At Daily Kos and elsewhere, in discussions about the incomprehensible decisions by presumably smart and well-informed people like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Edwards to support the Iraq war resolution, I’ve written that some of the administration claims had been so patently false that it was obvious to me they were lying their asses off.
When I’ve explained how I reached my own conclusions, several people have responded that hindsight was easy, and that, in pre-blog 2002, they just weren’t going to believe that I knew what I said I knew without proof.
This was the text of my Daily Kos post and the results of a poll I ran there.
As things ratchet up to the 2008 election, and pieces like Kos’s Clinton diary re-raise the Iraq war resolution vote, commenters like myself who have said we didn’t believe the case laid out by Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, and others about Iraq’s WMDs, links to al Qaeda, and the imminent threat to the United States have received a number of responses from people who — like Clinton, Edwards, Kerry, and others — were apparently gullible enough to believe all of those things, and who demand “proof” that we really thought the Bush administration was lying back in 2002 and 2003.
You can point out that most of the Congressional Democrats voted against the AUMF and therefore did not view Iraq as a threat. You can say that most of our allies — including people who sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001 — didn’t see Iraq as enough of a threat to join in the venture.
You can mention that uranium and plutonium processing for even a single nuke takes enormous amounts of space and electricity and produces radioactive waste (see Hanford, Rocky Flats, Oak Ridge) that are very difficult to hide. You can laugh at the idea that a country with no aerospace industry was being touted as having weaponized drones that had a far longer range than the US-built Predator. You can point to pre-war articles by people who said that the administration’s evidence of WMD were fabrications.
But unless you can come up with some “proof’ that you personally thought the administration was lying about Iraq, those people will say you’re engaged in “self-flattery”.
If that’s the case, I guess I’m going to need a new reason for having opposed the Iraq war back in 2002. I thought for the past five years that it was because the little bit I knew about science and electronics and computers and international politics led me to the conclusion that the claims of the administration were bogus, but if people don’t believe me, then I have to turn to the dKos community to provide me with some reason more palatable once those recollections are shoved down the memory hole.
Please help.
