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From the Lord Butler Report
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Originally posted by sgtclub
I think it strongly supports the case for war.
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President Bush evidently disagrees with you. Presented with the opportunity the other day. Bush didn't say, "My fellow Americans, so there weren't any WMD, nor any nuclear program. We were right to go to war because Saddam Hussein had the strategic intention of starting up his nuclear program again if containment ever stopped working."
Not wanting to admit error or change horses in midstream, he instead introduced a new phrase: that Hussein had "weapons of mass murder":
- Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq. We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder, and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take.
Matt Yglesias fisks this nonsense:
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Near as I can tell, this is a bald-faced lie. Saddam didn't have the capability of producing WMD. The phrasing was probably changed from "weapons of mass destruction" to "weapons of mass murder" in order to somehow make this come out as technically correct (Stalin killed an awful lot of people without any nukes or poison gas, so...) but we all know what he's talking about here. It's just not true.
Again, did Saddam have the "capability" of passing the weapons he couldn't build on to terrorists "bent on acquiring them?" Sure. But everything in Saddam's history -- including the period of time when he really had WMD -- suggests he had no inclination to do so. Meanwhile, the list of nations that have this capacity is rather large -- Pakistan, for example -- and we're not invading all of them. Indeed, thanks to the administration's bungling, it's a list that's grown to include North Korea. There's all these people out there offering better theories, though, if the White House wants to try and find something more plausible.
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Quote:
Originally posted by club
I have acknowledged that from the get-go. Go back and read my posts. I was agreeing with you.
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Didn't get that. Sorry.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
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