so much for draining the swamp

[oncemoreuntothejimbreech]

(11-17-2016, 07:01 PM)Dill Wrote: Ha ha, he opposed nation-building AFTER the invasion too--part of why it all went south.

Nothing in what I have written fails to acknowledge "what it meant for the US to subjugate its security to the self-interest of other countries on the UN security council."  Wherever do you get that?  What does that have to do with your original contention that Clinton or Obama would likely have invaded Iraq as well--that is what I have been contesting.

You still don't seem to get that cooked intel was created outside official channels and presented to Powell and Congress and eventually the UN. That the CIA Rome office invalidated the yellowcake report is matter of record. Dated even. They weren't misled. The Energy Dept's assessment of the aluminum tubes is a matter of record. They weren't misled--but they were muzzled for the two weeks following the White Paper presented to Congress.  Powell HAD NO IDEA that what the Rome office said. And the Rome office assumed the yellowcake forgery was dead, a non issue--until they saw Powell presenting it to the UN--thanks to Berlusconi's end run. Powell had no idea that the bio weapons report came from a single source in Germany no one in the CIA had actually interviewed--a source the Germans considered an unreliable alcoholic looking to be paid for intel. And CIA intel analysts gasped when they saw that included in his presentation.  Much of  this only came out in the investigation afterwards.

And I repeat--to say that Clinton or Obama would have invaded Iraq is to say that they too would have cooked intel to fool Congress, because that is the only way they could have gotten the needed resolution.  The belief that Iraq could be broken and then democratized American style is a neo-liberal fantasy, far from anything found in either Clinton or Obama's administration.

And this is relevant to the current conjuncture because once again we have a cowboy in the White House who knows more than all the generals and liberals put together.  The Bush/Cheney intel fiasco refutes your thesis about "career staffers" providing a check on crazy.  They are helpless when a strong-willed president or vice-president "knows better" than the generals.

Knowing what you don't know is just as important as knowing what you do know. If I may be so bold as to paraphrase W., we have a old phrase in Texas which comes from Tennessee, but we have it in Texas, too. He don't know what he don't know and to me that is the funniest damn part of this whole conversation.