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Originally Posted by politicophile
Possibility 1: If Bush didn't know that the intelligence was false, then the Democrats are hypocritically faulting Bush for being misled for intelligence that also misled (at the very least) the vast majority of Senate Democrats, not to mention France, Germany, and the United Nations. It wouldn't make any sense to hold the President accountable in this situation because EVERYONE was misled.
Possibility 2: The President did know the intelligence was false. He intentionally misled the Senate into believing that Saddam had WMD's even though Bush knew that there were no WMD's. If this is the case, the Democrats, along with every employee of the intelligence agencies in a half dozen countries, are idiots because they were duped by Bush into believing that their intelligence showed something that it did not. Are we really willing to allege that Bush fabricated the NSA intelligence, the CIA intelligence, the French intelligence, the German intelligence, etc. etc?
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Neat. So either way, Bush is spotless? Even if he lied, it's the congressional Democrats' fault for believing it? That's nice. Come here and let me punch you in the nose and then blame you for putting your nose in the way of my fist.
The buck stops nowhere NEAR this administration. And they called Clinton slick!
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Originally Posted by politicophile
It is obvious at this juncture that Bush didn't know that the intelligence was flawed. There simply is no conceivable was in which he could have fooled all those agencies. For this reason, one must conclude that Bush didn't know, couldn't have known, that the intelligence was flawed. Thus, the Democrats' recent complaints about being misled by the intelligence cannot in any way be used to fault Bush, who clearly was equally misled.
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First, nobody is claiming that the administration fooled the intelligence agencies. Again, you're making up straw man arguments. This is a typical right-wing argumentation practice, but watch out. When somebody calls you on it, all your logical card houses will collapse.
The claim is that the administration manipulated the intelligence, selectively chose the intel to focus on, and arrived at conclusions that weren't borne out by the evidence at hand. The intelligence agencies were screaming their heads off that the conclusions were unwarranted, but anyone who actually spoke out about that had their wife outed as a CIA agent. Cheney was standing in the corner with his hatchet, just waiting to take the head off anybody who criticized too vocally.
It's patently obvious to anyone willing to step outside their party lockstep that the administration had an outcome they were interested in, and shaped their argument to arrive at that outcome. Bush wanted a war. It first came out of his mouth late on the morning of 9/11, when he asked is advisors for a way to pin the attacks on Iraq. He was itching for a fight, and he shoehorned conclusions onto the evidence at hand that got him the fight he wanted.
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
You can look back and say 'this guy said different, and this guy said this' etc but intel is never black and white, and the big picture said Saddam was working on WMD's.
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Because you saw all of it, right? What's your clearance level, Ustwo? Which intelligence agency do you work for?
Unless the answers to those questions are something OTHER than "Well, no,", "I don't have one," and "I don't," then you're a dupe right along with the rest of us. The intel you saw was the intel the administration WANTED you to see, shaped and sculpted to reinforce the conclusion the administration wanted you to draw. It's staggeringly arrogant and naive to think that you, as an ordinary US citizen, you have access to "the big picture". You see what the administration shows you, what the media shows you. You might occasionally get a glimpse behind the curtain when some journalist or blogger does some (rare) investigative work.
You were convinced by what you were shown partly because it WAS convincing, and partly because you're locked into a way of thinking that Bush is Always Right. Fortunately, only 34% to 37% of Americans agree with you at this point.
Personally, I wasn't ever convinced. Nobody seems to remember this, but there was a fair amount of healthy skepticism about the quality of the intelligence and the results of the analysis of it at the time. But that was back when Bush had 70% to 80% approval ratings, so it wasn't politically workable to really raise the objection.