CHENEY: Criticize me and you don't support the troops - Page 5

I think you're right on a lot of that -- leaks, what Blix was saying, etc. but in the end that had to be held up against the finished U.S. intelligence product.

Oh, and lest your head get too big for your hat, remember, a stopped watch is right twice a day, too.

Laugh, dammit.

No it wasn't. This war was never decided by anyone dealing with "finished U.S. intelligence product." Not congress, not the admin and not the public.

But it's perfectly clear that's not the case if you look at the details. The details have always told the same story. Don't forget that. The strongest argument from the admin was always that the claims weren't borne out in the facts because the important facts were "unknown." Of course, no one denied that there were things we didn't know, but it was abundantly, not slightly, clear after looking at the details that it was physically impossible for those unknowns to add up to anything remotely resembling what the admin was claiming.

And in the end, the fact is that we could check at the time and see that the admin was making stuff up. They made specific claims that were simply not true, and we could see them at the time. When bush said "I saw an IAEA report that says Iraq will have nukes in 6 months," we could actually look and see that no such report existed. And it went on like this throughout the end of 2002 and 2003.

Wouldn't that be the sort of thing you would find in that SIC report, though? Hyped, of course, but made up?

Hey dmz, do you know why the Senate Dems shut down the Senate for an afternoon a few weeks ago? It was over this issue. Looking into that might answer your question here.

Your point?


Actually, they do need to be pointed out.


Dude, I QUOTED YOU: "Clinton's conclusion that we ought to invade was the same which makes it hard to show that "Bush lied because we all know he cooked intelligence to get what he wanted."


Analogies change the subject. Let's stick to what we have, please, which is spinning out of control pretty quickly.


No. He did not. You need to read that again. He said that it was our hope that regime change would happen from within.

I would say the the very big decisive change in policy came with 9/11. That isn't an attempt to say that Saddam caused 9/11 which is a simplification. Rather it is taking the same previously understood situation and deciding that the previous solution for it is no longer acceptable in the context of new events.

I've stated clearly that Bush made the change and push for a preemptive doctrine.


While we can never truly know hypotheticals, I do not think they would have argued Clinton wrong in taking on the same two targets that we decided to act on after 9/11. Perhaps a few more Democrats would have supported it. Perhaps a few less Republicans wouldn't be able to get past it being Clinton. Who truly knows?


Instead of arguing Republicans and Democrats, what we should ask is whether preemption has been right and whether we should use it in the future. If you want to argue Bush wrong for arguing preemption you are welcome to do so. However just be consistant. That means argue that people who voted for the preemptive war are also wrong. Be honest and put it above teams.

Nick

Are you implying that Northgate was dishonest somewhere? If so, please point it out.

Your response reminds how successfully the Bush administration has prevented the fundamental question from even being posed, much less answered:

Was there ever a chance in hell that invading Iraq to topple Saddam was going to result in a pro-American democracy in the region? I seem to recall a great many terrorist loving Saddam supporting liberals very loudly pointing out that the biggest problem with Bush's little scheme was that it wouldn't work. They, of course, were defeatists and blame America first types who practically had French citizenship, so insipid and effete were their objections.

It's funny, because one would think that would be the first question to answer, and you would think that it would be the central question now.

But somehow the myth of American infallibility makes one of the underlying assumptions of the debate that, sure, given proper execution and resources and maybe some luck, invading Iraq was potentially efficacious, and the only thing that needs hashing out is whether or not we had sufficient justification for doing so.

I mean, if a reasonable person might conclude that the whole mission was doomed to failure on its own terms from the very start (bizarre and historically ignorant comparisons to post-war Japan and Germany not withstanding), it makes the dishonesty of the run-up so much more toxic to our sense of who we are and what we are capable of.

In other words, when talking about how the Bush administration lied and distorted and suppressed and massaged to drive support for a plan that was stupid and unworkable on the face of it, I think it's important not to forget the "stupid and unworkable on the face of it" piece.

I didn't hear it as part of the CIA anti-war clique. I have read the whole Plame thing as proof that even Bush supporters were against the war. Wilson wrote what he did about Niger and gave himself additional credibility by claiming that he was sent at the behest of Cheney. Thus people were pointing at Wilson and naming him as an example "Bushies turning against their own." When investigated, it was found that Wilson was not sent by Cheney but by his own wife and thus was not a Bushie turning against his own, but a man with his own agenda.

Nick

Wilson never claimed he was sent by Cheney. I realize it's a beloved wing-nut talking point, but it's a straight up lie.

What is it about the shelf life of these kinds of expedient fake factoids?

They come up, they get refuted, their water carriers fall silent for a while, and then they drag them back up after a suitable interval as support for a different argument, like somehow we won't notice if they slip them in later.

Maybe the idea is to just exhaust the opposition by forcing them to keep track of an ever expanding back-catalogue of bullshit.

My point is quite clear. If two different administrations conclude that Saddam WMD's then one wasn't truthful while the other was a manipulative liar.


Snarky, snarky.


Sorry. I don't get drafts on this stuff and obviously typed a bit too fast. I'm sure my overall intent has been made clear.


What is spinning out of control is the ability to see past a cheering for one's political team.


And that we would fund, etc those "within" folks. I consider that to be actively pursuing even if you do not. I suppose by your reasoning the Bay of Pigs wasn't actually "actively pursuing" since it didn't use our own men and women.

Nick

I suppose that evil, right-wing rag the Washington Post is just full of crap then as well?

Washington Post

Nick

The question and debate you propose here is an honest one.


Thanks for being consistant here.


So now we are on the true meat of the matter. A discuss about preemptive war is what we need to have. The reason we are not having it is because, as you have noted, it would harm some Democrats in addition to some Republicans.

As for whether the Republicans would have or not, I don't think all of them would have. The are a large number of Neo-cons within the part and they have outflanked the Paleo-con members of the part who do not believe in U.N. actions, nation building, etc. The same is true of fair-trade within the Democratic party. All the Democratic interests appear to have free trade working against what they desire, yet somehow the Democratic party keeps coming out for free trade.


There is nothing wrong with taking the position that preemptive war is not the best policy. It doesn't make one a pacifist in my book.

Nick

So perhaps we could continue this more general question in my new threads hmm?

As already mentioned by multiple people multiple times:

1. Clinton didn't "conclude that Saddam [had] WMD's." That statement has no meaning in the context of what was happening in 1998

2. The bush admin lied and exaggerated. There is a mountain of statements that can be, and have been, pointed to that demonstrate this.

Your insistence on continuing to argue against straw men and make deceptive and outright false statements belies your empty requests for an "honest" discussion.

Well, I don't want to get too far off the thread, but, for God's sake Nick, you've linked to an article that says nothing whatsoever about Wilson claiming Cheney sent him to Niger. Or are you under the impression that one hit on Wilson's credibility is as good another?

Moreover, even what the article you linked to does talk about-- whether his wife recommended him for the trip-- is a largely credulous report of the Pat Roberts/republican side letter of the full Senate Committee report, which, strenuous efforts by the Pat Roberts and the Republican committee members notwithstanding, is a good deal less assertive about its conclusions as this much more recent article in that very same "liberal" WP makes clear.

But that's not what was concluded at all. Nowhere in that statement is there anything about WMD. There is a reference to weapons programs, but nothing specifically indicating WMD. All that statement says is that the US policy is that Iraq needs a democratically elected leader and to come into the fold of the good guy nations and that the US has set aside $8m to help further that along (who knows what that means).


I'm not sure what your intent was. You said that Clinton wanted to invade Iraq. Then you said you didn't say it. I'm not sure what's up.


There are teams? I think we should argue about intent and motive, don't you? Whaddya think? Shall we argue about intent and motive, rather than the arguments themselves?


Again, I'm not sure what that means. If that money were used entirely in the US to fund data gathering or infrastructure building, it's hardly the same as sending it through back channels to buy AK-47s for the Kurds, is it?


Let's deal with the issue at hand, please. You seem to want to draw an equivalency between Clinton's and Bush's policies towards Iraq. I'm arguing that one is a policy of invading Iraq and the other is a policy of not invading Iraq. That is not an equivalency.

And as for pre-emption: always wrong.

That article does not say that Wilson claimed Cheney sent him. In any case, we don't need a third party, we can look at his statement directly: "In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake a form of lightly processed ore by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office."

But on the other point about why Plame was outed: I agree with your post, that the line was that he was chosen by his wife rather than Cheney - as much of a bogus point as that was, it was the point. But that's not inconsistent with what I've said. I mean, why would his wife working in the CIA undermine his credibility? Because the subtext is that it was well-known that the White House and the CIA were at odds over WMDs.

Because clearly the Bush admin is interested in ferreting out all instances of cronyism in the government?

Oooh, snap.

Hey you guys, the whole Wilson thing was covered in the SIC report. (Check the TOC, it's within the first 100 pages)

It's really, well, a combination of weird and screwy.

What is so weird and screwy about it? There are some discrepancies between what Wilson says and what the Senate says - the Senate says that his wife recommended him, and he continues to deny it and the CIA denies it. The Senate says that his report changed few minds, which is entirely possible. Perhaps he believed his report's influence was greater than it really was. But in the end, he was right, and the White House has admitted it. I'm not sure what's so weird and screwy.

Weird and screwy as in the patented DMZ "I'm on the wrong side of this so it's time once again to act as if nothing is truly knowable and it's all a big mess and mortals will never get to the bottom of it".

I suppose next he'll say this whole war debate is really all about metaphysics.

I thought this was:

and this:

Not weird and screwy, but a huge political football. We know he was criticizing the Bush administration, and we know they were hitting back. That report was written right in the middle of all that. Maybe he made some mistakes, or maybe others were doing their best to discredit him. But the basic facts are that, in order to press for war, Bush said something in his State of the Union address about Iraq and nukes that Wilson said was false, and the White House later had to admit shouldn't have been in the speech.

Sigh

But seriously, I'll leave off for now. But for your entertainment -- and with a least a little tongue in cheek, one Parting Shot -- at least try to read it.

Have a great Thanksgiving, we all really have a lot to be thankful for.

Exactly. It -is- tiresome to hear the same bullshit being spouted, refuted, and then being spouted again as truth. Rinse and repeat and hope the "newer" bullshit will stick with the fanatics and the lazy....and of course the Fox news viewers.