Can you point to an assertion made recently that has been found to be false? No. Bush has on the contrary referred to the intelligence being inaccurate MANY times. The left has instead of being ‘giving’ has gone on the attack making charges that the Bush admin ‘cooked’ the intelligence or ‘manipulated’ the intelligence also. There has been no basis for the charges.

Why not simply just say you disagreed with going to war? Why with the ugly baseless charges during a war time? It’s horrible what the left has done.

The hate emanating through your posts is quite astounding. Do you want dialog or do you want attack (on your part) and defend on our part? It’s useless as we’ve seen with your types before. We point out the pattern and it doesn’t change for weeks and weeks and weeks. And it’s uncalled for really. Laundry lists of accusations makes your world go around but not most people.

pre-emptive war against Iraq is draining money,personnel and resources against Al-Queda IMHO you may not agree but that’s how I see it.

Actually the genius of the war on Iraq is that a place has been created where AQ and so many others have come to kill Americans that is on their soil not ours. In essense, we brought the attack to the enemy and it is staying on their soil. Our military who is trained to fight this enemy is doing what they are trained to do. Our civilians have been kept safe as the attention and resources of our enemy has been in fighting our military. That my friends is genius.

As far as Dick Cheney’s quote, you forget one thing, at that time he was Def Sec, he is doing his job which is to parrot the administration he was working under. It was the policy of the 1st Bush president to not confront Sadamn then, as it still is now. But that might not be how Cheney honestly feels, so Tommy your quote is actually of no value to the argument. – Lorica

You see Tano, to some 9/11 is a justification for a War on Terror. Most take this to mean War in the sense of “War on Drugs” – metaphorical, not literal. A war to be fought using traditional international crime fighting techniques and limited police actions using military force.

So while Bin Laden- the responsible party – still goes un-punished, we flush billions of dollars and thousands more lives down the toilet in our misadventures in Iraq. We’ve created a huge problem that we didn’t have pre-9/11, and Al-Qaeda- our real enemy – only benefits from this. GWR’s idea that somehow using Iraq as the world’s battleground to fight terrorist is ridiculous on it’s face. This fantasy must assume there are a limited reservoir of potential terrorists. As if we can just drain it and go home!

By GWR’s justification for war on Iraq, there are a few other countries that should also be on the list. Pakistan, anyone?

9/11 was perpetrated by “thugs armed with nothing more than box cutters”. Our response? Send our armies around the world to topple an annoying dictator with no real ties to the people responsible for the attack on our country. Then claim this is somehow helping the WOT. So while GWR plays connect-the-dots, we mortgage our future in a war where even the best realistic outcome would have no upside for us.

That’s not what the drive-by legacy press told me….

Now you didn’t think I was going to stay out of this WaPo "whoopsie" story did ya? A case where our MSM ran a whole story based on a report from the DoD.  Official’s Key Report On Iraq Is Faulted…

Start with nine years of escalating terrorist attacks, culminating in one horrific day which showed that we could be attacked effectively right here at home, by thugs armed with nothing more than box cutters. That might not have been a wake-up call for Tano, but it was for most of us.

We know Saddam was helping to finance terrorists. He was letting AQ train on Iraqi soil. We know he was intent on acquiring yellowcake, and did in fact have some poison gas and other WMDs. So let’s connect the dots. The probability that he would make some very advanced and lethal armaments available to AQ was high.

What changed, then, is that we understood that we no longer had the luxury of treating terrorism as an annoyance, as we did pre-9/11. It isn’t that anything Cheney said was less true – it was that we could not longer accept the likely consequences of doing nothing.

Tano stays in the cocoon:
how can anyone believe today that an invasion of Iraq would yield any significant headway in the war against al-Q or islamist jihadis?

For one thing, I think it’s a pretty sure bet Saddam won’t be helping AQ train or providing them sanctuary. A long rope took care of that. For another, it’s become the focus of the WOT for the islamofascists. They understand the impact of a relatively free and democratic Iraq, even if you don’t. That’s why they’re going all in to win there, and that’s fine with me. It makes for a nice target-rich environment there. Personally, if we must be fighting AQ, I’d rather do it with marines in Baghdad than with firemen in New York. You’d prefer it the other way around?

Creating a failed chaotic state where al-Q elements can come in and operate with a fair amount of freedom is, objectivly, a step backward in the greater war on terrorism.

They were doing that beforehand. However, the interesting point is that you seem to have concluded that Iraq must become a failure. That’s not a certainty at all. You want to know what is a step backward in the WOT? Attempts by our own left to undermine the prosecution of the WOT. Nothing heartens the average jihadi more than when our leftists march and editorialize against it. Every time a Dick Durbin makes nonsensical Nazi charges against our troops solely for some partisan motives, AQ gets a little more resolve. They know their only hope of winning is to convince Americans to stop fighting and give up. And they know right where to go for help.

In what way did 9/11 change the relevance or truth of any of the specific points that Cheney made in that passage? How did 9/11 change the fact that it would be hard to find Saddam, once we went in. How did 9/11 change the fact that we would be left with trying to set up a government. How did 9/11 change the fact underlying reality that Cheney seems to have been alluding to – that Iraq could well end up a chaotic mess with us as the responsible power, if we were to invade.

And of course, how can anyone believe today that an invasion of Iraq would yield any significant headway in the war against al-Q or islamist jihadis? Creating a failed chaotic state where al-Q elements can come in and operate with a fair amount of freedom is, objectivly, a step backward in the greater war on terrorism.

I get the sense that people here are far more intent on trading one-liners, and “winning” arguments against visiting dissenters than they are with taking these critical issues seriously.

I didn’t hear it from the drive-by legacy press. Might as well say I get my news from ST.

Most shocking is the obvious fact that the reporter and editor never read the IG’s report. If they had, they would have realized the quotes were wrong. Do they proofread their work or is the rush to judgment more important?

Problem for youse guys is that the American public ain’t buying it anymore.

Which calls to mind this quote:

Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the tempermental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature.

- Winston Churchill, September, 1941.

As I recall, Churchill is also credited with saying that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. (yes, I know, I’m going bonkers with the quotes tonight. ) Every time I hear someone cite polls as a reason for doing something, I’m reminded of one on-camera polling interview I saw a few years back. The pollster asked a young lady in her early 20’s if she knew the war in which George Washington fought. Her answer: World War I. Not too coincidentally, she also was voting Democrat.

Bak, thanks for the excellent, spot-on reminder of the Lincoln presidency, and how it’s important to be a leader in dangerous times, not a finger-in-the-wind poll-driven politician.

So, the Washington Post and other news outlets posted a bunch of stories today about how Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans within the Pentagon was investigating whether there were links between al Qaeda and Iraq and that the actions of that off…

You’re (sic) biggest question about the caliphate is not one I’m taking very seriously because that’s not going to happen in my lifetime.

On that, two points: first – so you don’t mind if it happens to your children? Are you that self-centered?

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

- Ronald Reagan

No less true today than it was when he said it.

If it’s all the same to you, tommy, the rest of us would prefer to have a spine.

The second point – since you’re not worried about anything that won’t happen in your lifetime, I challenge you to go tell Bob and the rest of your left-wing buddies to shut their pie-holes about global warming, since that wouldn’t affect you either, even if it were true.

We’re so used to the relentless media bias that we’ve come to expect it on a daily basis. Considering the amount of times they screw up, the mainstream press unwittingly has become a boon for bloggers over the past several years. Today we have a whop…