Kevin Bjornson wrote: KB) an area (foreign policy) where he claims special expertise. (KB
BH) I do? When? (BH KB) My understanding is that you are proposing two resolutions for the next LP convention, one urging that president Bush be impeached, the other calling for a rapid and unconditional withdrawal from Iraq. (KB It doesn't take any special expertise to demand that the Constitution <http://knowinghumans.net/2007/11/impeach-george-w-bush.html> be obeyed, and that America leave Iraq after achieving <http://knowinghumans.net/2007/11/model-lp-resolution-on-foreign.html> its war aims. BH) My resolution doesn't say he [Bush] "lied". (BH KB) "pretenses" overlaps considerably with "lies": 1. The act of pretending; a false appearance or action intended to deceive. 2. A false or studied show; an affectation: a pretense of nonchalance. 3. A professed but feigned reason or excuse; a pretext: under false pretenses. (KB My meaning is of course (3) -- the one in which falsehood is not built into the meaning (or else "false pretense" would be redundant). Iraqi WMDs were Bush's pretext. His pretext was indeed (as I called it) "recklessly or negligently false". I leave it as an open question whether or how much he knew it was false. KB) Bush did not say that Saddam had nukes in his possession. (KB I didn't say he did. KB) your factual basis for alleging pretense is unfounded. (KB You haven't seen my factual basis. Maybe you should argue with Bush, who said: "I fully understand that the intelligence was wrong, and I'm just as disappointed as everybody else is." And if you think WMD were found in Iraq, you should argue with the Pentagon's Iraq Survey Group, who wrote: "While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter." Your claim about uranium is not to be found in their 19-page summary of key findings, which generally included as many post hoc justifications for the invasion as it could. KB) did you really expect to find large quantities of WMD in Iraq (KB Bush and Cheney evidently did. KB) after Bush foolishly gave Saddam the exact hour of the invasion, and plenty of time to move them to Syria? (KB If Bush's timing really did predictably lead to the transfer of Iraqi WMDs into the hands of an arguably worse sponsor of terrorism, that would be even more impeachable than his mishandling of WMD intelligence.
