Posted on 02/19/2016 6:35:00 AM PST by SeekAndFind
RE: If Trump based his conclusion on data coming from governments that was a false and possibly a lie
Let’s put it this way — even DEMOCRATS who were privy to the intelligence reports ( e.g. Hillary and John Kerry and Joe Biden ) ALL VOTED FOR THE INVASION.
So did our British allies (e.g. Tony Blair ).
Trump then wants people like me to believe that ALL OF THEM colluded to invade Iraq KNOWING FULL WELL that there were no WMD’s ( this after Saddam used WMD’s on the Kurds ).
What Trump should have said in the interest of accuracy was the invasion was a mistake. PERIOD. But did he stop there? No he did not. He had to accuse George W. Bush of LYING about the reasons for war.
I dont think he is that conservative at all, maybe middle of the road. his big issues are border/terrorism, debt, and trade deficit. Other than that, you are right, its wide open. A purist would be great, but i believe his followers are banking on those big issues.
Volumes could not say more.
As someone else said, it’s not so much that Trump is lying, but it’s the constant creating of his own reality. Either way, it’s not good.
ok.
In 2004 79% of Americans thought invading Iraq was justified even if no WMD were found.
Trump did not have access to secret military intelligence. Bush did and his team molded the intelligence (propagandized) to fit their plan. More hair raising is that there were additional plans to go after IRAN and LIBYA. The NeoCon handiwork is quite evident.
Below is the “Downing Street Memo” written by our allies contemporaneously who also believe that the intent was to invade Iraq no matter what.
“Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”.....”the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.”
Below is the memo in its entirety.
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/article91033.ece
As originally reported in the The Sunday Times, May 1, 2005
SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY
DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02
cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell
IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER’S MEETING, 23 JULY
Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.
This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.
John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam’s regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.
The two broad US options were:
(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).
(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.
The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:
(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.
(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.
(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.
The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun “spikes of activity” to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.
The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.
The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.
The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.
On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.
For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.
The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.
John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.
The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.
Conclusions:
(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.
(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.
(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.
(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.
He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.
(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.
(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.
(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)
MATTHEW RYCROFT
(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)
[end text - emphasis added]
The same information Bush received from the Clinton administration. WMD went to Syria with the help of the Russians while Russia was stalling the invasion for three months at the UN.
You get three guesses.
RE: Trump did not have access to secret military intelligence. Bush did and his team molded the intelligence (propagandized) to fit their plan.
FROM LARRY ELDER:
It’s one thing to disagree with the decision to go to war in Iraq. That, believe it or not, was once a minority view. According to a Gallup poll taken in March 2003, the night after the Iraq war began, 76 percent supported President George W. Bush’s decision. Two months after the invasion, a Gallup poll found 79 percent of Americans thought the war was justified — about half of those said, “The war will be justified regardless of whether (weapons of mass destruction) are found.”
But in the last GOP debate, Republican candidate front-runner Donald Trump took things to a new level. He not only called the decision to go to war “a big, fat mistake” (and, post-debate, proclaimed it “a disaster”) but also said: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none.”
That was breathtaking. Neither Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war before later repudiating her vote; nor Barack Obama, who called it “a dumb war” in 2002; nor Bernie Sanders, who called it “the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of the country” had accused Bush of “lying.”
Trump, of course, is not alone. Former Associated Press Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier, for example, once said, “George W. Bush lied us into war in Iraq.”
This claim — by a reporter, no less — incensed Judge Laurence Silberman, who co-chaired the Robb-Silberman Commission set up by Congress to examine the intel leading up to the Iraq War. In a Wall Street Journal piece called “The Dangerous Lie That ‘Bush Lied,’” Silberman said: “I am ... keenly aware of both the intelligence provided to President Bush and his reliance on that intelligence as his primary casus belli. It is astonishing to see the ‘Bush lied’ allegation evolve from antiwar slogan to journalistic fact. ...
“Our WMD commission carefully examined the interrelationships between the Bush administration and the intelligence community and found no indication anyone in the administration sought to pressure the intelligence community into its findings. ...
“... No one in Washington political circles offered significant disagreement with the intelligence community before the invasion. The National Intelligence Estimate was persuasive — to the president, to Congress and to the media. ...
“The charge is dangerous because it can take on the air of historical fact — with potentially dire consequences. I am reminded of a similarly baseless accusation that helped the Nazis come to power in Germany: that the German army had not really lost World War I, that the soldiers instead had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by politicians.
“Sometime in the future, perhaps long after most of us are gone, an American president may need to rely publicly on intelligence reports to support military action. It would be tragic if, at such a critical moment, the president’s credibility were undermined by memories of a false charge peddled by the likes of Ron Fournier.”
The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, who wrote a book about the decision to go to war in Iraq, also said Bush didn’t lie: “I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.”
David Kay was the “weapons hunter” sent by George W. Bush after the war to locate the expected stockpiles. He did not find them. But Kay said: “I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. ... .And never — not in a single case — was the explanation, ‘I was pressured to do this.’”
Kenneth Pollack, ex-CIA Persian Gulf military analyst and Bill Clinton’s top Persian Gulf adviser, disagreed with the timing of the decision to go to war. But he said that all of America’s intelligence agencies — there are 16 — asserted at the highest level of probability that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMDs.
Accusing a commander in chief, irrespective of his or her party, of knowingly lying to start a war is serious business. In the Iraq War, almost 4,500 U.S. service members died, to say nothing of the war’s cost. To claim that the Bush administration knowingly lied to start the Iraq War is to assert that the CIA was behind 9/11 or that O.J. Simpson was innocent of double homicide.
Facts don’t matter. Lack of evidence means presence of proof.
Your ears are not lying to you it is just that your ears are just retarded/learning disabled. Trump's "I guess" is not a ringing endorsement for a war - which was like 6 months into the future and not even something seen as about to happen.
But what that does tell me is that the paid operatives can't discredit Trump for being vocally against the Iraq war (one would assume a heretical view in the GOP) so the default position now is to try and make it seem Trump was not ahead of the curve then the rest of the GOPe candidates who praised the war right up until Trump hammered W on it and rose in the polls instead of sinking.
The effort in Iraq was undermined by the left and the media. The outcome could have been much better but they got to the American public and now the whole episode has been largely rewritten.
It seemed at the time the task of finding and getting Bin Laden and Al Queda took a back seat and was not the priority it was supposed to be.
In retrospect we see that the Iraq War was a contrived thing and I think we were all lied to about it. The Intel for going was almost manufactured to fit the narrative Bush and Neocons wanted us to think.
SO I am not surprised Trump may have said what he did but what is important is that he saw that it was a crock earlier than the rest of us and said so.
Yeah, OK. Put it to bed. I know for a fact that Bush wishes he’d done some things differently and so, I’m sure, did Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur, Lee, Washington, Hannibal, Xerxes and Alexander the Great.
While I may question some of Trump’s (and all the others’) “modification of memory” and positions, this ain’t one of them.
But meanwhile Trump is also the only GOP candidate who says NOW that invading Iraq was a mistake.
Google is your friend. Don’t be so lazy.
September 11 2002 was six months before the war began.
Stern gets an obviously hesitant response to his question, do you support going to war against Iraq. Trump says, “I....guess...so...but they should have fought it correctly the first time.”
That is obviously not a glaring endorsement of going to war. In the intervening 6 months his attitude did not become MORE supportive. It became less supportive. He objected to the way it was being fought in 2003 and called it a mess.
BTW, we were cleaning Saddam’s clock at the time.
What could he possible have meant?
This is crazy. That was 2002. Trump’ss record is meaningless, you have to go by what he says in the campaign.
He said in the debate he has always been against the war in
Iraq, we at FR have always valued politician’s campaign rhetoric over their actual record.
\sarc
Actually, looks like google is filtering on Trump is a Clown images.
In that interview, Hillary reminded the world that the Dems were the first to promote regime change in Iraq.
Trump might need this interview at some point.
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