Are these statements accurate?

[DevilsAdvocate2]

A conservative friend of mine showed me this article to prove to me that the Bush administration was not alone on the Iraq WMD assumptions. Does anyone know if these statements were taken out of context or mis-quoted?

http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=11885

[i_am_not_john_galt]

1. They are basically correct

and it appears virtually everyone - bush, clinton, clark, the french, and saddam himself - shared the assumption that Iraq had at least chemical weapons. 50 years from now maybe it will seem funny.

[curlyred]

2. But they didn't drag us into war

I would think that before blowing up a country we'd already beat to death with sanctions and fly by bombings, we would have solid proof of a grave danger to our country.

We didn't.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

7. Excellent point

Every gives Bush some kind of impunity, as if it's not his fault, just like with last year's state of the union lie. Everyone fails to realize that he's the only one with any real power and the blame does and should fall squarely on his shoulders and none other.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

3. Taken out of context

None of them were privvy to any real knowledge, just the BS that the Bush Regime spit out. Naturally, many refused to believe the President of the United States would so blatantly lie about such a grave matter. Plus, need I remind you how unpopular it was to say anything else? All of these were people trying to arrange themselves politically and to speak up and speak loudly was to exile yourself. And yes, I'm aware people like Kucinich have been anti war all along... but those were people who could afford to do so. Kucinich does not face a difficult House re-election and has never been seen as a serious contender for the White House.

[Postman]

4. But they didn't push for unilateral invasion based on guesswork.

Sanctions and inspections have been proved, by the lack of weapons, to have worked in destroying said weapons.

Maybe the right strategy would have been to exercise a threat of invasion as a ploy to allow inspectors back into Iraq. Which worked, by the way, Inspectors were back in Iraq doing their job. But that wasn't good enough for Bush. He needed to invade Iraq to divert the countries focus away from him not being able to get Osama.

Besides, inspections were never in the cards as far as the PNAC plan for the Middle-East.

These people are fascists. Plain and simple.

[curlyred]

5. you're also breaking the rules

when you post from a right wing source, you need to state your opinion about the piece in your post.

[XNASA]

6. To assume is one thing.

To unilaterally invade a country based on an assumption is another.

I live in a major metropolitan area. I come within eyesight of literally thousands of people that I don't know personally every day. I assume that each and every one of them could do something crazy, so I keep my eyes and ears open.

But I have never attacked anyone without provocation.

Savvy?

I'll bet you have more than just one conservative friend.

[markses]

8. Ah, the old "conservative friend" approach

A classic by now, and winning in sheer boldness what it loses in originality.

Now, on to the statements: Of course they are accurate. What this has to do with anything is beyond me. That the US gov't needed to present an appearance in BELIEF in WMD is obvious enough - we orchestrated and continued to implement a sanctions policy that managed to kill off damn near a million Iraqis over the course of ten years. You don't do that without making frequent claims of danger.

Whether or not anyone ACTUALLY believed in the threat of Saddam, or even the existence of weapons, weapons programs, or weapons programs-related activities, is another story altogether, and could certainly not be proven by the mere assertion of belief, since that mere assertion had a DIFFERENT FUNCTION in the international diplomatic regime (i.e., to keep the Iraqi state isolated, despite the appalling cost in lives - for various good and non-good reasons).

I love that these "conservative friends" are constantly acccusing liberals of being "naive." Yet they behave as if these statements should be viewed as referring to a belief, rather than exercising a function in realpolitik. The fact that the same people making these statements didn't see the need for a bloody and murderous invasion (the bloody and murderous sanctions were more diplomatically acceptable, apparently) should tell us that the belief threshhold was far higher than the statement threshold.

CONTEXT is everything, friends.

[justinpower]

9. Im no Dean fan, but...

http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/dean/dean021703sp.html

He was taken out of context

[tom_paine]

10. Further, Dean and the others were proceeding by assuming the intelligence

was good.

Dean and the others don't have their own CIA (it would be better if they did, considering what the Imperial Family has done with theirs).

So, they assumed they weren;t being lied to.

Anyone could have told them Busheviks lie like most people breathe, and that to accept ANYTHING at face value from Imperial Scum like that is a mistake.

I don't fault these poeple for what they said based on the false intelligence they were given. They assumed that the Bushevik Arm of the CIA was honest.

Now THAT is what makes them foolish.

[jpak]

11. Is this statement accurate????

George W. Bush killed and imprisoned more I-raqis in 2003 than Saddam has over the last ten years.

[Moderator]

12. Locking.

1. If you start a thread in the General Discussion forum, you must present your opinion in a manner that is not inflammatory, which respects differences in opinion, and which is likely to lead to respectful discussion rather than flaming. Some examples of things which should generally be avoided are: unnecessarily hot rhetoric, nicknames for prominent Democrats or their supporters, broad-brush statements about groups of people, single-sentence "drive-by" thread topics, etc.

2. The subject line of a discussion thread must accurately reflect the actual content of the message.

3. The subject line of a discussion thread may not include profanity or swear words, even if words or letters are replaced by asterisks, dashes, or abbreviations.

4. The subject line and the entire text of the message which starts the thread may not include excessive capitalization, or excessive punctuation.

5. If you post an article or other published content which is from a conservative source or which expresses a traditionally conservative viewpoint, you must state your opinion about the piece and/or the issues it raises.

6. You may not start a new discussion thread in order to continue a current or recent flame war from another thread. The moderators have the authority to lock threads in order to contain flaming on a particular topic to only one thread at a time.

7. Discussion topics that mention any or all of the Democratic presidential primary candidates are not permitted in the General Discussion forum, and instead must be posted in the General Discussion: 2004 Primary forum.