foxnews.com/story/0,2933,126124,00.html
WASHINGTON
[quote=“fred smith”]Sorry big difference. Saddam was obligated to prove his innocence. We were not obligated to prove his guilt. Big misperception there. He had committed several warlike acts and the ceasefire was premised on HIS compliance not or proof of his noncompliance. Get it? Anyway, who cares. He is gone and we have won. Onto the next battle. Do you think that the Iraqis are worse off? If so, why have 1.5 million returned to the country?
Why are nonIraqis more unhappy than the Iraqis? If the Iraqis are happy that Saddam is gone, what’s the big beef with people like Rascal?[/quote]
Precisely what in the hell does that have to do with how Bush tried to convince people that war was necessary?
Personally, I do agree that Iraq is better of without Saddam. He was a brutal dictator, and was so throughout his reign. Funny that Donnie Rumsfeld didn’t have such a hard-on for kicking Saddam’s ass back in '83, while they were selling him all those nasty WMDs.
[quote]do you cheer for the once-and-for-all of an enemy
whose hand our man don was on in '83
but who now exemplifies all evil
that’s what you get for shaking hands with people[/quote]
I’ll put this nice and simply for you Fred:
The end does not justify the means.
BTW, just to help:
Like I said - guilty until proven innocent. Isn’t one of the central tenets of the legal system the idea that the burden of proof lies not on the accused but on the accuser?
Saddam WAS proven guilty and several times during the inspection process he was caught trying to hide various wmds and programs so guess what he was found guilty so many times that no one believed him anymore. Those that did not want to act had strong financial motives including French, Russian and UN leaders to some degree German leaders and of course pacifists like George Galloway who were on his payroll.
Saddam had already been adjudged guilty by the world, including the UN. That was the reason for the UNSC cease fire agreement… i.e., he was obliged to account for the destruction or other disposal of WMD material that he claimed to have in possession. The UNSC cease fire agreement can be likened, if you will, to a parole or probation arrangement for Saddam.
He failed to comply with the terms of his parole/probation.
This has been discussed many times. This was NOT a case of guilty until proven innocent. It was a case of parole/probation violation.
*delete me. wrong window :s *
He was obligated to keep his nose clean. Please see Tigerman’s analogy to parole violation. That was the basis for the ceasefire and he was caught numerous times over the 12 years hiding things, developing things, etc. guilty guilty guilty and NOW we have new evidence that Saddam was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger and contrary to published reports, it was Wilson who was lying and that the reports state that the evidence is well founded. So? Where are those apologies? Hahahahaah we win again.
[quote=“Hans Blix in his 27 January 2003 report, obviously lying <img src=”{SMILIES_PATH}/RollEyes.gif" alt="
" title=“Oh brother!” />"]
Chemical weapons
The nerve agent VX is one of the most toxic ever developed.
[color=red]Iraq has declared that it only produced VX on a pilot scale, just a few tonnes and that the quality was poor and the product unstable.[/color] Consequently, it was said, that the agent was never weaponised. Iraq said that the small quantity of agent remaining after the Gulf War was unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.
[color=red]UNMOVIC, however, has information that conflicts with this account. There are indications that Iraq had worked on the problem of purity and stabilization and that more had been achieved than has been declared. Indeed, even one of the documents provided by Iraq indicates that the purity of the agent, at least in laboratory production, was higher than declared.
There are also indications that the agent was weaponised[/color]. In addition, there are questions to be answered concerning the fate of the VX precursor chemicals, which Iraq states were lost during bombing in the Gulf War or were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.
I would now like to turn to the so-called
Yes, “his followers” is pretty much everybody. If he lied to his followers, then he lied to everybody. It was meant to mean Bush’s coalition, but for some reason that easy solution didn’t come to me - until I read your post - and I settled for the far-inferior “followers.”
Almost sounds like something Spock would say about an alien, inferior race, doncha think? 
It’s hard to write one of these things by yourself; they’re almost always improved when they’re written by at least two people who are free to debate the terms a bit, throw out ideas, edit, etc. It’s an easy mistake to make to either over-write or under-write when only one writer creates a poll.
[quote=“The Magnificent Tigerman”][quote=“Hans Blix in his 27 January 2003 report, obviously lying <img src=”{SMILIES_PATH}/RollEyes.gif" alt="" title=“Oh brother!” />"]
Chemical weapons
[Blix makes many references to chemical-weapon existence in Iraq; this intelligence was largely supplied by the US Department of Defense, then: The investigation…is still proceeding…]
Biological weapons
[…it should be found and be destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision or else convincing evidence should be produced to show that it was, indeed, destroyed in 1991…][/quote][/quote]
Unfortunately for the US, Bush chose to interpret Blix’s report as evidence of the existence of WMDs (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, one of the more famous Rumsfeld assertions) - apparently. As you’ve pointed out, we do not know nor can we prove what Bush knew at this time, and we therefore cannot prove that he lied.
He chose further to use Blix’s report, which argued for the need for further inspections (while, it is true, taking full advantage of the US army that was bristling all around Iraq at the time Blix made it), as a wedge to justify an-already-preordained war on Iraq. It was heaped on with other Department of Defense distortions (which came largely from Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress; e.g., from guys like Curveball 
) and used to hurry the onset of the war.
Blix was thankful of the US army, but he saw its presence as a credible threat only. Blix wanted to use the US army and inspections to provide a complete account of Iraqi WMD programs while avoiding war if possible. Bush, on the other hand, had already decided to use the army to force Hussein out of Iraq; his only wish was for Blix to produce a smoking gun and then get the hell out of the way.
Even today, TMTM, comments like yours just go to show how Bush pulled off the war, how he was able to skirt the legal definition of ‘imminent threat’ yet take full advantage of its meaning.
In fact, comments like yours get at the heart of this very poll.
Bush should have followed the plan of Blix and the UN. Instead he chose to use both as pawns to justify an immediate-enough threat and, as it turned out, a totally unnecessary war.
While you agree that both instances were examples of lying, I see you’ve missed the nuance of my comparison. :s
The idea that, while not technically lying outright, Bush nonetheless misled Americans is pushing itself into mainstream American media circles- finally.
Yeah, I know, it took forever to get there - and yet some try to accuse the American news media of being liberally biased. Needless to say, this constant charge by American conservatives - ‘the liberal media’ and ‘the only reason Bush has problems with his policies is due to the liberal media’ - throroughly chaps my ass. In fact, it’s likely due to the Bushies’ manipulation of press access that has kept this topic - does Bush lie? - out of mainstream American media circles for so long now.
Anyway, here are two interesting views on the subject, three of you count Paul Krugman’s
First, Kevin Drum in an old discussion; you should click on the link and read the whole blog entry. Written nearly 11 months ago, it almost seems prescient now.
[quote=“Kevin Drum, at Calpundit”]September 19, 2003
A TAXONOMY OF LIES…The Bush administration tells a lot of different kinds of lies…um, untruths. What kinds are there?
Paul Krugman likes to focus on the brazen lie, the kind favored by Dick Cheney this weekend that finally got the press up in arms. As Krugman points out, this is the kind of lie where Bush says (during the 2000 election) that he’s going to take a trillion dollars out of Social Security and this will make the system stronger. It’s completely outrageous, but if you say it loudly enough and with enough confidence, people believe it. After all, no one would make up something that crazy unless it were actually true, right? … [/quote]
Matthew Iglesias has a newer interpretation of Bush’s misleading statements. Iglesias is better-connected than Drum (Iglesias writes for American prospect as well as his own weblog) so if this eventually - finally - gets into mainstream American discussion, it will likely be due more to Iglesias’s ideas than Drum’s.
From the same Hans Blix report TM cited earlier:
[quote]The implementation of resolution 687 (1991) nevertheless brought about considerable disarmament results. It has been recognized that more weapons of mass destruction were destroyed under this resolution than were destroyed during the Gulf War: large quantities of chemical weapons were destroyed under UNSCOM supervision before 1994. While Iraq claims
The Republicans talk a lot about “fighting war on the cheap” which seems to simply involve ideas like subcontracting everything over to Kellogg Brown & Root (a Halliburton subsidiary) and chuckling away while U.S. soldiers don’t get body armor, adequate food, night-vision goggles, etc.
Just think of the savings if we had kept using Hans Blix (not even on the U.S. payroll!) to scour Iraq with his boys. Result? Iraqis would have kept their heads down, WMDs would still not have been found, some 900+ US dead and 5000+ US wounded would have been avoided. 140,000 U.S. troops would have been ready and available for strikes anywhere else in the rest of the world instead of being bogged down in one country for the foreseeable future.
This would have made a lot of sense, but then the neocons had big hardons for Iraqi oil and no-bid contracts for Halliburton. A no-invasion strategy was right in front of the noses of the Bush administration, and yet we persisted with a plan that did nothing except waste a bunch of lives to benefit Bush’s closest buddies.
Gollee gee, I don’t think there is a difference …after all, one was a blow job, and the other mass murder…no different, really 
.
Both involved something getting blown.
Sorry I was too tired to read all this thread but in case no one mentioned it…I was disappointed when the option…Bush misled his followers and he lied all the time about WMDs in Iraq…was not a choice for the poll.