The lead-up to war in retrospect

How did we and others judge the situation in the winter of 2002/3?

1. jayackroyd - 10/19/2005 10:48:03 PM

In the parts of the web I'm inhabiting, the confluence of events--the president's crashing popularity, the Judith Miller fiasco, the Fitzgerald investigations, a new book by George Packer--is making me try to remember what I thought about the Iraq war and when.

There may be others with a similar desire to recollect. Would it be possible to unarchive the Iraq War thread from, say, August 2002 to August 2003? Or the mideast thread for that period? Or are the archives on the web somewhere?

2. wonkers2 - 10/19/2005 11:04:09 PM

Great idea.

3. wonkers2 - 10/19/2005 11:05:04 PM

Relevant comments may not all be in one thread.

4. jayackroyd - 10/19/2005 11:49:47 PM

I know. But I find myself wanting to say "At the time, I...."
and I just don't trust memory.

5. alistairconnor - 10/20/2005 6:05:06 AM

Yes, that would be fair enough... I have a copy of the unpurged database, from July last year. (ooops... I have it here on my computer at work... I'm leaving this job in 2 weeks... glad you mentioned it)

I'll take it home, and either generate some big HTML pages or poke it back into the live databases.

A worthy project. We could hold a little seminar, invite Niner, Ace, Pincher etc...

6. wabbit - 10/20/2005 9:36:02 AM

I have big html pages ready to go, I just need to put them somewhere. AC, I can send them to you or you could send me the FTP info and I'll create a directory and upload them directly.

7. jayackroyd - 10/20/2005 9:42:28 AM

I am vaguely interested in seeing how wrong other people were, but I'm a lot more interested in seeing how much I (and others) were taken in by the line.

Have you noticed that Ritter, who was right down the line, is still a pariah? Still a traitorous 5th columnists, while the people who were completely wrong are still peddling the same old hoke?

8. alistairconnor - 10/26/2005 1:07:51 PM

It hasn't officially been announced, but Wabbit has done a huge job of making the Mote's archived threads available again. They are linked from the "Mote Archive page", by a link called "More archived threads"


This brings you to this menu ... which contains a colossal amount of half-forgotten treasures [if you don't mind wading through the usual shite to get to them!]

9. alistairconnor - 10/26/2005 1:18:05 PM

Jay, I spent a couple of hours last night going over that ground (would have been better spend sleeping)

I've finished the first thread, Conflict in the middle east, Pt 1, which covers the time before the actual dying starts. 9/6/2002 to 3/9/2003

Aha aha... just wondering where "Part 2" was...

there is a link from the bottom of "Part 1"

http://www.themote.com/archive/archive_conflict-mideast2.htm

but it 404s

10. jayackroyd - 10/26/2005 1:27:06 PM

Thanks very much wabbit and alistair.

Alistair--was it worth it? Did you learn anything about what you'd learned? Was there insight there? Or was it just wanking and whining?

11. arkymalarky - 10/26/2005 6:37:26 PM

Thanks so much for doing all that, Wabbit and Alistair.

12. jayackroyd - 10/26/2005 8:24:05 PM

I hadn't looked when I'd put up my thanks.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!

It's all up there. Every thread from the beginning of time. It was an incredibly generous labor of love. Thank you very much wabbit.

I just hope there are some words worth the effort of preserving and presenting.

13. jexster - 10/26/2005 8:43:13 PM

Thanks AC..all kidding and schadenfreude aside this is historian source material...

14. alistairconnor - 10/27/2005 4:34:46 AM

Hey I didn't do anything... this was a Wabbit solo job!

THANKS WABBIT!

15. alistairconnor - 10/27/2005 5:05:32 AM

Lots of wanking and whining, for sure, Jay.

It strikes me on re-reading that Jex and I were mostly on the money, but we shouldn't particularly claim credit for it, it was more out of prejudice than perspicacity. For example, I trusted the UN inspectors more than the CIA/Bush administration.

The only significant thing that I know now that I didn't know then, is the confirmation of the Connor/Ackroyd hypothesis, which was only clearly confirmed for me the other day, watching that Wilkerson video. I didn't think then that Blair, Powell, Rumsfeld etc sincerely believed that Saddam had useable WMDs. But it appears they really did, after all! Taken in by satellite evidence which Saddam was fabricating for them, and stovepiped intelligence from Chalabi's crew.

What strikes me today is that Chalabi and co undoubtedly knew the truth... he had the human intelligence that the CIA lacked.

A less resolute president than Bush would certainly have flinched before sending US troops to face chemical and biological weapons. The rational tyrant Saddam underestimated the madness of King George!

16. alistairconnor - 10/27/2005 5:11:09 AM

Actually, I think I'm being unfair to Jex. I believe he understood better than any of us how badly broken the Bush administration's policy making apparatus was, and he understood it because of his hands-on Washington experience. Try this, Jex on 7 Sept 2002 :

GWB is a geopoltical incompetent. His decision apparatus is out of control. Because he hasn't the temperament, experience or intellect to match the strong personalities of his decision making team, the decision process has become an anarchy where the power to decide has now moved from inside the administration to newspapers, pundits, and other domestic and foreign political leaders. That is the end stage of a bureaucratic political disaster, and this is a bureaucratic political bumble that is without precedent in US history.

17. wonkers2 - 10/27/2005 7:29:00 AM

Jexter had Iraq figured out correctly from the very begininng.

18. PelleNilsson - 10/27/2005 9:25:28 AM

If one were unkind, which, of course, I am not, one would say that there is bound to be a gem or to in the enormous body of verbiage jex turned out. A bit like Shakespeare and the typewriter wouldn't you say?

19. Magoseph - 10/27/2005 9:57:27 AM

A certain poster raved and ranted that the new government would be “neo-fascist”, the “social contract” never one of its priorities, and the new President likely to be only a “figure-head”.

20. Magoseph - 10/27/2005 9:58:50 AM

Oh, by the way, this woman was for the Iraq war.

21. alistairconnor - 10/27/2005 12:27:26 PM

... and believed that Iraq's oil, under US guidance, would lead to a rapid improvement in the standard of living for the grateful liberated Iraquis...

... perhaps she should have listened to her husband?

22. Magoseph - 10/27/2005 12:49:58 PM

... perhaps she should have listened to her husband?

Sexist you!

23. Magoseph - 10/27/2005 1:29:12 PM

Wise man! Except that he thought reason would prevail.

Yes, he did and he thought at the time that my comments were too incendiary. They were on targets since now we have neo-cons in the government, Bush’ brain Rove, and a suffering middleclass.

24. jexster - 10/27/2005 2:19:39 PM

Merci AC... I told you that Wilkerson stole my shit...we need to put some security controls on this Imperfect World of ours

25. jexster - 10/27/2005 2:27:33 PM

Message # 16

In ego te absolve. In nomine patris, et filis, et spiritus sancti. Amen


No go and sin no more

26. jexster - 10/27/2005 2:51:37 PM

Actually AC thanks to Dr. Paul Freedenberg, my Undergrad advisor and grad school classmate of Paul Wolfowitz, also sometime working buddy of Richard Perle back when he was on Scoop Jackson's staff.

Seminar National Security Decision Making 1971

and the classic

"[T]he case that I saw for four-plus years," [Wilkerson] said, "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, and perturbations in the national-security [policymaking] process," he added.

27. Ms. No - 10/27/2005 4:07:54 PM

I don't recall participating much in the discussion but have vague memories of support for military action if WMD were found.

Lord, I'm fluffy. I had no idea.

Must go read now.

28. PelleNilsson - 10/27/2005 4:36:32 PM

I have added a link to the archive page at the top of the butter bar. It is very large, even with DSL it took minites to load. But once you have it in your cache it will be easy to access.

There are some rules:

1. This thread is the place to look back at the discussion in the winter of 2002-03 in the perspective of what we knew then and in the light of what we know, or think we know, now.
   
   
2. It is not the place to discuss current developments in the affairs surrounding the White House. There are other threads for that purpose.
   
   
3. Regarding posters who are no longer around it is OK to refer to them and quote them as exampes of a certain lines of arguments,but I think it would be unfair and a bit tasteless to attack or ridicule them.
   
   
4. A modicum of modesty may be fitting.

29. jayackroyd - 10/27/2005 5:01:47 PM

For your convenience updating the butterbar, here are the links for the pieces. As far as "attack and ridicule" goes, I'd say they do a fine job on their own. I've paged through more than I have time for. But one thing that is striking is how the line of the day is taken up, and then forgotten as it proves to be correct, to be replaced by a new line.

http://www.themote.com/archive/archive_conflict-mideast_pt1a.htm

http://www.themote.com/archive/archive_conflict-mideast_pt2.htm

http://www.themote.com/archive/archive_conflict-mideast_pt2a.htm

http://www.themote.com/archive/archive_conflict-mideast_pt3.htm

http://www.themote.com/archive/archive_conflict-mideast_pt4.htm

http://www.themote.com/archive/archive_conflict-mideast_pt5.htm

Respective dates:

3/9
4/8
6/10
9/23
12/21
5/5/04

30. jayackroyd - 10/27/2005 5:03:45 PM

"incorrect"

I can also see why they left.

I never really did understand that, but now I think I do. It seems a pity that this medium doesn't seem to permit the coexistence of conflicting points of view.

31. PelleNilsson - 10/27/2005 5:07:33 PM

Thanks, jay.

32. jayackroyd - 10/27/2005 5:48:31 PM

Two thirds through George Packers Assassins' Gate, I gotta say that wombat made a mistake here:

Wombat - 4/8/2003 10:08:50 PM

I see Kanan Makiya as the potential Vaclav Havel of Iraq.

This TPMCafe post by a digby contributor named tristero makes a point that was brought out by the discussion of Assassins' Gate at TPMCafe, and other places.

Essentially, the defense of people like Pollack and Packer who supported the war on humanitarian/democracy/anti-Saddam grounds is that they were right, but the administration conducted the war incompetently. With enough troops, better (as opposed to NO see Packer's book for details) post-war planning, a more realistic assessment of the Iraqi political situation and so forth, this could have been a successful intervention.

Tristero's point is that if you buy this defense, you can't do arithmetic. The sequence of events that had to break right are long enough, and the odds of each event low enough that betting on this war was like buying a lottery ticket.

I think he's right. I can't say that I would have made the argument this way, before the war, but I certainly didn't think it was a good idea. I certainly didn't think it was justified by the reasons presented by the admnistration, And I thought there wasn't a prayer that these guys could manage the post-war situation.

But I remember, clearly, a lot of people taking the position that Saddam was evil, probably poses a threat and needs to be removed. These people are now the ones being called "liberal hawks." Friedman and Kristof took positions like this.

So one motivation for my wanting to look at this is to figure out how the heck so many people convinced themselves that this was a good idea. But a hard-headed guy like Wombat looked at this wacky exile and saw Vaclav Havel. Even if that was a throwaway line, it's an insane association. Havel stayed in Czechoslovakia. He went to prison repeatedly. Mikaya went to Cambridge. (Not to fault him. If he had stayed, he'd be dead.) But this guy was simply not going to lead a velvet revolution.

So where did this delusion come from?

33. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 10/27/2005 6:52:39 PM

I miss Cellar . . .

6856. Al D - 3/24/2003 1:33:09 AM

The Wiz is in his glory because the U.S, had a bad day. You think this guy has any love of America? Give me a break. Crawl back in your hole you creep.

6857. jayackroyd - 3/24/2003 4:35:57 AM

Toys.

6858. magoseph - 3/24/2003 7:55:42 AM

Stupid people equate criticizing stupidity with infringement of free speech because such speech is all they are capable of.

Well said, Dantes. The response to a post should be a response to the position the poster has taken rather than an attack on the poster. What you fail to point out is that concerned is the most consistent violator of that measure of courtesy.


6859. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 3/24/2003 10:37:08 AM

For the record, Al, I think Gen. Tommy Franks is a superb officer and I've never been prouder of our military— whom I identify with completely—that is, being forced to fight in a war that should never have been started.

Like Viet Nam, this is a viper pit that will poison America's reputation for decades—maybe forever. If you had any "intellectual honesty," as Dantes likes to say, you'd admit that this war is about domination cloaked as "liberation."

The mounting death toll of the brave and the pure in Iraq will eventually be laid at the feet of Bush and his cowardly manipulators, but not until thousands more die, regrettably.

If you think that gives me any pleasure, you're dead wrong—it only infuriates me with a cold and bitter rage that will stiffen my resolve to bring about a change of regime, here in this country.

Make no mistake, it will stiffen the resolve of many others as well.





6860. Cellar Door - 3/24/2003 10:44:24 AM

Sing Out Louise!

34. arkymalarky - 10/28/2005 12:30:53 AM

That's a very fine post of yours that prompted Cellar's response, Wiz.

35. Ulgine Barrows - 10/28/2005 1:59:18 AM

28. PelleNilsson - 10/27/2005 9:36:32 PM

......

There are some rules:


No.

36. PelleNilsson - 10/28/2005 2:19:08 AM

Thanks for putting up the links, wabbit.

37. Ulgine Barrows - 10/28/2005 2:19:38 AM

jexster, I hope you're preening.
Accolades!

38. Ulgine Barrows - 10/28/2005 2:33:06 AM

Hey
did you steal oil today?

Why not?

39. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 10/28/2005 9:18:57 AM

Thanks ark; I get lucid once in awhile, but in this case, I wish I had been wrong about everything.

Herculean task, wabb–mega kudos!

40. Macnas - 10/28/2005 9:40:22 AM

I've spent a fair amount of time reading stuff from the archive.

I don't think there is much to be said or learned from it. Indeed, within the archive there are a few examples of retrospective analysis already.

What is interesting is the way the pro-war argument changed, not totally but subtly. And the way the pro-war people, like Sickles and Pincher, Ace and Dantes just faded from the discussion. Never to return in fact, which is a pity really, even though I found some of the personal insults too much at times.

41. jayackroyd - 10/28/2005 11:09:57 AM

I agree. I was somewhat surprised to find that, really, people looked at the same collection of evidence and reached opposite conclusions very early on. Those conclusions were pretty much unaffected by developments; although the evidence in support of the pro-war position moved some, the position did not.

I have theories I'll leave unvoiced about whether different evidence would have led to different positions.

I did have one question for Pelle, though. What motivated me to ask about this (and I'm glad that it led to not merely the war archive, but the whole archive; I think we'll be glad to have it.)

Pelle's position is the one that comes the closest to what people are currently calling the liberal hawk position--that the regime was appalling and that sanctions were unsustainable, and therefore something had to be done.

Looking back, there are two reactions from such people. First is "I was wrong. It was harder than I'd realized, and I had been fooled by the evidence that had fooled everyone else wrt the threat from Iraq."

The seond reaction is "I was right. If these idiots had not bollixed up the occupation and the occupation's aftermath, a reasonable government friendly to the US and reasonably representative of the population could have been established. Both the geo-political and humanitarian goals could be have been attained if the war and its aftermath had been conducted competently."

Pelle, do you have comments?

If you'd like to see discussion relating to these issues, you can find a defense of the position here from a managing editor at Foreign Policy, and what I consider an appalling follow up here, from the same guy.

The discussion turns on the book I've already mentioned, Assassins' Gate by George Packer, which is a fine piece of work. Packer is also a liberal hawk, whose position on the spectrum between "huge mistake" and "disastrous implementation" is not clear.

His is a good case in point, because he does a fine job in his book, and in the New Yorker articles that he wrote during the period he was visiting Iraq, of demonstrating just what a disastrous implementation it was. It's hard to do the "what if" experiment, because pretty much everything was done wrong.

42. arkymalarky - 10/28/2005 11:49:15 AM

Including failing to secure massive amounts of explosives that have apparently come in very handy in blowing up American soldiers and Iraqi citizens for the last two years.

43. wonkers2 - 10/28/2005 11:51:53 AM

Interesting stuff. I'll be interested in Pelle's take on the issue. He was very unfairly dismissive of Jexter's positions during the lead-up to Bush's invasion of Iraq. Critizing Jexter's prolixity fails to recognize that he, more than anyone, was consistently opposed to Bush's foolish, unnecessary, badly executed, disastrous "big Iraq attack."

44. jayackroyd - 10/28/2005 1:44:37 PM

Arky,

That falls into the "administration screwed up something that could have worked" line of argument. Is that where you come down?

45. arkymalarky - 10/28/2005 1:50:15 PM

No. Just because they screwed up doesn't mean things would have worked with a more competent (or any?) plan. They probably would have been less a mess, but I can't see how outcomes would have been successful under any plan. I come down on the side of them having taken a bad situation and made it much worse. At the time I was ambivalent about the invasion. Now I'm to the point of believing they created the defense of invasion from whole cloth, and we had no more business invading Iraq than we do any other dictator who isn't a significant threat to the US or our vital interests.

46. PelleNilsson - 10/28/2005 2:48:57 PM

jay, I would describe my position as close to your second option, that the outcome could have been much better but the coalition screwed it up. I had misgivings, of course. I don't want to be offensive here, but Americans in general are not known for their ability to understand and interact with other cultures and peoples on their terms.

I felt deep unease when the plunder started and virtually nothing was done to stop it and Rumsfield said it was quite natural for an oppressed population to "let off steam". That's where the rot started, IMO. The proper way to interact in this case would have been to shoot a few dozen looters on sight and to hell with the Geneva conventions. Instead it continued, public building were stripped to the bone and the arms dumps were looted. That is evidence of almost superhuman incompetence. After years of UN inspections the locations of most, if not all, of them must have been known. The army must have been caught up in the propagande meme of being welcomed as liberators who would get the cooperation of everybody.

I never believed in the objective of setting up a western democracy in Iraq. I thought, and still think, that the best that can be hoped for is something on the Jordanian model: a traditional tribal system tempered by some of the institutions of democracy such as a parliament where national issues can be discussed and a reasonably independent judiciary.

47. PelleNilsson - 10/28/2005 3:13:12 PM

Yes, wonkers, I was dismissive of jexster, not because he opposed the war, but because he didn't really oppose the war as such, he opposed Bush.

Let me quote a post of mine:

2889. PelleNilsson - 2/4/2003 12:32:42 PM

So, now we see quite clearly that concerned's and jexster's respective stand on crucial international issues has nothing to do with objective realities but solely with considerations arising out of US domestic politics.

This was prompted by a diversion into the Serbia/Kosovo incident which, at the time, jexster defended whith his usual vigour (Kill the Serbian pig farmers!) and concerned opposed.

Do you seriously believe that those positions were founded on a serious analysis of the situation at hand in the countries in question, or did they represent the views of two poltical hacks on the opposite ends of the spectrum?

My ongoing criticism of jexster's arguments is based on the same grounds.

48. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 10/28/2005 3:22:07 PM

Pelle will always opt for order over justice, what can be done over what should be done.

The sad fact is that we should have never gone into Iraq and the thugs of corporate fascism thought they could exploit the place for future profits while complacent sheep all over the globe went along with them and allowed it.

It was the wrong thing to do and that's the bottom line.

49. wonkers2 - 10/28/2005 4:53:20 PM

That's not a fact but rather your personal conclusion, one with which I disagree strongly. You often state your personal opinions as if they were fact. Jexter opposed Bush AND he opposed the war. And he stated consistently and clearly why he opposed the war. More so than anyone else in this forum. Sometimes his objections were expressed in his own words and sometimes via links to other thoughtful people like Anatol Lieven who questioned the wisdom of the war which, for those who took the trouble to read them, provided an alternative view hard to find in mainstream American media.

50. PelleNilsson - 10/28/2005 5:03:31 PM

No. jexster opposed the war because he opposed Bush. I note that you don't address the case of Serbia.

51. thoughtful - 10/28/2005 5:11:49 PM

Watch it Wonks...there's only one thoughtful™ in these thar threads.

52. wonkers2 - 10/28/2005 5:22:38 PM

Why, Pelle? Pelle: "Just because I said so."

And Jexter was correct on Serbia also. (I'm assuming he supported intervention, without going back and re-reading his posts.)

53. thoughtful - 10/28/2005 5:22:47 PM

Always interesting to read what one has written years ago that one little remembers. From 10/31/02, almost exactly 3 years ago:

My concerns are:

* Saddam has a lot to lose now so is "contained." If we attack anyway, he'll have nothing to lose and will launch whatever weapons he has at hand straight to Israel.
* Urban fighting would be Saddam's strongest hand and lead to the most casualties on both sides, so in my view, a quick and easy win like Desert Storm is not a given.
* Foster even greater anti-American sentiment ensuring more terrorist attacks on the US.
* At the same time divert US attention away from the real threat of al qaeda and all the necessary spending on improving US security at home.
* Resulting oil price spike would push a still soft US economy back into recession.
* I feel no need to "experiment" with the US setting up a democracy in Iraq and severely doubt it would ever happen as, a) the US has had a poor track record in doing so and b) the likelihood of the policy makers letting that happen, in my view is slim...a true democracy would mean control by the Iraqi shiite majority with potential for alliance with Iran...that other "axis of evil" nation.

Clearly not an A, but I give myself a B. What I got wrong:

o Hussein was attacked but did not launch anything at israel. Little did I know how sexed up the pre-war intelligence was...he had nothing to launch at anyone.

o Oil prices have shot up, but despite the economic models and predictions of most economists, $60/bbl oil has not yet been sufficient to push the US or global economy into recession.

But so far, its stood the test of time well.

54. jayackroyd - 10/28/2005 5:32:05 PM

wonk--

To disprove Pelle's claim, you need to find a position that Bush supports that jexster also supports.

Or a coherent argument for supporting the Kosovo intervention and opposing the Iraq intervention. (You can find those lying around the internet, but did jexster make them?)

I got one.

Hey jexster, what was your position on the Homeland Security Act? What did you think, when did you think it, and did you change your mind along the way?

55. wonkers2 - 10/28/2005 6:28:20 PM

I think I'll just let Pelle prove his assertion. If he's done that, I missed it.

56. wonkers2 - 10/28/2005 6:29:05 PM

Okay, Jex, do you agree with Bush's decision to extend the Davis-Bacon Act?

57. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 10/28/2005 6:36:49 PM

In a file photo Exxon Mobil Corp. Chairman and CEO Lee Raymond laughs during a news conference in Dallas, Wednesday, May 25, 2005. Exxon Mobil Corp., the largest publicly traded oil company in the world, on Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005, said third-quarter profit surged, buoyed by higher crude-oil and natural-gas prices, even as the period's hurricanes hampered production. Revenue grew to $100.72 billion from $76.38 billion in the prior-year period. (AP Photo/Donna McWilliam)

58. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 10/28/2005 6:41:07 PM

49. wonkers2 - 10/28/2005 4:53:20 PM

That's not a fact but rather your personal conclusion, one with which I disagree strongly. You often state your personal opinions as if they were fact. Jexter opposed Bush AND he opposed the war. And he stated consistently and clearly why he opposed the war. More so than anyone else in this forum. Sometimes his objections were expressed in his own words and sometimes via links to other thoughtful people like Anatol Lieven who questioned the wisdom of the war which, for those who took the trouble to read them, provided an alternative view hard to find in mainstream American media.

Since when is a personal opinion taboo here and what, specifically, do you disagree with?

59. arkymalarky - 10/28/2005 8:47:35 PM

Ace of Spades' blog was quoted on CNN today.

60. robertjayb - 10/28/2005 8:56:27 PM

Repent! The end is nigh!

61. wonkers2 - 10/28/2005 11:13:26 PM

Wiz "Since when is personal opinion taboo here?"

It's not. I didn't mean to imply that is is. But it's not worth much unless the reasons for the opinion are expressed also.

Wiz "What specifically do you disagree with?"

With Pelle's assertion that "Jexter opposed the war because he opposed Bush." My answer "Jex opposed the war for many good reasons some of which he expressed in his own words and for others contained in many thoughtful and informative linked articles and blogs." He also opposed Bush.

62. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 10/29/2005 9:11:09 AM

wonk- I assumed you were talking about me and my opinions. Sometimes events take place when the reasons for them seem obvious, but it's often impossible to prove your intuition about them is, in fac,t correct.

I don't have jexter's computer time or inclination to follow events with such perspicacity. Nevertheless, I felt the exact same way as he wrt Iraq and the Bush Administration.

There is a wonderful essay by Lewis Lapham in the October Harpers about the corporate fascism that is behind so much of the global events initiated by people who think they have the right to own our world.
It starts off with this quote by FDR from 1938:

"But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land."

Now there is no way to prove that FDR's opinion is "fact," but there is no way to disprove it either. What's interesting to me is the perspective. That's what an opinion is–just a way of looking at something that you resonate with or you don't.

63. wonkers2 - 10/29/2005 11:57:59 AM

I get your point and don't disagree. Lapham is one of my favorites. His writing is elegant, and his views usually coincide with mine. He is why I subscribe to Harper's. I dropped the Atlantic Monthly recently because I find myself at odds with their editorial policies. My impression is that they have moved from center or a bit left of center to right of center in recent years.

64. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 10/29/2005 12:57:08 PM

Thanks for responding wonk. (I hope all went well with your son's weddding.)

65. wonkers2 - 10/30/2005 9:16:17 AM

It's in March.

66. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 10/31/2005 11:01:55 AM

I hope all goes well, then!

67. jexster - 10/31/2005 2:05:22 PM

Damn Wonk...that IS bad news.. I was kinda counting on you for an arranged marriage..

I need a rich husband

68. jexster - 10/31/2005 2:09:15 PM

Just like Jexie told you

Bush Had No Policy to Rebuild Iraq
Financial Times

69. jexster - 10/31/2005 2:11:50 PM

You guyz know I was right on Slerbia and Iraq.

What you do not know is that I was also right on Vietnam, right to the point where I called the 1972 NVN offensive that "no one expected" right on location of the attack, order of battle for NVN, and the week it would take place

Actually a buddy of mine and I called it..just ask Jim Rees...

70. jexster - 10/31/2005 2:29:22 PM

Pelle's got it all wrong tho - so what else is new eh?

The reason I am so fuckin good - regular sacrifice to Mars

71. jayackroyd - 10/31/2005 2:32:36 PM

BTW, I may not have been clear about this. While George Packer's Assassins' Gate was the proximate cause of some blogosphere discussion on the runup to the war, it is not an apologia for the "liberal hawk" view. It's actual a fine collection of reporting, with very little opinion expressed, other than very obvious observations about the inadequacy of the planning and implementation of the post-war enviroment.

I recommend it highly.

72. jexster - 11/1/2005 10:38:03 AM

Clumsy Forgeries, Italian-Style

by Gordon Prather


The real question is not ow come Jex is so fucking good but rather how come Pelle is so fuckin dumb.


I declare

slagsmål!!

73. jexster - 11/1/2005 10:56:13 AM

What are the larger implications of the Cheney cabal? To start with, the US has gotten itself in a huge mess by invading Iraq, by brandishing highly questionable "evidence" and by telling the world to take a hike if it did not like its actions. Now, as US casualties surpass 2,000 in Iraq, the international community seems to be sending the exact same message to the Bush administration.

A war that was carried out with no regard for world opinion or international law has created such a quagmire for the US that it simply has to extricate itself by eradicating the Iraqi insurgency. However, that eradication will come with a human cost that no US administration will be able to pay. How long can the Bush administration prolong its staying power in Iraq at the same rate of American casualties? The answer, simply, is not very long. That very fact may be good news to those who wish America ill, but certainly not to those who worry about its long-term implications for Iraq, the Middle East and the US...

The unraveling of the Cheney cabal
By Ehsan Ahrari - Asia Times

74. jexster - 11/1/2005 11:02:31 AM

Am presently in slagsmal with a Republican supporter of the Icon of Disaster who rested his case for war on this Editorial from the Economist 08/2002:

The moron has no worldview not given in the pages of this crackpot journal or the RNC weekly talking points..


HEADLINE: Confronting Iraq - Confronting Iraq

BODY:
TO HEAR his many critics tell it, George Bush had serious charges to answer this week before the United Nations court of international opinion. The leader of the free world stands accused of threatening to disrupt international law and order. America's insistence that Iraq be stripped of its illicit weapons of mass destruction, as a matter of urgency, by force if necessary, is anyway surely a ruse, since Mr Bush has publicly admitted his aim is to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. Although America has called on others to join it, Mr Bush has said he will go it alone if necessary. Such rampant unilateralism undermines the very authority of the United Nations.

The charges are preposterous. Yet Mr Bush had some explaining to do. In a democracy, any leader contemplating going to war has a duty to explain--in Mr Bush's case to Congress and the American people, but also to the wider world--why this needs to be done. His speech to the UN General Assembly on September 12th came too late for The Economist to gauge its impact. But whether the world stands with him in dealing with the menace Iraq poses, as he has asked it to, or against him, it is not Mr Bush who needs hauling into the dock, but Iraq's dangerous regime, and those members of the UN Security Council which for years have helped Iraq wriggle out of the disarmament obligations the council itself imposed. Ends and means

"Not without United Nations approval" is the near-universal chant that has greeted Mr Bush's insistence that doing nothing about Iraq's illicit weapons is no longer an option--as if the Security Council were the moral conscience of the world. Would that it were. It is instead a collection of powerful states, all pursuing their own interests with what one can only hope is a sense of wider responsibility. There was nothing high-minded, for example, about Russia's refusal to countenance military action to halt Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. It backed the butcher of the Balkans to the bitter end. Some still claim that NATO's intervention there was illegal, since it lacked explicit UN endorsement. Yet 19 of the world's strongest democracies were surely right to act where the UN, divided, could not.

The case of Iraq is different, admittedly. Saddam Hussein has killed far more of his own people and his neighbours than Mr Milosevic ever did; and he has sent his armies and his rockets well beyond Iraq's borders. The Security Council, at first letting principle triumph over pusillanimity, repeatedly declared him in open breach of his disarmament obligations. What it failed to do was rectify that situation. When it came to the crunch--authorising force to back up the inspectors' right to search out and destroy Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological stocks--first Russia and China backed off, keen to close all weapons accounts, see UN sanctions lifted and return to oil-business-as-usual. Then France did the same, leaving America and Britain to attempt to hold the line.

The result has been much worse than stalemate: as a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies points out, Mr Hussein has hung on to his still-hidden arsenal and has had four years free of inspections to restore and conceal as much as he could of what the inspectors had earlier destroyed ()see page 58. To those who, when told that Iraq is a mortal threat to the peace of the world, say "prove it", the only sane reply is: what more proof could anyone need?

If it was right to act in Kosovo where the Security Council was stymied, it is surely right to act in Iraq where the council has failed, with potentially disastrous consequences, to deal with what it has accepted itself is an even more potent threat. Then ask yourself, who is undermining the authority of the UN and its Security Council--those who seek to uphold its repeated resolutions on the nuclear, chemical and biological frisking of Iraq, or those who stand in the way? Credible threats

Yet while it may sometimes, regrettably, be necessary to act without UN approval, isn't America guilty at best of poor judgment, at worst of hypocrisy, in calling not just for inspectors to return to disarm Iraq but for Mr Hussein to be turfed out of power? Won't he be even more tempted to use his horrific weapons rather than see his regime destroyed?

The fact is, it has taken the credible threat of massive force to get Iraq's--and others'--attention. Without it, Mr Hussein would not even be hinting at new inspections (someday, with strings attached). Russia would not now be forced to contemplate how closely to move alongside Mr Bush in order to protect its business dealings in a post-Saddam Iraq. France's president would not this week be reversing himself, to propose a tough new Security Council resolution demanding that Iraq admit inspectors within three weeks, or else (though the "or else" still has no force to it).

If Mr Hussein's only concern were to stay in power, he could have done so by handing over his banned weapons and had sanctions lifted. Instead he has treated inspections as a continuation of the Gulf war by other means. That suggests he has more dangerous plans. It is plausible to conclude that Iraq will not give up its weapons of mass destruction unless he goes. And if he were to surprise the world, and hand them over after all? Then even Mr Bush might conclude that the threat he poses had been suitably deflated.

It is the Security Council's failure to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, not a gun-slinger's determination to look for trouble, that prompts Mr Bush to insist that America, with others where possible, must finish the job. Yet it is not too late for Russia, China and others who say they want him to work with the UN rather than around it to come up with a properly effective plan for dealing promptly with the threat Iraq's weapons pose. All they have lacked is the will. And for his part, Mr Bush knows that the more international support he can muster, the better, not just to contain and disarm Iraq, but to set the place on its feet properly again once the disarming is done. Why else bother to take his case to the UN at all? But, with or without the UN, disarmed Iraq must be deatlt with

75. jexster - 11/1/2005 11:25:03 AM

Wonk..No I do not agree with Bush's Davis Bacon decision.

The first Bush decision that is, not the second, the reversal he made under pressure from persons of principle and conviction..ie Bush haters - short hand

76. jexster - 11/1/2005 1:41:36 PM

77. wonkers2 - 11/1/2005 1:51:05 PM

I was referring to Bush's decision not to exempt hurricane repairs from Davis Bacon.

78. wonkers2 - 11/1/2005 1:56:26 PM

Am I hallucinating or did I read somewhere that the source of the Italian yellow cake forgeries was actually a rogue, neocon CIA agent.

79. wonkers2 - 11/1/2005 2:24:52 PM

Or maybe that a rogue, neocon CIA agent put the Italians up to it???

80. robertjayb - 11/1/2005 3:20:21 PM

Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?...(American Conservative)

.............................

Information developed by Italian investigators indicates that the documents were produced in Italy with the connivance of the Italian intelligence service. It also reveals that the introduction of the documents into the American intelligence stream was facilitated by Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), a parallel intelligence center set up in the Pentagon to develop alternative sources of information in support of war against Iraq.
...........................................

81. wonkers2 - 11/1/2005 3:27:09 PM

Here is the story:

"An FBI investigation into the provenance of these (yellow cake) documents is ongoing, though critics suspect that a U.S. government agency--ostensibly the White House Iraq group--may have itself produced them.....

"In an interview published April 7, 2005, Cannistraro was asked by Ian Masters what he would say if it was asserted that the source of the forgery was former National Security Council and State Department consultant, Michael Ledeen. Canistraro replied, "You'd be very close."

Here is the rest of the sick story.

82. wonkers2 - 11/1/2005 3:28:42 PM

No wonder Cheney ordered that Joe Wilson be smeared. Perhaps we'll be hearing more about Michael Ledeen?? This is sounding more and more like a LeCarre plot!

83. wonkers2 - 11/1/2005 3:36:35 PM

The sad thing is that all the lies about WMD shouldn't have mattered. Iraq was contained and had shown no inclination to attack the United States. Saddam Hussein was a little pissant tyrant who had no time of day for al qaida terrorists and was incapable of harming the U.S. At a party last Saturday two relatively average unsophisticated Michigan people expressed support for Bush's invasion of Iraq because Saddam was somehow responsible for the 9-11 attacks. Bush and Cheney encouraged this myth along with fears of WMD with misleading slogans like "better to fight terrorism in Iraq than here in the U.S. It's surprising how many people still haven't figured out they were had.

84. PelleNilsson - 11/1/2005 5:29:43 PM

Yes, the alleged Saddam-Al Qaida connection was far more serious and infuenced, I think, the American public far more than the Niger yellowcake thing. And, as you say, it still remains as a meme. Who cooked it up? That's a juicy piece to investigate.

85. arkymalarky - 11/1/2005 8:30:20 PM

Do they have the specific source of the story of the 9/11 terrorist/Iraqi meeting in Czechoslovakia?

86. wonkers2 - 11/1/2005 8:37:33 PM

Good question. I don't know.

87. arkymalarky - 11/1/2005 9:25:38 PM

If they identify the original source of that story and the source of the forged Niger documents, they'll have a lot. Rather than money laundering, it seems as if there's been some story laundering here, and it will be interesting to see if anyone's able to get to the bottom of it.

88. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 11/1/2005 10:25:32 PM

Don't expect much to happen, ark . . .

The National Security Agency (N.S.A.) has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes, two people familiar with the historian's work say.

89. jexster - 11/2/2005 12:30:19 PM

While You Slept
They lied us into war

90. jexster - 11/2/2005 1:26:57 PM

While Pelle palavered


We told you so

Bush Manipulated Iraq Intel - Jimmy Carter


Just enough rope to fit around your neck...

Thanks Pelle

91. jexster - 11/2/2005 1:30:50 PM

The Other Liars


and even now the Iraqi government is telling Saddam's henchmen "we need you"

Told you that too

du er välkommen

92. jexster - 11/2/2005 10:51:41 PM

Somewhere in those archives you'll find a number of statements to the effect that I did not believe that Bush was at all interested in Saddam's weapons or his murders or the security of the US but rather was about a grand fantasy of neoimperialist adventure....


True Confessions
William Lind | October 28, 2005


On October 19, 2005, the American Secretary of State, aka the Tea Lady, did something extraordinary for the Bush administration. She told the truth. According to the October 20 Washington Times , in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Miss Rice said that it was always the Bush administration's intent to redesign the Middle East after the September 11 attacks, which exposed a “deep malignancy growing” in the region, and that the Iraq was part of that plan.

Well. There we have it. It's not official: Saddam's eternally elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction were just eyewash. The decision to invade Iraq came first, and the various contrived justifications came after. Thos Iraqi WMDs were as real as Polish attacks on Germany in 1939, and as cynical. The cynicism is, if anything, ever more brazen: Herr Ribbentrop never testified to the Reichstag that “Polish aggression” was just a set-up, even if everyone knew.

Does it matter? To the American press and people, apparently not. Miss Rice's official confirmation of everyone's suspicions got virtually no coverage. After all, the NFL season has started.

But in other respects, I think it does matter. It matters, first, because it reveals this administration's utter cynicism, a cynicism born of the neo-cons, who seldom met a lie they didn't like. In effect, Miss Rice testified, “Yea, we lied. So what?”

Well, beyond 2,000 dead and 15,000 wounded, so cavalier an attitude toward the truth suggests the lies have probably continued. As they have: the administration routinely engages in (illegal) domestic propaganda, puffing anything it can call a “success” in Iraq while classifying or otherwise burying the bad news. The latest example is the spin on the Iraqi constitutional referendum. The Bushies are hailing it an “another victory of democracy,” when in fact the outcome could not have been worse. The Sunnis pulled out all their stops and still lost, telling them the system is stacked so heavily against them they have no political future. Where ballots fail, bullets still offer promise.

Another reason the WMD lie matters is that the real reason the administration invaded Iraq, “to redesign the Middle East,” reveals (officially) a truly breathtaking hubris, coupled to a monumental ignorance of the region in question. Redesign the Middle East? What do the Bushies think it is, a Chevrolet?

At it happens, the war in Iraq is redesigning the Middle East, but not exactly in a planned fashion. Just as the calling of the Estates General in 1789 opened the door to the French Revolution, so the American destruction of the Iraqi state has opened the door to a broader collapse of the state system in that region, an outcome the administration is now pushing in Syria as well. Osama, sitting in his cave, no doubt continues to thank Allah for President George W. Bush.

Finally, the official revelation, in Congressional testimony no less, that the Bush administration's motto is “Lies R US” will matter politically, as the American people begin to come to grips with the fact of a lost war. That may happen by the elections of 2006; it will certainly happen by 2008. It is safe to say that the public will not be happy, and the realization that they were duped into the lost war won't make them any happier. As Republican Members of Congress are beginning to realize, the blowback may be of historic proportions. Anyone seen any Whigs lately? (The fact that the Democrats continue to offer a profile in cowardice on the war might even open the door to a serious third party, God willing. There have to be some real, small-r republicans out there still.)

And so Wilsonianism will come full circle. Wilson lied America into World War I, with fables of German soldiers bayonetting Belgian babies. The result was Lenin, Hitler and World War II. But the experience did give America a lesson in minding her own business and, for a time, a foreign policy for Americans (first). This time, Wilsonianism will give us a vastly disordered Middle East, the greatest Islamic victory since the fall of Constantinople and oil prices that might make the Trabant America's best-selling car. Will it also give us, again, a foreign policy for Americans, as Senator Robert A. Taft put it? We can hope, we can hope.

93. jexster - 11/3/2005 5:35:44 PM

Message # 4168 in thread 161

Lies Have Consequences


But the line from the novel that Packer should have memorized goes like this: "Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm." It's a useful lesson for a useful idiot.

94. jexster - 11/6/2005 12:23:42 PM

Frank Rich:

As Mr. Bush's approval rating crashes into the 30's, he and the vice president are so desperate to wrap themselves in khaki that on the day of the Libby indictment, they took separate day trips to mouth the usual stay-the-course platitudes before military audiences. If this was a ploy to split the focus of cable news networks and the public, it failed. Perhaps Scooter Libby is hoping that a so-called faulty-memory defense will save him from jail, but too many other Americans are now refreshing their memories of what went down in the plotting and execution of the war in Iraq. What they find are harsh truths and buried secrets that even the most compelling administration scenarios can no longer disguise.

95. alistairConnor - 11/6/2005 6:11:25 PM

The thing that troubles me most, concerning the lead-up to the Iraq war, is the useful idiots among liberals who helped Bush's stampede to war.

I've been reading the 9/11 thread ("War on terrorism part 1"). It's very instructive with respect to people's attitudes to the Iraq war. The thing that struck me the most was Wombat (I single him out because I have great respect for his knowledge and wisdom), who, within a couple of days after 9/11, said something like : I hope Saddam was involved, because then we can take him out like we should have ten years ago.

They should have known better ("they" including the alleged liberal media). They knew the Bushites wanted war for the wrong reasons, yet they still believed that it could be, magically, a just war. They knew the extent of the administration's delusion and incompetence, yet they believed the war, and the aftermath, could be somehow, magically, correctly handled.

The problem with this, and it's a huge one, graver even than the Iraq mess, is that the winners will be the isolationists : the Roths and the Wilkersons, who think the USA should never have entered either world war, and who would reform the system so that no president can take the US to war again.

That's the wrong lesson.

96. arkymalarky - 11/6/2005 7:18:40 PM

They did not know the intelligence they were presented in defense of war was false, much less purposely falsified. If liberals choose to beat themselves up over that rather than moving on to who falsified info, who knew it was false, and what the administration's actions were in that regard, they'll be left in the dust yet again come '06. The high road is being handed to them. They need to take it and lead ahead, rather than continuing to look behind them.

97. alistairConnor - 11/6/2005 7:40:42 PM

I agree, Arky, with respect to the US domestic political situation. And undoubtedly they will muddle through.

What I'm worried about is that the wrong lessons will be learned with respect to America's role in the world, and there will be decades of American isolationism. That's better in some respects than neocon interventionism, but it's not a good thing. The world needs the US as a rational actor.

98. arkymalarky - 11/6/2005 8:52:43 PM

We may get back to that, but I don't see a Democratic leader like Clinton on the horizon, and I think you're right about coming isolationism, not as much from our current foreign policy blunders as from domestic discontent that will force attention on bread and butter issues in coming elections.

It's interesting. I have exchange students every year from various continents, and the contrast between what I hear from them now compared to what I heard when Clinton was president is unreal. We attacked Serbia at a time when I had two Serbian exchange students, and they still had nothing but praise for Clinton's genius. These days I think they'd just as soon we slip into the woodwork for a while.

99. jexster - 11/8/2005 8:12:58 AM

Steven Walt, JFK School of Govt:

The architects of defeat must be held responsible.

Moderates who backed the war, including a number of prominent Democrats, now argue that they did so only because they were misled by the cia’s faulty intelligence and deliberately deceived by President George W. Bush’s administration. This line of reasoning was Sen. John Kerry’s defense during the 2004 presidential campaign. Similar explanations have been offered by other pro-war Democrats and repentant pundits such as the Brookings Institution’s Kenneth Pollack, whose prewar book The Threatening Storm made the moderates’ case for war. The problem with this alibi, however, is that there was already plenty of evidence that cast doubt on the administration’s case, information that was publicly available before the fighting started. Invading Iraq was not their idea, but the moderates who went along deserve no credit for being so gullible

100. wonkers2 - 11/8/2005 1:23:34 PM

Beyond this, the invasion was a dumb idea whether or not Saddam Hussein had WMD or was attempting to produce WMD. There was reason to believe he may have had left-over poison gas or bio materials, because we knew labs in the U.S. had shipped materials to him years before. Dealing with these issues hardly required an invasion.

And I don't recall anybody who bought the idea pushed by Bush that Saddam was somehow responsible for or linked to 9-11. That was debunked before the invasion. It was clear that Hussein was a secularist who was chary of Al Qaida and other Islamist fanatics.

101. Magoseph - 11/8/2005 3:43:28 PM

I’m not too certain this belongs, but since there’s more action here….

Blair blames France for Iraq war in reply to diplomat's claims
Tony Blair has angrily rejected the charge by Britain's former ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, that he could have used his "swing vote" to stop the US going to war in Iraq.
Sir Christopher claimed in his outspoken memoirs that Britain's support for military action was "taken for granted" by the White House, after Mr Blair agreed to military action with reservations at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002.
At his monthly press conference yesterday, the Prime Minister responded with claims that the French President, Jacques Chirac, was to blame for the slide to war without a second UN resolution. He said the French had threatened to veto a second UN resolution on Iraq.
Mr Blair told journalists: "If you go back and look at what happened in March 2003, I think you will see that I made the most strenuous efforts to get a second UN resolution and to end up with a second resolution that would have given us more time. The fact is, we couldn't get one for a very simple reason: the French made it clear they would veto any such
Tony Blair has angrily rejected the charge by Britain's former ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, that he could have used his "swing vote" to stop the US going to war in Iraq.
Sir Christopher claimed in his outspoken memoirs that Britain's support for military action was "taken for granted" by the White House, after Mr Blair agreed to military action with reservations at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002. More…

102. jexster - 11/9/2005 8:30:19 PM

Where Are Ace and the Other Useful Idiots?

Lying with Intelligence


Who in the White House knew about DITSUM No. 044-02 and when did they know it?

That's the newly declassified smoking-gun document, originally prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2002 but ignored by President Bush. Its declassification this weekend blows another huge hole in Bush's claim that he was acting on the best intelligence available when he pitched the invasion of Iraq as a way to prevent an Al Qaeda terror attack using weapons of mass destruction.

The report demolished the credibility of the key Al Qaeda informant the Administration relied on to make its claim that a working alliance existed between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. It was circulated widely within the US government a full eight months before Bush used the prisoner's lies to argue for an invasion of Iraq because "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases."

Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi--a Libyan captured in Pakistan in 2001--was probably "intentionally misleading the debriefers," the DIA report concluded in one of two paragraphs finally declassified at the request of Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and released by his office over the weekend. The report also said: "Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest."

He got that right. Folks in the highest places were very interested in claims along the lines Libi was peddling, even though they went against both logic and the preponderance of intelligence gathered to that point about possible collaboration between two enemies of the United States that were fundamentally at odds with each other. Al Qaeda was able to create a base in Iraq only after the US overthrow of Hussein, not before. "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements," accurately noted the DIA.

Yet Bush used the informant's already discredited tall tale in his key October 7, 2002, speech just before the Senate voted on whether to authorize the use of force in Iraq and again in two speeches in February, just ahead of the invasion.

103. jexster - 11/10/2005 8:48:11 AM

104. jexster - 11/10/2005 11:58:36 AM

Published on Sunday, April 14, 2002 in the Los Angeles Times
Iraq War: The Coming Disaster
by Immanuel Wallerstein

NEW HAVEN -- George W. Bush is a geopolitical incompetent. He has allowed a clique of hawks to induce him to take a position on invading Iraq from which he cannot extract himself, one which will have nothing but negative consequences for the United States--and the rest of the world. He will find himself badly hurt politically, perhaps fatally. And he will rapidly diminish the already declining power of the United States in the world.

105. jayackroyd - 11/10/2005 12:47:52 PM

At my house, one of the things that the Judith Miller business has pointed up is that it's clear that the management of the NYT supported the war. The fronting of her stories, and the burying of the contradictory stories. Leaving her on that beat. Running pieces that seemed absurd to me at the time (I've confirmed that impression in the archives), and in retrospect look like Warner Brothers war cartoons from the 40s.

Turns out that Bill Keller had a backchannel to Wolfowitz during that period. IOW, NYT management was getting "independent" confirmation of Judy's stories from their own administration sources.

What a profound embarassment this all is. Um, we're real sorry, Iraq. We'll leave as soon as we can face up to our little mistake. Real soon now.

106. jexster - 11/10/2005 1:00:06 PM

Similarly Jay have you seen Ikenberry's minutes of the recent gathering of the strategic class at Princeton

High comedy

107. jexster - 11/15/2005 6:10:24 AM

Billy Kristol's Mother - nee Himmelfarb

A magazine communicates through its covers as well. Most telling was one of George W. Bush, gesticulating before an audience of troops, arm extended in a Caesarian pose. “The Liberator,” the Standard headline proclaimed. Flatter the leader who will do your bidding. It was February 2003, and the editors knew by then that war was almost certain.

Bush and his team have since fallen out of favor in Standard land. The magazine has begun blaming the bungled prosecution of the war on Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and has called for his resignation. As Bush sinks in the polls, the journal will surely look to other politicians to carry out its aspirations. If David Brooks, now a New York Times columnist, is an indicator, that figure is likely to be a centrist or a “progressive” in the Joe Lieberman mode—conservatism as a vehicle for neoconservative foreign-policy goals having been pretty much run into the ground.

During the second week of the Iraq invasion, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz interviewed several intellectual supporters of the war. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman (who backed the war despite being haunted by its similarities to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which he saw firsthand) suggested that this was very much an intellectuals’ war. “It’s the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. … I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.” Then Friedman paused, clarifying, “It’s not some fantasy the neoconservatives invented. It’s not that 25 people hijacked America. You don’t take such a great nation into such a great adventure with Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard and another five or six influential columnists. In the final analysis what fomented the war is America’s over-reaction to September 11. ... It is not only the neoconservatives that led us to the outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to the outskirts of Baghdad is a very American combination of anxiety and hubris.” The AMerican Conservative


They played AmeriKa like a drum
Message # 9572 in thread 155

108. jexster - 11/15/2005 6:14:55 AM

109. OhioSTOPAS - 11/15/2005 1:08:03 PM

What Bush, Repub/conservative spokesliars and lazy reporters keep referring to as the Senate's vote "for the war" wasn't quite that. The October 2002 authorization for war required that the President make the determinations that:

"(1) reliance . . . on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone either (A) will not adequately protect the national security of the United States . . . or (B) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and (2) acting pursuant to this joint resolution is consistent with . . . necessary actions against international terrorist and terrorist organizations, including those . . . who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."

Bush made this dubious finding in March 2003.

However unwise (and politically cowardly) it was to give Junior the keys to the car, it's not inconsistent for those who granted conditional authorization in October 2002 to argue that the conditions were not satisfied, or in any event to argue in March 2003 that the changed circumstances (primarily, the reinstitution of inspections) made going to war unwise.

And it's absolutely ridiculous to assert that Democrats in October 2002 had the "exact same intelligence" that Bush had in March 2003 (even if one disregards the fact that Congress NEVER has all the information that the President has). How can people make this statement??

110. OhioSTOPAS - 11/15/2005 1:14:19 PM

It's disturbing enough to see the President making blatantly false statements in speeches, and accusing those who contradict him as encouraging our country's enemies.

The fact that he chooses to make these partisan McCarthyite attacks in speeches to our TROOPS makes it worse.

111. jexster - 11/15/2005 1:29:00 PM

No shit. But at the heart of the matter is that damned War Powers Act. If there had been a declaration of war as the Constitution requires, he'd not have gotten away with it because as we now know, that UN gambit was just the Charade b4 the Crusade

Short of that, had Dascle the balls to put off the vote until after the election, there'd have been investigation and oversight, and no war.

Of course, they were afraid of the Big Bad Bush, that he might call them unpatriotic. This he did anyway.

No brains and no balls

112. alistairconnor - 11/15/2005 1:38:36 PM

I thought at the time that Congress had really no other option than to grant the president authority to prosecute a war, if he thought it necessary. I don't really see how the USA can exist as a superpower without that delegation of power in a crisis situation.

Refusing to do so because of the manifest incompetence and delusion of the administration, was an easy call to make from where I was sitting... but an impossible one for Congress to make at the time. Because its obvious constitutional corollary would have been destitution of the president (since he would not be trusted to make the decision to go to war), and I don't think they had grounds to do that at the time.

113. jexster - 11/15/2005 1:57:20 PM

Sure it can. Did the Kaiser suffer because he had to awa9it a declaration of war? Did the Brits?

Hell no. And that is the point of the Constitution - necessary in a democracy even of the WWI german kind. Without representative input and buy in there can be no sustainable war effort and this has been true since your countryman invented mass warfare.

114. jexster - 11/15/2005 2:12:36 PM

Ohio..apropos of your posts, you might check out two at TPMC

Larry Johnson, CIA:

Like a passenger who just leaped from the Titanic into the icy waters of the North Atlantic, George Bush is frantically looking for a rescue boat



Nearer my God to thee
Nearer to thee!

115. jexster - 11/15/2005 2:19:50 PM

NEARER MY GOD TO THEE
Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!
E'en though it be a cross that raiseth me,
Still all my song shall be,
Nearer, my God, to Thee.
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!


Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down,
Darkness be over me, my rest a stone.
Yet in my dreams I'd be
Nearer, my God to Thee.
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!


There let the way appear, steps unto heav'n;
All that Thou sendest me, in mercy given;
Angels to beckon me
Nearer, my God, to Thee.
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!


Then, with my waking thoughts bright with Thy praise,
Out of my stony griefs Bethel I'll raise;
So by my woes to be
Nearer, my God, to Thee.
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!


Or, if on joyful wing cleaving the sky,
Sun, moon, and stars forgot, upward I'll fly,
Still all my song shall be,
Nearer, my God, to Thee.
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!


There in my Father's home, safe and at rest,
There in my Savior's love, perfectly blest;
Age after age to be,
Nearer my God to Thee.
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee!

116. TheWizardOfWhimsy - 11/15/2005 5:21:35 PM

117. jexster - 11/17/2005 7:37:22 PM

It is all too easy in this debate three years after the fact to miss the point that Bush's aggression against Iraq and justifications for it, were widely condemned both inside and outside the government, inside and outside the Mote (save in Perfect World)


Here's a refresher which links PlameGate to HorseShit Gate

118. alistairConnor - 11/18/2005 9:18:48 PM

But wait!We got it all wrong! Repent! Mea culpa!

Ace is a true believer :

Recently discovered Iraqi documents now being translated by U.S. intelligence analysts indicate that Saddam Hussein's government made extensive plans to hide Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 - and had deep ties to al Qaida before the 9/11 attacks.

Hide the weapons of mass destruction. Clever people. They hid them pretty well.

119. jexster - 11/18/2005 10:50:30 PM

Drugs

120. jexster - 11/23/2005 2:16:24 AM

The Ace of Spades should be spinning like a whirling dervish about now...wish I had a camera


ADMINISTRATION
Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel

By Murray Waas, special to National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005


Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.


The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.






The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

The September 21, 2001, briefing was prepared at the request of the president, who was eager in the days following the terrorist attacks to learn all that he could about any possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Much of the contents of the September 21 PDB were later incorporated, albeit in a slightly different form, into a lengthier CIA analysis examining not only Al Qaeda's contacts with Iraq, but also Iraq's support for international terrorism. Although the CIA found scant evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the agency reported that it had long since established that Iraq had previously supported the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization, and had provided tens of millions of dollars and logistical support to Palestinian groups, including payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

The highly classified CIA assessment was distributed to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, the president's national security adviser and deputy national security adviser, the secretaries and undersecretaries of State and Defense, and various other senior Bush administration policy makers, according to government records.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

Indeed, the existence of the September 21 PDB was not disclosed to the Intelligence Committee until the summer of 2004, according to congressional sources. Both Republicans and Democrats requested then that it be turned over. The administration has refused to provide it, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.....continued


I seem to recall being treated to one of his super-amphetamine 3 day rants on this very issue...

Ahh those were the days..


And those days are OVER

121. jexster - 12/10/2005 6:13:03 PM

Intiqaam...Arabic for "revansch"

We'll Miss Saddam


When they finally hang Saddam Hussein, we'll probably miss him. He has, after all, been an obsession of American politicians since 1991. Since the Washington media obsess over whatever the politicians obsess over, Saddam's face has adorned our television screens for 14 years. He bears a strong resemblance, by the way, to the late actor Walter Matthau.

I say FREE SADDAM!

Whose bright fucking idea was it to invade IraQ in the first place?




Slagsmål!

122. jexster - 12/10/2005 9:12:20 PM

The "usually disengaged" president, as columnist Maureen Dowd labeled him, had just returned from a prolonged, brush-cutting Crawford vacation to much criticism and a nation in trouble. (One Republican congressman complained that "it was hard for Mr. Bush to get his message out if the White House lectern had a 'Gone Fishing' sign on it.") Democrats were on the attack. Journalistic coverage seemed to grow ever bolder. Bush's poll figures were dropping. A dozen prominent Republicans, fearful of a president out of touch with the national mood, gathered for a private dinner with Karl Rove to "offer an unvarnished critique of Mr. Bush's style and strategy." Next year's congressional elections suddenly seemed up for grabs. The president's aides were desperately scrambling to reposition him as a more "commanding" figure, while, according to the polls, a majority of Americans felt the country was headed in the wrong direction. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld had "cratered"; in the Middle East "violence was rising."

An editorial in the New York Times caught the moment this way in its opening sentence: "A simple truth of human existence is that it is vastly easier to amplify fear than it is to assuage it." Now, there was a post-9/11 truth – except that the editorial was headlined "The Statistical Shark" and its next sentence wasn't about planes smashing into buildings or the way the Bush administration had since wielded the fear card, but another hot-button issue entirely. It went: "Consider the shark attacks that have occurred in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina this summer."

This was, in fact, September 6, 2001
....

123. jexster - 1/3/2006 3:00:30 AM

We don't publish in Washington and New York. We write for Columbus, Georgia, and Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and Fort Hood, Texas, and Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina, where the people who get sent to war live and where they leave their families behind.

EXCERPT: FEET TO THE FIRE


Knight Ridder's Washington bureau chief speaks about media missteps in reporting the war -- and why he thinks we invaded Iraq in the first place.



More often than any other journalist or news organization, Knight Ridder was mentioned by those in "Feet to the Fire" as the best source for post-9/11 reporting.

The person most responsible for setting this platinum standard of journalism is John Walcott.

Long after the Twin Towers had collapsed, Walcott and his crack team of reporters were virtually alone in their pursuit of what the real intelligence analysts were saying about the White House's case against Saddam.

Cumulatively, Knight Ridder's reporting damns the Bush administration in devastating detail...

John Walcott: It was clear to everyone within days of 9/11 that the administration was already beginning to turn its attention to Iraq, so the reporting we did from the very start was on three tracks.

There was a terrorist track that had to do with al Qaeda, and what was known about that. There was an Afghan war track, where we formed a fairly extensive team of people from all over Knight Ridder to go to Afghanistan and cover combat operations while some of us here tried to learn what we could about al Qaeda as documents were uncovered.

So there was a terrorism track, an Afghanistan track, and almost from the beginning, an Iraq track. Literally the day after 9/11, people either close to or in the administration began talking about Iraq. As 2001 turned into 2002, it became clear that the president had made the fundamental decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Warren Strobel and I wrote a story about it on February 13, 2002, "Bush Has Decided to Overthrow Hussein."

The lead was: "President Bush has decided to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power and ordered the CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies to devise a combination of military, diplomatic and covert steps to achieve that goal, senior U.S. officials said Tuesday."


A lengthy excerpt...

124. jexster - 2/19/2006 6:09:58 PM

The Academic's Flying Fickle Finger of Fate<
For the Record: Our Analysts on Iraq
Middle East Policy Council

Some organs of the major media, such as The New York Times, are expressing regret that they did not examine more closely the Bush administration's rationale – or the underlying evidence – for war. Likewise, the administration's characterization of the political, financial, social and human consequences of the invasion and occupation of Iraq went largely unchallenged in these media sources.

In fact, the views of many thoughtful and informed commentators who questioned both the stated purposes and predicted outcomes of this undertaking found their way into print in the run-up to war. Middle East Policy and the Council's Capitol Hill Conferences were two sources for this type of responsible analysis. Here are some samples ....


Check it out

125. jexster - 2/19/2006 8:56:23 PM

The Man and the Hour Have Met
Told ya..
That punk bitch bush said "Bring it On"

Several times 2002-2003

Now Francis Fukuyama tells ya

The problem {Bush Doctrine NeoConservatism ]was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering — which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare — suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics. By the time of the Iraq war, the belief in the transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social engineering.

The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."

Sound familiar?

When the attack on Russia starts the world will hold its breath....We have only to kick in the front door and the whole rotten Russian edifice will come tumbling down.

Ya wohl Mein Fuehrer!

126. Ulgine Barrows - 3/3/2006 8:28:15 AM

I don't think so.

128. wabbit - 3/19/2006 8:17:07 PM

repost of Jexster's #127

127. jexster - 3/19/2006 12:35:59 PM

Back in the archives you'll find a discussion the premise of which is that Israel for its subornation of the impending war in Iraq would upon its failure pay dearly for its role in the aggression.

The time is coming fast. The WarParty through its Republican CoverUp Congress has been able to delay the day of reckoning, but that day is at hand

THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

U.S. foreign policy shapes events in every corner of the globe.  Nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East, a region of recurring instability and enormous strategic importance.  Most recently, the Bush Administration´s attempt to transform the region into a community of democracies has helped produce a resilient insurency in Iraq, a sharp rise in world oil prices, and terrorist bombings in Madrid, London, and Amman.   With so much at stake for so many, all countries need to understand the forces that drive U.S. Middle East policy.

The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy.   For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel.  The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and eopardized U.S. security.

This situation has no equal in American political history.  Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state?  One might assume that the bond between the two countries is based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperativs.  As we show below, however, neither of those explanations can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States povides to Israel.

Instead, the overall thrust of U.S. policy in the region is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the “Israel Lobby.’ Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored, but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.

In the pages that follow, we describe how the Lobby has accomplished this feat, and how its activities have shaped America´s actions in this critical region.  Given the strategic importance of the Middle East and its potential impact on others, both Americans and non-Americans need to understand and address the Lobby´s influence on U.S. policy.

Some readers will find this analysis disturbing, but the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars.  Indeed, our account relies heavily on the work of Israeli scholars and journalists, who deserve great credit for shedding light on these issues.  We also rely on evidence provided by respected Israeli and international human rights organizations.  Similarly, our claims about the Lobby´s impact rely on testimony from the Lobby´s own members, as well as testimony from politicians who have worked with them.  Readers may reject our conclusions, of course, but the evidence on which they rest is not controversial.

- John Measheimer, Steven Walt
   The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy
   Introduction

The Mote | Mote Archive

back to top