Bush Lied

Well, it should be fun to watch how this thread develops...

 

You should have put an option for 'groupthink.'

 

How is cherry picking not lying?

 

Indeed, but wouldn't it also be fair for those who are persistant to believe that Bush is not a liar to also state why they continue to believe so? The 34% minority should have a voice too.

http://online.wsj.com/public/articl...2bx6maguMY_20061116.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top

 

Either lying or cherry-picking intel constitutes misleading the country to get us into a war. The only difference is in the strongness of the word lie versus mislead. It's the same thing.

 

Well I think he did what he thought was good for the United States at the time by taking out a ruthless dictator and potentially gaining a stable source of oil reserve in Iraq. There is also the side benefit of creating a friendly Arab democracy in the middle East. However, in order to achieve this, he cherry picked the intelligence to convience the public and congress that Iraq is an immenent threat to the US. I do not believe he should be impeached over this.

 

As I stated before....

Lied? No.
Selectively promoted some intelligence reports while sweeping others under the rug? Definitely.

And it isn't that Bush, et. al. had anything to gain from starting the war under false pretenses.

They had a lot to gain from starting the war, period....under any kind of pretense.

And that is exactly what they are doing.

 

I think "No, he didn't lie but he willfully focused on intelligence that favored his views to make his case for war."

The closest choice was "c" so that's the one I picked.

I think the Neo Cons convinced Bush that democratizing Iraq was our best chance at creating a stable and lasting peace in the Middle East. However, it was obvious that in order to sell the war to the American public, it had to be framed as a matter of self-preservation and not an idealistic crusade.

Was oil and Haliburton part of the equation? Maybe a little bit, especially from Cheney's perspective. But Bush doesn't strike me as a money-grubbing a*hole. He is a man of principle who likes to deal in moral absolutes.

Of course, moral absolutes can often get you into trouble when you deal with problems of delicate nuances in a region where the choice is not ialways between good and evil, but rather the lesser of two evils.

I cannot say conclusively that the Neo Cons are wrong about their goal of creating a democracy in Iraq. Maybe 30 years from now we will all thank them for having the vision to commit us to a fundamental change of a turbulent region. Containment is obviously a short-term solution and the day of reckoning had to come, sooner or later.

What I did have a problem with is the fact that the Neo Cons framed the debate as a matter of self-defense and patrotism. We live in a democracy and that means we need to openly debate issues of great importance. The dishonest focus on the WMDs and terrorist ties prevented us from having a complete debate on the subject. To that end, the Neo Cons did our democracy a great disservice.

 

I think that "lied" is too strong a term, and as such, I voted for cherry picking "intelligence," which I believe the administration did.

Reasons:
The American people were fed misleading and outright false claims regarding WMD programs. Rice said she didn't want the "smoking gun" to be a mushroom cloud, Bush reported the debunked yellowcake claim in the SOTU, Rumsfeld said that not only did they KNOW that Saddam had WMDs but that we knew EXACTLY where they were, and other officials were all over the talking heads shows making these and other claims over and over again.

The Congress, including the intelligence committee, were given only the reports that supported the WMD claims, even though there were dozens of reports that these claims were false. They were given reports from unreliable sources like "curveball" and others who had a vested interest in seeing us invade Iraq.

What was there to gain:
Nobody disputes that GWB was hot to go into Iraq even before 9/11. Reports show that he was trying to draw connections to Iraq immediately after 9/11 and 9/11 gave him the perfect opportunity to manipulate the American people into supporting a war.

Another war that would still be going on during the '04 election cycle. GWB (actually, Rove) saw what happened to his father after Desert Storm. Clinton beat him handily in part because the war had already ended. Rove knew the the American people are reluctant to change leadership during a war and they had an opportunity to have a war that would give them traction leading up to the '04 elections.

A chance to get back at the guy who tried to kill his daddy.

Potential for a permanent set of military bases in the ME.

Deflect attention from the economy and from the fact that they were unable to capture or kill OBL.

A chance to give massive contracts to the people who got him elected.

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That is most of it the way I see it.

 

Where is the choice, "what do I care?"

 

Bush had a casual indifference to the truth.

That is lying in my book.

 

Bush used WMDs and a potential attack against us as the justification for use of force. If you go back and look at the debate in the Congress over the authorization for war you see that the entire discussion is about Sadam as a threat, not about Sadam as a despot. While I think the overall strategy of Wolfowitz et. al was about turning the Middle East into a democracy, I think that Bush wrongly mislead the people by selling the war as a matter of national security rather than foreign policy ideology.

 

Why is NOT the question at hand.

 

I believe Bush believed Saddam was a threat. He knew he was going to have trouble getting the country and world to support intervention, so he selectively showed evidence of Iraq being an immediate problem. He knew there was other contradictory evidence and ignored it - whether it was for politics or he felt it was false in his own mind, who knows. Regardless, he intentionally misled, and ended up lying by stating things as facts when they simply weren't.

 

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

 

How is it that the Republicans control all branches of government, Fox is the most watched news channel, had Bush voted in twice, and still have such a large percentage of people think he is lying and is a poor president?

It can't be the dems fault because they are small and beaten, and it can't be the media because Fox is the most watched news channel. How can a party have so much power and control, given to them by the people, and lack so much support? how come they can't control the very small minority view that is becoming the majority view?

 

Do a search, basso. I've answered these questions exhaustively and you've repeatedly replied by calling me an America hating Saddam lover. I started to type that I was through wasting my time with you on this stuff, since you always come back with the same slanderous pap. But god bless me I'm just not that smart. One more time then...

I have long believed the primary reason was politics. I don't know this for certain, because I can't read minds. But I believe the Rove strategy was to innoculate Bush from all criticism for as long as possible. 9/11 fell into Bush's lap and made it inappropriate to criticize anything Bush did from Afghanistan (which I supported) to tax cuts for the filthy rich (which I did not). Politically speaking, it was the greatest gift the admin could have received. As soon as people started feeling it was safe to criticize Bush on policy again, there was Afghanistan and everyone shut up again. As soon as that protection from dissent began to fade there was Iraq and it was once again "unpatriotic" to oppose even Bush's insane SS plan. So that's my guess (and it is a guess) as to the primary reason. There were many secondary benefits, like oil, Halliburton profits, removing a murderous dictator and the freedom that meant for Iraq, settling the WMD question once and for all, waving a bully stick at the world to let them know we were not to be ****ed with, establishing a pro-US outpost in the ME, and on and on. And many of those benefits are of great appeal to me, but I don't actually believe any of them (least of all concern for the Iraqi people) was the primary reason. I believe the primary reason was politics closely followed by profits (remember James Baker's reason for the first Gulf War? "Jobs, jobs, jobs."). Do I believe Bush thought Iraq was a threat to the US? I believe it's conceivable that he found that conceivable. I also believe he absolutely had reason to have very serious doubts that they were a threat, because as we now know he was told that. He chose not only not to listen but actually to tell us Iraq was definitely a threat. That was not truthful and he knew that.

But we can't know for sure WHY Bush misled or lied to the country. We can know for sure he did though. And I include the 9/11 connection as a lie (or whatever more polite word you'd like to use) too. Bush has plausible deniability in a semantic, slimy, legalese, 'definition of the word is is' kind of way about explicitly making that connection (Cheney doesn't), but it's entirely cynical. Virtually every time Bush was asked why we had to go to war he said 9/11. Consequently, a vast majority of the country erroneously believed Iraq was complicit in 9/11. Bush and Cheney led them to that false conclusion in order to bolster support for the war. It was a lie, even if you'd prefer a more polite word.

Frankly, I couldn't give a damn which word is used. Mislead, lie, cherry picked, whatever. We were led into a war under dishonest circumstances. And a lot of people have unnecessarily died as a result.

The reason Bush and co. pushed WMD's so hard is because they knew that was the one thing that would be supported by the American people. And, had the charges been true, I would have been among those in support of the war. Check the record. I said from the beginning that the WMD argument was scary (and the SOTU scared the **** out of me), but that I was unconvinced by the evidence presented that Iraq was a threat to us. I said all along that if they were proven to be one, I would support the war. I trusted Hans Blix over Bush. You bet I did. Bush had been dishonest and shady on so much already, I wasn't inclined to let jingoism or fear or anger over 9/11 suddenly translate into trust of a person I found to be wholly untrustworthy. Turns out I was right. Bush was dishonest with the American people on an issue of the highest possible importance and we're paying dearly for that now. The surprise to me isn't that a sizeable majority now opposes the war, thinks it wasn't worth it, thinks Bush misled us and that he is a basically dishonest person; the surprise to me is that there's still anyone left that thinks otherwise.