Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
Are we back to parsing "learned" again, when the Brits still stand by their statements? Or that he shouldn't have used the word "imminent" in a sentence, even though he was expressly disclaiming imminence at the time? Or is it the WMD thing, where everyone who knew anything for years, including Clinton, believed the same thing? Or maybe it's the terrorism-link thing, where all new evidence seems to support a direct tie to AQ, but even if that doesn't turn out to be true, it seems to be accepted that SH was providing huge support to, at the very least, terrorists in one of the most unsettling hotspots in the world? Or possibly it was that SH was a bad guy, and you're not convinced, and think that maybe he just had a different point of view that we should respect in its diversity?
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I have a hard time believing that this is really up for discussion. A whole range of administration people said things about Iraq that have now been shown to be baseless. There were no WMD -- no matter what Clinton believed, it was Bush who went to war over it -- and there is no direct tie to Al Qaeda. If Hussein was supporting terrorists,* he doesn't seem to have been doing so any more than every other government in that part of the world. The Administration clearly believed they were going to go in and find support that they didn't find. Their (and your) efforts to marshal scattered pieces of evidence on these subjects are reminiscent of the teenaged boys and elderly men who were sent out with Panzerfausts to try to stop the Red Army from its westward progress in 1945.
And no one but no one disputes that Hussein was a bad man. Throwing that into the argument is a cheap rhetorical ploy to distract from what the Administration was saying.
Speaking of rhetoric, you've done a nice job of spinning the Niger uranium thing as a sign of persistence on the part of Bush's critics, rather than an illustration of the Administration's disregard for the truth in its effort to muster support for the war. You don't need to parse what "learned" meant. Bush -- or someone writing his speech -- kept that sentence in over the objections of the CIA because they wanted to scare the American people about the threat of WMD. No WMD have been found. I say this again only on the off-chance that you've been reading the National Review for so long that this basic fact is still eluding you.
* The lack of evidence that Hussein was supporting terrorists can be seen in the repeated efforts by Cheney and others to point to Ansar-al-Islam's activities, even though they were functioning in a part of Iraq outside of Hussein's control.
