Well, now that apologists for the Junior no longer have the threat of imaginary WMDs to cling to, not even programs for creating WMDs, they are just trying to brazen out the charge of misleading the public to war by claiming that Saddam was just waiting to “ramp up production” so we had to get him before he could get us, even though there is no evidence that he was out to get us (see how insidious this plot is?). This is the perfect argument, since it can’t be disproven. It is what is also known as a fallacious argument, again, because it cannot be disproven.
But that was not how the war was sold. It was not sold as war on any country that has a highschool chemistry lab and "evil" intentions. "Intentions" are not enough. Using the "logic" of Bush apologists (for example Krauthammer) I think I can conclude that Bush is in fact a cross-dresser. The fact that we have not seen it or found the clothes proves even further that he is very adept at hiding this fact.
However, I will refrain from drawing this conclusion, since I (unlike Krauthammer) cannot read people's minds, so I have to rely on facts.
Actual items is a good place to start when addressing facts. Does Iraq have WMDs? Does Bush own any size 14 dresses? The FACTS suggest that the answers to these two questions are the same (although we haven't searched the white house closets, so...).
So let's cut to the chase, apologists want to claim this war was about the war on terror. Funny, I've heard that one before. Of course, Bush and his administration have claimed this. But they did more than just claim this, because someone in the admin realized that in order to convince more than just the 30% of the US electorate who would believe them if they said the moon is made of cheese that they would need an argument, not merely an assertion. Assertions are just not enough.
So Bush and his cronies made an argument, not a good one I'll admit, but it is the one they made and it is predictably tilted in their favor (in other words, they made damn sure that the burden of proof was easily met). Bush argued that Iraq represented a terror threat and that Hussein wanted to attack the US using terrorists in the future. Now, obviously, we can't summon evidence from the future, so what was the evidence of this alleged intention and threat? The evidence of this intention and threat, as asserted by the pResident and his administration, was that Iraq possessed WMD, and the possession of such weapons by Iraq "proved" that they intended to use these weapons on the US.
Now, as I mentioned, it was not a very good argument -- since possession of WMD does not necessarily imply intent to use WMD and even a one-time (or in our case, two-time) use under specific historical circumstances does not imply future use -- but there you have it, that was the argument, that any uncertainty regarding Iraq's future intentions and the threat they posed would be resolved by the discovery of WMD.
Only a curious thing happened -- no WMDs were found. The weapons that would "verify" the assertion of the terrorist "threat" simply did not exist, and hence the (already poor) argument--that possession of WMD implied the intent to practice terrorism--was invalidated. And so, since no WMD were found, then the argument supporting the assertion that Iraq posed a terrorist threat to the US collapsed like the house of cards it always was.
So, although the argument to go to war was couched in the language of the "war on terror," the evidence produced by the hundreds of millions of dollars over the thousands of hours of searches coordinated by hundreds if not thousands of operatives during the past six month exonerated Iraq according to BUSH'S OWN STANDARDS! Wrap your head around that one -- Bush's own argument for war disproves the allegation that Iraq posed a terrorist threat.
Need I also recount what Bush and Rumsfeld have already stated?: that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
That is why WMD are not just political fodder. Not only does the lack of any trace of WMD invalidate the very premise for this costly war, but they go to the heart of what is wrong with this regime: the fact that we cannot trust Bush to do the right thing. Not "guess" right, actually do his homework and act on the basis of fact, not ideology. The failure to find WMD highlights the tendency in ALL facets of this regime to prefer ideological fairy tales--just like his apologists are doing now--to a factual assessment of valid policy options. [We won't even get in to how these fairy tales always manage to benefit campaign contributors and/or election strategy.]
This war may have been about a lot of things, but the war on terror was not one of them. Here's a final confirmation of this, in case Bush's own original argument wasn’t enough: the war on terror involves a culprit named bin Laden.
So please, Junior, don't piss all over the memory of those who died in the terror attacks by trying to recruit them posthumously for your own imperial ideological projections. This war has made us less safe from terrorism, just as the CIA any many other patriotic Americans predicted it would.
5:21:55 PM
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