Posted on 02/18/2016 5:54:25 AM PST by Kaslin
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.
Obviously not
To your knowledge? Was you there? I know an Army officer who was in Iraq in 2003-04 who found some.
It isn’t a blanket statement for all people, all groups, and all subjects, and I think you know it, so why don’t we stick to this one statement I have a particular issue with, if possible.
The group is Code Pink (including them in the same post as the word “logic” is problematic) who I have had much closer interaction with than perhaps you have, and it is on this specific issue that I concentrate, though I would be hard pressed to find one, single, solitary position they as a group have taken on any issue that I can agree with.
I don’t believe deranged moonbat chant of “Bush lied people died” which is near and dear to the heart of Code Pink. I believe that, in the immediate shadow of 9/11 the administration did the best they could with the information they could get, which coming out of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, was not 100% dependable no matter how it was sliced.
If you believe Bush knew there was solid proof that no WMD existed in Iraq anywhere, and that even if they did, they would never fall into the hands of any terrorists anywhere, then I would be glad to hear that solid proof, because I haven’t heard it.
And I have heard and seen plenty of solid evidence that there WERE indeed WMD stores in Iraq at some point in time. And that is enough for me. Our military certainly thought there were WMD when they went in.
So, yeah. To question a guy who is spouting nonsense does indeed make me think twice on whether I can hold my nose tightly enough to pull the lever for him.
I might get sued by him! : )
Note he threatens lawsuits many times.
True Grit: LaBoeuf: She draws him like a gun
I had the opportunity to meet a lot of military personnel during that time frame, and their opinion of GWB was far more positive and enthusiastic overall than anyone on FR even cares to acknowledge. If they stand behind them with their asses on the line (as you did) that means something to me. And their respect for him wasn't the kind of crap you see see now with toadies in the military who suck up to Obama because it is good for their career or they fear what might happen if they don't. The military people I spoke to privately had, overall, a genuine respect and appreciation for the man. One can disagree wholeheartedly with much he did (and I do as well) but it disgusts me to see the herd behavior amongst a portion of proclaimed conservatives who will go so far to distance themselves from GWB that they will jump right into the arms of scum like Code Pink. I won't take part in it. As you said, HE WASN'T INFALLIBLE. He was PLENTY fallible.
Thank you for your service. My younger family members who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan have expressed similar feelings/thoughts about loyalty, nation building and the "peaceful religion".
That being said, those of us from the Nam era seem to be more "zoned in" to the differences between discussions of policy/"hindsight" examination of war VS propaganda used to "degrade" the participants to obtain an objective....
Mr Trump is participating in the latter type of discussion as was used by people like Genghis Khan Kerry.
Trump can (and should) discuss why he would (or wouldn't) have gone into Afghanistan (or Iraq) to give us an idea of how he would act as President.....but calling Bush (and others) LIARS that sent men out to die for personal reasons (or no reason at all).....is guttersnipe propaganda being used for his OWN political agenda like that used in the past to attack our troops.
As an old dog like me who lived through the Nam years....Trump knows better than to go that route....which tells me a LOT about what kind of man he is
Welcome Home.
One of the primary reasons I find this revisionist state of affairs so irritating and offensive is that I have seen it before.
I watched this in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, where people in the media and government were given free reign to disparage the men who served, and their mission.
There are plenty of reasons to disagree with the fundamental mission our men have been involved in, but their mission was to do their job, to the best of their ability, when we, as a country asked them to do so, and the vast majority did that, and with honor.
I watched firsthand how our men were treated by their countrymen while fighting over there, and how they were treated coming home. I hated and despised it, but I was weak, like many others were who felt as I did, and I said nothing. I allowed that to happen by remaining silent.
I vowed never to do that again, and I won’t. I can disagree with the execution of the plan, the money spent, the equipment used, the politics involved, and even the justification, but the men who served did what they were told and kept the faith.
George W. Bush may not have held a rifle in his hands or slept on the ground next to the treads of a tank, but the execution of his job took its toll on him just as surely as it did on many who he sent into combat.
I get the impression many who served with him as CIC understood that.
Yeah. Thanks.
Michael Moore doesn’t want to be accused of being a Trump supporter, regardless how he secretly feels
That is the opposite of what WMD-hunter David Kay said, and if memory serves, he's the guy whose people shot pretty good long-range videotape of calutrons (uranium-processing gear, big damn things the size of Terex Titan tires) going out the back gate of one of Saddam's suspected nuke facilities before the war, while he and the other UN inspectors were being stalled at the front gate by Iraqi security men.
Did you read the article? Were you alive in the 90's? Do you know anything about the Gulf and Iraq Wars, or just what you read on BuzzFeed and TruthOut?
They did more. The grand-tactical mission failed, and we couldn't keep Ho Chi Minh from enslaving South Viet Nam, but our guys achieved a strategic result.
The CIA spurred the Indonesian colonels to get rid of the bugbear Sukarno, who was a stalking-horse for the Communist PKI, and they fell on the PKI itself and slaughtered them in the hundreds of thousands, 800,000 of them by one count, so that the Andaman Sea and the Java Sea were full of floating corpses for two years.
As for the Vietnamese Communists, our guys destroyed the Viet Cong in two great campaigns in 1968, even as the KGB and the New Left plotted to overthrow the Democratic Party from within, and then our people went on to kill over a million other Communist cadre in the field in the big battles and air campaigns of 1967-73.
The NVA cadre we killed, and the tanks they were riding when SAC arclighted them and piled their T-54's on top of each other like Tootsie Toys, were the ones Ho was counting on to lead his thugs to Singapore and break a blood-red flag over the Malacca Strait, one of the world's great maritime highways.
The Sino-Soviet grand campaign to cut the East in two and deprive Japan of her energy supplies, failed thanks to the sacrifices of American soldiers, Marines, and airmen, and the efforts, however uneven, of the ARVN, the Mikes, the Hmong and Montagnards and the rest of the people who fought with the good guys in the Lost Armies of Indochina.
Greetings, LG. Placemarking! Fascinating history lesson.
That is an excellent analysis I have never heard, and well written.
What a region of the world filled with bloodshed for the better part of two decades, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia.
Thanks for posting that.
Thanks for the reply.
GWB fought to end “racial profiling” of Arab Americans as a pre 9-11 candidate, whitewashed Saudi involvement in 9-11, kept spouting that Religion of Peace hogwash while he was President, gave us the Patriot Act and the Iraq invasion as answers to 9-11 when confronting Islam was the correct and uncomfortable answer, and bungled the post victory handling of Iraq.
So how do you reconcile those faults with the enthusiastic support he got at the time, especially from the Troops? America had been attacked, and we always rally around the leader, I think he genuinely loved the troops and that feeling was returned, and at the time it was still a matter of “GWB or the Leftists”.
The whole “Us or the Left” argument has kept American conservatives in thrall for many, many years. Much of the conservative leadership puts globalist and international business interests ahead of American interests, and they use the bogey man of the American Left to frighten and silence conservatives who dare to question that agenda.
Witness the shrill efforts on this thread to tie Trump to Code Pink. Any questioning of the motives of Bush, the idea of nation building as a military objective, or the willingness to avoid offending Arabs and Islam at the cost of national security means that you are an ally of Code Pink? It’s an unthinking smear.
Also, any policy that self destructs at the end of a term due to unpopularity is by definition a failed policy. We can point fingers at Obama all we want, and be right in doing so, but if we fail to recognize the policies of GW Bush as the fathers of the election of Obama, we are fooling ourselves.
I’m sure GWB manipulated and controlled information in order to justify the invasion of Iraq, rather than confront Islam as a whole, and the source of the support of the 9-11 hijackers (his buds, the Saudis). In Washington DC they call it nuance, in the schoolyard we called it lying.
Trump is many things, but he’s not a DC insider, and he doesn’t like DC nuance. We are flummoxed by Trump because we can’t get beyond the old labels of left and right, and he doesn’t fit either one.
I feel odd when you talk about "history lessons" ..... It makes me think of that scene in that Clan of the Cave Bear movie (the other one, after Quest for Fire with Rae Dawn Chong, that had my poor cousin the anthropological archaeologist writhing on the ground in academic agony), when the heroine consults the aged moghurs, who sit around in a cave toking up and getting high on dynamite mushrooms, "reach out to her mind" with giant magic and interrogate her higher functions like her brain was a Zip drive.
</off ancient moghur groaning noises>
8o)
Perhaps it has something to do with his two arrests for sexual approaches to young (underage) girls, and his conviction in 2010. He was just paroled 18 months ago.
Did that include all those tons of yellowcake that wound up being sent to Canada for processing into something useful?
Wow .... these screwy punctuation marks .... you ALWAYS have to go back and edit your head off .... Sorry about that.
I am SO thankful I didn’t read those books. Stuff sticks in my mind too much.
I hope you’re well!
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