All those who said that Bush lied in the State of the Union address can now start eating their crow.
The Butler Report has now been released to the public and can be found here. As I had previously reported, it concludes that the President’s statement in the 2003 State of the Union were indeed correct and that the British government did and still does believe that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium. The forged documents given to the US did not in any way play into this assessment. From the report:
From our examination of the intelligence and other material on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa, we have concluded that:
a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium and the British Government did not claim this.
d. The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.
In other words, the argument that Bush lied about African uranium is 100% completely and totally wrong. Those 16 words were not in any way untruthful and the criticism that they were ignores what Bush was saying and its completely dishonest.
Not that such pesky things as the facts will diminish those who continue to peddle the argument that Bush lied…
Of course, the real issue now is whether the media will give as much attention to these repeated vindications of Bush as they did to the original allegations against him. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
When it comes to Bush, this is the media’s working assumptions:
1) Splash any charge against Bush, no matter how baseless, with maximum coverage…so if for instance, someone accuses him of meeting with space aliens to hand over planet earth, just run with the story…
2) Assume Bush is guilty until proven innocent
3) Even when innocence is proven, bury the story of the vindication
NPR’s news report this morning on the Butler Report was basically the same as the 911 commision, that intelligence, while apparently unintential, overstated the WMD threat such that the decision to go to war was ill-advised, at best, and illegitimate, at most. Not even a hint of any vindication for Bush in their reporting.
What’s that familiar dragging sound I hear?
Oh, right. It’s Jay moving the goalposts of the argument again.
Once again, the argument “Bush didn’t know it wasn’t true, so he didn’t lie” rings pretty hollow when the person you’re talking about is the best informed man on Earth.
If you consider that a “vindication”, you have some pretty low standards for your president. Those of us with higher standards will be voting Kerry/Edwards in November.
The desperation is overwhelming.
Bush’s 16 words in the SOTU were true when he said it. The Democrats called it a lie. Now the British government has said, yes, it is true.
So the Democrats were the ones peddling a lie here. The forged documents had nothing to do with the British intelligence cited in the SOTU.
In other words, Chet is resorted to once again lying and saying that the evidence was not true when I’ve just cited two government reports that said the exact opposite.
It’s clear that if this is all you have, it’s just utterly and totally pathetic.
One issue that tends to get lost in all of this: Bush made the right decision based upon the available evidence. That is reassuring in a post-9-11 world. The Dems would have made the wrong decision given the evidence, and that is disturbing after 9-11.
Also, the war still was not a mistake: the outcome has been very positive and certainly a step forward for the Iraqi people and the people of the world.
Those who criticize the war are implicitly stating that they would prefer the prior situation, which is where Saddam was in power. So I guess they should answer for that reasoning and tell us why they think the world would be a better place with Saddam still in power.
Another Thought, are you insane? Racing into a unilateral war to fight an unarmed enemy, occupying his country, and centrallizing military resources at a place where they’re not stopping people who actually are trying to kill us was “the right choice” and “reassures” you? I sometimes wish a military draft would be enacted so that we could see how many chickenhawks still thinks Bush made “the right choice” when Uncle Sam suddenly wants them and not just the kid across the tracks. THAT would “reassure” me.
Mark: Are you insane? Preferring to have that mad, genocidal, terrorist-supporting dictator Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq, with his hoard of cash and rule that would have gone on for years and years, only to be followed by his sons? And slandering our 30+ allies and calling our action “unilateral.”
I wish you and the other war critics could have lived under Saddam’s rule and then tell me if it was such a bad thing to take this guy out of the equation. Funny how you never bring up Saddam or his crimes…funny how you just want to pretend that Iraq was this nice little paradise before we liberated it, ala Michael Moore…
I also wish you war critics would go over to coalistion countries who have sacrificed lives and treasure and tell them how they don’t really count as allies in your estimation…how the action was so “unilateral”…
It seems to me that it is a great message to send to our enemies in a post 9-11 world that if you have weapons of mass destruction, if you act as if you have weapons of mass destruction, if you give us good reason to think you have weapons of mass destruction, then we will act to destroy them.
I would much rather play it safe than sorry…and getting rid of a genocidal tyrant is not exaclty a bad thing…notice how the libs never mention Saddam or his atrocities…they don’t like to remind people of the good we have accomplished…
The bottom line is this: Bush will protect us, Kerry will only talk about it in the UN and then allow us to get nailed…
It seems even Bill Clinton agrees with me (from the BBC):
“Bill Clinton says that no government could have failed to act against Iraq after the 11 September 2001 attacks in view of intelligence provided.”
Clinton also added:
“But he said war could have been avoided if the UN had passed a resolution threatening military action.”
So if the UN had passed the resolution wanted by the Bush admin maybe we could have avoided the war due to the pressure on Hussein.
As Ed Morrisey notes:
So Clinton supports the Iraq war, and rather unequivocally, as opposed to the Democratic ticket for the White House this year. Unlike John Kerry, Clinton lays the blame for the lack of UN support on the torpedoed final resolution, which died as a result of French and Russian intriguing. That’s a far cry from Kerry, who reflexively blamed Bush and the American government for alienating its allies at the UN and building a “fraudulent coalition”, which excluded only those nations getting rich off the UN Oil-For-Food program.
Another Thought, start advocating the ousting of “murderous tyrants” in Liberia, Sudan and Equatorial Guinea and I’ll be willing to at least give you credit for a consistent position on America’s status as the world’s enforcer. Of course, you’d still be wrong to suggest America is “smart” to allocate our military resources into “humanitarian wars” rather than self-defense, particularly when we’re already battling terrorists who do pose a serious threat to our security. Again, are you willing to wage war against North Korea, Saudi Arabia or Liberia on the “better to be safe than sorry” canard?
As for “insulting our coalition”, I guess you could say I’m doing that. We have a coalition of two, along with smaller governments like Kazahkstan who are sending a couple dozen troops in exchange for freebies from our government that we’re not likely to find out about for years. If I as an American was willing to “go over to one of our coalition countries”, as you say I should, they’d most likely expect I would be from the State Department and bringing them their latest check for remaining in our “coalition.” When they found out I didn’t have any money to give them, I may very well be killed on site. Then I could count on you to come marching in with the military and wage war against them right? Better to be safe than sorry, right?
Mark’s argument that in order to have moral credibility for ousting one bloodthirsty tyrant, we have oust them all is a logical fallacy, and a rather overused one at that. Try again my friend, and tell me why it is bad to overthrow a tyrant who committed acts of sectarian and ethnic cleansing against his own people. Your argument does not do that, but simply desperately changes the question.
By Mark’s reasoning I should not give any money to a charity, because I can’t fund all charities.
Mark’s ridiculous statements about our allies also further reduces his credibility; he states that we have a “coalition of two”…I guess he means the US and Great Britain, and that with the other countries if he showed up without a check for their services he “may very well be killed on site.” Funny, I didn’t realize going to Australia, Italy, Poland, etc. was that dangerous.
Mark does a good job at reciting Michael Moore talking points, but that’s about it.
The libs reasoning against Bush and the Iraq war makes no sense. Supposedly, Bush cooked this whole war up for pure selfish gain. Yet this makes no sense; what did Bush gain for this?
Some libs say he did this for oil and money. Yet if he wanted the oil, it would have been far easier to get rid of the sanctions against Saddam and just do business with him. Plus, we haven’t exactly seized the oil wells over there, and the libs crowed when gas prices went up…so Bush has gotten less oil than by making deals with Saddam.
Plus, if he and/or Cheney or whoever wanted to make more money, there are far easier and less risky ways to use the power of the presidency to make money, and in fact, these people could have made the most money staying in the private sector and using their contacts and their name for financial gain. So the idea of the Bush admin doing this for money doesn’t add up.
Then there’s the idea of doing this for political gain. Yet if Bush lied about the WMD issue, as libs assert, then he knew there were no WMDs there, and thus would have known that this truth would surface after we took over the country. In fact, he would have known that the way he timed the liberation of Iraq would have guaranteed the truth about WMDs would surface around the time of the elections. Sure he got a bounce in the polls once we took Baghdad and the statues of Saddam fell, but he would have known that would fade, and so if he wanted to time this for maximum political gain he would have waited until this year to take out Saddam. So the idea of taking out Saddam for political reasons does not make sense.
In fact, if Bush wanted to take the politically safe way, he would not have gone into Iraq at all, allowed the economic recovery to blossom earlier, and rode high on taking out the Taliban in Afghanistan and the economic recovery.
The problem with criticism for the sake of criticism is that it often leads to getting into logical twists and contradictions.
One can argue about the wisdom of the liberation of Iraq, but the libs conspiracy theory criticism makes no sense.
By Mark’s reasoning we should not have removed Hitler because at the same time we didn’t remove Stalin.
A question no one on the left dares to answer: do you really think it would be better to still have Saddam in power in Iraq?
If one is against the war that liberated Iraq, then one implicitly favors the status quo before the war, which was Saddam being in power. One implicitly asserts that the world and America would be better off with Saddam in power.
One cannot have it both ways, and just state that they know Saddam was a bad guy, but… Talk is cheap. Being against the war puts one on the side of preferring the situation that existed before the war, which was to have Saddam in power. No amount of verbal contortions can get away from that.
Another Thought, I’ll be the first on the left to answer a resounding “YES!” America is much less safe with a destabilized Iraq creating a cesspool of American hatred in the Middle East and throughout the world than we were with Saddam Hussein alive. Hussein was a danger to his own people, but I dare say fewer would have been killed in the last 18 months under Saddam than have because of our misbegotten war to stop a non-attack from non-existent WMD. As for whether the Iraqi people will be better off without Saddam, we’ll see. Every indication is that the only way to stop a decades-long power struggle between the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites is through American-style “martial law” or the barrel of a dictator’s rifle. I’d like to be optimistic about our chances over there, but I have a bad habit of calling a spade a spade.
Only a fool would still say this war was worth fighting….someone so blinded by ideology that they’re forced to frame the war in the context of “we stopped a madman and the world’s better for it” after all other justifications for war have fallen miserably short and there’s no end in sight. You’re like a jet flying over the Atlantic Ocean running on fumes. That argument may still work on a few simple souls for a short time longer, but as things continue to go awry, it’s only a matter of time until you crash and burn.
So to answer your question again…..YES! The Iraqi status quo was much better for American security post 9-11 than the current quagmire. There’s something to be said about multilateral nation-building, but the 9-11 attacks produced a real enemy and seriously diminished the need to deal with the phantom threat of Iraq with or without WMD. This war will go down as one of biggest mistakes in US history.
By Mark’s reasoning I should not give any money to a charity, because I can’t fund all charities.
No, by Mark’s reasoning, you should prioritize – you give to the United Way before you give to the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League.
Saddam wasn’t a priority in the war on terror.
As for the 16-word claim, I find it disingenuous that Repubs are trying so hard to substantiate a fairly unimportant claim. Could it matter less if Saddam “tried” to get some uranium? Does that justify a war? I really don’t think so.
Hey, does anybody have some uranium? I’d like some. There – does that mean you guys can invade Minnesota now? I am, after all, literally “seeking uranium.”
Hey, Jay, how come you didn’t include these parts of the report, particularly germaine to our discussion?
We note that much of what was reliably known about Iraq’s unconventional weapons programmes in the mid- and late-1990s was obtained through the reports of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) and of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). These international agencies now appear to have been more effective than was realised at the time in dismantling and inhibiting Iraq’s prohibited weapons programmes.
You all should really read the report. Unlike Jay’s juvenile analysis it actually concludes that no case for war was actually made; rather, that the rush to war precluded attempts to accurately assess the evidence. Or, in the words of the report:
However, we are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the Government’s procedures which we saw in the context of policy-making towards Iraq risks reducing the scope for informed collective political judgement.
Mark:
Amnesty International estimated 36,000 Iraqis killed per year due to sanctions alone. This number is probably low by a factor of at least two, but we’ll go with it for now.
The highest estimate of casualties from the war is 12,000, and that’s inflated by taking whatever the Iraqis said duing the war seriously.
That’s 24,000 lives saved – and that’s a low estimate.
But hey, they’re just brown people, right Mark?
Nice try at a gotcha, too bad you didn’t read the very material you quoted.
It merely says that based on what is known now, the IAEA and UNSCOM seems to have done a better job of disarming Iraq than anyone thought. Which does absolutely no good to Bush and Blair in 2003 when they’re actually making the decision to go to war – they had no way of knowing that information.
If you want to criticize Busha and Blair for not having the magical powers to see into the future, fine, but don’t expect that argument to go anywhere.
It’s clear you didn’t read the report. As it says:
And…
Which of course is exactly the point that has made from the beginning.
The anti-Bush crowd keeps arguing that Bush and Blair “lied” – now both governments have said they did not. Anyone with a modicum of intellectual integrity would end such a discredited argument. Yes, the intelligence was flawed and incomplete, but that is the nature of intelligence work – it is not an exact science and it is wrong to suggest otherwise.
But no, the Big Lie has already become a religious belief to the new Church of Bush Hatred – a belief to which Chet, Mark, and their ilk are as dogmatic as any other fundamentalist would be.
Jay, I always thought it was us Democrats who were guilty of race-baiting. You’re starting to sound more like Kweisi Mfume everyday. Congratulations. Your boys had every opportunity to lift the sanctions on Iraq if they were so devastating. The fact that you’re arguing there’s no policy ground in between maintaining failing sanctions and pre-emptive war is vintage Jay Reding tripe. “We’re gonna save you Iraqis from Saddam Hussein and sanctions and kill you instead with rifle bullets and have ourselves a little fun dragging you around Abu Gharid on a dog leash.” After all, you “brown people” flew planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and it’s time we got our revenge!!!!
The anti-Bush crowd keeps arguing that Bush and Blair “lied”
Hrm, any time you cared to show me where I made that argument, you can go right ahead.
As far as anyone can tell, though, that’s just one more special delivery from Strawman Central.
Mark writes “America is much less safe with a destabilized Iraq creating a cesspool of American hatred in the Middle East and throughout the world than we were with Saddam Hussein alive.”
Let’s see…and before the war…Iraq was not only a destabilizing force throughout the entire Middle East, but also was destabilized itself…read the Kay Report and its conclusion that this destabilized nature of Iraq made it an even greater threat…also, before the war it seems to me that there already was a cesspool of American hatred in the Middle East…see 9-11 for proof of that one…in fact, Bush has taken the one step that gives us hope for real transformation in the Middle East….
Mark’s thesis is all wrong: he believes the terrorists hate us because of what we have done; he doesn’t realize the terrorists hate us because we are who we are and have different philosophies of life…Mark falls into the lib trap of blaming all hatred on America on America…
Mark wants to give this country a huge inferiority complex…
Another Thought, we have created more terrorists and anti-American sentiment because of the war. All the evidence I need to offer on that is support for Bush among Arab-Americans. In 2000, Bush won somewhere in the ballpark of 72% of the Muslim vote. The last poll I saw showed him in single digits among Muslims in 2004. That’s not a very good testimonial of Bush’s popularity among Muslims, and if American Muslims dislike Bush this much, imagine what the sentiment is among young Palestinian and Saudi males who watch Al-Jazeera. Unless of course you’re saying all “brown-skinned people” are already terrorists, your argument falls flat.
Yup, we’re just going out and shooting Iraqis. We certainly aren’t rebuilding their country, giving them more freedom and sovereignty than they have ever had in their history, building schools, giving out humanitarian aid, etc…
The old hatred of the military comes out once more. Forget all those things, all our soldiers do is kill people and commit abuses like the ones at Abu Ghraib.
What Mark doesn’t note is that removing the sanctions guarantees that Saddam Hussein obtains WMDs, which is exactly what the Butler Reports says.
It’s more example of how the anti-war crowd is reduced to cheap shots and straw men to buttress their failing argument.
Jay, for someone who throws around the nine-letter S-word as frequently as you, you sure do employ the tactic yourself with almost dizzying regularity. Whether we’re building schools and hospitals in Iraq is irrelevant to matters of American security, which is why we were told we had to go to Iraq in the first place.
As for “hatred of the military”, I was mainly making the analogy that the administration’s never-ending lie about Hussein being responsible for the 9-11 attacks most likely led to soldiers at Abu Gharib believing they were avenging the 9-11 attacks as they drug Iraqis around with belts and made naked pyramids out of them. In my opinion, Abu Gharib is the price America paid for blurring that line to as many people as would fall for it.