Revisionist History???!!......

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.


...According to Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary"

khornet,

but this statement ignores the history of UN sanctions against the regime:

Turns out, Wolfowitz was being asked why we didn't try economic sanctions against Saddam, like we would for N. Korea. His answer: they wouldn't work against Iraq, because Iraq "swims on a sea of oil", that is, she has economic resources which make her relatively indifferent to sanctions. So military option was chosen.

An oil embargo is actually one of the easier embargoes to carry out - its not a matter (when one is taling about a trade on a national scale like Iraq) of them hiding oil under machine parts or in false bottoms on trucks. In fact I'd say economically embargoing a regime like Saddams, which is based around the oil business, would be easier than embargoing a nation that isnt as dependent on one resource like North Korea.

Personally, I dont know enough about the US to say one way or the other about Bush and the way the war was pushed over there. From the UK perspective, frankly the whole thing stinks and the actions of HMG have made people so suspicious of TB and his ilk that the Torys under the positively Fabian (and it seems more than a little prescient) Iain Duncan Smith are now in the lead, poll-wise and will probably win the next general election on the issue of Governmental mistrust alone.

Care to elaborate? I don't know what you're referring to.

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Forgot the tinfoil, eh? It helps you tune in alpha waves from Alpha Centuri - the ones with the voices telling you about the conspiracies and black helos. Also keeps TIA and Ashkroft from reading your thoughts.

An oil embargo is actually one of the easier embargoes to carry out -

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Iraq was smuggling oil through Turkery and Syria. By 2002, the sanction regime was falling apart and generally losing effectiveness while providing Saddam with a ready-made rationale for Iraq's economic failures. The sanctions were a source of mounting anger thoughout the Arab world. For a discussion of why continuing sanctions - even "smart sanctions" - was ultimately untenable, see _The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq_ by former CIA officer Kenneth M. Pollack.

We really did not have any good options. Continuing the sanctions and no-fly zones was a bad policy. War is always a bad policy. Walking away and washing our hands of it all would have been a bad policy as it would undoubtedly have given Saddam a free hand to slaughter Kurds and Shia, and resume his quest for WMD and regional hegemony. Any way you sliced it, innocent people would die, and the US would be blamed by somebody or another.

Regardless of whether or not the war was the least-bad option, it is undeniable that the Bush Administration lied in order to garner support for the war. By "lie," I mean that they made false statements with knowledge of their falsity, or with reckless disregard for the truth thereof. (It amounts to the same thing.) They intended that we rely on these false statements.

It was not a case of "oops, I did it again," another error. These were deliberate calculated lies.

Welll...

Don, the thread was here at THR. Wolfowitz' remarks, in English, were translated into German by the German paper (Der Spiegel? Can't remember) and that was picked up by the Guardian and translated back into English...always a good way to scramble meanings. Then the Guardian story was posted here to show how the war was alway about us seizing their oil. I'm sure others here can recall.

Agricola, we both know that Iraq was selling oil via the UN "Oil for Food" program, bringing in plenty for Saddam to use. And we both know how easy it was for the US to get the UN to do their bidding. It makes sense that embargo wouldn't work.

Actually, you did say one wise thing, the wisest in the entire thread:

"Personally, I don't know enough.."

Dead right. None of us do.

bfason, I don't have words to address a non-rational response like that. Let's have a discussion, an exchange of ideas, a comparing of reasoning, not a peeing contest.

Let's try this.

"In 1998 the Clinton administration asserted that Iraq provided technical assistance in the construction of a VX production facility in Sudan, undertaken jointly with al-Qaeda. In retaliation for al-Qaeda's August 1998 truck bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Bill Clinton ordered destruction of the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan's capital.

"Clinton's advisers released scant public evidence about al Shifa, and the Tomahawk missile attack was widely regarded as a blunder. Top Clinton administration officials, and career analysts still in government, maintained there was strong evidence behind the strike like that it remains to valuable to disclose.

"On March 16, 2003, the Observer (UK) reported that despite the Clinton administration's assertion that there was VX nerve production at the al Shifa factory,' little evidence substantiated that claim, and subsequent investigations found that the factory made veterinary antibiotics and nothing else.'"

From the Washington Post, Dec. 12, 2002

We all know how that one turned out. Was Clinton lying? or did he feel the need to act quickly and firmly with less-than-perfect intelligence?

The point is not to Clinton-bash. It's to say that this kind of thing happens, in all sorts of administrations, for all sorts of reasons, and lying ain't necessarily the one.

bfason, I don't have words to address a non-rational response like that.

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I posed four questions for you. To recap:

1. Did you read the article by Hersh that I referenced?

2. Can you name a specific person who is "using any pretext to weaken the effectiveness of this president"? Seymour Hersh? Bfason? Anyone here at The High Road?

3. Do you believe that the President's men with all of the intelligence resources at their disposal were duped by the bad uranium-from-Niger forgeries?

3. Was Hersh's exposition of the Bush Administration's uranium fraud an act of treason?

They are all yes-or-no questions.

Was Clinton lying? or did he feel the need to act quickly and firmly with less-than-perfect intelligence?

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The Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of Khartoum could not have been folded like a tent and spirited away in a day or so. There was no militarily important need to "act quickly and firmly." Are we to believe that the only time they could hope to hit this plant was on the night of Monica Lewinsky's return to the grand jury?

Regarding the question "was Clinton lying?" the only possible answer would be "well, were his lips moving?"

Yes, I'm telling you that our leaders lie.

(BTW, it's not Santa Claus - it's your parents.)

Don,

There you are confusing two different Wolfowitz statements, I think. They are:

1) The Vanity Fair interview:

"For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in Vanity Fair magazine's July issue.

2) The discredited Gaurdian article (6/4/03) that took words out of context:

"Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

I read Der Speigel daily.

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It's published *weekly*. And it's "Der SpIEgel," not "Der SpEIgel."

Khornet wrote:

If we applied the 'Bush lies' rules of evidence to the 'Bush lies' crowd, they too are liars, since a number of their claims (tens of thousands of casualties, slaughter of civilians, eco-disaster, etc) have been shown wrong.

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Those were not CLAIMS - they were PREDICTIONS.

There is a difference between a claim and a prediction. If you make a prediction that does not materialize, that doesn't mean you are a liar. It just means your prediction was wrong.

Khornet, do you see the difference between a prediction and a claim?

Prediction: I predict that they will not find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Claim: Saddam and Bin Laden are smoking a hookah in an Afghan cave with Elivs.

And now the latest from Britain.
Blair Aides Don't Expect to Find Iraqi Weapons, Reports Say

Pull the string, and it appears that the whole ball starts to unravel.

Bfason,

I did look at the Hirsh article from the New Yorker...left wing writer hacking for a left wing magazine. ZERO chance of a report that even comes close to playing down the middle. Aside from the obvious, the detail that really struck home was Mr. Hirsh citing unnamed sources revealing information allegedly gleaned from a top secret Senate meeting with the chief of CIA. After reading that, the rest was so much yadayadayada.

Conspiracy theorists and the bufoonery that surrounds their attempts to contort reality to fit their twisted perspective are usually the fodder for a good guffaw.

You folks, on the other hand, scare me
with your treasonous whining and feeble attempts to discredit this administration.

I did look at the Hirsh article

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His name is Hersh.

Seymour Myron Hersh was born along with a twin brother April 8, 1937, to a middle-class family in Chicago. His father ran a dry-cleaning plant, and he had older sisters who were also twins. In 1958 he received a B.A. in history from the University of Chicago. Shortly thereafter he entered journalism when a friend told him that the Chicago City News Bureau, a crime and courts clearinghouse for the city's newspapers, would hire college graduates with no experience for $35 a week. He later served in the army and was honorably discharged. He went to work for United Press International wire, and then for Associated Press, which shipped him to Washington. There he proved indefatigable, and AP promoted him to Pentagon correspondent in 1966. He did 7 years at The New York Times, and uncovered the story of the My Lai massacre using his contacts within the military. He uncovered the CIA's illegal surveillance of domestic organizations it deemed subversive -- a blatant violation of the agency's charter to gather foreign intelligence only. He's written intelligently about Henry Kissinger, John F. Kennedy, Barry McCaffery, the Israeli nuclear program, etc. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist. British press baron Robert Maxwell and his foreign editor at the London Daily Mirror, Nicholas Davies, once sued Hersh for libel, and lost.

And you just dismiss him with a wave. Had you heard of him before?

What do you mean by "leftwing"?

You folks, on the other hand, scare me with your treasonous whining

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What do you mean by "treasonous"?

Does a Good American always believe the Fearless Leader? Is it treasonous to demand evidence to support accusations? Does skepticism of our leaders depend on which party sits in the White House? If the case against Saddam was so solid, why did they lie?

Actually our nation would be safer if he did lie.
If he didn't then there was a catastrophic breakdown in intelligence or the weapons are still out there only no one is in charge of them. This whole situation is a Catch 22.

Don,

Checked your link to CBS story. I agree it sure doesn't look good for Bush (or us). On the other hand, two things: the text doesn't really bear out the headline's claim that Bush knew the data was false. Second, this is only the umpteenth story in which the damnation of Bush turns on the very careful parsing of one phrase describing one portion of the administration's rationale. As noted above, we once had 'ironclad' proof that the administration frankly admitted we were in Iraq to take their oil.

I'm sorry guys, but enough major media outlets and their hero reporters (Peter Arnett comes to mind) have come a cropper in the last year that I would think a reasonable person would want to wait awhile before accepting anything, whether it supports or undermines his own views. Especially stories which purport to dissect the motivations and inner thoughts of others. That's nothing more than common sense.

As for Mr. Hersh, when did he become without sin? If he was once right about something, does it follow he's always right? Because by that standard, Bush is by definition right, since he was right about some of his claims on Iraq.

As for 'prediction' vs 'claim': a distinction without a difference, my friend. Both were being used as absolute reasons for and against a proposed action. If we wish to play the parsing game, we would have to accept that the opponents of the war were baldly CLAIMING that Saddam had the power to inflict horrible casualties. They were CLAIMING that we could not wage war without slaughtering thousands of innocents. Etc, etc.

bfason- I was referring to your comment about my impression that Bush is honest, the one about "Get thee to a library", as being non-rational. I'm sure you can see my point.

four questions

They were all yes-or-no questions. And you still do not want to answer them.

As for Mr. Hersh, when did he become without sin?

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No one claimed that is he "without sin," only that he has a track record for integrity and meticulous attention to detail.

Review the evidence surrounding the uranium claim and you are forced to arrive at either one of two conclusions.

A) The Bush foreign policy players (Cheney, Rummie, Wolfowitz) are incredibly incompetent for believing it; or

B) It was a calculated, deliberate lie.

The first conclusion is simply implausible.

I start from the impression that Bush is honest

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Well, he is a politican, right?

You forgot a letter, bfason

c) the story is being manipulated and blown out of proportion, but swallowed whole by those who are so predisposed.

Remember...

Nobody is going to change anyone's mind one way or the other...

I'll bet the bush admin. could just go ahead and say, "yeah, we lied. We made up the whole thing so we could take this 'bad guy' out. Plus we've got our own stronghold in the middle east now, and control of a major stockpile of oil - but you folks go on ahead and buy another SUV and vote for bush again. Our second term will begin with acquisitions of Iran, Syria, Liberia, etc... The United States would like to welcome Afghanistan as our 51st state... It will now be known as Bushizion."

Most party-line followers would still have their noses up his...

The truth is irrelevant here... This is all about emotion.

I think you're right.

That is, there's a lot more emotion than reason in this debate.

That's why I ask the Bush-lied crowd to exercise the same skepticism they apply to stories reflecting well on Bush to the ones which condemn him.

How many times do I have to say this before someone even addresses it? We just don't know, and if half what the anti-Bush folks say is right, and half of what the other side says is right, then....we just don't know yet.

Khornet signing off