Quote:
Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
What "we" was looking. I knew the inspectors hadn't found anything. You knew that, right? If someone had asked "do you think covert inspections had been done that did discover WMDs?"
I would have said no, because they would have been publicized.
So me, thinking US citizen, heard Bush to say "we knew he had the weapons, we can't see that he got rid of them, so we assume he has them." The inspectors hadn't found any sure, but that seemed part of the game. Blix has said he was sure we'd find some when we invaded and the UN kept the Sanctions in place, apparently because it assumed they were there.
Bottom line,
1 everyone knew "we hadn't found them."
2 everyone assumed he had them
3 Bush wasn't willing to run that risk
4 I would have been angry if he was willing to run the risk
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Assuming your 3, and yet Bush didn't want to tell the truth -- that he didn't have hard evidence of WMD but didn't want to run the risk -- and so he told people a different story -- that we knew Iraq had WMD. Perhaps he thought he was doing the right thing -- the ends (defending the country against the risk presented by Hussein) justified the means (telling mistruths to rally public support).
If you believe he was right, then stop pretending that he told the truth, and argue that the President should be lying to the public if he thinks he needs to do so.
The President isn't "everyone." The President presides over the best intelligence apparatus in the world.
There is a big difference between the President saying
- there is a 20% chance that Hussein has WMD and we should invade him to protect ourselves against that risk, and
- there is a 20% chance that Hussein has WMD, but I'm telling you that it's 100% because I don't trust the public to agree with me that a 20% chance is enough to justify an invasion
The difference is pretty fundamental to living in a democracy. If conservatives can't understand this, maybe that's part of the problem with our efforts to introduce democracy to Iraq.
