Bloodless Coup

LET'S NOT NEGLECT THE NEWS THAT THE DOD IS MONITERING THOSE RADICAL EXTREMIST QUAKERS.IF THIS ADMINISTRATION STAYS TRUE TO FORM WE WILL SOON BE INVADING PENNSYLVANIA AND WAGEING PEACE ON THE AMISH IN AN EFFORT TO CONTAIN A GLOBAL WAR ON PACSIFISM.JEBUS SAVE US.

Hilzoy.

Binky,
Hilzoy's right, except, no, they're not. Nixon didn't inform the Senate leadership that he was organizing a break in. Nixon's break in was to help him get re-elected, not to defend our nation in a times of war (which as most liberals fail to point out has been successful). In fact, in this way when Clinton lied to the courts for his own political gain by avoiding another scandal, that was far worse than what Bush has done here. Again, this is not without precedent, Lincoln suspended liberties during the civil war. The great and mighty FDR suspended liberties during WWII in a far greater and more prejudiced way, and he wasn't impeached for it. Great Presidents recognize that there is humility even in service to the law because there are things greater than law, and great Presidents realize that minor sacrifices of liberty done in full view of the opposition party are sometimes essential to preserve the greater liberty of life.

Morris,

I think you are so far wrong on this as to scare me.

On the facts:

1: Bush may have informed the Senate, but it was a strange sense of "inform". There were objections in the Senate (see my link to the NYT; it looks like Rockefeller objected), and Bush just ran over them. Nowhere did the Senate actually debate this, or officially authorize it. Additionally, only two (see the second page) judges were informed of the program. By no way, shape or form can Bush claim this program was authorized and debated by other branches of the government.

2: Clinton's transgressions were hardly ones for his own political gain. Clearly he did wrong (he lied under oath), but he did so in order to avoid personal embarrasment, not for political gain (though the personal embarrassment might have led to political issues). However you want to spin this, in the end he lied about extramarital affairs to avoid all the issues that would have created. There was nothing "political" about his actions. You clearly cannot say that about Bush and this issue: it's fundamentally political.

3: Lincoln. Lincolns actions have been and will be debated for years. That being said, I think the sheer scale of the different situations requires that Bush not be compared to Lincoln. Lincoln had an enemy army invading the US, and a fractured political structure (some in the north were only reluctantly in the Union) to deal with. Hence, he violated the constitution. This is "the constitution isn't a suicide pact" (Maybe Moon can chime in on what Lincoln did or didn't do to make his actions legal). Bush, on the other hand, is facing a much less significant threat: Al Qaeda, whatever else it might do, is no threat to the country in the sense of being able to force a change in government or even substantially damage our infrastructure. It's just not a comparable situation. 1861: Hundreds of thousands of organized and armed Southerners trying to militarily defeat us. 2001: At most a couple of thousand half-organized fundamentalists with nothing more powerful than a few guns, homemade explosives, and box cutters. Bush doesn't get to do what Lincoln did, 'cause the threat levels are not even remotely comparable.

4: FDR. In general, see above. 1941: Millions of armed and organized Japanese and Germans trying to militarily defeat us. Just not comparable to today. Also, what did FDR do that violated the constitution? The only cases I'm familiar with are the Japanese internment (found to be unconstitutional after the war), and the way some Nazi submarine-dropped spys were executed (think FDR ordered secret military-run courts martials, but I could be wrong; in any event, I don't think they were found to be unconstitutional). What are you thinking about?

I disagree that there are greater things than the law (from a political point of view, not personal, and the President is - above all - a political office). As I noted in my post, the only thing that separates the US from North Korea is our system of laws and checks and balances. If the President can, at times of his/her own choosing, choose to violate those laws because they feel called upon to act for some amorphous "greater good", then the laws mean nothing, and the US has just pretended to be something special for 225 years. No person, whomever that may be, is above the law.

How does it feel to be a sheep?

I'm pretty weak on Lincoln, but I know he suspended, and in full public view, the writ of habeas corpus for the duration of the Civil War, effectively taking out of the courts any oversight over the treatment of the enemy (and, presumably, the Union where necessary). But as you point out, his focus largely was on dealing with what amounted to hostile foreign nationals, secessionists, standing on American soil. There's no comparison to the maritime surveillance of Americans without a warrant, and to my knowledge Lincoln effectuated nothing so draconian.

And if you have a problem with me characterizing this as maritime, call a senator and ask him to declare a war. As far as I'm concerned, all of this, even Iraq, is a "police action" and the blank check the Senate wrote the president is a constitutionally reprehensible and morally suspect cop out.

I thought the GOP was the party of originalism. An originalist wouldn't stand for 2,000+ dead American soldiers in an undeclared war.

Morris, when are you going to finish flogging Clinton? I swear, you ought to get paid for all the efforts you make to keep his name in the discussion.

Btw, I forget the details, but at some point in the past year or two I read the relevant cases, and I recall that the German spies found in our midst ultimately were afforded greater due process potections than we have afforded the detainees in Guantanamo.

Well, it looks like Billmon also sees shades of Stalinism in domestic spying.

Did someone say Sauron? (Via Hoffmania.

How does it feel to be an absolutist, Baltar? When you suggest any infringement on liberties at all is a great threat without looking at the context, you're being absolutist, seeing things as either your way or the highway. The greatest Presidents understood that liberties could be taken away in times of great crisis, and I honestly think you're underestimating by a great degree the threat posed by terrorism today. Even not including Iraq, terrorists are on the news at least every month for blowing up buildings in Saudi Arabia, in Spain, in Bali, in London, in Egypt, in whatever country they plot to kill a whole bunch of innocent civilians. And for every attack we hear about being carried out, we hear about another averted, whether it be in Germany, in Morocco, or on the Brooklyn Bridge, and this is where the intelligence of a few hundred wiretaps comes into play. If worldwide terrorists are organized enough to attack us (the innocent ones they seek to destroy just to make a point) all over the world, killing hundreds at a time, that strikes me as being pretty organized. If you'll recall, the South was outgunned in the Civil War, but Lincoln didn't say, "Okay, okay, since you're not as strong as us militarily yet, I'm not going to take away liberties until you get stronger than we are." That's essentially the argument you're making, saying that we shouldn't adapt to this threat until it's stronger than we are. And that is all well and good in an ivory tower, but every time terrorists kill hundreds of people, they probably think in their last breath of life that the threat is potent enough to adapt to.

As for FDR, the Supreme Court in Hirabayashi ruled that it was okay to enforce a curfew for members of a minority group when that minority group's nation is at war with the US. Hugo Black wrote the Korematsu decision that the need to protect against espionage was greater than an individual's liberty. This individual case was overturned because of suspect evidence but the core issues this case addressed were not overturned. The Supreme Court has a history of recognizing that difficult problems require difficult remedies. FDR took away certain liberties because he knew what he was up against, and Bush has done the same.

As far as Clinton goes, maybe his actions weren't politically motivated to save his administration from embarassment and in doing so maintain its power; maybe they were. Maybe they were just to save himself the hassle getting caught was going to bring him. Either way, this was not a matter of the nation's security.

Moon,
As far as Gitmo goes, the right you're referring to was an independent finding the Germans were enemy combatants.

i know this is back on the current list due only to spam, but i find unfinished business here.

morris writes: "the Supreme Court in Hirabayashi ruled that it was okay to enforce a curfew for members of a minority group when that minority group's nation is at war with the US. Hugo Black wrote the Korematsu decision that the need to protect against espionage was greater than an individual's liberty. This individual case was overturned because of suspect evidence but the core issues this case addressed were not overturned. The Supreme Court has a history of recognizing that difficult problems require difficult remedies."

wait just one gold-darned second, congress-loving, court-hating morris. in case you need to be reminded, the congress long-since has roundly repudiated the korematsu ruling and japanese internment generally, and indeed has compensated monetarily those it determined in its majoritarian wisdom were wrongfully detained during WWII.

i thought you loved congress for manifesting the will of the people and hated the court for manifesting the will of nine smart people. explain to me how this sudden reliance on the court at the expense of congress's more recent and diametrical action doesn't evidence exactly what you claim to stand against: finding authoritative whichever branch of government serves your immediate interest.

just to be clear, one of the reasons i'm so vehement with regard to the Supreme Court in action and composition is that, regardless of its personnel at any given moment, i have the same perception of its coequal place in the constitutional scheme. thus, i am particularly disturbed when it appears to be tilting severely to the right, since even when it does so, i still think it has a much more prominent role to play in government than most conservatives would say (which is not necessarily the same as what they want; bet you can't find me a republican who disavows Bush v. Gore as running counter to the Rehnquist Court's new new federalist cant by taking from a state something that was properly a state matter and was ably handled by its own state courts).

that is to say, unlike the right (and to be fair, plenty of people on the left as well), i wouldn't change the balance of powers according to what serves my ideological ends. my beliefs about the proper calibration are entirely non-partisan, and i'm willing to suffer the consequences of my convictions when the wrong people are in power.

Moon,
We are talking about a legal issue here, right, whether Bush broke the law? If the law as it exists now is based on precedents by the Court that have never been overturned, then by what measure are Korematsu and Hirabayashi irrelevant to whether Bush broke the law? They're precedents, they're stare decisis, they are until overturned our basis for understanding what is legal. If I commit an action that is consistent within the spirit of Supreme Court rulings that have never been overturned, what legal basis is there for suggesting those actions are illegal? The Court has ruled, the Constitution has been interpreted. The only other option is to conceive of a Court that is essentially a political, lawmaking instrument, and I do not believe the Court exists for this purpose. But of course culture changes, yet if they were drawn up to be protected from the whims of the people, does this truly matter in making an interpretation of the law? Scientific research changes as we learn more, but has the science of the Korematsu decision really changed? Interpreting a previous Supreme Court's decision is by its nature a creative process, and each of these creations do run counter to stare decisis. So what is their job, what is the context, the paradigm within which it's okay for them to make a new adaptation of the Constitution given a new cultural set of values or a new set of research? There are as many paradigms as there are people who have conceived of them, but I would prefer that they err on the side of the elected branches of government, those responsible to the people, when making decisions. What is most important to me is not a particular system of government but compassion, and I don't mean sympathy. What is most important to me is that the people are protected and are free to prosper and develop themselves. I don't see how a wiretap that can only be used to convict someone of terrorism runs counter to what is important to me, but I would strongly object to wiretaps being randomly used for any purpose. If we find out someone's done this, that does go against the spirit of freedom and democracy, but not so much when we use them to protect our democratic system and our people from destruction by people who really want to destroy us. I hope sincerely that these people come to embrace compassion. I see democracy and freedom as the context under which compassion tends to develop, when people are free to embrace any ideology, rather than Iran or North Korea's ideologies of paranoia and hatred, rather than the threat of punishment existing for being compassionate. Even democracies make mistakes regarding what will best serve humanity, and if I perceive something that grave, I hope someone will stand up and break the law, because the law is not the most important thing in the world to me. There can be a rotten, corrupt democracy that does rotten, corrupt things, and I'm not sure that would be any better than a prosperous, benevolent oligarchy. But most of the time it works out the other way, with a rotten and corrupt oligarchy and a prosperous, benevolent democracy, so that's why I do support the will of the people in almost all cases.

As far as whether the American people are in line with Bush as far as these policies go, according to the Rasummen poll of January 4th, only 29% said our legal system worries too much about national security. Only a third of the people surveyed believe Bush broke the law, and half the people believe he did not. Now, of course you're going to bring up the January 8th AP Ipsos poll , but if you'll click on where it says topline results, it will show you they sampled 52% democrats and only 40% republicans, as well as half their sample being above the $50,000 income bracket, hardly a sample representative of the American people. The American people, at least those who aren't swayed by a few days of media attacks, understand what Bush did and why.

as is so often the case, i have no idea what you're talking about here. first of all, the most difficult and momentous decisions -- see, e.g., bush v. gore -- are very clearly limited to their facts, and i think it's unlikely that the Court would dwell much on korematsu, a case without meaningful precedent concerning internment based on national origin, in deciding a wiretapping case with clearly applicable statutes and constitutional principles. if that's why you're citing those cases, i'm simply going to say that i'd bet they are found fundamentally inapposite to the wiretapping matter at hand, and at most would be cited to color a broader background discussion of wartime authority and ultimately would not furnish the grounds of decision.

as for paranoia and hatred, sorry, but i still think you should be careful using those words as some sort of totem, since no two words better describe the amorphous international threat of terrorism and supplementary web of lies promulgated by the bush administration. and a propos, i don't give a rat's ass for polls when it comes to constitutional matters, and that's an area where you and i cosistently part ways. if 100% of americans have an erroneous view of the fourth amendment, that doesn't write it off the books. that's the whole idea of an independent judiciary (in which, of course, you signal you have no interest every time you urge that the Court ought to respond to the will of the people).

then there's this:

I don't see how a wiretap that can only be used to convict someone of terrorism runs counter to what is important to me, but I would strongly object to wiretaps being randomly used for any purpose. If we find out someone's done this, that does go against the spirit of freedom and democracy, but not so much when we use them to protect our democratic system and our people from destruction by people who really want to destroy us.

I'm sorry, but which part of Bush saying I used wiretaps to spy on American citizens and I'll do it again did you fail to grasp? So how important is it to you that your Dear Leader has gone and continues to "go against the spirit of freedom and democracy." Data mining and aggregating pretty clearly constitutes precisely the sort of random searching you claim to disfavor.

Moon,
How is it at all paranoid to reference the threat of terrorism (domestic and international) after 9/11, after Oklahoma City, after Bali, London, and Khobar Towers? Paranoia refers to delusional beliefs of persecution, so how many people exactly have to die before you come to believe that the threat of international terrorism is real? I would say maybe 1,000 or 2,000, because liberals see that many of our soldiers die and it's significant, but how many is it when it's international terrorism? If Israel and the US have been secretly plotting the destruction of Iran or North Korea, my apologies. But to my knowledge we haven't killed thousands of Iranians or thousands of North Koreans in the last fifty years, ergo their concerns are paranoia. As far as hatred, have you ever heard Bush say he intended to hunt down all of a certain group of people and destroy them, as the Iranians have said about Israel and as North Korea has said about us? We hunt terrorists, not because of hatred of a nation or leader or religion, it doesn't matter. We'll execute Timothy McVeigh, an American, because he was responsible for the deaths of a bunch of children when that bomb went off. But my bad, next time I'll be more specific and say the Iranians and North Koreans experience religious or national hatred, unlike America that hates mass murder, because we're so fundamentalist, right?

My reference to the polls was in response to your suggestion that I was somehow being undemocratic in my reliance on the Court. The polls provide evidence that a majority of the people do not think Bush is guilty of a crime. And, yes, the Court's rulings provide a backdrop for the balance between civil liberties and national security by the commander in chief at a time when our nation is threatened. If Bush's executive order is consistent with the Court's precedent regarding this balance, how is he breaking the law?
Democracy means government by the people, how does it go against democratic principles for Bush to do something the people support? It's true this is democracy's purest form, rather than representative democracy. That the searching is based on intelligence regarding terrorism and used only for prevention of terrorism does not make it random, it makes it related to terrorism.

You realize you're being inane, right Morris? Whether or not something is illegal has nothing to do with national public opinion polls or philosophical theories of democracy. It's much simpler than that - did someone break the law. Just b/c what someone does might be popular doesn't make it any less illegal.

you're right, morris, that there is real terrorism and real people have died and real threats remain.

it's paranoia, however, when the government sets the agenda in the absence of complete information, rejects all forms of legitimate criticism and dissent (even that based on incontrovertible fact), and then turns virtually all of its attention to one of the few groups of people in the region in question least connected to the terrorists who killed so many american innocents. it's hatred when we go tear a country to shreds on false pretenses (at grave expense to the legitimate goals of the war on terror) to prosecute a decade-old grudge that just happens closely to reflect the policy agenda the majority of bush's inner circle was writing about in the mid-nineties (back when most of the imminent terrorism we could point to was white, military, and american (why you keep bringing in mcveigh to justify a war on terror focused entirely on brown people who have no demonstrable connection to terror i'll surely never understand)). it's hatred and paranoia when bush doesn't say, the day of 9/11, Get me answers, but instead says, Get me answers that implicate Iraq.

and as for mass murder, since you bring it up, see one of the more recent posts here (citing Juan Cole, I believe) observing that we passed up an obvious opportunity to interdict a chemical attack on iraqi shiites in 1991, an attack that reslted in the deaths of tens of thousands of non-combatants, in an effort to appease the saudis.

I guess I'm confused about why ya'll are getting bogged down in the "this is necessary to fight the grave threat of terrorism" side of things. It strikes me that's crock - I mean if we accept that the reason that even potentially matters is that the president's overall goal is protecting American lives.

Sure terrorism is a threat. It has been for decades (a shame the president wasn't aware of that for his first 8.5+ months in office). But just because a threat exists, that doesn't mean the government can proceed illegally to block potentially deadly behavior. AIDS kills vastly more Americans than terrorism. Should we therefore start illegally tracking everyone in the country who's got it and then send government agents down every time it looks like they are going to engage in behavior that might spead the virus? I think most Americans would agree that no matter how you fight it, you should fight it according to procedures that fit with American law. I mean what do we have a government for if not to uphold our laws? Yes, there are tens, scores, hundreds, thousands of things that threaten American lives - but the law is the law - and you'd think (hope) that the people in Washington would write it in ways that acknowledge, and make allowances for grave threats.

And, of course, in this case, they actually did that - yet event with provisions like allowing after the fact warrants the president can't be bothered to act according to US law. Instead he brazenly and gleefully pledges to break American law in perpetuity, instead of working through our system of government to ty and accomplish what he wants.

He's encouraging illegal behavior, and basking in the glow of his own actions in that regard.

Since when do conservatives think that's ok? What's this guy done to the party of Goldwater and Reagan?

Bro,
I think you make a good comparison with people dying from terrorism and people dying from AIDS. The common theme you seem to ignore is that these were both ways that people in this country aren't comfortable with seeing other people die. That's why the government spent way more on AIDS per patient than they were spending researching cancer or heart disease, that's why they spent all that money on commercials telling people to use condoms. People aren't supposed to die like that, to die because they had sex, to die when they're in the prime of their life. As we saw AIDS spreading and we had no defense from it, people sat down and decided education was the best way to manage what could have become an epidemic, education and research into treatment. But how would a solution like this be available for terrorists from Iraq? We couldn't get ads on state run TV to tell them what a great country we are, Saddam controlled state run TV. And if you know some sort of treatment for terrorism, would you mind sharing it with the rest of the world. Yet bringing freedom to the Middle East is in some ways exactly the same as an education program, because now people may become aware and have choices in terms of what ideology they support, choices to watch a television station that preaches something besides hatred for the infidels. Before the solution offered to Palestinian and Iraqi youth was focused on coping by hatred of the US and Israel. Now they have other options, unless you're prepared to argue as a professor that teaching has no effect. Keep reading just a couple more sentences.
Moon,
You and my brother don't seem to get that FISA did not allow for warrants on US citizens. And for someone who appears to believe we're only going after brown terrorists, I'd think you might be happy that the president circumvented a law that provides priveleged status to Americans. This is why I keep bringing up McVeigh, because all the FISA warrants in the world would not have allowed a wiretap on McVeigh's phone, would not have given us a chance at a moment's notice to keep all those Oklahoma city children alive. To ignore that American citizens are capable of the same heartlessness displayed by Al Queda is setting us up to be hit again, it leaves us vulnerable to the threat from the inside. I love how you talking about this administration as rejecting all forms of dissent and criticism; that's what a President does when they enact any policy. In a country this big, there's going to be a million people who dissent from any decision any President wants to make. People have different ideas about what the biggest problem is, and even people who agree on what the biggest problem is disagree about what the solution to that problem should be. But somehow the media wants to publicize every lobby security worker from Langley who gave his supervisor a memo about what would happen in Iraq, and their supervisor covered it up, didn't send it all the way up through the chain of command. As for incontrovertible fact, how about a Clinton-appointed CIA chief who made the case for a war against Iraq. As for cover up, if it was so widely known that Saddam wasn't a threat, why didn't Clinton come out and say that, what about the cover up he undertook to keep regime change as U.S. policy in Iraq when all they want to do is have birthday parties for kids? It's baloney, and you know it. Incontrovertible fact is believing Saddam was ten years away from a nuke in 91 and finding out when we got there it was 12 months. Incontrovertible fact is sometimes incontrovertible facts aren't so incontrovertible in the intelligence business, though it's a good word, and I like it so keep using it.
What Cole didn't do is link any sources talking about how we knew Saddam was using his air power to deliver chemical weapons attacks until after he did it. My brother's right in that Three Kings is a great movie, but are you suggesting that it would have been okay for the elder President Bush to depose Saddam without a plan of how to rebuild their government back then, but somehow it wasn't okay for Bush the younger to do it ten years later? Is that what you're saying, because it sounds like that's what you're saying.

Uh, Morris - Whether or not we knew Saddam Hussein was killing several tens of thousands with chemical weapons or conventional weapons, we certainly knew he was killing them - and we stood by and did nothing. We could have stopped a lot of that without going the regime change route - but we chose not to. Remember that the next time you hear someone compliment Gen Schwarzkopf, but that's not really the point of this thread so I'm going to get back to that.

I find it peculiar that you spend a whole paragraph responding to me - without responding to me.

You want to spy on Americans? You think that's aboslutely necessary to protect the national interest? OK, then get the president to change the laws to allow him to do what you want him to do. If it is such a horrifying threat he should be able to achieve that - he's got a Republican Congress and Court and we live in a post-9/11 mentality.

The thing is - he can't be bothered to uphold, or even apparently care about, the law. He just wants to bark imperial orders and have them carried out. But that's not our system, and it's not our system for a perfectly good reason. Breaking the law is breaking the law, regardless of intentions.

The president had 3 choices - follow it, change it, break it. He chose the path followed by criminals. And he chose it for year after year after year.

Bro,
Are you listening to yourself? What I hear is, "We knew Saddam was killing a bunch of people in 1991, and we stood by and did nothing. Ten years later, we knew Saddam was still killing people, but Iraq wasn't the kind of threat North Korea or Syria were, so we shouldn't have done anything there." I know you love attacking anyone named Bush's policies, but your positions here appear quite contradictory. If it was right in 1991 to knock Saddam in 1991 without a plan of what to do once he was out of power, then how was is wrong to do the same thing liberals have been lamenting since before the war? There's no consistency in your line of attacks on Bush. Which is it, depose Saddam or not? Because if you say this is the wrong war, obviously you can't also argue that Bush should have deposed Saddam in 1991 without a plan to rebuild the Iraqi government. A hundred thousand Shiites dying is what we could have expected if Saddam had stayed in power another ten years, so take a stand and say whether we should be in Iraq right now. I'll put to you the same question, are we mass murderers if we stand by and let this happen.
Actually, it's not entirely a Republican controlled Congress because your minority tends to whine like a two year old when they don't get what they want. They filibuster, and even though the filibuster rule's been changes several times before, this would be an unprecedented "nuclear" option to change this rule now. The people support the President's position according to the polls, and I'm grateful we have someone as Commander in Chief who's willing to take the risk of going to jail in order to protect our nation when we're vulnerable and Tom Daschle isn't up for the job. And just in case you didn't realize it, the jails tend to be filled with self serving people who don't care about others, there aren't many heroes in jail.

Well, we are standing by and letting a genocide in Sudan happen - so if you think not acting to stop the deaths of millions makes a president a mass murder - then, yeah, the current Bush is a mass murderer.

Your first paragraph is exasperating. You live in this ridiculously simplistic world in which you think events at time A equal events at time B (a decades worth of things in between don't matter) and in which all the strategies and tactics a superpower can muster are essentially 1 2 or, on a really complex day, 3 choices.

The way in which you are framing this question then is pretty ridiculous.

But if you want my opinions (and it's only that) - what should we have done? Well, taking as a given that we were already in the middle of a war in early 1991 (so begining at the 100 hour mark) - I would have 1) fought longer, as some of our military commanders wanted to, finished off more of the Republican guard, and not let the timing of the end of battle be set by public relations goals 2) not allowed Saddam Hussein to use his helicopter gunships (as, I guess by your definitions "mass murderer" Schwarzkopf did) 3) and three gone ahead and ended the war - leaving Saddam in power - but with more opponents, both in the army, and in the opposition groups who could have dealt with him internally.

So, bascially, I think the first Bush administration messed up (in horrifying ways) some key things at the end of that war - but no, I don't think the US should have marched to Baghdad then.

Your last paragraph is just nasty trolling so I shouldn't even deal with it - but if you insist - George Bush is no hero. And he's not acting "heroically", risking jail to protect people. In the first place, while he's celebrating what's likely criminal behavior, there's nothing to really prove that his crimes are "protecting" us. And secondly, no one can prosecute him because he names the prosecutors. So he's not being noble or bold - he just knows he can get away with it.

And filibuster what? What the hell are you talking about - the Patriot Act which only 1 senator voted against (so a Filibuster would fail)? The renewal of a handful of parts of it that even a rock-ribbed conservative Republican like Larry Craig has problems with?

And, fyi, it's look to me like you are the whiner - you little two-year old hypocrite. :)

Thanks, Bro, at least I anticipated your last sentence. So, if I understand your argument, you wanted to do more damage to Saddam during Desert Storm, so that would leave an active civil war in place because Saddam by your desire wouldn't be as able to maintain order in his country, and the Shiites of course wouldn't be any militarily stronger than they are today with our support, so they wouldn't be capable of ending the war by force. So, basically, you'd be creating another Sudan.
And you're absolutely right about different times being substantively different. In 1991 we didn't know Saddam was capable of killing a hundred thousand Shiites because he'd never done it before. Ten years later we knew this and acted accordingly to make sure it didn't happen again.
And Daschle, for which he's apparently very proud, let Bush know there was no way he was going to get the wiretaps he desired in the Patriot Act, and considering their use of the filibuster tactic in the past, that would be their obvious recourse.

Let's drop invective and stick on facts for a moment - how many Democractic filibusters have there been in the Senate since Bush's election? I don't know that #, but I'm sure it's damn low, and as you yourself and many Republicans have noted - if the GOP REALLY wants to do it, they could change (or break) Senate rules and get rid of the filibuster. But they haven't (though they have certainly scaled back minority protections in the Senate). If the GOP is so noble and out to protect us all and doing that depends on getting rid of the filibuster - why have they allowed the maintenance of that dangerous procedural tactic.

As to Iraq - my preferences might have led to civil war. But there is no telling how bloody that would have gotten. It's a counterfactual you can't prove in any direction. But there are plenty of people in our intelligence service who think if things had unfolded as I suggested that Saddam H. would have been overthrown. And if regime change was one of the goals of our most recent endeavor ... And no, there's no guarantee that would have happened. But it was certainly more likely than leaving his best troops shockingly intact and opening the door to him brutally mowing down his domestic opponents.

And your second paragraph shows a rather stunning lack of knowledge of Saddam H's history. He'd been killing vast numbers of opponents (sometimes with our knowledge and help if the Shiites happened to be based in Iran) for well over a decade. We knew exactly what he was capable of - it's absurd to suggest we didn't know that. Though yeah it's depressing to remember that the Reagan and Bush I White House's were so cozy with this mass murderer.

Bro,
If you want to argue Daschle was powerless to stop wiretaps, and ergo his recent press release is just a desperate attempt to grab headlines, go for it. And remember, it's only a few of the GOP who support retaining that rule, so slow your roll when blasting all conservatives for the sometimes dangerous actions of that few.

Okay, your preferences might have led to a civil war, but there's no way to prove that, and because other people agree with you that risking a bloody civil war in that way would have been better, that's supposed to make it right, or more right, than logic at its face value, that two enemies more equally matched would continue to fight until one has the upper hand? How is your suggestion not just as counterfactual since it didn't happen? And what is the point of bringing up what happened ten years ago if your response is going to be that such things are counterfactual? Or maybe it's just counterfactual when a conservative says it?

Yes, Saddam had killed numerous people before 1991, but to our knowledge he never killed a hundred thousand people. Ergo, we had far less reason to believe he was capable of that level of destruction in 1991 than we did ten years later. Unless maybe you're prepared to argue that past behavior is irrelevant to predicting future behavior.

OK brainiac, tell me if you know so much - how many people had Saddam's orders killed before 1991? It was a hell of a lot. And if you count the Iranians (which seems entirely reasonable) it was a lot more than a hundred thousand - many many more. But if you're saying it's only dead Iraqis that should count in measuring his brutality - fine, be like that, but give me a number if you think we shouldn't have known what he was going to do (though of course regardless of the # he'd killed before, it's well-document that several American decision makers knew exactly what he was going to do).

Bro,
I'm not going to do your research for you. Yes, Saddam had killed thousands of his own people, which is what we're talking about here. With the examples of other awful leaders like Hitler and Stalin, we keep track of how many of their own they killed, unless you want to start equating foreign wartime casualties with peacetime elimination of internal opponents, and then we can talk about how FDR killed several hundred thousand people. You understand, it isn't necessarily the same thing. Yes, I'm sure many American decision makers "knew" what Saddam was going to do, just as so many liberals "knew" Bush was wrong, that is to say they guessed it one way and Bush read it another. Either way, there's no better predictor of future behavior than past behavior, so if he'd killed tens of thousands before 1991, after 1991 we had reason to believe he was more likely to continue to kill as many as a hundred thousand at a time, because he'd done it before. It isn't complex, the argument I'm making, and if Juan Cole says it was right to stop Saddam in 1991, then it was so much more right to stop him after ten more years of killing political opponents.

According to your personal philosophical belief system, perhaps.

As a matter of maximizing the national security and relative power of the United States in the international system - I strongly disagree. And even if it was the "right" choice to go in (which I don't believe it was) President Bush managed to go about that in a horrifyingly incompetent and needlessly damaging way.

But if this thread has simply spun back into a disagreement over whether the war the president started in 2003 was a good idea and well-executed plan (the answers being no and glaringly no) then I think I'm pretty much done with this thread. We've hit that far to many times to go back to it again.

Well, Bro, I can finish up by responding with your responses: "President Bush managed to go about that in a horrifyingly incompetent and needlessly damaging way According to your personal philosophical belief system, perhaps."

Not exactly, because people with various personal philosophical belief systems have come to the same conclusion. That would point to "according to the facts."

as armand said, the president had the choice to follow, change, or break the law, and he chose the last, least defensible option. worse, he's defended with little more than platitudes that amount to "because i said so."

regarding dissent, i agree, morris, that at some point a chief has to stop listening to all the options and choose a cours of action. but the overwhelming evidence suggests that on matters of policy both domestic and foreign, bush has surrounded himself with an unprecedented number of yes men, has shown remarkably little tolerance for views contrary to his own, and has repeatedly insisted that intractably complex issues be reduced to powerpoint-level simplicity. whether this is due to a dangerously manichean worldview, or a lack of capacity to act with subtlety both diplomatically and militarily in the face of adversity, i don't suppose it really matters. the bottom line is that virtually any other wartime president has shown more skill and finesse than this one.

and even if we grant that we are safer now than we were (and that no 9-11 style attack has occurred since that date is no demonstration; the same was true of the prior, oh, 50 years, but i don't hear you touting the anti-terrorist prowess of President Carter), that doesn't preclude the possibility that our safety has been enhanced despite, rather than in virtue of, our gross misallocation of resources in iraq, and that our safety could have been far more pervasively and enduringly enhanced by a greater focus on those who actually threaten us directly. further, there is simply no evidence that our safety has been enhanced due to the president's flouting of the laws designed to safeguard the freedom for which the terrorists allegedly hate us except his own self-serving, vague, and conclusory assertions to that effect. given his history of mendacity (how many years did he and his minions allow the american public to continue to believe that 9-11 was the work of iraqis rather than his own strange bedfellows in saudi arabia?), it's going to take more than that before i turn a blind eye to the stream of urine with which this administration is soaking the very constitution they claim to defend.

oh, and one last thing. while i lack the expertise to prognosticate as to what might have occurred had bush 41 prosecuted the gulf war further, i will note that there's ignorance in morris's attempt to flout liberals with their own resistance to the current campaign should they dare to lay some of the blame at the doorstep of bush 41's political cowardice in pulling the plug early. in 1991, we had the world behind us, and a clear provocation of globally consequential proportions: saddam's war of conquest in kuwait, and his clear intent to annex as much land as the world would let him. that is to say, saddam had committed an act of war against a non-aggressor, and the world reacted with unified revulsion. to say that such a war might better have been conducted to its logical conclusion is hardly to say that the current war -- roundly rejected by every country we lacked the leverage to arm-twist, and in response to some phantom provocation derived from evidence that had been revealed to be shaky or simply false long before the first shot was fired -- must now be conducted to the same conclusion. saddam might have been sticking his tongue out at us the past few years, but he was contained, and posed very little threat to anyone, contra the situation in 1990 and 1991. with the most dangerous military the world has ever seen, i'd like to think we'd have the poise to discriminate between the idle provocations of a petty and impotent despot and the antecedents of a just war.

Moon, I have no idea what your last paragraph says. Do you mean that Morris is blaming liberals for not supporting the drive to Bagdad in 1991? Or that if liberals supported the drive to Bagdad in 1991 they should automatically support fighting to the end in 2006?

sorry, i was responding to morris's apparent conviction that if you were in favor of a more aggressive strategy in 1991 you ipso facto must favor the same now. i merely intended to point out that given divergent circumstances on several dimensions, it would not at all be inconsistent to regret the pull-back in 1991 but still believe that the current war has been a bad idea poorly prosecuted from minute one.

Moon,
Why do you think a President would surround himself with people who have a vision of foreign policy closely related to his own? Surely, it couldn't be because the people with different perspectives leak things to the press every week or two. Heavens, no, that's never happened, so it must be because he's not open to other opinions, what with him being a conservative and all.

President Carter to our knowledge hadn't stopped 35 terrorist activities in the two years following 9/11, as Bush had, and no telling how many more since then. To my knowledge, Carter didn't stop attacks on the Brooklyn Bridge or New York subway stations, as Bush did.
We've had these debates before.

No one disputes that Saddam offered aid to Al Queda and harbored other terrorists within his country. You and I disagree on how we interpret all the coincidences connecting Iraq and Al Queda we've discussed before, probably because as a Bush supporter I tend to believe him and as someone who opposes Bush, it's easier for you to doubt. There is no doubt according to Duelfer that Iraq was gathering a bunch of WMD scientists as they were confident of bringing down sanctions via their oil for food bribes. Why do you think they were doing this? Maybe it's because as Duelfer said, WMDs were of "totemic" importance to Saddam. Although we didn't find as much in the way of WMDs as we were expecting, we did find numerous violations of UN resolutions in terms of banned weapons systems. Even Blix said that good came of the liberation of Iraq because we'd gotten rid of Saddam, because of all the "horrible, horrible" things he'd done. The idea that we had no reason to believe WMDs were in Iraq and the idea that Iraq was not actively reconstituting its chemical and biological weapons programs are both absolutely false, they were spending much more than ten times what they'd been spending just a couple years before. The fact that we did not find massive stockpiles of these weapons only proves that we acted at the right time, because according to Duelfer it would only take a year once sanctions were dropped for these stockpiles to be constructed.

Binky,
People with various philosophical personal belief systems agree on such things as Lilo and Stitch being a documentary of alien experimentation sponsored by the trilaterals. There is no way to build a model encompassing all the meaningful variables (remember chaos theory and butterflies) of how either scenario would have turned out. This is not a debate about facts because the facts of what would have been are ill informed, this is purely perspective based on experience. My Bro's experience with certain personalities in his academic study of political systems suggests to him one conclusion, my own experience with people's psychological responses in certain situations suggests another.

Morris,

1. I'll dispute that " Saddam offered aid to Al Queda". He did not. There is no evidence of this (that is accepted by anyone other than moonbats). He did offer aid to other terrorists groups (though much less than most other states in the region, including our ally Saudi Arabia).

2. "There is no doubt according to Duelfer that Iraq was gathering a bunch of WMD scientists as they were confident of bringing down sanctions via their oil for food bribes." The purpose of the sanctions regime was to remove the WMD from Iraq at the time. There was no international consensus that Iraq could never have WMD; just one that they had to be removed at the end of the 1990-1991 war. The US decided (unilaterally) that Saddam in possession of WMD wasn't something we could put up with.

3. "we did find numerous violations of UN resolutions in terms of banned weapons systems" Not true. We found some violations (missiles that flew only a few miles over the limit imposed by the treaty, but still only 70 - 80 miles: thus, not a serious threat), and things that were called violations at the time, but later turned out to be red herrings (the chemical weapons truck which was a weather balloon station; the unmanned airplane that actually didn't fly; etc.). In no way, shape, or form did we find "numerous" violations.

4. No one (NO ONE) is (or has ever) argued that Saddam was a good guy, or removing him wasn't in some way good. The argument is about whether it was worth the cost; everyone admits that removing him was a good thing.

5. "the idea that Iraq was not actively reconstituting its chemical and biological weapons programs are both absolutely false" You are just wrong. There was no evidence that Iraq had any infrastructure for developing WMD. Sure, they had some people who could have put it together (every state in the world has this; the chemistry behind some chemical weapons is high-school level). They may even have had some plans to do this (again, just about every state likely has plans to do this; that's what militaries do - they plan). There was, however, no evidence that Iraq had begun any chemical, biological or nuclear "reconstruction". None.

6. "The fact that we did not find massive stockpiles of these weapons only proves that we acted at the right time, because according to Duelfer it would only take a year once sanctions were dropped for these stockpiles to be constructed" You do yourself no favors by making utterly absurd statements. The fact that we found nothing "proves" we acted when we needed to? Do you realize how dumb this sounds?

Baltar,
I'm just going to have to implicate some other "moonbats" as you call them who believe Saddam offered help to Al Queda, namely the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee (and it's before Bush even took office, so you can't come back with your standard "the CIA was pressured by Bush response"):
"*The offer of asylum was also included in the Senate Intelligence Committee's unanimous, bipartisan review of prewar intelligence. From p. 335 of the Senate report: "A [CIA Counterterrorism Center] operational summary from April 13, 1999, notes four other intelligence reports mentioning Saddam Hussein's 'standing offer of safe haven to Osama bin Laden.'"
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/696twoqc.asp?pg=2

Yes, we decided unilaterally we didn't want Saddam to have WMDs, exactly, and good came of it, at least according to Blix. People who do horrible, horrible things and WMDs don't mix. Honestly, I wasn't aware of the sunset provisions on the UN resolutions, but I guess the sun was setting as the oil for food was spreading.

Okay, here's the numerous weapons systems:
"U.S. inspectors estimated that Iraq bought about 280 engines from Poland between 2001 and 2003 with the intent of using them to equip a new medium-range missile that violated U.N. range limits. The engines had been removed from Polish missiles decommissioned after the Cold War."
"In Bulgaria, a firm called the JEFF Co. exported more than $7 million worth of warheads, missiles and launcher units to Baghdad in 2002 in violation of U.N. sanctions, the report found. Other Bulgarian traders sold chemicals and machine tools to Iraq that could be used for civilian purposes but were really intended for missile components and other military purposes."
Then there are violations that were at least planned:
"In most cases, U.S. weapons inspectors found no clear evidence that officials in those countries were involved in the arms deals. One exception was Ukraine, where leaders gave their blessing to the sale of missile and radar systems to Iraq.
The Duelfer report notes that President Leonid Kuchma personally approved the sale of a $100 million anti-aircraft radar system to Iraq via a Jordanian intermediary in 2000."
"In Romania, Iraqi intelligence agents used diplomatic pouches to send photos of tanks and other military equipment available for sale. Although weapons inspectors said it was unclear how much equipment was purchased by the Iraqi government, they did uncover documents after the war showing that a Romanian firm, Uzinexport SA, signed a contract in October 2001 to sell magnets to Iraq that 'could have been suitable' for a uranium-enrichment program."
"Mr. Claude worked for Lura, a French company that sold tank carriers to Iraq, according to documents recovered by the top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. The mysterious Frenchman also may have helped the Iraqis attempt to acquire military-related radar and microwave technology, despite a U.N. ban on such trade with Iraq since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
Other French military contractors came to Baghdad with offers to supply the Iraqi government with helicopters, spare parts for fighter aircraft and air-defense systems after 1998, when U.N. weapons inspectors withdrew under pressure, according to a report issued this week by Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector."
The missiles they were working on had a range of 620 miles. Now how far away is Iraq from Israel?
And your response is that at unmanned attack plane isn't a violation because it didn't fly? That's like someone saying they didn't commit a crime because the gun misfired when they pulled the trigger.

Saddam's may not have built the infrastructure to produce them, but his investments in WMDs were skyrocketing.
"The Duelfer report notes the following changes in Iraq's Military Industrialization Commission (MIC), Saddam's secret organization in charge of WMD development, in the years leading up to the war:
Between 1996 and 2002, the overall MIC budget increased over forty-fold from ID 15.5 billion to ID 700 billion. By 2003 it had grown to ID 1 trillion. MIC's hard currency allocations in 2002 amounted to approximately 364 million. MIC sponsorship of technical research projects at Iraqi universities skyrocketed from about 40 projects in 1997 to 3,200 in 2002. MIC workforce expanded by fifty percent in three years, from 42,000 employees in 1999 to 63,000 in 2002."
Why increase spending by this much unless he was building this program back up?

The Duelfer report said that Saddam could have substantial quantities of WMDs within a year (for substantial quantities, within a month they could begin production). Ergo, if we'd waited, sanctions would have fallen, and when we invade after that, he attacks our troops with WMDs. I wonder how it is you don't see this as acting at the right time.

Morris,

The Weekly Standard (not, by the way, a valid source; just as I wouldn't cite "prospect", I wouldn't cite the Weekly Standard) article does not say what you claim it says. It lists a number of "contacts" between Saddam and Bin Laden (some of which, by the way, are only hearsay by biased/unreliable sources, and should be ignored). None of those "contacts" ever rose to any sort of working relationship, and it is very debatable whether any actual useful information passed back and forth (it is clear that no physical help - money, arms, etc. - passed back or forth). There was no relationship between Bin Laden and Saddam. None. Nada. Zero. How many ways can I say it?

The Polish engine story is a crock. If Saddam had engines, why didn't he build rockets? However, that seems the most serious violation (and it isn't serious, since nothing came of it). The others are even sillier. The Ukranians planned to sell a radar system (but didn't)? The Bulgarians sold $7 million worth of "warheads, missiles and launcher units" (whatever that means) which may or may not be a violation (Saddam was allowed some rockets, and launchers aren't a violation). And you did read the headline, and subheadline of the MSNBC link, right? "Inspector: Iraq had no WMD before invasion: Final report says Saddam had ambitions but no chem or bio arms" That sort of says it all.

As for all that stuff about Saddam's MIC, it doesn't prove a thing. The MIC is responsible for all military development (not just WMD), so why shouldn't he spend money on that (it isn't a violation).

As I said, anyone can produce WMD (chemical weapons) in their bathtub. The fact that Saddam could have made some after the sanctions were lifted is irrelevant: the sanctions were there to make sure he had none, not to certify him free of WMD forever. The US decided that as a policy, not the UN or the rest of the world.

Moreover, WMD (in and of themselves) isn't actually a very good battlefield weapon. It doesn't work very well (which is why Saddam stopped using it during the Iran-Iraq war, and saved it for use on his own civiliians). No one is militarily scared of chemical weapons, and only marginally more so by biological weapons. Only nukes are really scarry, and Saddam had none of those (and couldn't have gotten them anytime quickly, as the sanctions had removed all of his infrastructure).

Baltar,
The weekly standard cites a page number for the Senate report if you doubt its authenticity. If I look it up, you can just say I'm lying, but it you look it up, then you can blog about how the Weekly Standard lied (unless of course they're actually telling the truth). I'm sure that it's a unanimous, bipartisan report only means that the conservatives used strong armed tactics to persuade the valiantly struggling liberals to go along, probably threatening their wives and children, right? Apparently you didn't read the quote, because it says: "A [CIA Counterterrorism Center] operational summary from April 13, 1999, notes four other intelligence reports mentioning Saddam Hussein's 'standing offer of safe haven to Osama bin Laden.'" How is offering a safe haven to a terrorist not a relationship? If I offer safe haven to a bank robber, I can be prosecuted for it. Why is it you demand a higher standard for determining a relationship between Saddam and Osama than our laws require in determining an accessory or principal in a crime?

I love your response: Nothing came of it! That's wonderful, Baltar, that's saying that people all over America can plot to steal, rape, murder, and as long as nothing comes of it, forgive and forget, right? I mean, why be concerned with a crime until after the damage has been done, right? Why be concerned with stopping terrorists before they act because their bombs might not go off, and then wouldn't we look silly for trying to stop them!

It's amazing to me how you criticize Bush because he's not interested in details and surrounds himself with yes men, yet when I cite you an article which has a substance you disagree with, you're not interested in the details (may or may not be violations, right, so what's the big deal if Saddam is making missiles he can fire at Israel, he hadn't done it yet). You just want the headline. Professor, teach thyself.

Now you say that even though we had evidence he was bringing all the scientists in to study WMDs, that WMDs were (to quote Duelfer) of "totemic" importance to him, we can't just assume that because he was throwing much more money at the part of his budget that covered WMDs, he was actually spending it on developing WMDs. Right....

That's great, no one is militarily scared of WMDs because they're not a good battlefield weapon. You know, there's a reason we've signed a treaty banning those things. I wonder if you would feel differently about how scary they are if you were on the battlefield.

Morris,

States are not people. The standards by which we try and convict (or not) people within the justice system of this country are not the same standards we hold actions of other states to. We can't. States are "sovereign" (it's a word I get two on the second day of my class for freshmen; it's that important), which means that states can do anything they want within their borders. Sovereignty allows for diversity (we can be different from you because we are legally separate from you - sovereign - and we choose to different, and you can't make us change), but it also allows for states to take actions that we don't like. Sovereignty allows for this. If a state takes an action we don't approve of, we are limited in what we can do about that (unless we choose to violate their sovereignty).

You need to learn to read more closely. The Weekly Standard (still not a good source, whatever you say) says the 9/11 commission as well as a Senate Intelligence report claims the CIA saw four reports that Iraq offered Bin Laden asylum. These are unconfirmed reports (we don't know this actually happened), the report fails to note if this was four separate invitations or a single invitation that got back to us from four sources. The latter is significantly more likely than the former. Moreover who the hell cares, as it still isn't evidence of a working relationship; the offer wasn't serious as anyone knows (Saddam is a secular leader; Bin Laden a religious leader - they hate each other. Saddam offered just to tweak the west, not out of any serious conviction he would be taken up on it). THERE WAS NO RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IRAQ AND AL QAEDA. I can't put it any plainer. I don't care if there were meetings, or offers of asylum or anything. Neither side seriously considered working with the other, and neither side gave any substantial help to the other. Period. Full stop. End of statement.

As noted, Iraq isn't a person: it's a state. States can act in ways that a person would get in trouble for. Sovereignty allows this. We didn't like Bin Laden, but it wasn't a violation of any treaty, agreement or UN directive for Saddam to offer Bin Laden anything he wants. We may not like it (it violates our laws and our morals), but that's not the same thing. You cannot judge Saddam's actions by the standards of what people in this country would (or would not) be allowed to do.

And yes, nothing came of it. If Saddam had any form of weapons of mass destruction, he would have used them during the brief war (or the inspectors would have found them). He did not have them. He may have wanted them (not a violation of the UN sanctions), he may have planned for them (I don't believe this, but still not a violation of UN sanctions), but he didn't begin research, development, or production of them. Period. Full stop. End of statement.

Again, the UN sanctions were to remove Saddam's weapons in 1991. Once those weapons were removed, Saddam was to get his complete sovereignty back (no restrictions). Thus, if Saddam had actually given up his WMD back in the early 90s, he could have built whatever nukes or anything he wanted later. The UN sanctions regime was limited.

And remember: with all your "evidence" this stuff is just the best guess of people who had an interest in finding the worst possible case (A Bush appointee - Tenet - appointed Duefler, which doesn't make him unbiased). I don't care if WMD were "totemic" for Saddam or not (by the way, do you know what "totemic" means? It means it was a totem for him, something more important for it's presence and public relations than for it's actual military value). He didn't have them. He wasn't building them.

And I never brought up Bush - you did. I haven't mentioned him because he's irrelevant. We're arguing about whether Saddam was in violation of either the spirit or the letter of the UN sanctions regime that was in place, and whether Saddam (irrespective of the answer to the first part) was a threat to the US or US national interest. I think the factual evidentiary record is clear that the answer to both questions is "no".

On WMDs: NYT

A high-level intelligence assessment by the Bush administration concluded in early 2002 that the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was "unlikely" because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles, according to a secret memo that was recently declassified by the State Department.

"If I offer safe haven to a bank robber, I can be prosecuted for it."

The lawyer asks: where? If you give a bank robber safe haven, you certainly have committed a crime in any jurisdiction in this country. But merely offering safe haven to a criminal is, at least in general, not a crime in most jurisdictions, any more than the intent to commit a crime, by itself, is a crime (inchoate (read, attempt) crimes generally require "a substantial step," that is, an affirmative move to effectuate criminal attempt). I can sit around here thinking about committing a crime all day. I can tell my friends that I want to commit a crime. That's simply not enough to warrant prosecution.

This is mostly pithyness and jerking your chain, Morris, but had Baltar not already covered it, I would have segued from here to the fact that given bin Laden's and Hussein's irreconcilable ideological differences, Hussein's supposed offer of asylum was about as sincere as the GOP's proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage -- a sop thrown to certain interest groups the value of which inhered precisely in the fact that everyone with half a brain knew it would never be more than a doomed proposal, an effete gesture.

Actually, such an offer of asylum could be seen, from bin Laden's perspective, as highly threatening. Given their hugely different ideologies, agendas, and in many cases allies - bin Laden could have reasonably assumed he would have been at considerably personal risk if he'd gone to Hussein's Iraq.

Anyone remember Musa Sadr? [The founder of Lebanon's Shiite AMAL movement who mysteriously disappeared in Libya in 1978.]

Morris -

A. You say above that the existence of WMD is a grave threat to our troops in the field, so much so that we've signed treaties banning them.

1) What - since when do you care about international treaties where US security is concerned? And 2) did it ever cross your mind that the reason we signed those treaties (or one of them anyway) is that they in fact aren't good battlefield weapons and hence there was no dramatic need to keep them? There are literally hundreds, and I expect thousands, of pages in memoirs and GovDocs sections of libraries that make it clear that one of the reasons why the nation's of the world came to such a quick, and close to unanimous stand on banning these things was b/c they weren't useful. If they were, we'd have been much less likely to ban them.

B. You also say that we shouldn't tolerate a world where countries have weapons that they might someday fire at Israel.

You do realize that 1) lots of of countries have such weapons and 2) in many cases we have provided them with those weapons, right?

Why do you hate America's defense industry? :)

Baltar,
Yes, states are not people, but you seem to have trouble with the idea of the idea here. Sovreignty is a construct, it's an idea, it doesn't have a real world, operationalized definition except that which we give to it. It's like so many of the psychoanalytical terms in psychology, we can talk about id, ego, and superego, but some psychoanalysts sometimes make the mistake of presuming these terms to have concrete, observable meanings rather than presuming that they are simply abstract ways of understanding the mind. Sovreignty is as important to us as we choose for it to be. I'm under no societal or spiritual bond not to interfere in another's state's affairs, the only reason I may choose not to is because it doesn't get me what I want. I'm not saying there's no value in giving lip service to sovreignty because it may have meaning to others who may accordingly choose not to meddle in my state's affairs. But it's nothing more than some persuasive or hypnotic device. Ergo, there's no reason to inflate the value of a relationship with a state above that of the value of a relationship with another person. Think of it this way, if another state breaks a treaty, I'd be less likely to trust that other state to keep its next treaty, just as I'd be less likely to trust a person to keep a promise if they broke one. There are ways in which relationships and behavior in relationships are similar among states and people. And if our society chooses that harboring a fugitive is a significant enough relationship to be a punishable act, it's entirely consistent to extend that to our relationships with other states. This has nothing to do with moral judgment, this has to do with what's in the best interests of our society. Moral judgment is implying our relationships with states must abide by higher standards than those with persons. Where did that judgment come from that we must be bound to it?

I do wonder how many intelligence sources it would take to convince you of something. It's my understanding that four independent sources is quite a lot. I could come up with quite a list of the number of times on this blog you quote Bush basing stories based on one or two sources. But when it's meetings between Saddam's agents and 9/11 hijackers, they're just conservative propaganda? Dan Rather is trustworthy, Stephen Hayes isn't?

How in the world can you continue to believe Saddam did not plan for WMDs? The Duelfer report was very clear that WMDs were of "totemic" importance to Saddam, which according to your definition means they were for their presence important to him. He was bringing in all kinds of WMD researchers from other countries. You accuse me of not reading thoroughly? The MSNBC source I quoted above talks about research of a rocket with a range of 620 miles. How is that not planning and research? Or maybe MSNBC's no more reliable than the Weekly Standard, or any newspaper that doesn't bash Bush, always, all the time? You may not have brought up Bush in this thread, but you've criticized him in this way before ("If this is really the way the Administration thinks and set policy, how can this be good?" from your comment to the non-reality-based administration thread, and your comments in this thread indicate that you're not really any better at accepting criticism or looking at details when they displease you than you accuse our president of being). How are all the contracts Duelfer cited, included those which we know were carried out, not planning? You call me sheep, I call you ostrich. Get your head out of the sand (I hope you realize I'm being generous, here).

In fact, I'm feeling so generous I looked up the UN resolutions.
From UN resolution 687:
"8.Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of:
(a) All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities;
(b) All ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities;
9. Decides, for the implementation of paragraph 8 above, the following:
(a) Iraq shall submit to the Secretary-General, within fifteen days of the adoption of the present resolution, a declaration of the locations, amounts and types of all items specified in paragraph 8 and agree to urgent, on-site inspection as specified below;
(b) The Secretary-General, in consultation with the appropriate Governments and, where appropriate, with the Director-General of the World Health Organization, within forty-five days of the passage of the present resolution, shall develop, and submit to the Council for approval, a plan calling for the completion of the following acts within forty-five days of such approval:
(i) The forming of a Special Commission, which shall carry out immediate on-site inspection of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile capabilities, based on Iraq's declarations and the designation of any additional locations by the Special Commission itself;
(ii) The yielding by Iraq of possession to the Special Commission for destruction, removal or rendering harmless, taking into account the requirements of public safety, of all items specified under paragraph 8 (a) above, including items at the additional locations designated by the Special Commission under paragraph 9 (b) (i) above and the destruction by Iraq, under the supervision of the Special Commission, of all its missile capabilities, including launchers, as specified under paragraph 8 (b) above;
(iii) The provision by the Special Commission of the assistance and cooperation to the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency required in paragraphs 12 and 13 below;
10. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally undertake not to use, develop, construct or acquire any of the items specified in paragraphs 8 and 9 above and requests the Secretary-General, in consultation with the Special Commission, to develop a plan for the future ongoing monitoring and verification of Iraq's compliance with this paragraph, to be submitted to the Security Council for approval within one hundred and twenty days of the passage of this resolution;"

If you'll look at #10, obviously the UN made a distinction between construction and development (which you did not), ergo research of a missile with a 620 mile range does violate this section, as does bringing in a bunch of foreign scientists to research these weapons. They also violated 10 because they agreed not to aquire any of these weapons, and making contracts I listed above is undertaking to aquire these weapons, and thus, prohibited by the resolution.

They obviously violated number 8 as well because their chemical and biological weapons stocks were to be destroyed under UN supervision, and of course they claimed to have destroyed them on their own. Again, research and development were to be terminated and this did not happen so this is another violation of number 8. They violated 8(b) because they had Polish engines for missiles with a range exceeding the limits of the resolution, and the Bulgarian launcher units and missiles also violated this section. They violated 9(a) because they did not report these engines to the UN. These also violated 9bii because they were to give these to the UN to be made harmless if they had them.

What was it you said? Ah yes, "We're arguing about whether Saddam was in violation of either the spirit or the letter of the UN sanctions regime that was in place, and whether Saddam (irrespective of the answer to the first part) was a threat to the US or US national interest. I think the factual evidentiary record is clear that the answer to both questions is 'no'." Guess again.

morris, it's hard not to see support for your suggestion of definitional relativism a propos sovereignty in the fact that you can't seem to spell it correctly.

Morris - A list of things in which A does not equal B.

1. A wish for something and having something are very different things.

2. Also not the same thing - having some components that are necessary to create object X and actually having object X.

3. Having a meeting with person X and planning specific operations with person X.

And I'm lost as to why missiles are even part of this conversation - they aren't WMD.

Armand, don't forget this one: feelings are not facts.

Warning: I appreciate Moon's correction of my spelling, but the link he's posted causes a window to come up saying, about:blank (I've had trouble with spyware when I close windows like that without going through task manager).

Moon,
I appreciate your help with my spelling. I guess that makes it obvious how much credence I give to that doctrine if I don't bother to spell it right. I realize that plans to aid would not be prosecuted much, but I was under the impression that was simply because it was difficult to prove, rather than that it was legal to, say, write someone a letter telling them you want to harbor them while they're a fugitive.

Bro,
Baltar disputed that Saddam had violated any UN resolutions. UN resolution 687 included a ban on "All ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities;"
Now, in response to your second point ("Also not the same thing - having some components that are necessary to create object X and actually having object X"), the resolution says "major parts." Maybe you'd like to dispute that an engine is a major part of a missile?
In response to your first point ("A wish for something and having something are very different things"), resolution 687 says, "10. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally undertake not to use, develop, construct or acquire any of the items specified in paragraphs 8 and 9 above...." Now, focus on "...undertake not to...aquire." Now, I don't think it's a stretch that the act of undertaking to do something (such as negotiating a contract to buy prohibited goods) violates the condition of undertaking not to do something. That is, if I undertake not to do something, then that means once I'm undertaking to do something, I'm no longer undertaking not to do something. I've broken the promise that I would undertake not to do it by the fact that I am undertaking to do it, and by Iraq undertaking to aquire these goods, they violated this section, whether or not the goods actual came into their possession, because this resolution required more than not acquiring, it required undertaking not to acquire, attempting not to acquire, and at the point they were shopping for prohibited weapons systems, they have violated the condition of trying not to acquire these weapon systems.

I'm aware that CBWs aren't terribly useful on the battlefield except for their shock and awe value. What I mean is, as we'd discussed in the other thread, there are worse ways to die than others. Going into convulsions, not being able to breathe, spending my last moments coughing up blood is not really how I want to go. That's our interest in signing this treaty, in keeping this stuff out of our battlefields and our city streets and homes. I, as you know, am no supporter of internationalism for it's own sake. But this is about protecting people from one of the worse ways to die.

Iraq had fired missiles at Israel during the Gulf War, as was noted in UN resolution 687:
"Aware of the use by Iraq of ballistic missiles in unprovoked attacks and therefore of the need to take specific measures in regard to such missiles located in Iraq,"
(that's why missiles were included in the resolution).

You do make a good point, I will have to admit, regarding what happens to terrorists who seek asylum in Iraq (remember, Abu Nidal committed suicide with multiple gunshot wounds), or at least those who do and don't do their master Saddam's bidding. I continue to maintain of course that two of the Prague meetings as well as numerous other coincidences connect Saddam and Al Queda. I really didn't want this thread to go that direction, because we are talking about anonymous single sources in some cases , and I don't think they tend to be as persuasive as others apparently believe them to be, except at confirming a previous hypothesis.

Binky,
As you'll notice, I didn't cite the nuclear weapons section of the resolution. Saddam without a doubt violated other sections, even if he hadn't kept out the inspectors or attempted to obtain nuclear weapons.

Morris,

Sovereingty is sovereignty: it may be a social construct (it exists because people believe in it; like money), but that doesn't change the reality of the world. Most (if not all) states refer to it in official documents and treaties, and the UN gives way to it in their policies. Fine, it can't be touched or picked up - doesn't matter. Still clearly exists, and is a fundamental part of the international system. It is, arguably, the single most important part of understanding/explainging international politics.

And it's not "four independent sources"; the Weekly Standard quotes the Senate Intel report which notes four "other intelligence reports". Thus, there were four reports. They all could be (and likely are) separate reports of the same piece of intelligence, not four separate offers of asylum. It's a single event (Saddam offers Bin Laden asylum) reported four times. Moreover, it's an unconfirmed report (meaning: likely/probably didn't happen). This isn't evidence of anything at all.

As for the UN sanctions you quote, I'm not sure what to make of those. My understanding was the Iraq was to be sanctioned by the UN for a limited time; that Iraq was to remove WMD (and WMD programs) for a limited time, and then the sanctions would expire. #10 on your list has no time limit, and seems to imply that Iraq would be unable to develop or possess any WMD forever - something I can't really see the UN doing, or any state agreeing to. There are many references to Iraq's sovereignty in the document, which argues that the ban on missiles/WMD can't be forever. I'll admit confusion (this makes no sense). Does anyone else (with further information) want to chime in on this?

In any event, Saddam wasn't in violation of the UN, as he wasn't researching or developing anything. A few engines don't mean anything (and what's this about scientists? Give me a cite).

Baltar,
I've been reading over the Duelfer Report tonight: interesting stuff, I'll save the most interesting until the end.
In response to your argument that Saddam didn't violate the UN resolutions, there's the ones I mentioned above, as well as deliberate attempts to foil UN inspectors, and this in itself is a violation of the UN resolutions: "Throughout 1997-1998, Iraq continued efforts to hinder UNSCOM inspections through site sanitization, warning inspection sites prior to the inspectors’ arrival, concealment of sensitive documentation, and intelligence collection on the UN mission.
Increasingly after September 1997, Iraq burned documents, barred access to sites to UNSCOM, banned US inspectors, and threatened to shoot down UNSCOM U-2 missions until the UN forced compliance in November of the same year."

In response to your argument that Saddam wasn't researching or developing anything, I will quote you directly from the Duelfer Report:
"Around 2000, Saddam ordered the development of longer range missiles. In response, Huwaysh asked his missile scientists to see what was feasible....Following Huwaysh’s orders, Iraq pursued efforts to develop a long-range (400-1,000 km) solid-propellant ballistic missile....Iraq after 1998 continued with its HY-2 modification efforts with the HY-2 range extension project and started a completely new effort to increase the range of the HY-2 cruise missile to 1,000 km....Concurrent with the failures of the L-29 RPV program, Iraq began in 2000 to pursue new, long-range UAV options....Iraq entered into negotiations with North Korean and Russian entities for more capable missile systems. Iraq and North Korea in 2000 discussed a 1,300-km-range missile, probably the No Dong, and in 2002 Iraq approached Russian entities about acquiring the Iskander-E short-range ballistic missile (SRBM).
According to contract information, Iraq imported at least 380 SA-2/Volga liquid-propellant engines from Poland and possibly Russia or Belarus. Iraq claims these engines were for the Al Samud II program, but the numbers involved appear far in excess of immediate requirements, suggesting they could have supported the longer range missiles using clusters of SA-2 engines. Iraq also imported missile guidance and control systems from entities in Belarus, Russia and Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY)."
Or, since your a fan of the short versions:
"UNMOVIC convened a panel of missile experts in February 2003, which concluded that the Al Samud II violated UN statutes, and, therefore, the program should be frozen and the missiles destroyed."
(and)
"Iraq declared that its Al Fat’h missile had exceeded 150 km during flight tests to the UN. As with the Al Samud II missile, the UN ordered that Iraq cease all flight tests of the system until they could further evaluate the system’s capabilities. By the start of OIF, a guided version of the Al Fat’h was within weeks of flight-testing. Even without a guidance system, the Al Fat’h proved itself to be a viable weapon system, and the Iraqi Army fired between 12 and 16 missiles during OIF."
As for research:
"The CAFCD and UNMOVIC inspections provided a brief glimpse into what Iraq had accomplished in four years without an international presence on the ground. Given Iraq’s investments in technology and infrastructure improvements, an effective procurement network, skilled scientists, and designs already on the books for longer range missiles, ISG assesses that, absent UN oversight, Saddam clearly intended to reconstitute long-range delivery systems, potentially for WMD.
Iraq constructed a new liquid-rocket engine test stand that was larger and more capable than the existing engine test stand. The new stand, with modifications, would have been able to support tests of more powerful engines or clusters of engines. Although ISG found no evidence that tests of more powerful engines had occurred, Iraq had clearly begun to establish the infrastructure to support such tests in the future.
Iraq undertook efforts to improve its composite solid-propellant infrastructure. Iraq repaired one of the two 300-gallon mixers and two bowls from the BADR-2000 program and tried to repair the second mixer, although reports vary as to the success. According to two former Iraqi officials, the mixer was used for a short time in 2002 and then dismantled before UN inspectors returned. In addition, Iraq built an annealing chamber capable of handling rocket motor cases with diameters greater than one meter. Other infrastructure improvements included new, larger diameter casting chambers and a significant increase in propellant component production capabilities.

And on a grim note not really related to this thread, I hadn't seen this before:
"Under the aegis of the intelligence service, a secretive team developed assassination instruments using poisons or toxins for the Iraqi state. A small group of scientists, doctors and technicians conducted secret experiments on human beings, resulting in their deaths. The aim was probably the development of poisons, including ricin and aflatoxin to eliminate or debilitate the Regime’s opponents. It appears that testing on humans continued until the mid 1990s."

And as to Saddam's perception of WMDs' value:
"In Saddam’s view, WMD helped to save the Regime multiple times. He believed that during the Iran-Iraq war chemical weapons had halted Iranian ground offensives and that ballistic missile attacks on Tehran had broken its political will. Similarly, during Desert Storm, Saddam believed WMD had deterred Coalition Forces from pressing their attack beyond the goal of freeing Kuwait. WMD had even played a role in crushing the Shi’a revolt in the south following the 1991 cease-fire."

Related to our discussion of Bush not stopping Saddam's use of chemical weapons on the Shiites, there's an timeline that describes Husayn Kamil, the Director of MIC, wanting to use VX, finding out none was available, then wanting to use mustard. But they didn't use mustard gas because it would be detectable by coalition force, and that's why they used Sarin instead.

Wow...you've got to read this, it's chilling (maybe it was better not to invade in 1991):

"Excerpts from a Closed-Door Meeting Between Saddam and Senior Personnel, January 1991

The Iraqi Regime routinely, almost obsessively, engaged in the recording of its high level meetings, not in the conventional documentary form of more ordinary bureaucracies, but by way of audio and videotapes. Despite the highly secret and sensitive nature of CBW, even discussions in this area are known to have been recorded in this manner. Below is an example of an audio recording recovered by ISG, probably made during the second week of January 1991. Saddam and senior officials move from making routine, even jocular, small talk about ceremonial clothing, to engaging in a detailed discussion of chemical and biological weapons. The following are excerpts from a conversation lasting a quarter of an hour between Saddam, director of the MIC Husayn Kamil Hasan al Majid, Iraqi Air Force Commander Muzahim Sa’b Hasan Muhammad Al Masiri, and, at least, one other senior official in which they discuss the prospect for WMD attacks on Saudi and Israeli cities (see Annex D “Saddam’s Personal Involvement in WMD Planning” for the complete meeting transcript).
Begin Transcript:
Speaker 2: Sir, the design of the suit is with a white shirt and a collar (neck line) like dishdasha.
Saddam: Then my design is right.
Husayn Kamil and Speaker 2: Absolutely right, sir . . .
Saddam: I want to make sure that—close the door please (door slams)—the germ and chemical warheads, as well as the chemical and germ bombs, are available to [those concerned], so that in case we ordered an attack, they can do it without missing any of their targets?
Husayn Kamil: Sir, if you’ll allow me. Some of the chemicals now are distributed, this is according to the last report from the Minister of Defense, which was submitted to you sir. Chemical warheads are stored and are ready at Air Bases, and they know how and when to deal with, as well as arm these heads. Also, some other artillery machines and rockets (missiles) are available from the army. While some of the empty “stuff” is available for us, our position is very good, and we don’t have any operational problems. Moreover, in the past, many substantial items and materials were imported; now, we were able to establish a local project, which was established to comply with daily production. Also, another bigger project will be finalized within a month, as well as a third project in the coming two to three months that will keep us on the safe side, in terms of supply. We, Sir, only deal in common materials like phosphorus, ethyl alcohol and methyl (interrupted) . . .
Saddam: what is it doing with you, I need these germs to be fixed on the missiles, and tell him to hit, because starting the 15th, everyone should be ready for the action to happen at anytime, and I consider Riyadh as a target . . .
Husayn Kamil: (door slams) Sir, we have three types of germ weapons, but we have to decide which one we should use, some types stay capable for many years (interrupted).
Saddam: we want the long term, the many years kind . . .
Husayn Kamil: . . . There has to be a decision about which method of attack we use; a missile, a fighter bomb or a fighter plane.
Saddam: With them all, all the methods . . . I want as soon as possible, if we are not transferring the weapons, to issue a clear order to [those concerned] that the weapon should be in their hands ASAP. I might even give them a “non-return access.” (Translator Comment: to have access to the weapons; to take them with them and not to return them). I will give them an order stating that at “one moment,” if I ‘m not there and you don’t hear my voice, you will hear somebody else’s voice, so you can receive the order from him, and then you can go attack your targets. I want the weapons to be distributed to targets; I want Riyadh and Jeddah, which are the biggest Saudi cities with all the decision makers, and the Saudi rulers live there. This is for the germ and chemical weapons . . . Also, all the Israeli cities, all of them. Of course you should concentrate on Tel Aviv, since it is their center.
Husayn Kamil: Sir, the best way to transport this weapon and achieve the most harmful effects would come by using planes, like a crop plane; to scatter it. This is, Sir, a thousand times more harmful. This is according to the analyses of the technicians (interrupted) . . .
Saddam: May God help us do it . . . We will never lower our heads as long as we are alive, even if we have to destroy everybody.