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.
Thanks
Oh and spare me the Trump insults. I do not support any Rep candidate. Huckabee was my guy!
I agree. I sure wish he'd go back to what put him at the top.....talking about securing our borders, keeping businesses in the U.S., stopping the flow of Syrian refugees, and the attack on Christianity.
Spoken like a true member of Code Pinko.
This is puke talk that you would expect out of Code Pink or Michael Moore.
Trump's running in the wrong primary...........
Hate to break this to you, but the WMD’s that were found in Iraq dated back to the Iran/Iraq war, and we helped them get them... Saddam was not mass manufacturing new WMD’s... there were no mobile manufacturing stations, or any of the other things that Powell presented to the UN.
We didn’t go into Iraq because Saddam had some WMD’s we helped give him decades before, we went in because we were told he was manufacturing them and harboring and aiding terrorists.
The Neocons trumped up evidence to this end.
That’s the long and short of it. Trying to argue that Bush was right about Iraq is a foolish argument to try to be making 13 years later. We spent trillions, destablised an entire region and Iraq is virtually a failed state at this point and a haven for terrorists far worse than the Taliban.... I supported the war at the time, but there is no doubt that it was not worth it.
Does that make BUSH personally a liar? No, given the evidence we assume he was given, I would have made the same choice... I would hope I would have made different ones after the hot war was over, so that we didn’t wind up losing the peace, but that’s a different conversation. However, there is no way you can make the argument that the intelligence presented as reliable to justify it at the time was not known by some to be flawed and unreliable and presented at reliable anyway.
In 1998, Saddam kicked out the weapons inspectors which was a violation of the cease fire agreement. From that point until 9/11, Saddam claims that he had eliminated all of what he had last acknowledged in 1993, despite not eliminating any of it during the first seven years of the cease fire.
Should we have taken him at his word? Or should we have verified? Bush chose to verify. He convinced Saddam to allow UN inspectors back in to see if everything was as before. The final report coming from these inspectors (Scott Ritter included) was that they could not account for everything, and that Saddam was not allowing them the access they had been promised.
Keep in mind that 9/11 was a game changer. The bottom line with Iraq is that they were in violation of the cease fire agreement and had been so for quite some time. This first and foremost was the reason for invading, as the Authorization for Use of Force in Iraq clearly detail. Furthermore, Saddam was also a sponsor or terrorism which was our primary target.
He was right at home in Iraq where little girls and boys are nothing more than chattel.
I've been saying that for eight months now.
After Mitt Romney lost to President Obama, the Trump criticized the GOP for being too harsh towards illegal immigrants:
“The Democrats didn't have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they weren't mean-spirited about it,” Trump told Newsmax’s Ronald Kessler in a Nov. 26, 2012 interview.
Romney's solution of "self deportation" for illegal aliens made no sense and suggested that Republicans do not care about Hispanics in general, Trump says.
"He had a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal," Trump says. "It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote," Trump notes. "He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country."
It is all about Trump, it’s his mouth and he stuck his foot in it
So, you are a pinko if you are able to read? FOlks are on the record all over the place admitting they presented questionable intelligence as reliable to trump up the case for war in Iraq. Was it by Bush’s orders? I doubt it, but that doesn’t mean the american people were not deceived, and the end result was not worth it.
There is nothing communist about recognizing the Iraq War was a failure in hindsight... If you look at where Iraq is today, and think that we succeeded there, there is little hope for you. Yes we toppled a dictator, and had no idea what to do once we did... so now we have a virtually failed state, terrorism far worse that the taliban running rampant, and trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost. Like it or not these leaders in this part of the world keep the more radical elements in check, they may do it ruthlessly, but they do it.
Obama made the same stupid mistakes when he supported the Arab Spring.... may not have put boots on the ground but by forcing out less then nice guys, he let the radicals fill in vaccuums all over the region.
We have 16 years of flagrantly failed foreign policy in that part of the world by 2 administrations.
You got it.
“Your bitterness in FR postings doesn’t help TC though.”
You think this is about Ted Cruz?
No, this is about a bitter bitter man, Donald Trump. You seem to be fine with his bitterness.
Oh stop with the bloviating Code Pink crap. Iraq had/has WMD's and Obama gave them to ISIS.
Trump said Bush Lied, don’t try to soft peddle this, You don’t even believe this Kook as you admit...so how can you support this piece of garbage?
I’m an OIF vet. I’m not insulted by the idea that the war against Islamic terror could have been better served by something other than regime change and nation building in Iraq.
My pride and loyalty lies with my country and comrades, not a strategic decision and certainly not to any politician or political party.
I think GWB had his heart in the right place when it came to the War on terror, and I was proud to serve while he was at the helm. Doesn’t mean his strategy was infallible.
In fact, his religion of peace statements are still a running joke here, and rightly so.
So WMD isn’t WMD if it is supposedly “old”?
If you look at where Iraq is today, and are ignorant of what Obama did to create that, there is little hope for you.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.