--- Doug Pensinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I respect your opinion, and understand that this is > the way you understand > the situation. I hope that you can read the > following and try to > understand the reasons I disagree with you and > perhaps try to convince me > that I'm wrong in a manner commensurate with your > intelligence (for which > I have the utmost respect.) Please consider that > the opinions below are > not just my own; tens of millions of Americans are > asking similar > questions and coming to similar conclusions. So no > matter how much you > dislike me, these are questions that can not be > avoided by supporters of > the Bush administration.
I don't dislike you at all Doug. But I have become increasingly uncomfortable discussing politics on this list, because it seems to me that there are a fair number of people who really, really hate the President. Not disagree with the President, _hate_ the President. It's sort of like when Howard Dean was in the Democratic debate and kept referring to President Bush as "the enemy." No, he's not, and if you think of him that way, then we do have a problem. Osama Bin Laden is the enemy. Assad, maybe. Various people in Saudi Arabia. But President Bush is the President of the United States. I don't agree with everything that he's done. You apparently agree with nothing that he's done. But that doesn't make him evil, and it shouldn't in your eyes. > > I've read compelling testimony that the > administration stovepiped > intelligence in order to build the case for war. > This week Tenat said > that "analysts never said there was an imminent > threat" yet prior to the > war, Administration officials including the > President repeatedly made the > case that there was (quotes available upon request.) First, the President _never_ used the word imminent to describe the threat. Not ever. Second, "stovepiped" is a description of American intelligence pretty much all the time. I can recall meetings with Cabinet and sub-Cabinet level officials in 1998, 1999, 2001 and 2002 in which they described the principal problem of American intelligence organization as "stovepiping". So Tenet's description was one of an institutional problem, not of something the Administration did. But, more than that, the case that the Administration made was indistinguishable or _more conservative_ from the beliefs of other governments. Thanks to the Hutton Inquiry, we now know beyond any doubt that the Blair government was entirely honest in its presentation of the facts. We also know, interestingly enough, that it was opponents of the war - the ones complaining loudest about Administration lies - who were in fact faking stories to discredit the war effort. One can wonder why so-called liberals were do desperate to save Saddam Hussein. But that's neither here nor there - just an aside. But the Blair government agreed with the Administration's threat assessment. The German government publicly stated that they believed that Saddam was _6 months_ away from acquiring nuclear weapons. The French government agreed that Saddam had WMDs. Everyone agreed that Saddam had WMDs. There wasn't any real debate on the topic. Even if you limit yourself to American intelligence, the Clinton Administration believed the exact same things that the Bush Administration does. In fact, Bill Clinton himself has repeatedly said - most recently in Davos just a few weeks ago - that he believed that Saddam had WMDs. Which, of course, we know that he did. We just don't know what happened to them. So we were wrong. We were wrong in Libya too, but in the exact opposite direction. We had _no idea_ that their WMD program was advanced as it was. Had we been wrong in the other direction in Iraq, would that have been preferable? > Somewhere in there, > the truth has been compromised. So: 1) Do you deny > that the > administration made misleading statements? 2) If > you do, how do you > explain the conflict between Tenet's statement and > the administration's > statements prior to the invasion? 3) If not, are > you saying that the > administration lied to accommodate the U.N.? I've covered the first three questions, I think. The Administration made arguments that not only did _it_ believe, _every other government in the world_ believed as well. No one thought Saddam did not have WMDs. The Administration conveyed the threat as well as it knew it, and _no one disputed the truth of that threat_. They just disputed whether it was worth doing something about it. 4)> How do you explain the > statements by O’Neil and others that the > Administration was determined to > take out Hussein from their first day in office? O'Neill was well answered by Michael Kinsley who - by his own statement - hates George Bush. All O'Neill showed was that there were meetings before 9/11 discussing regime change. This is not a surprise - the Bush Administration was legally compelled, by nearly unanimous vote of the Congress, to seek regime change. It was a stated goal of the Clinton Administration. O'Neill was horrifyingly, stunningly naive about Washington, and the strongest indictment you can make against the Administration is that it was dumb enough to hire someone so incompetent. I quote: "O'Neill seems genuinely surprised to discover that Bush actually does intend to cut taxes (as he promised repeatedly in his campaign); that the administration wants "regime change" in Iraq (as did the previous administration and almost everyone else in the world�the question was what to do about it)". Everyone wanted regime change. Everyone understood that there was only one way to do it. The only difference between the Bush Administration and its opponents was that it was honest enough to admit this, and brave enough to do something. Those are generally thought of as virtues, not sins. The fact that some opponents of the war deny these two undeniable truths - that regime change was a goal of the US government before the Bush Administration (again, something that we were legally committed to by a vote of Congress and by many public statements from the Clinton Administration) and that there was only one way to do it (invading Iraq) - is why people like me no longer have faith in _their_ good intentions. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
