CNN on President Bush’s commission on WMD: No Weapons of Mass Destruction. No Mobile Weapons Labs. No uranium importation program.
No credible threat to the U.S.
Thanks, Mr. Tenet. Thanks a lot. You should wear that medal with pride.
CNN on President Bush’s commission on WMD: No Weapons of Mass Destruction. No Mobile Weapons Labs. No uranium importation program.
No credible threat to the U.S.
Thanks, Mr. Tenet. Thanks a lot. You should wear that medal with pride.
I’d hate to get all Chomsky, but it is rather interesting that Iraq was the only OPEC country to drop the dollar as its reserve currency. This war may or may not have been for oil, but it certainly wasn’t for WMD. At all. Never was. End of story.
Amb. L. Paul Bremer got a medal too, adding that he “used his time in Iraq to learn Arabic.” I only remember Jon Stewart’s reaction. “Wait so you didn’t *know* Arabic beforehand? Wouldn’t that have been kinda necessary to know before leaving for Iraq?”
Remeber if you go into a bank and represent you have a firearm and will shoot hostages…and the cops shoot you…and it turns out the “gun” was just your finger…the cops are LYING NEOCONS!!!
No blood for oil. We paleos would rather have that oil funding our own doom. Because mass terrorism is real liberty.
Bremer is cleary an idiot, because Jon Stewert is all hip and smart. Everybody should know everything, learning things are dumb. Because Jon Stewert says so.
I’m not sure I understand all of the comment above, but the first part does raise a serious problem. Saddam Hussein evidently did not have weapons of mass destruction, but he didn’t want his neighbors (or his victims) to know that. He also refused to document, as had been agreed, the destruction of the weapons that he had admitted having in the past. So he was sending out signals that indicated he had weapons, although it seems that he didn’t have them. (The sanctions, as they were manipulated by Saddam, were quite awful in their impact on the people, but one effect was a serious degrading of his ability to wage war.)
My point was a rather simple one. We may see how one could be fooled by such behavior. (And how Saddam lost a very high stakes gamble.) But you don’t give a medal to the man who failed to use the resources at his disposal effectively enough to be able to see through the deception.
President Bush really gave us all a thumb in the eye by awarding medals to those three. Tenet failed to provide accurate intelligence. Bremer made the one colossal mistake that has cost more lives than anything else: disbanding the Iraqi army and sending all the soldiers home without any income. (That was a mistake so bad that it’s the only one I thought at the time was remarkably stupid; I am normally hesitant to express opinions on military strategy, since I’ve never fought a counter-insurgency war before.) And Tommy Franks was a military officer who may have done a good or a bad job, but who did not deserve a civilian award.
Such mistakes do not deserve medals.
Oh Dr. Palmer, a truism of beltway politics best explains Tenet’s medal:
No mistake in Washington DC goes unrewarded.
Perhaps he should be forced to give his medal to Hans Blix who was proved right after all.
>>Such mistakes do not deserve medals.
From an institutional standpoint, they weren’t mistakes. Partly as a result of these men’s actions, the military bureaucracy has grown in scope and power. Tens of billions of dollars will be funnelled into military spending as a result of this war and the prolonged occupation. Everybody wins — except us, of course, and the Iraqi and US soldiers who got killed.
I would respond to the…umm… comments (?) above but I don’t know where to begin. If anything I was making an observation. If the commenter (who incidently chose to post anonymously) thinks I am another “denounce any pro-American supporter as neocon” demagogue than so be it. But he’s wrong.
This commenter furthermore cannot deny the role that oil has played in the affairs of the US in the Arab world. Hence the US claiming to oppose outposts of tyranny but supporting the House of Saud. Or the CIA overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran.
I never insinuated that Ambassador Bremer was an idiot. Perhaps not the right person to lead the provisional authority, but no idiot. My point was, and yes it may have been made clearer, to show just how silly the entire situation was with Bremer and Tenet getting medals.
If anything Mr Bonicillo was right “no mistake in Washington goes unrewarded.”