From: "Robert J. Chassell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Bryon Daly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
Seriously, if the admin actually was trying to craft a believable lie that would not blow up in their faces, don't you think they'd do a better job of it, and have all their ducks lined up, i's dotted, t's crossed, etc.?
Please tell me why the Administration did not have the US Army search through its then list of feared sites in the latter part of April?
I don't know. It seems like a good, valid question that's worth asking. It seems to me that real questions like this have been lost in the flood of "Bush LIED!!!" media coverage.
It is this lack of a search that leads many people to think the Administration was not being competent. This is the problem.
Maybe or maybe not. It is worth putting the question to the administration. (I'm personally willing to reserve judgement on it until I hear both sides.)
It might seem like it at times, but I do not consider myself a Bush partisan; but I am pro-war and think it's critical for us to succeed in rebuilding Iraq as a successful democracy. My main points for getting involved with this thread was that it appeared to me that the Bush Lied accusations and then calls for his impeachment were trumped-up, which had the effect of 1) hurting the US goal of rebuilding Iraq by trying to make the Iraq invasion seem groundless and illegitimate (based just on a single disputable sentence), and 2) distracting focus from the real forward-going issues such as the handling of Iraq's reconstruction.
Hopefully the Administration was wrong before the war, or was lying. Hopefully there was nothing dangerous in those sites, or anywhere else.
I don't think they were lying. Maybe they were wrong, but I just can't think of a good reason why Saddam would sacrifice/risk so much (in terms of sanctions and later the threat of US invasion) to thwart the WMD inspections for years, if he didn't actually have/want them any more. Also if he had destroyed the WMD the UN *knew* he had prior to kicking the inspectors out, why would he not have kept records/proof/evidence of this?
My pet theory I haven't seen anyone else propose yet: When it became apparent that the US was starting to set its sights back on Iraq, Saddam read the writing on the wall, and started destroying all evidence of his WMDs in advance, with the thought that once the US forced inspectors back in, if they actually found anything, Bush would have his smoking gun for implementing regime change.
Suppose the Administration were not lying -- Gautam keeps saying this. Suppose the Bush Administration were telling the truth, as best they understood it.
If this is true, then we have a different question: perhaps the Administration is not poor at lying -- an inadequacy we would expect of honest men and women -- but is simply incompetent.
Suppose the Administration was truthful. That does not take away the problem. We still have the very serious questions of why the Army did not search the sites on its list in the latter half of April, why US took so long to create a new local government after its first attempt failed, why it has taken so long to admit to and get a handle on the guerilla war, and why the cost of the occupation is higher than said before. (The cost is now running at nearly a billion US dollars a week -- an amount that is greater than the humanitarian money the US, according to John, is supplying to Afganistan over the year.)
All valid questions. I do think it is a huge, daunting task, though, so I'm somewhat willing to be patient as long as the process is reasonably transparent and accountable. Germany and Japan took years to reconstruct, and I don't think we can expect Iraq to happen any quicker, really. IMHO, we need to be engaged for the long haul, accept that fact and resist those on both political sides that want to bail out before the job is done.
(It goes without saying that no one expects perfection. Everyone makes mistakes. That is why you nurture organizations and critics and independent people within them to detect problems and learn quickly. That is why you have Plans B, C, and D. But regardless of that, politically, the point in choosing one set of people over another for an Administration is that the better set is supposed to make fewer big mistakes.)
If you and Gautam are right, the question is not whether the Bush Administration were telling the truth as best they could, but whether they are sufficiently competent enough to `build nations' and otherwise defend the US.
Yes, and I sincerely hope they are! I think the consequences of failure would be high. Sadly, I also think there are some people who would prefer to see the US fail in Iraq to discredit Bush rather than have the US succeed when that would benefit Bush.
-bryon
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