Michael Moore on Afghanistan and ObamaFollow

Sigh...

No. They didn't. Could you please point out the location in that document in which Iraq is stated to currently (present tense) possess usable weapons of mass destruction? And before you go there, a "weapons capability" does not mean actually possessing the physical weapons.

And before you run off an insist that even though it's not written in the document in which we wrote the reasons we were going to war, here's what Bush said about the subject

A specific excerpt:




I can only wonder how the world might be different if someone had spoken those words about Hitler and acted upon them. I'm not saying that the threats were the same, but rather pointing out the pattern. It's clear from this speech that Bush viewed this as a threat that was growing and ought to be nipped in the bud now instead of waiting until it hits us over the head.

Well.. "That document" is the one legally binding one, which actually says why we went to war. Everything else is someone's opinion. And somehow, I don't find an article written by Dean to be sufficient counter to that. Do you?


The question wasn't "Did some people think and say that Iraq had WMDs?". The question was "why did we go to war?". The answer to why we officially went to war is contained in the very document authorizing it. If Bush's statements were so influential to that decision, don't you think Congress would have written them down? Clearly, Congress took the statements and opinions out there with a grain of salt and took the time (correctly) to write down just the fact that they knew to be true. They then voted on whether or not that set of facts represented sufficient justification for war, and the vote was "yes".


Congress voted on what is written in the document. Not what Bush may have said in one speech, or Cheney said in an interview, or what anyone else said. They vote on the bill they have in front of them. Thus, regardless of what other things may have been said and done, we "went to war" for the reasons in that document and *only* for the reasons in that document. Congress found that those reasons were sufficient justification. Everything else is superfluous and irrelevant.

The question on the table was, were we told explicitly that Iraq had WMD? And the answer, per the speeches quoted in the Dean article, is yes. Yes, we were.

Heh... Gbaji tried this same lame defense back when Santorum and Hoekstra were trying to insist that some degraded shells were proof of WMDs in Iraq. A senior Defense Department official said (as the Dept's official response) "[They] are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war" and Gbaji started spinning his "But CONGRESS voted! Only Congress's opinion matters!" as though the Executive office had suddenly given up the Commander-in-Chief mantle and was no longer the person deciding when & why to deploy troops.

Even if (and it's asinine to think so but let's play along) Congress's vote shows that Congress wanted to go to war over other factors, the point remains that the Commander-in-Chief of the United States armed forces and his administration all believed that Iraq had WMDs and used that, publically and on record, as justification to invade. In speeches, in the media and before the United Nations.

Trying to say "But.. but.. Congress!" is really, really pathetic.

I see, so the recent Healthcare bill passed by the house was completely internal, as it was presented, and Obama was superfluous and irrelevant to the proposal. Furthermore, the media had nothing to do with it, and the countless debates and coverage, statements, and interviews, and opinions, which create the entire damn zeitgeist of our nation, were superfluous and irrelevant.


jesus christ..

Edited, Dec 4th 2009 12:29am by Pensive

So, regardless of the legally stated reasons for going to war, it's okay that Bush went on TV and flat out lied to the American people.

I was responding to a statement about why we went to war, not about what statements may have been made about the folks we went to war with along the way. "Why we went to war" asks the question of legal justification. You're focusing on "things said about the people we went to war with", and while those may certainly get people angry or sad or whatever, they aren't reasons we actually can hold others accountable to.


And when even factcheck.org says that Bush's statements about WMDs weren't a lie, you might want to drop that little bit of theater...

Oh, right, I'm sorry, Bush isn't a liar, he just ran an incompetent intelligence network.

I apologize for claiming Bush was intentionally deceptive when in fact he was criminally negligent. Half of the factors in the Iraqi resolution turned out to be false.