great post rattyboy.
Quote from ratboy88:
Silly word games and weapons of mass destruction
http://www.hillnews.com/marshall/110503.aspx
"In recent months, Democrats have criticized President Bush for claiming that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed an imminent threat to the United States. Ted Kennedy said it. Wes Clark said it. And plenty of others have, too.
But now Republicans say itâs a bum rap. A chorus of conservative columnists and talk-show hosts claims that nobody in the administration ever said any such thing.
âNo member of the administration,â conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan recently wrote, âused the term âimminent threatâ to describe Saddam Husseinâs Iraq. No one. ⦠[Wesley] Clark is repeating a lie that has been thoroughly exposed on the Internet and elsewhere, a lie that even The New York Times has stopped repeating.â
Could this possibly be true? Could all our memories be so faulty?
In a word, no.
Letâs start by looking at what the presidentâs spokesmen said about the âimminent threatâ claim before things in Iraq started going sour.
Last October, a reporter put this to Ari Fleischer: âAri, the president has been saying that the threat from Iraq is imminent, that we have to act now to disarm the country of its weapons of mass destruction, and that it has to allow the U.N. inspectors in, unfettered, no conditions, so forth.â
Fleischerâs answer? âYes.â
In January, Wolf Blitzer asked Dan Bartlett: âIs [Saddam] an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home.â
Bartlettâs answer? âWell, of course he is.â
A month after the war, another reporter asked Fleischer, âWell, we went to war, didnât we, to find these â because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States? Isnât that true?â
Fleischerâs answer? âAbsolutely.â
I could go on. But I trust you get the point.
Itâs true that administration officials avoided the phrase âimminent threat.â But in making their argument, Sullivan and others are relying on a crafty verbal dodge â sort of like âI didnât accuse you of eating the cake. All I said was that you sliced it up and put it in your mouth.â
The issue is not the precise words the president and his deputies used but what arguments they made. And on that count, the record is devastatingly clear.
To call something an imminent threat means that the blow could come at any moment and that any delay in confronting it risks disaster. Websterâs defines âimminentâ as âready to take place; especially: hanging threateningly over oneâs head.â That gets it just about right. The White House described the Iraqi threat as a sword over our heads, a threat we had to confront now.
With this in mind, consider a few more examples.
Hereâs how Vice President Cheney described the threat in August 2002: âWhat we must not do in the face of a mortal threat is give in to wishful thinking or willful blindness.â
A month later, Bush called Iraq an âurgent threat to America.â
The next month, he described the threat like this: âIraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. ⦠Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof â the smoking gun â that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.â
Or Fleischer two days after that: âAnother way to look at this is if Saddam Hussein holds a gun to your head even while he denies that he actually owns a gun, how safe should you feel?â
Or the president justifying war as it got under way: âThe people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.â
For more than six months, Bush and his top deputies told Americans that Iraq posed a grave, immediate and imminent threat. Delay risked horrors like WMD terrorist handoffs or mushroom clouds billowing over American cities.
Some now point to statements in which they seem to declaim the idea of an imminent threat. In the State of the Union, for instance, the president said: âSome have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words and all recriminations would come too late.â
But here the president isnât ruling out an âimminent threat,â but rather just bending the concept out of all recognition by arguing that the threat will be âimminentâ only when we get a formal warning from the potential attackers. And thatâs just more of the same rhetorical gobbledygook and obfuscation.
Critics like Sullivan want to put the onus on Democrats to untangle these silly word games if they want to talk about what we all know happened in the run-up to the war.
But thatâs just not how it works. Just as they canât undo what they did, the White House and its supporters canât undo what they said.
Thereâs no use denying it. It was only a year ago. We were there. We remember."