On the whole, a very fair and well-written newsitorial in the NY Times:
In fact, a review of the president’s public statements found little that could lead to a conclusion that the president actually lied on either subject. But more pertinent than whether the president told the literal truth is what factors he stressed and which ones he played down.
Certainly, a strong argument can be made that he exaggerated the danger posed by banned Iraqi weapons when he was trying to convince the country and Congress of the need for a pre-emptive strike and that he overemphasized the benefits to people of modest means when he was trying to sell his tax cut.
Which is what I have been saying for months. He hasn’t lied- he may have exaggerated, and in the end, he and everyone else (including all the Democrat Senaotrs who once agreed Iraq had WMD) may have been wrong, but he hasn’t lied.
In the speech in March, on the eve of war, Mr. Bush declared, “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”
There is no evidence the president did not believe what he was saying. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and other Democrats said last week that intelligence briefings they received justified Mr. Bush’s statements.
Democrats- calling him stupid had more traction than calling him a liar. You see where that got you.
RHJunior
He neither lied, nor exaggerated. If anything he merely restated what nearly every governing body and diplomatic and intelligence organization in the free world– INCLUDING THE U.N.– was saying about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs.
Furthermore, people are quite casually forgetting that
1)They have 1,000 suspected weapons sites. Of which, last word, only a hundred or so had been inspected and cleared.
2)There has been plenty of evidence of skulduggery already. From mustard gas in the euphrates to chemical warheads in warehouses to a nuke lab so hot it pegged the needles on the geiger counters to two mobile chemical labs. Throw in the terrorist training grounds– complete with a mockup of a 747 cockpit and passenger section– and his known donations to existing terrorist, you’ve got all the reason you need.
3)The relative size of what we’re looking for. Even Hans Blix admitted that Saddam had several thousand litres of rather nasty agents yet unaccounted for…enough to turn entire cities into graveyards.
But people have trouble realizing that “thousands and thousands of litres” translates to maybe a few dozen barrels. We’re not looking for warehouses full of warheads, we’re looking for stuff that could be crammed into kitchen cupboards and stuffed in cracks between walls…or dumped down holes and covered in concrete.
4)From the outset, Iraqi’s army was a chaotic mess. Their lines of communication were utterly trashed in the first two or three days of the war, and their command structure was a hash. Reports after the fact indicate that Iraqi troops were being given weapons they didn’t even have the training to operate– which were subsequently abandoned on the spot. I suspect that whatever WMDs actually got mobilized ended up being dumped in the sand in the same way– -because the troops were scared shitless to try to use them against American troops.
5)For a regime with “no WMDs,” they sure had a shitload of biohazard equipment stockpiled.
6)There is also the distressing fact that *at least some of the WMDs may have been smuggled into other countries already*— during the time we had to play silly-ass games with the U.N. and France.
7)We’re kinda busy rebuilding Iraq, snuffing out pockets of armed resistence and rounding up the last of Saddam’s regime. It just might be that we’re a teeny bit distracted at the moment, so keep your goddamn shorts on.
8)Politics. If George Bush has any sort of political strategy, it can be summed up as “Never interrupt an enemy who’s in the process of making a fool of themselves.”
From the moment he was elected, he’s played a soft-serve approach to his political adversaries, appearing to concede, playing the affable dummy, making seeming titanic blunders– watching his political adversaries reel out enough rope to hang themselves. He did it with Gore-Lieberman, he did it with the Democratic party over tax relief, he did it with France, he did it with the U.N., he’s doing it with Hamas in Israel, and if I don’t miss my guess he’s doing it now with the Iraqi WMDs…. holding his cards close to the vest, letting the jackass at the table shoot his mouth off– before he drops a royal flush on the table in front of them.
Liberals make the same mistake about Republican presidents every time… they assume that Republicans are stupid. Don’t make the same mistake yourself.
Eye Opener
Concur yr analysis.
What is really required by the nay-sayers, for them to publicly acknowledge Iraqi WMD capacity or threat? Shards of Iraqi-SCUD missile-bits near the recently-abandoned outskirts of Miami AFTER the anthrax attack? Would they THEN acknowledge that its a real threat? Or, since the act has then been carried into the realm of REALITY, would the nay-sayers CARP and WHINE that ‘you should have done more to protect us!’?
Skews me, but it really seems like damned if we do, damned if we don’t. And seems like a hidden agenda of “America is the root-cause of ALL the world’s misery!”