Scott Ott's piece on this is good. Clark calls for a REAL Iraqi trial, like in the old days.

With the latest news that the "insurgents" are actually Iraqi's and not foreigners, it's becomming clear that someone forgot to mention to the Iraqi's that they were liberated...

But seriously Mitch, if the President had gone on national television before the war started and said we were going to go to war to "liberate" Iraq, do you believe that the American people would have allowed that to happen? How about Congress?

"On the other hand, perhaps we have not. I watched Chris Wallace's show on Fox on Sunday morning; Mara Liasson and Juan Williams, both NPR personalities (Liasson is officially a reporter) were still bloviating about how the lack of vast caches of WMDs invalidated the whole liberation"

Mitch, must you go on about the Bush didn't lie meme? You hive mind folks are silly sometimes.

If the lack of WMD doesn't drive a stake in the heart of Bush's justifications, answer for me, what was the hurry? Why did he expell inspectors? If there was no need to inspect, why let them in at all? If he wasn't in a hurry, since Houssien certainly could have been ousted a month later, why did he interrupt their inspections that FINALLY would have put to bed whether Houssien HAD WMD?

The answer is simple, it WAS his primary justification. No one ever said sole, but you lie to your readers and claim that his opposition presented it as the sole justification, and then refute it with sidebar comments about what a bad guy Houssien was. No, they said, rightly, Bush used it (WMD), and the threat it would be given to Terrorists as his "imminent danger" that couldn't wait, not even one more month.

Perhaps it's time for you to stop lying.

PB

It's really pretty simple PB. If the inspectors would have been allowed another month to do their job, they would have been forced to conclude that there were no weapons and the opportunity to invade would have been lost.

I'm so confused. I thought Bushitler was mind controlled by the neocon cabal, right? According to the BlackFive blog, "The Wolfowitz Doctrine - which is based on several classified policies written by several people (including Wolfowitz) - reportedly supports (1) pre-emptive action to prevent rogue countries from developing WMD, (2) unilateral action because coalitions often fail (and the U.S. is the backbone of every coalition, anyway), (3) detering rogue nations from assuming regional or global dominance and (4) developing democratization of the Arab world to deny terrorists safe harbor, support (moral, financial, and military) and recruitment."
So, if Bush is indeed a puppet of the neo-cons,
1) Wasn't the goal to find current WMD and PREVENT the (re)development of additional WMD?
2) Weren't there multiple rationales, not just the probable presence of WMD?
The Wolfowitz doctrine isn't a secret, and the left loves to claim Bush is simply the tool of the neocons. Yet they continually ignore the full rationale for the battle (not war) of Iraq. The left's strategy: Claim, falsely (and knowingly if they have read any neocon doctrine or ignorantly if they haven't), that WMDs were the only rationale, and then say any other successes are illegitimate in the absence of WMDs.

PB and Doug, what would another 1 month, 6 months, 1 year of weapons inspections have accomplished? Would you take an "all clear" report from the UN as gospel? You'd stake the safety of your country on it?
Then why let inspectors work at all you ask? Because if France, Russia, Germany etc. had stood with us and behind their own UN mandates the inspectors might actually have accomplished something. Saddam would have run out of options and would have been forced to comply with the UN requirements of full and open disclosure of his weapons program and their (supposed) dismentlement. Instead they allowed Saddam to play for time yet again using his standard divide and conquer methods.
Did he act like a man without WMD, a man with nothing to hide?

Chrisss,

Good response, first and foremost.

Regarding the last point first, yes he acted like someone with something to hide. However, that alone does not justify invasion (Downing Memo pretty accurately describes the reasons the world will accept).

As for staking our safety on the UN, their intell and opinion were far more accurate than our own. Certainly you'd never solely rely upon the opinion of the UN, but on the other hand concluding the opinion of your allies has no relevance and ignoring it, is a pretty quick way to being both out in the cold and probably wrong.

The fact is that the investigation into WMD concluded he had not in any way reconstituted his programs for WMD, quite the contrary, he shunned them as a way, he thought, of getting rid of inspectors.

Nevertheless, I supported Bush's efforts to coerce Houssien into allowing inspection of his palaces, it had been 10 years, and it was high time. So that additional month, or 6 weeks (the inspectors estimates) it would have taken to inspect places we had never before looked at, would have closed the loop.

This does not answer whether Houssien would have immediately reinvested in them once the gloves were off. He probably would have, but I suspect (don't know) that the original resolution didn't say he could NEVER develop them, it said he had to give up his current capability.

Finally, I, and for that matter most of the left, have never claimed this was the sole reason for the invasion, just, as I said, the primary one. Regarding Wolfowitz doctrine, I've read similar things, and the issue is that it is wholly not supported by international law to "prevent a hostile regime from becoming a dominant, coercive power." We may want to, but that is precisely imperialism if we do so.

PB

My recollection is that the "allies" were generally in sync with our intel on Iraq. Blair as much as said, "C'mon guys, we all have the same info, we all know he's got -- and is trying to make more -- WMDs. The question is what to do about it."
Bottom line for me is,
> Saddam either had the weapons or wanted everyone to believe he did (while waiting for sanctions to be lifted to re-arm).
> He never provided evidence of when or how the weapons EVERYONE agreed he had at one time had been destroyed.
> The UN inspections were a decade long joke.
> After Pakistan, whose nuke bazaar we closed, and perhaps N Korea which is a whole different kettle of fish, Iraq was the single most likely source for the WMDs that could have ended up in Times Square*.
Solid rationale, none of them negated by the absence of WMD post-invasion.
Perhaps not you, but Mitch's post was about Juan Williams and Mara Liasson saying that any collateral success are illegitimate due to the absence of WMDs -- as I said either a dishonest or willfully ignorant position given the long paper trail of the evil geniuses pulling Bush's puppet strings.
* Sadly the months we wasted waltzing with the UN make it more likely that the WMDs Saddam had left the country and are in the hands of third parties.

"PB and Doug, what would another 1 month, 6 months, 1 year of weapons inspections have accomplished?"

Mr Powell and Ms. Rice both stated in early 2001 that Iraq was contained and they did not pose a threat to their neighbors.

There was no imminent threat and we know there was intelligence that said that Iraq's weapons programs were dismamtled along with his weapons.

As I said before, another year of inspections would have turned Americans from being a herd of pathetics scared little sheep to actually looking critically at the "evidence" we were being fed. Some of us did actually look at it and when Bush lied and said war was the last resort, we all knew it was bullshit.

Support for this war would have waned and Bush would have lost the one bit of marketing material available for his re-election campaign in 2004.

nodding gradually shaded?dwindling bunkhouse suffix crossbar:disjunctions

particles:Putnam appendicitis squeak napkins .

perpendiculars walked Martinez smuggler construe unfamiliar cyst dippers.

perpendiculars walked Martinez smuggler construe unfamiliar cyst dippers.