McClellan says he believed in Bush as war started

Friday 30th May, 06:44 AM JST

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Jahdog at 01:45 PM JST - 1st June

What is hilarious is to see all these democrats now treating McLellans word as gospel... the same they would not have believed a single word from, just a few years ago. But then, of course, now he says what they want to hear.

Yeah, that's hilarious! They didn't believe a single word when he was repeating administration lies! then, when he says the administration lied the US into war, right after it's revealed that former generals posing as independent analysts at TV networks were working for weapons makers and Rumsfeld, they believe him. Go figure.

Confederacy of Dunces: a president swept up by his own propaganda and a grand plan of seeding democracy in the Middle East by overturning Saddam Hussein’s regime; aides so wrapped up in trying to shape the story to their political advantage that they ignored facts that did not fit the picture; national security adviser "more interested in figuring out where the president stood and just carrying out his wishes while expending only cursory effort on helping him understand all the considerations and potential consequences” of war...

6/97: PNAC statement: the use of military power and bold global leadership will be essential elements of any plan to bring peace and security to the world. (signed) Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, et al http://bigpicture.typepad.com/writing/2003/10/iraqiinvasion.html

7/11: FBI agent Kenneth Williams sends memo to bureau brass in Washington and New York warning of OBL disciples at U.S. flight schools... http://bigpicture.typepad.com/writing/2004/04/nobodytoldus.html

9/11: NORAD commander Gen.Eberhart: planes could have been stopped had there been order within the chain of command. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/18/politics/18PANE.html http://www.truthout.org/article/norad-commander-911-planes-could-have-been-stopped
Zaphod at 02:52 PM JST - 1st June

Jahdog:

" Yeah, that's hilarious! They didn't believe a single word when he was repeating administration lies! "

Translation: When he says what you want to hear, he is a great guy who tellst the truth. When doesn't say what you want to hear, he is "repeating administration lies".

Figures.

Again, what is amazing is to see the new hero of the democrats... Scott McLellan...
buddha4brains at 03:27 PM JST - 1st June
Zaphod, Jahdog, et al:
```
"" Yeah, that's hilarious! They didn't believe a single word when he was repeating administration lies! "
```
Translation: When he says what you want to hear, he is a great guy who tellst the truth. When doesn't say what you want to hear, he is "repeating administration lies".

Figures.

Again, what is amazing is to see the new hero of the democrats... Scott McLellan..."

Is that it? Like McCellan, you offer nothing new to say.

Very few believe McCellan because he said something. In fact most claim he has said nothing new in his book that has not been said before. Hardly a hero, but the sideshow is entertaining.
Madverts at 05:41 PM JST - 1st June

"I remember the humanitarian angle because I was was one of the only people here talking about it. Adverts will back me up on that."

I will. He did.
SezWho2 at 08:57 PM JST - 1st June

SuperLib,

I think if you were "one of the only" people here talking about it, that was because others had already considered it and dismissed it. (This includes people around the world and at the UN and not just here on this message board where people get notoriously off track.) Nonetheless, I think that if you ever brought up the humanitarian angle with me I would have addressed it with you, just as I am addressing it even now. I'm not much of one to run from an argument or to shift the subject.

The time to consider the humanitarian angle for invasion, was pre-invasion not now. That much at least, cannot be absurd. You are right that there was considerable talk about "no blood for oil" or revenge because "Saddam tried to kill his daddy"--but not from me. However, those theories primarily refute the humanitarian argument by asserting that there was another motive.

And I think there obviously was. My point was always that the humanitarian angle did not justify going to war in the first place. And in the second place, it was not the reason that the administration herded us into war. We may never fully know the mental processes that got us into Iraq, but the clear casus belli was the assertion of WMDs and the danger of Iraq as a terrorist state. The former was (at best) mistaken as the inspectors (who we now want to believe about Iran) had repeatedly indicated and the second was vastly overplayed and pale in terms of other threats.

Any humanitarian concerns that the administration had were offered up to win support for a war it wanted. It would seem that if you did not buy any of the other arguments you at least bought this one.
zurcronium at 09:44 PM JST - 1st June

Humanitarian?

Killing a million people and displacing 3 million more? Is that what Bush and the echo bunnies on this board wanted to accomplish?

Can there be a better definition of failure that the bush administration and a better defintion of pathetic than the rightwingers who still spin the failed invasion and resulting chaos?

The lies remain the same, only the aliases change weekly to hide the guilty.
Betzee at 11:13 PM JST - 1st June

"I remember the humanitarian angle because I was was one of the only people here talking about it. Adverts will back me up on that."

But in knee-jerk rather than sophisticated fashion (which would have required some knowledge of history). By contrast, Francis Fukuyama did outline the various options before disassociating himself with the neocon movement:

Speficially, he wondered why Bush never proposed a more convincing justification for invading Iraq — based not just on a fear of Saddam Hussein's weapons (which could have been expressed in a non-alarmist fashion), nor just on the argument for human rights and humanitarianism, which Bush did raise, after a while. A genuinely cogent argument, as Fukuyama sees it, would have drawn attention to the problems that arose from America's prewar standoff with Hussein. The American-led sanctions against Iraq were the only factor that kept him from building his weapons. The sanctions were crumbling, though. Meanwhile, they were arousing anti-American furies across the Middle East on the grounds (entirely correct, I might add) that America was helping to inflict horrible damage on the Iraqi people. American troops took up positions in the region to help contain Hussein — and the presence of those troops succeeded in infuriating Osama bin Laden. In short, the prewar standoff with Hussein was untenable morally and even politically. But there was no way to end the standoff apart from ending Hussein's dictatorship.

To get back to McClellan's point, and many posters seem eager to avoid mentioning him at all, selling a war on these grounds would have been a complicated endeavor. Better to go with the thirty-second soundbite emphasizing Saddam's lethal WMD arsenal for which the only patriotic response was a "preemptive strike."
SuperLib at 11:22 PM JST - 1st June

My point was always that the humanitarian angle did not justify going to war in the first place.

Taking each point on it's own it's difficult to justify the invasion. But the entire body of evidence makes a more compelling argument: the humanitarian conditions, the invasions of other countries, the refusal to cooperate with the UN based on terms he agreed to. It wasn't just one thing, and it wasn't just about the past. There was a future cost to keeping him in power. Milosovich wasn't nearly the menace that Saddam was yet Europe didn't seem to have a problem firing up the jets and going in there.

In the end I'm not saying you have to agree with me and support the use of force. I'm saying there's a compelling argument that's a lot more than "a war based on lies" which is what others have reduced it to. That concept completely and entirely removes Saddam and his crimes from the table and that's an absurd thing to do.

it was not the reason that the administration herded us into war.

I didn't ask you to believe the administration. I've said from day 1 that the link to Al Queda is completely bogus. And that's why I can say that I supported the invasion but I'm no Bush lover.

But your answer shows the difficulty of getting the question into the discussion. I bring up the humanitarian and other reasons that one could justify the use of force, and it all gets wiped off of the table with the old "Bush didn't talk about that" response.
Betzee at 11:31 PM JST - 1st June

zucromium, I saw your brother's name mentioned in the NYT's yesterday in conjunction with the McClellan revelations along with the circumstances of his death, e.g. looking for WMDs after David Kay had said they didn't exist.

Here we go with SuperLib again:

And when I look at situations in Burma and North Korea and the people that have died or are dying now and I think the world bears some responsibility for not doing anything about it. If those people were white the West would have acted, period.

Presumably it's others who have to do the acting while he remains comfortably ensconced on his high horse far from danger.
Madverts at 12:41 AM JST - 2nd June

zurc,

"The lies remain the same, only the aliases change weekly to hide the guilty."

Heh, one of them is even using yours:

http://www.japantoday.com/member/view/zurcromium1

Nothing like radical right-wing Denial to cheer up your day.
Madverts at 12:48 AM JST - 2nd June

Superlib,

If we had spent half the money that has been wasted on the invasion funding opposition to Saddam, or even assasinating him could quite possibly have had the esired effect.

Removing the head of state from Iraq and in the process destroying the whole countries' infra-structure, armed forces and way of life has not been a humanitarian business....in the slightest.

Unless things get a lot better and soon, defending the invason from a saving lives point of view will be impossible IMHO.
Betzee at 02:14 AM JST - 2nd June

There's a number of different themes which could have been explored on this thread. Off the top of the bat is the tendency of just about everyone to cash in on public service. I find it discomforting, and I doubt I'm alone here, but others might argue this is capitalism and necessary to get good people into government jobs.

Then there's the issue of a "spill your guts" memoir such as the one Scott McClellan has written. I haven't heard anyone dispute the contents, though the book has not yet hit the shelves, only criticism that he was disloyal. In other words, a snitch. Yet to whom does he owe his loyalty? The country or the administration that brought him onboard?

This is essentially a crime story which is why it won't go away (and all the attempts to make it about Saddam will never succeed). People want resolution on the issue of whether GWB "lied" rather than simply making a judgement call based on the evidence available. He was stuck with the story he told, otherwise why would soldiers have been risking their lives looking for WMD after David Kay, the administration's hand-picked inspector who conducted an exhaustive and expensive search, declared "there weren't any"?

Recently I watched the documentary Body of War which details the life of a young man who was left paralyzed by the same Madhi Army attack that killed Casey Sheehan. He'd been in Iraq less than two weeks. At one point, he and his mother are seen watching GWB yuck it up at that annual journalists' dinner with a little "Now where are those WMD? Nope, not under here!" comedy routine. A close-up shows Joseph Lieberman finding it very funny. As the mother of the 20-something disabled for life soldier observes, "They are so insulated." I guess that got to McClellan.
SezWho2 at 07:29 PM JST - 2nd June

SuperLib,

I don't think the humanitarian issue gets wiped off the table with a "Bush didn't talk about that" response. I don't think it gets wiped off the table at all. It is there and it has been there for quite a while. It is still there.

It was there before the invasion of Kuwait and it was there during the flyovers and sanctions. People were talking about what Saddam was doing in Iraq and people were talking about the effect of our sanctions on the people of Iraq. Bush eventually talked about it. The humanitarian issue was much talked about--and still is with the question of whether we have made the situation better or worse, if better whether stably so and if worse whether ameliorable..

However, whatever Europe may have believed about the relative dangers of Milosevic and Saddam and whatever European governments decided or consented to do about Milosevic, there was no agreement--except possibly among the governments (but not the people) of the Coalition countries--that humanitarian concerns justified an invasion of Iraq. I think the counter argument proceeded along the lines that peace in the Middle East runs through Palestine and not Iraq and that war was the wrong way to bring about humanitarian relief and was unlikely to be successful.

It didn't help that Bush was perceived to be dishonest in his approach to the war, but that was not the main reason that people rejected the humanitarian case for war. You're right that there were a constellation of problems in Iraq, yet taken as a whole--and including the humanitarian concern--there was still no agreement that war was a good idea.
Madverts at 09:20 PM JST - 2nd June

Sez,

Not only talked about it, a lot of the stuff was actually in-correct.

Remember the "inubabtor babies" story that Bush 41 rallied soldiers with, where the girl testfying turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, USA and a liar?

And what happened to all the Saddam doubles?
Betzee at 09:30 PM JST - 2nd June

GWB did not ask Congress for a use of force authorization for a grab bag of reasons. It was to be a bargaining chip to get Saddam to disarm. As David Kay, a rare civil servant with integrity, observed in a spring 2004 interview:

If you say you are going to war because he has weapons of mass destruction, and you don’t find those weapons, it is not persuasive to jump to a second argument when that didn’t work but here I have a second explanation.....

I don’t think there was a surprise about the conclusions I was drawing...I think the surprise woud be that he would speak out and say that....

I had the privilege, although I didn’t see it as a privilege, of watching a lot of senior government officials come to agonizing terms about Vietnam and decide not to speak out because they knew they’d never be asked to lunch again. They wouldn’t be part of the process. And I think like a lot of people of my age and my generation who were in the government, by no means unique to me, I just decided that if ever the occasion came I simply wasn’t going to live like that. There wasn’t a lunch or part of a process that was important enough....

http://www.truthuncovered.com/UNCOVEREDtranscript.pdf