He could have done bad stuff!
George W. Bush in a speech today once again attempted to convince people that his invasion of Iraq was justified.
“We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take,” Bush said.
So if any country is an “enemy of America” and merely has the ability to make WMDs, that’s enough justification to invade them? Even if we can’t prove they are actively being malicious? Seems like we should be really busy, then, invading places like Iran and North Korea. Why aren’t we? What makes Iraq so special that we’d decide to invade there instead of anywhere else?
Bush also claimed that Saddam refused to open his country to inspections, which was yet another reason to invade. However, in February of 2003, just a month before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Hans Blix reported exactly the opposite. His statement to the U.N. clearly indicated that Iraq was very cooperative with the inspectors, and that with full cooperation, the period of disarmament through inspection could be short. I guess that was just too long for Bush.
Once again, Bush seems to think that if he repeats something enough, it’ll become true. Unfortunately, the facts aren’t on his side, and he can’t change history to make them so. This war was precipitated on faulty and dishonest reasoning. A recent Senate Intelligence Committee report states that the CIA vastly overstated the threat of WMDs in Iraq, and Bush swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.
Bush once famously said, “Fool me once, shame on … shame on you. It… fool me. We can’t get fooled again” in reference to the fact that Saddam has managed to remain in power for over a decade since the first Gulf War. Well, it sounds like you’ve been fooled again, Mr. Bush. This time, though, it was the CIA’s faulty intelligence that got you. Yet, somehow, I, and millions of others like me, weren’t fooled into believing war was justified. Why not? Maybe we just weren’t eager to all be “war presidents.”
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How interesting that you say, of Bush, that he “seems to think that if he repeats something enough, it’ll become true,” when you and other people of your political persuasion do exactly the same thing. (I’d bring up the 2000 election as an example, but I can’t bear to get into it again right now.) But, since it’s okay for President Bill Clinton and other Democrats to state in 1998 that Saddam Hussein is developing weapons of mass destruction and he needs to be taken care of, but it’s not okay for President Bush to say that in 2003, I suppose I really shouldn’t be surprised.
Anyway, I’d like to encourage you to read http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/ledeen/ledeen200407120941.asp and http://windsofchange.net/archives/005191.php for information about what’s really in the report, a fair amount of which hasn’t really been accurately reported elsewhere. If you don’t trust those sites (and I’m guessing you probably won’t), the report itself can be found online at http://intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf.
Matthew,
I think maybe you missed my point. I’m saying that Bush wasn’t actively trying to fool the American people into going to war. He was just eager to go to war, and the CIA’s problematic intelligence gave him reason to do it.
Those links do seem to provide good, concrete analyses of the report, and seem to support my point: the CIA’s intelligence on WMDs in Iraq was incorrect. Bush based his argument for invading Iraq on the fact that they illegally had WMDs. Hence, the war was precipitated on faulty reasoning.
I’ve never addressed the issue of Clinton’s views on Iraq, since I’ve only really been paying attention to politics since the 2000 election. But I think it’s perfectly fine for Clinton to have said that Saddam was developing WMDs and that he needs to be taken care of, because he didn’t then proceed to use any excuse he could find to start a war, putting hundreds of thousands of people in harm’s way and causing the deaths of tens of thousands of them.
I object to Bush saying it now because he’s just reaching for an excuse to have fought a war that shouldn’t have been. At some point, he ought to just come clean and say that he was misled, that his original reasons for going to war were incorrect. Yes, it’s a good thing that Saddam is out of power; you won’t find many people who disagree with that. The method used to remove him from power is what’s wrong.
Bush made it very clear from the beginning that although Saddam might not have been a threat now (this first part was said very softly), he might be a threat in 1 or 5 or 1000 years if we didn’t bomb the crap out of him.
Matthew Murray is a bit disingenuous in his fury. Yes, Clinton did claim that Saddam was developing WMDs in 1998. But Clinton decided that “he needs to be taken care of” meant bombing raids not a disastrous full-fledged invasion, conquest and Occupation.