“Disinformation” on WMD
By Anthony | November 10th, 2005 | 6:21 pmDavid Boyd blogs about Richard Miniter’s book, Disinformation, which purports to explore media myths and misinformation about Iraq’s (nonexistent) WMDs. There’s a good discussion going on in the comments there, so check it out.
November 13th, 2005 at 5:46 pm
Confession: I haven’t had time to read that link yet, but I have a question. In light of all this info that the Prez went to war on faulty/false intel about WMD, what then, is the real reason that people think we went to war? I was hoping that my new hero Patrick Fitzgerald would tell me, but he just seems to be mad that Libby wouldn’t tell him. I wish I understood all this.
November 13th, 2005 at 5:57 pm
Ummm… OK… I started reading the exchange that you linked to, and while it was interesting (and long), it still sounds like “he said, he said,” so I’m back where I started from. I’ve heard the arguments from both sides (which seem to be repeated in that post, correct me if I’m wrong and there’s a lot of new stuff there… I scanned a lot of it), and I still just don’t know…
November 13th, 2005 at 6:52 pm
PS – I’m not trying to hog your blog (I rhymed!!) but this post over at Joel’s blog really helped me cut through my confusion. OK, I’ll leave you alone for the rest of the day! 😉
Blessings,
Michele
November 13th, 2005 at 8:24 pm
Hey Michele! Please don’t feel like you’re hogging my blog. I love getting comments on it — it’s always nice to know that somebody’s actually reading it.
Regarding the “he said, she said” angle: I’d like to think that if you read the whole exchange, including the links, rather than just scanning it (I know, it’s an awful lot of text by this point), that it would become evident that the examples David gave simply don’t hold up as examples of WMD. I know that’s not necessarily the case though, because despite my best efforts, both David and Joe seem unwilling to concede that there’s been any significant rebuttal to their claims.
As I tried to show, when each of the items he listed are looked at a little more closely, none of them seem to be a true example of a WMD find. This, coupled with the fact that the Bush administration itself — an administration that never has a problem repeating its talking points ad nauseum in press gaggles and interviews — doesn’t even claim to have found WMDs, makes it seem very likely that there aren’t any WMD finds to speak of.
As for the post at Joel’s blog, I’ll have to think about whether I should comment there or not. I’m not sure if I have the stamina and time to open up a new front in the whole Bush/Iraq/WMD battle. 🙂
November 13th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
Yeah well, I’m just glad I’m a girl. Y’all figure it out. 😉
Feminists: Do not send me hate mail. 🙂 LOL.
November 15th, 2005 at 4:23 pm
I’m curious as to what you think about her original question:
…what then, is the real reason that people think we went to war?
November 16th, 2005 at 12:31 am
Hi David,
Well, it’s possible that WMD really were the reason for the war, and the administration was just horribly mistaken in evaluating that threat. However, if it is the case that they were just over-hyping WMD as an excuse to go to war for some other reason, there are probably many motivations that could have been the real reason for the war. Pick and choose, mix and match:
– Putting a friendlier government in charge of all that oil
– Creating a playground to run unregulated experiments in unfettered capitalism
– Serving up a cash cow for American contractors
– So Bush could one-up his Daddy
– Prime real estate for American military bases
– Revenge – Saddam tried to kill Bush’s Daddy
– People in the administration may have been mad that Saddam was no longer a friendly pet tyrant that could be used for their own purposes
– Because Bush is a War President. YeeHaw!
Keep in mind that there are likely many people in the administration who advised Bush on Iraq, and they each could have had their own individual purposes. I’m not saying that any particular person definitely did harbor any of these justifications as their main motivations for the war, I’m only trying to show that there are plenty of potential reasons other than WMD, since that’s what was asked.