> Actually, a large part of the justification for te war was based on the > fact that Iraq was continuing to pursue the acquisition of WMD's - > particularly nuclear weapons - and not that it necessarily already had > nuclear weapons. Moreover, I also recall Colin Powell mentioning mobile > biological weapons *production* facilities in his speech to the UN - again > reference to a program, rather than the acual weapons themselves, during > the justification period.
But this is such a difficult thing to judge. We think that he may develop weapons and we think that if he has them he will use them. That is not the impression that the government gave us. It presented its case of a threat that was much more imminent. Once again I am not personally arguing against the war. Its timing could have been better but that is a quibble. We had two very good reasons to go there. To get rid of a monster and to demonstrate to the arab world that we were serious and that our power could and would be turned on them if they supported terror. So what is my complaint? They did not do this the right way. Seems pretty trivial that I would complain about the style rather than the substance. The problem for me is that this is perhaps the only thing that the administration has done that find acceptable. All of the other stuff; taxes, environment, social justice, religous freedom, scientific research unfettered by religous ideology. The administration uses the same deception (read lying) to present its cases for these policies. Let me give just one well known example: The benefit of the tax cut to average citizens. The government used the mean tax cut (the average of all tax cuts) rather than the median tax cut (the tax cut for the average american). This simple statistics. It is such and egregous error that it must count as the most cynical manipulation of the truth. As I have said before it is the same technique that Clinton used to much more harmful effect. The stem cell "compromise" is another example. The administration vastly overestimated the number of viable cell lines available for research despite good information to the contrary. But it is more than the fact that the administration practices deception on a massive scale. It is that it believes its own lies. The administration has a narrow view of the world (e.g tax cuts are always good, any "tampering" with human fetuses is bad)and a belief that this view is the only correct view. Therefore only those facts fit the world view are allowed and any and all exagerations are excused since it all leads to the ultimate final good, a country and a world with one ideology. > We already have one smoking gun that indicated that Iraq merely buried its > nuclear program, not dismantled it as required. More like a smoking swiss army knife. Look I don't think there is any sense amoung Bush's critics that Iraq wanted a nuclear arsenal. But the critics said that the 91 war and the sanctions had so degraded Sadaam's nuclear program that even under the best of circumstances (best for Sadaam) he was years away from doing anything. The buried components of the nuclear program are sign of how moribund that program had become. 10 year old stuff buried in someone's backyard does not constitute and imminent threat to the world. > > Moreover, given the past record of our intelligence on predicting the > acquisition of nuclear weapons by a country accurately, this fear was > certainly very real. > >So let me get this straight. The government doesn't trust our intelligence services >(it trusts the brits a bit more than our own guys) so we go to war? Seems that CIA >was pretty accurate about what it knew and did not know.
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