"thunder" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 18:49:35 +0000, NOYB wrote:


Bush has always maintained that there were several reasons for invading
Iraq. However, as Wolfowitz said in an interview soon after the war,
"WMD
was the one issue we could all (Dems and Republicans) agree upon".

BS! Wolfowitz never mentioned Democrats in his quote.

No, he didn't. But when he said "everyone could agree on", he was obviously
referring to Republicans *and* Democrats. Here's Wolfowitz's exact words to
Vanity Fair's Tanenhaus:

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S.
government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree
on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but . . . there
have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass
destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal
treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a
fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. . . .
The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the
Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly
not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is
the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy,
even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda
group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al
Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke
about in his U.N. presentation."

He also added this (which is reason #5):
"There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by
almost unnoticed--but it's huge--is that by complete mutual agreement
between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of
our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years
has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. . . . I
think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the
door to other positive things."



Reason #6, is of course, oil...which is the connection between the first 5
reasons.



He stated WMD was
used for "bureaucratic reasons". Presumably, because there was some
disputing the other reasons between the State Department (Powell) and the
Defense Department (Rumsfeld).

There was also Democrats, and holdovers from the Clinton administration in
the CIA and State Department (ie-Richard Clarke), who disputed the notion
that Saddam was working with terrorists...and did their darndest to try to
dispel the notion.

Among the other reasons, were capitulating
to Al Qaeda's demands to remove American troops from Saudi Arabia.

Yes, that was one of them.


Bush stated the Iraqi threat in his Cincinnati speech of 10/7/02. It
doesn't hold up very well either.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0021007-8.html


Apparently, the Dems quit agreeing once they saw a political angle to
exploit.

Disingenuous.

My statement? Or yours?