[Industrialblog,
May 20, 2004]
What the hell...
At the risk of giving aid and comfort to our opponents on the left, I just want to say that ignoring inconvenient facts is not limited to the left. Sorry. It's true. Our side does it, too.
(What provoked this? This. From here.)
Yes, liberal writers haven't mentioned the WMD discovery. But that's because it's still just ONE shell. The uncomfortable fact remains that Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations to justify the war in Iraq contained inaccurate information, and that's pretty damned sloppy business. It makes those of us who supported the war look like idiots.
You don't go before the Security Council on international television and present to our allies (and our would-be allies and everyone else) screwed-up information. You just don't do it. every bit of info needed to be triple checked. The errors presented have hurt our credibility and have hurt Bush's credibility. Heads should roll because of it.
Now, to me, the War on Iraq is pretty much self-evidently justifiable, that is, the reasons were obvious even to the casual observer. The sanctions regime was killing Iraqis. It was inhuman. The options were give in and back-off, and reward Saddam Hussein's ruthlessness and obstinacy, or raise the stakes, and invade the country and replace him. The credibility of the U.N. and the U.S. was at stake. Our allies like France and others like Russia were irresponsible and immoral in merely seeking to exploit the situation. So the attack came, and it was long, long overdue. It should've happened in 1992. Bush I screwed up. So good, we've fixed the problem.
But that said, you don't go before the Security Council and especially corrupt allies like France and blow smoke.
I haven't seen enough on the right on just how badly Bush screwed this up.
And another one was three or four years or so back, National Review ran one article after another gleefully reporting how California's energy crisis (brownouts and such) was caused by tampering with market economics. There were complaints that the problem would take years to fix because California companies weren't building power plants.
Then, one day, the electricity-supply problem went away. One day and it was gone, and has not returned. What happened? You wouldn't know from reading National Review. They didn't say another word about it. A big omission, don't you think? (What happened is a law was changed and electricity started to flow back into the grid.)
There are fair-minded people, and there are not. And both kinds are in both parties.
(What provoked this? This. From here.)
Yes, liberal writers haven't mentioned the WMD discovery. But that's because it's still just ONE shell. The uncomfortable fact remains that Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations to justify the war in Iraq contained inaccurate information, and that's pretty damned sloppy business. It makes those of us who supported the war look like idiots.
You don't go before the Security Council on international television and present to our allies (and our would-be allies and everyone else) screwed-up information. You just don't do it. every bit of info needed to be triple checked. The errors presented have hurt our credibility and have hurt Bush's credibility. Heads should roll because of it.
Now, to me, the War on Iraq is pretty much self-evidently justifiable, that is, the reasons were obvious even to the casual observer. The sanctions regime was killing Iraqis. It was inhuman. The options were give in and back-off, and reward Saddam Hussein's ruthlessness and obstinacy, or raise the stakes, and invade the country and replace him. The credibility of the U.N. and the U.S. was at stake. Our allies like France and others like Russia were irresponsible and immoral in merely seeking to exploit the situation. So the attack came, and it was long, long overdue. It should've happened in 1992. Bush I screwed up. So good, we've fixed the problem.
But that said, you don't go before the Security Council and especially corrupt allies like France and blow smoke.
I haven't seen enough on the right on just how badly Bush screwed this up.
And another one was three or four years or so back, National Review ran one article after another gleefully reporting how California's energy crisis (brownouts and such) was caused by tampering with market economics. There were complaints that the problem would take years to fix because California companies weren't building power plants.
Then, one day, the electricity-supply problem went away. One day and it was gone, and has not returned. What happened? You wouldn't know from reading National Review. They didn't say another word about it. A big omission, don't you think? (What happened is a law was changed and electricity started to flow back into the grid.)
There are fair-minded people, and there are not. And both kinds are in both parties.
I understand what you mean: this is not vindication of Powell's presentation by any means.
However, I feel I must point out that much of Powell's presentation was centered on the movement of WMD...movement to where? We are finding caches almost daily over there, even after a year of being there.
And these two shells of different types being put to use in pretty much the same location. We need to determine the origin of the shells, obviously. If they came from Syria or Iran, that's one thing. But if they belonged to Saddam, that indicates that Saddam was trying to sneak them through inspection process, or he delivered them to terrorists for safekeeping to avoid the inspection process. We cannot ignore that Hans Blix didn't find them, our military did; the inspections were not working. Either way, this demonstrates connections between terrorism, Iraq, and WMD. That's all President Bush ever asserted, right?
Ok, two shells. I think we need a little more if that's the justification. Fortunately, we have dozens of good reasons.
However, this actually shows a link between Iraq and 9-11. If that's true, then it's a whole different story.
Not to mention, I don't think that we know that anything that Powell said was wrong. It hasn't been confirmed yet, but it would also be nearly impossible to confirm as false.
For example, do you have any idea how big and how many Iraqi amunition points there are? And this is significant, since as David Kaye noted, the Iraqis weren't exactly in the habit of labeling their chemical weapons and keeping them separate with large flags saying "Illegal Chemical Weapons Here!" written in english and flying above said APs.
And there's no contesting that they had programs in the ready to be restarted and/or doing useful research on legitimate standins.
While a single shell isn't as big a deal as it might be, I think that you're blowing the bad news out of proportion.
And I still think that we should just nuke france. I mean, what's the UN going to do? issue a resolution calling for us to un-nuke france? We are a veto holder, after all.
In the Meet the Press interview with the unfortunate camera incident( transcript here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/ID/4992558/), Powell himself said that he now doubts the truth of the information he presented to the UN and described the sourcing that provided him with that information as "inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading."
The whole interview is interesting and well worth a read.
Doh!
:-)
Interesting. Don't forget that Powell is in the US State department, though, which is an amazing bastion of dictator-lovers.
I mean, if there was a diplomatic failure in anything (e.g. Turkey), it is Powell who should be fired for it.
It will be interesting to see where this goes, and it will be interesting to see how much that was thought true, now false, turns out to be true again.
After all, they're still occasionally finding weapons caches from WWII. Life is a remarkably complex thing.
In any event, this debate was over a long time ago for those who are legalistics; the contraband plane and the contraband missiles, found before the invasion, were both enough to legally justify it.
For those not talking about legalities, well, how much is an Iraqi life worth? We can measure it in gallons of oil, if one likes — the gallons of oil we've spent driving our equipment (and supplies) around their country when we removed the butcher of baghdad. It really makes you think, when people complain about the cost of the war (remember that? the $87 billion that no one would ever forgive Bush for?) are essentially saying, "No oil for blood!".
But, in the end, what is there to say to a man who believes that we should make threats but not enforce them? He's more a dog than a man, really, and it's not productive to argue to dogs.
I haven't heard too much of an outcry about the financial cost of the war - but maybe we get our news from different places.
Historically, this tends to not be much of a rallying point -ie if someone supports the reasons for a military action, the financial cost isn't going to be what will dissuade them from that position, and the anti-war crowd is in trouble if they can't find a more compelling argument than that.
>Interesting. Don't forget that Powell is in the US State >department, though, which is an amazing bastion of >dictator-lovers.
>I mean, if there was a diplomatic failure in anything
>(e.g. Turkey), it is Powell who should be fired for it.
That might be in the works. There's a rumor that Powell might not be around to long - from this profile in GQ.(here's the link: http://us.gq.com/plus/content/?040429plco_01 )
Fair warning - the piece, IMHO, has at least a slight lefty slant. At the very end of the article, Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson speculates that his boss is not long for this administration.
"ignoring inconvenient facts is not limited to the left"
IMHO, the partisan nature of communication within/between the parties and by the media commentators stifles needed debate and undermines our ability to find workable solutions. It's as if to admit any failing or questioning any policy is, well, giving comfort to the enemy.
With regard to Iraq, Bush needs to publically address issues and quesions about the war from somebody outside of his own party. Right now he ends up seeming out of touch. I think this is hurting him in the polls and making him vulnerable in the fall. No doubt staying on message is a tremendous plus, but so is being able articulate the issues and demonstrate how your current strategy will solve them would throw a lot of water on the fires. Rummy usually manages to show he knows what the questions are all about.
All:
Actually, I always a little surprised by the whining about the news from the Right. You guys won. You control all branches of the Federal government. You got your big tax cuts, you got your President, and just about everything else. How can the press focus on anyone else when the Right sets the policy on everything? The Right is the center of gravity these days. It's a natural result of winning. Bush got kid glove treatment four years ago.
Chris:
The reason 1 or 2 or even 100 old artillery shells isn't compelling is that they don't constitute a threat to the US or Middle East stability. I think most people are amazed we didn't find at least some stash of chemical weapons, so finding some limited materials 1-year later doesn't meet the criteria to impress anyone. In fairness to Bush, Tenet and the CIA seems to have done a massively crappy job on it. (Can't we at least fire Tenet).