Justifications...
Paul Wolfowitz cited these reasons for going to war with Iraq in an interview last year,
"....there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people....The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it."
Let examine this for just a moment. Well, we know Iraq doesn't have any Weapons of Mass destruction. Both the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee have agreed that although there were limited contacts between terrorists and Iraq in the mid 90s, no actual relationship existed. Furthermore these contact subsided completely nearly half a decade before we invaded. Both investigative bodies found no substantive link whatsoever between Iraq and Al Queda.
That leaves the third reason, which under Wolfowitz's own admission is not reason enough to "put American kids' lives at risk..."
posted by ian @ 5:06 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
No substantive link??
"I must say I have trouble understanding the flack over this. The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government. We don't disagree with that. What we have said is… we don't have any evidence of a cooperative, or a corroborative relationship between Saddam Hussein's government and these al-Qaeda operatives with regard to the attacks on the United States. So it seems to me the sharp differences that the press has drawn, the media has drawn, are not that apparent to me.”
9-11 Commission Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton, Democrat, June 17, 2004
"We don't have any evidence of a cooperative, or a corroborative relationship between Saddam Hussein's government and these al-Qaeda operatives with regard to the attacks on the United States" = No substative link!!!
Ah, but you cut the quote off a la Maureen Dowd...
If you let the Vice Chairman complete his sentence, he is speaking with regard to "the attacks on the United States." This means that the Commission simply has no evidence that Saddam participated in the attacks on 9/11. This conclusion should not, however, be stretched to conclude that there was no substantive link between the two parties. In fact, just a sentence before, Hamilton claims there WAS A CONNECTION between Saddam and al Qaeda.
Enough with the selective reading...talk about misleading.
Who knew we had a NY Times editor posting on the site.
-BB
OK, so maybe you didn't cut the quote off... must have been selective reading on my part... my bad.
I guess I just couldn't believe you could come to that conclusion after reading the full context of the sentence.
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