The Answers, part 4 and 5:
COMMENT: Saddam and his majority sect was systematically exterminating the minority sect in his county. He used chemical weapons to do so at least on one documented occasion.
JIM’S RESPONSE: His sect (Sunnis) are only about 20% of the Iraqi population. No argument from me that he deserved what he got. See also what he did to the Shi’ite Marsh Arabs.
COMMENT: I think to use the excuse of weapons of mass destruction was wrong.
JIM’S RESPONSE: Well, what they wanted was a quick and sure and simple sell to the American people that They Were In Danger. WMD fit the bill, and they manipulated the CIA and other reports to make all sorts of claims that could never hold up to close examination. They also believed that underneath all of that horsecrap, that they would find a pony eventually and they would be able to breath a lot easier. They never did.
Which means that in the present, they’re not too interested in you looking at what they did to sell the war, how much they lied or how badly they’ve done in handling Iraq. The line is now ‘it’s a bloody mess, and we have to fight on now that we’re in it.’ Ah, but why should we trust you to know how to go forward with this? Everything else has been a total mess once you’ve touched it, Mr Bush and Mr. Cheney!
And the whole ‘if we don’t fight them there, we’ll have to fight them here’ line is connected with that. More on that later. But the problem again and again (and this is what royally torques me off) is that that crew can never admit, never explain, just go off on some sort of new tear about what’s Dangerous Now. They never explained that no, there were no WMDs in Iraq. This conclusion was particularly awful:
- The repetition of tentative news stories, even if they are subsequently disconfirmed, can assist in the creation of false memories in a substantial proportion of people.
- Once information is published, its subsequent correction does not alter people’s beliefs unless they are suspicious about the motives underlying the events the news stories are about.
- When people ignore corrections, they do so irrespective of how certain they are that the corrections occurred.
I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer that the people who run the country are halfway honest and straight with the citizens of our country.