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Originally posted by Spanky
I don't think Bush lied, but I don't disagree what happened had foreign policy ramifications. All I am saying is that it has nothing to do with whether or not it was the right thing to go to war. If you believe the only strategic interest the US had in going to war was getting rid of WMDs then you think Bush messed up big time (or lied).
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I don't agree. If I think that the US had a strategic interest in going to war to spread democracy in the middle east or whatever else, I can still think that Bush messed up by misrepresenting the evidence on WMDs and claiming that WMDs was the main reason for war.
Why? Because I don't have the hubris to think that, just because I might think that a war is otherwise justified, that the rest of the country would agree with me. YMMV.
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But Bush's lies have nothing to do with whether or not going to war was the right move. Either it was a good move or it was not.
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Bush's lies, or as you put it "what happened", had policy ramifications -- as you said. In my view, they made the costs higher. If we are looking at this as a cost-benefits question (including economic, strategic, and moral costs and benefits), rather than as a moral absolute ("war is bad"), then anything that had policy ramifications necessarily has something to do with whether going to war, in the fashion in which we went to war, was a good move.
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As far as not being prepared for the occupation, I don't think that was related to the WMD talk. I think the WMD talke was all about proganda and no one in the pentagon thought we were going to pull out once we "Secured them".
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If that's the case, then you cannot possibly think that Bush and the Admin didn't lie. Shit, Rumsfeld said we'd be gone in less than six months.
