Yes, groups and individuals with more money get a bigger megaphone.
Well, that is where we disagree. They not only get a bigger megaphone, but they get a much bigger influence over our political process. I don't think that George Soros or Paris Hilton should have more control over who gets elected just because they have more money.
Your Dan Rather comment is just trolling.
Democracy is a stupid idea, which is why our Founding fathers gave us a Constituitional Republic.
No, it isn't. Our Founding Fathers were guided by democratic ideals and tried to craft a government that was democratic, but avoids some of the pitfalls of a pure democracy, like the tyranny of the majority. Like a lot of ideas and theories, pure democracy doesn't work very well in this imperfect world, but that makes it no less important or profound an idea. And there are places were it has worked: take the ancient Greek cities that flourished under pure democracies.
Sen. McCain is what is known as a RINO.
"Independent" or a "maverick." But Democratic? You need to look at his voting record. The ACU gives him an 84 lifetime score, which ranks him among the more conservative Republicans. Even Zell Miller only scores a 65!
Without campaign finance regulation (and regulation political money, etc), the more money you have, the more say you have in our political system. That is fine if you are living in a plutocracy (which we are becoming/have become), but it is very damaging to the ideals of democracy. And I still don't understand how unlimited monetary donations in the service of a political campaign constitutes "speech."
Also, I would be careful to single out Democrats as you do. McCain-Feingold was led by a Republican and a Democrat, lest you forget, and it was passed by a Republican House.
That said, I don't think that the current laws are effective and I think Congress is solely motivated to pass laws that protect incumbency rather than enact true campaign finance reform. But I still think it is something to strive to achieve.
If all they wanted to do was market gmail, they only needed to write a single line of text at google.com describing its features and providing a link to the service.
Ahh, but that would give you so much less information. This way, Google has a social network of Gmail users. Whether they take advantage of it yet or not, it gives them much more data then just having someone sign up.
Apple is starting to take notice of this and I think they are willing to deal. The prime example is BigMac (or SystemX). They started with desktop Macs, which didn't have the ECC ram that all of the other clusters of that size did. Everyone was scratching their heads, wondering how they were going to deal with single bit errors in RAM. VT waved their hands about "special software" that could take all of that into account. Then, early this year, they were all replaced with Xserve G5s, the first ones off the lot. Does anyone believe that wasn't part of the original deal? Of course it was, and Apple most likely took a loss on it because of that. But it wasn't against their sales, it came out of their G5 marketing budget.
I think that Apple, with OS X and the G5, is really starting to be able to compete for the big business deals they were shut out of before and they are starting to take advantage of it. They've obviously got a team for the large sales deals and I'm sure they're willing to deal with them on price. Hopefully, they'll start to respond to those costumers' demands on the hardware front, as well.
Okay, I've said before that I know he cooperated with inspectors during the pre-war months. Okay, I've said before that I know he cooperated with inspectors during the pre-war months.
Then why do you keep saying it isn't true? Now you say it is. Jeez.
Whether it was intended to allow him to rebuild his weapons programs or just the result of paranoia on his part, it is still suspicious behavior.
This would be a stronger point if we were blameless. But we put CIA agents in the inspection teams, we targeted buildings that had no WMD value, and then during Desert Fox we bombed a bunch of those same buildings. We corrupted the inspections process and are at least as culpable for its failure as Saddam.
What they got was a re-printing of a disclosure previously given them. Iraq did nothing to address the concerns of the UN which had compelled them to ask for full disclosure.
No, it was a 10,000 page document that contained a lot of old stuff and some new stuff. And what about what Hans Blix reported? It doesn't sound sound like the Iraqis were doing nothing.
Does this mean that Bush is a war-mongering irresponsible president? Probably not.
No, what makes Bush a war-mongering, irresponsible president is that he misled us into war. He used intelligence that everyone should have known was wrong or at least questionable (Chalabi did not have our best interests at heart), giving a huge weight to anything that fit into his world picture (anti-Saddam) and virtually ignoring anything that didn't. He threatened us with nuclear mushroom clouds and terrorist chemical attacks. He tried to tie Iraq to Al Qaeda when there was no connection there. He had no idea what he was getting into. And he pulled troops out of Afghanistan for a two-bit despot who wasn't even on the list of major threats the United States. That is why he is a war-mongering, irresponsible president.
Will the world be worse off in the long run as a result of Bush's actions? Maybe, but again probably not. After all Saddam wasn't exactly a good world citizen.
Saddam wasn't a world citizen period. After '91, he pretty much crawled back into his hole and stayed there. It sucked for Iraqis, but he wasn't a threat to the rest of the world. And "probably not"!? What timeframe are you using? It is going to be a problem for the foreseeable future and no one knows after that. Democracy could start to grow, or it could fall into civil war and threaten the whole region (and thus the rest of the world). But the real reason the world will be worse off is the opportunity cost. What else could we have been doing with those resources instead of our pointless invasion of Iraq and our never-ending occupation?
Yes, and that was something they were working on. The Iraqis didn't have adequate documentation on materials they claimed to have destroyed, so UNSCOM was going through the process of interviewing the people Iraq claimed had destroyed them. There were also differences over what weapons Iraq had produced, because we were guesstimating on a lot of the figures. The thing to remember here is THE IRAQIS WERE RIGHT! They didn't have weapons of mass destruction, they or we had destroyed them all, as we have now proved.
The other thing you have to take into account is that anybody forced against their will to do something is going to do it grudgingly. Saddam had to save face, both nationally and internationally, so of course they are going to be belligerent. You can't expect them to just rollover and be happy about it. That isn't realistic and the Bush administration knew it. The key is that on the important things, on the substantive issues, they were fully cooperating with us. They were allowing us to search any building, unannounced, even the presidential palaces and not impeding us like they did in '98. They were allowing us to interview the scientists and other works who had worked on the programs. And they were providing us with documentation on the dismantling and destruction of their WMDs.
Were they holding out on some of the documentation or were they telling the truth on that count? I haven't heard of any extra documentation being discovered that Iraq was holding out on. It would have helped give the administration some cause, but nothing has come out. Of course, nothing probably will, because the ministry housing those records wasn't guarded and was completely ransacked.
That would be a true statement only if you ignored the fact that UNSCOM reported that they could not ascertain whether or not Iraq had any WMDs because the Iraqi government refused to fully comply with the inspectors.
Mr. President, in my 27th of January update to the Council, I said that it seemed from our experience that Iraq had decided in principle to provide cooperation on process -- most importantly, prompt access to all sites and assistance to UNMOVIC in the establishment of the necessary infrastructure.
This impression remains, and we note that access to sites has so far been without problems, including those that have never been declared or inspected, as well as to presidential sites and private residences.
What the Iraqis had failed to do up to that point is provide irrefutable documentation that all of the WMDs we thought they had were actually destroyed.
That said, you are right. I should have said that the inspectors couldn't find any and didn't believe they had them, but still had questions about what happened to some of the materials. I don't think it substantially affects my point, which was that at that point, they were pretty sure they didn't have any WMDs and all of the intelligence that we had allowed UNSCOM to see had been proven false.
No, that's not true. He restricted access to government buildings. Also, he would not allow suprise inspections.
You again appear to be ignoring the context of my comments, which was regarding the 2002-2003 inspections, even though I have said explicitly multiple times. However, assuming you did read my previous posts and you are talking about the same thing, you will have to provide some kind of reference backing up your claim. Here are mine:
According to this December, 2002 Guardian article:
On November 18, a team of about 30 weapons inspectors, led by the chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, and the director of the IAEA, Mohammed el-Baradei, returned to Baghdad to begin Unmovic's work.
They will carry sensors capable of detecting nuclear material as well as chemical and biological agents, and their findings could determine whether or not Iraq will face another US military onslaught.
Under Resolution 1441, the UN has given inspectors the right to go anywhere at any time and warned Iraq of the "serious consequences" it will face if it does not cooperate. The teams must report back to the security council on January 26 and inform it of their progress.
[Mohamed el-Baradei] said Iraq has provided immediate access to all inspection locations and that four Iraqi scientists have been interviewed in private.
In fact, that CNN article gives a pretty good summary of the weapons inspectors' reports; I'd recommend reading it.
I know all this, but to say that he was completely cooperative is at best misleading.
Which might be why I didn't say it. Who's misleading? I said he let us look anywhere and he did. I'm not saying he wasn't a dick about it, I'm not saying he didn't still play his little games, but as far as I know he didn't deny the inspectors access to any place. Look, Saddam was a dictator and I have no idea what that much power does to a person, but it isn't good. I don't know if psychopath even applies, but he was definitely a cruel and capricious leader. I thought we should support the Marsh Arabs instead of leading them to the slaughter. But I want to talk about facts and not propaganda.
Please read my responses to the other comments addressing the same issue (all written over a half-hour before yours). I was referring to 2002-2003, not the previous inspections. Although he was still shifty, I don't believe he denied us access anywhere and nobody has provided any evidence to the contrary.
As for why Hussein played games, I think you've touched on it. I think it was Iraqi nationalism (not wanting to give in, maintaining the image of a strong Iraq, and the possibility that Iraq could have WMD, kind of like Israel) but also, and perhaps primarily, that sanctions were a useful tool for maintaining control. As long as his people were blaming the U.S. for all of their problems, they weren't blaming him. And it wasn't like he was hurt by them.
If you are talking about the prior inspections where he did deny us access to buildings (like the presidential palaces), there were also legitimate security concerns on his part due to the fact that we were using the inspection teams for intelligence gathering (I believe Scott Ritter dances around this issue in his book, but later talked about it more directly).
I agree. "Parts" of a centrifuge, by definition, aren't a centrifuge.
You might be interested in Obeidi's new book, The Bomb in My Garden. Kevin Drum partially summarized it as thus:
Saddam didn't have a bomb program in place after 1991. But that's not all: not only didn't he have an active program, but Mahdi makes it clear that he couldn't have had a program. There are half a dozen extremely advanced technologies involved that Iraq could get only from foreign sources, and even with a porous embargo in place it was just laughable to think they could get their hands on them.
In other words, all the prewar nonsense about a "smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud" was just that: nonsense. And not just nonsense, but stuff the Bushies obviously knew was nonsense.
I am looking forward to reading it myself, but that fits everything I heard from pre-war skeptics: Iraq didn't have the tech to make a nuclear program and they couldn't have imported it. And it turns out they were right.
See my response to the comment before yours, but I was talking about 2002-2003. I thought that was obvious by the context in the parent post of "At some point, we had to say 'enough' to his gamesmanship": we "said enough" in 2003. In the prior inspections regime, we never believed they were hiding WMD in the presidential palaces; we were trying to force them to say no. Read Scott Ritter's very informative book on the subject, Endgame.
I am talking about 2002-2003. Regarding the earlier inspections, read Scott Ritter's book. The reason the Iraqi's had problems with allowing inspection teams into presidential palaces and the like was because we had placed CIA agents on the inspection teams and Saddam was paranoid the inspectors were gathering intelligence to have him assassinated. He was at least half-right: we were gathering intelligence, but I don't know that we would have assassinated him. There was no point. He was contained, as Powell himself said.
The Seattle Times quotes the state republican party chairman as saying he believes Democrats were behind the theft.
That is interesting, because the police don't believe they were: After Bellevue police investigated, however, police spokeswoman Jessamyn Poling said, "There was no indication at the scene that this burglary was politically motivated."
Hmm, who to believe? I don't know. I mean, why would anyone want to steal laptops except for partisan political purposes?
And while we're on the subject of amazing coincidences, where was this scandal coverage in 2002?
For those of us paying attention, this isn't news. Here is an article from March, 2003. I saw stories about this in 2002 (and I believe that is what this article means when it says "The administration was forced to admit publicly that dissenters exist"; they don't specify the time frame, but just prior they talked about 2002), but I'm not going to spend the time to dig up a source. I believe it was in early December, but it might have been earlier. LexisNexis it yourself if you even care.
The point of this article is to take a more in-depth look at how that decision was made (it is something like 15 pages).
Nice links, by the way. Have anything demonstrating that Iraq still had WMD, because none of those do. Of course, it would be pretty hard to show they had weapons of mass destruction WHEN THEY DIDN'T!
What post-9/11 intelligence demonstrated Iraq had WMD? The inspectors, who were there, said they didn't. And it turned out that they didn't. What intelligence did we have? Some satellite photos that we interpreted completely wrong (which the inspectors informed us of) and Ahmad Chalabi and the INC.
The problem is that they don't take any intelligence seriously, but act on what they believe, regardless of what the facts are. We call it "faith-based intelligence."
The only stories the New York Times has "gotten wrong" and "had to retract" about Bush are ones that favored him (such as Judi Miller's stories on Iraq's non-existent WMD).
Sadam[sic] did have illegal weapons, he even used some of them in the war.
Huh? Illegal weapons? Did they use banned assault weapons? He certainly didn't use WMD on us, because as we now know (and some of us knew before) he DIDN'T HAVE WMD! That is the bottom line here. And while some people studiously try to ignore them, there were people who knew he didn't have WMD, such as the inspectors who were there.
How do I prove I don't have something? Especially if you are convinced that I do? It is easy to prove I have something, I can show it to you. But to prove I don't have it I... show you nothing? But then you say it is over there. So I show you there is nothing over here and you say that I moved it over there. Of course, by the time we are able to check, you say I've moved it somewhere else.
However, getting away from the philosophical and theoretical prove, I am pretty sure that was never a condition to begin with. He had to agree not to develop weapons of mass destruction and allow inspectors to look around to verify that he wasn't. While we can't prove somebody doesn't have WMD, we can be reasonably certain they don't because the development of all them leaves chemical traces behind that can be detected long after they've left. Which is why an inspection regime can work.
The ball was in Saddam's court.
No, he let the weapons inspectors in and let them search anywhere. We gave them the locations of where we thought they were producing WMDs and they all turned out completely wrong. We kicked the weapons inspectors out so that we could bomb Iraq.
How up-in-arms about this were you in 1992 or 1996? If the answer is anything less than "completely fucking rabid," you are a hypocrite and a fool. If that is your answer, then you're just a fool.
No, Clinton didn't deny he dodged the draft and he also didn't support the Vietnam war. Bush does claim he would have gone to Vietnam and he did support the war. Bush is the hypocrite. If he came clean on his Guard service, you might have a case, but he hasn't. The White House continues to insist that he served faithfully and deserved an honorable discharge when he did not. That he got one is an example of why Colin Powell said:
"I am angry that so many sons of the powerful and well placed and so many professional athletes (who were probably healthier than any of us) managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units. Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country."
Here's one: Air Force Times This story is now a little bit dated (it was written after doubts had been raised but before CBS acknowledged their documents were false), but that has no impact on its accuracy. There isn't anything in here that isn't in the other sources I cited and that hasn't been known since the White House released the batch of records records earlier this year, but it doesn't hurt to hear it one more time. Of course, Twirlip will shrilly denounce it as a DNC mouthpiece ("everybody knows the Air Force is the liberal branch of the military") and try to use his circular logic to refute it ("everything I say is true; I say it isn't true; therefore, it isn't true").
And yes, I know the Air Force doesn't produce the Air Force Times. It is the same company that does USA Today. Gannet is pretty conservative, though (in the status-quo preserving, media-conglomerate sense).
Provide some sources. Again, just because you say it is false, etc., etc., doesn't make it so. For example, googling on "Septermber 17" and dental records turn up nothing on any dental records from September 17th, 1972 for George W. Care to clarify that? I mean, what do I have to do to get you to give me some evidence? I'm willing to read whatever you can post.
Until then, I'll stop wasting my time. Hopefully someone else will find my earlier posts interesting.
How do dental records from January 6th, 1973 help? I ignored them because they aren't relevant to my argument. See my full response above yours. He missed at least five months, that is a fact, pure and simple. He left for Alabama in May and didn't even receive permission to transfer until mid-September. And then he still didn't train until at least the end of October. That this is even debated shows just how much confusion surrounds this issue, mostly thanks to the Whitehouse's obfuscation (much like the Saddam/9-11 link).
You aren't understanding simple points here. 1. No such order was ever given. Therefore 2. it never could have been disobeyed. There exists absolutely no evidence that any such order was given; that was an invention of these memos. Expecting the president to publicly deny every crazy allegation that gets cooked up about him is just silly.
Exactly. You seem to have misunderstood what I meant and read it as an equivalent to "when did you stop beating your wife". I meant that if the order had never been given, and I don't believe any such order was (it would have been redundant; it was already a requirement of pilots), shouldn't Bush have been able to say "that never happened"? I don't expect the president to deny every crazy allegation that gets cooked up, but I also don't expect him to hand them out to everybody in the press core, either. My point was that they knew it wasn't true, but didn't mind helping to further muddy the waters (which is what I think). But that is just speculation. And perhaps based on a false assumption, if you can provide a source for your "press corps policy." That would be new to me.
Actually, yeah, it is. If you want to be cleared to fly, you have to take a physical. If you aren't going to be required to fly (as Bush wasn't) and you don't want to hang on to your status for some other reason, you just don't take the physical. Common practice.
Look, just because you say it over and over doesn't make it true. It was a mandatory requirement and if a pilot failed to take it, a commander had to conduct an investigation and either convene a Flying Evaluation Board or forward a detailed report up the chain of command. See this document, page 18. If you can actually site a source that is more credible, please do. Also, "common practice" isn't a defense. It may be common practice to cheat on your taxes, but you are still cheating on your taxes.
He didn't. When Bush requested a transfer to Alabama, he was told that he would be welcome but that due to a surplus of pilots who had rotated back home, there would be no place on the flightline for him. More pilots than aircraft, you see. More pegs than holes. Ergo, he would not be flying in Alabama. Ergo, no need to maintain flight status.
Here, read this. Bush first tried to transfer to a standby reserve unit, one that wasn't required to meet or train. He had signed up for ready reserve, so this was of course rejected in July (after he had already "transferred" himself to Alabama). He missed his physical in May. Also, although you present the most recent story, Bush has told many over the years.
In his "autobiography," he doesn't even mention the physical and instead says "I was almost finished with my commitment in the Air National Guard and was no longer flying because the F-102 jet I had trained in was being replaced by a different fighter."
Then, it was that he had missed his physical because he was going to get examined by his personal physician.
Now, it is because Alabama units weren't using the F-102.
As for the transfer itself, he didn't apply again until September.
Yet another untruth spread by you for purposes unknown. We have service and pay records indicating that not only did Bush show up for duty in Alabama, he fulfilled all of his requirements for service. In both 1972 and 1973, Bush earned 56 points, more than the required 50 points. You don't get points if you don't show up.
Whether or not he earned the required 48 points in a year has no bearing on whether or not he missed five months. The payroll records are for the last weekend in October. Look, the facts as released by the Whitehouse are that he missed five months, from the end of May to the end of October. The question is whether he ever showed up in Alabama as the payroll records show or not, because a bunch of ot
If they couldn't possibly be true, then why did the White House distribute them? Why did Scott McClellan say "We had every reason to believe that they were authentic at that time"? Shouldn't George Bush have been able to recall that he hadn't disobeyed a direct order?
If you skip it, you lose flight status.
An annual physical is not something you just "skip" because you don't feel you need to have flight status. The government spent over a million bucks training him, he doesn't just get to say he isn't interested any more.
Bush has never denied... dropping out of flight status for his last 18 months in the Guard.
Actually, that's not true. In his "autobiography," A Charge to Keep, he claims just that. "I continued flying with my unit for the next several years." The truth is he stopped after less than two years.
First, the memos were trotted out as proof that Bush pulled strings to get his spot in the Guard, allegations that were floated and debunked in 1994, 1998 and 1999.
Debunked? No. First, just look at the prima facie evidence: Bush got in in front of thousands of others after scoring a 25% on his aptitude test, the lowest grade accepted, and he was sworn in on the day he applied. That is far from standard operating procedure. So the question isn't if strings were pulled, but who pulled them. It is very possible that neither Bush had anything to do with it and it was a family friend working on his own initiative, so you can argue that Bush didn't pull any strings, but strings were pulled and he was the benefactor.
[N]or has he ever denied transferring to Alabama.
A transfer would imply that he showed up in Alabama, but the records show he was simply gone for five months. There are no credible witnesses that can recall him ever showing up in Alabama.
The Whitehouse has succeeded in making this a confusing issue by lying about it, repeatedly claiming to have released all of Bush's service records and then releasing more, and trying to turn it into a he-said/she-said issue despite the facts. This is a pretty good summary of what we know at this point.
Frankly, I would be more than happy to have the whole thing dropped if Bush would simply acknowledge what the record shows: he didn't faithfully fulfill his obligation to the National Guard. It is as simple as that.
And I said, "I don't enjoy watching films with such boring photography and unrealistic editing," in the context of how this movie appears from the trailers; I did not say the very different "this movie has boring photography and unrealistic editing."
Then what you meant to say was "I don't enjoy watching films that appear to have such boring photography and unrealistic editing" or "I don't enjoy watching films with such boring photography and unrealistic editing in their trailers," which is not the same as what you wrote. That missing context was exactly my point: you seemed to be extending your judgment of the trailer to the entire film.
I wasn't trying to twist your meaning, simply pulling out the relevant quotes. The full context is in your post. You're right, the amateurish quote boils down to "the movie looks like it sucks", not "it sucks." And apparently you meant something else with the other sentence. Sorry for the misunderstandings, but they aren't all based on my lack of reading skills or nefarious intentions.
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Well, that is where we disagree. They not only get a bigger megaphone, but they get a much bigger influence over our political process. I don't think that George Soros or Paris Hilton should have more control over who gets elected just because they have more money.
Your Dan Rather comment is just trolling.
Democracy is a stupid idea, which is why our Founding fathers gave us a Constituitional Republic.
No, it isn't. Our Founding Fathers were guided by democratic ideals and tried to craft a government that was democratic, but avoids some of the pitfalls of a pure democracy, like the tyranny of the majority. Like a lot of ideas and theories, pure democracy doesn't work very well in this imperfect world, but that makes it no less important or profound an idea. And there are places were it has worked: take the ancient Greek cities that flourished under pure democracies.
Sen. McCain is what is known as a RINO.
"Independent" or a "maverick." But Democratic? You need to look at his voting record. The ACU gives him an 84 lifetime score, which ranks him among the more conservative Republicans. Even Zell Miller only scores a 65!
Also, I would be careful to single out Democrats as you do. McCain-Feingold was led by a Republican and a Democrat, lest you forget, and it was passed by a Republican House.
That said, I don't think that the current laws are effective and I think Congress is solely motivated to pass laws that protect incumbency rather than enact true campaign finance reform. But I still think it is something to strive to achieve.
Ahh, but that would give you so much less information. This way, Google has a social network of Gmail users. Whether they take advantage of it yet or not, it gives them much more data then just having someone sign up.
I think that Apple, with OS X and the G5, is really starting to be able to compete for the big business deals they were shut out of before and they are starting to take advantage of it. They've obviously got a team for the large sales deals and I'm sure they're willing to deal with them on price. Hopefully, they'll start to respond to those costumers' demands on the hardware front, as well.
Then why do you keep saying it isn't true? Now you say it is. Jeez.
Whether it was intended to allow him to rebuild his weapons programs or just the result of paranoia on his part, it is still suspicious behavior.
This would be a stronger point if we were blameless. But we put CIA agents in the inspection teams, we targeted buildings that had no WMD value, and then during Desert Fox we bombed a bunch of those same buildings. We corrupted the inspections process and are at least as culpable for its failure as Saddam.
What they got was a re-printing of a disclosure previously given them. Iraq did nothing to address the concerns of the UN which had compelled them to ask for full disclosure.
No, it was a 10,000 page document that contained a lot of old stuff and some new stuff. And what about what Hans Blix reported? It doesn't sound sound like the Iraqis were doing nothing.
Does this mean that Bush is a war-mongering irresponsible president? Probably not.
No, what makes Bush a war-mongering, irresponsible president is that he misled us into war. He used intelligence that everyone should have known was wrong or at least questionable (Chalabi did not have our best interests at heart), giving a huge weight to anything that fit into his world picture (anti-Saddam) and virtually ignoring anything that didn't. He threatened us with nuclear mushroom clouds and terrorist chemical attacks. He tried to tie Iraq to Al Qaeda when there was no connection there. He had no idea what he was getting into. And he pulled troops out of Afghanistan for a two-bit despot who wasn't even on the list of major threats the United States. That is why he is a war-mongering, irresponsible president.
Will the world be worse off in the long run as a result of Bush's actions? Maybe, but again probably not. After all Saddam wasn't exactly a good world citizen.
Saddam wasn't a world citizen period. After '91, he pretty much crawled back into his hole and stayed there. It sucked for Iraqis, but he wasn't a threat to the rest of the world. And "probably not"!? What timeframe are you using? It is going to be a problem for the foreseeable future and no one knows after that. Democracy could start to grow, or it could fall into civil war and threaten the whole region (and thus the rest of the world). But the real reason the world will be worse off is the opportunity cost. What else could we have been doing with those resources instead of our pointless invasion of Iraq and our never-ending occupation?
The other thing you have to take into account is that anybody forced against their will to do something is going to do it grudgingly. Saddam had to save face, both nationally and internationally, so of course they are going to be belligerent. You can't expect them to just rollover and be happy about it. That isn't realistic and the Bush administration knew it. The key is that on the important things, on the substantive issues, they were fully cooperating with us. They were allowing us to search any building, unannounced, even the presidential palaces and not impeding us like they did in '98. They were allowing us to interview the scientists and other works who had worked on the programs. And they were providing us with documentation on the dismantling and destruction of their WMDs.
Were they holding out on some of the documentation or were they telling the truth on that count? I haven't heard of any extra documentation being discovered that Iraq was holding out on. It would have helped give the administration some cause, but nothing has come out. Of course, nothing probably will, because the ministry housing those records wasn't guarded and was completely ransacked.
How so? Here is what Hans Blix said in his report on February 14th:
What the Iraqis had failed to do up to that point is provide irrefutable documentation that all of the WMDs we thought they had were actually destroyed.That said, you are right. I should have said that the inspectors couldn't find any and didn't believe they had them, but still had questions about what happened to some of the materials. I don't think it substantially affects my point, which was that at that point, they were pretty sure they didn't have any WMDs and all of the intelligence that we had allowed UNSCOM to see had been proven false.
You again appear to be ignoring the context of my comments, which was regarding the 2002-2003 inspections, even though I have said explicitly multiple times. However, assuming you did read my previous posts and you are talking about the same thing, you will have to provide some kind of reference backing up your claim. Here are mine:
And this February, 2003 CNN article: In fact, that CNN article gives a pretty good summary of the weapons inspectors' reports; I'd recommend reading it.According to this December, 2002 Guardian article:
Which might be why I didn't say it. Who's misleading? I said he let us look anywhere and he did. I'm not saying he wasn't a dick about it, I'm not saying he didn't still play his little games, but as far as I know he didn't deny the inspectors access to any place. Look, Saddam was a dictator and I have no idea what that much power does to a person, but it isn't good. I don't know if psychopath even applies, but he was definitely a cruel and capricious leader. I thought we should support the Marsh Arabs instead of leading them to the slaughter. But I want to talk about facts and not propaganda.
As for why Hussein played games, I think you've touched on it. I think it was Iraqi nationalism (not wanting to give in, maintaining the image of a strong Iraq, and the possibility that Iraq could have WMD, kind of like Israel) but also, and perhaps primarily, that sanctions were a useful tool for maintaining control. As long as his people were blaming the U.S. for all of their problems, they weren't blaming him. And it wasn't like he was hurt by them.
If you are talking about the prior inspections where he did deny us access to buildings (like the presidential palaces), there were also legitimate security concerns on his part due to the fact that we were using the inspection teams for intelligence gathering (I believe Scott Ritter dances around this issue in his book, but later talked about it more directly).
I agree. "Parts" of a centrifuge, by definition, aren't a centrifuge.
You might be interested in Obeidi's new book, The Bomb in My Garden. Kevin Drum partially summarized it as thus:
I am looking forward to reading it myself, but that fits everything I heard from pre-war skeptics: Iraq didn't have the tech to make a nuclear program and they couldn't have imported it. And it turns out they were right.
See my response to the comment before yours, but I was talking about 2002-2003. I thought that was obvious by the context in the parent post of "At some point, we had to say 'enough' to his gamesmanship": we "said enough" in 2003. In the prior inspections regime, we never believed they were hiding WMD in the presidential palaces; we were trying to force them to say no. Read Scott Ritter's very informative book on the subject, Endgame.
I am talking about 2002-2003. Regarding the earlier inspections, read Scott Ritter's book. The reason the Iraqi's had problems with allowing inspection teams into presidential palaces and the like was because we had placed CIA agents on the inspection teams and Saddam was paranoid the inspectors were gathering intelligence to have him assassinated. He was at least half-right: we were gathering intelligence, but I don't know that we would have assassinated him. There was no point. He was contained, as Powell himself said.
That is interesting, because the police don't believe they were:
After Bellevue police investigated, however, police spokeswoman Jessamyn Poling said, "There was no indication at the scene that this burglary was politically motivated."
Hmm, who to believe? I don't know. I mean, why would anyone want to steal laptops except for partisan political purposes?
For those of us paying attention, this isn't news. Here is an article from March, 2003. I saw stories about this in 2002 (and I believe that is what this article means when it says "The administration was forced to admit publicly that dissenters exist"; they don't specify the time frame, but just prior they talked about 2002), but I'm not going to spend the time to dig up a source. I believe it was in early December, but it might have been earlier. LexisNexis it yourself if you even care.
The point of this article is to take a more in-depth look at how that decision was made (it is something like 15 pages).
Nice links, by the way. Have anything demonstrating that Iraq still had WMD, because none of those do. Of course, it would be pretty hard to show they had weapons of mass destruction WHEN THEY DIDN'T!
The problem is that they don't take any intelligence seriously, but act on what they believe, regardless of what the facts are. We call it "faith-based intelligence."
Sadam[sic] did have illegal weapons, he even used some of them in the war.
Huh? Illegal weapons? Did they use banned assault weapons? He certainly didn't use WMD on us, because as we now know (and some of us knew before) he DIDN'T HAVE WMD! That is the bottom line here. And while some people studiously try to ignore them, there were people who knew he didn't have WMD, such as the inspectors who were there.
How do I prove I don't have something? Especially if you are convinced that I do? It is easy to prove I have something, I can show it to you. But to prove I don't have it I... show you nothing? But then you say it is over there. So I show you there is nothing over here and you say that I moved it over there. Of course, by the time we are able to check, you say I've moved it somewhere else.
However, getting away from the philosophical and theoretical prove, I am pretty sure that was never a condition to begin with. He had to agree not to develop weapons of mass destruction and allow inspectors to look around to verify that he wasn't. While we can't prove somebody doesn't have WMD, we can be reasonably certain they don't because the development of all them leaves chemical traces behind that can be detected long after they've left. Which is why an inspection regime can work.
The ball was in Saddam's court.
No, he let the weapons inspectors in and let them search anywhere. We gave them the locations of where we thought they were producing WMDs and they all turned out completely wrong. We kicked the weapons inspectors out so that we could bomb Iraq.
No, Clinton didn't deny he dodged the draft and he also didn't support the Vietnam war. Bush does claim he would have gone to Vietnam and he did support the war. Bush is the hypocrite. If he came clean on his Guard service, you might have a case, but he hasn't. The White House continues to insist that he served faithfully and deserved an honorable discharge when he did not. That he got one is an example of why Colin Powell said:
"I am angry that so many sons of the powerful and well placed and so many professional athletes (who were probably healthier than any of us) managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units. Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country."
Here's one:
Air Force Times
This story is now a little bit dated (it was written after doubts had been raised but before CBS acknowledged their documents were false), but that has no impact on its accuracy. There isn't anything in here that isn't in the other sources I cited and that hasn't been known since the White House released the batch of records records earlier this year, but it doesn't hurt to hear it one more time. Of course, Twirlip will shrilly denounce it as a DNC mouthpiece ("everybody knows the Air Force is the liberal branch of the military") and try to use his circular logic to refute it ("everything I say is true; I say it isn't true; therefore, it isn't true").
And yes, I know the Air Force doesn't produce the Air Force Times. It is the same company that does USA Today. Gannet is pretty conservative, though (in the status-quo preserving, media-conglomerate sense).
Until then, I'll stop wasting my time. Hopefully someone else will find my earlier posts interesting.
How do dental records from January 6th, 1973 help? I ignored them because they aren't relevant to my argument. See my full response above yours. He missed at least five months, that is a fact, pure and simple. He left for Alabama in May and didn't even receive permission to transfer until mid-September. And then he still didn't train until at least the end of October. That this is even debated shows just how much confusion surrounds this issue, mostly thanks to the Whitehouse's obfuscation (much like the Saddam/9-11 link).
Exactly. You seem to have misunderstood what I meant and read it as an equivalent to "when did you stop beating your wife". I meant that if the order had never been given, and I don't believe any such order was (it would have been redundant; it was already a requirement of pilots), shouldn't Bush have been able to say "that never happened"? I don't expect the president to deny every crazy allegation that gets cooked up, but I also don't expect him to hand them out to everybody in the press core, either. My point was that they knew it wasn't true, but didn't mind helping to further muddy the waters (which is what I think). But that is just speculation. And perhaps based on a false assumption, if you can provide a source for your "press corps policy." That would be new to me.
Actually, yeah, it is. If you want to be cleared to fly, you have to take a physical. If you aren't going to be required to fly (as Bush wasn't) and you don't want to hang on to your status for some other reason, you just don't take the physical. Common practice.
Look, just because you say it over and over doesn't make it true. It was a mandatory requirement and if a pilot failed to take it, a commander had to conduct an investigation and either convene a Flying Evaluation Board or forward a detailed report up the chain of command. See this document, page 18. If you can actually site a source that is more credible, please do. Also, "common practice" isn't a defense. It may be common practice to cheat on your taxes, but you are still cheating on your taxes.
He didn't. When Bush requested a transfer to Alabama, he was told that he would be welcome but that due to a surplus of pilots who had rotated back home, there would be no place on the flightline for him. More pilots than aircraft, you see. More pegs than holes. Ergo, he would not be flying in Alabama. Ergo, no need to maintain flight status.
Here, read this. Bush first tried to transfer to a standby reserve unit, one that wasn't required to meet or train. He had signed up for ready reserve, so this was of course rejected in July (after he had already "transferred" himself to Alabama). He missed his physical in May. Also, although you present the most recent story, Bush has told many over the years.
In his "autobiography," he doesn't even mention the physical and instead says "I was almost finished with my commitment in the Air National Guard and was no longer flying because the F-102 jet I had trained in was being replaced by a different fighter."
Then, it was that he had missed his physical because he was going to get examined by his personal physician.
Now, it is because Alabama units weren't using the F-102.
As for the transfer itself, he didn't apply again until September.
Yet another untruth spread by you for purposes unknown. We have service and pay records indicating that not only did Bush show up for duty in Alabama, he fulfilled all of his requirements for service. In both 1972 and 1973, Bush earned 56 points, more than the required 50 points. You don't get points if you don't show up.
Whether or not he earned the required 48 points in a year has no bearing on whether or not he missed five months. The payroll records are for the last weekend in October. Look, the facts as released by the Whitehouse are that he missed five months, from the end of May to the end of October. The question is whether he ever showed up in Alabama as the payroll records show or not, because a bunch of ot
If you skip it, you lose flight status.
An annual physical is not something you just "skip" because you don't feel you need to have flight status. The government spent over a million bucks training him, he doesn't just get to say he isn't interested any more.
Bush has never denied... dropping out of flight status for his last 18 months in the Guard.
Actually, that's not true. In his "autobiography," A Charge to Keep, he claims just that. "I continued flying with my unit for the next several years." The truth is he stopped after less than two years.
First, the memos were trotted out as proof that Bush pulled strings to get his spot in the Guard, allegations that were floated and debunked in 1994, 1998 and 1999.
Debunked? No. First, just look at the prima facie evidence: Bush got in in front of thousands of others after scoring a 25% on his aptitude test, the lowest grade accepted, and he was sworn in on the day he applied. That is far from standard operating procedure. So the question isn't if strings were pulled, but who pulled them. It is very possible that neither Bush had anything to do with it and it was a family friend working on his own initiative, so you can argue that Bush didn't pull any strings, but strings were pulled and he was the benefactor.
[N]or has he ever denied transferring to Alabama.
A transfer would imply that he showed up in Alabama, but the records show he was simply gone for five months. There are no credible witnesses that can recall him ever showing up in Alabama.
The Whitehouse has succeeded in making this a confusing issue by lying about it, repeatedly claiming to have released all of Bush's service records and then releasing more, and trying to turn it into a he-said/she-said issue despite the facts. This is a pretty good summary of what we know at this point.
Frankly, I would be more than happy to have the whole thing dropped if Bush would simply acknowledge what the record shows: he didn't faithfully fulfill his obligation to the National Guard. It is as simple as that.
Then what you meant to say was "I don't enjoy watching films that appear to have such boring photography and unrealistic editing" or "I don't enjoy watching films with such boring photography and unrealistic editing in their trailers," which is not the same as what you wrote. That missing context was exactly my point: you seemed to be extending your judgment of the trailer to the entire film.
I wasn't trying to twist your meaning, simply pulling out the relevant quotes. The full context is in your post. You're right, the amateurish quote boils down to "the movie looks like it sucks", not "it sucks." And apparently you meant something else with the other sentence. Sorry for the misunderstandings, but they aren't all based on my lack of reading skills or nefarious intentions.