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Originally Posted by roachboy
mm: given that the debate about the iraq war has been recycled here again and again with no appreciable movement from either side--tho in this case, i think the only meaningful movement would come from conservatives, who have no choice by now but to concede that the case for war was false from the beginning and deal with the concsequences of that, both political and psychological---i am not interested in going through all of it again--but think about it--the unsc did not believe the bushcase for war. there was ample evidence from the outset, available even to folk like us, that the administration was lying at the worst, cooking the books at best, to justify a rush into an unnecessary (and costly) war.
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While this is a reasonable opinion, I still have a problem with your last sentence. The question was not
whether Iraq had WMDs, but whether they had
destroyed them. Meanwhile, the Iraqis were still shooting at us, and the UN had dumped the situation into our laps. Had Saddam cooperated with the UN weapons inspectors, there would have been no war.
So I have to question your statement regarding the "ample evidence" of the administration's either lying, or cooking the books.
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that the american political class as a whole initially bought the administrations argument can and should stand as yet another indictment of the system as a whole--but i also i suspect that a reason for the initial credulity was that folk like kerry etc. were in a position like you seem to still be in--they wanted to assume good faith from the white house--however, unlike you, most of those folk have had to reconsider their positions---they, like you, were wrong. unlike you, folk like kerry actually faced having been decieved by the administration. you have not.
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It would be helpful if you could provide evidence of the
deliberate deception the administration perpetrated on Mr. Kerry, et. al.
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it seems to me that the sole function of these recurrent "yeah but what about clinton..." threads are indices of the extent to which conservatives who continue to support the administration--a dwindling number, btw--seem to be doing so because they cannot deal with the dissonance that thinking critically about what george w bush has done would entail.
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Again, hard evidence that he deliberately lied would settle the disagreement. As of yet, the worst that can be documented is that he acted on bad information. Until worse can be proven, it would be senseless for the Republicans to compete in the political arena under the "Marquis of Queensberry" rules, while the Democrats proceed to kick them in the balls at every opportunity.
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the problem is the system as a whole.
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No argument there.