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Originally Posted by Azure
False evidence? I'm highly curious what false evidence they manufactured in order to sell the war.
Its hilarious how people will accuse Bush and Cheney of doing that, yet how many Democrats were in step the whole way? I don't think I have to go back and find the articles of how Hillary, Kerry and the rest of them, except Obama...were saying AND believing the exact same thing Bush and Cheney did.
I've been through this argument before. I don't think any manufactured evidence to try and go to war. Instead, they went to war on almost nothing. Everything about Iraq came from sources OUTSIDE of the US government. German sources...defectors within Iraq...absolutely it wasn't credible...but that doesn't mean they made it up.
And yet, even with that information out on the internet for people to read....some still beat the old 'manufactured false evidence' drum.
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As usual, the truth is somewhere between "no-one could have foreseen this" and "the Bush administration lied about WMDs." It's pretty clear that they over-reached and exaggerated--not an uncommon thing in politics. (Ironically, the knock on Al Gore in 2000 was his tendency to exaggerate...) They also worked hard to suppress dissenting voices in the administration, at least once breaking the law in order to do so. What's the payoff? Easy.
People sometimes forget that in early 2001, Bush's presidency was beginning to look like it might be in trouble. He'd had very little discernible "honeymoon" effect, and his poll numbers were starting to dip into the low 50s, very unusual for a president in his first year in office. What really saved his presidency, at least in the public eye, was the fact that he was later able to redefine himself as a war president. In the aftermath of 9/11, he had a lot of support both domestically and abroad, and after that enacted a pretty sweeping foreign agenda, which included the invasion of Iraq as a way of defining the U.S.' new foreign policy, justified by global terrorism, but also very clearly an attempt to extend U.S. military power more forcefully into the world.
Does this mean Bush "lied." Not really--this is just how politics works. I have no doubt that he genuinely believed Iraq would work out better--and if it had, I submit that we wouldn't even be talking about the marketing of the war. Because it's a disaster, we're now asking the tough questions about how we got where we are in the first place.
Which leads me to the complex question of the media--who in hindsight were ALL guilty of the worst kind of yellow journalism. CNN, CBS, NBC, Fox, etc. etc.--all were equally guilty of just jumping on the bandwagon and going along with a lead up to a war that in hindsight looks a bit foolish.
Fox's problem has been that since then they've STILL failed to ask the questions that other media outlets are beginning to ask--and as the Bush admin's talking points begin to seem ever more distant from reality, Fox looks even sillier for continually repeating them as if they came from a credible source. They're still on the bandwagon, still spouting that same yellow journalism--and it's getting embarrassing, whatever your political stripe may be.