Just claim victory
Nixon declared victory against Vietnam. He also claimed that if a President breaks the law, it's not really against the law, because anything a President does is necessarily correct.
Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.
All the real experts, the actual weapons inspectors, said there was no evidence of Saddam having WMDs. The Bush Administration declared not only that there were, but they knew exactly where they were. For proof, they offered a known forgery (the famed yellowcake document that Bush touted in his State of the Union address, even though it was previously declared a fake), aluminum tubes (constructed in a way to make them unusable as a component of a uranium centrifuge), the word of a known double-agent who was on Iran's payroll (Curveball), and the fact that Donald Rumsfeld and George H.W. Bush brokered a deal to sell Saddam chemical weapon technology in the 1980s. So we bombed Iraq and seized their oil fields. Eventually we admitted that there were no WMDs, and there haven't been since they were destroyed in the aftermath of Gulf War I.
Well, that doesn't sound very good if you're trying to elect Republicans in 2006, so what's the answer? Return to Nixon's tactics and just declare that WMDs were indeed found. That's right, the neocon propaganda machine is now just declaring that Saddam's WMDs have been found. There's only one problem, the facts. Some shells constructed in the 80s were indeed found in 2004, and they had contained sarin gas. The gas has decomposed, the shells are corroded, and many were completely disabled. Weapons experts testified that these shells cannot be used as intended (they wouldn't survive firing) and could not be made into IEDs. The actual gas itself now has a toxicity level of pesticides found in household products.
Undeterred by facts when it's important to declare a talking point as truth, Representative Curt Weldon described the presentation of the facts as "in my opinion, is just plain stupid".
Wonderful. Just declare that WMDs were now found. Damn the facts, we've got an election coming up and we've got to save face and reinstill fear in the minds of US citizens, so just keep repeating the talking points. Rove's one-play playbook.
Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.
All the real experts, the actual weapons inspectors, said there was no evidence of Saddam having WMDs. The Bush Administration declared not only that there were, but they knew exactly where they were. For proof, they offered a known forgery (the famed yellowcake document that Bush touted in his State of the Union address, even though it was previously declared a fake), aluminum tubes (constructed in a way to make them unusable as a component of a uranium centrifuge), the word of a known double-agent who was on Iran's payroll (Curveball), and the fact that Donald Rumsfeld and George H.W. Bush brokered a deal to sell Saddam chemical weapon technology in the 1980s. So we bombed Iraq and seized their oil fields. Eventually we admitted that there were no WMDs, and there haven't been since they were destroyed in the aftermath of Gulf War I.
Well, that doesn't sound very good if you're trying to elect Republicans in 2006, so what's the answer? Return to Nixon's tactics and just declare that WMDs were indeed found. That's right, the neocon propaganda machine is now just declaring that Saddam's WMDs have been found. There's only one problem, the facts. Some shells constructed in the 80s were indeed found in 2004, and they had contained sarin gas. The gas has decomposed, the shells are corroded, and many were completely disabled. Weapons experts testified that these shells cannot be used as intended (they wouldn't survive firing) and could not be made into IEDs. The actual gas itself now has a toxicity level of pesticides found in household products.
Undeterred by facts when it's important to declare a talking point as truth, Representative Curt Weldon described the presentation of the facts as "in my opinion, is just plain stupid".
Wonderful. Just declare that WMDs were now found. Damn the facts, we've got an election coming up and we've got to save face and reinstill fear in the minds of US citizens, so just keep repeating the talking points. Rove's one-play playbook.
posted by zblog at
12:00 AM
1 Comments:
We've all heard the rhetoric that we invaded and occupy Iraq as punishment for 9/11, even though al Qaeda actually attacked us on 9/11, and neither Iraq or Saddam had anything to do with it.
But the punishment of the Iraqi people continues. No Iraqi had anything to do with the murder of those 3000+ Americans, but about 6000 Iraqis were killed in the violent civil war that dubya's war brought into existence.
Six thousand deaths in two months is almost 100 deaths a day in a country with just 26 million residents. Adjusted for population differences, that would be the equivalent of a 9/11 about every two and a half days in the United States.
And now they're talking about invading Syria and Iran...
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zblog, at 2:00 PM
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