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MysticNacho

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Because We Could

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

 

 

he failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.'s) in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But is it the real story we should be concerned with? No. It was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now.

 

Why? Because there were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason.

 

The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn't enough because a terrorism bubble had built up over there — a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured. This terrorism bubble said that plowing airplanes into the World Trade Center was O.K., having Muslim preachers say it was O.K. was O.K., having state-run newspapers call people who did such things "martyrs" was O.K. and allowing Muslim charities to raise money for such "martyrs" was O.K. Not only was all this seen as O.K., there was a feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level the balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because we had gone soft and their activists were ready to die.

 

The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don't believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government — and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen — got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.

 

The "right reason" for this war was the need to partner with Iraqis, post-Saddam, to build a progressive Arab regime. Because the real weapons of mass destruction that threaten us were never Saddam's missiles. The real weapons that threaten us are the growing number of angry, humiliated young Arabs and Muslims, who are produced by failed or failing Arab states — young people who hate America more than they love life. Helping to build a decent Iraq as a model for others — and solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — are the necessary steps for defusing the ideas of mass destruction, which are what really threaten us.

 

The "moral reason" for the war was that Saddam's regime was an engine of mass destruction and genocide that had killed thousands of his own people, and neighbors, and needed to be stopped.

 

But because the Bush team never dared to spell out the real reason for the war, and (wrongly) felt that it could never win public or world support for the right reasons and the moral reasons, it opted for the stated reason: the notion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate threat to America. I argued before the war that Saddam posed no such threat to America, and had no links with Al Qaeda, and that we couldn't take the nation to war "on the wings of a lie." I argued that Mr. Bush should fight this war for the right reasons and the moral reasons. But he stuck with this W.M.D. argument for P.R. reasons.

 

Once the war was over and I saw the mass graves and the true extent of Saddam's genocidal evil, my view was that Mr. Bush did not need to find any W.M.D.'s to justify the war for me. I still feel that way. But I have to admit that I've always been fighting my own war in Iraq. Mr. Bush took the country into his war. And if it turns out that he fabricated the evidence for his war (which I wouldn't conclude yet), that would badly damage America and be a very serious matter.

 

But my ultimate point is this: Finding Iraq's W.M.D.'s is necessary to preserve the credibility of the Bush team, the neocons, Tony Blair and the C.I.A. But rebuilding Iraq is necessary to win the war. I won't feel one whit more secure if we find Saddam's W.M.D.'s, because I never felt he would use them on us. But I will feel terribly insecure if we fail to put Iraq onto a progressive path. Because if that doesn't happen, the terrorism bubble will reinflate and bad things will follow. Mr. Bush's credibility rides on finding W.M.D.'s, but America's future, and the future of the Mideast, rides on our building a different Iraq. We must not forget that.

 

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This sentence sums up what I have thought for quite a while: "Mr. Bush's credibility rides on finding W.M.D.'s, but America's future, and the future of the Mideast, rides on our building a different Iraq."

 

The best scenario I see coming out of this is an improved, progressive Iraq and no WMDs found. The results will (hopefully) be complete embarrasment of the bush cartel and his removal from office in the next election, along with benifit for the rest of the world from a.) an improved iraq and middle east situation b.) no bush.

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HEY FENCE SITTER

 

HERE YA GO, TAKEN FROM THE WOLFIE ARTICLE.

 

Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

 

 

AND WHY THE HELL ARE YOU NOT OUT AT INDEX????

 

 

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FENCE POST THE ARTICLE......

 

YOU ARE RIGHT HALIBURTON IS A PRETTY COMPLEX ISSUE. THE 7.2 BILLON+ WITH NO SPENDING CAP MAKES FOR A COMPLEX DECISION.

 

DO I GET THE LOTUS OR THE MCLARHRAN F1?? CHENEY MUST BE STRESSED!!!!!!

 

AND I SHOWED THE STATEMENT. WHERES YER REBUTTAL??

 

AND CANADA HAS NO MORE OIL THEN THE US, MAYBE TONS MORE NATURAL GAS AND OTHER MINERALS, BUT WHAT WOULD A COUPLE OF OIL MEN WANT WITH NATURAL GAS???

 

 

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minx said:

in my experience, the truth is never complicated. it's the spin that people choose to put on it that makes reality such a mess. wave.gif

 

in my experience... international politics is quite complicated...especially when you throw in a whole bunch of different cultural premises that are wholy incompatable...

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erik said:

HEY FENCE SITTER

 

HERE YA GO, TAKEN FROM THE WOLFIE ARTICLE.

 

Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

 

no!!!!! he could not have said that we went to iraq because of the oil!!!!!he could not be this stupid!!!!!! smirk.gif

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Fence_Sitter said:

minx said:

in my experience, the truth is never complicated. it's the spin that people choose to put on it that makes reality such a mess. wave.gif

 

in my experience... international politics is quite complicated...especially when you throw in a whole bunch of different cultural premises that are wholy incompatable...

 

"perhaps the truth is more complicated than the hippies think...."

 

international politics and truth are NOT the same thing. in my experience...they aren't related in any way at all. Simply responding to your generalization re: truth

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you use the opinion of one man to base a premise on and berate me for stating contrary? i have no reason to listen to a man who gives essentially no basis for his stance on the matter... can you tell me why? comparing korea to iraq is ridiculous... i think the real reason we haven't attacked north korea is that they might f*** us up bad... they got a whole lotta firepower...we'd get em' but get pretty messed up along the way...

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minx said:

Fence_Sitter said:

minx said:

in my experience, the truth is never complicated. it's the spin that people choose to put on it that makes reality such a mess. wave.gif

 

in my experience... international politics is quite complicated...especially when you throw in a whole bunch of different cultural premises that are wholy incompatable...

 

"perhaps the truth is more complicated than the hippies think...."

 

international politics and truth are NOT the same thing. in my experience...they aren't related in any way at all. Simply responding to your generalization re: truth

 

fine i will refine my statement... the truth entombed in international politics would require an omnipotent mind and far transcends the feeble brains that we were given... no-one can know the truth as far as international politics go... you would have to know every tiny piece of a culture, their political structure etc. there is no-one who knows taht ever for one country let alone the scores that are present in the world today...

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ASHINGTON, June 3 — A top secret United States intelligence report last fall is now at the center of an internal C.I.A. review to determine whether American intelligence miscalculated the extent of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. The report had concluded that Baghdad had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear program.

 

The document, which was described by intelligence officials familiar with the review, provided President Bush with his last major overview of the status of Iraq's program to develop weapons of mass destruction before the start of the war.

 

The document, called a national intelligence estimate, was issued last October. It is significant because it provided the White House with the last attempt by the entire intelligence community to reach a consensus concerning Iraq's weapons programs before the war started in March.

 

The national estimate has been an early focus of attention for a small team of retired C.I.A. analysts who have been brought in by the agency's director, George Tenet, to assess the accuracy of the intelligence reports produced before the war, according to officials familiar with the review. Separately, the C.I.A. is now in the process of turning over to Congress the underlying documents that were used by analysts to prepare the national estimate, just as lawmakers in both the House of Representatives and the Senate are preparing for their own reviews of the prewar intelligence.

 

Traditionally, a national intelligence estimate is one of the most important reports produced by the intelligence community. It is intended to provide a forum for analysts from all of the different American intelligence agencies to express their differences on a specific topic and then reach a position on an assessment on which they can agree. Such broad-based involvement from top analysts throughout the government lends the estimates special weight among policy makers, including the president.

 

The review of the intelligence estimate made last fall comes as the failure to find Iraq's weapons of mass destruction so far is flaring into a major political issue for the Bush administration. Both Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Mr. Tenet have been forced in recent days to defend their handling of intelligence in the months that lead up to the war. At the same time, intelligence analysts inside the government continue to complain about the role played over the past year by a special Pentagon unit that provided policy makers with an alternative, and more hawkish, view of intelligence related to Iraq.

 

In a prepared statement issued by the C.I.A. late last week, Mr. Tenet denied that the intelligence on Iraq was warped in order to satisfy the Bush administration's desire to find evidence to support its policies. "The integrity of our process was maintained throughout, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong," Mr. Tenet said. But several C.I.A. officials interviewed recently declined to comment on or defend the actions over the past year of the Pentagon's special intelligence unit, which sought to highlight information from Iraqi exiles and other sources that had frequently been dismissed by C.I.A. analysts. And some C.I.A. analysts have said they felt pressure to make their reports conform to the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

 

Now, officials say that the C.I.A. review team examining prewar intelligence plans to ask the Pentagon for documents from the special intelligence unit to try to determine what its role was in shaping the intelligence during the months leading up to the war.

 

In Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services Committee have announced plans to conduct a joint inquiry into the prewar intelligence, while the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence plans its own examination. In a May 22 letter, the leaders of the House panel asked Mr. Tenet to provide answers to a series of questions on the issue, including whether the "sources and methods that contributed to the community's analysis on the presence and amount of W.M.D. in Iraq were of sufficient quality and quantity to provide sufficient accuracy." One official familiar with the C.I.A. review said the answer to that fundamental question may be no. The official said it appeared that the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies had developed fairly solid intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs after the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and through much of the 1990's, as United Nations inspectors scoured the country.

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During that time, the United States grew convinced that Iraq had chemical weapons, was trying to develop biological agents and was seeking to reconstitute a nuclear program that had been disrupted by the war. But the official said it now appeared that the quality of the intelligence concerning Iraq's weapons programs subsequently declined, particularly after the inspectors were withdrawn in 1998.

 

Without conclusive new intelligence to the contrary, it appears that the intelligence community continued to make projections assuming a continued Iraqi weapons effort, in line with its earlier assessments, the official said. The fragments of intelligence that came in periodically after the inspectors were withdrawn were never enough to prove that Mr. Hussein had abandoned his weapons programs, and so the natural inclination was to assume that those programs were still under way.

 

United States intelligence officials still caution that American forces may yet find conclusive evidence of Iraq's chemical or biological weapons. Mr. Bush has pointed to the discovery of two suspected mobile labs as evidence that Iraq was trying to develop biological weapons.

 

However, officials now acknowledge that at least some of the pre-war analysis was inaccurate. The United States had, for example, received reports indicating that Iraqi military units had received the authority to deploy and use chemical weapons against advancing American troops. But postwar searches of Iraqi military facilities and interrogations of Iraqi officers have failed to turn up any evidence that chemical weapons were deployed.

 

It was perhaps inevitable that the national estimate on Iraq's weapons programs would receive special scrutiny. Even as it was being produced last fall, the estimate was already at the center of a political struggle between Democrats in Congress and the C.I.A. and the Bush administration over the threat posed by Mr. Hussein's government.

 

Last summer, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, including Bob Graham of Florida and Dick Durbin of Illinois, asked the C.I.A. to produce a national intelligence estimate that would review all of the major policy issues related to Iraq. The intelligence community resisted, agreeing instead to produce one that was more narrowly focused on the status of Iraq's weapons programs.

 

When Mr. Graham, then the intelligence committee's chairman, finally saw the report, he asked that its findings be declassified in time for the Senate debate on a resolution to support the war in Iraq. When Mr. Tenet provided a letter to Mr. Graham that included some of the report's findings, Mr. Graham complained that only those findings that supported the administration's position on Iraq had been declassified, while others that raised questions were not.

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comparing korea to iraq is ridiculous... i think the real reason we haven't attacked north korea is that they might f*** us up bad... they got a whole lotta firepower...

 

confused.gif really? i thought bush said iraq could deploy and hit us with their chemical arsenal within 45minutes confused.gif i guess it's just all too complicated for us common folks smirk.gif

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j_b said:

comparing korea to iraq is ridiculous... i think the real reason we haven't attacked north korea is that they might f*** us up bad... they got a whole lotta firepower...

 

 

confused.gif really? i thought bush said iraq could deploy and hit us with their chemical arsenal within 45minutes confused.gif i guess it's just all too complicated for us common folks smirk.gif

s. korea's weapons program is a bit more intensive JB... given that they have been essentially unrestricted for a long time...and have been PROVEN to be making their weapons as of late... and they admitted to it...

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Fence_Sitter said:

j_b said:

comparing korea to iraq is ridiculous... i think the real reason we haven't attacked north korea is that they might f*** us up bad... they got a whole lotta firepower...

 

 

confused.gif really? i thought bush said iraq could deploy and hit us with their chemical arsenal within 45minutes confused.gif i guess it's just all too complicated for us common folks smirk.gif

s. korea's weapons program is a bit more intensive JB... given that they have been essentially unrestricted for a long time...and have been PROVEN to be making their weapons as of late... and they admitted to it...

 

SOUTH KOREA IS NOW OUR ENEMY AS WELL???

 

 

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