Jophiel wrote:
I'll take that as a "yes" to my previous question. A very wordy yes that tries to deflect any blame or culpability, but a "yes" regardless.
By the way, I never said it was "what I want", per se. It was Gbaji who said that "they didn't do it because they were misinformed, or didn't have all the data they needed". According to Gbaji, they were accurately informed and they did have all the data they needed. That's a false statement. You can keep saying "Well, that's the nature of the beast", but it doesn't change the fact that Congress wasn't accurately informed. Your lengthy explanations about why it's okay that Congress wasn't accurately informed do nothing to change the facts.
By the way, I never said it was "what I want", per se. It was Gbaji who said that "they didn't do it because they were misinformed, or didn't have all the data they needed". According to Gbaji, they were accurately informed and they did have all the data they needed. That's a false statement. You can keep saying "Well, that's the nature of the beast", but it doesn't change the fact that Congress wasn't accurately informed. Your lengthy explanations about why it's okay that Congress wasn't accurately informed do nothing to change the facts.
Joph. I think your problem is that you are trying to apply an absolute to a world that's full of grey area.
Congress was "accurately informed" about the status of WMD in Iraq. They were given all of the relevant intel we had at the time. That intel showed that Iraq possessed WMD. What more do you want? We were as sure about the existence of WMD in Iraq as any administratin can be sure of anything learned purely via intelligence gathering means.
You keep saying that since we didn't find WMD, that that somehow means that Congress was not accurately informed. How can that be? They were given all the information we had. I'd also still like to point out that just because we haven't found chaches of WMD in Iraq, does *not* mean that they weren't there at the time the intel was gathered. You're trying to mix past, present and future and ignore that the world changes while you are gathering information and deciding what to do.
And what good would a month have done us? One month? It can be argued that the year we spent between when the UN first started working on removing sanctions and when we finally declared war on Iraq was too long. One could argue that that gave Iraq plenty of time to make what we found not match what our (now 2+ year old intel) incorrect after the fact. One month wouldn't have made any difference (except we'd be a month farther back I suppose).