My friend is a big BIG Democrat and argues that Bush "invaded Iraq" under false pretenses.  I want to know what my Neo-Cons think about this.  This is from the emails he sent is Bush as bad as he is shown here:

I was making the statement we went into Iraq on false pretenses. That Bush misled us into war on purpose on charges of terrorist ties and WMDs. If there was legitimate and substantial evidence for WMDs and terrorist ties that were proved wrong I would not be making the criticism. But the stuff that keeps coming out paints a different picture. I am saying that it was Bush's fault and not that he was tricked into going into war.

So here is a lot of stuff. Any one thing on its own you could probably discount. But when you have a lot of stuff come out and continue to come out it eventually adds up. The problem is not all this stuff came out in one big gulp. Bits and pieces came out over time.


1.) Bush expressed desire to invade Iraq well before 9/11. Well beyond normal\prudent "planning for all contingencies" type discussions, etc. It was obvious he wanted to go in and wanted to find or make an excuse.

a.) http://www.globalresearch.ca/<...leId=13829
Two years before the 9/11 attacks on America, George W. Bush told a Houston journalist if elected president, “I’m going to invade Iraq.”

b.) http://www.cbsnews.com/s...2330.shtml
“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”

He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. “There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, ‘Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,’" adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001.

c.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<...hern_Focus
Bush administration prepared for war well before all the "evidence" had come in to build a case for war by stepping up attacks in no fly zones. The operation lasted from June 2002 until the beginning of the invasion in March 2003.


2.) BUSH Administration encouraged torture in order to get "proof" of an Iraq al Qaeda connection to help justify invasion.
a.) http://www.cnn.com/2009/...q.torture/
 Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.

At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.

"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."

Al-Libi's claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's government had trained al Qaeda operatives in producing chemical and biological weapons appeared in the October 2002 speech then-President Bush gave when pushing Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. It also was part of Powell's February 2003 presentation to the United Nations on the case for war, a speech Powell has called a "blot" on his record.

Al-Libi later recanted the claim, saying it was made under torture by Egyptian intelligence agents, a claim Egypt denies. He died last week in a Libyan prison, reportedly a suicide, Human Rights Watch reported.


3.) Bush Administration Purposely Ignored Evidence Against WMD claim
http://www.salon.com/opinion/<...index.html
On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

On April 23, 2006, CBS's "60 Minutes" interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. "We continued to validate him the whole way through," said Drumheller. "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/


There is more. I was working on this on my website and did not finish. All the torture stuff too. And stuff like this keeps coming out too:
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/...amp;page=1

Some more stuff...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<...treet_memo

Additionally, when there is a lot of stuff that is secret and holes to fill you sometimes have to make judgments based on patterns. If an administration has a record of honesty relative to others you may give them a benefit of the doubt. If an administration has a record of secrecy and dishonesty beyond the norm, then you may tend to give negative reports, findings and comments more weight. Which is part of the reason I have my opinion.

I did not always have such as strong opinion against Bush and the war. It developed as more information came out, more Bush controversies came out and the recent torture stuff is what put me over the edge. On entp.org I was defending Bush somewhat against a lot of the torture accusations awhile ago such as abu Ghraib but since then a lot more stuff has come out implicating high level condoning of torture. Stuff like this adds up for me.


Oh here is something I also referred to awhile ago. Another abuse of power incident which along with others makes me give more credit to a lot of the war arguments.


US Attorney Controversy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<...ontroversy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...76_pf.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<...ontroversy

So you had made the point that Clinton removed all his attorneys when he started office. Well, that is common accepted practice for all Presidents and Reagan did the same thing. This is not what this controversy was about. What made this controversial was that it was done mid term for what was deemed illegitmate (political as opposed to performance based) reasons and thus unprecedented and thus considered an abuse of power.

And also because there is strong evidence bush officials lied about it (possibly under oath) and tried to cover it up such as Karl Rove:
http://www.boston.com/news/

And also because in addition, stuff came out about hiring federal prosecutors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Goodling

On May 3, 2007, the Washington Post reported that the United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General launched an internal probe into whether or not Goodling "illegally took party affiliation into account in hiring career federal prosecutors" in her work at the Department.[2

“You have a Monica problem” several Justice Department officials told Robin C. Ashton, a criminal prosecutor at the Department of Justice. “She believes you’re a Democrat and doesn’t feel you can be trusted.”[23]

I'm not sure what your friend is trying to prove. If Bush led America into war under false pretenses, what were the true pretenses? The conspiracy theories rolled out here make me laugh -- it was the greedy Jooooos, Bush and Cheney wanted to enrich their oil pals, the Illuminati is concerned about the Middle East adopting petro-dollars -- this stuff is crackpot central.

Public officials, especially those in the Pentagon, have contingency plans for just about everything. Every few months idiots like Seymour Hersh come out with stories proclaiming that the military-industrial complex has plans to attack countries like Iran. This is true, but trivial-- we pay people to have plans for everything. That's their job-- devising scenarios and creating plans for readiness.

Senior Democrats voted the Iraq War, including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Harry Reid, John Edwards, Chris Dodd. That they were duped by Bush, as if Bush is some sort of evil genius, doesn't fly with me. This "Bush Lied" stuff is just liberals covering their own ass, since the war was much messier than initial expectations. The Iraq War resolution they voted for was titled "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002." It clearly outlined why Saddam needed a smackdown. So I'm not believing the liberal story, nor what's being peddled by their moronic allies in the media.

Elephants remember what the jackasses say. On February 12th, 2002, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Al Gore stated that

Even if we give first priority to the destruction of terrorist networks, and even if we succeed, there are still governments that could bring us great harm. And there is a clear case that one of these governments in particular represents a virulent threat in a class by itself: Iraq. As far as I am concerned, a final reckoning with that government should be on the table.

That's the case for regime change right there. Tyrannies open themselves up to military intervention when they either commit genocide against their own people, start predatory wars against neighboring states, fool around with NBCs, or give aid and hospitality to international terrorist networks. Unlike Afghanistan, Saddam's Iraq met ***all four*** of these criteria. So it is understandable why many felt regime change was necessary in Iraq, especially when our tolerance for risk had been significantly lowered by the events of 911. This made both strategic AND humanitarian sense -- 500,000 died under the sanctions, and an unstable Iraq is undesirable for the civilized world given the region contains a lot of oil. If Saddam died, for example, there could have been a civil war among his beautiful children and other elements that may have spilled over into Iran and Saudi Arabia

In short, the leftists are not only rewriting history, they're cherry picking details without understanding the big picture.