"To be charitable, she (Rice) didn't know what she was talking about."

WP
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/28/AR2005112801225.html?referrer=email

More Than a 'Mistake' on Iraq

By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

A line is forming outside the Iraq confessional. It consists of Democratic presidential aspirants -- where's Hillary? -- who voted for the war in Iraq and now concede that they made a "mistake." Former senator John Edwards did that Nov. 13 in a Post op-ed article, and Sen. Joseph Biden uttered the "M" word Sunday on "Meet the Press." "It was a mistake," said Biden. "It was a mistake," wrote Edwards. Yes and yes, says Cohen. But it is also a mistake to call it a mistake.

Both senators have a point, of course. They were told by the president and members of his War Cabinet -- Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld -- that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. In particular, those three emphasized Iraq's purported nuclear weapons program. As late as August 2003, Condoleezza Rice was saying that she was "certain to this day that this regime was a threat, that it was pursuing a nuclear weapon, that it had biological and chemical weapons, that it had used them." To be charitable, she didn't know what she was talking about.

As it turned out, neither did Vice President Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney said, "Increasingly, we believe that the United States will become the target" of an Iraqi nuclear weapon, and Rumsfeld raised a truly horrible specter: "Imagine a Sept. 11th with weapons of mass destruction" that would kill "tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children." Imagine a defense secretary who thought he was propaganda minister.

I quote this trio of braying exaggerators -- all of them still in the administration -- because they emphasized the purported nuclear weapons threat. Yet by the time the war began, March 20, 2003, it was quite clear that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program. All the evidence for one -- the aluminum tubes, the uranium from Africa -- had been challenged. What's more, U.N. inspectors in Iraq had found nothing. "We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq," said Mohamed ElBaradei of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency. That was on Feb. 14. The next month, the United States went to war anyway.

Yet by the time the war began, March 20, 2003, it was quite clear that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program.

A little fact that didn't keep Cohen et al. from using it to scare the country into George's Glorious Little War.

or playing it up?

It seems like all the other kids are doing it...

he's a disgusting pseudo intellectual pig

The fact that things were known by March 2003 is not relevent to a vote in October 2002. The inspectors were not there in October.

The facts obtained by the inspectors were the basis of many people, including Kerry and Dean, speaking out against going to war before the start of the war. It was in the first 2 months of 2003 that people marched. The media COULD have joined the outcry - but did only in a half hearted manner. I couldn't believe we would attack a country that was destroying it's own weapons.

The Bush administration went to war knowing there was no nuclear program. The Senators had gotten the administration to change the IWR to SPECIFICALLY take out regime change and preventing Iraq from destabalizing the middle east as reasons and to limit the action only to Iraq. The administration which agreed to these changes to get the votes of Democrats and moderate Republicans did this negotiation in bad faith. They now ADMIT that their goal was to spread democracy.

This is why in 2003, Kerry told Eric Alterman that he was "God Damn right that he was angry that Bush lied to him." He then many times said he would never trust the man again.