Sanctimony comes easy to Al Gore, even when he's right -- as he is here in 1992 berating the Administration of Bush the Elder for ignoring the threat from Saddam Hussein: his cooperation with terrorists, his genocide, and his stock pile of WMD.
So, who lied?
8 comments:
I cannot tell whether this makes me hate the man more, or less. Either way, I still don't like him.
Sorry, I don't see how you think this changes anything.
Bear in mind it was 1992, Gore was on the Democratic ticket as VP, or he was in the running to be. No one running for any sort of national office in the US can afford to be seen as weak on "national security". And in 1992, that meant wetting yourself over Saddam. Whether Gore actually believed it or not is irrelevant.
Furthermore, you can throw up as many "proofs" as you want, the fact remains that despite extensive searching US forces found no stockpiles of WMD. Just accept it...move on.
"Whether Gore actually believed it or not is irrelevant."
Pretty much describes Gore's subsequent PR career, don't you think?
"... the fact remains that despite extensive searching US forces found no stockpiles of WMD."
And the fact remains that given Saddam's well-documents behaviour, we were entitled to believe he had WMD, and (given his own genocide) that he would use them.
I'm sending you 2 Glenn Greenwald books. I always order several to justify the outrageous postage from Amazon. I have not yet given up hope of your improvement.
Bush has been absolutely lawless -and that's why McCain has long been enthusiastically supported by the country's most crazed warmongers - like Lindsay Perigo.
McCain is even more irrational than Giuliani -- he is pro-life and is a far more conventional conservative on social issues. I hope Peikoff doesn't back down.
Give the books away if you don't want them.
It's true that Saddam couldn't be trusted to be straightforward about his WMD's, but the point that you consitently miss is that those of us who opposed the war did not do so on the basis of Saddam's word.
At least one former UN weapons inspector confirmed that in his opinion Iraq had been "comprehensively disarmed", many of the proofs offered were swiftly exposed as at best sloppy intelligence (Powell's UN speech, Blair's speech to Parliament) or outright fakes (the alleged uranium from Niger), many of the same people arguing for war, specifically Powell and Rice, were both on record only a year or so before the war drums began to beat as dismissing any notion that Saddam was a threat.
I mean, didn't you find ANY of this just a little bit suspiscious?
Anon - but the point that you consitently miss is that those of us who opposed the war did not do so on the basis of Saddam's word.
Anon, you must be an idiot. The WMD was used as a cover. The US went into Iraq to remove the fucker from power, since in the long run, Saddam would have consistently given headaches to those in Washington (administration of the day) who had to finance the securities of the majority of the Gulf states who cannot defend themselves on their own. The other issue was the policing of Iraq against violations of the existing UN charters, such as the no-fly zone. Remove the fucker and all the existing problems gone. Now, there is no need for regular flights to police the no-fly zone, since it is very expensive to do this sort of operations. You can't run such an operations indefinitely and at some point, you have to stop it.
WMD was a non-issue, whether they found it or not. WMD had been used by anti-US nutters to say that the war was illegal, if that is the case, I have news for you. The bombing of Serbia/Kosovo was illegal , since the UN didn't authorize it. But hey, if the occupation by Nato of Kosovo after the bombing campaign had been unstable since then (suicide bombings, massacres), such as we're seeing in Iraq today, there would have been protests & calls by lefties to say, see, we told you, don't intervene in Serbia/Kosovo or the bombing was illegal since it wasn't authorized by the UN security council.
Get your head over the US involvement in Iraq. You don't help ordinary Iraqis who had been living under the repression of Saddam. All you do is bark from a distance. Its a US policy, with their US soldiers blood they sacrifice in Iraq for their own interests and security concerns. There is no NZ soldier in there.
How about you do something useful, like protest very hard against Mugabe or Sudan. Thugs in Sudan had killed more people in Dafur than those in Iraq as a result of the US invasion . Similar thing for Mugabe, the people there are so desperate, go and do something good there or lobby for someone to do something. Don't worry about Iraq, because the US is doing all the good thing there to bring the country into prosperity and a good democracy. It is tough at the moment, but Iraq will emerge as a successful economy and democracy in the future and now that is worth it for the US to invade. Dafur? Zambabwe? Watch those countries descend into chaos, not cause by the US, but by thuggers. Compare that to what the US is doing in Iraq? I bet you that Zambabweans if they're given the choice of US occupations or Mugabe, then I can guarantee you that a five year old would know the answer.
Mikeby
I never said the war was "illegal", simply that the justification explicitly proffered for it turned out to be false. Given that fact, people are perfectly entitled to criticise what was clearly an unnecessary war.
Was the war in Iraq necessary? Whatever the case, it has had the interesting effect of causing the Islamo-fascists to direct much attention and invest much of their resources in that country instead of elsewhere.
LGM
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