Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

9Comments

1. 1.

   Kimmitt

   October 13, 2003 at 1:56 pm

   President Bush did not state that the threat from Iraq was imminent in the SOTU, and the reportage to that extent was bad. Bush specifically stated that we should not wait until it was imminent, then gave a laundry-list of reasons why it was imminent anyway.

   However, and this is my favorite quote, Condoleeza Rice put forward the idea that these days, we cannot know when a threat is imminent, so we are forced to assume that the one Iraq poses is. Her statement is hardly a lone voice in the wilderness; there are plenty of other supporting statements by Administration officials which use variants on the phrase “imminent threat.” One method by which the American public was sold on the war was the ongoing statement set by the Administration that the threat from Iraq had to be dealt with as soon as reasonably possible, because we had reason to believe that Saddam would suddenly and unpredictably decide to sponsor a massive terrorist attack against the US or Israel — in other words, that the threat was real, and that it was imminent.

2. 2.

   Andrew Lazarus

   October 13, 2003 at 3:04 pm

   Here you can find a collection of “imminent” and “immediate” quotes. For example (from the WH site), this press conference:

   Q Ari, the President has been saying that the threat from Iraq is imminent, that we have to act now to disarm the country of its weapons of mass destruction, and that it has to allow the U.N. inspectors in, unfettered, no conditions, so forth.

   MR. FLEISCHER: Yes.

   That’s the entire answer.

   Secretary Rumsfeld didn’t say imminent threat; he said “immediate”:

   But no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

   And as a last example (there are more at the link above), this is what the President DID say (SOTU):

   Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.

   Now, to my mind, this paragraph means that BY THE STANDARDS OF MODERN TERRORISM, the threat of Saddam WAS imminent.

   This brings me to a question I was going to ask from the other thread. Even if I allow, for the purposes of argument, that the Kay Report shows a WMD program (by its own admission, it didn’t find any WMD or evidence of same), surely this “program” didn’t rise to the level of threat you expected BEFORE THE WAR, did it? Wouldn’t you agree that Saddam would have posed no greater threat after more months of UN inspections? Wouldn’t you agree that it is NOT the case our usual Allies were blindly and stupidly overlooking an Iraq attack on Europe or America within a one-year time frame?

   I ask this partly because, for people who claim liberals will never give up or admit error, your excuses for the failure to turn up actual physical WMD (or even evidence that WMD had been destroyed or evacuated) is pretty frustrating. SIX months ago, Charles Krauthammer said

   Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem. I don’t have any doubt that we will locate them. I think it takes time. They’ve obviously been deeply hidden, and it will require that we get the information from people who know where they are.

   Now, six months later, is he writing about the credibility problem? No, he’s writing that Saddam must have had a Toyota-like “just in time” WMD assembly system, quite amazing given the debilitating effect of sanctions and punitive bombings on his factories and transportation system. Why Saddam didn’t use the just in time system wasn’t explained, and probably can’t be explained any more than how Santa Claus gets to so many chimneys on one day. So, which team is it that’s constantly moving the goalposts? Show me Saddam’s nuclear weapon and I’ll admit I was wrong. So far, though, all you have is gas.

3. 3.

   David Perron

   October 13, 2003 at 3:30 pm

   I immediately understood the SOTU address to mean that although we didn’t know the threat to be imminent, by the time we did it would be too late to do anything about it. It baffles me how anyone could have gotten a different impression from the SOTU. Maybe I’m just too stupid to have been fooled into reading between the lines.

   Actually, Andrew, Krauthammer wrote sometime in the last week that we’ve inventoried about (paraphrasing here) just under ten percent of the arms caches discovered in Iraq to date. Oh. Here it is. I bet they’re deliberately dragging their feet on that operation, though.

4. 4.

   Andrew Lazarus

   October 13, 2003 at 6:20 pm

   As I said before, I’m willing to go out on a limb about the WMD. And, I’m willing to wait. Just let me know at what percentage of depots inspected you give up on the existence of physical WMD (even 100% is an OK answer).

   On the Krauthammer theory, with all the captured, cooperating scientists, we didn’t find one who knew how to tell the CW from ordinary munitions. How do you think *Saddam* was going to tell them apart? It’s like laying a minefield in your REAR and not keeping a map. It would also have been nice, too, if Krauthammer had specifically come out and said his earlier 5-month deadline was too short. I’m unhappy when people forget things like that.

   As far as the SOTU, would it be OK with you if I said that Bush spoke of an attack sufficiently far advanced that immediate preëmption was required? And that’s somewhat more than we actually found.

5. 5.

   David Perron

   October 14, 2003 at 9:35 am

   I wish I knew what you were getting at, Andrew. I can only hope that you know what it is that you’re getting at, and are just doing a poor job of communicating it.

   I don’t know of anyone who maintained that this was a preemptive attack, in the sense that we expected Iraq to attack us anytime in the near future. If you feel you were sold on the invasion on the basis of that, then you need to address who said it. I didn’t think you were sold on the attack in the first place, so it’s not clear what’s got you so upset.

6. 6.

   Andrew Lazarus

   October 14, 2003 at 2:00 pm

   David, I understood Rice and Bush et. al. to be saying (falsely) Iraq could attack at any moment. Our warning might be a “mushroom cloud”. That strikes me as selling the war on the basis that Saddam could attack us without warning using WMD. Isn’t that what it means to you? And that’s why Saddam had to be removed from power, not his habit of torturing dissidents.

   As I like to point out, even war _supporter_ Thomas Friedman agrees that this war was sold as a war of necessity. Of course, it wasn’t. It was a war of choice initiated for any number of reasons NONE of which had to do with Iraq’s (non-existent) capability to attack the United States, nor with retaliation for Iraq’s (non-existent) connection to Al Qaeda. But reasons like “It will fracture the Democratic Party” and “It will give us great photo-ops” and “Halliburton will make a lot of money” and “Great leaders understand that war is the natural state of mankind” (The first ones I don’t have proof for, but the latter is Dick Cheney’s take on V.D. Hanson) wouldn’t fly so well.

7. 7.

   David Perron

   October 14, 2003 at 10:05 pm

   Well, Andrew, you’re officially the only person I’ve ever run into that’d admit to having taken it that way. I think you’ve got a great deal more than having been deceived to be angry for.

   It’s only a war of necessity after someone loses an eye, is that it?

8. 8.

   Kimmitt

   October 15, 2003 at 1:50 pm

   Essentially, yes.

9. 9.

   David Perron

   October 17, 2003 at 10:25 am

   I think that’s a perfectly valid opinion to hold, actually. Just not one held by everyone. Me, for example.