New York Times: In Unpredictable District, Some Say Bush Is Politicizing Terrorism. No, you think?
On a related note, the evangelical they interview in the story is refreshingly suspicious Bush's lie-filled rhetoric: “The whole thing about W.M.D. and that Iraq is somehow tied to 9/11, I just don’t believe it.” So maybe there is hope for the redemption of American Evangelicalism, after all?
3 comments:
to ruin your hopes....
1. the Saddam-al qaeda link seems to be more the result of media hype than bush... remember, we went in for WMD's (i.e. the whole bush lied argument) not for al qaeda.
2. the wmd argument if treated fairly is bad intelligence was hyped (assuming the idea that the weapons were moved into syria is false) and that it wasn't intentional lies. if you can't trust your intelligence, you're screwed either way.
let me know when you find Bush saying iraq is tied to 9/11. I haven't heard that from Bush yet.
Iraq was about WMDS and the repeated failure of iraq to abide by UN resolutions, not 911. anyone who infers otherwise seems to have ignored the whole rationale for it.
1.) Yeah -- and Bush has no effect whatsoever on what the media writes. Because he doesn't give speeches in which he implies connections (especially ideological ones) that simply do not exist. Hussein was not an "Islamofascist" or whatever the buzzword is these days to describe Islamic extremists who engage in terrorism. Hussein wanted the U.S. to stay out of his business, and he was a terrible, cruel dictator, but he was not a threat to the well-being of the U.S.
2.) We call it "bad intelligence" for a reason: it is faulty and/or unreliable. And bad intelligence has clear marks, generally. That's why Powell wasn't comfortable with giving the "proof of WMDs" PowerPoint Presentation: He knew the intelligence was bad. Which means that Bush knew it was bad, too. Which means that Bush did, in fact, go into the war with much less evidence than he claimed to have had. Which means he lied. :-)
You say, "if you can't trust your intelligence, you're screwed anyway." The problem is that we unquestioningly trusted our "intelligence" in one specific case where it didn't make sense to do so. Intelligence is only as useful as its users let it be.
"didn't make sense to do so"
12+ years of UN sanctions wanting proof of disarmament.
Years of weapons inspectors not allowed to do their job.
A full senate and house and media repeating the same mantra about Saddam having wmds.
And where did it not make sense to do so?
Hindsight's supposed to be 20-20. However, it seems some would like to pretend that there was a clear alternative to UN sanctions that were being mocked and ignored. I am no UN fan.. but what good were repeated threats that never came to pass? To be honest, if Clinton had put some teeth into those resolutions, he would have been a hero and the media reaction would have been much different. So would the coverage. And then Bush would never had to put into action what the UN refused to do. To be more fair, if Bush Sr had done his job, this would have all been avoided.
And to beat a dead horse, Hitler wasn't a threat to the US either.
And to further expound, even though Bush has never made a connection between Al qaeda and iraq, there were al qaeda in iraq pre 911. It's simple logistics, really. They have cells in every country in the world practically. Would you have us believe that somehow they magically weren't in iraq as well?
Then we get into a debate about how active/inactive they were. Must post in my own blog if I have time tonight.. Ranting mood in am I.
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