Who said this?
What if Saddam fails to comply (with UN sanctions), or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more time to develop this (WMD) program? He will conclude that the international community has lost its will… [that] he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, I guarantee you, he’ll use this arsenal.
Answer: President Bill Clinton in February 1998.
Okay then, who said this?
The United Nations believes that Saddam Hussein may have produced as much as 200 tons of VX (nerve gas)… we face a clear and present danger… terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in New York City had in mind the destruction and deaths of 250,000 people….
Answer: Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen on November 15, 1997.
Who said this?
The world hasn’t seen, except maybe since Hitler, somebody quite as evil as Saddam Hussein. If you don’t stop a horrific dictator before he gets started too far, he can do untold damage….
Answer Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright on February 20, 1998.
Taken from: The Hidden History of the Iraq War Critics-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7 comments:
Don't forget these as well...
-"He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq..." - Colin Powell, 24 February 2001
-"The sanctions, as they are called, have succeeded over the last 10 years, not in deterring him from moving in that direction, but from actually being able to move in that direction... And even though we have no doubt in our mind that the Iraqi regime is pursuing programs to develop weapons of mass destruction -- chemical, biological and nuclear -- I think the best intelligence estimates suggest that they have not been terribly successful." - Colin Powell, 15 May 2001
-"We are able to keep arms from him [Hussein]. His military forces have not been rebuilt." - Condoleezza Rice, 29 July 2001
In the end, all that mattered is what the neoconservatives (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc) believed it seems.
Thank you!!! You have proven the point that Saddam and his terrorist-supporting regime were a threat. - a threat that demanded preemptive action. This can be concluded from two realities that liberals attest. First, let’s take your litany of statements. The three statements make it clear that Iraq had not been able to build a conventional military force. Three reasons: the financial devastation of the Iran-Iraq war that Saddam was slowly recovering from via the U.N., the obliteration of the Iraqi military by U.S. forces during Gulf War I, and the financial and material sanctions imposed on Saddam by the U.N. (mostly executed by the U.S.). These three factors practically obliterated Saddam’s “conventional” capabilities. The key word here is CONVENTIONAL. That means an organized, standing military. Iraq’s ability to project a conventional military threat to either his neighbors or the U.S. was never the issue. Bush was not concerned with Iraq invading America.
In comes point two. After the invasion of Afghanistan, the libs screamed that Bush should have taken preemptive action against the Taliban before they were able to take out the Towers. Now, I ask, was the Taliban a conventional threat to the U.S.? Were they going to raid America with an organized, uniformed army? NO!!! Did the libs, to include a majority of Congress, support action against Afghanistan? YES!!! They posed a terrorist threat. In fact, they posed such a threat the World Trade Center no longer exists. This brings us back to Iraq. They posed a terrorist threat also. Our pre-war policies against Saddam kept his conventional threat at bay, but not his terrorist threat. Thus, in commenting about his statement concerning conventional capability, Colin Powell said:
“Because it focused the President's attention, all of our attention, on the fact that if there were nations in the world that were continuing to hold or develop weapons of mass destruction, in the aftermath of 9/11, where we saw the kinds of terrorist organizations that were out there that would stop at nothing to strike us or other civilized nations, then a nexus existed between the possibility of such terrorists getting access to these kinds of weapons.
And, also, the reality of it was that Saddam Hussein did have these weapons. The previous administration acknowledged it. The previous administration went to a mini-war in late 1998 and bombed Saddam Hussein's facilities for four years. And so here -- for four days -- excuse me -- and here it was five years later, in 2003, the President made a decision, based on this continued violation of UN resolutions for all these years, after taking the case to the UN, that the world in this post-9/11 environment could no longer tolerate that kind of activity by a regime as irresponsible as Saddam Hussein.” (taken from http://www.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2003/24600.htm)
Iraq had the capability and was working on enlarging his capability to provide chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons to terrorist. Thus, as preemptive action was demanded by libs post-Afghany invasion, the Iraq war was a legitimate execution of Bush’s preemptive policy. However, it is not the Bush administration that needs to defend itself. Righteousness and integrity is on his side. It is the libs that need to explain and defend their position. That is, please defend for me why a vicious, genocide-committing dictator like Saddam Hussein should have stayed in power? I am sure the myriad of Kurdish families who had a loved one massacred would love to hear your reasoning.
Saddam Hussein did not pose a threat to the United States.
No one inside the administration contends this now. You're using a 2003 quote from Powell. But we know now that many of the things they said in 2003 about Iraq were not true (that's not questioned... the only debate is whether it was an intelligence failure or intentional lies). Powell himself has come forward to state his regret that certain aspects of the case for war (ie. the idea that Saddam might possess nuclear capiblities) were overly hyped and mischaracterized.
The 9/11 Commission and every group that has looked into it since the war has concluded that a) there were no weapons, and b) there was no terrorist connection in Iraq. This is fact. And, again, even the White House does not dispute that at this point. In official is asked now why they insisted that Iraq had connections to Al Qaeda or 9/11, they lie and insist that they never made that connection. They say the same thing when asked about their assurances in 2003 that the war wouldn't cost taxpayers anything and that it would be a six-week cakewalk. When Rumsfeld was asked a while back why they stated that Iraq was an imminent threat, he also stated that, no, they have never said that. They then played Rumsfeld a clip of himself saying that... and Rumsfeld still had the nerve to deny that was what he said, playing the "you didn't know what I meant" card.
The White House now tries to retroactively justify the war based on Hussein's human rights record and their notion that we're supposed to force democracies around the world.
So if even the White House is no longer tries to state that Iraq was a threat to us or had WMDs or had terrorist connections, why do so many people still hold onto that belief? Because a lot of Americans invested a lot of emotion into believing that this war, and the President were right, and it's hard to counter that strong of a belief.
Even arch-conservatives like William F. Buckley, George Will, or Newt Gingrich have been forced to admit that this war has been a failure and was not justified. The administration is left in a position to merely argue "Hey, give us time, maybe this thing will work itself out in the end".
As for the Kurds, they have my sympathy. That's more than the Reagan/Bush Sr. administration gave them. But while human rights abuses by Saddam were an after-the-fact justification for the war (only after the WMD, terrorism connection cases fell apart), that was not how the war was sold. We were told Saddam was an imminent threat to us... he was not. The U.S. was well aware of Saddam's human rights abuses in the '80s when we were doing business with him, but we didn't care until he outlived his usefulness to us. The U.S. isn't the world's policeman. There are dozens and dozens of countries with brutal despots as leaders and we ignore them. Genocide in the Sudan? We're apparently not bothered. We just had the Chinese president over for a friendly visit and his regime is despicable. But Saddam we went after because we had an agenda there. I didn't want him in power, but that didn't justify an invasion. If the U.S. is in the dictator-removing business, we'd be at war with a quarter of the world.
[PS- As a bit of friendly advice, I'd avoid using the word "lib" in a debate or to describe your opponents. It's a bit too Limbaugh-esque and childish. If I went around referring to half the country as "cons", I know I wouldn't expect to be taken very seriously.]
Blueduck, I am impressed how quickly you respond. I fear I either don't have as much time or as much wit.... I assure you that I was not using "lib" with any condescending motive. It is merely shorthand for those contrary to my position. Honestly, I would not mind if you used a respective shorthand in referring to conservatives – 'con' has too much attached to it to work. However, I do apologize for any offense taken….
Iraq was not seen as a threat by liberals because of two reasons: they believe Iraq did not directly and conventionally attack us, and America is mostly responsible for why Iraq was the way that it was under Saddam - and besides, liberals hold that there is really no way we can win anyway. Thus, we are hypocrites and murders for bringing him down and trying to establish democracry. A failure to either understand or admit both the intelligence links and the ideological cooperation between Iraq and terror organizations is pervasive among liberals.
I really have a heard time believing your statements – not because of the truthfulness or untruthfulness of what you state, but because I believe what you see as reality is jaded by your liberal presuppositions. Of course, you could make this same argument about things that I say. So, the only way for us to arrive at what is really true is to first realize what are our presuppositions and second, to address facts with intellectual honesty. It would be grand for you to have the Bush administration confess that all was wrong and is now currently hopeless – as your statements above intimate. But, that is simply not true. I will be the first to admit that the Bush administration has done a very poor job in defending going to war post-invasion. But, I do not believe there is malicious intent there (again, because of presuppositions I have).
One critical fact that you failed to mention in your prior post are the numerous documents that became public in March of this year. These documents, as ABC news of all organizations reports, clearly establish links between Al-Qaida and Iraq and the existence of both stocks of WMD and the capabilities to produce them (entire story available here http://abcnews.go.com/International/IraqCoverage/story?id=1734490&page=1). ABC news reports,
“New Documents from Saddam Hussein's Archives Discuss Bin Laden, WMDs. Following are the ABC News Investigative Unit's summaries of four of the nine Iraqi documents from Saddam Hussein's government, which were released by the U.S. government Wednesday. The documents discuss Osama bin Laden, weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda and more. The full documents can be found on the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office Web site” – official site is http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/products-docex.htm.
ABC went on to say concerning one of the documents dated September 15th, 2001,
“An Iraqi intelligence service document saying that their Afghani informant, who's only identified by a number, told them that the Afghani Consul Ahmed Dahastani claimed the following in front of him: That OBL and the Taliban are in contact with Iraq and that a group of Taliban and bin Laden group members visited Iraq. That the U.S. has proof the Iraqi government and 'bin Laden's group' agreed to cooperate to attack targets inside America. That in case the Taliban and bin Laden's group turn out to be involved in 'these destructive operations,' the U.S. may strike Iraq and Afghanistan. That the Afghani consul heard about the issue of Iraq's relationship with 'bin Laden's group' while he was in Iran.”
There is more concerning WMD’s, but I believe the above proves my point. Yes, IRAQ was a threat and was guilty of conspiring to attack to the U.S. and these documents to testify as such – please review them.
I believe what characterizes the modern liberal political movement is a selective reporting of events out of context in an attempt to destroy the Bush administration, for which they are blinded by hated toward. Why also do you only mention Reagan and Bush Sr. failing to engage Saddam concerning his genocide? Why is Clinton not mentioned? Again, a selective reporting of the facts to further AN AGENDA. Let’s both commit to intellectual integrity.
So, I ask, what are your presuppositions? We both bring numerous presuppositions to this debate – as is true of any political dialogue. These presuppositions necessarily affect the way we interpret data. Thus the interpreting of the myriad of realities concerning the Iraq War and Bush’s foreign policy by conservatives and liberals lead to two diametric conclusions. It used to not be this way in relation to foreign policy; it was for the most part only domestic policy that caused partisan division. Some liberal presuppositions that lead to these different conclusions are 1) War is wrong in almost every case, 2) The U.S. is responsible for the hatred foreign countries have for America, 3) America is guilty of gross colonial oppression throughout the world. When conservatives observe these beliefs in liberal’s statements they immediately, and I believe rightly, accuse the modern liberal movement of treason. Please prove me wrong concerning treason, PLEASE!!!
I simply do not possess skill enough to present the type of cogent arguments that you gentlemen have, but I would like to share this simple truth:
"The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate." -Francis Bacon
'J to the G' has already humbly declared we all bring our own presuppositions to the table, and he has asked BlueDucky what his are with no response. I will leave you with one of my own in his stead (with a little verse):
Liberals, more than most,
evade the truth when it suits;
On oil, on Bush,
in all of their pursuits.
From our Founders to the posture of Courts;
verity, they have rejected.
Social sinks with terrible drips,
ne'er have they inspected.
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