[CLUE-Talk] Another Bush lie

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

--- Kevin Cullis <kevincu at orci.com> wrote:
> 
> And you don't think Clinton and every other president does photo ops?
>

You're (deliberately, I suspect) missing the point: It was a
carefully-planned photo op, and I doubt that any of the details were
left to chance. The White House knew that people would be seeing the
banner and drawing inferences from it -- and I doubt that they were
saying "oh, yes, I'm sure everyone will see this and think it was meant
to mean "The U.S.S. Lincoln's mission is over."" 

Of course they do photo ops, that wasn't the point -- although I do
think that Bush's little flight-suit opportunity was hypocritical in
the extreme, considering he was AWOL for much of his tour of duty. 

> Give me a break, Joe!!  To take a photo op as a lie is ridiculous. 
> Even
> if it is not quite an accurate statement/picture and you call it a
> lie? 

Yeah, Kevin, I call a carefully orchestrated media event a "lie" when
it's designed to misinform people. 

> If peoples lives were at stake or it was a cover up, then I'd start
> believing your comments, but taking an exteme view of every little
> word
> as a lie is to carry things a bit too far.
>

Um... people's lives *are* at stake, Kevin... or hadn't you noticed?

>And what will it mean if they did
> admit
> that hostilities were NOT over?  That they made a mistake going in
> there
> in the first place?  That they need to pull out and let Saddam
> achieve
> power again, because he's not in American hands?
>

It would mean this: We sent a message to the American people that
taking over Iraq was 1) necessary to the security of the U.S., 2) would
be mostly a matter of defeating the Iraqi army. 

In fact, the truth is that 1) It wasn't necessary, 2) we (the Bush
administration) either knew or should have known there would be
significant resistance on behalf of some of the loyalists to Saddam and
other Iraqi people and that it is very likely we will be in Iraq now
for a very long time in order secure peace. This will be extremely
costly in terms of money and lives. We deliberately underplayed the
difficulty in securing Iraq in order to win popular support for this
action. 

> Maybe I don't understand what you mean by "they screwed up."  

I mean: 1) We didn't need to be there in the first place. 2) They have
either severely underestimated the resistance or deliberately
understated the resistance to U.S. forces in Iraq. 3) They have
ill-prepared the troops for the occupation. The last point (3) is
simply not debatable -- U.S. forces are having to confiscate weapons
from the Iraqis due to weapons shortages and the fact that the
U.S.-supplied weapons do not perform well in Iraq's climate.


> After hosilities of the Revolutionary War ended, how long did it take
> for our country to "settle down" and get to running the country? 
> However, the terrorists of today are a different breed than people
> were
> over 200 years ago.

I don't really know off the top of my head how long it took for us to
"settle down" -- but it's also not really comparable to the Iraq
situation. First, we're talking about vastly different cultures.
Second, we're talking about vastly different circumstances and vastly
different technologies. Hell, you couldn't even *have* a war in under
two months in that time period between two countries as far apart as
the U.S. and Britain -- it would have taken that long for troops from
Britain to arrive to fight in the first place... 

Zonker