctrine has shamed us before the world. We now have to admit we had no reason to go to war. What a disgrace. But remember: that is the doing of the Bush/Cheney Administration.
And we have a chance to tell them what we think of it in November.
"Report Says Key Assertions Leading to War Were Wrong
By DAVID STOUT"
Published: July 9, 2004
Excerpt:
"On one important point, the committee found the C.I.A.'s conclusions reasonable ? that there had been no significant ties between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda terrorists."
Got that: NO Significant Al Qaeda Ties. Will someone send Dick Cheney the Memo to stop lying about these phony connections.
Excerpt:
"The report zeroed in on the crucial October 2002 national intelligence estimate in which analysts concluded that Iraq already had chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program.
"Now, these are very emphatic statements," Mr. Roberts said. "Simply put, they were not supported by the intelligence which the community supplied to the committee.""
Rest of the Story:
Report Says Key Assertions Leading to War Were Wrong
By DAVID STOUT
Published: July 9, 2004
ASHINGTON, July 9 ? The Central Intelligence Agency greatly overestimated the danger presented by deadly unconventional weapons in Iraq because of runaway assumptions that were never sufficiently challenged, the Senate Intelligence Committee said today.
In a long-awaited report that goes to the heart of President Bush's rationale for going to war and is certain to intensify political debate on Iraq, the committee said that prewar assessments of Saddam Hussein's supposed arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and his desire to have nuclear weapons, were wildly off the mark.
"Today, we know these assessments were wrong, and as our inquiry will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence," Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who heads the panel, said at a briefing on the 511-page report.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/national/09CND-INTEL.html
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(2 of 33)
Re: The Painful and Public Death of the Bush Doctrine of Pre-emptive War: Intel was WRONG.
Jul 9, 2004 7:15 PM
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But of course, you know what the neocons will say:
"If the CIA was dysfunctional, it was all Clinton's fault".
It all amounts to a very feeble attempt on the part of GWBush to find a scapegoat for his disastrous administration. From ignoring the warnings about Al Quaeda pre-911, to looking for WMD's in all the wrong places, from hunting down Saddam Hussein who posed no real threat to the USA, to abdicating the hunt for Osama bin Laden, from pushing for and getting huge tax breaks for the wealthy while millions are thrown out of work, GWBush doesn't have a record he can run on. So he needs his scapegoats.
The question is, for how long will most of the electorate be fooled?
"Fool me once, shame on ? shame on you. Fool me ? you can't get fooled
again" ? George W. Bush
"Then you wake up at the high school level and find out that the illiteracy level of our children are appalling." ? George W. Bush
"I am not a crook" - Richard M. Nixon
"I stand by all the misstatements that I've made." - Dan Quayle
"It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas." - Ronald Reagan
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(3 of 33)
G.W.Bush: The World's Greatest Buck-Passer.
Jul 10, 2004 11:59 AM
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Rockefeller nails it when he said thw CIA was working under an atmosphere of overt intmidation from the White House, who already were making belligerant and far out front statements based on their ideology, not facts. The CIA then felt pressured to support that ideology. Cheney yelled at several top CIA people and Rumsfeld was so unhappy that the Saddam/AlQaeda connection was denied, that he and Fieth adn Wolfowitz set up THEIR OWN INTELLIGENCE DPARTMENT. This military intel has not been looked at yet, but will be, and it was blatantly biased, false and ideological -- and directly tied to White House interference, cherry picking and phonying up of claims.
This is only the beginning.
At least the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection is dead.
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12,357
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9/13/99
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(4 of 33)
Jul 12, 2004 12:07 PM
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1) What happened to all of the WMD-related material that Iraq was known to have had but never accounted for via destruction under UNSCOM supervision or documentation?
2) Why did Saddam Hussein block weapons inspectors repeatedly in the 1990's if there wasn't anything to hide?
3) Did Iraq fire repeatedly on US aircraft?
4) Did Iraq violate repeatedly the cease fire agreement it signed?
5) Did Iraq have ties to terrorism?
And a couple more I'd like to know:
6) Was removing Saddam a good thing?
7) Do you want the US to succeed in Iraq?
"Don't worry about it." -Lt. Kermit Tyler
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103
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(5 of 33)
Senate Report Should Be Named: Pre-Emptive War...OOOPS!
Jul 12, 2004 12:34 PM
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The whole idea of pre-emptive war is like that Tom Cruise movay, arresting criminals before the crime happens. Insane.
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(6 of 33)
And of course if terrorists armed with WMD made in Iraq...
Jul 12, 2004 2:29 PM
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...hit the US, we'd be hearing from the Left about how "insane" it was Bush didn't do anything.
"Don't worry about it." -Lt. Kermit Tyler
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(7 of 33)
Jul 12, 2004 6:55 PM
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Good questions.
1) Blix thinks they destroyed or lost it and had very poor records. In other words, the missing weapons never were missing, just not written up.
2) Saddam was exrtremely weak militarily, adn feared his neighbors and the USA. It was useful to him to maintain some ambiguity about the WMD's, which he did shalelessly and stupidly. I thinkhe laso felt we were NEVER going to let up on teh sanctions so he had nothign to gain by coopeating any more.
3) I don't believe most of those firings ever happened. After further looks, those were imagined by the pilots or bogies. I DO think they turned on radar and that scared the US pilots.
4) WEll, not in any major way. Turns out they complied.
5) Their teroor ties were noting compared to real baddies like the Iranians and Libyans and Syrians. NOT a single teror act against us can be traced back to IRaq.
That's all I have time for now.
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(8 of 33)
Could NOT agree more Lefty.
Jul 12, 2004 10:01 PM
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The whole rotten and foul concept has been destroyed in its first work out.
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(9 of 33)
Jul 13, 2004 8:21 PM
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but there's noneed to go into that now...
Seriously, we could be hit by bin laden or a pakistani nuke tomorrow. Going into Iraq was a total waste of time and there will be blame no matter where the next one came from. Keepingthe UN inspectors there and the embargo tight woudl have satisfied everyone, and saved our resources to where we should be going: after Bin Laden.
What ifs are awaste fo time. We have stimuated NOrth Korea to produe 7-10 nukes whiel we were fiddling with Iaq. Any of them might come down on us.
Was that smart?
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(10 of 33)
Jul 14, 2004 6:03 AM
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>>Going into Iraq was a total waste of time and there will be blame no matter where the next one came from. Keepingthe UN inspectors there and the embargo tight woudl have satisfied everyone,<<
And allow Saddam to do his dance for another 12 years? I don't think so. What we could've ended up seeing is Saddam announcing he had nukes.
>>and saved our resources to where we should be going: after Bin Laden.<<
We still are going after Bin Ladin and have been since 2001.
>>What ifs are awaste fo time. We have stimuated NOrth Korea to produe 7-10 nukes whiel we were fiddling with Iaq. Any of them might come down on us.<<
They admitted they had an ongoing nuclear weapons program before the new Iraq war. What exactly would you have had Bush do to North Korea? Invade? Let's not forget that the NKPA was thought to have had nukes already before the new Iraq war.
>>Was that smart? <<
What wouldn't be smart is allowing Iraq to become a North Korea straddling the oil fields in the Middle East.
"Don't worry about it." -Lt. Kermit Tyler
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(11 of 33)
Jul 14, 2004 6:11 AM
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>>1) Blix thinks they destroyed or lost it and had very poor records. In other words, the missing weapons never were missing, just not written up.<<
I might entertain that had Blix not turned up banned missiles and chem warhead shells. However, he did.
>>2) Saddam was exrtremely weak militarily, adn feared his neighbors and the USA. It was useful to him to maintain some ambiguity about the WMD's, which he did shalelessly and stupidly. I thinkhe laso felt we were NEVER going to let up on teh sanctions so he had nothign to gain by coopeating any more.<<
See above response.
>>3) I don't believe most of those firings ever happened. After further looks, those were imagined by the pilots or bogies. I DO think they turned on radar and that scared the US pilots.<<
Even if I accept your explanation that "most" didn't happen (which I don't), that still leaves a defeated power shooting at US aircraft. That's grounds for restarting the war right there.
>>4) WEll, not in any major way. Turns out they complied.<<
No. Iraq violated it repeatedly by blocking inspectors. That by itself is a legitimate reason to restart the fighting.
>>5) Their teroor ties were noting compared to real baddies like the Iranians and Libyans and Syrians. NOT a single teror act against us can be traced back to IRaq.<<
Libya is cooperating now (gee, I wonder why?), Iran is getting close to revolution which cannot be hurt by the fact the US has troops on TWO of its borders, and as for Syria, well, let's just use Lincoln's maxim of "one war at a time". Once Iraq is settled, I think we'll see Syria on the hitlist.
"Don't worry about it." -Lt. Kermit Tyler
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(12 of 33)
Sounds Like Deadwood:"I shot him because he woulda shot me, boss."
Jul 14, 2004 11:41 AM
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But then most of these guys grew up waving cap guns and cowboy hats to the Lone Ranger.
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8,646
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3/9/03
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(13 of 33)
Lepi: Did you read the report?
Jul 14, 2004 12:06 PM
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Lepi: Did you read the senate report?
In their conclusions, Iraq and Al Qaida had numerous ties throughout the 1990's to present day.
Go read it yourself.
I did.
Conclusion: Saddam and Al Qaida were together.
There's no known connection between them and 9/11.
I think you should read the report.
Bret
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(14 of 33)
Re: The Painful and Public Death of the Bush Doctrine of Pre-emptive War: Intel was WRONG.
Jul 14, 2004 7:40 PM
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You are wrong Butterfly. An article from a liberal rag does not change the truth. If we do not stop this conservative (god in a box) crowd we will one day be under their heal. Where will all your precious social programs be then? No America, no social engineering. You will be overrun and put to the sword just like millions have had happen to them in the past. Islam has not spread by attraction but by the sword.
Truth exists regardless of what is said about it.
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(15 of 33)
Jul 15, 2004 11:47 AM
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It's one of those things that demystifes the whole Western Myth we've grown up with. I love Ian McShane.
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