I believe that regardless of what your feelings on how and why we are there may be, the fact is we ARE there. It is wrong to start a fledgling democracy and leave it before it ready to secure itself. Pulling out now will definitely lead to the mass extermination of Sunnis by the Shiites, then they will turn on each other in a grab for power. American soldiers are the fine line between a slow and deadly progress and absolute chaos. How can we cry for the children of Darfur and be so willing to abandon those in Iraq. Get rid of Bush...get rid of Republicans...bring the soldiers home...Iraqis will still die...and then it won't be for a government or a hopeful future...just the same old ethnic hatred...dying for nothing. We have a responsibility to finish this. The goal with any war should be zero casualties for us and 100 percent casualties for them. But we are so afraid to look like occupiers that we don't fight this way. What is wrong with being occupiers? We occupied both Germany and Japan for a time. That's how it's done. As for sending my son...they are not of military age yet, it's hard to picture them as men. Both my brothers were military officers who finished their service years before round 1 in Iraq. The one has been to the Middle East within the past few years as part of his job as a contract officer. I would not "send" my sons anywhere but if that were their job I would worry and pray and be damn proud just as I am already. And isn't it amazing that there has not been an attack on our soil in 6 years. I don't think anyone thought that was possible. But isn't that what the military does...fight out enemies and keep civilians here safe...it certainly seems to be part of the job at least. We started it, we screwed it up...we can't just choose failure. We either succeed or fail legitimately. But lets at least do our best.
i agree that we have a responsibility to finish this, but i disagree that more troops are the answer. the study groups would disagree as well. this is the point that olbermann was trying to make, and i don't agree at all that saying so makes him (or mamao) a drama queen.
prior to 9-11-01, there hadn't been a decent attack on nyc since what '93? the fact that there hasn't been one since means nothing to me in comparison to what is going on in iraq. if you honestly believe that whole "fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here" speach, then... well, let's just say i don't buy it and leave it at that. if there is any success that can be attributed to no attacks here in six years, then it's more likely that we are at least doing something right in terms of homeland defense. however there is no true and accurate way to measure alleged thwarted plans is there?
yes that is the military's job... no one denies that. it is how one chooses to utilize the military that is at question. further, no one is opting for failure but rather just trying to pick the lesser of evils at this point. there have been no experts that i have heard spouting that more boots on the ground is the answer. objecting to this doesn't make anyone a drama queen.
Democracy is not something that can appear with the flip of a switch or the firing of a gun.
We have been unable to secure Iraq, or Baghdad, or even the green zone within Baghdad. Is it logical to continue?
It is not a matter of not caring about the children of Iraq. The issue is that they are dying horribly right now with us there.
With all of those soldiers there the Iraqi people are already killing each other. With us there it is already a civil war.
If we want what is best for the people of Iraq then we have to let them sort this out for themselves. If there is the will within the country to solve these issues and become a peaceful nation then they will do it. If there is not the will to do this, American soldiers will be unable to do it.
In ancient times the Romans would not occupy conquered territory for long if there was any rebellion. They would sell the people into slavery and sow salt into the land of the capital so nothing would ever grow there again.
After the second world war the people of Germany did not take up arms against the occupation, so it was possible to put the pieces back together.
However, this war is different. We destroyed the nation of Iraq and botched the reconstruction so badly that WE can't put it back together now. Only Iraq can.
Either way a lot more Iraqis are going to die. The question we have to ask ourselves is this: Is there anything about our occupation of Iraq so far that leads you to believe that our continued occupation will lessen the suffering and hasten political resolution? (besides wishful thinking, that is)
what makes Olbermann a drama queen is all the scripted camera pivots and "Sir" as well as "MR". Also, just a few days ago he referred to the Iraqi Study group report as meaningless all things to all people bromide and now he's practically in tears because "MR" Bush isn't bowing down to it. 85 percent of attacks in Iraq are happening in just 4 of the 18 provinces. Forty percent of the population of Iraq lives in these provinces. Can you see why the soldiers are so disgusted by the media not reporting anything that goes right. I disagree that we can not fix this...we never did occupy Iraq...we are trying too hard not to. I agree there have been major mistakes, but leaving will only make it worse. Olby makes it sound like we send our guys to be slaughtered by sending them over there. I don't see it that way. While every death is tragic, the number of deaths over a 4 year period has really been pretty low considering the dangers inherent in military work. In 2004, more soldiers died outside of Iraq and Afghanistan than inside these active war zones. Even under the peacetime administration of Clinton, there were over 4000 miliary deaths between 1993-1996. Our military is making a difference and it can keep things from being much, much worse... you are right...democracy does not happen overnight. And it won't happen if we continue to dance around this thing.
presumably the american invasion of iraq was to halt the war on terror and confiscate WMDs controled by a madman which threatened our homeland security... bogus
it was wrong to believe that a "fledgling democracy" could be started in the first place in a country where two religious factions wanting to be in control of their theocracy had to be suppressed by a military dictator... "they were grabbing for power" long before saddam came to power... that's why he came to power...
american presence is the difference between "slow and deadly progress and absolute chaos"... please define absolute chaos and tell me you believe that point has not already been reached!!!
we do have a responsibility to finish this... becoming disinvolved with a civil war is one way to expedite the end of hostilities
i, too, have a strong family military background... U.S. Army to be exact... and a son-in-law currently serving in Iraq... i wholeheartedly support our troops... at the same time, i think our commander in chief is a moron and is unnecessarily putting our military personnel in harms' way rather than optimizing their skills to truly keep the homeland safe... american presence in iraq is not fascilitating homeland security... it is, rather, a threat to our safety at home and abroad...
democracy only works for people who WANT democracy enough to fight for it themselves... it never works for people upon whom it in imposed!!!
olbermann's special reports ooze emotion... and i can do without the sarcastic emphasis on the Mr. and the Sir... i would, however, not call him a drama queen and effectively shoot the messenger because i believe he speaks the truth
if our military is making such a difference and if, in point of fact, mr. bush really does intend to listen to his generals in iraq, why are casey and abuzaid being replaced...
and why are we hearing words like "surge", "escalate", and "sacrifice" coming from mr. bush as he forms his "new way forward" for iraq...
do you really believe the garbage you spew in such a logical fashion!
It's funny how disturbed you seem to be by the term "drama queen." Olbermann seems overly dramatic to me. You have no trouble with personal insults that are much less accurate and far more hate-filled if the opinions they express are conservative. Just look back at the archives of this very blog if you doubt that.His show is an opinion show. There is no dissenting view which leads to sometimes sloppy research. No one is going to question him on air...why check the facts. He has been found to use blogs as sources that were proven to be incorrect. Yet he never goes back to retract the statements. You agree with his opinions,so you like him. That's fine...it does not make him correct. As far as the "garbage" you mention. You mean the statistical facts? I'm not sure ...but I am very suspicious of the mainstream media. I read a lot of different sources and am constantly amazed at the stories that get big play and the ones that get buried or mentioned in passing. And why are the soldiers themselves so frustrated by the media portrayal of Iraq. I don't think we are getting an accurate report. There seems to always be an agenda. Absolute chaos would mean no progress can be made. A hopeless situation. I don't think that accurately describes the current situation. You have a different opinion. I respect that. I could debate the reasons for being there in the first place, too. I'm sure you have already heard it all and have decided that my opinions, although backed by factual information, are garbage. And ok...I do like to disagree just to disagree...but usually the point is to throw in something you may not have heard or considered. I find it interesting and far more fun than everyone agreeing.
fact: there was no immanent threat against the united states from iraq
fact: we were lead to believe that there was an immanent threat
fact 1 plus fact 2 = one big fat lie.
for the sake of argument, lets say that there were other reasons we went… reasons we weren’t told until after the fact such as helping the people of iraq, removing a terrible dictator, etc. these were reasons that were intended to try to save face and nothing more. as an american, if i were told these reasons in the first place, i likely would have backed the war. the false premise changes everything. it’s my husband’s boots (among many, many others) that are on the ground and they didn’t even have the common decency, honor, or morals to tell me the truth as to why he has to go. those are the facts that matter to me.
this is from a journalist at the Wall Street Journal...I think he makes some valid points...
"...Yet even stipulating--which I do only for the sake of argument--that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Mr. Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Mr. Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.
How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Mr. Tenet had the backing of all 15 agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions."
The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and--yes--France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix--who headed the U.N. team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past--lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:
The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km [105 miles] southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.
Mr. Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.
So, once again, did the British, the French and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the U.N. in the period leading up to the invasion. Mr. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as secretary of state. But Mr. Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:
I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP--Ammunition Supply Point--with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.
Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Mr. Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, was convinced:
People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.
In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about:
Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.
But, according to Wilkerson:
The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this rpm, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?
In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Mr. Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.
Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written:
I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).
No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material." (Hard as it is to believe, let alone to reconcile with his general position, Joseph C. Wilson IV, in a speech he delivered three months after the invasion at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, offhandedly made the following remark: "I remain of the view that we will find biological and chemical weapons and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam's regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons.")
But the consensus on which Mr. Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Bill Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:
If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.
Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:
Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.
Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:
He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.
Finally, Mr. Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.
Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Mr. Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President "to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs."
Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:
Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.
This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Mr. Bush succeeded Mr. Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new president, a group of senators led by Bob Graham declared:
There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.
Sen. Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Mr. Bush's benefit what he had told Mr. Clinton some years earlier:
Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:
In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.
Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:
There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.
Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:
We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.
And here is Mr. Gore again, in that same year:
Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.
Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:
I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force--if necessary--to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.
Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Mr. Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:
Kennedy: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
Byrd: "The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons."
Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that "without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again."
The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was "hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation."
So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with this admonition:
Of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous--or more urgent--than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.
All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Mr. Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Mr. Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the 16 resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?
Another fallback charge is that Mr. Bush, operating mainly through Mr. Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.
The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Mr. Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Mr. Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war. Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Mr. Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:
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. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.
What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as Mr. Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."
Which brings us to Joseph C. Wilson, IV and what to my mind wins the palm for the most disgraceful instance of all.
The story begins with the notorious 16 words inserted--after, be it noted, much vetting by the CIA and the State Department--into Bush's 2003 State of the Union address:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
This is the "lie" Mr. Wilson bragged of having "debunked" after being sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to check out the intelligence it had received to that effect. Mr. Wilson would later angrily deny that his wife had recommended him for this mission, and would do his best to spread the impression that choosing him had been the vice president's idea. But Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, through whom Mr. Wilson first planted this impression, was eventually forced to admit that "Cheney apparently didn't know that Wilson had been dispatched." (By the time Mr. Kristof grudgingly issued this retraction, Mr. Wilson himself, in characteristically shameless fashion, was denying that he had ever "said the vice president sent me or ordered me sent.") And as for his wife's supposed nonrole in his mission, here is what Valerie Plame Wilson wrote in a memo to her boss at the CIA:
My husband has good relations with the PM [the prime minister of Niger] and the former minister of mines . . ., both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.
More than a year after his return, with the help of Mr. Kristof, and also Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and then through an op-ed piece in the Times under his own name, Mr. Wilson succeeded, probably beyond his wildest dreams, in setting off a political firestorm.
In response, the White House, no doubt hoping to prevent his allegation about the 16 words from becoming a proxy for the charge that (in Mr. Wilson's latest iteration of it) "lies and disinformation [were] used to justify the invasion of Iraq," eventually acknowledged that the president's statement "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address." As might have been expected, however, this panicky response served to make things worse rather than better. And yet it was totally unnecessary--for the maddeningly simple reason that every single one of the 16 words at issue was true.
That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Furthermore--and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that this assurance has now been discredited--Britain's independent Butler commission concluded that it was "well-founded." The relevant passage is worth quoting at length:
a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British government did not claim this.
As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Mr. Wilson himself, far from challenging the British report when he was "debriefed" on his return from Niger (although challenging it is what he now never stops doing), actually strengthened the CIA's belief in its accuracy. From the Senate Intelligence Committee report:
He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the report [by Mr. Wilson] was that Niger officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium.
And again:
The report on [Mr. Wilson's] trip to Niger . . . did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal.
This passage goes on to note that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research--which (as we have already seen) did not believe that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons--found support in Mr. Wilson's report for its "assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq." But if so, this, as the Butler report quoted above points out, would not mean that Iraq had not tried to buy it--which was the only claim made by British intelligence and then by Mr. Bush in the famous 16 words.
The liar here, then, was not Mr. Bush but Mr. Wilson. And Mr. Wilson also lied when he told the Washington Post that he had unmasked as forgeries certain documents given to American intelligence (by whom it is not yet clear) that supposedly contained additional evidence of Saddam's efforts to buy uranium from Niger. The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according to the Butler report:
The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine [that assessment].
More damning yet to Mr. Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:
[Mr. Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article . . . which said, "among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.' " Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.
To top all this off, just as Mr. Cheney had nothing to do with the choice of Mr. Wilson for the mission to Niger, neither was it true that, as Mr. Wilson "confirmed" for a credulous New Republic reporter, "the CIA circulated [his] report to the Vice President's office," thereby supposedly proving that Cheney and his staff "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie." Yet--the mind reels--if Mr. Cheney had actually been briefed on Mr. Wilson's oral report to the CIA (which he was not), he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.
So much for the author of the best-selling and much-acclaimed book whose title alone--"The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity"--has set a new record for chutzpah.
But there is worse. In his press conference on the indictment against Mr. Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that lying to federal investigators is a serious crime both because it is itself against the law and because, by sending them on endless wild-goose chases, it constitutes the even more serious crime of obstruction of justice. By those standards, Mr. Wilson--who has repeatedly made false statements about every aspect of his mission to Niger, including whose idea it was to send him and what he told the CIA upon his return; who was then shown up by the Senate Intelligence Committee as having lied about the forged documents; and whose mendacity has sent the whole country into a wild-goose chase after allegations that, the more they are refuted, the more they keep being repeated--is himself an excellent candidate for criminal prosecution.
And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq--the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy--have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American ideals."
inspite of all of this...olbermann's histronics aside...americans are AGAINST this new policy.
it is my opinion that bush is creating a big set-up for not only the democratics in the senate and the congress, but also for whomever occupies the white house after the '08 elections.
i just cannot wrap my arms around this new surge in iraq. won't help anyone, especially the boots from our soil.
i would like to see all the specifics the bush has in store. it is obvious he doen't have a precise and i mean complete and total plan for these troops. commitment to a victory that will never truly be is bullshit.
do not forget, we are ever going to leave iraq...not with a $2billion embassy being built.
I would say this as a short rebuttal. First, the time-line given for people thinking that there were weapons in Iraq is impressive. There was a general belief that this was the case.
However, there is a difference between being sure enough to say something in a speech and being so sure that thousands of people should die. Others besides Bush were wrong, but they had the wisdom not to act on something that they may have had doubts on.
Secondly, what difference does it make how Wilson got chosen to go to Niger? If Cheney specifically asked, or just alluded to wanting an answer Wilson was working officially for our government on that mission.
In fact, it is largely Cheney's word that you base your critique on. I find him to be an unreliable source.
Agan, the 16 words were enough in doubt that they should not have been included. Why won't Bush and his appologists take responsibility for what they have done? It seems like there is always this "ok, we made a mistake but you would have too" mentality that drives me crazy.
As far as where attacks occur in Iraq, and lack of reporting of "good news" here are two facts to consider:
First, the bulk of attacks are in the Capital. Like nearly every war ever fought the capital of your enemy is where you want to do all yoru fighting. Why is this remarkable at all? To "win" the invasion of Iraq, Bush toppled Saddam by taking Baghdad. The insurgents are doing the same thing.
Secondly, there are a lot of good things happening in Iraq, as far as schools built etc. But the country is too dangerous for reporters to go outside of the greenzone much. If the administration wants it to appear that Iraq has more than chaos, it should come up with a way of pacifying the country sufficiently so that reporters can see progress!
18 comments:
i actually cried hearing this. i wonder if the white house is listening?
...you've gotta be kidding...
nope! i love keith!
one drama queen to another...it figures!
you believe in this war enough to send your son?
I believe that regardless of what your feelings on how and why we are there may be, the fact is we ARE there. It is wrong to start a fledgling democracy and leave it before it ready to secure itself. Pulling out now will definitely lead to the mass extermination of Sunnis by the Shiites, then they will turn on each other in a grab for power. American soldiers are the fine line between a slow and deadly progress and absolute chaos.
How can we cry for the children of Darfur and be so willing to abandon those in Iraq.
Get rid of Bush...get rid of Republicans...bring the soldiers home...Iraqis will still die...and then it won't be for a government or a hopeful future...just the same old ethnic hatred...dying for nothing. We have a responsibility to finish this.
The goal with any war should be zero casualties for us and 100 percent casualties for them. But we are so afraid to look like occupiers that we don't fight this way. What is wrong with being occupiers? We occupied both Germany and Japan for a time. That's how it's done.
As for sending my son...they are not of military age yet, it's hard to picture them as men. Both my brothers were military officers who finished their service years before round 1 in Iraq. The one has been to the Middle East within the past few years as part of his job as a contract officer. I would not "send" my sons anywhere but if that were their job I would worry and pray and be damn proud just as I am already. And isn't it amazing that there has not been an attack on our soil in 6 years. I don't think anyone thought that was possible. But isn't that what the military does...fight out enemies and keep civilians here safe...it certainly seems to be part of the job at least.
We started it, we screwed it up...we can't just choose failure. We either succeed or fail legitimately. But lets at least do our best.
i agree that we have a responsibility to finish this, but i disagree that more troops are the answer. the study groups would disagree as well. this is the point that olbermann was trying to make, and i don't agree at all that saying so makes him (or mamao) a drama queen.
prior to 9-11-01, there hadn't been a decent attack on nyc since what '93? the fact that there hasn't been one since means nothing to me in comparison to what is going on in iraq. if you honestly believe that whole "fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here" speach, then... well, let's just say i don't buy it and leave it at that. if there is any success that can be attributed to no attacks here in six years, then it's more likely that we are at least doing something right in terms of homeland defense. however there is no true and accurate way to measure alleged thwarted plans is there?
yes that is the military's job... no one denies that. it is how one chooses to utilize the military that is at question. further, no one is opting for failure but rather just trying to pick the lesser of evils at this point. there have been no experts that i have heard spouting that more boots on the ground is the answer. objecting to this doesn't make anyone a drama queen.
Democracy is not something that can appear with the flip of a switch or the firing of a gun.
We have been unable to secure Iraq, or Baghdad, or even the green zone within Baghdad. Is it logical to continue?
It is not a matter of not caring about the children of Iraq. The issue is that they are dying horribly right now with us there.
With all of those soldiers there the Iraqi people are already killing each other. With us there it is already a civil war.
If we want what is best for the people of Iraq then we have to let them sort this out for themselves. If there is the will within the country to solve these issues and become a peaceful nation then they will do it. If there is not the will to do this, American soldiers will be unable to do it.
In ancient times the Romans would not occupy conquered territory for long if there was any rebellion. They would sell the people into slavery and sow salt into the land of the capital so nothing would ever grow there again.
After the second world war the people of Germany did not take up arms against the occupation, so it was possible to put the pieces back together.
However, this war is different. We destroyed the nation of Iraq and botched the reconstruction so badly that WE can't put it back together now. Only Iraq can.
Either way a lot more Iraqis are going to die. The question we have to ask ourselves is this: Is there anything about our occupation of Iraq so far that leads you to believe that our continued occupation will lessen the suffering and hasten political resolution? (besides wishful thinking, that is)
what makes Olbermann a drama queen is all the scripted camera pivots and "Sir" as well as "MR". Also, just a few days ago he referred to the Iraqi Study group report as meaningless all things to all people bromide and now he's practically in tears because "MR" Bush isn't bowing down to it.
85 percent of attacks in Iraq are happening in just 4 of the 18 provinces. Forty percent of the population of Iraq lives in these provinces. Can you see why the soldiers are so disgusted by the media not reporting anything that goes right.
I disagree that we can not fix this...we never did occupy Iraq...we are trying too hard not to.
I agree there have been major mistakes, but leaving will only make it worse.
Olby makes it sound like we send our guys to be slaughtered by sending them over there. I don't see it that way. While every death is tragic, the number of deaths over a 4 year period has really been pretty low considering the dangers inherent in military work.
In 2004, more soldiers died outside of Iraq and Afghanistan than inside these active war zones. Even under the peacetime administration of Clinton, there were over 4000 miliary deaths between 1993-1996.
Our military is making a difference and it can keep things from being much, much worse... you are right...democracy does not happen overnight. And it won't happen if we continue to dance around this thing.
presumably the american invasion of iraq was to halt the war on terror and confiscate WMDs controled by a madman which threatened our homeland security... bogus
it was wrong to believe that a "fledgling democracy" could be started in the first place in a country where two religious factions wanting to be in control of their theocracy had to be suppressed by a military dictator... "they were grabbing for power" long before saddam came to power... that's why he came to power...
american presence is the difference between "slow and deadly progress and absolute chaos"... please define absolute chaos and tell me you believe that point has not already been reached!!!
we do have a responsibility to finish this... becoming disinvolved with a civil war is one way to expedite the end of hostilities
i, too, have a strong family military background... U.S. Army to be exact... and a son-in-law currently serving in Iraq... i wholeheartedly support our troops... at the same time, i think our commander in chief is a moron and is unnecessarily putting our military personnel in harms' way rather than optimizing their skills to truly keep the homeland safe... american presence in iraq is not fascilitating homeland security... it is, rather, a threat to our safety at home and abroad...
democracy only works for people who WANT democracy enough to fight for it themselves... it never works for people upon whom it in imposed!!!
olbermann's special reports ooze emotion... and i can do without the sarcastic emphasis on the Mr. and the Sir... i would, however, not call him a drama queen and effectively shoot the messenger because i believe he speaks the truth
if our military is making such a difference and if, in point of fact, mr. bush really does intend to listen to his generals in iraq, why are casey and abuzaid being replaced...
and why are we hearing words like "surge", "escalate", and "sacrifice" coming from mr. bush as he forms his "new way forward" for iraq...
do you really believe the garbage you spew in such a logical fashion!
It's funny how disturbed you seem to be by the term "drama queen." Olbermann seems overly dramatic to me. You have no trouble with personal insults that are much less accurate and far more hate-filled if the opinions they express are conservative. Just look back at the archives of this very blog if you doubt that.His show is an opinion show. There is no dissenting view which leads to sometimes sloppy research. No one is going to question him on air...why check the facts. He has been found to use blogs as sources that were proven to be incorrect. Yet he never goes back to retract the statements. You agree with his opinions,so you like him. That's fine...it does not make him correct.
As far as the "garbage" you mention. You mean the statistical facts? I'm not sure ...but I am very suspicious of the mainstream media. I read a lot of different sources and am constantly amazed at the stories that get big play and the ones that get buried or mentioned in passing. And why are the soldiers themselves so frustrated by the media portrayal of Iraq. I don't think we are getting an accurate report. There seems to always be an agenda.
Absolute chaos would mean no progress can be made. A hopeless situation. I don't think that accurately describes the current situation. You have a different opinion. I respect that. I could debate the reasons for being there in the first place, too. I'm sure you have already heard it all and have decided that my opinions, although backed by factual information, are garbage. And ok...I do like to disagree just to disagree...but usually the point is to throw in something you may not have heard or considered. I find it interesting and far more fun than everyone agreeing.
fact: there was no immanent threat against the united states from iraq
fact: we were lead to believe that there was an immanent threat
fact 1 plus fact 2 = one big fat lie.
for the sake of argument, lets say that there were other reasons we went… reasons we weren’t told until after the fact such as helping the people of iraq, removing a terrible dictator, etc. these were reasons that were intended to try to save face and nothing more. as an american, if i were told these reasons in the first place, i likely would have backed the war. the false premise changes everything. it’s my husband’s boots (among many, many others) that are on the ground and they didn’t even have the common decency, honor, or morals to tell me the truth as to why he has to go. those are the facts that matter to me.
this is from a journalist at the Wall Street Journal...I think he makes some valid points...
"...Yet even stipulating--which I do only for the sake of argument--that no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Mr. Bush was lying when he asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Mr. Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.
How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Mr. Tenet had the backing of all 15 agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions."
The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and--yes--France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix--who headed the U.N. team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past--lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:
The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km [105 miles] southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.
Mr. Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.
So, once again, did the British, the French and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the U.N. in the period leading up to the invasion. Mr. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as secretary of state. But Mr. Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did:
I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP--Ammunition Supply Point--with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.
Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Mr. Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, was convinced:
People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.
In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about:
Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.
But, according to Wilkerson:
The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this rpm, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?
In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Mr. Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.
Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written:
I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).
No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high confidence" was that "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material." (Hard as it is to believe, let alone to reconcile with his general position, Joseph C. Wilson IV, in a speech he delivered three months after the invasion at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, offhandedly made the following remark: "I remain of the view that we will find biological and chemical weapons and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam's regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons.")
But the consensus on which Mr. Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Bill Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:
If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.
Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:
Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.
Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:
He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.
Finally, Mr. Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.
Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Mr. Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President "to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs."
Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:
Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.
This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Mr. Bush succeeded Mr. Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new president, a group of senators led by Bob Graham declared:
There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.
Sen. Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Mr. Bush's benefit what he had told Mr. Clinton some years earlier:
Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:
In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.
Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:
There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.
Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:
We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.
And here is Mr. Gore again, in that same year:
Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.
Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:
I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force--if necessary--to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.
Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Mr. Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:
Kennedy: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
Byrd: "The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons."
Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that "without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again."
The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was "hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation."
So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with this admonition:
Of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous--or more urgent--than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.
All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Mr. Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Mr. Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the 16 resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?
Another fallback charge is that Mr. Bush, operating mainly through Mr. Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.
The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Mr. Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Mr. Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war. Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Mr. Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:
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. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.
What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as Mr. Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."
Which brings us to Joseph C. Wilson, IV and what to my mind wins the palm for the most disgraceful instance of all.
The story begins with the notorious 16 words inserted--after, be it noted, much vetting by the CIA and the State Department--into Bush's 2003 State of the Union address:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
This is the "lie" Mr. Wilson bragged of having "debunked" after being sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to check out the intelligence it had received to that effect. Mr. Wilson would later angrily deny that his wife had recommended him for this mission, and would do his best to spread the impression that choosing him had been the vice president's idea. But Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, through whom Mr. Wilson first planted this impression, was eventually forced to admit that "Cheney apparently didn't know that Wilson had been dispatched." (By the time Mr. Kristof grudgingly issued this retraction, Mr. Wilson himself, in characteristically shameless fashion, was denying that he had ever "said the vice president sent me or ordered me sent.") And as for his wife's supposed nonrole in his mission, here is what Valerie Plame Wilson wrote in a memo to her boss at the CIA:
My husband has good relations with the PM [the prime minister of Niger] and the former minister of mines . . ., both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.
More than a year after his return, with the help of Mr. Kristof, and also Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and then through an op-ed piece in the Times under his own name, Mr. Wilson succeeded, probably beyond his wildest dreams, in setting off a political firestorm.
In response, the White House, no doubt hoping to prevent his allegation about the 16 words from becoming a proxy for the charge that (in Mr. Wilson's latest iteration of it) "lies and disinformation [were] used to justify the invasion of Iraq," eventually acknowledged that the president's statement "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address." As might have been expected, however, this panicky response served to make things worse rather than better. And yet it was totally unnecessary--for the maddeningly simple reason that every single one of the 16 words at issue was true.
That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Furthermore--and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that this assurance has now been discredited--Britain's independent Butler commission concluded that it was "well-founded." The relevant passage is worth quoting at length:
a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British government did not claim this.
As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Mr. Wilson himself, far from challenging the British report when he was "debriefed" on his return from Niger (although challenging it is what he now never stops doing), actually strengthened the CIA's belief in its accuracy. From the Senate Intelligence Committee report:
He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the report [by Mr. Wilson] was that Niger officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium.
And again:
The report on [Mr. Wilson's] trip to Niger . . . did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal.
This passage goes on to note that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research--which (as we have already seen) did not believe that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons--found support in Mr. Wilson's report for its "assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq." But if so, this, as the Butler report quoted above points out, would not mean that Iraq had not tried to buy it--which was the only claim made by British intelligence and then by Mr. Bush in the famous 16 words.
The liar here, then, was not Mr. Bush but Mr. Wilson. And Mr. Wilson also lied when he told the Washington Post that he had unmasked as forgeries certain documents given to American intelligence (by whom it is not yet clear) that supposedly contained additional evidence of Saddam's efforts to buy uranium from Niger. The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according to the Butler report:
The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine [that assessment].
More damning yet to Mr. Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:
[Mr. Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article . . . which said, "among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.' " Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports.
To top all this off, just as Mr. Cheney had nothing to do with the choice of Mr. Wilson for the mission to Niger, neither was it true that, as Mr. Wilson "confirmed" for a credulous New Republic reporter, "the CIA circulated [his] report to the Vice President's office," thereby supposedly proving that Cheney and his staff "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie." Yet--the mind reels--if Mr. Cheney had actually been briefed on Mr. Wilson's oral report to the CIA (which he was not), he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.
So much for the author of the best-selling and much-acclaimed book whose title alone--"The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity"--has set a new record for chutzpah.
But there is worse. In his press conference on the indictment against Mr. Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that lying to federal investigators is a serious crime both because it is itself against the law and because, by sending them on endless wild-goose chases, it constitutes the even more serious crime of obstruction of justice. By those standards, Mr. Wilson--who has repeatedly made false statements about every aspect of his mission to Niger, including whose idea it was to send him and what he told the CIA upon his return; who was then shown up by the Senate Intelligence Committee as having lied about the forged documents; and whose mendacity has sent the whole country into a wild-goose chase after allegations that, the more they are refuted, the more they keep being repeated--is himself an excellent candidate for criminal prosecution.
And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq--the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy--have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American ideals."
inspite of all of this...olbermann's histronics aside...americans are AGAINST this new policy.
it is my opinion that bush is creating a big set-up for not only the democratics in the senate and the congress, but also for whomever occupies the white house after the '08 elections.
i just cannot wrap my arms around this new surge in iraq. won't help anyone, especially the boots from our soil.
i would like to see all the specifics the bush has in store. it is obvious he doen't have a precise and i mean complete and total plan for these troops. commitment to a victory that will never truly be is bullshit.
do not forget, we are ever going to leave iraq...not with a $2billion embassy being built.
Wow, what a post by imbecillin.
I would say this as a short rebuttal. First, the time-line given for people thinking that there were weapons in Iraq is impressive. There was a general belief that this was the case.
However, there is a difference between being sure enough to say something in a speech and being so sure that thousands of people should die. Others besides Bush were wrong, but they had the wisdom not to act on something that they may have had doubts on.
Secondly, what difference does it make how Wilson got chosen to go to Niger? If Cheney specifically asked, or just alluded to wanting an answer Wilson was working officially for our government on that mission.
In fact, it is largely Cheney's word that you base your critique on. I find him to be an unreliable source.
Agan, the 16 words were enough in doubt that they should not have been included. Why won't Bush and his appologists take responsibility for what they have done? It seems like there is always this "ok, we made a mistake but you would have too" mentality that drives me crazy.
As far as where attacks occur in Iraq, and lack of reporting of "good news" here are two facts to consider:
First, the bulk of attacks are in the Capital. Like nearly every war ever fought the capital of your enemy is where you want to do all yoru fighting. Why is this remarkable at all? To "win" the invasion of Iraq, Bush toppled Saddam by taking Baghdad. The insurgents are doing the same thing.
Secondly, there are a lot of good things happening in Iraq, as far as schools built etc. But the country is too dangerous for reporters to go outside of the greenzone much. If the administration wants it to appear that Iraq has more than chaos, it should come up with a way of pacifying the country sufficiently so that reporters can see progress!
Post a Comment