Quote: 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!!
That is entirely different from what you were stating before. You just said he lied to justify the war, when all of the arguments thus far have been he lied and took us to war. Two completely different thoughts there, bub.
You claim those points are "entirely different", yet you don't bother to explain why. I therefore have no idea what you mean.
BTW, you and JaTo are apparently no longer on the same page. He says Bush didn't have to (and apparently didn't) weigh the evidence for himself, as he was entitled to rely on the CIA's conclusions. You, on the other hand, say that you "assume" Bush weighed all the evidence. Who's right?
Originally posted by EternalOne:
Quote: 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.
Ok, you're line of thinking makes no sense.
- The President should have weighed all of the evidence himself. (Most of us assume he did this, you assume he did not.)
Why do you "assume" the president weighed the evidence? The facts indicate just the opposite:
Look at the facts. The evidence Bush saw showed that the alleged uranium sale was based primarily on an unverified document and uncorroborated rumors, that the aluminum tubes were not likely to be usable in a WMD centrifuge program, and the allegations of an existing WMD program were largely from disgruntled exiles. (There was more "evidence", but none of it was any stronger than these examples). No rational person could conclude from this "evidence" that there was "no doubt" that Saddam had WMDs. So I conclude that Bush either failed to analyze the evidence (unlikely - he's not that stupid) or he lied when he said it was strong (i.e. "no doubt" or "slam dunk").
Originally posted by EternalOne:- The entire World was showing intel that supported our own intel, that Saddam had WMD's. (Yet you believe somehow if the President would have looked closer he could have have come to a different conclusion, even though he is not an intel analyst.)
The "entire world's" intel did NOT support ours. Sure, many countries' intel agencies also concluded that Saddam probably had WMDs. But most of them admitted their evidence was not yet strong or reliable enough to support war. Their intel did not corroborate the CIA's evidence with anything the CIA didn't already have (I think we would have heard about it if, say, Italy had come up with new evidence that strongly supported one of Bush's main justifications for the war). The truth is that foreign agencies were just about as clueless as the CIA about Iraq. Your sweeping exaggeration is misleading and false. Prove me wrong.
Originally posted by EternalOne:- You claim "weakness of the evidence was readily apparent". (Yet no-one in the world's intelligence community agreed with you at the time, remembering that hindsight is 20/20.)
See above. I explain there (as I have in many previous posts) why the weakness of the evidence was readily apparent.
