Interesting reading this and then this.
The former is a New York Times article on the highly partisan (all Democrats approved, only 2 Republicans approved) Senate report which--no surprise here--endorses the Democrat talking points on the war in Iraq.
The 170-page report accuses Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.
FYI: Snowe has a 28% Conservative Union rating for 2007; Hagel has a 79%. Just sayin'.
The second story is by the intellegentsia at Pandagon, who must not have read the rest of the NYT piece where it stated:
The report on the prewar statements about Iraq found that on some key issues — most notably Iraq’s purported nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs — the public statements from Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other senior officials were generally “substantiated” by the best estimates at the time from American intelligence agencies. But the report found that the administration officials’ statements usually did not reflect the intelligences agencies’ uncertainties about the evidence or disputes among them.
Maybe all these brilliant writers never took debate, but usually, when one is making an argument, one emphasizes facts that help your argument and downplay points that don't help it. Using the NYT system, when running for re-election in 1996, Bill Clinton should have spent as much time discussing, say, his Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, failure of his attempted takeover of the health care industry, and scandals involving the White House travel office and misuse of FBI files as his accomplishments as president.
Side note: notice the NYT's use of quotation marks around "substantiated," a technique used by supposedly "objective" journalists to inject their opinions into news stories. If I use quotation marks around "reporters," it questions whether they are "reporters," right?
The Pandagon post badly mangles the NYT story, using it as a jumping off point to complain that instead of invading Iraq and taking out Saddam Hussein--a ruthless dictator who had tried to have a U.S. president assassinated--we should have taken out Robert Mugabe--a ruthless dictator who hasn't tried to have a U.S. president assassinated. Or rather, the poster says he doesn't want us to take out Mugabe...or something.
This isn’t to say that a military invasion of Zimbabwe should have been tossed on the pile - exactly the opposite. But it is to say that the gross abuse of the world’s trust might have been ameliorated, ever so slightly, had Bush actually attempted to obscure the massive fuckup he was about to embark on by engaging other spots around the world where the direct intervention of an American president with what was, at that time, large-scale support and sympathy could have truly done some good.
This sounds, to me, like, "After 9/11, when the world was united in sympathy with us, we should have used that in some completely unrelated corner of the world where people were not, in fact, trying to kill us."
I'm not sure that I buy the logic of squandering the post-9/11 good will on the perennial problems in Africa, particularly since--using good liberal logic--there was no causal link between African totalitarian dictators and Islamic extremists flying airplanes into American buildings. Even if you buy the argument that Saddam Hussein wasn't involved in 9/11 (the causal link), he was most certainly problematic for the U.S. with regards to Middle Eastern stability and support for American enemies. But then, the post didn't seem to be long on logic in the first place.
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