More from Christopher Hitchens on the ridiculous "Bush lied" meme that the MSM is trying to rehabilitate both themselves and the Democratic Party with:
"What do you have to believe in order to keep alive your conviction that the Bush administration conspired to launch a lie-based war? As with (I admit) the pro-war case, the ground of argument has a tendency to shift. I saw two examples in Washington last week. An exceptionally moth-eaten and shabby picket line outside Ahmad Chalabi's event on Wednesday featured a man with a placard alleging that Bush had prearranged the 9/11 attacks. I know a number of left and right anti-warriors who have flirted with this possibility but very few who truly believe it. (Even Gore Vidal, who did at one point insinuate the idea, has recently withdrawn it, if only on the grounds of the administration's incompetence.)
But then there is the really superb pedantry and literal-mindedness on which the remainder of the case depends. This achieved something close to an apotheosis on the front page of the Washington Post on Nov. 12, where Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus brought complete gravity to bear. Is it true, as the president claimed in his Veterans Day speech, that Congress saw the same intelligence sources before the war, and is it true that independent commissions have concluded that there was no willful misrepresentation? Top form was reached on the inside page:
But in trying to set the record straight, [Bush] asserted: "When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support."The October 2002 joint resolution authorized the use of force in Iraq, but it did not directly mention the removal of Hussein from power.
A prize, then, for investigative courage, to Milbank and Pincus. They have identified the same problem, though this time upside down, as that which arose from the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, during the Clinton-Gore administration, in 1998. That legislation—which passed the Senate without a dissenting vote—did expressly call for the removal of Saddam Hussein but did not actually mention the use of direct U.S. military force.
Let us suppose, then, that we can find a senator who voted for the 1998 act to remove Saddam Hussein yet did not anticipate that it might entail the use of force, and who later voted for the 2002 resolution and did not appreciate that the authorization of force would entail the removal of Saddam Hussein! Would this senator kindly stand up and take a bow? He or she embodies all the moral and intellectual force of the anti-war movement."
Wow. Two of the vaunted Washington Post's big league, big name journos (and 90% of the nationally elected Democrats) absolutely stripped naked with two paragraphs. Read the whole thing.
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Bush did lie. In general, he lied by continuously saying that he and his CIA were more sure of Iraq's WMD than they were, and hiding the doubts. If you insist on parsing a specific sentence for the lie in a legalesque Clinton style, it was in the same speech that he used the "smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud" line, when he used the words "I know" to describe his certainty about centrifugal tubes, when at that time he was aware that the tubes in question where probably small rocket tubes.
Personally, I don't fall for the legalistic argument. I know when you have tried to hornschwogle me, and I don't forget it.
He lied just as much as Clinton lied. In Clinton's case, his lie cemented Newt's controll of the Congress and assured us that spending would be kept under control. We can only hope that the neo-con Rovian big spenders get similarly hamstrung, and some real conservatives take over the purse strings.
This was not a lie that deceived many Americans. A big part of American understood perfectly that his was a cheerleader's lie, whipping up the troops for what they thought was an easy victory, and participated in it. This blog and the Permian Basin are filled with people who shreiked it like teenagers at a high school pep rally. In fact, the same Democrats who are attacking him for it now mostly went along with the lie, and in many cases repeated it. The fact that so many people knew it was a lie and said nothing makes me feel less bothered by it -- it's almost like telling a little a kid there is a Santa Claus. All the folks wanted to believe there was a nuclear Sadaam, why not let them ?
But we all knew that Iraq was a third world shithole that couldn't build a nuke at the time. I knew it, and all I do is read the web and the occasional newspaper. Only one of my pro-war friends would bet money that nukes would be found, and then only a token $2 to save face. (Doesn't even come close to making up the massive loses I had to him over UT's football games later that fall.)
It is a bit unfair that as a big chunk of voters decides the whole fantasy is getting too expensive, even to put on their grandkid's credit cards, they may kick the Republicans out of Congress and replace them with equally guilty Democrats.
If you participated in this nonsense, then I suggest you preserve your soul's chances at the afterlife by doing the following:
1) take the total cost of the war, and divide it by the number of people who vote for W in 2004. This is your individual responsibility.
2) Follow the directions here to write a check and pay your debt:
http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdfaq.htm#opdfaq42
Now, if we can also get the ones who didn't support W in 2004 to pony up for monsterous social programs they are responsible for, and cap it off by voting out both the Republicans and Democrats in 2006 in favor of honest independents, this country will have taken a first step on the road to recovery.
R, you type real well, even when obviously trembling.
As far as your beef with so-called fiscally conservative Republicans, both local and national, I think that you should find enough text in the pages of this blog to see that we too have been unhappy about their actions not matching their rhetoric.
As far as your arguments on Iraq: The WMD Only argument doesn't work on anyone that has read....well....anything at all. It is a cheap, press-fed meme that is obliterated by anyone who has the will and the time for two Google searches.
You obviously have the latter...and just as obviously lack the former.
You guys are great about catching local boondoggles that enrich the local businessmen and developers. But if W's Federal government rips you off to the same tune to enrich bigger corporations, nary a peep.
As far as the "WMDs only": Bush and more than half America, including most Democrats, DID have more stated reasons to go to war in Iraq than WMDs. But it was WMDs that we can't deny having lied about. Of course we also lied about Iraq having connections to Osama, etc etc, but the WMDs are the smoking no-mushroom-cloud. That's the lie where we GOT CAUGHT. The reason why we told that lie, of course, was that the other lies weren't good enough to fool ourselves into the right mouth-frothing pep rally mood to get our war on.
Note how W's recent defenses of the WMD intelligence stuff focus on a "but everybody was doing it" strategy -- he points out all the Democrats that voted for it also. In that he is ENTIRELY CORRECT. During the election, Kerry refused to say that he would not have voted for the war knowing what he knew now about WMDs. You know why ? Because ( this is pure conspiracy theory conjecture on my part of course, or at least a wild guess ) there exist recorded secret intelligence briefings in which Kerry and the other major Democrats were informed of the full non-extent of our WMD intelligence, and Rove would arrange to have those leaked if they try to claim that they were mislead by the Bush administration.
And rightly so, of course. I hope some Democrats other than the scrappy know-nothing backbenchers come out and directly claim, "I would not have voted for Iraq if W hadn't lied to me", and get totally creamed for it by proof of classified briefings that show they knew and jumped on bandwagon because they thought we would win the war easily.
Look, we were morons to get into this war, with so much expense and so little payoff; at some point you got to call it quits and quit drilling deeper hoping to hit something. There is nothing to hit in this hole. If you refuse to ever quit, then by definition the first dry hole is your bankruptcy.
Walshingham, it's ok with me if you don't publically acknowledge your debt to society, I don't really care. If you need to save face with the drinking buddies that's cool, I've been there. However, please secretly, when no one is looking, get out your check book and pay that debt off:
http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdfaq.htm#opdfaq42
According to CNN, 62,040,606 people voted for Bush. The cost of the war so far is about 200 Billion. According to my calculator, you owe $3223.70. Pay up.
I do the calculation this way because I figure in the 2000 election many people didn't know W was going to invade Iraq, but by November 2004 he had done it, and like I said above, we knew it was lie from the day they started saying it. So if you voted for him in Nov. 2004 then you agreed with it. That's ok by me, just pay your bills. If you think about it, $3223.70 isn't that much. It's like a used car. You can afford it.
If you want to do the calculation some other way, perhaps divide it by ALL voters or something (after all, Kerry supported the war, so why should you not pay your share for voting for Kerry?), well, just look into your soul and think about what you truly owe and pay it. After all, no person ON EARTH will know if you did the right thing or not, but there will be COMPLETE ACCOUNTING after earth.
I will gladly pay my $3,223.70. In fact, I will triple that amount.
But first, I need a credit for my portion of the "Great Society" that, by your logic, I should not have to pay for because I did not vote for LBJ.
On the "everyone lied about WMD" meme that you are advancing, it would help if you could point to any (non-Iraqi) intelligence agency that thought that they didn't have any. There is no way to show that this wasn't the overwhelming consensus of opinion. The closest that you can get is "everyone was wrong", but you can't say "everyone lied".
Have you noticed that while everyone is crowing about how no WMD's were found, no one is saying that they never existed. (Do I really need to post a picture of thousands of dead Kurds and/or Iranian soldiers to butress this point?)
But to wonder about what may have happened to them and where they may currently reside is obviously not as productive or fun as bagging on Bush et al for not having found them.
As far as the cost of the war. Go back and have a look at the cost of 9/11 on the world economy. Also remember that in the combined operations that have liberated two countries we have lost roughly 1,000 fewer soldiers than we lost civilians in a certain two hour period one September morning.
(The Global War on Terror is, for me, exactly that so don't try to make the case that because Saddam Hussein was neither the paymaster nor the mastermind of the 9/11 operation that his regime did not support terror in a major way.)
R is exactly the kind of annoyance I am talking about...to him/her, WMD means only mushroom-cloud-making-stuff..never mind the poison that the Kurds know about, or any other form of major troubles. If no nukes were found, ergo, Bush lied...and you will never convince him/her that the war kept us safer. Reason is not a factor here, obviously.
Walsingham:
If everyone paid for LBJ's Great Society along with their other pet government agendas, we'd be better off. Unfortunately, we WILL pay the bill whether we liked those projects and wars or not, and not equally; we will probably pay by having an inflation spike that will reduce our savings to nothing right as we retire, and those who don't save will not pay, and those that worked hard and saved will pay. If you like that plan, keep voting for every incumbant of both parties and every local bond issue that comes on the ballot.
You point out that Iraq must have had WMDs to gas thousands of their own people and Iranians at some point. True, but that fact was not enough to get us into the war; it may have been enough to get YOU in the war, but in order to the NATION to go to war, they needed to say that Sadaam Hussein was a danger to the United States, not merely that he had done some bad things in the past. After all we knew for nearly two decades and even during one war with Iraq that he had once had chemicals and used them, and it wasn't enough then, and the reason didn't get any better as the crime got older.
You say "But to wonder about what may have happened to them and where they may currently reside is obviously not as productive or fun as bagging on Bush et al for not having found them." Bush himself says simply that they were never there, he's not wondering, and he has access to better information than you or I. Bush isn't wondering what happened to the gas used on Kurds, he knows it was gone before he ever took office and admitts it straight faced and un-ashamedly, which I give him serious credit for -- I have a hard time immagining Kerry doing the same, and it would give credence to his claim it was all a mistake, if we didn't know he knew about the aluminum tubes probably being for rockets when he talked about centrifuges.
You claim that we have liberated 2 countries for a cheap price; but that's not the deal we were sold. The American people weren't willing to spend that many lives and billions to liberate, but they were willing to risk that and more eliminate a nuclear threat. So it still comes down to lying in order to get the war on.
Of course, it wasn't a very effective lie; we were willing to go along with a war without justification as long as it was cheap, kept gas cheap, and was won quickly, and we knew it was a lie.
Finally, you declare "The Global War on Terror is, for me, exactly that" in reference to Sadaam Hussein and 9/11. That's silly. You can say, "for me, Spiderman is better than Superman" or "for me, Frodo Baggins did more to save Middle Earth than Bilbo" because those are made-up worlds. However, "for me" I think you will one day stand in front of your Maker and be questioned and judged by what happened in the world He made, not the world you thought would be best for backing up your blog posts.
And you just don't happen to live in a world where Saddaam justified an attack by attacking us first on 9/11, or justified an attack by preparing to attack us with a nuclear weapon.
Cassandra: Sometimes I have to wait more than hour before my browser will properly refresh this site without getting it from cache, so I get a page that doesn't show my post but other computers will show it.
Our problem is that however wrong the statement is that "Bush lied"...it will be repeated and repeated ad infinitum, with people who know better finally tired of refuting it, and the false statement becomes "truth" through dogged repetition.