2 thoughts on “Good speech, if only it wasn’t full of lies.”

1. You know I have the most respect for you, Clay. However, after reading through your blog and several posts, I have to wonder why you are buying into the “lie” theme that is bandied about so often. We have seen, time and time again, that people from all sides of the isle — with the same intelligence — decided it was right to go to war for many reasons. If we are talking about the WMD issue “lies”, President Clinton said they had them, John Kerry said they had them, and the list goes on:

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   “(If) we do not stop Saddam now, we will look back on some terrible day with a profound sense of remorse and guilt and say, ‘Why didn’t we do it?’ ”
   – Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Connecticut

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   Aug. 9, 2004, when asked if he would still have gone to war knowing Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, Kerry said: “Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have.�

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   Kerry joined with 97 other senators and voted for the Patriot Act in October 2001. Campaigning in New Hampshire in June 2003, he defended his vote, saying, “it has to do with things that really were quite necessary in the wake of what happened on Sept. 11.�

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   Hell , forget the quote clips and lets bring out the video: http://media1.streamtoyou.com/rnc/111505a.wmv

   The point is, that we could both throw arguments around all day and call both sides a liar, but who is that going to help? I personally don’t like the fact that we were in Iraq and I even think that the war against Afghanistan could have been done differently, but I certainly cannot fault the President for acting on good intelligence. In my opinion, the verdict is still out. We have found large stockpiles of chemical weapons — sure they were “old” weapons, but they were weapons Saddam claimed were destroyed. The media has still yet to make much of a deal about the reports that the WMD were moved to Syria (which was even stated by Bill Clinton at one point) http://www.2la.org/syria/wmd.html

   Now, if you want to claim that the President should have commenced our war with Iraq differently to prevent the movement of these items (the President and others did say they knew where they were at one point), then I’ll agree, but I think that’s still a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking without the real intelligence reports provided to the President.

   I would hope that you consider what you say about the President in a much more even tone — particularly if you expect the country to become united again behind ANY President at any given point.

2. This post was my quick in-a-nutshell opinion made shortly after watching the President’s speech. It reflects my feelings at the time based on what I heard. The link was there to clarify some of the misconceptions the speech was full of.

   The “lie” label is a strong word, and it is thrown around a bit too much, I agree. Looking back, I was offended at the time by the President’s spin on many of the issues on which he spoke. However, looking back on it, I don’t think it’s much different than other State of the Union addresses. At these times the President is aiming to shore-up his support and to do that he needs to try and make sure we feel good about his decisions.

   I don’t begrudge the representatives you quoted for wanting to do something about Saddam, I just don’t think they made the right decision. I also can’t take seriously a video put out by the RNC that cherry picks clips to support their policy. The same goes for the Dems. Anyone can edit just about anything together to support their agenda, but that doesn’t make it true.

   In response to your question, I might ask you why you buy into the Administration’s assertion that the decision was justified? The evidence doesn’t seem to have supported it in my opinion. However, you are right on the money with the observation that this is all “a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking.” Hindsight is always 20-20 as the saying goes.

   I’ve never had any qualms about our being in Afganistan. The Taliban was directly and credibly linked to Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden. Iraq was a different story. I’m not aware that there was never a credible link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. The WMD threat was something that only got pushed publicly after people started questioning the links to Al-Qaeda. Don’t get me wrong, the issue of WMDs is an important one, and one that should’ve been dealt with. However, there was a lot of bad intelligence and speculation going on, and in the wake of 9/11, there weren’t a lot of people asking questions. We knew Saddam was a bad guy, so it all seemed to make sense.

   Lets take a step back and look at the situation today with Iran. Iran has weapons of mass destruction. They supply arms and funding to terrorist organizations and are attempting to further develop their nuclear program. So why haven’t we attacked them? We’ve gone to great lengths to try and reach a diplomatic solution, but have so far failed in this endeavor. We knew about these things long before the declaration of war with Iraq, so why Iraq and not Iran?

   I think it’s our duty as citizens to consider our leaders decisions, and hold them to account when necessary. I think our current administration has made a lot of questionable decisions and has put us in a much worse position than we were in pre-Iraq. I wouldn’t fault the President for acting on good intelligence either. However, several investigations have revealed that specific pieces of intelligence used in the decision to invade were questionable at best.

   Please understand, I do respect your opinion, I just don’t agree with it. I also realize that everything is usually a lot more complicated than it seems. I’m perfectly willing to accept the fact that I may be dead wrong. I’m just not convinced of that yet. Anyway, thanks for reading, and for the debate. You’ve given me more to think about. 🙂

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