Apparently a guy named Tyler Drumheller just gave a rather important interview to CBS. It seems he was our chief spook in Europe, and he claimed that in early 2002 before the invasion of Iraq that the CIA finally got high-level HUMINT penetration in Iraq, and that Rumsfeld, Cheney et al. were very excited to hear this. That is, they were excited to hear this until the Iraqi declared that there were no WMD or WMD programs active in Iraq at that time. Then they were immediately disinteresed, and claimed that since he was just a single source, that they shouldn't weigh that too heavily, even though they'd been happy enough to accept other single-source inputs that fit their presuppositions. When Mr. Drumheller objected, saying "Hey, what about the intel", the reply was "Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change."
So here's the scary idea. Let's face it, Bush's a theocratic twerp who doesn't even pretend to be a conservative any more. Ok, we were sorta coming to grips with that, and hoping that maybe he hasn't destroyed all the momentum we'd built up on the Republican side of things. But what if the tinfoil asshats on the left are actually correct, and the president really was out for empire? I'm all for what's gone down if the claims really were true to the best of our knowledge at the time, well except for Shit-secki (misspelled on purpose -- he's an ass whose people hated him) getting his successor named years before his retirement because he said the obvious, that we'd need a lot of troops to maintain order. But what if the Bush really had gone into the war on false pretenses? I find that very disturbing. I find it doubly disturbing that I'm not hearing ANY denunciations of this guy's statements in the MSM; I've been waiting for the "ok, he's full of it and here's why", but nothing. Near media-silence. Is this CBS interview total tin-foil-hat and the left-wing twinkies have been wasting my attention or what?
Or, in the immortal words of the bard, whiskey tango foxtrot over.
14 comments:
It was always about regime change, Jim. WMD was just a convenient pretext.
Do you regard that as good or bad?
I regard it as bad form. Lying when you don't have to burns capital and good will unnecesarily and makes it harder for you to move quickly in the future. It also displays a perception that those with patrician attitudes have about America: we're rubes who will only react to immediate threats, no matter how poorly manufactured.In terms of anything else, the term weapons of mass distruction is aobsolete term that the Soviets used to describe what we called Nuclear/Biological/Chemical. It was fished out and selected because it sounded good. The invasion of Iraq was still neccessary, but the attempts to justify it were criminally clumsy.
Total agreement with Blair: Hussein had to go, for many excellent reasons. WMD was a piss-poor way of justifying something that we could really have done w/o passing a single resolution.
Well, I understand that we already had "legal" authority due to Hussein's violation of the terms of the cease-fire, and I agree with you there. But there's something I grossly dislike about a president willingly deceiving us "little people" vis-a-vis his role of commander-in-chief. If other people can be arrested and jailed for much less important "false official statements", aka govermental fraud, then shouldn't the president be held to the same account? Or does the president's role of Commander-in-Chief "do what's necessary" make him above the law in this regard? Grrrr.
The whole thing leaves much less room to parry the "imperialistic oil monger" statements of the left-wing nitwits out here as well, which pisses me off on a personal level too.
I always used the analogy of trying to defend Presbityrianism when the local Presbityrian minister is a drunk who tries to pass unneccessary bribes to get a dinner reservation at an uncrowded restaurant.
I'm not worried about it invalidating republican democracy; I'm worried about being able to believe that, even if incompetant, at least Bush believes what he's saying to us. If not, you get into a cynical cycle where you can't take any motives for granted; that sort of "well, the gov't said this, but lets read the tea leaves" may be a near universal experience, but it's far more the hallmark of tyrannies than of "civilized" societies.
Then rest easy. He believes in the validity of every action that he's taking. It's just that one of his beliefs is that the American public can't/won't handle foreign policy that isn't in response to an immidiate threat and isn't short term. In his textbook, the perfect operation was Grenada. The American public woke up one day to find that with a minimum of casualties, we had repelled the bad guys from an island.
Perhaps, but it doesn't exactly allow for informed debate.... Patriochal government like that I more associate with Singapore, where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and only professionals (aka ruling party) are allowed to engage in political debate.
I'd rather that he made the case to the polity than take the totally patrician approach; maybe this's ok w/ Bush, but would you want Clinton, Gore or Clinton acting in the same manner? Scary.
Me too. If he had explained whatneeded tohappen, it's all very simply put, it would have done untold good for his cause and for prolonged public support.
What throws me is what consistutes a "WMD" program. He had everything he needed (in defiance of UN orders), and could start cranking it up within 72 hours of word go. I count that as a WMD program, if have the ability its the same as having the stuff. Especially when you have a history of using the stuff. But that is a point you can't really explain the the public because it uses big words and requires longer than 30 seconds to explain. But I also agree that his (GBW) attempts to explain exactly what we were trying to do and in what order was about as grey as grey can be. Pretty pathetic.
When a Republican president has, well, I won't call myself a Republican exactly, but staunch anti-liberals feeling like they can't trust him & don't know what his real motives are, how on earth is his party going to win swing voters? For god's sake, he's gonna end up putting Hilary in the white-house and destroying the Republican majority simply so he doesn't have to be accountable to a "line in the sand". Pathetic indeed.
I'm not sure Clinton *didn't* do something like this - that is, sell things to the public with reasons that were politically expedient rather than true. Actually, I thought all politicians did that. Then again, I *am* from Louisiana.
Amanda
When Clinton did his limp-wristed "hey, lets risk no lives" missile-throwing exercises, at least he stated what his objectives were. The fascists at the Washington Times (who, incidentally, finally turned me off from the Republicans) wrote article after article about how this was all just to distract from his impeachment, but the real criticism of the time wasn't "why'd you do it?", but "why didn't you do a better job of it?" I'm fine with honest incompetance -- no policital party is better than the Peter Principle -- but murky motives are different. Most of us tend to shrug and say "yeah, well that's Louisiana", not well, that's the U.S. :-)
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