re: Bush Press Sec Ari Fleischer tries to "call out Iraq war Myths". Believe him or not?

I'd have to go to SE Asia for that.

ETA: Or part of a political/corporate cabal that uses underage sex slaves. The former might be easier.

What can I aay, pedophile site.

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What say you poliboard? Do you believe him or not?

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Since that substantiates every thought I have ever had about the "bush lied - people died' canard from day one = yes I believe it.

Further, I believe that Saddam did have some - how substantial is open to debate - chemical WMD that he transported to Syria during the long nonsensical debate that delayed the action to take him out.

I believe it would have been an act of supreme naiveté to leave Saddam in power while he was posing as a nuclear threat to the whole region.

Sentrius - I admire you and your reasoning on almost every issue on the poliboard - but I disagree with you on this issue entirely.

I believe that you are applying the 20/20 vision of hindsight to your analysis. War is an uncertain game.

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All I know is that regardless of whether they lied about WMD's or not, they clearly did not have a plan for what to do after the invasion and the battle is "won" and what to do about the power vacuum that would take place thereafter

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do you know what the plans were that FDR/Eisenhower/McArthur had for the possibility that Germany/Japan would have folded their tent within a week? Would you have been railing against the massive buildup that was wholly unnecessary??

And we have stayed in those countries half a century after their total defeat. still there. Had we actually stayed the course in Iraq - and had not Obama precipitously pulled out our forces prior to a stable government being established, Iraq could easily be a thriving ally in the region by now. (I emphasize 'could' because nobody actually knows what the outcome of the US staying would have been - but I am totally convinced it would be better than what happened when we didn't stay,)

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they clearly lied to us about that part of the debacle.

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I really don't see the 'lie' here.

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I do know that Bush did not do himself any favors by surrounding himself with a bunch of snakes that loves open ended war like Cheney, Rumsfeld and so on.

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Here we really disagree - I believe Cheny and Rumsfeld were great patriots. And I take offense at these charges of 'neocon' (whatever that means) being used as drive-by insults = equivalent to the leftwing radicals labeling everything as "hate speech."

After 9-11 I would have been in favor of turning that whole damn goat-yard into a glass parking lot. I thought the Bush administration was way too 'understanding of feelings' and way too reticent to go to war with everything that moved over there.

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I actually believe this but the question is what kind of pressure (if any) the administration applied to the intelligence community to deliver the the results that it wanted.

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Actually if you read the report there was no evidence on the administration or political powers applying any pressure to achieve a desired result. If that matters.

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Amazing. Incredible that Saddam Hussein could fool multiple intelligence officials and analysts by just saying "Yeah, I have WMDs."

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Can you cite a single credible source that concluded that Saddam did NOT have WMD???

I remember those times vividly - I do NOT remember anyone standing up with any kind of evidence that it was all a 'lie" - Hell, even Hillary Goddam Clinton believed the WMDs were there.

Who are these savants that could have prevented this disaster?

Do you know that the Nazis did not have gun emplacements on the bluffs overlooking Point du Hoc at Normandy? Every facet to the allied intelligence and military were convinced they were there and represented a real hazard to the success of the invasion.

Who lied in the lead-up to 6/6/44??

War is hell - it is an uncertain endeavor - it should not be undertaken foolishly - there are to be unknown factors that only become known only as it unfolds or in the aftermath - preparation for war must factor in the most extreme consideration of what MIGHT occur - waiting for mathematically-perfect knowledge of all parameters before taking action is known as SURRENDER.

Monday morning quarterbacks and arm-chair generals make me want to puke.

You remind me of the dumb-fricks on TV commiserating about our 'lack of planning' when the Iraqi army fell back in headlong retreat and we had to wait a day for our fuel trucks to catch up to the pursuing Abrams tanks. APPARENTLY we had spent way too much time planning an effective advance against a determined enemy and NOT ONCE had we adequately planned for the IMMEDIATE COLLAPSE of the opposing forces. i.e. We did not have a fuel depot and a convoy of waiting fuel trucks with no defense structure set up in time to support immediate withdrawal of the opposition from the field of battle.

Pathetic in so many ways.

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The blowback of the Iraq War has been massive. From millions of civilian deaths to the deaths of American and coalition soldiers to the open distrust of the intelligence community

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Wait - is the IC supposed to be trusted or not??

you are bewailing the fact that Bush TRUSTED them - and now bewailing it is bad that there is 'open distrust' of them - which is the correct stance in your 20/20 hindsight - and at what point did this universal truth become apparent??

Can you imagine the outcry had we done nothing in Iraq, ignoring the IC - and then suffered a massive chemical attack on our forces supporting the Afghanistan operation, with the threat by Saddam that a Nuclear response would follow any retaliation?

Perhaps the intelligence community is corrupt like the CIA, DOJ, and FBI?

Hussein had to convince everyone he still had them because if his neighbors knew he didn't they'd have rolled across his borders.

He had to maintain the charade in the face of crippling sanctions in the hope that he could wait out Europe (which was beginning to work).

The Bush Administration giving him a "put up or shut up" deadline to disclose whether he had them or not put him in an untenable position.

Frankly, even absent the WMD issue (which, considering the policy of pre-emptive action in the wake of 9/11 explains everything), the US had ample justification to act based on the ongoing violations of the no fly zones.

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What say you poliboard? Do you believe him or not?

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Curveball was selling his dubious information to every service that was buying. It became this circular "confirmation", even though it was largely based on this sole source, the agencies didn't - indeed couldn't have known this because of the way source information is treated.

But, that means that nobody was doing hard work to get a second source for themselves, they relied upon allied confirmation.

This isn't particularly new. We knew this by 2005 or 2006.

And there were scads and scads of WMDs in Iraq. Just not the exact, precise ones the anti-war movement wanted. And if those had been there, they would have said, "Well, it still isn't worth it."

But, the Curveball thing isn't a big revelation. This is almost a decade and a half revelation.

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Can you imagine the outcry had we done nothing in Iraq, ignoring the IC - and then suffered a massive chemical attack on our forces supporting the Afghanistan operation, with the threat by Saddam that a Nuclear response would follow any retaliation?

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Starting a land war in one country to stop the remote possibility of that country somehow attacking your land war forces in an unrelated country 1,400 miles away.....

GENIUS!

Think of all the wars this could justify.