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Originally Posted by Azure
Trust me, I'm not happy with what is going on in Iraq too. But was the war based on lies? That is your opinion.
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"Lies" is such a strong word. I prefer "truth-impaired utterances."
Seriously, though. Whether you believe Bush lied or not all depends on who knew what when. It's now quite clear that the administration was receiving extremely mixed signals at the very least--and I'll give you two examples of things that can in all probability be called "lies," if your definition (like mine) is "knowingly making a statement designed to misinform or mislead."
The first has to do with aluminium tubes ordered by Iraq. Bush claimed in the State of the Union address that these tubes were intended for the enrichment of Uranium--but it now appears that both he and his administration had known for MONTHS that these tubes were completely unsuitable for this purpose. Isn't that a lie?
The famous "trailers" cited by Colin Powell in his address to the U.N. had ALREADY been investigated by American intelligence operatives--and had been conclusively found to have nothing to do with WMD production. Powell went ahead and used them in his address anyway. Isn't that a lie?
I'm not commenting on conspiracies, or what the actual agenda may have been--but I don't see how these can be anything but untruths. And these are merely the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even got into Rumsfeld claiming "bulletproof" evidence that Al-Qaeda and Iraq were tied to one another, Dick Cheney making the same claim and then later DENYING ever having made that claim when it was clear that it was untrue. Condi Rice saying the "smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud"--the list goes on. If these aren't lies, then I don't know what the standard could possibly be.