I thought that the Italians were behind the forgeries.
Wait, why would you want it NOT to be true?
Didn't Laura Rozen of Warandpiece follow this story down the rabbit hole and end up getting stonewalled at some point by Italian intelligence?
In the video clip McGovern explains that the VP's office farmed the job of forging the documents out to their "cottage industry of former intelligence agents, that did a rather amateurish job." "In very close touch with the Italians." "Like the 'plumbers.'"
Because it means that we are, and have been, more fucked than we knew? But I don't believe it -- surely Cheney could have had a better job of the forgeries done.
Because of the grievous harm its truth would do to our nation. Look, I have little love for Cheney, but the fallout from this would be catastrophic.
I don't believe it. Too big a deal.
Right, I don't believe it either, but just thinking about the possibility scares me.
The theory would be that Ledeen passed it to SISMI, if I remember correctly. Via that Rocco doofus. Google fails for now.
Ok, the Office of the VP knows some guys who manufacture the forgeries and pass them to the Italians, who in turn pass them to the Brits and the French, but the French don't bite. The Brits know they are forgeries, but have other evidence that they won't make public that says that the yellowcake deal was not necessarily in Niger, but somewhere in Africa. Wilson shares some tea with his old buds in Niger who say yes the Iraqis were in town, but no we didn't sell them anything, although Niger has nothing else the Iraqis might want. Not being a trained CIA analyst all I can say is fuck the HUMINT and give me more satellites.
Oh. I already believe that Cheney's a lying motherfucker who'd go to any lengths.
The amateurishness probably shows that it was done either by an amateur working with poor intelligence, as McGovern suggested, or that it was made as a burn by a real intelligence agency.
10 to 1 Nine Fingers handled the forging.
This shit is all connected.
Don't even get me started how they used the same explosives on the MacArthur maze as they did at the twin towers.
15 to 11
Never underestimate the amateurishness of white-collar conspirators. These people did learn their trade as College Republicans.
5 and everyone: I don't see a significant distinction between accepting bad forgeries and creating bad forgeries.
It would probably make the scandal more understandable - and therefore more politically significant - if the forgeries were done in Cheney's handwriting, but I don't think it would significantly increase the administration's actual culpability. Am I missing something? Does someone actually believe the administration was fooled by these forgeries?
17 gets it from the perspective of people who have been watching this.... but the publicity might be different. It could take this from being a totally obscure TPM-grade scandal to something the man on the street could grasp from a headline.
17 - Are you kidding? The only way there could be a bigger news story would be if it came out that Cheney was behind 9/11.
If the Iraq War had been won the forgery would have been ignored and forgotten. But it wasn't.
I can only understand FL's concern in the sense that "This nation is so rotten that it won't be able to deal with the crooks the way they deserve." He may be right. Personally, I'm hoping for a smoking gun, but I suppose I'm overoptimistic about the US.
Kennedy (the fifth vote) named Bush President because he was worried that a struggle would tear the country apart. A lot of the Iran-Contra people, including George W. Bush, got away scot free too, partly for that reason -- nobody dared to push it. (I will always believe that the Reagan team cut a deal with Khomeini in 1980). Watergate apparently is going to be the last time that the crooks get what they deserve.
This doesn't shock me in the sense of "good god I didn't think Cheney could go this far." You'd pretty much have to invoke drinking the blood of virgins before I'd be shocked.
So if the accusation is true, I'm thrilled its being made public. I guess it all depends on whether McGovern has some evidence TPM doesn't.
19, 18: Maybe I wasn't clear, but I was trying to differentiate between actual culpability and perceived culpability. I agree that the perception could be changed. But we already know what the reality is.
And I see that Dr. B said this more succinctly in 13, so I'll just be quiet now.
17: There are still perfectly respoectable people out there who think that the worst thing anyone in the administration did with respect to pre-war intelligence was to be over-eager and credulous about ambiguous reports -- the sort of person who says "Everyone believed that Saddam had WMD." If Cheney were convincingly ID'd as having actively procured forgeries, that class of people would have to come down for or against him.
23: They will come down for him. They don't give a shit whether Cheney lies, steals, eats babies, or starts wars under false pretenses. They just don't like fags and hippies.
This guy's name has been bandied about in VIPS circles.
23: There are still perfectly respectable people who aren't paying enough attention.
I think the actual culpability is greater, as well. It's the difference between a prosecutor railroading someone with no evidence, and the prosecutor manufacturing and planting false evidence.
If true, this revelation would actually surprise me.
It's early in the news cycle, but "ray mcgovern" gets a total of 17 hits on Google news, only two or three about this story, and none of the three is mainstream media. A few mainstream media reported a recent related story (the letter to Tenet from McGovern and others).
23, 24. No, I think you're wrong. I don't think GWB could pardon Cheney and get away with it the way Ford did with Nixon. I have a hard time believing that a man that has dedicated much of his life to public service would be so venal, and yet stranger things have happened. Following the money usually works, but I don't see that here. Other than the access to Iraqi babies' blood, why would he open himself up to this sort of discovery. As neil said above, this reads more like some sort of sting.
28: I think the a*****y that you were looking for is: It's the difference between a prosecutor presenting evidence he or she knows to be false, and actually manufacturing that evidence.
I suppose sophisticated moral thinkers can find an important distinction there, but that's slicing things a bit more fine than I can manage.
This wouldn't surprise me at all. This is the administration that legalized torture; Cheney could skullfuck a baby on CSPAN and I'm not completely certain it would shock me at this point.
"I don't think GWB could pardon Cheney and get away with it the way Ford did with Nixon."
Do you think GWB could pardon Cheney and get away with it the same way GHWB did with Weinberger?
32: I'm not certain the story would break into the mainstream media, either.
I love Warandpiece.com. Rosen is very good.
33. No. Iran contra is a different ball of wax altogether.
I don't think GWB could pardon Cheney and get away with it the way Ford did with Nixon.
Sure he could. The question that nobody has asked is: does Bush have the balls to attempt to preemptive pardon himself before he leaves office? Because you know it's got to have crossed his mind more than once by now, and really, is it that much more outrageous than a signing statement?
The GHWB pardoned Weinberger he was pardoning himself. If the investigation and trials had continued, Bush the Elder would have been put on the spot. Walsh specifically and explicitly regretted not being able to finish his investigation of George the First, and he knew of key evidence which was being withheld.
(I will always believe that the Reagan team cut a deal with Khomeini in 1980).
Is this such a shocking idea? I rather suspect it. However, I would be surprised if Cheney forged the Niger documents. Maybe it's a question of what history one actually lived through.
24: They will come down for him, because they'd forge the evidence, too.
38. I'm afraid I can't stick around to discuss, but one difference between Watergate and Iran Contra was that Iran Contra was pretty convoluted, and involved whether the Executive has the right to ignore Congress while conducting (a sleazy) foreign policy. We know where GWB would stand on that one. If the VP's office did originate the Niger forgeries they have committed a criminal offense, and one that gave support to starting a war. I don't see how you pardon that. And I say this as someone who supported the war.
20 "Bush President"
John, now that is truly excellent.
This shit is all connected.
I'm thoroughly Becks-style by now, but 15 gets it exactly right. This goes all the way to the TOP, motherfuckers. (A little) more seriously, I've always taken for granted that the Niger forgeries were shopped to the Italians from the Office of Special Plans. Who else had the means or motivation? And the "Office of Special Plans" was always, ultimately, Dick Cheney.
And to be honest, I also suspect that at some level, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the current clusterfuck are all connected. It may not be provable now, but I believe that Dick Cheney, with significant fraction of the Republican Party behind him, took office in 2001 determined to "get even" for Watergate.
FWIW, I tracked down this interview clip (mp3) between Scott Horton (now writing for Harper's) and former CIA dude and McGovern crony Philip Giraldi. The latter "won't name names" but says "uh-huh" when Horton suggests former CIA agents Alan Wolf and Duane Clarridge (who was indicted and pardoned in Iran Contra) as the forgers.
31 - You think that it require sophisticated moral thinkers, but simultaneously that it could have a big impact on perception of culpability? Does that mean that the US is full of sophisticated moral thinkers?
Look, I have little love for Cheney, but the fallout from this would be catastrophic.
FL, the phrase you are looking for is, "appalling vista."
Jesus, let's keep the sophisticated moral thinkers out of this. No runaway trolleys, no nothing.
Ha. Ha. You know, if this is all true, there's a world-historical irony in the fact that the guy making the accusations is named "McGovern."
One of the horrifying things about Bush is that it has put the odious but mostly rational Negroponte in the role of the "good guy" at times.
43 "determined to "get even" for Watergate"
Acually, a similar point was made by Lou Dubose in "Vice: Dick Cheney and the hijacking of the American Presidency." More to the point, it was Cheney's experience during the Ford presidency, weakened by Watergate, that brought his resentment to a boil.
Ok, we can get to the bottom of this right now. Someone ask Becks to ask Spackerman to ask his neocon buddy Eli Lake about Mr. Clarridge.
"Following the money usually works, but I don't see that here."
The guy was the CEO of Halliburton. And Karl Rove's favorite fucking book is The Secret Agent. Go read that shit.
gold bars under the motherfucking towers!
If there is any truth at all to this:
Holy Jesus Fuck.
Wasn't Rozen's working hypothesis that the Niger documents were a burn gone wrong? I need to read her archives.
Bush and Cheney knowingly used false evidence to gin up a case against Iraq. Is anyone arguing this?
I understand why it *would* be a huge deal if Cheney were actually caught being behind the forgeries in some direct way. I just don't understand why it *should* be a huge deal. Are these sumbitches still in office because we lack evidence to impeach them?
Carville once remarked that if you drag $100 bill through a trailer park, there's no telling what you'll come up with. It's pretty much conventional wisdom that the Niger forgeries were motivated by money. Is there any question why money was available for such a thing?
56 - Lots of people still don't believe this, even people who have turned against the war. (There are probably people who believe we really found WMDs in Iraq who've turned against the war. It's not a popular war.) Bush crawl intoand Cheney still have a narrow space hide in where they can say it was all an understandable mistake. This would take away their last hiding place.
54 gets it exactly right.
56: Not the evidence, maybe, but the political will. Don't see a whole lot of noise about impeachment anywhere but the internet, because of course people could make mistakes with all that intelligence, goes the story, and everyone knew Saddam had WMDs. A forgery, though? That's harder to sweep under the rug, though the crazification factor still will hold up the rug, but you know, fuck them at the this point.
PF, I don't understand "smoking gun" thinking either. But if Cheney or someone working for Cheney is shown to have had a direct hand in making the forgeries, it's no longer possible to pretend that it didn't happen.
"Lots of people still don't believe this"
True.
"This would take away their last hiding place."
Also true. It was never my intent to contradict either point.
There's still nothing on this at Google news. Hopefully it's the news cycle.
Right now, I think it's hard for many people to distinguish between a) the administration stampeded us with fear, and b) the administration itself stampeded with fear, and we followed them. That is basically the administration excuse at this point, just put in a more flattering light.
59: I honestly thought that I had made this point several times, but obviously with zero clarity.
Yes. I absolutely agree. You have distilled my point to its essence.
I know that at this point this is all just one man's accusation, and as of yet he has offered zilch in the way of hard evidence to back it up, but goddammit it has such a ring of truth to it. Yes, we knew they were liars, but this ain't the fucking Canuck Letter we're talking about here. This is High Crimes and Misdemeanors in anybody's book.
Yes, let this not be true, for it is so, so horrible. But I really think this must be true.
Y'see, Cheney wasn't being serious when he said "who will rid me of this troublesome priest find documents connecting Saddam to uranium?"
Some people seem to be under the misapprehension that facts matter. They don't. These people can pretend anything, and be believed by at least 30% of the electorate.
There's still nothing on this at Google news. Hopefully it's the news cycle.
What do you think is going to show up in the news? If McGovern goes public with names and evidence, the day after that is the earliest you'll see stories in the Times and WaPo.
No, Google News does TV too. They don't even have the original Tucker Carlson story.
Well, I would absolutely believe it. They thought it was all going to work out just great, and so the risk of acting was greatly outweighed by the risk of acting. And I don't think that the incompetence of the documents indicates that Cheney (or Feith) were behind it.
What I can't believe is that so many people are so forgiving about the whole 'everyone thought there were WMDs' line. OK, in October 2002, there were issues: materials not accounted for, behavior on the part of Saddam that made him look like he might have something (which was otherwise pretty smart on his part). By mid-February, though, no one paying any attention at all thought that the previous understanding was remotely correct. OK, I'm fine with people who weren't paying attention saying 'well I wasn't paying enough attention to understand that the consensus had completely crumbled well before the war, and that the statements of the Pres and VP in the weeks and days before the war, made with knowledge that the earlier consensus was untenable, were immoral on a scale we've never seen from our public officials.' What I'm not fine with is 'I wasn't paying close enough attention, and since the Pres and VP are pretty much like me, I guess they weren't p[aying attention either, and so I can't really blame them for not figuring out what we now know.'
I don't see how Feith's involvement (or Clarridge's) in the forgeries, if proven, would change this dynamic. All the elements are already there, and people who are inclined to give lying scum the benefit of the doubt aren't going to be dissuaded.
You're being reasonable, Carp. In this kind of situation that's not a smart way to be.
70 - It's tempting to believe that just because you find a particular line of argument compelling, that everyone who doesn't find it compelling is automatically acting in bad faith. I certainly believe that the administration was lying, but I am extrapolating from my sense of the people involved. It's not the case that the evidence that the Bush administration was lying is so incontrovertible that no one fair-minded could think otherwise. (For example, no one fair-minded could think that the war is currently FUBAR, and really no one fair-minded does.)
McG won't be going public, because the supposed evidence he's probably referring to was an investigative document Patrick Fitzgerald obtained from the Italian parliament. McG hasn't seen it directly.
A much more plausible scenario is laid out in The Italian Letter. It basically concludes the documents were created by SISMI agents in early 2001 as a money-making scheme, then passed along after 9/11 by those eager to kiss Bush butt. There's little doubt the Cheneyites knew they were fake, but thought they could use the intel echo chamber (citing the Brits and French as independent verification, even though all were sourcing from the same forgeries) to make a plausible story. Just like they did with the NYT aluminum tubes story. The "everybody thought Iraq had WMD" gambit. Which is just as bad, or maybe even worse, than forging the documents.
Ya know, in light of this, Kucinich's decision to introduce articles of impeachment against Cheney rather than Bush makes a lot more sense.
72 -- Your darn right it's bad faith. Every falsifiable assumption of the prewar intelligence was falsified in early February and March of 2003. This was perfectly crystal clear: Blix's folks went where the CIA was saying they's been told the stuff was, and found it wasn't there and had never been there. Everyone knew this. Everyone paying attention, that is.
I got no problem with people not paying attention. God knows there are whole vast areas of human endeavor to which I don't pay any attention at all. It's that people who weren't paying attention want to pretend that the President (and VP) were just like them. Well, they ought to be fired if this was true, but it wasn't true. They knew damn well what had happened, and knew that when Canada and Mexico proposed a short extension of the inspections regime in the weeks before the war, the result would be catastrophic to US policy. So they gambled everything, betting that the result would be so glorious that no one would care about the pre-war intelligence.
76 - This is demonstrably false. I was paying attention, and I thought Iraq had WMDs until June of 2003.
I'm assuming that McGovern has real evidence and that he will bring it forward fairly soon. Otherwise this whole thing evaporates.
What Sven describes is the pre-McGovern understanding of the case. McGovern seems to be saying something different, that the Cheney people were actively involved with SISMI very early in the game.
I just got around to watching the Bill Moyers bit on the press and the war, and you know what? I want to cry. I can't believe my country has taken this kind of fall. I fancied myself a coolass cynic for many years when I wasn't really even paying attention, and now that I am, there is nothing cool on my horizon, and being a cynic captures nothing of value. As someone said upthread, I just want to hug my knees and rock in a corner. The wrongness of it all looms to block out the sun.
Sorry, Walt. I don't know how you missed it.
When you look now, do you not see that the Administration knew different? Cheney asserting that he knew better than El Baradei, when all the information Cheney had had already been given to El Baradei. Bush refusing the proposed 6 week extension of inspections, although success would very likely lead to a second UN resolution?
I was paying attention, and I thought Iraq had WMDs until June of 2003.
I don't claim to be especially smart or especially informed, but when Powell showed up at the UN with *mumble mumble* evidence of Iraqi WMDs, I knew the fix was in. If they'd had actual evidence of the WMDs, it would've been all over the news 24/7--photos, interviews, whatever. The whole thing just had the feel of a used car pitch. They were trying too hard. That's what convinced me, at least.
I thought Iraq had WMDs until June of 2003.
That there weren't **any anywhere** caught all sorts of people by surprise, even the most skeptical. That there clearly wasn't an active program or stockpiles of a size even beginning to approach a realistic threat was obvious before the invasion. The inspectors were there, reporting good cooperation from the Iraqi government, and going to exactly the places the US intelligence was requesting. It was very, very obvious that the claims made in the SOTU address were bunk, though.
I don't claim to be especially smart or especially informed, but when Powell showed up at the UN with *mumble mumble* evidence of Iraqi WMDs, I knew the fix was in.
Yeah, you know, I was/am certainly not any kind of authority, but I remember thinking that if the powers that be, who have all available resources at their disposal, can't make a more convincing case, then maybe it IS all bullshit. Which it was. In the end, the only thing that made me any different from Joe American Public X was a slight impulse toward skepticism, justified or no.
I think it was a day or two before Powell's speech that I confidently predicted that WMD's would be found, because the administration was at least competent enough to plant them if they were not there.
NB: The page on whitehouse.gov containing the text of Powell's UN speech includes the sub-heading "Denial and Deception." Exactly!
McGovern seems to be saying something different, that the Cheney people were actively involved with SISMI very early in the game.
I don't know about that; I've heard that charge before from McG and others. IIRC the VIPS have been hinting at that since late 2005 when that Fitzgerald info came out. And they obviously also have inside contacts (of course so does Sy Hersh, who floated the "burn theory.")
The Clarridge connection is very compelling. It's pretty apparent the VIPS are convinced, but I doubt they have documentary evidence.
I don't think McG meant to go that far out on a limb on CNN (his purpose was to knock Tenet down). If the VIPS had an air-tight case, Larry Johnson would have beat Ray Suarez over the head with it tonight on PBS.
In retrospect, it seems clear to me that they were lying. At time, I suffered from whatever the opposite of confirmation bias was. I was already sure that Saddam was working on WMDs from before Bush was President. I didn't know how to evaluate technical issues such as how good of a job the inspectors were doing, how easy it was to hide the weapons program, etc., so it came down to the fact that I put a low initial probability on the idea that the administration was lying outright. I didn't think that Bush was some super-patriot, but I thought that in the aftermath of 9/11 he was enough of a patriot that he wouldn't take us into an irrelevant war on a completely phony pretext. From that, I extrapolated that he was telling the truth, and the mystery of how Saddam was managing to fool the inspectors would have to wait until after the war.
86: This is honest and detailed, virtually a model statement that I think must describe that portion of my acquaintance who supported the war. I don't think I've ever seen it put that well before, without whining or self-justification. It does seem incredible when you put it that way.
The power of the belief in 9/11 as a transforming event, whatever you did, wherever you went with that belief, seems to lie at the heart of my disconnect from this view. From the beginning I resisted that belief, and doing so made me feel like a stranger in this country. I read a lot of Slate in those days, and I remember that the one or two Brits writing for it that week were taken aback by the force of this conviction, which they could not share.
One thing I noticed was how ready, how psychologically prepared, many opinion leaders were for the line they took. It's as if they'd been waiting for years for the transforming event they knew would come. Looking back, the whole existential-threat-from-terrorism, this-is-our-Pearl-Harbor, Greatest-generation-style outlook had been gathering itself up at the start line for a long time. There had been a couple of false starts: the first hours after Oklahoma City, after the Flight 800 crash it had sprung out into full stride, only to be called back.
I had noticed a fulfillment, almost like glee, with which we later became so familiar, and the hangover from which is now so evident, in the first few hours on those occasions, and I'm sure that played a part in my response to 9/11.
It certainly makes sense. I followed the Italians/forgeries thing from the beginning, and I've always suspected that either OSP or the White House Iraq Group (WHIG, historical irony fans) was behind it, just on the grounds that I can't work out what interest the Italians had to do it on their own initiative.
WHIG might be a good one to follow up - the same nonsense went into the British "dodgy dossier", and WHIG was coordinating with Alistair Campbell's PR operation in the UK.
53:And Karl Rove's favorite fucking book is The Secret Agent.
Jesus wept. The lesson of The Secret Agent is that you can't trust spies, and the Russian embassy's genius plan to stage a terrorist attack and force the British to lock up people they don't like fails because it's too smart - and that the police take the time to follow up the leads, whereupon the whole thing unravels with awful consequences for everyone.
It certainly makes sense. I followed the Italians/forgeries thing from the beginning, and I've always suspected that either OSP or the White House Iraq Group (WHIG, historical irony fans) was behind it, just on the grounds that I can't work out what interest the Italians had to do it on their own initiative.
Yes, my own view was something similar. Then again, I became extremely cynical about the British government within a couple of years of the 1997 election so by the time September 11th and then the Iraq war came round, I was already heavily inclined towards extreme scepticism about the UK dossier claims, the Niger claims, etc.
86 -- Fair enough: I should revise my definition of 'people paying attention' to account for people who wanted one thing or the other to be true.
I've thought the President was a liar all along -- I used to generally refer to him as The Lying Sack of Shit, until my wife made me stop -- but didn't have a confirmation bias on WMD. That is, I don't start with the proposition that whatever he says must be false. The fall 2002 Washington Post stories on the aluminum tubes, though, tipped me over on the Iraqi WMD thing: books were being overcooked.
I was in a funny, but I think not uncommon, position on WMDs before the war, becaue of the dishonest slipperiness of the administration rhetoric. From the aluminum tube stories and the Colin Powell presentation, I was convinced that Iraq didn't have anything worth worrying about, but I wasn't sure about maybe a warehouse full of mustard gas or something.
But I was arguing online with some really unpleasant, hostile people, who kept on sliding back and forth between 'OMG, Saddam's nukes are going to kill us all!' and 'This war is legally justified because he's in violation of the Gulf War I ceasefire if there's even an ounce of chemical weapons anyplace". And I didn't want to say anything that was going to get proven wrong, so I let a lot of claims that "Everyone knows Iraq has WMD" past, because I didn't feel safe flatly denying it, and the argument about "Yeah, maybe some old gas shells, but nothing that we have any justification for fearing" was too much work to have every time.
There were for a long time after the war, and maybe there still are, a lot of people resting their faith in the administration's honesty on that gap. It was possible for an informed person to honestly believe that Iraq had 'WMD' as the phrase was being used, to include a mustard gas shell someplace. And if that was a possible belief for the administration to have, then nothing they said about WMD's was really a lie, rather than an overreaction. This is incredible crap, but it's what people rest on.
sliding back and forth between 'OMG, Saddam's nukes are going to kill us all!' and 'This war is legally justified because he's in violation of the Gulf War I ceasefire if there's even an ounce of chemical weapons anyplace"
Hm, was Obsidian Wings the venue for any of these transactions?
91 describes me almost to a T. Seriously, it was the aluminum tubes and the balsawood drone of flying death. "Weapons of mass destruction" was a deceptive phrase chosen for a reason, and I honestly suspect the Bushies were surprised that there weren't stocks of decaying nerve gas lying around forgotten somewhere. (I was.) That LB and I, living in New York and DC and getting our news from in-the-tank outlets like the Times and the Post (and a few blogs), figured this out but trained professionals, particularly in the media, didn't (or weren't willing to go on the record saying so) remains the most important problem to fix domestically, I think.
There is a crying need for a work of historical fiction (what is this called? "alternate history" fiction?) in which stocks of decaying nerve gas are found following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and used by the administration as evidence that the war was justified and good, and the American people are satisfied with this.
Charley sums up my feelings nicely.
How could you not know that they were full of crap? You had to blindly close your eyes and assume that your country, as the U.S. OF A by golly, would never do anything bad.
We are the good guys after all, right?
As quick as this country is to throw blame on others, the vast majority of people refuse to believe it about us.
94 - Oh yeah. Don't you remember the frenzy whenever there was a preliminary report of finding mustard gas? Ha ha, those treasonous Democrats are really going to be sorry now! Suck it, Scott Ritter and Saddam's Angels! I'm sure some of the Foxbots thought for months if not years that we had found something.
Every crooked cop knows that you should at least carry a throw-down weapon with you. Sheesh.
94 - Not exactly a work of alternate history fiction; rather, this is the alternate reality currently inhabited by 25% of the American people.
97 - Yeah, but couldn't they at least do a decent job of filing off the serial numbers?
94, 96: Finding old WMDs wouldn't have satisfied anybody given that we were still losing the actual war. Look: long after the Duelfer Report came out, a solid majority of Americans consistently reported in numerous polls that invading Iraq was the right decision to make. It was clear that there weren't WMDs; it was clear that American forces in Iraq weren't "fighting for freedom" or defending America from a grave and gathering threat. But Americans kept supporting the initial decision to invade for as long as it looked, to them, like the war could be won. The impulse to invade may have been nominally justified by a self-defense argument (aluminum tubes, yellowcake, etc.), but it was ultimately rooted in the post-9/11 desire to pick a defenseless target and stomp it to death. Americans only decided this decision was faulty when they came to realize Iraqis weren't terribly defenseless after all.
100 - Right, but. If there had been weapons-of-some-destruction, I think the Republicans concerned with maintaining power and not cementing Bush's legacy would have been able to crowbar American troops out in advance of the 2006 elections. (Or at least announce that they would be leaving.) "We got Saddam, we got the hideous balsawood WMDs, now we can leave! Another triumph!" If that decision had been made in 2005, it would be a very, very different landscape now.
We're going to have to have Harry Turtledove adjudicate this one, I think.
I'm sure some of the Foxbots thought for months if not years that we had found something.
I think the Republicans concerned with maintaining power and not cementing Bush's legacy would have been able to crowbar American troops out in advance of the 2006 elections. (Or at least announce that they would be leaving.)
But see, this is what most of us assumed Bush would get around to doing at some point, aided by any number of convenient "Iraqi Freedom" benchmarks (the handover of "sovereignty," any of the Iraqi elections, etc.). It eventually became clear that Bush cared more about "winning" in Iraq, whatever that means, than his party's political future, and that none of his allies or handlers has been able to convince him otherwise (which Rove more or less admitted recently). The discovery of "WMDs" may have prolonged public support for the war for a bit longer, but not that much longer. Vietnam was "justified" by the presence of communists, but that war wasn't winnable, either. The presence of "actual" WMDs wouldn't have made the Iraq War a PR success story, either.
Like Lizard, I was open to the idea that Saddam had some old mustard gas shells lying around someplace, but I was deeply outraged that they had invented this category that included both nuclear weapons and old mustard gas shells.
As far as I'm concerned, inventing a slippery category like WMD remains the administrations biggest lie. It was a shockingly manipulative piece of rhetoric, enabling them to take the fear of nuclear weapons and apply it to almost anyone. (Why aren't cluster bombs and land mines counted as weapons of mass destruction on this definition?)
During the lead up to the war, a colleague of mine at Auburn University had a cartoon on his door with a picture of Uncle Sam at a blackboard lecturing pupils labeled "Europe" and "peaceniks." On the blackboard was a mushroom cloud, and Uncle Sam was saying "what part of WMD don't you understand." My colleague was a huge war advocate, and this cartoon represented the fundamental logic of his case. It was a transparent piece of deceptive sophistry. I have no idea how he could push it with a straight face.
Rob, you're forgetting the One Percent Doctrine.
If anything, the amateurishness of the forgeries points the finger directly at our current administration. These people are complete amateurs at everything they do. They are amateurs at planning wars, executing wars, upholding the law, running abstinence-only programs, hurricane relief and reconstruction, hiring cronies, firing cronies, outing agents whose husbands speak unwelcome truths, on and on and on. Everything they touch falls apart sooner or later, gets exposed, gets investigated. Nobody cares very much in the end, but there is absolutely zero reason anymore to assume that this administration is in any way competent at anything. It's very appealing to think of them as smart and talented and crafty and clever because it makes them this formidable enemy but in truth, I think, they are a cadre of second-string doofuses (doofi?) from the Nixon & Ford administrations who got lucky. That they would fuck up forging documents is the very last thing that would surprise me.
Everyone paying attention, that is.
Even people who were paying attention were going a very long way to suspend disbelief in favor of their preferred views. I remember being told by a war supporter in 2003 that "Hans Blix couldn't find his own ass with both hands." This guy was not an expert on WMDs, Iraq, the UN or Hans Blix. He just said it because, to him, it sounded good.
On the contrary FL; this is the best sort of thing that could happen right now. Just not in the short term.
As S. Jones says up above, losing the war is the only reason we're taking about this.
My guess is that the American strategy called for the Iraqis to sit there waiting to be killed, exactly like in Gulf War I, but that the Iraqis (whether in independent groups or under Saddam's direction) had already decided not to try to fight the US Army conventionally.
I suggested this idea to a strategic expert on a comment line somewhere, and he laughed scornfully, explaining that Saddam was too stupid to think that far ahead. But that's what happened: an easy conventional victory followed by very tough resistance.
And then there's David Limbaugh: "The entire WMD issue has been a Democratic diversion from the get-go."
But...but...we didn't raise the WMD issue, the administration did.
The whole article linked to in 110 makes no sense. I can't find a thread of argument in it.
* Do you sometimes get the feeling people put bullet points in front of their sentences just to make them seem more important.
* Even though the sentences don't form a coherent list, or even match grammatically.
* I mean, really.
106: That most bikers are decent, law-abiding people, except for an "outlaw one percent?"
* I mean, really.
[laughter]
I can't really provide a lot of context for this (being that the setting was a cocktail party and the people were friends-of-friends whose veracity I can't guarantee) but I was also recently told by a couple of people who work for various fed agencies and have had some first-hand experiences with the decision-makers that Bush really is a True Believer who was never going to settle for anything less than Idyllic Iraq and that the people surrounding him are/were nothing like blinders-on believers but did choose to hear only what they wanted to hear. Between those two viewpoints, the entire operation was a guaranteed clusterfuck from the beginning. This has to some degree shaped my opinion that they are all just incompetent loons and that anything they do will turn to shit in short order.
Here are two ideas I'm pretty sure that I believe, supplied for your inspection and ridicule:
*I think that the for the neocons and "liberal" supporters of the war, the idea of Middle East transformation really was the motivator. Hey, Saddam's a bad guy, his people are oppressed, why don't we do something good in the Middle East? History is over ! Let's spread some democracy ! (And let's fix this mess that GHW Bush created with his wimpy premature withdrawal.)
*I think Saddam's incompetence is much overstated. As an ambitious tyrant, he had a pretty nifty idea in invading tiny Kuwait with its huge oil reserves. As long as the oil keeps flowing, who is going to object? People forget that the decision by the U.S. to fight Gulf War I was not a foregone conclusion.
As for Gulf War II, what was Saddam going to do to head that off? He'd already ditched the offending weapons and accommodated the inspectors. He didn't have any connection with al Qaeda, and wasn't a primary sponsor of terror even against Israel.
So I say that Saddam was undone by his own ambition, by Bush Daddy's competence, and by W's incompetence.
Rob gets the jump on everybody in 111 and pre-ridicules me for my bullets.
However, like my president, I feel that bullets are the best response to most disputes.
Here's the thing: every utterance by every Republican should be assumed to be a falsehood until there is some empirical evidence produced to confirm it, and even then, you should remain skeptical. This principle also holds true for 99% of the speech of 99% of Democrats, Tories, Laborites, Liberal Democrats, Congress Party members, BJPers, Communist Party of China members, Socialist Party members, National Front members, Greens, PRI members, etc. etc.
On a different note: Happy May Day! Take a moment today to remember the Haymarket Martyrs (Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg) and all the unknown workers who fought and died to provide us with the few protections against capitalism we enjoy today. Remember Centralia, Wash. in 1919; remember Minneapolis in 1934; remember the Chartists; remember Wat Tyler; remember Paris, 1968; remember the Pullman strike of 1894; remember the Homestead strike of 1892; remember the Columbine massacre of 1927; remember the Miners' strike of 1977; remember Cesar Chavez. Remember that, even if you're working in the knowledge factories or as a professional, or even if you're in the managerial class, this society is not organized for your benefit.
Also, support your local immigrants!
I think that the last sentence of 115.1 is very true. (I don't have a formed opinion about the rest of it.) I would baselessly suspect the neocons wanted it to prove American power and increase hegemony, etc., but that Bush wanted it because (a) it would be nice to rub it in Daddy's face and (b) on his better days he really believes in transformative miracles.
re: 117
I am humming the Internationale.
117 - Minneapolitan hates Joe Hill.
I think that the for the neocons and "liberal" supporters of the war, the idea of Middle East transformation really was the motivator. Hey, Saddam's a bad guy, his people are oppressed, why don't we do something good in the Middle East? History is over ! Let's spread some democracy !
I think this is right, and the underlying impulse wasn't evil for some of those people, but they should be ashamed of themselves for being idiots, and dishonest about their idiocy. First, whether the WMD claims were lies or just irrelevant, everyone knew they were necessary to sell the war to the public; that a democratic and undeceived American populace wouldn't have supported the war. You don't get to trick people into doing optional good deeds.
And the idiocy comes in in thinking it would work, given the ethnic differences, given the lack of troops for peacekeeping, given the massive unlikelihood of any war turning out exactly as planned. There are reasons that international law prohibits wars of aggression, and among them is the fact that as a rule of thumb, any war is vastly more likely than not to turn out to be a terrible, terrible thing. It is wrong to take that risk without a genuine necessity, like self defence, making the war unavoidable.
And yes, happy International Workers Day.
dishonest about their idiocy
See, more and more I just see plain dishonest. Remember the naif in chief was Wolfowitz. Who stood a chance of being remembered as a misguided idealist until he revealed himself as a plain-vanilla corruptionist.
Oh, you had to stick the pinko comment in there, dincha.
123: Well, but I'm also badmouthing individuals who weren't in power, people like Ogged, and Belle Waring, who were genuinely driven to support the war by a decent impulse to fix a lousy country. They just lost track of the prudential considerations, and the anti-democratic paternalism of supporting a war that wouldn't have been possible without a tissue of lies and irrelevancies propping it up.
(There are no discretion errors in this comment. If you think there are, you are mistaken.)
See, more and more I just see plain dishonest. Remember the naif in chief was Wolfowitz. Who stood a chance of being remembered as a misguided idealist until he revealed himself as a plain-vanilla corruptionist.
I think that's too easy. No one gets to the top of the greasy pole (or near it) without having a certain amount of moral flexibility. That doesn't mean that there aren't heartfelt beliefs about which those same people are notably inflexible.
I just wanted you crazy Americans to kill my Iraqi enemies. Totally no lose for me.
"and the anti-democratic paternalism"
This, for me, was a strong factor too. As in, 'who the fuck are we to unilaterally give to ourselves the right to go around messing in other people's countries?'.
Actually, my greatest shame is that I got my various miners' strikes confused, and actually wanted to memorialize the 1984-85 strike in the UK, although certainly all striking miners have my support.
The Yahoo news photos montage has a lot of great shots of actions in Turkey, Pakistan, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. It's sobering and moving to realize that there's still so many places, such as Pakistan, where appearing in a May Day parade is taking a real risk, not just on the day itself, but for the rest of the year in your workplace and home. So, glorious as the tradition (including Joe Hill) may be, it is those people who are putting everything on the line for their class and their communities right now who are the biggest heroes today.
Tim, I concede "moral flexibility" as a general principle, but in this specific case, baloney. It'd be one thing if Wolfowitz took care of his girlfriend; that's what patronage chiefs do. It's another if you do it while crusading against corruption and claiming it's what's keeping the Third World down. Then you're just full of it.
I confess ogged and Belle's positions, also Drum's and Yglesias's, mystified me at the time.
I mean, to be honest, it put me right off those blogs for a long time.
Slol, noted columnist Christopher Hitchens says Wolfowitz did nothing wrong.
And also, George Orwell would have favored this war. And voted for Bush. And asked another whisky, please.
In this, as in some other things, I vastly prefer Peter Hitchens. I am, secretly, a Tory.
That particular argument doesn't do much for me -- it sounds too close to the segregationist state's rights arguments we got here during the Civil Rights movement. If genuinely awful human rights related stuff is going on in another country, I don't think there's any moral sovereignity-based argument for not interfering; I do think there's a very powerful prudential argument for not interfering militarily. (And of course, there are awful human rights violations pretty much in any country where you care to look -- that's not a moral justification for toppling governments right and left unless you've got a real plan for ending the human rights violations, which a military invasion generally isn't.)
134 to 128.
To 131, I just got mystified. Enough decent people went that way (and repented afterwards) that it must have been a likely error for decent people to make, but I never understood it.
I have a weaker stomach than you.
Also, Peter Hitchens. I'm sure you've seen it before, but always worth revisiting.
re: 134
I genuinely think that the barrier for military intervention ought to be set REALLY high -- genocide + unanimous UN vote high. Certain types of sanctions, narrowly targeted, I have less of a problem with.
I note, simply for the sake of being honest, that I might still be an incompetence dodger, and unconvinced that I was wrong. We truly don't need to argue about it again.
137: Oh, in practice I'm right with you -- I just don't want to justify such a barrier with saying that each country has a sovereign right to abuse its citizens without interference from others. The reason not to invade under all but the most horrific of circumstances is that it's terribly unlikely to make anything better, not so much that it would be wrong if it did.
remember the Columbine massacre of 1927
Silly minne, the Columbine massacre was just a couple of years ago!
(Happy May Day!)
re: 139
I think there's a substantive difference of principle between our positions but not, as you say, a pragmatic one.
138: Yeah, this is where my 134 is unhelpful. While I think I'm right that the prohibition on aggressive war (when supported with claims that it will be a good thing for all parties) is a prudential, not a moral one, and that an aggressive war that really would be a good thing for all parties would be allowable, saying that opens the door to the incompetence dodge. And the prudential arguments are strong enough, IMO, that the incompetence dodge should be laughed out of the public sphere.
Treating the prohibition on 'benevolent' aggressive wars as absolute, rather than contingent on practicality and thus essentially absolute, would probably get people to the right answers more reliably.
Lots of insightful comment here. Two things:
1. WMD was not made up by this administration. It is an actual category of "nonconventional" weapons. when i was on active duty we called it NBC, for Nuclear, Biological or Chemical, so as a term of art they have always been conflated. But I do think that this Administration was deliberately using the term so that it would be conflated in the public mind. If you remember, when we invaded the troops had their MOPP suits on, just in case.
2. Guilty of being an idiot for thinking it could work. But then again, I still think it can work, so there ya go.
people like Ogged, and Belle Waring, who were genuinely driven to support the war by a decent impulse to fix a lousy country
Belle, to her credit, eventually admitted that not only was her support of the war wrong, but that it was partially motivated by an irrational desire to kill foreigners. If all Americans were so honest, we might be able to have an actual dialogue about our psychotically bloodsoaked foreign policy.
138: Yeah, that's why you're useless.
Three things I remember clearly about the lead up to the war. (1) Scott Ritter saying, loudly and insistently, that there were no WMDs; (2) the pro-war responses to him, which were mostly along the lines that he should shut up and didn't know what he was talking about; (3) Rumsfeld's answer to a press conference question about what if things didn't go smoothly: we'd be "greeted as liberators."
Those things convinced me at the time that if there were any weapons development programs in Iraq, or leftover mustard gas, they were at best a very weak and minor attempt at defiance and certainly not enough to realistically worry about, and that the pro-war folks were completely unrealistic and willing to dismiss the practical realities of people on the ground (Ritter, invading troops).
genuinely driven to support the war by a decent impulse
I mean no offense to anybody here, but I believe that nearly every moderate-to-left war supporter's motivations were partially driven by a (perhaps unconscious) need to distance themselves from the unseemly hippies and see themselves as "serious".
There. I said it.
It'd be one thing if Wolfowitz took care of his girlfriend; that's what patronage chiefs do. It's another if you do it while crusading against corruption and claiming it's what's keeping the Third World down. Then you're just full of it.
Republicans make the same claims with reference to Clintonian support for sexual harassment legislation while nailing interns. Either our descriptions of people's moral maps are bad or we overestimate the extent to which people are ever coherent and consistent in forcing their behavior to track mapped routes.
I still think it can work
Now this I would not say. Given how many Iraqis have died, there's no non-callous way to talk of this war having "worked," no matter how rosy the future Iraq might turn out to be.
I am humming the Internationale.
There's a great collection of Internationale recordings, in dozens of languages (including a Tuvan throat-sung version ) here .
I don't think there's any moral sovereignity-based argument for not interfering; I do think there's a very powerful prudential argument for not interfering militarily.
I believe that. I can imagine circumstances--involving explicit UN authorization, an actual coalition of world powers, plans for the aftermath, etc.--under which I would've supported an invasion of Iraq, but the real circumstances never remotely met those conditions.
it was partially motivated by an irrational desire to kill foreigners
I think this desire gripped a lot of people after 9/11, and the administration, taking advantage of what they knew to be a unique opportunity, shamelessly pointed at Iraq, saying "These are the foreigners we should be killing."
147: Oh, probably. But most of them wouldn't have been deceived by hippie-hating or bloodlust if they hadn't had the basic decent impulse to justify it.
138: I agree that there is effectively nothing to be gained by rehashing arguments. I think it's a tell about people who believe will to power arguments, and other various species of life from the comic books. I assume most of us who think that incompetence is not a sufficient defense come across as pessimists by nature; that might be true, too.
I don't really know what we're supposed to do when we come to the realization that different groups of people see the world very differently. Vote your team, I guess.
I'm glad we're still in conversation, here, with a few reasonable people who still hope it will work. I hate to feel we're in an echo chamber. Also as Apo suggests in 147, some of the real reasons for support of the war have already gone underground or been forgotten.
153: I think this is overly pessimistic. While Ogged should be disenfranchised for the good of us all, people like Waring and Drum and Yglesias, are, I think, better now -- I don't think those three, and the many more like them, are going to make that mistake again. It's not a mistake I understand making, but it's one that people can and have learned from.
our descriptions of people's moral maps are bad
IANAP, but I believe there's a fundamental difference between our "moral map" that tells us not to expropriate public goods for private gain and our "moral map" that tells us we want a dalliance. The former is a crime and subverts the republic. The latter, not so much.
our descriptions of people's moral maps are bad
IANAP, but I believe there's a fundamental difference between our "moral map" that tells us not to expropriate public goods for private gain and our "moral map" that tells us we want a dalliance. The former is a crime and subverts the republic. The latter, not so much.
143-1: It's foolish to conflate all "weapons of mass destruction" as being equivalent for foreign policy purposes. Is it possible to dispute that?
143-2: I'd be curious to hear some scenario under which the Iraq invasion "can" work. I'm not asking for a likely scenario, just one that's conceivable.
There's as good an argument as you can get for the "incompetence dodge" made by Paddy Ashdown, here.
I confess a susceptibility to isolationist siren songs (see above under "secretly a Tory") but I remain agnostic on the principle.
are going to make that mistake again
Well, I wouldn't support another such war, of course. I underestimated the degree to which the military's effectiveness could be undermined by civilian leadership. I think I'm arguing more that I was non-crazy and not-stupid than that I was right.
143: I think it `could work' in the abstract; in the sense that this sort of nation reconstruction could work in some possible world.
I never for a moment thought the pack of jokers in the current administration could pull it off though. In fact, I'm not sure the US is capable of pulling this off (by itself at least) in a best case scenario, and this was never even in the same league as a best case scenario.
87 - I think it's surprising that given that 9/11 affected so many people, that it left Bush and Cheney untouched.
95 - If you want to think that about me, there's nothing I can do about it, but it's just not true. It's not a question of right and wrong, it's a question of dereliction of duty, of treason. George Bush betrayed his country when it needed him most. This still surprises me in a way that Abu Graib does not.
Well, I wouldn't support another such war, of course. I underestimated the degree to which the military's effectiveness could be undermined by civilian leadership.
I think this still leaves you at a pretty high risk of making a similar mistake in the future. Thinking that success, defined as "Making Iraq a significantly nicer place to live, by a large enough margin to justify the carnage involved in getting there" was a likely outcome even if the people running it hadn't been incompetent maniacs, is still wrong, and barring large changes in the nature of politics and military power, is going to stay wrong.
I think I'm arguing more that I was non-crazy and not-stupid than that I was right.
You'll lose that argument, too.
I underestimated the degree to which the military's effectiveness could be undermined by civilian leadership.
I'm not really sure if it's just about civilian leadership undermining the military. Your military is also kind of pathologically fucked -- at least vis a vis the prosecution of the kind of 'war' that the invasion of Iraq would have needed to have been to be in any way successfull.
I think it's surprising that given that 9/11 affected so many people, that it left Bush and Cheney untouched
Yeah, and I realize that on that point alone I feel a weird affinity for them, in that like them I appear to have been less affected by it than people I came in contact with. I wasn't any more prepared for the utter cynicism with which it was exploited than anybody else, of course. That's why speculations that Bush is a true believer, such as the ones above, have such appeal. I think we'd rather believe that.
166: This is a big part of the problem though; it's my impression that a huge number of people in this country are scrambling for more appealing descriptions of `what happened' than the truth. Which is why I commented to FL that contrary to being worried about the fallout if the original story turned out to be both true and well publicised, I'm worried that this is the sort of thing that represensts the bare minimum needed to get people to actually deal with this properly.
I looked for McGovern story up at Google News again. Nobody picked it up at all. Drudge doesn't mention it either.
McGovern hasn't presented his evidence yet, but the media give play to plenty of stories as weak or weaker than as this one. Hell, we went to war on stories as weak as McGovern's.
I might mention: in the middle of the Iraq War debate, Scott Ritter was silenced by a report of a sex-crime arrest. The charge was a misdemeanor and had been dropped, and the court record had supposedly been sealed.
166: A couple of days after 9/11, I had a seminar with a renowned (but overrated) poli sci professor, and among the things he said was that the attack would surely end the newly revived cheerleading for missile defense -- wrong answer to the wrong threat.
Within weeks, IIRC, the administration was arguing for even more missile defense spending to "protect the homeland" or some other vague, fear-based nonsense. Just one of many instances that made it clear from the beginning that 9/11 was going to be used with complete cynicism to promote preexisting, independently motivated military/industrial goals.
Beyond the structural factors ttaM mentions in 165, which might be operating in any case, is the greatly increased partisan and political nature of the armed forces since Vietnam, although the roots go back much farther. It went from being apolitical and somewhat balanced in the political allegiances and origins of its officers, always conservative by nature, to one with a shockingly one-sided political orientation. I'd like to think we haven't reached early-twentieth century French polarization, but I think that is the trend. The vituperation heaped on Adm. Crowe, and later on Genl Clark from within the officer corps was shocking to me.
The exchange between Mark Kleiman and Lucian Truscott, on Mark's relief that a Coast Guard Admiral was in charge of an aspect of Katrina relief, sticks in my mind, although I haven't looked it up.
Does anyone mind if I blow my top for a second?
Those half-with sociopaths. Those fucktard thieving godbag scumfuck shit-for-brains bloodthirsty cannibal motherfucking satanic vampiric moronic drooling gibbering face-raping pinhead cowardly lying syphilitic whoring fart-sniffing pustular vain ignorant myopic pusillanimous dipshits.
Thanks, I feel better now.
half-with sociopaths
And the other half -- with lunatics.
scumfuck
You're letting them off a bit easy, Rob. I have more respect for the intelligence and judgment of the original Outlaw Scumfuck, and he regularly ate his own shit on stage. Though not in that video.
I underestimated the degree to which the military's effectiveness could be undermined by civilian leadership.
I think this is the one thing that being married to Mr. B. has really taught me--the degree to which military guys are (1) highly competent and principled; (2) very much dependent on political and civilian context for definition and support. Matt's right that the current military is pathologically fucked where ground-level occupation or insurgency-type wars are concerned, and I suspect that a major part of this is because post-Vietnam, most Americans (even gung-ho conservatives) just really do not want Our Boys to get killed. Which I think is a pretty good thing. But we've kidded ourselves into thinking that we can keep soldiers safe by investing heavily in high-tech recon/missiles/remote/airpower kind of stuff, as if war were a video game, and thinking this lets gung-ho conservatives have their cake and eat it too. Or at least believe they can.
I do think that the high tech shit is probably pretty effective as a kind of strategic threat, which probably helps give diplomacy some teeth. It's an expensive way to maintain persuasive power, but fine--if that's what the nation wants to spend it's money on, okay. But I honestly think that regular Americans (and hence political leaders) are by and large unwilling to see a lot of Americans killed for anything that isn't an immediate physical threat, and that since we're much too big and rich to really be physically threatened by pretty much anyone, we are not going to win any wars until or unless someone drops a nuke or some kind of massive crisis--global warming, oil shortage, economic collapse--makes us genuinely vulnerable.
168. There certainly was an effort to discredit Ritter with both the pedophile charges and also some nonsense about money from Sadaam to produce a movie.
Oh right, the pedophile thing. I'd forgotten that. I'll admit that I don't think that, at the time, I realized that that kind of character assassination was going to be s.o.p. for the rest of Bush's term.
I did wonder about that; particularly given that, IIRC, it was sting-driven. Didn't he get busted for making a date with a law-enforcement person posing as a 16-year-old girl online -- like, no real life teenagres were involved? While bad behavior taken at face value, that seems highly manipulable, particularly given the apparently politically motivated leak.
While were on the topic of forgeries, I wonder who was behind these.
175: I agree; as I see it, it's a problem of psychology. The armed forces are pathologically fucked by design, not by lack of talented, competent people. And the design was organic. Disjoint goals have resulted in a force that is incredibly capable of handling a war it will likely never see, and is at the same time quite incompetent to the tasks that it is currently engaged in, and likely to be seeing in the short-term future.
A. SNAFU is military slang. I've always thought well of the military in general, and of most of the people in it, but let's not go overboard.
B. People who thought that the politicians and military folks who spent the second half of 2002 not learning any lessons from Tora Bora would nonetheless prove competent in post-war Iraq were overly optimistic.
I had my neocon moment during the Afghanistan campaign. (At that time I was hanging out with a lot of genuine, committed pacifists.) But my half-hearted support for that war was betrayed by the administration's evident unwillingness to commit sufficient ground forces to make a real difference for the Afghans themselves. I had every confidence that we could do a better job of taking and holding Afghanistan than the Greeks and Russians did, but we didn't even try. Instead, we bombed the fuck out of the country, sent in a score or two of Special Ops guys, and relied on NATO troops to secure the capitol. Totally weak. After that, I didn't trust a thing the administration said. Aluminum tubes my ass.
Yes, but one of the reasons SNAFU (also "good enough for government work") are military slang is bureaucracy, not innate incompetence. And military bureaucracy has a lot of up sides: safety, redudancy, accountability, paper trails. Though it's also true that the downsides include promoting followers rather than leaders and a kind of tunnel vision about policies and procedures, on balance I think it's a good thing.
182: it's a problem of what is possible vs. what is plausible. With this lot, everything plausible is pretty dire.