Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1988 Editor's Choice: 19
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We knew it was wrong and we said so, Joe
[Read the article: The war, the vote and the Republicans' priorities]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Tiberius,
I, and many others who comment here, spoke out and tried our damnedest to keep this war from starting. We knew it was a bad idea before the war. We listened to Hans Blix, to Mohammed El Baradei, and we knew Saddam Hussein had no nuclear program, no weapons of mass destruction. We told whoever would listen that the Sunni, Shi'a, and Kurdish factions in Iraq would fall into conflict if we invaded. We knew that the stuff being pushed about Ansar and about Saddam Hussein having such complete control over the country that he must have supported Zarqawi was not true, and we said so. We said so because we saw a quagmire coming. We said so because the United States had a standing policy against preemptive war dating back at least to our criticism of the Japanese during World War II. We said so because we didn't want our soldiers blood spilt over specious excuses in Iraq. We said so because we had friends we didn't want to have to go. We said so because we didn't want the "ships of state to rush and drown in sand."
The responsibility of telling the troops what came of their losses lies with those, like yourself, who advocated this war. Don't try to hang the day of reckoning when we stand before the people who have sacrificed and admit the war was not a good idea on those who said so when saying so should have made a difference. For once in your life, take responsibility for your opinions and actions, and your support for the Iraq war. Cassandra was not to blame for the Trojan Horse.
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@Robert Franklin
[Read the article: The Bill Moyers documentary on our failed and barren press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Actually Robert, El Baradei said that he found no evidence of a program to create nuclear weapons. He was subsequently accused of aiding and abetting by the Bush people (probably on strength that he was a Muslim).
What Blix said, in testimony to the U.N. Security Council, when he delivered the last (?) report before the war started, the one where he asked for 3 more months to inspect, was that he personally believed there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but that as a weapons inspector, he needed to be sure before he could say that, so he could only say that it was improbable and that he hadn't found them. Were he to have 3 more months to look, he could say for sure.
The whole history of a lot of the numbers for the non-nuclear WMD supposedly in Iraq is interesting, because the numbers on botulinum and ricin and so forth come from a single weapons destruction site. Apparently, early after the Gulf War, the Iraqis believed that the faster they destroyed all the contentious weapons, the faster the sanctions would be lifted, so they piled a whole lot of them in one place and bombed or burnt it. Since it wasn't done in an orderly manner, the site was so contaminated that the weapons inspectors could not get close enough to it to find out exactly what was destroyed there. That began the discrepancy between the Iraqi count and the U.N. count, where the U.N. said that a certain quantity of the listed weapons (on the manifests provided to the U.N. by the Iraqis) could not be accounted for, the Iraqis claiming they were destroyed at that site, the weapons inspectors saying that might be true but they couldn't check them off until they could account for them.
Along came the neo-cons, and assumed that all unaccounted for weapons were part of an Iraqi arsenal. The figures that Colin Powell ended up quoting at the U.N. were all either the disputed stocks, or an extrapolation from those disputed stocks.
Like the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, which started from a theory that there were two Iraqi generals with the same name, and the one that CIA vetted and determined hadn't met with bin Laden was the "other one", not the one who met with bin Laden in Sudan, it all starts from one piece of misinterpreted data.
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Also known as...
[Read the article: The war, the vote and the Republicans' priorities]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...gambler's ruin.
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No, but I get your point, WeikuBoy
[Read the article: The Bill Moyers documentary on our failed and barren press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I suspect the scientific and academic world is a tad more democratic than U.S. war policy in 2002-03. Peer-reviewed literature, and all that.
The scientific community is still interested in the thing that Moyers and Pincus said the press gave up on years ago -- uncovering the facts. It is not democratic, it does not vote on truth, and although it tries to air all sides of a controversy, it also tries to decide without reference to popularity.
But I agree that the press and the politicians might learn something there.
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But he did not admit to the context Cheney used
[Read the article: Tenet: Bush, Cheney went to war with no "serious debate"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]He admitted to using the words "slam dunk". So what? He used them, apparently, in reference to the fact that a lackluster presentation justifying going into Iraq could be made less lackluster. That's very far afield from what Cheney asserted. If Tenet's version of the meeting is accurate, then Cheney just plain lied. And, when asked, the Administration is carefully refusing to dispute Tenet on this one.
Why should anyone believe him? No one says we should believe everything he says. But he was there for all the decisions, so we should at least hear what he has to say.
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Doesn't anybody remember what the "blackface" post was about?
[Read the article: The Dan Gerstein sham]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It was about a flyer distributed by the Lieberman campaign asserting that Ned Lamont was a racist. I read the post, I saw the picture, I didn't think she had much to apologize for.
Being tagged as a left wing nutjob racist by Michelle Malkin isn't a credible part of anyone's reputation. It's hardly what anybody who bothers to read what Jane Hamsher writes would refer to as "having a past."
Glenn's point is that Dan Gerstein has both a past and a present.