war stories
I Was Wrong, but So Were You
Parsing Bush's new mantra.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, Nov. 14, 2005, at 6:39 PM ET



President George W. Bush has suddenly shifted rhetoric on the war in Iraq. Until recently, the administration's line was basically, "Everything we are saying and doing is right." It was a line that held him in good stead, especially with his base, which admired his constancy above all else. Now, though, as his policies are failing and even his base has begun to abandon him, a new line is being trotted out: "Yes, we were wrong about some things, but everybody else was wrong, too, so get over it."

Quite apart from the political motives behind the move, does Bush have a point? Did everybody believe, in the run-up to the war, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction? And are Bush's Democratic critics, therefore, hypocritically rewriting history when they now protest that the president misled them—and the rest of us—into war by manipulating intelligence data?

President Bush made this claim—and thus inaugurated the new line of counterattack—at a Veterans Day speech last Friday before a guaranteed-to-cheer crowd at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania, one of the few American military bases that no sitting president had ever visited. (The White House transcript of the 50-minute speech notes a breathtaking 47 interruptions for applause.)

As with many of the president's carefully worded speeches on the subject, this one contains fragments of truth—for instance, nearly everyone, including the war's opponents, did think back in the fall of 2002 that Saddam had WMDs—but they serve only to disguise the larger falsehoods and deceptions.

Let's go to the transcript:

Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

This is not true. Two bipartisan panels have examined the question of how the intelligence on Iraq's WMDs turned out so wrong. Both deliberately skirted the issue of why. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence deferred the second part of its probe—dealing with whether officials oversimplified or distorted the conclusions reached by the various intelligence agencies—until after the 2004 election, and its Republican chairman has done little to revive the issue since. Judge Laurence Silberman, who chaired a presidential commission on WMDs, said, when he released the 601-page report last March, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

There's something misleading about Bush's wording on this point, as well: The investigation "found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments." The controversy concerns pressure from the White House and the secretary of defense to form the judgments—that is, to make sure the agencies reached specific judgments—not to change them afterward.

They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein.

This is an intriguingly ambiguous statement. What does he mean by "our assessment of Saddam Hussein"? Of the man—his motives, intentions, wishes, fantasies? In which case, he's right. Most of the world's intelligence agencies figured Saddam Hussein would like to have weapons of mass destruction. If he means an assessment of Saddam Hussein's capabilities, though, he's wrong: Several countries' spy agencies never bought the notion that Saddam had such weapons or the means to produce them in the near future.

They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing the development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.

This, too, is misleading. These resolutions called on Saddam to declare the state of his WMD arsenal and, if he claimed there was no such thing, to produce records documenting its destruction. The resolutions never claimed—or had the intention of claiming—that he had such weapons.

Saddam did demonstrably have chemical-weapons facilities when the U.N. Security Council started drafting these resolutions. But, as noted by former weapons inspector David Kay (but unnoted in President Bush's speech), President Bill Clinton's 1998 airstrikes destroyed the last of these facilities.

[M]any of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security."

Bush's opponent, Sen. John Kerry, did utter these words, possibly to his later regret. Still the key phrase is "to use force if necessary." Kerry has since said—as have many other Democrats who voted as he did—that they assumed the president wouldn't use force unless it really was necessary to do so, or unless the intelligence he cited was unambiguous and the threat he envisioned was fairly imminent. This, Bush never did.

That's why more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate—who had access to the same intelligence—voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

This is the crucial point: these Democrats did not have "access to the same intelligence." The White House did send Congress a classified National Intelligence Estimate, at nearly 100 pages long, as well as a much shorter executive summary. It could have been (and no doubt was) predicted that very few lawmakers would take the time to read the whole document. The executive summary painted the findings in overly stark terms. And even the NIE did not cite the many dissenting views within the intelligence community. The most thorough legislators, for instance, were not aware until much later of the Energy Department's doubts that Iraq's aluminum tubes were designed for atomic centrifuges—or of the dissent about "mobile biological weapons labs" from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Intelligence estimates are unwieldy documents, often studded with dissenting footnotes. Legislators and analysts with limited security clearances have often thought they had "access to intelligence," but unless they could see the footnotes, they didn't.

For instance, in the late 1950s, many senators thought President Dwight Eisenhower was either a knave or a fool for denying the existence of a "missile gap." U.S. Air Force Intelligence estimates—leaked to the press and supplied to the Air Force's allies on Capitol Hill—indicated that the Soviet Union would have at least 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles by 1962, far more than the U.S. arsenal. What the "missile gap" hawks didn't know—and Eisenhower did—was that the Central Intelligence Agency had recently acquired new evidence indicating that the Soviets couldn't possibly have more than 50 ICBMs by then—fewer than we would. (As it turned out, photoreconnaissance satellites, which were secretly launched in 1960, revealed that even that number was too high; the Soviets had only a couple of dozen ICBMs.)

So, yes, nearly everyone thought Saddam was building WMDs, just as everyone back in the late '50s thought Nikita Khrushchev was building hundreds of ICBMs. In Saddam's case, many of us outsiders (I include myself among them) figured he'd had biological and chemical weapons before; producing such weapons isn't rocket science; U.N. inspectors had been booted out of Iraq a few years earlier; why wouldn't he have them now?

What we didn't know—and what the Democrats in Congress didn't know either—was that many insiders did have reasons to conclude otherwise. There is also now much reason to believe that top officials—especially Vice President Dick Cheney and the undersecretaries surrounding Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon—worked hard to keep those conclusions trapped inside.

President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said today that the arguments over how and why the war began are irrelevant. "We need to put this debate behind us," he said. But the truth is, no debate could be more relevant now. As the war in Iraq enters yet another crucial phase—with elections scheduled next month and Congress finally taking up the issue of whether to send more troops or start pulling them out—we need to know whether the people running the executive branch can be trusted, and the sad truth is that they cannot be.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130295/

Good story. I too thought that Saddam had WMDs, until about two weeks after the war started, and none had been used. I was against the war, because of the sheer intolerance of debate from the hawks. It didn't seem well-thought out. I guess it turns out it wasn't.

I say we send every troop we have to Iraq in an attempt to secure that country as much as possible, and to execute a policy of compulsory military service for Iraqi citizens so that eventually they can maintain their own security.

We broke that country--so we bought it, and now we have to take ownership. I can understand how someone might disagree with me, but I want to hear some other ideas about what we should do.

I am/was against the war. I do agree with the "you broke it you bought it" idea. But I do have to say I think our mentality was different after 9/11 and we let critical errors slip by, because we were thinking about terrorism.

Haha, the ol' "two wrongs make a right" tactic.

Since we're explaining our reasons why we were against/(for?) the war, I wouldn't have invaded Iraq even if he had WMD. The U.S. had that country under check with those crippling sanctions. Clinton himself launched a few missiles when Saddam was trying funny things.

Then you have the whole Sunni/Shiite/Kurdish issue, and how war would beget more war, which I've been dead on correct for so far. War is hell. That alone didn't make a trip down the old "We need international consensus" or "war for oil" arguments necessary.

its funny, i never thought they had WMDs. I always had the suspicion that Saddam's power came from the unknown. Like he didn't want the inspectors in his country because they would not only find out he had not weapons, but this acknownledgement would render him powerless in the eyes of his people. I mean he rulled on fear(hmmm sounds familiar). And when we did invade his country we found a fucking shit whole civicly speaking. The sewer, water, electric, and oil lines were all in such bad shape that its suprising they ran at all. The only thing he did with his money besides hoard it was spend it on his castles.

Bush Rewrites History To Criticize His Anti-war Critics

David Corn
The Nation
Mon Nov 14, 3:53 PM ET

In a Veterans Day speech on Friday, delivered to troops and others at the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania, George W. Bush veered from the usual commemoration of sacrifice to strike at critics who have questioned whether he steered the country into war by using false information. This has become a tough and troubling issue for his presidency. A poll taken before his speech found that 57 percent of the respondents now believe that Bush "deliberately misled" the nation into war. That is astounding and, I assume, without precedent in history. Has there been another wartime period during which a majority of Americans believed the president had purposefully bamboozled them about the reasons for that war? Addressing this charge is tough for Bush because it calls more attention to it, and the on-ground-realities in Iraq only cause more popular unease with the war. But Bush and his aides calculated that it was better to punch back than ignore the criticism, and that's a sign that they're worried that Bush is coming to be defined as a president who conned the nation into an ugly war. So Bush tried. Let's break down his effort:

Our debate at home must also be fair-minded. One of the hallmarks of a free society and what makes our country strong is that our political leaders can discuss their differences openly, even in times of war.

Conservative who claim raising questions about the war does a disservice to the troops and is anti-American might want to keep these words in mind.

When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support.

Actually, Congress did not approve Bush's decision to remove Saddam. In October 2002, the House and Senate approved a resolution that gave Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq if he deemed that appropriate. At the time, Bush and his aides were claiming it was their goal to force Saddam Hussein to give up his weapons of mass destruction and his WMD programs (which, we know now, did not exist). When the resolution passed---and in the weeks after---the White House insisted that Bush was not bent on "regime change" and that he was willing to work within the UN to force Saddam to accept UN inspectors (which Saddam did) in pursuit of the goal of disarming Iraq. Is Bush now saying that he had already resolved to invade Iraq at this point and all his talk about achieving disarmament through the UN process was bunk? Is he rewriting history--or telling us the real truth? In any event, when Bush did order the invasion of Iraq months later in March 2003, he did not ask Congress to vote on his decision to remove Saddam.

I also recognize that some of our fellow citizens and elected officials didn't support the liberation of Iraq. And that is their right, and I respect it. As President and Commander-in-Chief, I accept the responsibilities, and the criticisms, and the consequences that come with such a solemn decision.

Bush might accept "the responsibilities and criticisms," but has yet to acknowledge the mistakes he and his aides made before and after the invasion about planning for a post-invasion Iraq. He also has not insisted on any accountability for these mistakes. For instance, he gave a spiffy medal to former CIA chief George Tenet, who was responsible for the prewar intelligence failure.

While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.

When was the last time Bush talked about how the war began--that is, when did he mention that his primary reason for war (protecting the American public from the supposed WMD threat posed by Saddam Hussein) was discredited by reality? Is ignoring history the same as rewriting it?

Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

This is not the full and accurate explanation of the controversy at hand. The issue of whether the Bush administration misled the nation in the run-up to the war has two components. The first is the production of the intelligence related to WMDs and the supposed al Qaeda-Sadam connection. The second is how the Bush crowd represented the intelligence to the public when trying to make the case for war. As for the first, the Senate intelligence committee report did say the committee had found no evidence of political pressure. But Democratic members of the committee and others challenged this finding. Several committee Democrats pointed to a CIA independent review on the prewar intelligence, conducted by a panel led by Richard Kerr, former deputy director of the CIA, which said,

Requests for reporting and analysis of [Iraq's links to al Qaeda] were steady and heavy in the period leading up to the war, creating significant pressure on the Intelligence Community to find evidence that supported a connection.

More to the point, Kerr told Vanity Fair that intelligence analysts did feel pressured by the go-to-war gang. The magazine in May 2004 reported,

"There was a lot of pressure, no question," says Kerr. "The White House, State, Defense were raising questions, heavily on W.M.D. and the issue of terrorism. Why did you select this information rather than that? Why have you downplayed this particular thing?...Sure, I heard that some of the analysts felt pressure. We heard about it from friends. There are always some people in the agency who will say, 'We've been pushed to hard.' Analysts will say, 'You're trying to politicize it.' There were people who felt there was too much pressure. Not that they were being asked to change their judgments, but there were being asked again and again to restate their judgments--do another paper on this, repetitive pressures. Do it again."

Was it a case, then, of officials repeatedly asking for another paper until they got the answer they wanted? "There may have been some of that," Kerr concedes. The requests came from "primarily people outside asking for the same paper again and again. There was a lot of repetitive tasking. Some of the analysts felt this was unnecessary pressure. The repetitive requests, Kerr made clear, came from the C.I.A.'s "senior customers," including "the White House, the vice president, State, Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Despite Bush's assertion, the question remains whether undue pressure was applied by the White House. And in his Veterans Day speech, Bush ducked the second issue: how he and his aides depicted the intelligence. This is the source of the dispute over the so-called Phase II investigation of the Senate intelligence committee. The allegation is that Bush and administration officials overstated and hyped the flawed intelligence and claimed it was definitive when they had reason to know it was not.

For example, in his final speech to the nation before launching the war, Bush claimed that US intelligence left "no doubt" about Iraq's supposed WMDs. But there was plenty of doubt on critical issues. Intelligence analysts at the Energy Department and State Department disagreed with those at the CIA about the evidence that purportedly showed Iraq had revived its nuclear weapons program: its importation of aluminum tubes and the allegation that Iraq had been uranium-shopping in Niger. (In 2002, Dick Cheney said the tubes were "irrefutable evidence," and Condoleezza Rice said they were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs." But a year earlier, as The New York Times reported in 2004, "Rice's staff had been told that the government's foremost nuclear expert seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons.") The CIA believed Iraq had chemical weapons. But the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that there was no evidence such stockpiles existed. Some intelligence analysts concluded that Iraq was developing unmanned aerial vehicles that could deliver chemical or biological weapons. The experts on UAVs at the Air Force thought this was not so. Was Bush speaking accurately when he told the public--and the world--there was "no doubt"?

Also, did Bush make specific claims unsupported by the intelligence? The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, produced in October 2002, maintained that Iraq had an active biological research and development program. Bush publicly said Iraq had "stockpiles" of biological weapons. There is a difference between an R&D program (which Iraq did not have) and warehouses loaded with ready-to-go weapons (which Bush implied existed). How did an R&D program become stockpiles? This is as intriguing a question as how those sixteen words about Iraq's alleged pursuit of uranium in Africa became embedded in the State of the Union speech Bush delivered in early 2003.

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Don't forget about DAVID CORN's BLOG at http://www.davidcorn.com. Read recent postings on Ahmad Chalabi's weak defense, the Rove/Libby scandal, the slow Phase II review of prewar intellience, and other in-the-news matters.

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On the key issue of Saddam Hussein's alleged connection to al Qaeda, Bush also made statements that went beyond the intelligence. This link was crucial to the case for war, for Bush and other hawks were arguing that Saddam Hussein could slip his WMDs to his pal Osama bin Laden. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein was "dealing with" al Qaeda. But his intelligence agencies had not reached that conclusion. (And the 9/11 Commission later said there was no evidence of collusion between al Qaeda and Saddam.) So how did Bush come to make such a statement? Recently, Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat, released formerly classified material showing that before the war when Bush, Cheney, Colin Powell and other administration officials cited evidence that Iraq had been training al Qaeda operatives in the use of bombs and other weapons, Bush and these officials were relying on the statements of a captured al Qaeda member whose claims had been discounted by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Once more, how had Bush and his senior aides come to disseminate specific and provocative information deemed unreliable by the intelligence community?

Bush's Veterans Days comments addressed none of this.

They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein.

The people with the most hands-on information regarding WMDs in Iraq did not. The International Atomic Energy Agency, led by recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, concluded weeks before the war (after their inspectors had returned to Iraq) that Saddam Hussein had not revived the nuclear weapons program that the IAEA had dismantled in the mid-1990s. And Hans Blix, head of the UN inspectors in Iraq, repeatedly said that his team was not finding evidence of chemical or biological weapons stockpiles.

...And many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security." That's why more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate--who had access to the same intelligence--voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

As noted above, the Democrats voted to give Bush the authority to use force when he thought he should--but only after Bush had promised to go to the United Nations in an effort to disarm Saddam Hussein, who, it turned out, was telling the truth when he denied his government possessed WMDs. Even the John Kerry quote that Bush cites contains the to-disarm condition. And several Democratic members of Congress have claimed that they did not see all the intelligence that was available to the White House.

The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges.

It's hard to argue with that.

These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them. Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough.

Who said that "it's perfectly legitimate to criticize" the "decision [to go to war in Iraq] or the conduct of the war"? That was Bush, moments earlier, in the same speech. So which is it? Is it okay to criticize the conduct of the war or not?

By the way, while accusing his critics of falsifying history, Bush never conceded that he launched the war on a false premise--that Saddam Hussein was up to his neck in WMDs--and, thus, as he paid tribute to veterans of this war and others, he did not accept responsibility for sending American troops into battle for a cause that did not exist.

Saddam was a pretty bad dictator that needed removal, but I agree that there were other avenues to pursue. It seems to me that the world is worse off because of the manner in which we removed Saddam's punk ass. How did we fuck that up? "Here, we'll replace the shit with--diarrhea!"

What bothers me most is even though I was against the war, I'm responsible. It's part of being born in a country. The shit carried out in OUR name! I would love for Hannity's bitch-ass to call me Un-American to my face for not supporting the war. Once the war began, I had no choice but to support it--I pay taxes. Now I want it to end, if it even can. We're going to have to work harder and make some sacrifices in order for this to happen. These so-called patriots were "clamoring for war like it was a football game," (to quote Mike Miles, former Democratic Senate candidate from CO), and now where are they? Nobody wants any responsibility for their actions; for THEIR COUNTRY'S actions...

I'm sorry, I was just ranting. This shit pisses me off. We're at war, and nobody (myself included) knows what that means.

Well, to be fair, I think that if any military entity had removed Saddam, you'd still have a similiar mess that we have right now. Saddam brutally suppressed the ethnicities different from his cabal, but weirdly enough he also kept them from brutalizing each other.

In a way, oddly enough, you both are right. Saddam was a terrible dictator, and the world could always use less of those. However, how to remove such a figure without ensuing chaos and warfare? Perhaps, and this is an obvious case of 20/20 hindsight, our window of opportunity was the first Gulf War. We had an obvious case for war, as Saddam invaded and occupied another soveriegn state. There was an almost jingoistic amount of support globally for pushing the Iraqi military out of Kuwait and taking down the man responsible for the invasion. With broader support, far superior numbers of troops and a much better situation logistically-speaking (base usage in Turkey for example and support from a Kurdish population ripe for revolution), this may have been a cleaner operation then. Al-Qaida, while in existance, was not what it is today and did not have the influence it does now. If Saddam were to fall, and Iraq stablized into a different nation that it is today (a free Kurdistan as well?), the window in time was probably then instead of now. Once that opportunity slipped past, and Saddam was left in power, he was practically untouchable without the threat of major insurgecy and retaliation. Times have certainly changed.

The United States is not without hope. But it remains to be seen whether we have the resolve to finish off the insurgency and stay in Iraq long enough to see this through. It is eerily similar to long-term nation occupying efforts of the past by both the U.S. and Soviet Union, but it may not have to be that way. Unfortunately, the answers do not lie with the military men, but rather politicians. Can it be done? I think there is a good possibility. But will it be done?

This is a good example of our spineless politicians ducking their responsibilities. It's written in the constitution, (article 1, section 8 ) that congress has the responsibility to declare war. Whatever happened to that?



As everyone is well aware, I'm sure, the US is still at the North/South Korean border 52 years after the armistice. So what is going to be the outcome in Iraq if we can't beat the insurgents? They don't seem to be unified; who are we going to negotiate a cease fire with? Henry Kissinger said that it's not important in guerilla warfare to win the war, the guerillas just need to not lose. This is what we seem to be facing--endless war. Either we have to admit defeat and skedaddle, or we gotta throw everything we've got at 'em. Which is better?

Isn't the potential of the latter the reason for the former to be witheld?

According to Nir Rosen in December's Atlantic, "Turkey is more concerned EU membership than with Iraq's Kurds--who in any event have expressed no ambitions to expand into Turkey." He goes on to say, "Turkey, as a member of NATO, would be reluctant to attack in defiance of the United States."

That's just one guy's opinion, but he is an embedded journalist in Iraq. Of course, one shouldn't expect a country to necessarily follow their logic. Countries have a funny way of making decisions sometimes...

*Corrected.

We haven't formally declared war in over 60 years. Lousy semantics.

"Make no mistake. We are at war." - George W. Bush

Haha.

Whatever it is, it seems like war. Congress should grow a backbone and stay in control of these things. Since Korea, congress would rather one guy make the decision to use military force than collectively mull it over and give the thumbs up or thumbs down. War affects everyone in this country, and it should be a representative issue.

The Republican Congress has basically been a puppet operated by the White House since 2000 giving nothing but thumbs up to all his policies.

Absolutely. But the point that I'm trying to make is that we, the people, ought to demand that Congress be in charge of sending our troops to war--not give that responsibility to the president. It's their job, and it was written in the constitution that way for the sake of seperation of powers.

Word, the prez should definitely only start a conflict if an attack on ourselves or an ally is A underway or B imminent. When the build up to this shindig was months upon months, there's no reason to get Congress's okay AFTER the fact.

He still needs Democrats...

I have developed a very large problem with this whole Iraq deal. And it is this:

It seems to me that everyone involved from top to bottom played politics from the get-go, and thousands have lost their lives to it.

That’s my biggest frustration at this point. Everyone’s selfish political games. Everyone. It doesn’t matter what facet of the Iraq war you look at, it’s just mired in politics, politcal legacies, and personal gains.

If the Democrat’s had spines, or if the Democrats truly didn’t believe in what was handed to them, then they should have stood up for it. Instead, they all balked, and they played politics. At the time of the war, the idea of war was wildly popular with post 9-11 mentality. And instead of standing their moral ground, they played into Bush, trying to feed off of his popularity, and perhaps show bi-partisanship. And even if they stood against Bush in the run up to the war, it STILL would have been politics.

The French, the Germans, the Russians, they were all playing politics. Looking out for themselves and their selfish business needs.

Hell, Kofi Annan and his boy were playing politics.

And fuck, Bush played politics. It would seem to me that a lot of the things that I thought Bush would never do, happened. I always said in the run up to the war that there had to be WMD’s. Bush was playing politics. He was trying to continue to build his legacy, and this was going to be the next notch in his belt. I figured there was absolutely no way that Bush would make the political gamble of his life. As I looked at it, there had to be WMD’s in Iraq, because there was no way Bush would make that kind of gamble.

I think we need to be a little more fair. We did find some old WMD’s in Iraq. Not many. Not to the extent at which it was sold. And we also need to keep in mind that Saddam was incredible decieving in the run-up to the war. Facts go against Jacktor unfortunately. Saddam was hiding a lot of shit. He did have the capacity to ramp up a significant chemical and biological weapons program. The infrastructure was already there, it was just used commercially. There was all kinds of illegal stuff found pertaining to his chemical weapons and biological weapons programs. It was all hidden from the UN too. Saddam also posessed the capacity to hit Israel. He was hiding unmanned drones, and medium range ballistic missiles. Saddam did have connections to Al-Queda, and provided a safe haven for some of it’s top members (Zarqawi anybody?). Saddam did have terrorist training camps, one state sponsored (Salman Pak), and Ansar al Islam, the left hand of Al Queda, was all over the place in Iraq. Not just in Kurdistan, but in the south as well. Saddam was doing nothing to stop terrorism from festering in his nation. How many camps were found altogether? Let us also not forget Saddam’s financial and material assistance to Palestinian terrorist groups which was very, very significant.

Saddam did lie. He played politics, waging that his troops would hold out and that Bush didn’t have the balls to play ball. Well, because of his refusal to cooperate and admit what he was doing, a lot of people died.

My other problem with Bush lies in the fact that he didn’t wait long enough. I mean, in all seriousness, he could have waited a few more months. A few more months would have debunked the Niger Yellow Cake memo. It would have debunked some of the “reliable” sources that we had in regards to WMD intelligence, that we have since found to be unreliable. Among other major pieces of information. We acted without verification. However, I feel that waiting for the inspectors was still a pointless joke and waste of time and human resources. But, those particular pieces of information should have been verified if you’re trying to sell a fucking war.

And now, we continue to play politics. While people are dying, the troop level’s are presently being dictated by politics. If we pull out, some people won’t like it, and if we were to up the troop levels, other’s wouldn’t like it. So we remain at 135,000, a number that either way you slice it, is not working.

What I find so odd, is how in agreement everyone is with the fact that Saddam needed to go for a multitude of reasons. Not finding massive stockpiles of WMD’s doesn’t discount that fact. I wonder if the war would have been sold to us on different terms, if political opinion would be different now, and if the tide would have been any different. If Bush would have said, “we’re gonna do it to save the people, to mitigate the threat to Israel, and the potential threat that exists to America and our allies.”

I still agree with the concept. Saddam needed to go, period, and he wasn’t cooperating. We needed the show of force. We needed to show governments that we wouldn’t stand for bullshit. We couldn’t balk at that point. On top of that, we need reform across the broad section of the middle east. In my opinion, there is no more important strategic location in the fight on terror than Iraq. You have a “functioning” democracy in Afghanistan now (save that debate for another day.) You have a cooperating Pakistan. Then in the middle of the middle east, you have the potential for another Democracy, that borders Iran and Saudi Arabia, not to mention Turkey. We now have Jordan on board as our allies, and Libya is cooperating with us. Positive steps have been attained through this war. Positive steps that would have never occurred without it. Having a free, functioning Democracy in Iraq will be the key if reform is to ever occur in Iran or Saudi Arabia.

But, I still feel that the whole politics from everybody has marred something that could have been much better on so many levels.