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Post by showcase on Aug 26, 2004 16:06:08 GMT -5
PGFC: you peruse the SSCI report released shortly before the Butler report (if I recall correctly), and I'll look into the Butler report itself, and we'll see what we agree on re: Saddam's WMD programmes. As I recall, the Senate's report indicates that the CIA overstated its certainty regarding these points and the reliability of the underlying information. intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdfYou sure the Butler report "demonstrates" (and we're talking in the sense of " To show to be true by reasoning or adducing evidence; prove") these assertions about Saddam's programmes, vs. simply states that reporting theses assertions by MI5 (or is it MI6) was reasonable based on their data?
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Post by jerseyhoya34 on Aug 26, 2004 16:45:06 GMT -5
I think we agree to disagree here and am glad that this has become a substantive thread, IMO. The rub in this matter is the "direct threat," which also encompasses the question of prewar intelligence. I think war is justified by more than direct threat. If not, we would not have extended operations in WW2 to the European theater. I also put stock in the neocon lark, as you describe it. "Direct threat" can be defined in myriad ways. If Hussein did posses wmds, as we supposed, then I think we can all agree it would have constituted a direct threat. The fact that we have discovered that he was maintaining wmd capabilities in defiance of UN resolution, imo, constitutes a direct threat, or at least, a threat worthy of regime change. But I also understand why a portion of the American population is upset and/or confused. History will judge, as it did the Civil War and World War 2. I think it's hard to go wrong when you go to bat for freedom. You make a good point here... I still think that Iraq was justifiable on some basis. What I disagree with, however, is the justification that Bush et al. provided because it was skewed at the time and does not hold water on more careful examination. Had Bush's justification been empirically correct, his re-election would be a "slam dunk." What enrages people, myself included, is that the justification was empirically wrong in spots, and I think Americans, Congress, our soldiers deserved better.
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Post by PushyGuyFanClub on Aug 26, 2004 17:23:46 GMT -5
I'm gonna do my homework. Be back.
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Post by jerseyhoya34 on Aug 26, 2004 17:28:35 GMT -5
I'm gonna do my homework. Be back. The dog ate mine... Will have to save Kerry/$87 billion floor statement search for tomorrow.
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Post by showcase on Aug 26, 2004 17:48:55 GMT -5
Well, as promised I looked into the Butler report. Paragraph 474 does support the exact representations included in your post, saying " we have reached the conclusion that...," based on the work of the US-led Iraq Survey Group. Problem is, when you go back in the Butler Report to its discussion of the ISG, you see that the ISG hasn't released any findings so far, and that the Butler Report's descriptions are almost 2d-hand hearsay. To wit: www.official-documents.co.uk/document/deps/hc/hc898/898.pdfDoesn't seem to me like the Butler Report actually "proved" anything, as opposed to noting and drawing conclusions based on 2d-hand 'preliminary indications' that collectively provide a fig-leaf for Blair's government. Heck, I think it's evaluations like this (i.e.: the sudden and inexplicable loss of qualifiers like "it appears") that got us into this Iraq mess in the first place.
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Post by jerseyhoya34 on Aug 26, 2004 19:50:08 GMT -5
Sucky, sucky, sucky... I just tried to post Kerry's floor statement and it was too long.. Unfortunately, the link won't copy and paste in its entirety either...
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Post by jerseyhoya34 on Aug 26, 2004 20:06:04 GMT -5
thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?r108:4:./temp/~r108i0IdhW:b88546: /temp/~r108S0a7cE:e79642:) That may also be a dead link, but it is the best that I can do. For those interested, please go to thomas.loc.gov and search the CR using Kerry and "$87 billion" as the search qualifiers in the CR search engine. It should pull up a few results, and I picked those from the debate of October 10 on the Emergency Approps for Iraq and Afghanistan. Hopefully that'll get you to the place where I found the text. If folks can't get there, please PM me or post an e-mail address, and I'll try and get it to you via e-mail. I should make a few disclaimers. The debate dragged on for a few days, and Kerry made a few floor statements on the issue, so picking the one "floor statement" on the matter is not something that can be done without exercising some amount of selection and so forth. A couple of nuggets stuck out at me from Kerry's statement of October 10. Here is the first that I'd like to discuss: "Last year, President Bush had three decisive opportunities to reduce this $87 billion bill. That first opportunity came when we authorized force. That authorization sent a strong signal about the intentions of the Congress to be united in holding Saddam Hussein accountable. I thought, and still believe, that was the right thing to do. It was appropriate for the United States to help stand up at the United Nations and hold those resolutions accountable. It set the stage for the U.N. resolution that finally led Saddam Hussein to let the weapons inspectors back into Iraq. That was correct." Once again, he stands behind his vote to give Bush the authority to use force against Iraq and takes issue with the process by which Bush took us to war. This has been a consistent strand in Kerry's discussion on Iraq. Whether it is meretorious or not is a separate question, but there does appear to be some consistency. What should also be noted is how Kerry is not using this $87 billion as a means to become some anti-war candidate. Kerry is merely making an argument against the President in the context of supporting the idea of holding Hussein accountable and bringing about compliance with UN resolutions. What follows in Kerry's statement is a discussion of how the Administration did not level with the American people with respect to intelligence and costs of war and how it misused an opportunity in the international community instead choosing war on a less justifiable basis than what it could have in the event that it exhausted the possibilities and opportunities that the international community permitted.
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Post by jerseyhoya34 on Aug 26, 2004 20:18:49 GMT -5
I'm trying to avoid going over the word limit, so I'm going to split this up and resume discussion here...
Kerry follows up with a discussion of why he believes in his bill, as crafted by Biden/Kerry/Corzine et al. He makes important points about the need for Americans domestically to make sacrifices to support the war in economic and cultural terms.
"It is simply not unfair to ask those earning the most, those who are the most fortunate, those who are the most talented, the hard-working Americans who are earning more than $300,000, not as a matter of any kind of targeting except for the fact they are the best off and have the greatest ability, to make this sacrifice without a negative impact on their lifestyle, on their choices, on their quality of life. This is a time for sacrifice. I believe it is appropriate for us to ask that in order to promote a free Iraq, in order to reduce the burden being placed on future generations of Americans, in order to reduce the burden placed on the middle class today, in order to have the least negative impact on our economy, the least negative impact on long-term interest rates, the least crowding out of borrowing by adding to the debt and crowding out private borrowing in the marketplace by public borrowing, the least negative impact on perceptions, the best way for America to deal with this problem of misinformation, this problem of promises broken is to turn to those the President seeks most to give the biggest breaks to most frequently and ask them to share the burden.
I hope my colleagues will do that, recognizing the sacrifice being made on a daily basis by 130,000 of our troops who live and die by what we do in the Senate and the House, in the Congress in Washington."
I believe he raises an important point in the sense that sacrifice at home may be vital to sustaining a war effort abroad even when this nation is more powerful in relative terms than the Romans and more powerful than the next X nations combined.
His point also is valuable in the sense that it is fiscally responsible and so forth.
He does, however, leave himself open to valid questioning with respect to why he would select this bill as the time and place to stage a protest over Bush's Iraq policy. I think this is a fair point and a matter of politics. One could say that he should just bite the bullet support Bush on the $87 billion and move on.
While this may be valid, I think what's more important than the political aspect of the issue is actually getting it right, so to speak, and passing a good piece of legislation. To my knowledge, roughly 5% of the $87 billion has been spent to date, which suggests a failure of the President to implement the legislation in keeping with its emergency nature. It suggests as well that the original legislation may have fallen victim to bureaucratic haggling during the implementation with the result that the approps may be lost in the shuffle. At the same time, the American taxpayer foots the bill.
What can also be pointed out is a mysterious $20 billion slush fund in the bill that I would like to investigate in more detail before elaborating further on the subject.
So, I think the bill supported by Bush may have been a crumby bill. Kerry's would have been better in the sense that it was more fiscally responsible. It is not as easy to make an argument in favor of it on the basis of implementation because it was never passed.
Anyway, some thoughts to start the discussion on the subject if anyone would like to bite...
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Post by PushyGuyFanClub on Aug 30, 2004 16:07:07 GMT -5
Back. I'm on two fronts here, so I'm gonna try to divide them up.
Jersey -- Whether or not repealing tax cuts to pay for $87 billion or not is fiscally responsble depends on your view of economics aka. politics. It seems like we agree on that. As for the $20 billion "slush fund," it is a fact that Kellogg, Brown, and Root have overbilled. They are being audited by the Pentagon and paying back all overcharges. The military requires contractors. Only a small number of companies have the equipment and expertise to serve in combat zones. It is up to the Pentagon GAO to make sure taxpayers and soldiers get their money's worth, which they are doing. I don't think there was a slush fund.
show (was gonna call you big show, but didn't know if that'd be insulting. as a "member," still feeling my way through internet manners) -- I don't know if you want to point me somewhere specific in the Senate report (it's 521 pages). I read the conclusions in the back and hit the intro and table of contents. Like most partisan documents, there is no unanimous conclusion. Rockefeller, Levin, and Durbin conclude that the prewar intelligence estimate was weak. I agree. They blame this on 1. hastiness and incompetence in US intelligence 2. pressure from administration officials. The former is currently being addressed. The latter, IMO, has been disproved. You disagree, I know, but there was no pressure to supress or advance intelligence. Tenet thought he had it. Bush didn't force his hand. Woodward shows this.
I'd rather use the conclusions of the Butler report because there are some and because, like the 9/11 report, it is a consensus document, rather than a polemic (the senate conclusions are polemics). The conclusions in the Butler report are minimums. The wiggle room it leaves is for more to come forth (i.e. stockpiles). They did debriefing, crosschecking, primary document analysis, etc. Butler staked his rep on these findings (a big deal in Britain), and his conclusions are as compelling as the narrative history offered in the 9/11 report. (It is when the 9/11 commissioners start to make "consensus" recommendations that they lose way. For example, the committee on safeguarding civil liberties. Thanks. It's called the courts. They're provided for in the Constitution. There's a reason we don't review legislation before implementation as they do oftentimes unsuccessfully in France. Sorry, diatribe, but I just realized the duplicity and inanity of this bureaucratic expansion.)
Signing off.
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kchoya
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Post by kchoya on Aug 30, 2004 16:59:34 GMT -5
Just wondering, do you guys have jobs or classes or anything? Not that there's anything wrong with political discourse, but i don't even have time to read all of this stuff, let alone post my thesis to the board.
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Post by Badger Hoya on Aug 30, 2004 21:23:35 GMT -5
Jersey -- Whether or not repealing tax cuts to pay for $87 billion or not is fiscally responsble depends on your view of economics aka. politics. It seems like we agree on that. As for the $20 billion "slush fund," it is a fact that Kellogg, Brown, and Root have overbilled. They are being audited by the Pentagon and paying back all overcharges. The military requires contractors. Only a small number of companies have the equipment and expertise to serve in combat zones. It is up to the Pentagon GAO to make sure taxpayers and soldiers get their money's worth, which they are doing. I don't think there was a slush fund. I think you're confusing the topics a little bit PGFC. From my memory, the KBR/Halliburton monies (along with all the other uncompeted contracts before and just after the war) came from the regular DoD budget for FY2003, and not the $87B emergency request for Iraq/Afghanistan that came down on Oct 10 of last year (FY04, technically, but before that budget was approved). As for the $87B, $67B of it went to support the military's operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (I can't remember the exact breakdown, but I think more than 2/3ds went to Iraq), while $20B of it went into an "Iraq reconstruction fund", which was to fund such noble efforts as creating a zip code system, funding a national health care system, infrastructure improvements, and other economic development efforts. All of this $ then went to the CPA, and something like 80% of it went unobligated (which is to say, hadn't even begun the normal contract process). Of course, they did spend a little more money than what I've indicated, but one can argue that they effectively stole that from the assets that were seized during the war, which technically belonged to the Iraqis. Moreover, and this is speaking from experience, the CPA was probably one of the absolute worst government agencies ever created. The people were the wrong people for the job, they tried to skirt all of the rules (including many of them related to conflict of interest), and effectively managed Iraq as if it were some fiefdom there for their own personal gain. In other words, I think many people breathed a sigh of relief when June 28 rolled around, if only because they wouldn't have to deal with those yahoos anymore. In short though, I think that given the CPA's track record with the money that was granted to it ($20B + $2ish billion from the assets), Kerry was prescient in not wanting to grant this agency the power of the purse that Bush wanted to give it.
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Post by showcase on Aug 31, 2004 8:14:29 GMT -5
I'd rather use the conclusions of the Butler report because there are some and because, like the 9/11 report, it is a consensus document, rather than a polemic (the senate conclusions are polemics). The conclusions in the Butler report are minimums. The wiggle room it leaves is for more to come forth (i.e. stockpiles). They did debriefing, crosschecking, primary document analysis, etc. Butler staked his rep on these findings (a big deal in Britain), and his conclusions are as compelling as the narrative history offered in the 9/11 report. I don't disagree that the SSIC Report isn't the apotheosis of clarity (much like the structure of this sentence). However, how do you react to the fact that Butler's "conclusions" about the "minimums" aren't really well supported at all? As I pointed out above, his conclusions about Saddam's intentions in Paragraph 474 merely drops the well-warranted "it appears" qualifier from Paragraph 397. Although Butler's report offers clearer 'conclusions,' it hardly seems like the conclusions in Paragraph 474 reflect the best of deductive reasoning.
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Post by showcase on Aug 31, 2004 8:19:00 GMT -5
Just wondering, do you guys have jobs or classes or anything? Not that there's anything wrong with political discourse, but i don't even have time to read all of this stuff, let alone post my thesis to the board. If you're still in the first half of your time at GULC, I'm surprised to see you on the board at all. If you're in the second half and you still can't find the time or an opinion to drop on the rest of us, you're probably not doing it right.
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Post by PushyGuyFanClub on Aug 31, 2004 14:03:03 GMT -5
you mean you don't all get paid for posting.
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Post by showcase on Aug 31, 2004 14:35:28 GMT -5
Nope. That being said, MCI still operates under the presumption that he not only gets paid, but gets paid by the word.
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