Sunday, March 14, 2004
Today's exercise: deconstruct Rumsfeld
On Face the Nation yesterday, Rumsfeld was attempting to claim that nobody in the Bush administration had claimed Iraq was an immediate threat. Not facing an immediate threat is a funny justification for going to war, but that's not the most interesting part. Thomas Friedman, also a guest on the show, repeated for Rumsfeld a sentance from his own September 19, 2002 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee: Said Donald, "No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq." Rumsfeld began to explain,
- "Mm-hmm. It - my view of - of the situation was that he - he had - we - we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that - that we believed and we still do not know--we will know."
Don't bother trying to read that out loud. It doesn't make any more sense. After chattering about how much VX one can fit in the hole Hussein was found hiding in, Rumsfeld eventually he came around to his point:
- [Saddam Hussein] - he didn't say, 'Come in and look and see what we have.'
Maybe not in Rumsfeld's twisted reality, but most of us did hear Iraq say 'Come in and look and see what we have.' And even if Hussein had denied access to inspectors, it would not have changed the claims made by administration officials that Hussein did certainly posses large stockpiles of banned weapons ... and was building more ... and could attack New York, etc, etc. Rumsfeld's attempt to blame Iraq for his own mistaken beliefs is as nonsensical as it is lame.
// posted by Erik @ 3/14/2004 11:32:00 PM
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