The shrub didn't lie?

[Another Bill C.]

What do you think"
http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20031103.html

My e-mail to the author:
Your article on "imminent threat" points out how the people in power have made a science of enthymematics. This gives them the benefit of false inference on the part of the public and deniability for the implication. You serve them well.

[HFishbine]

1. Once again, this misses the point

Okay, so Bush never uttered the phrase "imminent threat." Fine. Then, if we were in no imminent danger, why did we go to war?

[Wellong]

2. Well

to listen to his lock step supporters, to prevent him from becoming a threat. Well, Canada isnt a threat at this time...

[Catholic Sensation]

3. silly

because we wanted to help the iraqi people. Bush is a humanist-populist man who deserves the Noble Peace Prize, like Kissinger did!

[Qutzupalotl]

4. 45 minutes is not imminent.

It's a darned long time.

{/sarcasm}

[Catholic Sensation]

5. Well 45 minutes can seem like a long time

in some things ;)

[ma4t]

8. reasons? get your reasons here

Two points:

1. In point of fact, Bush actually did use the phrase "imminent threat" in his state of the union address. However; he used it to say that the U.S. could not afford to wait until the threat was imminent. In other words, he explicitly accepted the argument of the anti-war advocates that there was no imminent threat.

2. "...if we were in no imminent danger, why did we go to war?" There were several reasons. In no particular order they were:
a. Iraq actively aided and sheltered terrorists.
b. Saddam was a dispicable tyrant and the people of Iraq needed to be freed from his rule.
c. Iraq was a regional threat.
d. Iraq had repeatedly failed to honor its commitments and many U.N. resolutions on disarmement made as a condition of the Gulf War cease-fire.

An honest reading of history over the past 15-20 years will show that (a) through (d) above are true. Whether or not they justifed the war is another debate. One would be hard-pressed to come up with a consistent, principled rationale for war that excluded Iraq yet justified Haiti and Kosovo.

[Sick of Bullshit]

9. An "honest reading of history"?

Maybe you should try an honest reading yourself.

a. Iraq actively aided and sheltered terrorists.

Name a terrorist group he actively aided and/or sheltered.

b. Saddam was a dispicable tyrant and the people of Iraq needed to be freed from his rule.

Saddam was supported by the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, when it was well known that he was a tyrant. The right wing has supported all sorts of other tyrants over the years, including Marcos, Pinochet, the Shah, Rios Mott, Galtieri, Batista, Samoza, and a host of others.

c. Iraq was a regional threat.

So is Israel. But unlike Israel, Iraq had not attacked a neighbor in the past 12 years. And it is obvious that after its drubbing in 1991, Iraq was not about to try to invade another country.

d. Iraq had repeatedly failed to honor its commitments and many U.N. resolutions on disarmement made as a condition of the Gulf War cease-fire.

Once again, Iraq obviously had no major weapons, otherwise they would have been used once the coalition forces crossed the frontier from Kuwait into Iraq. And no prohibited weapons have been found.

[HFishbine]

10. Thanks SOB

Saved me the trouble.

[ma4t]

11. Honest reading of history.

To attempt to answer the questions raised by Sick_of_Bullshit when s/he said, "Maybe you should try an honest reading yourself."

OK, here goes:

a. Iraq actively aided and sheltered terrorists.

Name a terrorist group he actively aided and/or sheltered.

>>> Payments to suicide bombers, support of Hamas and providing shelter to Abu Nidal would seem to count to me. How would you characterize those?

b. Saddam was a dispicable tyrant and the people of Iraq needed to be freed from his rule.

Saddam was supported by the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, when it was well known that he was a tyrant. The right wing has supported all sorts of other tyrants over the years, including Marcos, Pinochet, the Shah, Rios Mott, Galtieri, Batista, Samoza, and a host of others.

>>> Granting that what you say is true, and personally I think much of it is, none of it is a refutation of point (b) above. Thus I will conclude that you concede that point.

c. Iraq was a regional threat.

So is Israel. But unlike Israel, Iraq had not attacked a neighbor in the past 12 years. And it is obvious that after its drubbing in 1991, Iraq was not about to try to invade another country.

>>> It appears that by saying, "So is Israel," you are conceding this point as well.

d. Iraq had repeatedly failed to honor its commitments and many U.N. resolutions on disarmement made as a condition of the Gulf War cease-fire.

Once again, Iraq obviously had no major weapons, otherwise they would have been used once the coalition forces crossed the frontier from Kuwait into Iraq. And no prohibited weapons have been found.

>>> Iraq may or may not have had any "major weapons". The U.N. resolutions and the cease-fire agreement did not say, "Iraq isn't allowed to have major weapons." Rather they required Iraq to allow unfettered inspections, to observe no-fly zones, to not attempt to molest coalition aircraft overflying the no-fly zones, etc. If Iraq was complying with all the cease-fire agreements why did President Clinton launch the massive cruise missle strikes there during his administration? Do you honestly want to claim that Iraq actually was honoring the U.N. resolutions and the cease-fire agreements? I thought not.



>>> Now for the bonus round, would you like to take up the challenge to offer a consistent, principled rationale for war that excludes the Iraqi war but justifies Kosovo and Haiti? Please take a shot at it. It should prove interesting.

[Fixated]

17. ....

Well in Kosovo there was no extensive ground war, fucknut, so we lost NO ONE. That's less controversial, don't ya think?

Also, Saddam gave payments to families of suicides bombers, not the bombers themselves. Obviously, the bombers are dead.

[MadMan]

20. Woooooaaaaaa Ma4t! Hold on a second cowboy...

You seem to be disregarding the fact that none of the reasons you outlined above were given for invading Iraq. Remember? It was a pre-emptive strike which by its very definition means the cabal viewed SH as an "imminent threat?"

You may be correct on some of your arguments (I don't care to go tit-for-tat point-by-point like some other posters) but really everything you've brought up is beside the point.

If the presIdiot had presented it to the American people as a humanitarian effort he would have gotten the support of pretty much everybody in the country. However, as has been well documented by now, he chose to lie.

[ma4t]

21. to address your points

First to "fixated":

The happy fact that we lost no KIA in Kosovo is hardly a justification for going to war there. I would hope we have not reached the point where folks think it is OK to initiate a war provided we take no casualties. Did you really mean to imply such?

Let me ask the question again. Can you put forward any consistent, principled rationale for war that will justify Kosovo and Haiti while not justifying Iraq? If so please do so. I would truly like to hear it. If you cannot, that's OK too; but please don't get mad at me for pointing out that its hard to do.



Next to "Madman":

"... none of the reasons you outlined above were given for invading Iraq." I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. I swear that I thought I remembered Bush and his cohorts talking about the plight of the Iraqi people prior the the invasion. I also thought that there were several speaches at the U.N. about the lack of compliance by Iraq but I guess I just imagined that, too.

[MadMan]

22. Never said it in the context of a reason to invade Iraq

*THE* reason was WMD and in turn, the "imminent threat" that SH and said WMD were to the US.

Of course, I'll consider any linked evidence you can provide to the contrary.

[NicoleM]

12. Nope.

We went to war because they had huge stockpiles of WMD and they were ready and willing to use them against us or give them to terraists to use against us. And they were going to have nukes any minute now, and we couldn't afford to wait until the smoking gun was a mushroom cloud.

THAT'S why we went to war.

[MadMan]

19. EXACTLY!!! This is unbelievable.

Only an idiot or a freeper (redundant, I know) could believe that we pre-emptively struck a sovereign nation that WASN'T an "imminent threat."

That is the very definition of a "pre-emptive strike." Sriking them before they strike us.

Holy crap. Some people are very very stupid. Have you noticed the lengths that the wingnuts will go to in order to avoid the truth?

A good analogy (IMO): I tell somebody that I have a box that's 1" x 1" x 1" and it weighs less than an ounce. Then that person goes around saying I said I had a "small box." Would I insist that I never actually said I had a "small box?" That's how ridiculous the argument is about the presIdiot never having said the words "imminent threat."

Hey morans out there in the Red states, he didn't have to say a word. Once he pre-emptively struck Iraq, "imminent threat" became a given.

[Snellius]

6. Bush Doctrine: anything possible is imminent

The whole premise of the Bush Doctrine -- "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" -- is that any potential threat is considered as an immediate threat.

[William Seger]

7. "The shrub didn't lie?" Of course he lied, repeatedly

I think it was Andrew Sullivan who started this "Bush never said 'imminent threat'" horseshit, but given the nature of the reactionary echo chamber, it's hard to say. Anyway, it's nothing but a ludicrous and idiotic attempt to distract attention from the fact that virtually everything the administration did say about Iraq was a bald-faced lie.

By showing that nobody in the administration actually used the term "imminent threat", what Sullivan has really done is prove that BushCo knew they were starting an illegal and immoral war. So much for "moral clarity", Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan likes to say that BushCo's argument was merely that Iraq was a "grave and growing threat", which still has two rather serious problems: 1) it's still an outrageous, bald-faced lie; 2) to say that the country that has the most powerful army is entitled to redefine international law is equivalent to saying that "international law" is a totally meaningless term.

[Cat Atomic]

13. We never said it was an imminent threat. We said Iraq was in

violation of a UN resolution demanding it give up it's WMD's.

Huh? No WMD's?

Oh- well, I meant to say that we invaded in order to liberate the Iraqi people.

Eh? What do you mean, "they want us to leave"? Fuck that. We'll "mow the place down", as Lott suggested.

To liberate it.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

[central scrutinizer]

14. John Marshall has chapter and verse

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

scroll down a couple of paragraphs

excerpt:

More in contention are the quotes from the president’s spokesmen at the time. Did they think the president was arguing there was an imminent threat? The evidence here is awfully clear. Three examples from my Hill column …

Last October, a reporter put this to Ari Fleischer: “Ari, the president has been saying that the threat from Iraq is imminent, that we have to act now to disarm the country of its weapons of mass destruction, and that it has to allow the U.N. inspectors in, unfettered, no conditions, so forth.”
Fleischer’s answer? “Yes.”

In January, Wolf Blitzer asked Dan Bartlett: “Is an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home.”
Bartlett’s answer? “Well, of course he is.”

A month after the war, another reporter asked Fleischer, “Well, we went to war, didn’t we, to find these — because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States? Isn’t that true?”

Fleischer’s answer? “Absolutely.”

[DakotaDemocrat]

15. Talkingpointsmemo.com.

CS -

You beat me to it by the hair on my chimpy-cin-chin! Thanks for posting!


Edit - taking out the post that is similar to #14

[LiberalTradition]

16. Yea Yea everyone who disagrees with you is either brainwashed,

ignorant, evil, or a brainwasher.

As the writer notes the body of evidence is that Bush did not portray Iraq as an imminent threat.

Who cares? Imminent. Lied. Mistaken. What difference.

What we do know is that he was wrong. The CIA was wrong. Our policy was primarily based on a false premise.

That is unassailablely correct. That is enough for grave concern and criticism. Why muddy the waters with ultimately unknowable claims regarding Bush's intent and foreknowledge and very weak claims regarding imminence?

Just curious?

[mmonk]

18. When the intention is to deceive by leading language

its a lie, plain and simple. They're playing semantics games.