I'd like to start off by thanking my most tireless opponents, sirs particularlly, also plane and Ami, for helping me crystallize my thoughts around the issue of "Bush Lied, They Died." You forced me to think hard, discard some of my previous patterns of thinking and ultimately to understand how it is that I, and probably millions of others, just "know" that Bush lied.
No, there isn't a "smoking gun." At least, none that I'm aware of. You can't find the lie by painstakingly parsing Bush's public statements and comparing them with events on a timeline. (Or maybe you can, but I didn't.)
It is really very simple. The elephant and the mouse. A nation of 300,000,000 people with the world's most powerful, expensive and technologically advanced military and a world-wide empire of bases to support it, "afraid" of a Third World, boycotted-to-breakdown, nation of 23 million? COME ON. There is the lie in all its glory. There never was a threat, there never could have been a threat, and NOBODY in a position of authority could have reasonably believed there was a threat.
How did this lie, this bullshit, so totally absurd on the face of it, achieve the success that it did? If you study the posts of sirs in particular, you will see one of the reasons. sirs argues gamely that Bush couldn't have been lying because "almost all the intelligence agencies of the world" believed as Bush was led to believe by his own "intelligence community." [Note, I am using quotes here to indicate a paraphrase of sirs' arguments, not an exact quote of sirs' own words, so I will apologize in advance if I have inadvertently misrepresented any of sirs' ideas, particularly those in quotes.] In a nutshell, it's deference to "expert opinion" taken to a slavish extreme. It has to be a reasonable opinion because the experts all say so.
Of course, the "experts" probably would not go so far as to say, "Invade Iraq." Supposedly, they only report on what kind of weapons Saddam has or is working on. They can assess the "threat" of weapons like that in Saddam's hands, i.e., what he would be likely to do with them. They might even go so far as to make policy recommendations or at least present a range of policy options for the "President's" to choose from.
Well, as we all know now, Bush reviewed the "intelligence" (or some of it) and decided to invade. What Bush and his administration told the nation to justify the invasion was that he had seen the intelligence, that it indicated that Saddam had WMD and was working on getting more and that the country could not risk waiting any longer for a diplomatic resolution of the "problem." The unmistakeable inference was that there was a threat in Saddam's remaining undisturbed in the possession of what WMD he had and in the work on developing and/or acquiring more of them. Common sense alone would tell any sane, normal intelligent human being that none of the weapons Saddam had or might have could possibly match the U.S. arsenal, and that at the first attack or even sign of an attack, that Saddam and his 23 million fellow citizens would be vaporized.
That same common sense must have suggested the same conclusions to Bush and his cabinet members. They MUST have known, even as they were putting out the word that a great "threat" existed, which had to be met with the most drastic action, that it was absurd and a lie. But to millions of Americans, trust in their institutions, fear of the alien, natural ignorance and probably xenophobia too all combined to blot out common sense and "buy into" the bogus justification for war that I am sure the administration itself knew was a crock.
In a sizeable element of the American public, a complete absence of common sense and critical thinking leaves a large number of citizens defenceless against the manipulation of demagogues like Bush, representing the most sinister influences in the nation. It's frightening.
