The loaded questions for Holsclaw...

Do you believe that anyone who feels that Bush Admin did argue Iraq as an imminent threat is ignorant?

Do you believe that any non-ignorant person who argues that they believe that the admin implied that Iraq is an imminent threat is lying?

If you don't feel comfortable calling a lot of people stupid or liars, how do you expect to win your $100?

Another questions for Holsclaw...

Can you honestly say with a straight face that nobody in the Bush administration ever even implied that there was an imminent threat from Iraq?

The two paragraphs quoted illustrate perfectly the Bush technique: say something vague then change the subject and glaze the mind's eye with irrelevancies and inconsistencies.

Obviously, what the administration wanted was to take Saddam out. Via faith based intelligence fed to them by Chalabi they "knew" he was an imminent threat, but they cy'd their very ample a's. They leave the clear impression here, as elsewhere, of an imminent threat whithout using the those two words, in fact denying them (a technique Bush uses a lot - denying the very thing he is doing or about to do).

But when you add it up it can only mean one thing: better take Saddam out now 'cause he's just about ready to nuke us and it would happen too quickly for us to prevent.

***

Parsing the two paragraphs just a little closer, note Bush mentions that the US cannot trust the "sanity and restraint" of Saddam. Bush then provides a list of horrors. They prove conclusively that Saddam, while surely evil, is fully sane and completely able to restrain himself. Note that his victims are all far less powerful than he and he destroys them utterly.And none of them are American and he did not atack a state, or even threaten to, after Bush/Iraq I.

That strikes me as eminently logical, if thoroughly obscene, behavior. You don't pick fights with people you can't destroy and you destroy completely those you can.

In short, Saddam, in all likelihood, was not preparing to attack the United States, had not attacked the US, and had not aided in US attacks. He was a sane monster.

We were sold a bill of goods, folks, but an Administration that is skilled at only one thing: composing elaborate lies.

I can't believe how close this all sounds to Clinton debating the meaning of words. And then you dismiss a thesaurus, as if it's the actual word "imminent" that is required, that no other word in the language can express the same sentiment.

Then you interpret Bush's message being that it's not relevant if the threat is imminent or not - which I agree with. Which should eliminate any need for thesaurus-bashing.

Basically, they gave millions of people the impression Iraq was an imminent threat. Whether that was accidental, purposeful, or the "evil liberal media's" fault, there's no way the WH was not aware of the public's (mis-)understanding. Most likely, as "good" (conniving, effective) politicians, they went with the misinterpretation because it served their purpose, while they believe(d) they were in the clear legally regarding the "imminent threat" phrase.

Hoo boy. I just read it a second time.

Holsclaw's rebuttal to the Rumsfeld quote is that "immediate threat" is so different from "imminent threat" that anyone who would confuse the two is some kind of word-twisting scoundrel who would "take a kernel of truth and apply so much distortion as to turn it into a lie. "

Are we really back to arguing what the meaning of is is?

The only question left to answer at this point is how long is Holsclaw going to hang around and make a fool out of himself...

This is especially not a context where 'immediate' is interchangeable with 'imminent'. The French have an immediate capability to attack us with nuclear weapons, but no one in their right mind would argue that the French nuclear capability is an 'imminent threat'.

You're right that the phrase "immediate capacity" is in no way equivalent to "imminent threat." One phrase merely indicated capacity, whereas one clearly indicates a present threat that could strike at any time.

But if someone described France as an "immediate threat", and used the term "immediate" to support the argument that we need to attack France right now to deal with this "immediate threat", then "immediate" and "imminent" seem exactly interchangeable. Both words indicate a present threat that could strike at any time. Right?

Holsclaw doesn't like Roget, so let's go to Webster. Try these Sebastian:

im·mi·nent
About to occur; impending: in imminent danger.

im·me·di·ate
3. Close at hand; near: in the immediate vicinity.
4. Next in line or relation: is an immediate successor to the president of the company.

Yeah, a "contextless range of somewhat similar meaning words." Right.

And it's Rumsfeld, not Rumsfield.

I can't help but think that the mere fact that this debate is taking place shows a serious lack of clarity in the administration's rationale for going to war. As far as I am concerned, no matter who wins the $100, Bush failed to articulate the reason for war in an unambiguous way. I think giving unambiguous reasons for something as fundamental as going to war is pretty much essential to being President.

For those who are convinced there was no argument for war under Bush's statements, what would you have done?

I ask this not sarcastically but sincerely. Where would be now with Iraq if we did not go ahead with the invasion? How would the world view us? Would we be better or worse? Would bowing to France's wishes have given the US more resoect in the world?

i would love to hear the rational arguments that play out in the diplomacy scenario. While I am still of the view that going to war was the right move and the arguments sound, I also can be convinced otherwise.

If this is a debate, then it should be judged on content of the argument and not on how you stand on the subject. I occasionally judge Lincoln Douglas debates at High School meets. So far Holsclaw appeared to do well by addressing each of Schwarz contentions. Schwarz also did well countering Holsclaw's contentions and made his own. Of course, writing it down and having the ability to look at your opponents argument makes this easier. So if this continues as it has so far, I don't see how either can win since the subject matter is so subjective. Holsclaw is arguing about what the Bush administration actually said, and Schwarz is arguing about what the Bush Administration implied. This really boils down to what you want to believe.

Loaded questions for appalled moderate -
Aren't you straight-out calling a lot of people stupid or liars when you say that the Bush administration lied to you about the non-existent imminent threat?

Doesn't asking those loaded questions of Holsclaw imply that everyone who agrees with him is stupid or a liar?

"If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late," Bush said. "Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option."

From the State of the Union Address. The pretext of the first sentence that Bush is assuming that a threat will emerge; an imminent threat

Where would we be?

U.N. investigators would still be turning in reports that they could find no WMD.

Hussein would still be contained.

We'd be hundreds of billions of dollars richer.

Several hundred American families wouldn't be grieving.

Thousands of GIs would still have their eyes, their feet, their peace of mind.

Thousands of Iraqis would be alive.

Al Queda's ranks wouldn't be swollen with new recruits.

The world would see America, still, as a shining city on the hill, a beacon for peace-loving people -- a country that leads by virtuous example.

That's a start.

Also 25+ UN workers and about a dozen journalists would still be alive.

I am sorry Sebastian, but I don't think you can make the 'complete fabrication' charge stick.

Although many others may disagree, I would give you credit for having made a very strong case for the following claim:

The thesis that Iraq posed an imminent threat was not an important part of the Bush administration's arguement in the runup to the war. Any discription of the Bush arguement for the war as being wholely or largely dependent upon the claim of an imminent threat is not supported by a careful consideration of the totality of the record.

In support of this claim, it is appropriate to look at any quotes about 'immediacy' in the context of the entire debate at the time. Your arguements about the SOTU and the fight over the language of the congressional resolution become, in my opinion, dispositive. The administration was careful, and vocal, in denying that an imminent threat was a necessary part of their case for the war.

However your bet was that such a discription is a complete fabrication. To disprove this, Sebastian need only show how there is a reasonable kernal of truth in that claim. This, his citations have done (again in my opinion.) Claims of current threat, or at least the high probability of a current threat, were made. They may have been few in relation to other, less explicit claims, they may have been explicitly downplayed, but they are there.

".. that the Bush administration argued in the runup to the war that there was an imminent threat from Iraq" may be an incomplete and misleading statement, but it does have at least some support and is thus not a complete fabrication.

As I argued on the last thread, the more important question is such talk helpful to the current debate. I would agree with you that it is not, that by focusing on a minor point while ignoring the major point it is a best a distraction from the real issues and often a disreputable rhetorical 'strawman' type arguement.

It is enough to argue that given a careful look, your opponent's arguement is not well supported by the evidence as a whole. You don't help yourself when you go on to claim that is arguement has no support whatsoever. It's the difference between "you are wrong" and "you are lying"

mrp:

The children's prisons will still be operating.

The mass graves would still be buried... and most likely new ones would be dug in the future.

Millions of Iraqis would have no voice in their government, nor any hope of such a voice, nor a life without the Ba'athist yoke and heel on their necks.

Thousands of other Iraqis than the ones you say would be alive (most of the dead, by the way, being Ba'athists and murderers, though surely innocent people also died. But don't pretend they're all innocent victims of American Aggression, either.) would be dead, or missing tongues, or greiving for a raped and murdered daughter or wife. One raped and murdered on state orders, mind you.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children would still be learning that Saddam Hussein is the Perfect Man, and would be lacking food because he preferred to buy palaces and weapons over feeding them wiht the money the UN handed over to his sole control.

Indeed, where would we be?

Where would we be?

U.N. investigators would still be turning in reports that they could find no WMD.

Despite the existance of hidden WMD facilities (described last week by the Kay report) which Sadam could turn on as soon as the attention waned.

Hussein would still be contained.

At a great cost (to us and to the Iraqi people), as long as we could keep attention on that part of the world. Tyrants are much better at winning a waiting game than democracies.

We'd be hundreds of billions of dollars richer.

Hundreds? the $87 billion would have to be ofset by the cost of maintaining an active blockade / threat, or less Saddam would not remain contained. Without the exageration, you are right, we would have saved money in the near term.

Several hundred American families wouldn't be grieving.

Thousands of GIs would still have their eyes, their feet, their peace of mind.

Thousands of Iraqis would be alive.

Tens of thousands of other Iraquis would be dead, tortured, and/or in jail. This would continue for years. The nation would be living in fear. The man-made drought would continue in the Marshes. Healthcare spending would be a fraction of what it is now. Uday would be happily raping and torturing for the sport of it.

Al Queda's ranks wouldn't be swollen with new recruits.

And your evidence that they are now so swollen is ??? I haven't seen anything other than speculation. I do know that many, including their less replacable leaders, are being killed in Iraq now. We won't know for a while where the balance is, but it is by no means a fact that the invasion has made Al Queda better off.

The world would see America, still, as a shining city on the hill, a beacon for peace-loving people -- a country that leads by virtuous example.

Much of the world has not had this view for decades.

That's a start.

And an end

The world would see America, still, as a shining city on the hill, a beacon for peace-loving people -- a country that leads by virtuous example.

You can't be serious!

But anyway, add another:

Hundreds of Iraqis would still be tortured right now.

Hundreds of Iraqis would still be imprisoned, unjustly, right now.

Or thousands?

I can't help but think that the mere fact that this debate is taking place shows a serious lack of clarity in the administration's rationale for going to war. As far as I am concerned, no matter who wins the $100, Bush failed to articulate the reason for war in an unambiguous way. I think giving unambiguous reasons for something as fundamental as going to war is pretty much essential to being President.

Or it shows that the Administrations critics have mostly succeeded in clouding the truth and in spreading lies.

"If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late," Bush said. "Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option."

From the State of the Union Address. The pretext of the first sentence that Bush is assuming that a threat will emerge; an imminent threat

A threat that will emerge is not the same as an imminent threat. That seems to be the whole point - that Bush argued that a threat would certainly come, so it was foolish to wait until it was imminent, because that would be too late.

"For those who are convinced there was no argument for war under Bush's statements, what would you have done? I ask this not sarcastically but sincerely."

Sickles, I would have given Hans Blix the "months, not years" that he was requesting to continue inspections. All I, personally, wanted was for every option to be expended before resorting to war (killing thousands of human beings).

Think back to March: all of France/Germany/Russia/China's vetoes (real and threatened) were over the issue of how much authority the US had to act militarily in the face of Iraqi defiance. The US wanted automatic triggers to authorize a US military attack. France (and Russia, and Germany, and China) wanted the US to come back for that authorization AFTER Blix were to signal non-compliance. Bush evidently decided that was not possible. I disagree.

Why not wait? We coulda gotten the sort of broad-based coalition we got in '91. It wouldn't have cost you and me $150 billion, and it would've gotten us more foreign participation, therfore saving American lives. Also, if that coaliton involved Arab nations (as in '91), then this wouldn't be perceived in Iraq as solely a western/white/Christian occupation of an Islamic country (perhaps averting the sort of reports we're seeing today from the UK's International Institute of Strategic Studies, that the Iraq war has SWELLED Al Qaeda's ranks, and making recruiting a breeze for them).

On the downside, Bechtel and Halliburton would not get so many of the reconstruction contracts. I know, bummer, huh?

Why President Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998, without additional UN discussion!

Interesting! How does this compare with current administration policy?

Discuss.

Fock: Any eventual threat is imminent? An evnetual threat of unknown timing is thus "imminent" (ie, due VERY soon)?

That's very interesting logic, especially when the President appears to have clearly stated he doesn't consider the threat imminent in that (normal, expected, contextual, correct) sense of the word.

What sort of threats are not imminent, by that categorisation? Only those that are precisely known with great surety to be not-imminent.

I repeat. "An [imminent] threat will emerge [at some unknown future date]" is not the same as "imminent threat NOW". To say that Hussein's Iraq would eventually threaten the US directly is to say that it does not do so NOW; and to say that we are not sure if they do so now, is to say that we do not KNOW if they do now, but it certainly is not the same as a claim that they do.

Bush is saying, in a perfectly clear manner, that we can't know if Iraq's threat is "imminent" until it's too late. That's very, very different from saying it's "imminent" now. Claiming otherwise, while you might have your own intellectually honest reasons for doing so, sounds to me an awful lot like scrambling for a toehold for recrimination, in most cases.

And, well, as has been said in this very thread, it doesn't seem to matter what the Administration said so much as how you (generic you, to all who argued in such a manner to any extent) felt about what they said, or were able to infer from what they said... so why should what you say matter more than how I feel about it? Or do different rules apply between Them and You, and You and Me?

I prefer to apply the rule that what is said and reasonably inferred with all context matters more than what I can convince myself to infer, strain for redefinition, stretch to cover what's conveneitn, and "feel" in any other way about what was said. If we debate unreasonable inference, and "feelings" about what people say, we might as well just give up, because no rhetorical style can overcome a hostile audience or post-facto redefinitions.

Patrick:

That's a very fair reponse, thank you.

i suppose you're right that we could have waited until we waited back from Blix, but would he have taken only a few months? I'm not sure about this. If he was still ambiguous, would you then have delivered "serios consequences" to Hussein? Or would you have waited longer? How much longer? Do you trust France to do the right thing? Or is what France, Germany and russia want "the right thing" and we should wait for their yea or nay?

And if you had waited, would the American people had been with you in the face of it? Perhaps, but perhaps not. They could have seen it as weakness in the face of UN obfuscation. Or they could have seen it as finding out better facts before taking action.

Either way, in what situation would you have finally committed a military action?

Heck, that one is easy, Sickles

The bombing raids were short lived and achieved the desired destruction at relatively low cost in lives and dollars.

The invasion and occupation is relatively long lasting, and has cost (and we're still counting) a great many lives and dollars.

Some in this string have questioned the relevance of this debate. The context here is that the Kay report showed quite clearly that there was no imminent threat from Iraq's WMDs, since they did not exist. So Bush is now saying that the Kay report justifies the war, since he reported that Iraq wanted to have WMDs. But if Bush actually justified the war based on an imminent threat, he owes us an apology, because the imminent threat was not there.

IMO, the debate in entertaining. But in the public perception, they now are hearing that there are no WMDs, and that will change the way some think about Bush's march to war.

Look, it doesn't matter what you call it, there was no compelling necessity to take preemptive, unilateral military action. For God's sake, we faced much more imminent threats during the fifty years of cold war. There was nothing threatening to the United States from Iraq that wasn't and still is threatening from Syria, Iran, North Korea, Libya, and the Palestinians. We are no safer today than we were two years ago, no thanks to Dubya. There are plenty of weapons out there for terroists, Iraq was not the exclusive source. And of course, to say that we had to act because he was sooooo bad is rubish. Hell, we supported him when he was gassing his own and supplied him with weapons. Don't tell me he was any worse than those criminals we supported in El Salvador or a hundred other places around the world over the last fifty years. This was purely an unnecessary war that has cost unnecessary lives and caused unnecessary grief for hundreds of families of the dead and wounded, not to mention the damage to our economy and standing in the world. This has been a disaster from the beginning, and all the more so because it was pushed off on us under false pretenses by a small group of very disturbed men who found themselves with too much power and the opportunity presented by 9-11 to abuse it.

A bit off topic since it doesn't deal with who will win Dan's debate, but am I the only one bothered by the conservative position that there never was and never needed to be an imminent threat? In the absence of collective world opinion in the form of a United Nations mandate, an imminent threat is the only possible justification for launching a preemptive war against someone who has not attacked you.

How forgetful we are.

The only thing that was imminent was the summer months in MOPP outfits.

We all knew that then.

And there was scant chance of turning back the huge military buildup that began well before any official decision was made. That gets into tactical decisions, surprise, etc., but it seems clear the decision had long-since been made.

"i suppose you're right that we could have waited until we waited back from Blix, but would he have taken only a few months? I'm not sure about this."

Maybe not. He SAID he would, but maybe not. If not, well, at least we'd have clear high-ground in the international community. We could legitimately claim that we'd played by the rules, jumped through all the hoops, done everything reasonable to get Iraq disarmed.

"Or would you have waited longer? How much longer?"

I dunno. How long did it take to compile the '91 coalition? Is there some reason why it'd be significantly more difficult/lengthy to repeat the feat in '03?

"And if you had waited, would the American people had been with you in the face of it? Perhaps, but perhaps not."

Yeah, but remember Bush said he was gonna do what was right, no matter what the polls told him, no matter how big the protests (which he referred to as "focus groups").

"Either way, in what situation would you have finally committed a military action?"

*If Blix declares that Iraq is non-compliant and removes his inspectors.
*If Blix's inspectors get kicked out without cause.
*If we find incontrivertable evidence of chemical or biological or nuclear weapons (not a "program," not an unprocessed vial of something, but actual weapons, with an actual delivery capacity.
*If we can legitimately say we've exercised every possible option, I suppose I'd have to commit a military action.

But I did not, and I still do not, believe we could say that. And (morals aside), I think it has made us less safe, not more so.

To siqifald and marc and bob monq:

Here we are again. You continue to tell us the horrors that Saddam Hussein imposed on his citizens, as after-the-fact justification for Bushco's taking war to Iraq based on the false evidence of an immediate threat.

Childrens prisons. Gassing people. Yadda yadda yadda. Terrible things.

I don't know how we can say it any more clearly:
The war wasn't sold on humanitarian reasons. The war was sold to the first world by telling us that first world countries were in immediate danger.

So stop saying that the end (as good as you may think it is) justifies the deception.

The gist of the pro-Iraq war position seems to be "There was no immiment threat; there didn't need to be: SH was a Bad Man and that justifies invading Iraq."

'Tis a lovely thing, to hear conservatives cry out for the liberation of the oppressed. I particularly enjoyed hearing Rummy/Powell et al. go on and on about the prisons and murders and such, seeing as how SH was doing all that back in the 1980's, when he was our Fair Haired Boy. Don't remember hearing a peep about human rights from Rummy/Powell back then.

There are Bad Men in charge in a lot of places. Among them, N Korea -- which, again thanks to the imitable Bush concept of diplomacy, is a lot more of a threat now than when Bush took office. Shall we in fact invade there next?

Or how about Burma, where the winner of the last Presidential election has been under house arrest for about 3 years now, and members of her party imprisoned and gunned down.

Or how about Syria. Or, gosh, Saudi Arabia, Land of terrorist education centers and training camps and where Sharia makes women's lives a living hell.

Or Tajikistan - whoops, no; they're an ally at the moment.

Or China -- whoops, no; we make an awful lot of money off China, don't want to upset that applecart.

Sorry, ducks. Human rights are not and never have been a compelling reason for any Republican to go to war or for a conservative to support one. Never ever. I don't buy that it was a good enough reason to do so now.

I esp. don't buy it in view of the fact that the Taliban, who we drove out of Afghanistan with such fanfare, are back in Afghanistan, and the Bushies have, again, not said word one about the return of the oppressive, murderous theocracy there.

Ok, let me ask this question.

If Iraq is an imminent threat what the heck does that make countries like North Korea and Pakistan? I mean its not like they aren't trading and selling things like advanced missle technology (Iraq only wanted it), have access to nuclear material, and in Pakistan's case demonstrated the technology. Pakistan has a history of hiding and/or ignoring terrorists within its borders so it seems far more likely a terrorist might get WMDs there that from a country under UN sanctions with inspectors running around...

Oh, did I forget to mention the tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in North Korean prison camps tortured on a regular basis? Heck, even if your not in prison your probably dieing of starvation anyway! We don't have all those service men and women in South Korea because its a cool vacation spot you know. Of course N Korea does lack oil and comes with powerful neighbors you'd have to actually talk to instead of lecture at so it wouldn't be a "simple" operation like Iraq.

Given his choices, Bush went for the easiest targets Afganistan and Iraq instead of the real threats like the radicals in Saudia Arabia / Egypt and real tricky situations WITH WMDs like N Korea.

For the record I don't advocate the invasion of any of these countries because it would a dumb thing to do, but I contend that they and other countries like Iran are clearly more imminent, immediate, growing threats than Iraq is.

Sickles, President Clinton made the wrong choice in '98, although he appears to have finished off Saddam's WMD production capabilities. The problem with the inspection process (and please note, the inspectors were not kicked out by Saddam, but pulled out by the U.N. in advance of the U.S. attack) at that point was that is was co-opted by the CIA. Saddam was paranoid that the inspections of palaces and party offices and such where being used to gather intelligence for an assassination or coup attempt. And the U.S. was using the inspections to gather intelligence on Iraq. So Saddam had a valid point and until the U.S. addressed it, the inspection process couldn't be seen just about inspecting. Read Scott Ritter's Endgame. It isn't a great book, but it does provide a first hand account of the inspection process from someone who actually led the inspections, which is invaluable. He is very critical of U.S. policy towards Iraq during the Clinton years.

Where would we be today without the war?

We'd still have hundreds of thousands of troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the rest of the Gulf, sitting in the sand "containing" Saddam, costing us billions of dollars, without any hope of EVER leaving.

Many MORE Iraqis would be dead by Saddam's regime - by torture, execution, etc - than have been killed by US forces.

Iraqi women would continue to be subject to officially sanctioned rape.

Iraqis would still be oppressed. They would not have freedom of the press, freedom of religion, etc. No independent newspapers. No shiite celebrations. No satelite dishes.

Baathists would still control the entire political process; there would be no freely elected officials.

No schools for ordianry Iraqis would be rebuilt, but palaces for Saddam would continue to be lavishly spent on.

Millions of children would not have been vaccinated.

Iraqis would have less electricity than they do today.

Saddam would still be making payments to Palestinian suicide bombers.

Saddam would still be committing genocide against the Marsh Arabs.

And, perhaps most importantly, there would not be any hope that there could be a liberal democracy in the heart of the Middle East.

But, in the anti-war freaks' world, all of these things are preferable to the war.

Okay, fine if you really want to parse language it's true that an impending threat isn't the same as an imminent threat. And although I think Bush tried to have it both ways, he did say right before my quote that we shouldn't wait until it's an imminent threat. But every press report said he argued it was imminent threat, so that's why I picked that.
How about this
"Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation." Not will be a threat, but is one now. That's even greater than imminent. From www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030306-8.html

The question is so narrowly drawn as to make the affirmative case nearly impossible. On the substance, however, I say bravo for Mr. Holsclaw. As he shows, any discussion of the issue and of the central term in question that is divorced from actual contexts is meaningless and ripe for manipulation, and the remarks of those who criticize him as somehow engaging in Clintonesque word games are unjustified: The debate would be impossible - or just a virtual shouting match - without clear, relevant definitions of the critical terms.

There is, however, one other argument that Mr. Holsclaw might have made that rests wholly on events rather than on verbal analysis: The Bush Administration demonstrated through its behavior that it did not believe the threat to be truly imminent ("about to occur without delay" being the principle relevant definition in MY Webster's).

If they had at any time believed a serious threat from Iraq to be truly imminent, then either a) it would have already been too late (as Bush's SOTU and other statements explain) and/or b) there would have been no time to consult Congress, introduce and debate resolutions at the UN, await the results of inspections, carefully build up an invasion force, and offer a last ultimatum: It would have been "come as you are" to intercept or destroy the threat, if possible. If armies are massing on the border (or an ally's border), or if VX is being handed over to terrorists, a president would be expected to do whatever was necessary to eliminate the danger. Congress and the rest of us would have been informed afterward - possibly as envisioned in the "national emergency" section of the War Powers Resolution.

Regardless of any statements among many thousands that may have strayed beyond the most careful propositions regarding the state of knowledge of Iraqi arms and intentions, and regardless of whether the administration believed there might be or even probably was a potential imminent threat (or the imminent threat of an imminent threat, etc.), the Administration did not act as though the threat it was seeking to combat was a truly imminent one.

Because there is a high cost of action without adequate preparation, and a high advantage to acting with adequate preparation and on one's own timetable, Bush chose to wait rather than to act against a potentially imminent threat. If there is another mass terror event on the scale of 9/11, or larger, the president will be less likely to wait for John Kerry to finish reversing himself or for the French ambassador to finish his poetry reading.

ETC you are comply off base...

I can't help but think that the mere fact that this debate is taking place shows a serious lack of clarity in the administration's rationale for going to war. As far as I am concerned, no matter who wins the $100, Bush failed to articulate the reason for war in an unambiguous way. I think giving unambiguous reasons for something as fundamental as going to war is pretty much essential to being President.

WRONG- In fact I have not heard anything more wrong the entire day on all these comments.

Bush did not fail to make the case clear, Indeed consider he said this:

"Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late."

Yet what we are witnessing is the liberals trying to twist his words. THIS WAS USED AS EVIDENCE ON BOTHS SIDES. Obviously Bush addressed this EXACT issue but the liberals twist and distort his words, run them thru a thesaurus and say "well he IMPLIED..."

I can't help but think that the mere fact that this debate is taking place shows a serious twisting of the President's words.

ETC If you were President you could not make words any clearer that the liberals would not twist and distort.

The liberals twisted the truth then and they are twisting it now. They did not want to bring freedom to the people of Iraq then and they don't like that Bush did it.

It really is that simple.

In the end this debate is about pre-emption vs waiting for a certain, verifiable threat. There are many who are uncomfortable with this policy of pre-emption and nothing in their minds will ever justify such action.

This is the world post 9/11. We will vote on the policy makers next November. It's that stark.

It seems to me that the debate over the use of the word "imminent" is missing the point, for those of us who care about more than rhetoric-parsing.

After all, the very quotations from Administration officials that Holsclaw cites, in support of his contention that they never claimed an "imminent" threat, do contain claims of a "direct", "grave", and "growing" threat.

And there is no better evidence for these claims than for the maybe-claim of an imminent threat. Paranoid speculation about the indefinite future not only can't support "imminent", it can't support "direct", "grave", or "growing" either.

So the fact remains that we were led to war on the basis of brazen lies about the threat Saddam's regime supposedly posed to American security, lies which have been shown up by the war and its aftermath; and nitpicking over the terminology used in the lies is a silly distraction.

Sickles, you're an idiot. Shut up.

What this all seems to come down to is that the "imminent" side of the argument is taking any evocation of any eventual threat as being an implication of an "imminent" threat. So maybe the question could be refined to "Under what conditions can an existent threat not be considered 'imminent'?"

Hey Al?

If all of those crimes of Saddam against his citizens plus the establishment of a democracy in the Middle East were such noble reasons to make war, why didn't George W. Bush have the courage of his convictions or balls to make that case?

Why?

If the prowar side was not arguing an imminent threat, then why did they talk about WMDs that could be used on the US in 45 minutes?

Dan -- Can you cite a source on the claim that the Administration was asserting Saddam had WMD that could be used on the US in 45 minutes? I'm not aware of any such statement.

It sounds like a confused regurgitation of the argument about the British intelligence estimate that Saddam might have WMD that could be deployed in theatre in as little as 45 minutes.

>

There was and is overwhelming evidence that Saddam's regime posed a serious threat to vital US interests - including, most obviously, the stability of the world energy market. The immediate and long-term strategic challenge posed by Iraq under Saddam's regime has been clear since Gulf War 1, and remained enough of a matter of international consensus to justify 12 years of sanctions and the famous 17 UNSC resolutions.

As has been pointed out by many, the Bush Administration was criticized prior to the war for providing too many justifications for act. This "problem" reflected the multiple dimensions of the Iraqi threat in the short, medium, and long term, within the "war on terror" framework and within larger frameworks which preceded 9-11, but which 9-11 helped remove from the realm of "paranoid speculation."

During the '90s we entertained ourselves with notions of the end of history and the frictionless spread of New Economic perpetual motion all over the globe. Many warned of events like 9-11 - and were dismissed as fearmongers or Tom Clancy-wannabes.

A responsible national leader has to think about more than today's headlines, and has to form policy, especially war policy, with an eye to the next generation, not just to the next couple of months. Iraq under Hussein and Sons was a problem that had to be solved sooner or later, and sooner rather than later.

Here's a Washington Post article from July 20, 2003 siting two occasions that the 45 minute claim was used by Bush in this country without CIA clearance.
Hope this helps.

Jakevan, I fear you have fallen into one of their semantic traps. Bush (once again) said he was citing British intelligence. Parse, parse, parse. And never underestimate the capability of this WH to torture words to fit their needs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17424-2003Jul19?language=printer

The White House, in the run-up to war in Iraq, did not seek CIA approval before charging that Saddam Hussein could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes, administration officials now say.

The claim, which has since been discredited, was made twice by President Bush, in a September Rose Garden appearance after meeting with lawmakers and in a Saturday radio address the same week. Bush attributed the claim to the British government, but in a "Global Message" issued Sept. 26 and still on the White House Web site, the White House claimed, without attribution, that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given."

Gee, I guess that ends it.

Heh, what does this show? Bush argued that Iraq could use its weapons in 45 minutes without checking with the CIA first? Geez, what a scandal.

mrp:

Bush did. If you didn't hear them, maybe you were instead hearing his nonexistent statements that Saddam was an "imminent threat"...

mrp, reread the article a little more carefully. It states "...but in a "Global Message" issued Sept. 26 and still on the White House Web site, the White House claimed without attribution, that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given."

Bush did state it as fact without attributing it to the Brits at least on one occasion and then supposedly it was(at least back when the article was written) it was on the WH web site without attribution.

So I see. Thanks. Useful.

You know, it's also unfair for Shakespeare critics to charge that Antony ever called Brutus a "dishonorable man" during the funeral oration in Act III, Scene ii.

Stop parsing. The president indeed argued that Saddam was an imminent threat, even if he didn't come out and say the words. The repeated motifs of fear, the tone, months of hype, months of scaring the hell out of the American people, months of playing "Sublimnal Man" with alleged links between Osama and Saddam -- the president and his stooges didn't have to come out and say the words "imminent threat" to deliver the desired impression to the American public. The argument was made, and now it's falling apart. Admit it.

For people looking for the White House's "45 minute" quote, it's available here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020926-19.html

"The danger is grave and growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons and is rebuilding facilities to make more. It could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb -- and, with fissile material, could build one within a year."

And I went through every instance that "imminent threat" was used in conjunction with Iraq during White House press conferences and such (i.e., everything in whitehouse.gov's archives) and posted the results here: http://anonymousblogger.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_anonymousblogger_archive.html#106611772314623690

MRP said "Childrens prisons. Gassing people. Yadda yadda yadda. Terrible things."

Thank you, MRP, for showing your compassionate side.

Wonderduck wrote to thank me for showing my compassionate side.

The "yadda yadda" referred to the continued litany of those who proffer humanitarian reasons for the war, despite the deep irony and contradiction.

You know, if the Bushes hadn't lied about babies thrown out of incubators and so many other things, citizens of the world might be more impressed by WH arguments.

Good post Anonymous Blogger, and I think one result you point to at your site is worth cutting and pasting here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030507-12.html

"QUESTION: Well, we went to war, didn't we, to find these -- because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States? Isn't that true?
MR. FLEISCHER: Absolutely. One of the reasons that we went to war was because of their possession of weapons of mass destruction. And nothing has changed on that front at all. We said what we said because we meant it. We had the intelligence to report it. Secretary Powell said it."

There you have it.

You have Ari Fleischer, the President's Press Secretary, responding yes, "absolutely" that "we went to war... because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States."

As an earlier post noted, we also have the White House web site and Mr Bush stating that Iraq could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17424-2003Jul19?language=printer). That sounds like an imminent threat to me.

There are literally DOZENS more spectacular examples from Anonymous Blogger's site: http://anonymousblogger.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_anonymousblogger_archive.html#106611772314623690

Check them out. It's pretty clear who's coughing up $100.

Game over Sebastian.

"The president indeed argued that Saddam was an imminent threat, even if he didn't come out and say the words."

You mean even though he expressly stated that Saddam was not yet a threat.
Seems odd to argue that X is true, while at the same time stating that X isn't true. Who is doing the parsing? Bush didn't say it but he implied it. Right.
The left is lying. Admit it. Bush never said Saddam's threat was imminent.

Holsclaw won this debate hands down. Those who don't understand that are ignorant of the meaning of the word 'imminent' in international law. It has always been understood to mean that mobilization is actually underway. Possession of armaments, threats to use them, evidence of aggressive intentions, do not constitute imminent threats. The ability to launch a biological attaqck in 45 minutes would not be an imminent threat. That is why this word was thought important. The Bush administration was arguing that the nature of modern wmds makes the traditional test of imminent threat untenable. What they said was that we can't be sure whether there the threat is imminent AND THAT DOESN'T MATTER. This could not have been said more clearly. How can anyone say Bush somehow said there was an imminent threat? What they mean is they got that impression because they don't understand such distinctions as that between 'imminent' and 'major' threats, don't understand what the president was talking about, and have seized upon the idea that some kind of cheap debating point might be scored if they can twist his words around. Actually we still don't know whether the threat was imminent, in the traditional sense, and won't know that till the Kay report is completed. But we already know enough to see that Bush was right - the question did not matter. By the way, the low point in these arguments was probably reached by mrp, who says theBushes "lied about babies thrown out of incubators" and that shows they can't be trusted in anything. He is referring to a false atrocity story spread by the Kuwaitis back before the first Gulf War, twelve years ago; its attribution to the first Bush administration is a canard ceaselessly repeated by leftwingers. The 'Bush lied' crowd would have more credibility if they were not such obvious liars. Holsclaw won this debate hands down.

Anonymous Blogger has done a wonderful job here: this is a must-read">http://anonymousblogger.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_anonymousblogger_archive.html#106611772314623690">must-read link.

Not only does anon assemble many pertinent quotes, his analysis of the rhetorical devices used by the Bushies is outstanding. We are having this disagreement because of the Bush Administration's frequent and purposeful use of ambiguous language. (The straightforward way in which the Administration denied that Iran is an imminent threat is worth the click all by itself.) I'd like to go into some of their patterns as a supplement to Anon's work.

(1) Meaningless quibbles. Some of the Administration quotes, for instance Rumsfeld's "immediate threat", Rice's "mushroom cloud", and Bush at the SOTU posit that Saddam might be an imminent threat, or that he is a threat of some "lower" level like "growing", but we don't really know. Just like you shouldn't eat a mushroom if it "might" be poisonous, I don't think it matters if we treated Saddam as an imminent threat or if we treated him as a threat of unknown gravity who therefore had to be treated as an imminent threat. The attempt to deny this retroactively is mere quibbling.

(2) Weasel words Besides the "might be imminent" claims, a look at the Kay Report shows words like "suitable", "possible", and "BW-applicable". Maybe this phrasing is a consequence of the fact the only truly unequivocal claim of the Administration—that Saddam had WMD and we knew where they were—turned out to be totally wrong. Kay himself, faced with the rusty canvas trucks, said that the idea they were for meteorological balloons "didn't pass the laugh test." Unfortunately, the company that sold these trucks for exactly that purpose identified them, and Kay was left to point out they had been cleaned so thoroughly we can't tell if they had been used for CW. To return to the weasel words, my son's school's chem lab is also "suitable" for the manufacture of WMD, and by Kay's standards the rotten food in my kitchen is BW-applicable. (The one vial of botulism is of a common although dangerous microorganism that can be found in back yards.) Weasel words like "suitable" are substituting for any evidence that the facilities or equipment actually were used for WMD, or even that there was a program to do so.

(3) Innuendo by juxtaposition. Except for VP Cheney's recent goof, the Administration never, AFAIK, explicitly stated that Saddam was materially involved in 9/11, but they somehow managed to leave 70% of the United States with that misimpression. And that's a natural consequence of constant juxtaposition of Saddam and Osama, as if they were close allies. Until Bush was asked point-blank if he had any evidence of Saddam's complicity in 9/11, I don't think anyone in the Administration had ever explicity denied it either. (Why bother, when you can say it's "possible" or "might" have been, or simply evade the question and talk about Saddam's WMD and terrible cruelty.) It's probably the long-delayed questions of this nature that drove Bush to the friendlier confines of small regional news outlets.

Exploring this "imminent threat" question might be just the springboard we need to strip away all of these evasions, obfuscations, and deceptions.

Doyne, I'm sorry, but your post is absolutely incomprehensible:
"Holsclaw won this debate hands down. Those who don't understand that are ignorant of the meaning of the word 'imminent' in international law. It has always been understood to mean that mobilization is actually underway. Possession of armaments, threats to use them, evidence of aggressive intentions, do not constitute imminent threats. The ability to launch a biological attaqck in 45 minutes would not be an imminent threat."
Okay, so according to you (without citation, but moving on) "imminent" means "mobilization is actually underway."

So, explain to me then, please (and I'm being completely serious), the following:
Undeniably, Bushco claimed Iraq could launch a bio/chem attack in 45 minutes. Let's say they had good reason to believe this was true (I don't think that; I think they are lying liars, but let's pretend). In other words, our intel pointed to this scenario: Iraq had its weapons program so far advanced that it could, within an hour, launch a devastating attack. It's reasonable to construe Iraq's acquisition of this capability as an offensive, "threatening," tactic, right? So, Iraq has, if you will, "mobilized" itself to the point where it can deliver a massive bio/chem attack within 45 minutes. Isn't that, even according to your definition, imminent?

And in any event, this is 2003, not 1914; "mobilization" isn't terribly relevant a concept. Wars aren't fought by a railroad schedule, and munitions not carried largely by horse and carriage; we fly shit around the world, very rapidly, and we lauch very, very rapid and very very destructive missiles. If you have acquired that technology--and, according to our Pres, Iraq HAD, as it was supposedly capable of attacking within 45 minutes--then you can be said to have "mobilized."

Seriously tho, I really don't see how the claiming Iraq could launch a bio/chem attack within 45 minutes IS ANYTHING BUT a claim of an imminent threat.

Andrew,

Agreeing with you, I'll point to the bitter irony, ala Miracle on 34th St, that our court system would concur that your son's school's chem lab is a wmd lab.... Several prosecutors are using the Patriot act to charge operators of meth labs with WMD violations. Our administration and their minions know no shame.

Okay, let's see if we can get at this this way:

Anonymous blogger says:

And wouldn't you know, in the 90 hits ..., the administration officials never once say, literally, "Iraq is an imminent threat."

Clearly, AB is confirming that he was mistaken, and the Administration really never once said "Iraq is an imminent threat."

"But no!" you say, "that's not what he meant!" And, of course, you're precisely correct. But that's exactly the position you put yourselves in by the continued argument that even though the continuing thread of the whole Administration position has been that the attack was justified even though there was no imminent threat, because the cost of "misunderestimating" Saddam and finding out about an imminent threat by it becoming an actual attack were too great.

This whole argument -- the more general one, not just the specifics of the local debate -- lies in this one point: the anti- side says "but Iraq wasn't an imminent threat" and the Bush administration agrees! Now they're arguing -- for what sure look to me to be purely political, rhetorical gains -- that even though the Bush administration agreed that the threat was not imminent, they must have implied it was imminent ... and therefore, since it wasn't imminent, they were lying. So we get into this whole business of parsing things interminably trying to come up with some tortured exercise in logic to show that Bush was implying A when they were saying not-A.

Maybe that's of interest in settling a $100 bet -- although I vote Drezner keep the $100 himself, because there's no way he's ever going to be able to make a decision without another six months of listening to whiners saying he was biased, one way or the other -- but however it might be settled, it's merely a vacuous debating point.

The real issue, though, would be worth discussing: at what point in the growth of a threat is it appropriate to act in self-defense? It might be that Bush's action was precipitous -- but there are a lot of examples of times in the last hundred years in which earlier action could have saved millions of lives and a world of hurt.

That debate would be a lot more illuminating.

It's always breathtaking to see the fruit of propaganda campaigns ripen and spread their seed.

Doyne says the Bush pere lie about the babies being thrown from incubators is a Kuwaiti rumor. Bushwah. From Snopes and Columbia Journalism Review:

Atrocity rumors are never new; they are merely retooled as circumstances change. In the ramp-up days towards the Gulf War, we were told Iraqi soldiers had rampaged through a Kuwaiti hospital, grabbing premature babies up out of incubators and tossing them to the floor to meet their deaths on the cold, hard tiles. Never mind that this apocryphal hospital was never pinpointed nor the grieving families of these infants located, the story spread like wildfire, inflaming passions against the Iraqis and stiffening resolve to fight them tooth and nail if it came down to that.

[Columbia Journalism Review, 1992]
"I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators ... and left the children to die on the cold floor." This was the story told by "Nayirah," the fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl who shocked a public hearing of Congress's Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990.

Nayirah's testimony came at a time when Americans were wondering how to respond to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2. Her story was cited frequently in the congressional debate over war authority, which was approved by only five votes in the Senate. President Bush mentioned it often as a reason for taking firm action. It was a major factor in building public backing for war.

As many are now aware, the incubator story was the centerpiece of a massive public relations campaign conducted by Hill and Knowlton [a PR firm] on behalf of a group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, for a fee of $11.5 million. After the war, the group revealed that it was financed almost entirely by the Kuwaiti government.

(And the girl who testified was the daughter of a diplomat living in Washington D.C.)

http://www.snopes.com/military/stamp.htm

Come on, Bushies. Do some homework.

I'm sorry. I meant to include links that detail the alliance between Hill & Knowlton and Bush I in the runup to the Gulf War.

http://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html

http://www.counterpunch.org/cohen1228.html

It is the height of naivete to think the Kuwaitis cooked the story up without consultation from Bushco I.

If the threat was not imminent, why was Bush so opposed to the Canadian and French proposal to delay any military action for 4-6 weeks? In other words, if Bush only believed that one day in the future the threat would become realized, why was he so opposed to giving the UN inspectors some additional time to continue their inspections?

Obviously these questions are rhetorical. The entire impression given was that time was of the essence and the threat both imminent and real that Saddam could supply Al Qaeda or others with WMDs that could be used against us. In fact, it was so much of a threat, that Bush was willing to forego an international coalition and do it unilaterally. How any normal person could interpret these actions as conveying anything other then an imminent threat is beyond me.

"The war wasn't sold on humanitarian reasons."

Another anti-war lie... there were multiple arguments for the war and one was, indeed, undoubtedly, humanitarian.

The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages -- leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained -- by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning. (Applause.)

Humanitarian reasons are best described as rationalizations. We knew all the humanitarian stuff about Iraq for the past 20 years. It wasn't new information. Heck, we supported Saddam when he was "gassing his own people."

Listen, very few people wanted to invade Iraq in August 2001, and a lot more wanted to do so in January 2003. We did not obtain any new information in the interim.

This is all very simple. The only relevant event here is the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

The anti-war crowd saw that Saddam was not responsible or connected to 9/11, and called bullshit.

The pro-war crowd felt that we needed to respond to 9/11 in a powerful way. We needed to change our outlook. Invading an easy target and getting rid of Saddam was the easiest way to go. He probably had some bad weapons, and heck maybe we could even establish a democracy there and bring peace and stability to the region. Wouldn't that be awesome? (I'm not being sarcastic, it really would be awesome.)

That's all there is to the pro-war/anti-war debate. Why all the agony?

It amuses me to no end to see the Right end of the political spectrum resort to word parsing, post-modern deconstruction, careful contextualization, framing, and inverted pretzel-logic in order to debate the meaning of the word is....

Har.

It also present an extremely interesting Catch-22, as follows...

IF the administration argued that Iraq WAS an imminent threat...then they lied, and are guilty of numerous crimes against the American People including lying to Congress under oath...as well as numerous crimes as described in the various international charters, conventions, and accords regarding the Starting of Wars based on Lies....You know...Nuremberg stuff....

On the other hand...

IF the administration never implied, stated, gave the impression, or encouraged the belief that there was an imminent threat...then they are, by definition guilty of Crimes Against the Peace as a result of engaging in aggressive war absent a demonstrable imminent threat or clear and present danger....Not to mention violation of the War Powers Act and violation of the Spirit, if not the Letter, of the Iraq War Resolution...

In reality, the administration, as laid out in several of their position papers, was trying to redefine the meaning of imminent with respect to engaging in pre-emptive or preventative war...

Imminent, in their eyes, should mean:

"could credibly be a threat in the near future"

as opposed to what it really means:

"WILL BE a definite threat in the immediate future"

Charlie, the question is not whether an Administration official said the literal phrase "Iraq is an imminent threat". If someone did (they surely did come close), that completely settles the question. The converse, however, is false. The Administration could still have made Saddam out to be an imminent threat using other words. (That innuendo can be libelous, by analogy, even in the absence of a specific accusation is well-settled.)

That the Administration gave many vague replies in no way diminishes the possibility that they claimed Saddam was an imminent threat. Here, for example, is one of the examples culled from anonymousblogger's masterful compendium.

QUESTION: The question, though, is it the President's view right now that the threat from Saddam is a very imminent one, that he could strike out at any moment and has intention to?
MR. FLEISCHER: I think, from the President's point of view, it remains a very grave threat.

By the way, Charlie, no one has presented a single quote like this: "Q, the threat isn't imminent, is it? A, No." So your claim that the Bush Administration agrees that the threat wasn't imminent is based entirely on speculation.

Do you really think if Ahmad Chalabi had been correct and Iraq was swimming with WMD, we wouldn't have heard, "Look, Il Magnifico Bush saved us from an imminent threat!"

I'll tell you a secret: I knew Bill Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinsky, and I didn't waste even one second of my life writing long pseudo-scholarship that since no one had asked about it using the word "fellatio", the Clinton Administration was telling the truth. But if I wanted to, I could probably put together a much better argument than yours.

As far as the humanitarian stuff, some was new and some wasn't, but that's besides the point. The argument that "you can't attack for humanitarian reasons unless you were always concerned about it" or "unless the information is fairly recent (as if Saddam suddenly stopped doing this)" has been particularly troublesome.

Charlie,

Interestlingly enough, people like to know whether their government is lying to them in order to get them into a war. You might just consider it "intermina[ble]" parsing and meant for "purely political, rhetorical gains," but that's where you and most of us differ.

And while you say, this is just a "tortured exercise in logic to show that Bush was implying A when they were saying not-A" that assumes Bush was not saying "A." But that's the whole point of this discussion, isn't it? Whether or not the Bush administration was saying "not-A", when to a whole lot of people, it sounded just like "A."

I should note that, in my blog posting, I let everyone see exactly what a "not-A" looks like in comparison to an "A."

"If the threat was not imminent, why was Bush so opposed to the Canadian and French proposal to delay any military action for 4-6 weeks?"

Because a 4-6 week delay would put us into the hot season and would mean a 7-9 month further delay. The UN couldn't get its act together in the the 5 months between October and March. The UN simply wanted to delay another 6 months and not coincidentally bleed America of 6 months of deployment with no result.

SH, more parsing.

I agree that the only thing truly imminent was the hot summer and the MOPP suits. And I agree that it was because of this that the admin lied its way to war.

The threat will not be imminent for 4-6 weeks. But we cannot successfully attack then as it will be too hot. Therefore, though the attack is not imminent now, we must attack tonight.

If that's the argument, I think I am justified in deciding that you believe the threat is imminent regardless of your words.

If you give me the choice: attack now and win, or attack later and lose, well, that's no choice. That's your postulating that the threat is now severe and imminent.

Well, no. There were two imminent matters spelling trouble for Bushco. The pending contracts between Russia and Iraq for oil, and the fact that U.N. inspectors were reporting continually that no WMD were being found (which meant that soon WMD could not be used to make war). Those two were imminent threats to Bushco.

Was the Death Star in Revenge of the Jedi an imminent threat? It wasn't operational. And yet the rebels couldn't wait until it became operational. It was imminent, and so, according to our Admin, was Iraq, regardless of their vague and ambiguous words.

MON MOTHMA
The Emperor has made a critical error and the
time for our attack has come.

MON MOTHMA
The data brought to us by the Bothan spies
pinpoints the exact location of the Emperor's
new battle station. We also know that the
weapon systems of this Death Star are not yet
operational. With the Imperial Fleet spread
throughout the galaxy in a vain effort to
engage us, it is relatively unprotected.

A volley of spirited chatter erupts from the crowd. Han turns to
Leia as Chewie barks his amazement.

ACKBAR
You can see here the Death Star orbiting the
forest Moon of Endor. Although the weapon
systems on this Death Star are not yet
operational, the Death Star does have a
strong defense mechanism. It is protected by
an energy shield, which is generated from the
nearby forest Moon of Endor. The shield must
be deactivated if any attack is to be
attempted. Once the shield is down, our
cruisers will create a perimeter, while the
fighters fly into the superstructure and
attempt to knock out the main reactor.

There's a concerned murmur.

ACKBAR (cont)
General Calrissian has volunteered to lead
the fighter attack

As far as the humanitarian stuff, some was new and some wasn't, but that's besides the point. The argument that "you can't attack for humanitarian reasons unless you were always concerned about it" or "unless the information is fairly recent (as if Saddam suddenly stopped doing this)" has been particularly troublesome.

Oh really? It troubles you? It keeps you up at night, as you wonder why all the anti-war people hate America and love evil? Wow, what a burden of goodness you carry on your shoulders. Please.

The idea isn't that "you CAN'T attack unless you've always been bothered by it." The idea is "you've known about this all this time, and you've never done anything about it, in fact you've encouraged it. So now when you suddenly declare that we're going to shift gears, pardon me if I'm suspicious when you bring this up as a major reason, because that doesn't seem believable."

The "summer approaching" argument is ridiculous.

The troops were going to be in the region for the summer regardless of whether or not they attacked in March or in April or in May.

The climatological counter argument is also quite easy:

Why the hell would any sane commander order an attack at the beginning of the worst of the sandstorm season (the spring), when satellite surveillance, air cover, radio communications, troop mobility, and machine susceptibility were all guaranteed to be at their worst?

IF Iraq had had a decent military with high moral, good (alternate) communications, better commanders and good strategies in place...our troops would have been mincemeat by the end of March...with stretched and vulnerable supply lines, poor air cover, and bad communications lines...in fact all of those DID occur, and the only reason that those factors did not influence the outcome is the plain fact that the Iraqi military was totally lame.

Regardless, the troops DID spend the summer there, in their armor, hot, dehydrated, fatigued, and so on...

I would argue that spending the summer in camp, in friendly territory, close to adequate supplies, not under fire...is MUCH better than spending the sandstorm season AND the summer season on full combat footing.

mrp is onto something: Waiting for the inspections would have gutted the fabric of lies that were the pretext for the military buildup in the first place...and would have made the "go" decision that much harder to support or defend...

And might have even resulted in the end of he sanctions regime.

The end of the sanctions regime would have led (in my opinion) to the toppling of the Hussein Regime by the Shi'ia -- the sanctions were the only thing keep Hussein in control, through his control of the Oil-for-food-and-medicine import and dispersal programs.

Toppling of Hussein by the Shi'ia, with subsequent contracts for the French, Germans, Russians and subsequent ties to the Iranians was the reason to take Iraq sooner rather than later.

Arguing that before the UN, or trying to sell the US populace on that strategy as a justification for war...well, that was not going to happen...

Here what I find baffling.

Although people are stating that Bush didn't say that Iraq was an imminent threat, there was little to zero evidence of Sadaam being a "gathering" threat.

not Drezner writes: "mrp is onto something: Waiting for the inspections would have gutted the fabric of lies that were the pretext for the military buildup in the first place...and would have made the "go" decision that much harder to support or defend..."

If we will admit that the start of war was dictated (to large degree) by the relentless parade of UN inspections showing no WMD, then we are faced with the stunning likelihood that Bushco KNEW there were no WMD.

When considering that, we must face a

Face what,mrp? What?

Crap, I think they got him.

mrp,

the suspense is killing me...

But, if we read This article in Time Magazine about the extent of CIA penetration of Iraqi forces, intelligence services, and government and couple that with Wilson's testimonials, Thielmann's testimonials, Gardiner's testimonials, and the host of other indicators, experts, and so on and so forth (Wilkie in Australia, The Hutton Inquiry in Britain) ... we are forced to come to the conclusion that it was WELL KNOWN in the upper circles of government, intelligence, and the military, that Iraq HAD NO WMD's...

Then let's go back to 2001, prior to the september 11th attacks, and recall Colin Powell and Condolleezza Rice at the Cairo Summit...at which they declared, unequivocally, that sanctions were working, that Iraq was defanged and represented no threat to its neighbors or to the US...

And we are forced, again, to conclude that there was NEVER any doubt about the status of Iraq as an imminent threat...until the Bush administration started SELLING Iraq as an imminent threat through various forms of implication, innuendo, juxtaposition with Al Qaeda, ominous threats and vague allusions to impending disaster...

And so on.

They HAD to go fast and go early, or they would have lost their fabricated cover for the invasion...

Dan (not Drezner),

I actually agree with your post, but don't discount the weather argument (wanting to attack before the heat of summer). Yes, troops would have to be there in the summer regardless, but there is a difference between rapidly tooling across the desert and fighting a full-scale war and being there after having won the war, when you could at least hunker down in the shade (such as it is) during the hottest part of the day. I know I wouldn't want to be sprinting over sand dunes in full kevlar in 120 degree heat. And I'm guessing that some of the military hardware doesn't perform as well at that temperature also.

I would guess Bushco had a bunch of scenarios on the table showing estimated casualties in a June attack versus a March attack and that helped speed things up. Of course, who knows, with this administration's bizarre expectations of dancing in the streets and instant democracy, maybe they did think they could pull a lot of troops out by June anyway.

TolucaJom says he doesn't understand my summary of international law on the question of preemptive strikes (posted above). He should consult a textbook ofinternational law, such as Akehurst's Modern Introduction to International Law, on the Caroline case, which has set the terms for discussion of these questions for 150 years (and which should be understood by anybody who wants to be thought qualified to express an opinion on these matters). As I tried to explain above, possession of an offensive capability does not qualify as an imminent threat, and it cannot be described as "mobilization." The administration never used the word "mobilization," and rightly so since no mobilization was taking place. One one cannot think what TJ imagines this word to mean. Nor does he realize how self-defeating his argument is. He says that the traditional definitions of "imminent threat" do not apply to modern technology so the definition of the conditions for anticipatory self-defense should be changed. That is exactly what President Bush has been saying. I am glad TJ has been converted.
In this connection, the person calling himself Drezner (not Dan) appears to believe that international law cannot be changed. He says that the administration is guilty of Crimes against the Peace, whatever those may be, for trying to redefine the word 'imminent.' Such attempts at redefinition he calls 'word parsing,' 'contextualization', 'framing', and even 'deconstruction.' In part he is simply muddled; what is being redefined is not the word 'imminent' but the conditions for anticipatory self-defense. But also he is in as much need as TJ of some acquaintance with a basic international law textbook. The law of preemption is a matter of customary law, not treaty law, and can be changed any time by the practice of states. Also word-parsing, contextualization, and framing are what lawyers are supposed to do, except that they are expected to do it with careful attention to the texts and the accepted meaning of legal terms. These correspondents obviously do not feel themselves bound by any such constraints.
First MRP said that the Kuwaiti atrocity rumor was a lie invented by "the Bushes." Now he admits it was of Kuwaiti origin. Does that mean he has retracted his original assertion? Is an apology to be anticipated? I fear not. Now he says it would be "the height of naivete" to think the Kuwaitis made up this story "without consultation from [he means 'with'] Bushco I". To make such an accusation without a shred of evidence is not naivete. It is, however, malicious slander.

Ack, so sorry. I'm not used to the software here, and have to scroll and tab back and forth to try to submit a post.

Here's what I was trying to say:

If we will admit that the start of war was dictated (to large degree) by the relentless parade of UN inspections showing no WMD, then we are faced with the stunning likelihood that Bushco KNEW there were no WMD.

Which takes us back to the dirty probability that WMD was never a motivating factor for attacking Iraq. Bushco needed a toehold in the Middle East for the Great Game. They had to break in, in order to secure the treasures and dominate the strategic position. Iraq was an easy country to hit. No other country would come to its aid.

And if the inner circle KNEW there were no WMD, then the whole matter becomes even more cynical and ugly.

And what about the reports of planes carrying out top Iraqis early on? And what about the reports of military chiefs being bought off with dollars; paid to stand down and leave in order to allow such quick conquest?

We really need to elect someone whose cronies and family aren't profiting from war.

TolucaJom says he doesn't understand my summary of international law on the question of preemptive strikes (posted above). He should consult a textbook ofinternational law, such as Akehurst's Modern Introduction to International Law, on the Caroline case, which has set the terms for discussion of these questions for 150 years (and which should be understood by anybody who wants to be thought qualified to express an opinion on these matters). As I tried to explain above, possession of an offensive capability does not qualify as an imminent threat, and it cannot be described as "mobilization." The administration never used the word "mobilization," and rightly so since no mobilization was taking place. One one cannot think what TJ imagines this word to mean. Nor does he realize how self-defeating his argument is. He says that the traditional definitions of "imminent threat" do not apply to modern technology so the definition of the conditions for anticipatory self-defense should be changed. That is exactly what President Bush has been saying. I am glad TJ has been converted.
In this connection, the person calling himself Drezner (not Dan) appears to believe that international law cannot be changed. He says that the administration is guilty of Crimes against the Peace, whatever those may be, for trying to redefine the word 'imminent.' Such attempts at redefinition he calls 'word parsing,' 'contextualization', 'framing', and even 'deconstruction.' In part he is simply muddled; what is being redefined is not the word 'imminent' but the conditions for anticipatory self-defense. But also he is in as much need as TJ of some acquaintance with a basic international law textbook. The law of preemption is a matter of customary law, not treaty law, and can be changed any time by the practice of states. Also word-parsing, contextualization, and framing are what lawyers are supposed to do, except that they are expected to do it with careful attention to the texts and the accepted meaning of legal terms. These correspondents obviously do not feel themselves bound by any such constraints.
First MRP said that the Kuwaiti atrocity rumor was a lie invented by "the Bushes." Now he admits it was of Kuwaiti origin. Does that mean he has retracted his original assertion? Is an apology to be anticipated? I fear not. Now he says it would be "the height of naivete" to think the Kuwaitis made up this story "without consultation from [he means 'with'] Bushco I". To make such an accusation without a shred of evidence is not naivete. It is, however, malicious slander.

Dear Dawson,

If you check the collected comments of George Herbert Walker Bush, you will find in the days prior to the onset of the Gulf War, he spoke of the babies being thrown from the incubators fully six times, in public comments and speeches. Indeed, you'll see that he railed that such "ghastly atrocities" were like "Hitler revisited."

If you'll do some homework, you'll see the deep connections between Bush I and Hill & Knollton. The man running Hill & Knowlton's Washington office was Craig Fuller, one of Bush's closest friends and inside political advisors.

Shame on you for supporting such putrid corruption and hypocrisy.

Further, Dawson, I did not say that the incubator story was "a lie invented by the Bushes." I said this: "You know, if the Bushes hadn't lied about babies thrown out of incubators and so many other things, citizens of the world might be more impressed by WH arguments."

So stop lying about what I said.

dawson,

for someone who accuses others of ignorance, you show an inordinate amount yourself...along with a striking inability or lack of desire to actually read what was written.

He [i.e. me] says that the administration is guilty of Crimes against the Peace, whatever those may be, for trying to redefine the word 'imminent.'

Ummm...no. What I said was that attacking without an imminent threat is a crime against the peace...if you want a definition of Crime Against the Peace, go here or here or here or here...

For someone who abjures others in such stentorian tones to "acquaint ourselves with international law textbooks" you apparently have no clue about what those laws are. Crimes against the Peace are basic to international law...

My point was that the administration was trying to redefine "imminent" in order to weasel around International Law:

If they never said or implied "imminent" and they attacked anyway...then they are guilty of crimes against the peace for engaging in unprovoked aggressive war.

If they DID say or imply "imminent" they they are guilty of crimes against the peace for LYING about the justification for unilateral aggressive action in pre-emptive self-defense.

ONLY if they redefine "imminent" and that redefinition is accepted as valid can they avoid the charge of crimes against the peace.

In part he is simply muddled; what is being redefined is not the word 'imminent' but the conditions for anticipatory self-defense.

Ummmmmmm...right.

Except the conditions for anticipatory self-defense, actually THE condition for anticipatory self-defense, requires imminent threat....

Therefore, the administration HAD to imply or state imminence, and make imminence mean something different than previously defined.

UN Charter Article 51 applies which states, quite clearly:

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.

as does UN resolution 3314 (1974) which defines aggression...

So, if you want to argue, then argue. If you want to be insulting, be insulting.

But if you intend to insult, then you had better get your facts straight, read what other people write before responding to what you THINK they wrote, and be prepared to put your money where your mouth is, or you're going to get your ass handed to you on a platter.

Have a nice day.

Here is an interesting and well written article explaining the history and legal ramifications.

Note that the UN charter ONLY talks about Self-Defence...that the UN Charter MAY encompass "traditional and customary" international precepts regarding the lawfulness of "killing someone who intends to kill"...but that even those traditional and customary precepts are rooted in the concepts of necessity and proportionality, based on immediacy and severity of the forecasted threat.

So, Dawson, are you STILL willing to scold me about my reading and comprehension?

Or are you just going to whine about how I hate America and love Saddam Hussein?

mrp:

“Here we are again???”

Erm, Yes. Because you asked the question, genius. I mean, seriously - what exactly kind of argument is that anyways? Does rhetoric even have a name for it?

That said, I think the only thing that remains to be done is to hang your words around your neck every time you post.

Which words?

These, my friend:

“Childrens prisons. Gassing people. Yadda yadda yadda.”
-mrp

Nice, real Nice

Said mrp to dawson:

"Shame on you for supporting such putrid corruption and hypocrisy."

Context, Incoming:

“Childrens prisons. Gassing people. Yadda yadda yadda.”
-mrp, 15 October 2003

Oh, yeah... That baby's on my hotkey.

Could Dawson explain why the "international law" definition of "imminent threat" should , if different, override the standard definition of imminent (Webster's etc.)

After all, hasn't Bush shown that international law is an irrelevant fantasy? If the most powerful military power on the planet , possessing the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, refuses to abide by the UN Charter then isn't international law a con game?

Does Dawson think Bush has
abided by the UN Charter? If so, why?

If you go to anonymousblogger's site, he has TWO quotations (one from Condi Rice, one from an official position paper) that in the age of WMD and terrorism, "imminent" no longer means "mobilization". Indeed, I agree with them. So the argument that Bush did not describe Saddam as an imminent threat because he didn't say the Iraqi Army had mobilized and sent tanks to the Kuwaiti border (or whatnot) doesn't hold water. Bush made it clear he did not intend to apply that traditional standard to the post-9/11 world.

Re Bush's prewar arguments about the Iraq threat, the most important reference is NOT the SOTU or the speech to the UN --rather, it is the claims he made in the White House draft of the Iraq War Resolution that was sent to Congress:
(http://voteview.uh.edu/iraq_resolution.htm
--scroll to bottom)

In that draft, Bush claimed:
a) That "Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States" --in part, because Iraq
is "continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations; "

b) That "members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq; "

c) That "Iraq's demonstrated capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its Armed Forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so, and the extreme magnitude of harm that would result to the United States and its citizens from such an attack, combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself; "

d) That "the United States has the inherent right, as acknowledged in the United Nations Charter, to use force in order to defend itself;"

[NOTE: Article 51 allows NationA to launch a military attack on another UN Member (NationB) ONLY if NationB attacks NationA. The international lawyers cited by Dawson stretch this to allow NationA to act if an attack from NationB is an "imminent threat".

By citing the UN Charter, Bush was telling Congress that the Iraq threat defined in bullets a-c MET the Article 51 criteria--that Iraq was an imminent threat.]

Now, after several months of US occupation in Iraq, haven't Bush's claims --the justification for military attack -- been shown to be false?? Isn't he therefore in violation of international law ?

Where is the evidence that Iraq ,in 2003, did indeed
"possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability,"?

Where is the evidence that ,in 2003, Iraq was "actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability"?

Where is the evidence that Iraq was supporting Al Qaeda?

Where is the evidence that Iraq had the capability to "employ those weapons [of mass destruction] to launch a surprise attack against the United States " and cause "extreme magnitude of harm that would result to the United States and its citizens from such an attack"?

Dawson/Doyne, nice try. Here is what you said:

"He (me, TJ) says that the traditional definitions of "imminent threat" do not apply to modern technology so the definition of the conditions for anticipatory self-defense should be changed. That is exactly what President Bush has been saying. I am glad TJ has been converted."

That's not quite what I was saying; I was advancing a hypothetical to go along with your supposed definition of the terms.

But you miss the OBVIOUS CONSEQUENCE here. According to your distortion of my words, yes, I might support a war of anticipatory self-defense (indeed, have; Afghanistan's _government_ never attacked our country, but they clearly posed an imminent threat by harboring and aiding a terrorist group who HAD). However, to support such a war, I would need pretty damn solid proof of a) severity of threat, and b) imminence of said threat.

Now, a bio/chem attack w/in 45-minutes qualifies. Good job Bushco for giving us a good, scary reason to fear Iraq and want to take them out.

THE PROBLEM
That claim was false. Fabricated. The British provided it. IF Bushco checked with the CIA, they probably told him it was bunk. Everybody now acknowledges it was bunk. The British disown it, we acknowledge the error in citing it.

So, instead, we turn to vague and scary talk about "mushroom clouds" appearing over the horizon.

Or, Sebastian's favorite SOTU bit--iraq is not imminent, but we can't wait for it to become imminent. when did terrorists ever announce their intentions, blah blah blah (and of course, set aside the fact that Saddam WAS NOT a supporter of terrorist groups [to any significant extent, and certainly far less than many of our 'allies'].

hmmm...so, it's not imminent "today," but we need to attack tomorrow, because next week it may well be imminent then (or 45 minutes after it decides to).

Isn't that for all intents and purposes claiming Iraq WAS an imminent threat?

The thing is, I feel lied to. I was afraid of Iraq. I was afraid of their massive, supposedly well-documented stores of all kinds of chemical and biological weapons, their budding nuclear program.

Turns out, my backyard has as much bio/chem weapon potential. They had NO nuclear program, and these massive, well-documented stores of weapons don't exist anywhere but in Rumsfeld and Chalabi's wet dreams.

There are a number of assertions in these sprawling anti-war arguments which need to be rebutted.

First, the idea that "international law" is a well-established statutory code similar to the U.S. legal system is simply mistaken.
"International law" would more accurately be described as "international arrangements," freely entered into by states and also freely repudiated by states. It's absurd to argue that this war was illegal because the U.N. Security COuncil didn't sanction it. The Security Council has sanctioned precisely 2 wars in its 50-year history, the Korean War (only because Russia was absent from the SC vote) and the Gulf War. To argue that the ultimate arbiter of whether a war is legal or not rests with a Security Council vote is a shaky proposition at best. What if Pakistan was threatening India and the SC could not come to a resolution due to great power alliances? Would that mean India didn't have the right to take appropriate measures? Literally hundreds of wars, police actions, missile launches, and the like have occurred within the last 50 years that were never sanctioned by the SC.

Second, the commonplace idea that Bush (or any president) would take the country into war to get contracts for his friends, or as a cynical political strategy to win the election, puts one squarely in the tinfoil-hat crowd. Bush's analysis may have been wrong (to my mind it was simply incomplete--just as virtually every other intelligence services' in the world's was), he may have been excessively cautious, but it's absurd to argue that Bush and Blair would knowingly launch a war without believing it was justified.

Third, to maintain that Iraq is now "worse off," or indeed that the U.S. security situation is now "worse off" than before is a patent absurdity. Go to www.memri.com and read the articles from the progressive Iraqi and Arab press. They certainly differ from the Bush administration on many points, but there is no doubt that chinks of light have appeared in the Middle East where only darkness and oppressive regimes ruled before.

Read the polls in which large majorities of Iraqis consistently say they expect things to be better in 1-5 years.

Two days ago there was a protest in Saudi Arabia, where all political protests are illegal. Did this happen spontaneously, or might Iraq have something to do with it? Anyone who argues that the smashing of Saddam's brutal fascist regime doesn't really mean much is beyond the pale.

Finally, well before the Iraqi war the U.S. published a new security strategy which explicitly established that the U.S. would no longer always wait for a threat to be imminent before taking action, given the threat of stateless terrorists and their state sponsors. This was certainly a major change in the status quo, and was one of the real reasons for the international uproar prior to the war. There are certainly good arguments to be made for and against such a strategy and its advisability. But given this it is somewhat pointless to concentrate on the "imminent" debate. The U.S. had stated clearly that it was prepared to take action on gathering and not only imminent threats.

In addition, while WMD was extensively discussed by both Bush and the rest of the international community as the major rationale for the war, there were numerous references to the lack of basic human rights in Iraq, from both pro and anti-war forces. To say that these issues were not vociferously debated prior to the war is ridculous, and can be easily confirmed by looking at the popular press during that time.

Despite its clearly low standing in the Muslim world, the U.S. has done more to liberate Muslims from oppressive governments and regimes than the U.N. ever has or ever will. Bush Sr. freed Kuwait after Saddam's first invasion, Clinton protected Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo after the Europeans threw up their hands and watched tens of thousands die, and GWB has liberated 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq from the Taliban and the Baathists. Does anyone seriously expect the Arab League's talkfests or the diplomatic niceties of the deVillepin/Chirac/ TotalFinaElf cabal to have done anything like this whatsoever?

Any reasonable person would be willing to wait 1-5 years to see how things actually turn out in Iraq before declaring Bush's high-risk stratagem for altering the dynamic of the Middle East a grand success or miserable failure. Those who are supremely confident that it is a "miserable quagmire" seem to possess the perfect foresight that ordinary mortals, from me to the President, lack.

Matthew Yglesias has a pretty good post about this debate on his site. Some key grafs:

"Imminent
Dan Drezner is hosting a remarkably articulate debate on the whole "imminent threat" issue. This reminds me of something I've been meaning to point out in general regarding retrospective debates about the pre-war debate, namely -- that debate went on for a long time, the situation kept changing, and the administration said different things at different times.

Particularly relevant to this question, I think, is to recall the exact situation at the time the US went to war. Saber-rattling and the threat that Bush would unleash Wolfowitz and the super-hawks had awakened the non-US, non-UK portion of the Security Council from their dogmatic slumbers and inspections were back up and running. The US then alleged (correctly, I believe) that Iraq was not in full compliance with Resolution 1441. We also argued (again, I think, correctly) that 1441 committed the Security Council to backing the use of force at this point. Other members of the Council, however, disagreed with this interpretation of the "serious consequences" clause and wouldn't back a war. There were compromise proposals on the table that would have turned the screws on Saddam's regime even tighter and leave open the possibility of a war in a couple of months. The Bush administration rejected these proposals and went to war.

In order to do so, they had to make a couple of arguments. One was that, legally speaking, 1441 did not require them to seek another resolution. This was, I think, wrong if you look at the legislative history, but was also serviceable as a pretext if war-without-resolution was really necessary from a policy stanpoint. Another was that, in general, the UN and world opinion were not things the US should take seriously. This was, I think, very wrong. If we had failed to get a resolution due to some eccentricity of the UN (a veto by one or two countries, say) despite a clear global consensus that was was the way to go, these arguments would have carried a lot of weight with me. Instead, the US was actually get much more support on the Security Council and from allied governments (remember "new" Europe) than we had in world opinion.

Lastly, they had to make the case that not only was a new resolution unnecessary, but that waiting a while to see if we could get one was a bad idea. I'm quite sure the administration never said "Iraq poses an imminent threat to the US and that's why we can't afford to wait two months," but it's hard to see why we couldn't afford to wait two months unless Iraq was an imminent threat. This was the point at which I really parted ways with the hawks -- the threat wasn't imminent, so there was no good reason to piss the whole world off and bear the risk of undertaking a costly and difficult occupation on our own. We had Saddam contained for the short term, and developments in the UN and in world opinion might well have started moving in our direction. We should have waited and seen what happened, meanwhile abandonning Don Rumsfeld's insane bully approach to diplomacy, possibly by putting American diplomacy in the hands of the State Department where it belongs.

At the time, going to war rather than waiting longer enjoyed strong public support. I can't read minds, so I don't know why that would be. Nevertheless, my inference is that people supported the war because either (a) they didn't understand what was happening on the diplomatic front, (b) they believed Saddam was involved in 9/11 and that, therefore, war opponents were being clearly irrational, or (c) they believed Saddam posed an imminent threat and that even a brief delay could be extremely costly."

Re Matthew Yglesias's site,
I think Daryl McCullough hits the nail in his comment:

"It's as if I ran around saying "Call the fire department! Bring the hoses! Bring the asbestos suits. Bring the rescue units!" and then later said, "I never said there was an actual fire. That was just your interpretation."

"The idea is 'you've known about this all this time, and you've never done anything about it, in fact you've encouraged it. So now when you suddenly declare that we're going to shift gears, pardon me if I'm suspicious when you bring this up as a major reason, because that doesn't seem believable.'"

Unless the early '90s is "now," your analysis doesn't cut it.

It's an immediate threat. It's a gathering threat. I won't deny that it's an imminent threat. For you to claim I say it's an imminent threat though is a complete fabrication. Totally made up. No basis in fact.

Oh wait, the debate is about it being a "complete fabrication", not "totally made-up" I must stop using synonyms.

AB, Andrew et al -- what's finally happening here is a convergence: you feel absolutely that in the face of everything to the contrary, Bush somehow implied without saying it that the threat was "imminent". And because you've drawn that inference you feel justified in saying that the Bush Administration lied because the threat wasn't "imminent".

Frankly, I don't see any way in which that inference can be justified without expedients like out of context quotation (eg, Ari Fleishcer's "yes", and no, AB, I don't find your interpretation convincing at all.) Following that inference leads to paradox: the Bush Administration somehow didn't believe the threat was imminent, but came up with a nefarious scheme with which to convince other people it was imminent, while precipitously starting a war, while at the same time spending two years pursuing diplomatic avenues toward enforcement of the same UN resolutions that had led the Clinton Administration and Congress to demand the overthrow of Saddam in 1998.

So, somehow, either the Administration believed it was imminent, and wasted years on diplomatic approaches in the face of an imminent threat, or else it didn't believe there was an imminent threat, and thus acted consistent with that opinion by spending years on diplomatic avenues before finally acting with force -- and thus somehow convinced you, without saying so, that they were saying the threat was imminent even though that wasn't consistent with their actions?

Wouldn't it be more intellectually honest to just say, axiomatically, "Bush bad"?

I would point out that , in the days just prior to the attack on Iraq, the White House did state that Iraq was an "imminent threat" --to ally Turkey.

The White House appeared to be using this as justification for attacking Iraq --under NATO Treaty for collective defense and Article 51 of UN Charter. This was the time when the White House was pressing Hussein to leave Iraq.

However, Turkey did not invoke Article V of NATO and in fact denied US access during the invasion of Iraq.

From http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030210-8.html
Feb 10, 2003 ; Press gaggle, Scott McClellan
----------
QUESTION: What about NATO's role? Belgium now says it will veto any attempt to provide help to Turkey to defend itself. Is this something the administration can live with, or is it a major obstacle?

MR. McCLELLAN: Two points. We support the request under Article IV of Turkey. And I think it's important to note that the request from a country under Article IV that faces an imminent threat goes to the very core of the NATO alliance and its purpose.

QUESTION: What can you do about this veto threat?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, again, I think what's important to remind NATO members, remind the international community is that this type of request under Article IV goes to the core of the NATO alliance.

QUESTION: Is this some kind of ultimate test of the alliance?

MR. McCLELLAN: This is about an imminent threat.

QUESTION: Who's going to do the reminding to NATO?

Based on the above White House press briefing, I think the Question under discussion needs to be clarified as follows (new text in capital letters):

"It is a complete fabrication that the Bush administration argued in the runup to the war that there was an imminent threat TO THE UNITED STATES from Iraq."

Don,

Wow! Excellent find! McClellan is the official voice of the administration, so if he said "imminent threat", then case closed.

Now admittedly McClellan is referring to an imminent threat to Turkey, not to the U.S., but the bet is about the following statement:

"It is a complete fabrication that the Bush administration argued in the runup to the war that there was an imminent threat from Iraq."

That doesn't say "to the U.S. only", so it seems to me that an imminent threat to an ally would also qualify.

This was not in the "run up to the war" under discussion. This was a totally different topic. This was about Nato refusing to honor a member nation's request for protection when it had become clear that the US was going to invade Iraq with or without UN clearance.

At the point of the invasion, since we were originally going to have troops coming in from a northern front, Turkey would certainly have been under imminent threat of retaliation from Iraq. Just as Kuwait was hit by missiles in the south.

This had nothing to do with convincing Congress. That was ancient history by the time of this press conference.

Taking events out of context doesn't help your arguments at all.

True.

I would note that the White House can drag us into a war based on the obligations of "collective defense" treaties with allies just as easily as it can by claiming an attack on the continental US is imminent.
In fact, I believe the SEATO treaty was used to pull us into Vietnam.

Re whether the White House's assertion (that Iraq was an imminent threat) occurred during the "run up to the war",
note that McClellan's statement occurred at a Feb 10 Press Gaggle (when Bush was trying to force Hussein to leave Iraq) and the Iraq invasion occurred on Mar 20.

Should this site sponsor another debate on a second question? "Did the date Feb 10 fall within the timeframe indicated by the phrase " run up to the war", given that the war started on Mar 20"?

Does "international law" also have a definition for "run up to war"?

Note: When I said "True" in my post above
(10.16.03 at 02:03 PM), I was agreeing with Ted, not with Mick.

Daniel Calto wrote: "Any reasonable person would be willing to wait 1-5 years to see how things actually turn out in Iraq before declaring Bush's high-risk stratagem for altering the dynamic of the Middle East a grand success or miserable failure."

Any reasonable person might have a son or daughter out there in Mess-opotamia or on the way there. Think before you speak. (Or perhaps your own children have enlisted?)

Any reasonable person might weigh the staggering expense of this venture and wonder if the improvement in Iraqi lives is worth the loading of debt on children yet unborn and worth risking default on America's own debts and worth our poorer schools and hungrier families (while the Bush family and cronies get ever richer off the blood sweat and tears of the military).

Mr. Williams - congratulations! You've finally got the President.
Quickly, now: Call the Police. You know, Mr. Williams, the Police...the International Police Department...
The one with the authority to enforce international "law"...

Oh, sorry, that's right... There's no such thing.

Oh, dear me - no Mr P (mrp) We'll have none of that now...

Someone might be tricked into thinking that you actually care about children.

Friends, let's remember what Mr P has said:

“Childrens prisons. Gassing people. Yadda yadda yadda.”
-mrp, 15 October 2003

Ha ha ha Art.

You know that's not the point here. Pretty pathetic that's the best response you can muster.

To refresh your memory, this is a DEBATE, with the WINNER receiving $100.

Mr Williams is quite right to celebrate having found definitive proof for his side.

Grow up.

You support a lying, crony-loving, dumb, traitorous scumbag.

To Art Wellesley:

There you go again.

You left off the words that contained the meaning of my sentences.

It's amazing that Repubs are down to parsing words, considering their past history.

Mr. Wellesley.

I am not a Mr. I am a mother of four children, two of whom are in the National Guard. I'll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head.

By the way, what unit were you in? I missed that.

I would like to thank Mick for giving me the motivation to look into this matter.
If he hadn't compared me to Robert Hanssen on the first thread, I might not have bothered.

"I have complete files"
--Terminator 2

Ok, if the Bush administration was NOT arguing an imminent threat, then why would they quote the British about the 45 minute thing? And remember, they have argued that mobilization is irrelevent to imminent nowadays.

Is 45 minutes not imminent?

No, Bush never said "Iraq is an imminent threat, we must kill things now." He did say how Iraq was supporting terrorists, had these weapons that could kill Americans right now, and was led by an evil, evil man, and that we couldn't wait a few months for inspections.

mrp

You state "while the Bush family and cronies get ever richer off the blood sweat and tears of the military".
For crying out loud, isn't there, oh, about a million ways for a president to make his "cronies" richer than to fabricate "lies" necessary to start a war which would be the best way for any president to jeopardize his career?
For example, why wouldn't the president simply pursue a tax credit plan targeted to companies that do Halliburton type business?

You could bury a weirdly worded proposal into just about any new tax legislation. Or why not just tip off your buddies that you are going to propose nationalizing healthcare? They could then simply short the stock of pharmaceutical or insurance company stocks and make a bundle.

Who's ever going to figure a fraud like that out?

Isn't the whole idea that rich people look out for other rich people's interest a crock? I mean, I know a lot of rich people who had lots of rich friends but when they went bust no one stepped up to the plate to help them. Isn't it an article of faith among the left that rich people are totally selfish? I wouldn't argue against that idea.

So why would the most powerful man in the world, rich himself, risk all of his power to make other rich people somewhat more rich? This defies logic particularly given the fact that there are far too many easier and safer ways to accomplish the same "goal" than to go to war.
You hate Bush, fine. You think he's a "liar", fine. But give up the crude attempt to smear him by repeating the idiocy that a selfish man would risk his power to help other, selfish, people.
Its really stupid.

Hey, why don't you Bush-bashers take up the question of what does "imminent" mean with the UN? After all, they make a great debating society these days?

Mrp:

Your comments re my comments are simultaneously illogical and ad hominem--a good trick. First, you imply slyly that I don't care about U.S. troops. Wrong. Second, you seem to think that the $100 billion spent is coming directly out of the mouths of schoolkids--school funding is done on the local and state levels in the U.S. the last time I checked.

$100 billion would be money very well spent if the liberation of Iraq over time causes a gradual democratization of the Middle East, and subsequent lessing of the Islamofascist threat to the U.S. and the world in general. How much did the Cold War cost? Was it worth it?

I simply don't understand why Dems, who are supposed to value internationalism and insist that the U.N. be involved in the decision to go into Iraq, lurches for the bogus and highly nationalist argument that spending money in Iraq is taking food out of the mouths of hungry babies here in the good old U.S.A., which after all consists only of plutocrats and the starving.

The truth is that the status quo ante in the Middle East, in which the U.S. and countries like Russia and France propped up repressive Arab regimes was a patently cynical and ultimately unsustainable policy that needed to be changed.

I live in NYC--I have a number of dead classmates and friends. I don't want anything like that to happen again, here, in LA, Paris, Berlin, Bali, or anywhere else. Given your clearly superior intellect and in your infinite wisdom, what's your solution to lessening the threat posed by the dangerous nexus between oil money, WMD, hatred of the West, and Islamic extremism in places like Saudia Arabia and Egypt? Get everyone together and have a group hug?

Bush Implied, People Died!

Nope, it just doesn't have the same ring to it.

How about:

"Interpreters of Bush's statements got lazy. Who pushes up a daisy?"

It won't fit on a bumper sticker, though.

1) Re JAG's question above:
"So why would the most powerful man in the world, rich himself, risk all of his power to make other rich people somewhat more rich?"

2) Well, look at George Bush's background. He had all the advantages of a wealthy upbringing --prep school, Yale, Harvard MBA (even with poor undergrad grades), money to start his own business.

3) Yet when Bush reached middle age, he was basically a drunk and a failed businessman (Arbusto would have been more aptly named "El busto").

4) All that Bush has -- his power, wealth, even his very self respect --was given to him by his rich patrons. And they can take it away. That's why he's their bitch --now and always. And Dick Cheney's there to remind him if he forgets.

5) Why would an "oil services" company like Halliburton hire an ex-bureaucrat with little to no experience in the oil business and in corporate management to be a CEO. Could it be that the "service" that the Houston oil boys need is the 82nd Airborne protecting their billion dollar investments overseas?

6) Cheney spent much of the 1990s trying to get access to the huge oil deposits in the Caspian Sea --he was on the Kazakhstan Energy Advisory Board.

7) Now, the "war on terror" is being used to justify the construction of several military bases in Central Asia --bases of little value for dealing with Al Qaeda but excellent as a tripwire which can give the US a pretext for war with Russia or Iran over the oil deposits. See see http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/26/11/feature2.shtml )
Those bases , paid for by the US taxpayer, will allow Bush and Dick Cheney to protect Houston's billion dollar investments in the Caspian Sea oil deposits.

By the way, the oil is unlikely to come to the US. China will have a huge demand for oil in the coming decades as several billion Chinese buy automobiles -- the potential profits are huge and will be shared by a favored few.

The oil deposits of Iraq are not trival, either. Ask the people of Kuwait how much democracy/freedom they have since
Cheney liberated them 12 years ago.

8) Regarding subterfuges, Bush has used those. His tax cut has shifted $2 Trillion in federal debt from the rich to the middle class. Payroll taxes of workers, vice income taxes on the wealthy, are being used to pay Treasury Bonds coming due. In exchange, the Trust Funds for workers Social Security, Medicare, are getting Bush IOUS, which --as Lawrence Lindsey noted --"are not real assets".

That's because the only way future governments can redeem the $5 Trillion in IOUS will be via heavy taxes (>60%) on middle class baby boomer withdrawls from IRAs/401Ks savings.

The middle class does not realize that , in exchange for $1000 "tax cut" , they've had $80,000 in additional debt dumped on them. But they will in about 5 years.

"Democrats rewrote history. Who died is a mystery."

???

Oh, boy; here we go with the "It's about the oil!" rant again...

Broken record.

Instead of continually debating how evil Bush really is, opponents of the war should spend more time reading what Iraqis and other progressive Arabs have to say about the effects of the war.

The Middle East Media Research Institute
Special Dispatch Series - No. 590
October 16, 2003

Iraqi Columnist: The Occupation of Iraq Means Liberty, Even if the Whole World Maintains Otherwise

In three articles published by the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, columnist Kamel Al-Sa 'doun, an Iraqi writer who resides in Norway, justified the U.S. occupation and political rehabilitation of Iraq. (Excerpts):

"Iraq and the whole region are on the threshold of deep fundamental changes… My country reached [a level of] devastation that other [nations in the area] never experienced… As we all know, the Americans, who took upon themselves to affect change, are the trail blazers in eliminating a bloody regime the likes of which the world has never seen… [We should admit] honestly that if we want to affect true change in Iraq, one that will cut through the layers and reach the core, there is no escaping [help from the U.S.]

Yes, the occupation is a blessed and promising liberation for Iraq, even if the U.N., Europe, Russia, India, and all the Arabs say otherwise. The logic of international law could be of interest to the French, the Germans, the Russians and the Arabs, who are enamored with it… but not to us, the Iraqis. International law should not be of interest to us in any form or shape, because Saddam's dagger was dripping Iraqi blood, not Russian or Arab [blood]. Saddam's plague wreaked havoc with us, the Iraqis, not with the Arab League's minions, nor the Russians or the Chinese! The Iraqi tragedy, which exceeded any rational boundaries, was and continues to be at the epitome of its viciousness and degeneracy.

"While others were sipping Araq [an alcoholic drink] in the most upscale resorts in Baghdad, thousands [of Iraqis] were being buried alive in Iraq's sands, deserts, lagoons, [and] vast and godforsaken plains. And while Arab journalists, intellectuals, politicians, and poets came to sing with their trilling voices, to beat the drums [in support of Saddam] and to take pictures with Latif Nassif, Jassim and Nawal Al-Aloussi, and the rest of the Ba'ath Party 'gang'- hundreds of [Iraqi] poets, scientists, and writers were dying [on] the war-front and in torture dungeons. During more than three decades, the dagger of death extricated Iraqis from their homes, their families, their work places, their schools and their [children's] playgrounds…"

Hundreds of Thousands of Mass Graves

"Look at the mass-graves… [Lest you say] no more than a few thousands, 10, 20, 50 thousand… No, there are hundreds of thousands of bodies that have not been unearthed as of yet, hundreds of thousands of human lives who could have become a rich resource for humanity. Every Iraqi, every Arab, and every human being should ask himself for the reason they were murdered, before he [waves] the banner of international law. We the Iraqis were candidates [to have the same fate as] the Hutu and the Zulu tribes, the Cambodians, the victims of the Holocaust and the millions of Russians massacred at the hands of Stalin. Considering the blindness of international law and the apathy and lack of compassion of our Muslim brethrens… and supposing that the U.S. had remained silent and in a truce with Saddam, we could have lost millions of additional lives in wars waged by Saddam, his sons and his grandsons.

"If the justification for the war was not very clear prior to its onset then following the liberation there has been no doubt about it in the mind of anyone who has any sense. It has become clear in light of waves of Arab mercenaries crossing the borders [into Iraq]… Saddam Hussein prepared for war, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying blatantly. It is true that he did not deploy his missiles, and it is true that he did not strap explosives to hundreds of thousands of his suicide seekers and guards so that they can blow themselves in the midst of Americans and Brits – the way Abd Al-Aziz Al-Rantisi [of Hamas] was hoping. But Saddam prepared a different weapon, more effective and more dangerous…

"Saddam Hussein's war was not against the Americans… Saddam's war was first and foremost against the Iraqis, including his own clan and household relatives. Therefore, his weapon… was more degenerate than any WMD, and he convinced himself that with it he could cast his fear on others. Saddam Hussein released from prison tens of thousands of the most die-hard criminals and murderers, after eliminating the last political prisoners he had in his hands…

"Therefore, the liberation of Iraq is an utterly blessed and positive deliverance, even if Germany, France, Russia, China and all the Arabs say otherwise." [1]

Charlie, maybe I inadvertantly weakened my argument. The Administration did claim that Saddam was an imminent threat, or in the alternative, that he was a threat of unknown level whom we therefore treated as an imminent threat. I mean, we did invade Iraq. Did we find Iraq a threat, or did Karl Rove advise it?

You (and for that matter Sebastian) seem to be hung up on the idea that if no one used the exact words "imminent threat", this is a complete defense to the allegation that the Administration conjured up an imminent threat (based on phony intel) to justify a war. This is preposterous.

[Aside to all you Bush-defenders playing in the sandbox: When Rumsfeld said we knew where Saddam's WMD are (present tense), was he (1) totally mistaken or (2) lying. If (1), are we taking steps to prevent a reoccurence, or does that not even matter?]

At first, I was puzzled by how an "an Iraqi writer who resides in Norway" could know that "there are hundreds of thousands of bodies that have not been unearthed as of yet" in Iraq. Then I looked at the source of this report: Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)

The light began to dawn when I looked at MEMRI's site and saw the endorsements there: ( http://www.memri.org/aboutus.html )
--------------
"the indispensable scholars at the Middle East Media Research Institute"
-The Weekly Standard, May 26, 2003

"Thanks to the translators at the Middle East Media Research Institute,Americans can get a much better sense of the message coming from the Arabic-language press throughout the Middle East. Their work helps combat those who would murmur messages of peace and tolerance to Western ears, and then incite hatred and extremism to their countrymen in their native tongue."
- National Review Online, May 20, 2003

"You know, you've got things in the Saudi papers running now that thanks to the Middle East Media Research Institute we can read in English translation."
- FOX News, May 16, 2003

"The single most important resource for understanding what is happening in the Middle East today."
-Charles Krauthammer, Pulitzer Prize winner, October 4, 2001

"MEMRI is the most important research source for the Arab world of which I know and it has been immensely helpful to me and to just about every other serious person who writes about the Middle East."
-Martin Peretz, Editor-in-Chief and Chairman, The New Republic, October 9, 2001

-----------
Hmmm. so I did some further checking and found this: ( http://www.washington-report.org/archives/april03/0304014.html
)

" [Richard]Perle is currently a “resident fellow” at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank where his good friend David Wurmser runs the Middle East department. Wurmser’s wife, Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser, is a co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which specializes in translating and distributing articles that present Arabs in a highly negative light. Another MEMRI co-founder is Col. Yigal Carmon, formerly of Israeli military intelligence. Perle also is on the Board of Trustees of the Indiana-based Hudson Institute, where the Middle East section is run by—guess who—Meyrav Wurmser. "

ha ha ha ha ha

You really had me going there for a minute, Mr Calto. But the next time you want to put up some Israeli agitprop, could you plainly label it " Paid for by Likud" ??

This article does illustrate how Israel and American neocons are manipulating US foreign policy behind the scenes. As I noted earlier, Bush invaded Iraq because Sharon saw Hussein as a threat --and Bush has prostituted himself to the neocons.

I hope that the $87 Billion Bush wants isn't going to be used to fund propaganda like this.

>This article does illustrate how Israel and American neocons are manipulating US foreign policy behind the scenes. As I noted earlier, Bush invaded Iraq because Sharon saw Hussein as a threat --and Bush has prostituted himself to the neocons.

Congrats. You now have honorary membership in the Jewish Conspiracy Hall of Shame.

You reveal the true colors of the anti-Bush crowd. It's all about Israel to you. Why don't you just come out and say it instead of beating about the ... oh never mind.

I just wish Hillary and Kennedy and Kerry and Dean and the rest would also come out and say the same thing. Maybe you could even get Lieberman to say it, now that would be a feat.

But thanks for peeling away the veneer of "international law" and all that crap about "Bush lied." It's much easier to deal with antisemitism when it's out in the open.

Oh, my, goodness, Mother (mrp)

To think that it would be just that easy.

Which Unit was I in? Surely you didn't set yourself up for that- in the anomyninity of Cyberspace of all places.. but wait, I can't be that nasty. My wife would like to speak to you...

Mr Lazarus

Re your question "When Rumsfeld said we knew where Saddam's WMD are (present tense), was he (1) totally mistaken or (2) lying " ,

you might understand current Pentagon intelligence better if you read this article about our current
deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence:

(Ref: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1520&ncid=1520&e=9&u=/afp/20031016/pl_afp/us_iraq_general_031016172420
)

----------------
" US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended a US general who portrayed the war on terrorism in talks to church groups as a spiritual battle by Christianity against Satan...
.. The general was a commando in the supersecret Delta Force and took part in the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran, the search for drug lord Pablo Escobar in Colombia and the 1993 raid in Mogadishu that ended in the deaths of 18 US soldiers. ...
... After displaying slides of Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, the Times said the general asked, "Why do they hate us?"

"The answer to that is because we're a Christian nation. We are hated because we are a nation of believers," he said, according to the Times.

An evangelical Christian, Boykin has appeared in uniform while delivering his message of a religious war to church groups, the Times said a month-long investigation found.

He was quoted as telling an Oregon congregation that President George W. Bush (news - web sites) was not elected by a majority of the voters: "He was appointed by God," he said.

In June 2002, he spoke to the congregation at the First Baptist Church of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, showing them a photograph he said he had taken of Mogadishu soon after the raid that contained a strange dark mark, the Times said.

"Ladies and gentleman, this is your enemy," Boykin said. "It is the principalities of darkness. It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy."

In a speech at a Daytona, Florida church in January, Boykin recalled how a top lieutenant of Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid had laughed on CNN after a raid by Delta Force commandos had missed by a few seconds, saying they would never get him because Allah would protect him.

"Well, you know what?" Boykin was quoted as saying. "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." He said the Aidid lieutenant was later captured.

Here she is:

He has been in the military for 16 years--a veteran of both Gulf Wars. I spent 9 months alone last year--juggling FT work with an infant. It's hard for me to believe that any smart woman could be a Democrat these days. Puh-lease.

This President enjoys more respect from military personnel than any other world leader today. But you can't be as pathetic as you sound--afterall, sounds like you have wonderful children.

That's all. Boy, no wonder he sits up here typing all the time.

Ouch. Thanks, Babe - I'll be late getting back from the agency today . Seen you soon.

Sorry Mother P - Had to be done.

..And as for you, Mr Williams, later...

Mick , re your statement "It's much easier to deal with antisemitism when it's out in the open."

I have nothing against Jews -- I have been to a bat mitzvah. I am aware that most of the 6 million Jews in America are middle class, that most of them have neither the wealth nor the votes to interest Karl Rove, and that , in any event, many of them are not supporters of Sharon or Likud.

As a US citizen, my loyalty is to America. I object to my national foreign policy being run by supporters of another country. Given that Bin Ladin stated that Sept 11 occurred because of US arms sales to Israel, I object to Bush hugging Todd Beamer's sobbing wife and then going back to whoring for Sharon's wealthy supporters-- some of whom (e.g., Conrad Black) are not even Jewish.

This is all about money. The Republicans know that --given their vicious policies -- they can only stay
in power by spending huge sums of money to continually run a propaganda machine that diverts and misleads US voters.
That being the case, they are renting out the US government to any cause or group which has the cash.

Meanwhile , the common citizen has to suffer the malign results --in debt and in blood.

Dear Don Williams,

You didn't refute my logic did you?
You assert that Bush is some rich men's "bitch".
Fine. Now explain why Bush wouldn't simply target some benefits strictly to those few who "bought" him? Aren't rich people greedy? Why would the men who made Bush their "bitch" want to share the goods with other rich people?
And exactly how is Bush going to keep on paying off his benefactors if he loses the next election over the Iraq war? Are you seriously suggesting that the benefactors he serves would rather take an enormous, obvious, risk for a short term gain instead of taking very limited, very targeted risks, for a period twice as long?

Oh yeah, that makes sense.
"I can help my buddies somewhat by going to war and taking the greatest possible risk a president can take or I can just give them a heads up before I propose legislation favoring or killing an industry or maybe I can simply cut them into an oil deal with the dictator as part of a "peace" negotiation package and back off the whole war idea....
oh what the hell, lets put everything at risk and go to war!"

You're right, Bush is too stupid to figure out there is a much easier way to make his friends rich than going to war.

>I have nothing against Jews -- I have been to a bat mitzvah.

Yes, and some of my best friends are Jewish.

You have the nerve to repeat such outrageous islamofascist conspiracy theories about Israel and Jews controlling the world, and then say you've been to a bat mitzvah?

Yeah, and Yasser Arafat is a man of peace because he won a Nobel prize.

What's next? That Israelis roll Palestinian babies in barrels full of nails to drain their blood for their bread? Drag out the Elders of Zion again, why don't you?

If Israel wanted to, they could wipe out the entire Arab world, and get back home before their soup got cold. They don't need to exert some mysterious control over the US to do it.

Who do you think has been preventing them from offing that fat pig Arafat?

Daniel Calto wrote to me: "Second, you seem to think that the $100 billion spent is coming directly out of the mouths of schoolkids--school funding is done on the local and state levels in the U.S. the last time I checked."

Are you not aware of the fact that taxes are increasing in many states and localities simply because of the burden placed on them by the actions of the Bush administration? Must be time to stop watching FAUX and get some real news.

And he wrote this: "I live in NYC--I have a number of dead classmates and friends. I don't want anything like that to happen again, here, in LA, Paris, Berlin, Bali, or anywhere else. Given your clearly superior intellect and in your infinite wisdom, what's your solution to lessening the threat posed by the dangerous nexus between oil money, WMD, hatred of the West, and Islamic extremism in places like Saudia Arabia and Egypt? Get everyone together and have a group hug?"

First, there was no connection between 9-11 and Saddam Hussein, whatever your fuehrer might have *implied*. Your friends were not lost because of Hussein. They were lost (apparently) because of the whoring of Bushco for Saudi Arabian interests.
I wonder if you are supporting the work of the 9-11 investigation? And I wonder if you wonder just why it is that the WH is obstructing the work of that panel? Your lost friends deserve a complete and transparent investigation. I'm sure you agree.

Second, it might be prudent to restrict the decision makers in the Middle East from profiting personally and from trading contracts for political donations. Ya think?

Third, most reasonable people (not Bushbots) would conclude that hatred of the West, Islamic extremism, and likely dissemination of WMD have increased since the PNAC-WH rolled out its new product (war).

Gad, the WH recently destroyed the intelligence assets that were tasked with tracking the movements of nuclear weapons materials -- destroyed those CIA assets for petty partisan politics.

And to your wondering what might be done? It would have been a very good thing if the Hart-Rudman blue-ribbon report on terrorism had been studied in February of 2001, instead of simply set aside in favor of a task force headed by Cheney WHICH NEVER MET BEFORE 9-11!

I'm sure that President Wesley Clark will have the integrity, the patience, the stature and the skills to reverse the damage done to America in the world community and move toward a more stable and prosperous century for all.

JAG wrote: "And exactly how is Bush going to keep on paying off his benefactors if he loses the next election over the Iraq war? Are you seriously suggesting that the benefactors he serves would rather take an enormous, obvious, risk for a short term gain instead of taking very limited, very targeted risks, for a period twice as long?"

I think you have missed a point. The purpose of the rush to war was to gain a toehold in the Middle East and to secure control of its riches. The Bush family and its cronies have already captured untold billions of American dollars through the military movements and logistics and support. The chaos they allowed is bringing them more tens of billions. The more chaos in Iraq, the more money they make. The more they break things up, the more money.

It doesn't really matter financially to the Bush cabal who are working Iraq if George W. is elected or not. His job is done. He got the toehold. And the dollars will flow for years and years and years, a debt to be paid by people not yet born.

y p.
Oh yeah, that makes sense.

Strike those last two odd lines in my last post. Obviously I forgot to delete them!

Point-in-fact, Mother. What you forgot to delete before posting was this, from the 15th.

“Childrens prisons. Gassing people. Yadda yadda yadda.”
-mrp, 15 October 2003

As to keeping civil tongues, Did you not have something to say to my wife? We are both of us extremely disappointed.

As for you, Mr. Toluca;

When you post:

"Grow up.

You support a lying, crony-loving, dumb, traitorous scumbag."

Posted by TolucaJim at October 16, 2003 02:52 PM

People are left to wonder at either your age, or your formal education, or your ability to have absorbed that education.

To wit; You post a demand unworthy of our respective stations, then follow it with a taunt that would find itself more at home on a grade-school play-ground, than a college professors web log.

Come now, "mother" was foolish enough to demand validation of my opinions - which is it? Age, lack of education, or inability to reason?

We're all of us waiting...

BTW - Well done, Mr. Calto

Don Williams:

So it's all the Jews' fault and you've been to a bar mitzvah. Congratulations. You and Mahatir Mohammed see the world in the same way. You're a moonbat and anti-Semitic to boot.

Memri, the site I referred to, has translations from the Arabic language press. The article I cited was published in London's Al-Hayat, which the NYT's Tom Friedman, no right-winger, called the best and most important Arabic newspaper being published today. All material on the memri site is translated from the Arabic language press, and offers a critical insight into the thoughts of the progressive Arab world.

But I guess this is all a nefarious Jewish plot too, like 9-11 and the rest. What a loser. Crawl back into a cave where you belong.

mrp:

So Bush is a "Fuehrer" and people who suppport him are "Bushbots" It's all about oil and Bush's cabinet is a "cabal." Anyone who disagrees with you hates U.S. soliders and wants to see them die. Got it. Thanks for your astute and dispassionate analysis.

Mr. Calto,

Exactly. Lot of good it does to post lengthy arguments, when you see where these people (ha , can't wait to see that in scare-quotes) are coming from.

And, let's not forget the quaote that I'll be hanging on Mother everytime she posts hate-speech (yes...loved writing that) instead of credible arguments.

Wait for it....

“Childrens prisons. Gassing people. Yadda yadda yadda.”
-mrp, 15 October 2003

Wow. I mean, seriously - just read it a couple of times and let it sink in. And the woman's a mother. Scary, huh?

Or so you'd think - apparently her kids are on AD right now. Probably just finished working with them. Hopefully when they get back, she'll take that out for dinner on the 11th of next month, and promise to never, ever, EVER show them what she posts.

Voouver,
I think you meant 'them' and not 'that', under "Hopefully when they get back..."

Right, Sorry - better.

No apology yet, eh, Vouv?

To Calto and Mick
Hurling unjustified slurs like "anti-Semitic" is not a strong argument --it is a sign of weakness

The most casual Google will show the immense wealth spent by the Israel lobby in American politics. Google, for example, on "Haim Saban" , "S Daniel Abraham", "Walter Shorenstein", "AIPAC" or "Delaware Valley PAC". Or go over to opensecrets.org and look up "Israel lobby" as a special interest.

Most Jews and most Americans support Israel's right to exist. But they do not, in my opinion, approve of the Bush Administration's support for Sharon's and Likud malign aggression -- the repeated sabotage of peace talks and the creeping acquisition of West Bank land
while destroying the Palestinian economy with repeated attacks and keeping the Palestians in perpetual poverty.

Your repeated slurs and refusal to address the facts I've presented suggests to me that you are not interested in what's good for America.

It suggests to me that you support Bush's whoring for campaign donations from the Israel lobby even when that brings death, destruction, and poverty home to America. Both you and Bush deserve contempt from real Americans.

ps tom friedman is hardly an objective authority on israel.

Calto
What MEMRI does, in my opinion, is the equivalent of selecting the most idiotic articles from Weekly Standard, Washington Times, and National Review, translating them into Arabic and telling the Middle East that those articles represent the US as a whole. And I realize that you cannot comprehend what a slur that would be.

So, Mr. Williams, safe to assume no primary vote cast for Mr. Lieberman, then, eh?

JAG
Re your question "exactly how is Bush going to keep on paying off his benefactors if he loses the next election over the Iraq war? Are you seriously suggesting that the benefactors he serves would rather take an enormous, obvious, risk for a short term gain instead of taking very limited, very targeted risks, for a period twice as long? "
--------------

I've pointed out how he relieved the rich of $2 Trillion of their share of the federal debt. I've also shown how he's shifting huge sums to defense contractors, how he's given Houston oil boys protection in Central Asia , and
how he's setting up a puppet government in Iraq which will let Houston such the Iraqi oil reservior dry at a cheap rate. Those favors are worth $Trillions more.

Why not give the money to his rich patrons directly? Because you have to talk money from someone to give it to someone else or to pay for favors like US military protection.

Direct transfers are rare because other interests, the Democrats, or the voters object to cruder displays of corruption.
Admittedly, they happen on occasion -- e.g, George H Bush telling us a few weeks AFTER the 1988 election that there was a "savings and loan crisis" and that he needed to take $150 Billion of our taxes (I believe it was ultimately $500 billion) to bail out some crooked S&L bankers and their investors. The welfare queens that George H ranted against (to distract the voters) could have bought Cadillacs for a 1000 years on that kind of money.

But such obvious payoffs are rare and usually have to be done at the beginning of a term --the income tax cut in March 2001 being an example.

That why Bush has to wrap his payoffs in the flag --justify them as somehow being in the national interest. Of course, his rich patrons have to support loons like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, National Review, etc. to distract the voters with wild , emotional, deceitful bullshit.

Williams

How do you get your head in the pencil sharpener every morning? It must hurt.

Ranting incoherently about the vast Jewish consipiracy to undermine the "real Americans" like yourself is not a strong argument--it's a sign of idiocy and ignorance so profound it's unalterable. Goodbye.

There you go again, Mr Calto.

I said nothing about a "vast Jewish consipiracy" --
I spoke about the supporters of Sharon and Likud. I supplied facts to show that it exists, has great influence on American politics, is not necessarily supported by Jews, and has major non-Jewish members.

If addition to misstating what I said -- a deliberate lie on your part, in my opinion -- you went into a rant totally devoid of any factual content much less a citation or reference to a fact.

When confronted with facts, you run away with your tail between your legs.

To reiterate my earlier point, it is not in the interest of the American people to engage in an unnecessary war with 1 billion Muslims.

Israel would not exist if not for $91Billion in past US aid, $3 Billion/year in present US aid, and massive transfers of advanced US weaponry.
None of which benefits the US. We do not even have a major base in Israel.

Muslims hold the US responsible for Sharon/Likud's aggression because we created Israel/Sharon/Likud.

Who do you think makes all those F16s , F16 bombs, Apache Helicopters, and Hellfire missiles that Sharon uses to kill innocent civilians in Gaza?

People may disagree about the specifics of what should be done in the Middle East. What really angers me is that, even after Sept 11, the mainstream news media is only telling one side of the story --favoring Israel -- and is thereby perverting and manipulating the discourse and views of US citizens-- to our misfortune.

What angers me is that there is so many buttkissing sycophants out there --in the National Review, Weekly Standard, Warblogs, etc. -- ready to defend Republican whoring with irrational rants --in spite of the damage to America.

I wonder who pays them?

The right runs true to form here. When the arguments against Bush are proven through evidence and logic, the defenders of the indefensible take refuge in personal attacks, hysteria, hyperbole and semantic tricks.

Who hasn't seen Michael Savage, or Ann Coulter, or Cliff May, or any of dozens of others attack in the way attacks are being waged here by defenders of the indefensible?

They take a few words out of context. They twist the words to give them more seeming importance. They derail the discussion. They demonize the speaker. They attempt through harassment to silence the speaker and other speakers.

We've all seen this movie. Here's what we should remember: When they crank up this carnival sideshow, they're admitting that they felt pain. Each time they put on the big nose and the red wig and start throwing stuff, you'll know you've made a direct hit.

Keep in mind that conservatism has failed to capture the public's imagination. Since the 1930s, the right has attempted to take by force and through attacks on the Constitution the power they couldn't win at the ballot box. Examples:

.Coup attempt against FDR only foiled by Smedley Butler
.McCarthyism
.Spoiling of the Paris Peace Talks
.Watergate
.Certain assassinations
.Reagan's shadow government and Iran Contra
.October surprise
.Deal made with Iran to affect Carter's presidency
.Pardon of Caspar Weinburger
.Attempted coup against Bill Clinton
.Richard Perle's interference in Middle East accord
.Election 2000
.Attacks on the separation of powers by Bush WH
.War against Iraq brought with false evidence
.Tricks to change the outcome of lawful elections, such as redistricting and recall.

Well, those are a few indicators of the desperation the ideologues on the right have felt as Americans have rejected their extremism.

And as George W. Bush comes ever closer to the destruction of the GOP, the desperation will mount. Hunker down, liberals. They'll be throwing feces at you next.

(Note that Mother and Father Bush were trotted out yesterday to talk about their boy and the hurtful criticism. Smile, liberals. That's the highest sign that W's in deep doo doo.)

>The most casual Google will show the immense wealth spent by the Israel lobby in American politics.

I guess you never bothered looking to see how many billions the Saudis are pushing around.

Casting this as an Israeli conspiracy is worthy of a press release from the propaganda minister of Syria. And it drags your argument that "Bush lied" down from just silly and stupid to being outright dispicable.

>When the arguments against Bush are proven through evidence and logic...

Sorry, neither.