Originally posted by Rex Barnes: I will conclude that Bush lied when he told us there was "no doubt" that Iraq had WMDs.
I will not cover what Jato has said and I have said but my question is..
Why did he lie?
So Cheney could make money from Halliturton stocks he divested himself from?
So he could get re-elected, given that after Afganistan his popularity was 80%?
To avenge the assasination attempt on his dad?
To get oil for his oil company buddies?
Are you implying Bush had no motivation to lie? That is absurd. He had the biggest possible motivation: he planned and started an unpopular and unnecessary war, and he had to justify it!! Bush and his advisors (Rove, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Perle, etc.) were determined to invade Iraq even before 9/11 (the news reports on this are readily available, feel free to ask for examples). They published papers during the 1990s in which they cited many reasons for a unilateral US invasion of Iraq, including bringing regime change, initiating a "democratic revolution" in the middle east, and putting oil supplies into the hands of leaders more friendly to U.S. interests. They had a radical new agenda, so radical that they knew the public would not support it unless they lied. Is that motivation enough for you?
You Bush supporters on CEG are in denial about the Bush administration's true agenda in Iraq and the middle east. I have pointed out many times that Rice, Perle, Wolfowitz, etc. have long advocated (even before Bush was elected) a radical new middle east agenda, which was formulated by neo-conservatives over the last decade. Throughout the 1990s they advocated U.S. invasion and regime change in Iraq to force democracy into the middle east, to replace Islamic regimes with U.S.-friendly regimes, and to improve our future access to oil. These policy goals were created by people like Wolfowitz and Perle over the last decade in various corporate-funded think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for a New American Century. The media have covered this fairly extensively, yet you refuse to acknowledge it. You freak out when I say you are supporting this radical new agenda by supporting Bush. Wake UP! The Bush administration is LED by people with these goals! You almost all declined to identify yourselves with this radical agenda (shouting "I am not a neo-con!"), yet you support Bush stridently. Feel free to ignore the contradiction, but it really detracts from your credibility.
Originally posted by Dan Nixon:You seem willing to believe ...that in a post 9/11 environment that he should have "assumed" the 4 best intel agencies in the world were providing weak intel.
Who said the president should have "assumed" anything? Not me. Rex and I said quite the opposite. We said that the president should have weighed the evidence himself. He should have taken the (presumably extensive) report given to him by the CIA and read it carefully to see whether the conclusions were supported by the evidence. He should have determined whether, for example, the evidence of Al Quaeda-Iraq ties, uranium sales, and VX factories was corroborated by reliable information and witnesses, or whether it was just jittery speculation. Judges and juries do this all the time. If the president can't do it, he is unfit for the job.
Tell me this: why are you so eager to excuse the president from his duty to weigh the evidence? You seem to be saying that it was OK for him to just accept the CIA's conclusions, when the weakness of the evidence was readily apparent. You pretend that since the CIA is also responsible for weighing the evidence, the president need not bother to do it. This makes no sense at all; it seems to me you are just covering up for Bush's mistakes.
