[lbo-talk] I don't get it..

[steve philion]

I would like to refer people back to what I was replying to. Someone had
wondered why the media was only now questioning the claims of WMDs because
the claims were "all made up to begin with." I pointed out that, until the
actual invasion, very few people even among the Left took this stance, since
it was far more likely that Saddam had _something_. The only people who
could take this stance with anything like evidence were the actual weapons
inspectors-- and even then, they had a whole country to search. Given what
was known then, believing that WMDs were fantasy would have been  pretty
far-fetched. So, it was a bit disingenuous to fault the media for not
suspecting that it was "all made up to begin with."
--I can say pretty safely that I doubted the veracity from the get go, it
was perfectly plain that we were just continuing the barrage of false claims
that got us into Gulf 1 and how many hundreds of thousands of unnecessary
deaths from war. If nothing else, the outstanding and careful job that Glen
Rangwala did of refuting the original so-called "British dossier" and the
subsequent one and Powell/Bush's speeches only further strengthened the
plain fact that the Bush administration was desperate for reasons to invade
Iraq. The so-called WMD 'issue' was never but farcical from the beginning.
The idea that there was some excuse for believing it, especially given what
we know about the clown troupe delivering the message of 'imminent threat',
is and always was preposterous.
Rangwala's counter-dossier is probably the most important systematic
refutation of the lies fed to us from 1400 and 10...
http://traprockpeace.org/counter-dossier.html
http://traprockpeace.org/iraqweapons.html
http://traprockpeace.org/iraqweaponsb.html