This Would Have Been Nice to Know Alot Sooner Than This
GOP Congressmen:Most Republicans Now Think That The Iraq War Was A Mistake
Anybody see this reported in the traditional media? Anywhere?
So you can mark this down as ONE MORE THING we were right about — even though these fools fought us, called us names and worse, here they are, after all of the blood and money has been spent thinking it was a mistake:
Rohrabacher:
“I will say that the decision to go in, in retrospect, almost all of us think that was a horrible mistake. …Now that we know that it cost a trillion dollars, and all of these years, and all of these lives, and all of this blood… all I can say is everyone I know thinks it was a mistake to go in now.”
McClintock:
“I think everyone [in Congress] would agree that Iraq was a mistake.”
And if you watch the clip at the link, you see something more than an admission that Iraq was a mistake — that they had qualms about Iraq and about Afghanistan from the beginning. But standing up and saluting when their President told them to was the path taken. Which likely fills in some of the rationale for why BushCo worked so hard at their war narrative — they needed to keep their own on board to keep selling the entire debacle. Outrageous.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky-ts5bYBdo[/youtube]
This goes in the “no shit Sherlock” file next to “Banks should not self regulate” BTW – Mike Castle still have not admitted that his vote for the Iraq war was a mistake. And he never will.
But we gotta ask him. Ask that since his colleagues told Grover Norquist that pretty much all Republicans think that the Iraq war was a mistake, would that include him?
Few Democrats and no Republican(apart from Ron Paul) will ever say it is a CRIME.
That’s why the CRIME goes on.
Great! Can we leave now?
We massacred the Iraqis coming out of kuwait ,and it was pretty obvious that Sadam wanted revenge ,that was no secret.
Inteligence reports indicated that he was manufacturing and collecting the means to do it.
The UN sends in people to verify that these means of revenge are gotten rid of .
Sadam kicks them out, and Clinton drops bombs (remember Monica and “wag the dog”).
911 happens and Bush later bombs them some more.
Eventually the UN sends in more people again, (remember Hans Blix) to find the means of revenge that Sadam may still have.
‘
Sadam doesn’t cooperate.
This is where Bush screws up, in my opinion.
At this point it should have been the UN’s responsibility to act.
After all, the UN threatened “serious consequences” if Iraq didn’t comply.
We should not have sent in troops. It was the UN’s responsibility to enforce their resolution.
That being said, we all knew that the UN was too feckless to act on their own threats.
I do think the UN could have flooded Iraq with so many people (“weapons inspectors”), for an indefinite amount of time, that it would have rendered Iraq pretty much unable to act out any kind of aggression.
And there, my friends, is today’s episode of Republican Selective History.
So Jason, I guess the brainless, wingnut, chimp that is George Bush, fooled all the brilliant Democrats in the house and senate into voting for the war, so they don’t have to admit that they were wrong.
I guess the brainless, wingnut, chimp that is George Bush, fooled all the brilliant Democrats in the house and senate into voting for the war, so they don’t have to admit that they were wrong.
That is exactly what happened. Mushroom clouds, smoking guns, Colin Powell at the UN…
Sadam doesn’t cooperate.
Re-writing of history, there. Weapons inspectors were in Iraq, not finding any weapons when we pulled them out so we could bomb Iraq anyway. I think we all know now why the weapons inspectors weren’t finding anything.
Mistake = criminal conspiracy to commit war crimes.
I guess the brainless, wingnut, chimp that is George Bush, fooled all the brilliant Democrats in the house and senate into voting for the war, so they don’t have to admit that they were wrong.
George W. Bush had a staff for that (why do you think we call him BushCo?) — Dick Cheney, Mary Matalin, Karl Rove and the rest of the gang rolled out the lies that ended up justifying the Iraq War. They even had intelligence stovepiped right to the VPs office from the stupidest man on the planet — Doug Feith. And they convinced some Democrats and intimidated others into their votes — but you won’t find too many Democrats who won’t tell you that they were lied to for their votes.
What’s fun about you trying to rewrite history is that you have no idea that this history is pretty much already written. The only people who don’t know it are wingnuts. Who still can’t stop themselves from just saluting when BushCo tells them too. Even when they are still wrong and still lying.
Weapons inspectors were pulled from Iraq in 1998 by the UN so the US could bomb. They weren’t back in the country until November 2002. For that 4 year period there was very little WMD intel coming out of Iraq. Bush went into Iraq in March of 2003 after Hans Blix was unable to tell the UN that Iraq was 1) in compliance 2) cooperating and 3) disarmed.
In the fall of 2002, there was an NIE put out about Iraq. It contained intel from 16 different US intel agencies. According to the Washington Post only a “handful” of our elected officials bothered to read it. The 2002 NIE gave the consensus opinion that Iraq did indeed have WMD, though one agency out of 16 dissented on the aluminum tubes and one agency out of 16 dissented on the attempted uranium buy from Niger, but that agency agreed that Iraq wanted to get enriched uranium.
When the Iraq War Resolution passed both chambers of Congress, the Senate was led by Democrats. It passed 77-23. Senators on both sides of the isle lined up to vote for the use of military force against Iraq without even reading the intelligence.
The idea that Feith et al “intimidated” Democrats into their votes is laughable, the pressure on Dems was coming from Tom Daschle and other Democrats. Daschle thought the Dems would keep the Senate if they went along with the Iraq War vote, instead they lost the chamber in the November 2002 election anyway.
In any event, Congresspeople who can be “intimidated” into voting to deploy the military need to go home and stay out of DC. Like Daschle.
The “stovepipe” story has never been conclusively proved. Feith felt that he was “vindicated” by the Senate investigation.
The “stovepipe” allegedly dealt mainly with the ties between Iraq and AQ. Those ties had been thought to exist for quite a while, and were certainly exacerbated by the 9/11 Commission testimony of Clinton’s Defense Secretary William Cohen who said the Clinton Administration bombed the “Sudanese aspirin factory” because of intelligence linking Bin Laden and the factory to Iraq and the father of Iraq’s VX nerve gas program.
In hindsight, invading Afghanistan AND Iraq both were mistakes. In the future I would hope the US adopts the Clinton style of war-mongering-bombing the crapola out of countries from 35,000 feet until they cry “uncle”. It certainly turned Bosnia around, despite the UN’s best attempts to screw everything up.
missundaztood at 4:48 pm:
“I would hope the US adopts the Clinton style of war-mongering-bombing the crapola out of countries from 35,000 feet until they cry ‘uncle'”.
Mizz,
Did you go to school to be a blood thirsty asshole….or did it come naturally ?
delacrat I’m anti war, regardless of whose war it is. But if the US is going to wage war, I would prefer they do it the way Clinton did it. Got it?
Before you embarrass yourself any further about what you don’t know about stovepiping or the state of the intelligence you need to read this or get ahold of this and read it. And as far as the difference between the stovepiped and the managed info versus those doing this business old school, you also missed Col. Wilkerson’s crusade some years back discussing this. The one US intelligence agency that got the Iraq data right was the State Department’s. Much to Colin Powell’s deep embarrassment. Which was why Col. Wilkerson was everywhere denouncing BushCo’s handling of the data.
And Tom Ricks’ Fiasco is quite good on the multiple fuckups of BushCo in lying their asses off to get their war on. This book especially focuses on how unprepared they were for that war — they thought they could lie through that too.
And this:
The idea that Feith et al “intimidated” Democrats into their votes
wouldn’t be what I said, but since you haven’t gotten any of the rest of it right, why should this be different?
to these asses, the mistake is that the spoils never came to fruition.
that is all
cassandra, of course you cite the New Yorker piece because that’s pretty much all there is backing up your “stovepipe” theory.
The 9/11 Commission Report clearly states that Feith did nothing “illegal.”
And Larry Wilkerson was the guy who was tasked with vetting every shred of evidence that Colin Powell presented to the UN. He did a heck of a job, didn’t he? Is his nickname possibly “Brownie”. I’d be blaming someone else for that whole Powell/UN fiasco, too.
The intelligence products that came out of Doug Feith were not the intelligence products laid out for Congress to use to base their votes on. What Congress received as intelligence was the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, that was NOT the product of Doug Feith, but was the work of 16 separate US intelligence agencies, including the State Department, the CIA, and the NSA.
That was the intelligence information that members of Congress were supposed to read before they cast their vote. Not that actually showing up to read it would have mattered, because again, the consensus opinion of the US intelligence community, as expressed in the 2002 NIE, was that Iraq had WMD. Here, this is George “slam dunk” Tenet’s statement on the 2002 NIE https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/press-release-archive-2003/pr08112003.htm
Now, does Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle sound “intimidated” here (CNN):
“Ahead of the vote, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle announced Thursday morning he would support Bush on Iraq, saying it is important for the country “to speak with one voice at this critical moment.”
Daschle, D-South Dakota, said the threat of Iraq’s weapons programs “may not be imminent. But it is real. It is growing. And it cannot be ignored.” However, he urged Bush to move “in a way that avoids making a dangerous situation even worse.””
No, he doesn’t, he even clearly states that the threat “may not be imminent”, so maybe “BushCO” didn’t hypnotize/fool/threaten democrats into voting for the IWR. Here’s the House Minority Leader Dick Gephart:
“”I believe we have an obligation to protect the United States by preventing him from getting these weapons and either using them himself or passing them or their components on to terrorists who share his destructive intent,” said Gephardt, who helped draft the measure.”
What? Gephardt helped “draft the measure”? That has Doug Feith’s fingerprints all over it, eh?
Anyway, believe what you want, but the bottom line is the 2002 NIE. That was the intel presented to Congress to read before the vote. Not Doug Feith’s. Unlike Congress, I read it. It is available online.
That New Yorker article is pretty much the definitive account — the one that really told the world how much they were being lied to. You should find out something about Seymour Hersh and find out something about the New Yorker’s fact-checking protocol. There is pretty damn near nothing like it even at places like the NYT or WSJ.
And Larry Wilkerson was not the head of State’s Intelligence Unit, but he was Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff. Those two have a very long history and you can bet alot of money that Wilkerson is not out spilling the beans without Powell’s approval.
the consensus opinion of the US intelligence community
This opinion was fabricated. The work on the analysts doing the day to day review and assessments was thrown away to get to the data that the WH wanted. The only US intel unit that didn’t do that was the State Department’s — because their boss wouldn’t interfere with them.
And if you could get away from FOX Noise for a hot minute, the Brits are in the business of raking their participants in this bad bit of business over the coals over what they knew and when did they know it. The British are well and truly pissed off that their leaders bought the BushCo lies and bullshit lock stock and barrel. And then went out to help sell it.
This history — the one where George Bush got the United States government to lie to the world in order to justify this war is written and done. You should do yourself a favor and go read every one of those articles and books I referenced. They did lie. Repeatedly. And sent an army out on a mission based on that lie. Just because you won’t read the best accounts of this there are doesn’t mean it didn’t happen that way.
But hey, let’s do more:
Paul Pillar in Foreign Policy
Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (Phase I)
Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community’s October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting. A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence.
Postwar Findings about Iraq’s WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How they Compare with Prewar Assessments (Part of Phase II)
And how about this — The Center for Public Integrity’s ,a href=”http://projects.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/”>astonishing timelime of actions and database of the falsehoods.
Not that you’ll read any of this, either. But the fact that BushCo lied his way into the Iraq War is really no longer in dispute.
That the State Department was one of those intelligence agencies that was part of the 2002 NIE, and their dissent is minimal, and they were part of the consensus opinion that Iraq had WMD. So even without those mysterious “bosses” “interfering” with them, the State Department reached the same conclusions as the other intel agencies.
And if you’re going to declare that multiple, autonomous, intelligence agencies “fabricated” their opinion on the 2002 NIE, I’d really appreciate some kind of citation to back that up.
This is not news. Even war supporters knew the Bush team was lying. I clearly remember that sentiment from conservative bloggers. The press, supporters, detractors, Joe BIden. Everyone knew. Most people who knew the truth simply didn’t care. They just wanted America to fuck shit up.
Well this is rich:
I’d really appreciate some kind of citation to back that up
I’ve provided you with 6 references already. At some point you have to goto those websites, print out the pdfs, or buy the books and read. Until then you are looking for someone to do your homework. Which we already know you won’t do. Because you wouldn’t be here asking for citations after being provided authoritative ones.
Yeah, cassandra, I just caught your post.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report did not blame the Bush Administration for the intel, they blamed poor on the ground intelligence and a “group think”.
That same Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report absolved the Administration on pressuring the intel community:
“The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.
The Committee found no evidence that the Vice President’s visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, or did pressure analysts to change their assessments.”
So much for that “stovepipe” and the power of Feith.
So much for the fact that you won’t read (Phase II):
“Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” Rockefeller said. “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
“It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.
“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.
“These reports represent the final chapter in our oversight of prewar intelligence. They complete the story of mistakes and failures – both by the Intelligence Community and the Administration – in the lead up to the war. Fundamentally, these reports are about transparency and holding our government accountable, and making sure these mistakes never happen again,” Rockefeller added.
The Committee’s report cites several conclusions in which the Administration’s public statements were NOT supported by the intelligence. They include:
Ø Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
Ø Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
Ø Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
Ø Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
Ø The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
Ø The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.
What you posted above was mostly Rockefeller’s opinion, when you get to the facts, the bullet points, the argument is pretty weak, especially when you look at the rhetoric coming from the Democrat Leadership at the same time.
Daschle, D-South Dakota, said the threat of Iraq’s weapons programs “may not be imminent. But it is real. It is growing. And it cannot be ignored.” However, he urged Bush to move “in a way that avoids making a dangerous situation even worse.””
”I believe we have an obligation to protect the United States by preventing him from getting these weapons and either using them himself or passing them or their components on to terrorists who share his destructive intent,” said Gephardt, who helped draft the measure.”
The worst thing you’ve been able to prove about BushCo is that they added an inch or two to the fish when they told the story. Is that surprising? Would you expect a US president to hem and haw his way into war? Clinton certainly didn’t when he took us into Kosovo http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/05/13/clinton.kosovo/transcript.html That’s a very dramatic speech by Clinton, not very accurate with hindsight, but damn dramatic.
Comment by missundaztood on 29 March 2010 at 5:09 pm:
“delacrat I’m anti war, regardless of whose war it is. But if the US is going to wage war, I would prefer they do it the way Clinton did it. Got it?”
Miss prefers the way Clinton does war, but Miss is anti-war. Uh-huh