[quote name='CocheseUGA']trq: The entire Congress and House had access to the same intel that the White House used to start the war. The WH wasn't misleading, it was the intel itself.[/QUOTE]
That goes to my point about opportunistic Democrats. The political atmosphere at the time, post 9/11, was so rigid, there was no way any Republicans were going to dissent from the President, and until they realized how unpopular the war would turn out to be, very few Democrats or Independents had any desire to stick their necks out over freaking Saddam Hussein, lest it get chopped off, which turned out to be very politically savy, given the "if you don't support the war, you're a traitor" meme that still floats around even today. So the idea that Congress and the Senate supported the war at first is both true, and irrelevant to the quality of the intel. It has been pretty clearly documented (
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9991919/site/newsweek/ ,
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/09/ap/politics/mainD8N67L6O1.shtml) that the State Department simply didn't like the less than completely pro-war conclusions the CIA was reaching. That's not a mistake -- that's lying.
[quote name='CocheseUGA']As for the UN inspectors, I've not seen so much telegraphing since before AG Bell.
'Hey, we're coming to inspect you. Sure hope you don't do anything in the meantime.'[/QUOTE]
Except it worked, didn't it?
[quote name='CocheseUGA']Just because they couldn't find them, doesn't mean they didn't have them. That line of thinking picked up some serious steam when we found fully functional fighter jets buried in the sand. He had the weapons, not all of it was used. So that left two possibilities: it left the country at some point in the last ten years, or it's still there. We hardly did anything when we were there the first time, aside from take prisoners and deal with oil fires. The man gassed his own citizens, then proceeded to poison the entire region with toxic gases from the oil field fires. You don't always add A+B and get C, but in this case it was a good bet to think you would. It's not as if chemicals are hard to come by. The only reason the 1993 WTC bombs weren't chlorine-based was that the people didn't have enough money.[/QUOTE]
Fighter jets and a fully functional nuclear program are two very different things. And if we can take satellite photos of what are supposedly some mobile chemical weapons labs, shouldn't we be able to track the materials for nukes as they travel across the desert? It sure is convenient how America can be hyper-competent one minute ("We KNOW he's meeting with Al Qaeda"), and all "Gee, those stockpiles must've gone over the border to Syria..." the next. Ultimately, it's not like it would have been out of character for Saddam Hussein to want WMD ... but priors on your rap sheet aren't enough reason to let the cops shoot you the next time you're strolling down the street.
[quote name='CocheseUGA']Hindsight is 20/20, but IIRC the very small amount of people who dissented were severely drowned out by those who went with the logical assumptions.[/QUOTE]
It's not hindsight, because plenty of people raised these doubts ahead of time, and were shouted down for it. But it was an assumption, and we all know how that saying goes.