Swings and Roundabouts

Female vote up, Hispanic vote up. What more can I ask?

Damn! Wrong user name.

Powell appears to be a decent man, but he is too linked to Iraq.

jen,

Imagine that Hillary, as Secretary of State, objects to specific policies that Obama is putting forward. Is it her job to oppose him once those policies are decided or is it her job to do her best to push those policies through? Sure, she can argue her case to him in private. But publically, what is her job?

This is how I see Colin Powell. The War Within the Whitehouse was an excellent documentary. Powell came out of it looking principled and loyal, unusual in this day and age. He fought the battle behind closed doors. He lost. And then he went out and did his job.

Powell knowingly misled the UN and the world.

I hope the right wing nutbags get their candidate (not Powell) and destroy their party in the process.

I hope that the Republicans gradually recover, move more to the centre, and become a decent opposition party that always comes close to winning elections but never quite does …

asanque,

It’s cynicism. Low expectations mean that I am rarely disappointed. 🙂

In a democracy, a strong opposition is required. Look at the horror that is New South Wales …

Is Powell the Turnbull of the Republican party? A moderate in a party that’s so riven with loopy fruits that he just does not stand a chance of pulling it all together?

Interesting parallel.

While there is no doubt Powell was espousing the stuff he was given to espouse at the UN he isn’t exactly what he is currently being projected to be.
Colin Powell has a history of blindly doing his superiors bidding on more than one occasion.
The first blot on his copybook was the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam where he was instremental in attempts to whitewash the issue.

He was also in the forefront of the Iran Contragate issue as well.
Some US veterans organisations are not overly impressed with General Powell and if he wished to go places i would suggest he may get there quick on some swift boats.
He is definitely a yes man when he is doing his bosses bidding when he should know better.

Powell also helped with damage control after the U.S. government’s failed attempt to kill Libya’s Moammar Khadafy – a bombing raid which instead killed one of the Libyan leader’s children. In January 1986, the political general again blindly obeyed his superiors and secretly transferred U.S. TOW missiles to Iran without the approval or knowledge of Congress.

http://www.usvetdsp.com/story13.htm

I would hardly say that Powell was instrumental in whitewashing the massacre, given that what he was asked to investigate was a letter accusing US personnel of bullying Vietnamese and which did not make any mention of the massacre ….

well, as long as they were massacring them and not bullying them….

jen

?

Here’s what Powell could do to redeem himself.
1. Quit the Republican party and join the Democrats (a la Specter).
2. Spill all on the inner depraved workings of the Bush Regime.

Anything else is just fluff.

17 DG
If there’s one thing wrong with the world and politics these days, its the complete lack of accountability.

Whilst a strong opposition typically would assist in ensuring the government is accountable, all I see is the Republicans trying to block everything just because its what Obama is suggesting.

I can’t see the Republicans in the near future having the ability nor the intelligence as a strong opposition of being able to differentiate between good public policy and their own interests.

Although, I do see your point regarding NSW Labor and the effects of no real opposition 🙂

Agree totally with Asanque and gaffhooks summing up of Colin Powell.

At best – a bootlicker extraordinaire

At worst – a recidivist war criminal

Some initial reading of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination:

-She is Barack Obama in a skirt, yet with differing outward personalities. A remarkable journey.

-She is not as liberal in her thought as her history and rhetoric suggests. Although, on the whole, she seems a reliable mainly progressive/liberal vote. Labour unions will love her.

-If you were a political animal( ie a chicago democrat) with an opponent on the ropes( ie The Republicans) she is manna from heaven…pass the popcorn and watch the trogs annhialate themselves.

the url for that article is:

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/UPDATE-2-Russia-breaks-wall-into-US-nuclear-market-SENCT?OpenDocument

Have a look at this. Grit TV. Laura Flanders – Fire Dog Lake.

http://lauraflanders.firedoglake.com/

It may have been running last year, but I have only just found it. The quicker Kevin Rudd fixes our Internet downloads and speeds up the Internet the better.

and btw- i don’t think Powell is an evil liar – i think he is of the school that did as they were ordered regardless.
Toast.

Powell wasn’t intentionally deceiving anyone. Even Tenet wasn’t deliberately deceiving anyone, although he sure was deceiving himself.

There were basically two divisions of the CIA who knew about Curveball’s story, which came via German intelligence. The spooks on the one hand had serious reservations because there was no verification and they hadn’t actually had access to Curveball for historical reasons. On the other hand, the nerds, the tech heads, were convinced his ‘evidence’ fitted with the technological requirements of brewing biological weapons, so, they figured, he had to be telling the truth.

There was some real barneys over who was right, and the nerds won because, well, they couldn’t be disproved and the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabals didn’t want to hear anything else.

Tenet was their lapdog, and he broke every rule in the intelligence gathering handbook to let this flimsy fraud get stove-piped into the Whitehouse with no caveats.

Powell, suspicious, could not do anything but accept what Tenet convinced him was rock solid intelligence.

Life is not so simple as goodies and baddies. It’s more a tale told by an idiot, as the man said.

When David Kay rushed up to Washington to meet Bush and Cheney he told the President it was all rubbish, there where no WMD. Bush simply had no idea until well after the war. He’d been duped too.

It’s interesting to note it’s Cheney running around trying desperately to shore up the story. Bush on the other hand must have eventually realised he’d been played by Cheney, and it must have been a pretty awful moment when he finally did.

45

It’s interesting to note it’s Cheney running around trying desperately to shore up the story. Bush on the other hand must have eventually realised he’d been played by Cheney, and it must have been a pretty awful moment when he finally did.

Yeah Kirri that is exactly as i see it. When all these top cats are coming out and saying that lots of things did not go past Darth to Shrub. That gives reason to isolate Darth and i remarked on the previous thread, IMHO A backroom deal has been done with shrub because the dope was duped and the deal is; Shrub continues to go free but for that nobody stands in the way of us rounding up Darth for his day in the sunshine.

Yeah, I’m with you on that one Catrina. Powell is light years ahead of any of the pedestrian excuses the Republicans could offer.

KR,
Nothing profound in saying that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Addington, Horowitz, Perle, Libby, Ledeen et al were behind the Iraq push.

Nothing profound in saying that Powell, Tenet and Bush knew that what was being peddled was absolute garbage.

Profound…now that would be saying Powell or Tenet “didn’t intentionally decieve anyone” LOL

Oh. Thanks for linking that. I’ve done the same myself.

Even if the intelligence was at all justified:
1. Why didn’t the US simply hand it to the UN weapon inspectors who were in Iraq at the time and allow them to verify?!
2. Even if Iraq could have hidden the weapons of mass destruction, with the UN in Iraq, they were no threat whatsoever with the close scrutiny.

Making the Iraq was the most illogical justification for a war in the modern era (i.e. illegal).

Now if only someone had the guts to pursue these scumbags…

The Huffington Post started four years ago it now has nearly nine million viewers. That is equivalent to cable TV stuff. Fire Dog Lake is following in their footsteps. The interesting thing is (and good thing) they are both run by women.

Jen @ 44, I thought you might have liked that bit. 🙂

It’s interesting to see how people think Powell and Bush must have known that Saddam did not have WMD. Funny, but they kept sending CIA teams in to find them AFTER the invasion, put troops in gas masks for the invasion, and made every appearance of people convinced of their assertions.

What some people seem to be missing is the capacity for self-deception, group think, and the fevered echo chamber of the intelligence world who in the lead up to the invasion were all sending the same (mis)-information to each other.

People also forget that immediately upon invading security went to shit in Iraq because the US was running around looking for the WMD. Don’t let short memories re-write history. The US administration bought its own story, it had become an article of faith, and every failure to find them was ‘proof’ of how devious Saddam’s regime had been.

It’s far too glib to just see Cheney et al as ‘evil’, knowingly concocting a war with ‘cooked’ intelligence, but that is so simplistic and wrong as to be laughable. These people had become a cult, for which no doubt was allowed, any other point of view heresy, and they totally believed what they were doing was to ‘protect America’.

Remember, they’d only just witnessed the most audacious attack on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers. It was a horrifying and traumatic set of events and they were desperate to make sure it didn’t happen again with radioactive or biological consequences.

Iraq had WMD. It used them in the 1980’s, killing thousands of Kurds and Iranians. Iraq did have a nuclear facility. The Israelis bombed it. Iraq did import chemicals agents for weapons.

And after the Gulf War II there was still a lot of unaccounted for bio-agents, enough to create the germ (pun intended) of doubt about what Saddam still had.

Sorry folks, life is more complex than story book ‘goodies and badies’ who behave in stereotypical ways.

KR,

They knew he had WMD: Rumsfeldt sold them to him, after all. 😉

I agree. And I also think that the motives for invading Iraq were complex, given that the call for invasion came from many different quarters and from people with differing and often contradictory views.

As a supporter of the invasion of Iraq, I can relate that while my personal motive was relatively one dimensional, I understood that there were certainly motives in play at the US governmental level that I disagreed with … and ones that I agreed with.

KR and DG – for all your assertions otherwise, I see you have not addresed the 2 primary questions as set out in my post of 57.

Which is that even if the US were convinced that Iraq had WMD, they were no imminent threat (remember Iraq gave full co-operation and UN weapon inspectors were in Iraq).
The US were desperate to concoct the legitimacy of an invasion and led the charge through gross stupidity or wilful blindness.

I suggest you re-visit your own memory of the period, as my memory is crystal clear. The revisionists are those that suggest that Bush and co might actually have a genuine belief that Iraq has WMD and an imminent possibility of use, when the entire world and the UN was asking for legitimate proof.

asanque,

Iraq did not give full cooperation.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/22/1061513785551.html

It is clear that the UN weapons inspectors *believed that there were WMDs there* and that the reason that *they* could not find them was because Iraq was *not* cooperating.

Regarding cooperation, it has always mystified me why Saddam Hussein, who must have *known* that he had no WMDs, didn’t cooperate fully. Ego, I presume: he could not admit to the Arab world that Iraq no longer had chemical and biological capability, and was behind Iran in nuclear research.

[‘In 1998 Iraq accused Butler and other UNSCOM officials of acting as spies for the United States, but the UNSCOM weapons inspectors were not expelled from the country by Iraq as has often been reported (and as George W. Bush alleged in his infamous “axis of evil” speech). Rather, according to Butler himself in his book Saddam Defiant (2000), it was U.S. Ambassador Peter Burleigh, acting on instructions from Washington, who suggested Butler pull his team from Iraq in order to protect them from the forthcoming U.S. and British airstrikes. A number of media reports in the United States suggested that there was some substance to the spying allegations and to the charge that he was tailoring UNSCOM’s findings to suit the United States. Eric Fournier, a French diplomat who served as Butler’s deputy at UNSCOM in 1998, told an Australian journalist, Christopher Kremmer, that the US bombing of Iraq in 1998 — which made the UNSCOM mission untenable — occurred “because Richard Butler reported that the Iraqis had not cooperated with inspections, even though more than three hundred had taken place in a few weeks and only a handful had been a problem. Three out of three hundred did not go perfectly smoothly…the report, drafted like that, was a good excuse for some members of the Security Council to take action”.[1] Fournier also told Kremmer that Butler at one point sounded positive about closing the disarmament issue. But then he received a call from the state department who weren’t happy with a positive outcome in Iraq.’]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Butler_(diplomat)

71 – DG

No one is denying the real politics.

What I am contesting is the logicial inconsistency of invading a country with supposed weapons of mass destruction, whilst another country that DEFINITELY has weapons of mass destruction was ignored.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Between_inspections:_1998-2002

[‘In late 2002 Saddam Hussein, in a letter to Hans Blix, invited UN weapons inspectors back into the country. Subsequently the Security Council issued resolution 1441 authorizing new inspections in Iraq. The carefully-worded UN resolution put the burden on Iraq, not UN inspectors, to prove that they no longer had weapons of mass destruction. The United States claimed that Iraq’s latest weapons declaration left materials and munitions unaccounted for; the Iraqis claimed that all such material had been destroyed, something which had been stated years earlier by Iraq’s highest ranking defector, Hussein Kamel. According to reports from the previous UN inspection agency, UNSCOM, Iraq produced 600 metric tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, VX and sarin, and nearly 25,000 rockets and 15,000 artillery shells, with chemical agents, that are still unaccounted for. In fact, in 1995, Iraq told the United Nations that it had produced at least 30,000 liters of biological agents, including anthrax and other toxins it could put on missiles, but that all of it had been destroyed.[citation needed]

In January 2003, United Nations weapons inspectors reported that they had found no indication that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons or an active program.’]

Sounds like pretty much full co-operation from Iraq to me.
As ludicrous as it was that they had to ‘prove’ that they had no WMD.

And given the UN were still in the country and Iraq were at least partially co-operating, they were no immediate threat.
Therefore, justification for war = 0.

asanque,

It wasn’t ‘ignored’. That was my point: different methods were applied because the situations were entirely different. There is no logical inconsistency there.

KR and DG – How exactly where Iraq a threat at a time?
Surely any invasion with a pretense of legitimacy had to prove an immediate threat?

And DG, lets talk about Hans Blix.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/31/1043804520548.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/20/iraq.usa
[‘The elimination of weapons of mass destruction was the declared main aim of the war. It is improbable that the governments of the alliance could have sold the war to their parliaments on any other grounds. That they believed in the weapons’ existence in the autumn of 2002 is understandable. Why had the Iraqis stopped UN inspectors during the 90s if they had nothing to hide? Responsibility for the war must rest, though, on what those launching it knew by March 2003.

By then, Unmovic inspectors had carried out some 700 inspections at 500 sites without finding prohibited weapons. The contract that George Bush held up before Congress to show that Iraq was purchasing uranium oxide was proved to be a forgery. The allied powers were on thin ice, but they preferred to replace question marks with exclamation marks.

They could not succeed in eliminating WMDs because they did not exist. Nor could they succeed in the declared aim to eliminate al-Qaida operators, because they were not in Iraq. They came later, attracted by the occupants. A third declared aim was to bring democracy to Iraq, hopefully becoming an example for the region. Let us hope for the future; but five years of occupation has clearly brought more anarchy than democracy.’]

Asanque, I never believed, was not convinced then, that Saddam was a threat to anyone in 2002, except to 20 odd million Iraqis. The hysteria of the US administration was self-inflicted, they always mistrusted Saddam (and he’d always given them good reason to), they’d been hit at home by terrorists, and they were desperate to over compensate for their not seeing it coming and stopping it in the first place.

That’s a lot of pressure. Imagine yourself in that position and then realising you had NO reliable intelligence assets within Iraq, you knew there had been large WMD programmes and you had Saddam playing games with UN inspectors.

How Curveball came into the game, lobbing into Germany in early 1999, seeking asylum, and so telling them any story to get in, get noticed, get looked after, and then his fabrications getting all the way through the CIA into the Whitehouse is a fascinating and bizarre story, but at no point did ANYONE except Curveball set out to deceive anyone intentionally. Even Curveball himself had no idea what he was saying was going to be used to justify a war.

I strongly urge you to read Bob Drogin’s book, with this quote from Frederick Forsyth on the cover, “The biggest fiasco in the history of secret intelligence”. Which is precisely what it was.

And even if the US truly believed the information from curveball was accurate.
Simply pass it to the UN for inspection, and leave them there for inspections indefinitely.

Problem solved.

They key point is that there was no immediate threat.

asanque,

I am wondering how you come to the conclusion that simply having a few hundred inspectors in Iraq could have prevented Iraq from, say, dropping some chemical munitions (assuming they had any) on US forces in Kuwait. Can you lay out the logic for me?

Kirri – I’m a bit unclear about your position. On one hand you are saying that you were against the Iraq war (as I well remember from previous discussions when we lived Over the Fence), but that somehow you see it as all understandable, if misguided.
huh?
WE were all loudly saying, from all over the world, that there was not enough credible evidence of WMD’s and that there needed to be more evidence. How is it OK that Bush, Powell, etc were prepared to accept such flimsy and disputed “evidence” when the average person in the street wasn’t. Surely you would expect they would need more proof than you or I, not less.

87 – DG

The principle of self-preservation.
Saddam whilst a brutal dictator was not an idiot.
What would he have accomplished by lobbing a few chemical munitions whilst the UN were in Iraq?
Complete annihilation of Iraq.

88 – DG
This is sounding more and more like an episode of 24. What possible gain could Iraq have by giving WMD to terrorists (are we talking random terrorists here, because Saddam was not in cahoots with al-qaeda)? Which again leads to the complete annihilation of Iraq by the US if it did happen. Alternatively, if that was justification for a war, then the US could just go waltzing into any country that has WMD without repercussions, such as Iran.

90 DG
My issue is that you and KR are using this paranoia as an excuse.

Our contention is that there was not a reasonable justification by any objective person that the steps the US took with the intelligence information was reasonable.

Whereas, I seem to be hearing, that the deluded Bush regime acted reasonably on the information they received, despite the numerous options they had available.

Dg @90 –
that all makes sense .Which is the whole point . It is absolutely not acceptable that a government with such power deludes itself into ultimately killing hundreds and thousands (at least) innocent people, and that it is whitewashed with the idea that somehow it is understandable ‘cos they were having a terrible time right then (due to a totally unrelated act of aggression) so they just got all in a tizz and got it wrong.
Don’t reckon I’d get away with that kind of an excuse to get out of a traffic violation.

jen at 95,

People get off things all the time with those excuses. Temporary insanity is a reasonable defence. 😉

86 and 94 – DG

How do you reconcile these two posts?

It seems you agree.
1. The US had many motives for invading Iraq (Post 86).
2. The US then used their belief (no matter how flawed), that Iraq had WMD to justify the invasion (Post 94).

The US had an agenda and then used whatever flimsy evidence was available to try and justify the invasion.

Which really gets us back to the original point.
The US were ‘wilfully blind’ or ‘recklessly indifferent’ as to what the evidence actually was. This was then deliberately spun to try and achieve their aim of an invasion of Iraq.

Either way they were equally culpable.