“Where hacks come to spew nonsense” - B2B
I friend of mine told me today that he doesn’t really care for it when people talk like Scooby-Doo or Astro.
Sure, those two dogs have some serious speech impediments. But honestly, how many talking dogs are out there? Cut them some slack.
(sent mobile)
“Play an Ella ballad with a cat in the room, and the animal will invariably go up to the speaker, lie down and purr.” - Geoffrey Fidelman
A post from my old pal Kermit at Anti-Strib:
There is a strawman that just will not go away. There were no WMD in Iraq. That this statement is specious on it’s face doesn’t prevent BDS sufferers from trotting it out over and over and over again. It really is tedious.
OK! So let’s move the debate forward. What do you have for us?
I am not going to defend the Bush occupation of Iraq, because I too think it has been poorly executed.
Off to a good start. Keep going.
While discussing mistakes made after the brilliant military campaign that toppled Saddam Hussein can be very soothing to the BDS sufferer, it is not very productive.
BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) mentioned twice already, hummm…But it sounds like we are really going to deal with something that is productive here. And what does he have for us?
I am therefore going to present, in serial form, the Clinton case for war in Iraq.
Oh jesus christ…you’re kidding me. All that talk about BDS and ‘unproductive arguments’ and he finally gets around to the wing nut favorite topic – Bill Clinton.
Kermit quotes a report from the State Department dated February 13, 1998 as well as a speech from President Clinton 4 days later which stated the belief about Iraq’s WMD program as it was believed at the time.
Kermit wraps up his post with:
We know that the Clinton Administration had a policy of treating terrorism as a criminal matter, and that they preferred negotiation to confrontation. We also know that America spent nearly a decade flying military missions over Iraqi soil. We know that this strategy ultimately led to the worst attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor. (bold mine)
We need to admit, finally once and for all that George Bush really believed there were WMD in Iraq.
Bill Clinton really believed there were WMD in Iraq….(edited – more Democrats listed believing Iraq had WMD)…They had good reason to.
Kermit continues to conflate Iraq with the attacks of 9/11 in order to justify the war. His connection of the no-fly zone patrols over Iraq and the events of September 11 are completely absurd. The simple fact is that Iraq had nothing to do with the first attack on the World Trade Center, the ‘98 African embassy bombings, the attack on the USS Cole, the attacks of 9/11 or al-Qaeda in general.
Why does Kermit believe that President Bush, as well as the laundry list of Democrats he named, had good reason to believe that there were WMD in Iraq when the weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq before the invasion were reporting just the opposite? The information coming out of Iraq in the days before the invasion should have made war less likely rather than the inevitability that it clearly was.
More to the point, regarding Kermit’s criticism of the Clinton Administration policy of treating terrorism as a criminal matter, can anyone name for me a single conservative or Republican who was prepared to use the power of the US military to attack al-Qaeda or the Taliban prior to September 11? Does he honestly believe that if President Clinton would have invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam in the 1990’s that bin Laden would no longer have the motivation to initiate attacks against the United States? The reality is that President Clinton did not have Republican support for any military action of any kind during his term. Additionally, it’s been well documented that once President Bush took office in 2000 his administration was far more concerned with Saddam Hussein and Iraq rather than those who already had a history of attacking US targets. Clinton was not able to deal with the threat of al-Qaeda and Bush was not interested.
The information to avoid our adventure in Iraq was available before the invasion and it was ignored. What Kermit is attempting is simply a bogus justification for this disaster that has left our troops battered and demoralized, military equipment in disrepair, budgets busted, our allies alienated, our enemies emboldened, created a whole new generation of radicals who wish to attack our country, provided them a training ground in which to learn how to fight and kill our soldiers, and has left the clear thinking citizens of this country gravely concerned about the future.
