Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

But that ignores what happened. A case was built based on evidence that did not exist. It was then sold to the Dems and Rs you mention as this huge threat. They did a great job selling it, for sure. But I simply do not buy that their intent was sound. I don't think you believe that either.

TM

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

one of us is. but we should both acknowledge that neither of us will admit which. can we agree Sidd is prone to hyperbole?

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

I don't think that was my sock-are you sure?

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

Cheney basically said, "There is no question that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and is therefore huge threat to our country." I do not know how to interpret this in any other way, since there were, in fact, HUGE questions about whether or not he had them. And that's just one example of the tremendous amount of bullshit they threw at everyone to pitch the war.

TM

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

Lots of people on boths sides of the aisle thought he had them or that there a serious risk that he was imminently going to get them. If cheney had been more lawyerly he would have spoken in lawyerly cya pussy talk like a lot of us do and prefaced that with "It seems as if....." He rolled the dice a little harder, but even if he had cya'd, we would still be having the same conversation. i don't think the problem was launching the war, it was more launching the war with no plan on how to properly prosecute and win it, or even what a "win" was.

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

I don't normally respond to the same post twice but in this case I will make an exception, what does your use of "basically" caveat? was that his quote or wasn't it? what did he actually say? Did he cya himself?

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

I don't usually respond to Penske, but the difference between Cheney and "lots of people" is that Cheney had access to the actual intelligence.

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

If Cheney had said" "We think Saddam is close to acquiring WMD, but the evidence is inconclusive. There are metal tubes that could be for a centrifuge but are more likely for conventional rockets. We have not been able to find any solid evidence of him purchasing uranium. Most of the evidence we do have is based on informants, including a guy code-named 'Curveball', who have their own reasons to want the US to remove Saddam and who are of dubious credibility." then he and his cronies would have failed entirely to build the case for war and we wouldn't be having a conversation about this at all.

You may call that "lawyerly cya." I think of it as something more like "tellling the truth", and I think of what Bush & Co. did as overzealous advocacy (i.e., misrepresentation about the strength of the evidence, in order to support a conclusion that they'd already formed.)

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

did you answer the question "why force a war if they didn't believe there was a threat" question? I really want to gathe everyones thoughts.

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

Well, lots of Dems had very good access. Hillary was a prime example, and her position on the war was, IMHO, fundamental to her fate in the elections.

But, unlike Cheney, most (all?) people in Congress, including Dems and Rs, did not actually make representations about what this evidence showed. Some Dems and virtually all Rs parroted the Bush/Cheney line, which is bad but not as bad.

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

My opinion is that they did oversell that one plank, the wmd plank, although there were plenty of dems who were on board with the wmd threat. In my opinion I think they should have attempted to sell the concept of removal on the totality of the circumstances surrounding his dictatorship, oppression of minorities in the region, destabilising affect on a volatile region, threat to israel, continuing to thwart the UN etc etc etc.

If they had, we wouldn't be having the discussion of why we went to war, but we would still be having the discussion of how badly they fucked up the prosecution of the war, and why....ymmv

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

Okay, then I'll say it again. For the umpteenth-plus-ten time.

I think that Bush and Co. actually did believe that Saddam had WMDs.* But rather than be honest about the basis of that belief, they misrepresented the evidence so that a critical mass of Americans would also form that belief.

I have trouble with the idea that anyone actually believed Saddam was actively supporting al Qaeda, except for a belief that has as much supporting evidence as your belief about the bumper stickers on my friends' cars, or transubstantiation. Faith is a strong thing, but still.

Got it?

*More specifically: I think that they believed he did have chemical weapons and was actively working to get nuclear. Chemical weapons were not remotely a threat to the US, and most barely qualify as "weapons of mass destruction."

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

I don't normally respond to the same post twice, but in this case i will make an exception, I don't think it is telling the truth. Its CYA. Telling the truth would be "We don't know, we have some intelligence, it could be right it could be wrong, bottom line, unless they show us that they have them, we won't know for sure until we are there and find them"....and no politician, of any stripe, is going to tell that type of truth, it would be akin to Obama saying of healthcare reform, "we think its going to work, CBO made some promising estimates of the benefits based on their analysis, but who knows, external variables that we can't foresee may change the whole thing, maybe the Rs are right about some stuff, we will just have to wait and see....." Ain't going to happen.

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

The question is threat of what. They certainly thought there were:

1. a threat of continuing annoyance (i.e. less than full cooperations with weapons inspectors, messing with no fly zones, etc)

2. a threat of future skirmishes with Iraq's neighbors and thus oil security

3. a threat of Sadaam sponsoring attacks on Israel, and

4. a threat of that they would miss their opportunity to avoid these things if they didn't get a war now.

The whole point of concern about the "lies" is the belief that for the administration this might have been an adequate justification for the war, but it wasn't for the public at large.

Re: 47% Pay No Fed Income Tax
 

I agree completely with your first paragraph, except as noted below. I half-agree with your second paragraph: That would be the discussion IF WE HAD GONE TO WAR. But that pitch would not have sold Americans on going to war. No way, no how.

On the first: It depends what you mean by "plenty." I've checked and my memory was right -- a majority of dems in Congress voted no on the resolution. And this despite the hammering Dems were taking -- as unAmerican, as terrorist sympathizers, as supporters of genocide, as allies of al Qaeda -- for not supporting the war.

Beyond that, if you look at some of the individual Dems who voted for and against, I think a picture begins to emerge: Dems in heavily-Dem areas tended to vote no. Dems in more mixed areas tended to vote yes. This suggests to me that Dems generally (as opposed to Dems in Congress) were against the war. Barbara Lee of Oakland/Berkeley knew she could vote against. So did Boxer. Dems from the South? Not so much.

I haven't done, and don't plan to do, a complete analysis to support the above, and I'd be interested in hearing what others actually know -- or, in light of the anticipated, customary lack of actual knowledge on this board (other than when RT posts about healt care), what others think in their gut.