"Lloyd Parker" wrote:
"David Gale" wrote:
Read the question that I was answering. He asked who, besides Bush,
Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and Cheney believed Saddam to be a threat. I
pointed out that most of the high-profile Democrats are on record
declaring
him to be a threat. Your claim that this is invalid because the
Democratic
party doesn't have its own intelligence agency is a complete
non-sequitor,
as well as irrelevant. Or would you claim that Powell has his own
intelligence agency? Rumsfeld?

They work for Bush. They said what Bush wanted them to say.

Which is why Powell, Rumsfeld, etc. have all said things that were rather
damaging to the president's image. Of course! It's all clear now!

Also, many of the quotes listed are from
before January, 2001; do you want to blame those on the man who was then
govenor of Texas?

Saddam had WMD at one time; that's not in dispute. But he didn't have
them
when Bush invaded; that's the issue.

But he was believed to have them. He had never proven that he'd destroyed
them, as was required. If I know I have a million dollars in my bank
account, and then my next statement indicates that I don't, and the bank
doesn't have any documentation about a withdrawal of funds, am I wrong, or
the bank?

But they did still believe that Saddam had WMDs, which was, as I pointed
out, the question I was answering. Whether that belief was correct or
not
is beside the point, since he hadn't asked who correctly believed Saddam
to
have WMDs.

It's easy enough to claim great wisdom in hind-sight, but the fact of the
matter is that before 2003, most of the world believed Saddam to have
WMDs.

Based on what? The US was the only one supposedly gathering this
intelligence. Why didn't we listen to the inspectors, especially Ritter?

Ah, of course. The Brits don't have an intelligence-gathering agency, the
Aussies rely solely on the CIA, and Poland, well, who can expect them to do
anything related to intelligence at all?

And, of course, you're still ignoring the fact that Saddam had failed to
show the destruction of the WMDs you admit that he had. If he couldn't show
that they were destroyed, what were we to assume? That he'd waved a magic
wand and turned them into pumpkins?

So, he was allowed to refuse to comply with the UN in order to deter
Iran?
I'm confused by this. The UN ordered him to disarm and prove to the
world
that he had done so; you claim that he did the former, but not the
latter,
in order to fake out Iran; the fact that not only Iran, but the rest of
the
world, including the US, was taken in is, however, Bush's fault.

The fact that Bush was so easily taken in by a third-world dictator
doesn't
mean he's not qualified to be president?

So, wait, is your case that Bush knew there were no WMDs, and lied about it,
or that he really, truly believed that there were WMDs, having been deceived
by Saddam?

You can't have it both ways--either he maliciously lied, and is a
manipulative genious, or he made an honest mistake, believing an enemy to be
as powerful as the enemy claimed he might be. Please pick which angle
you're going to go with.

So, breaking UN commands in order to deter a powerful neighbor is fine,

If not, the UN would have authorized military force.

....unless it were being paid off by the one breaking the commands. Oh,
wait, you deny that, too, even though it's documented in the Deufler report.

if
you're a tyrranical despot who tortures his own people for the fun of it,

Most dictators do. We supported most of them in the 80s and 90s. Heck,
we
supported Saddam in the 80s, so this wasn't a big deal to us then.

So we were wrong then. We aren't now. That's one of the weakest arguments
ever. "But Mommy, you didn't punish me for throwing food on the floor when
I was two; why should you punish me now that I'm thirteen?"