Stay Tuned, More War After This Commercial

As the Middle East continues to plung into the democratic domino theory that didn't work [http://www.foxnews.com/world/index.html] -Let us go back and examine what was said before we went into Iraq. Polls tell us that most people have totally forgotten the political diatribe got us over there in the first place. What would cause us to “cut and run” from Afghanistan –where we were told the terrorists that attacked us lived?

Here’s a bit of what we were told;
Topic: Iraq - Pre-Invasion

Speaker: Bush, George - President
Date: 3/6/2003
Claim: "No matter what the whip count is, we're calling for [a U.N.] vote. We want to see people stand up and say what their opinion is about Saddam Hussein and the utility of the United Nations Security Council. And so, you bet. It's time for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam.”
[Source: White House Web site]

Fact: "At a National Security Council meeting convened at the White House at 8:55 a.m., Bush finalized the decision to withdraw the resolution from consideration and prepared to deliver an address to the nation that had already been written.”
[Source: Washington Post, 3/18/03]

Fact: "On March 17, 2003, with a possible resolution waiting in the wings, Bush announced he would not call for a vote, saying, 'The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities, so we will rise to ours.”
[Source: Slate, 9/23/03]

Speaker: Bush, George - President
Date: 3/6/2003
Claim: "I've not made up our mind about military action. Hopefully, this can be done peacefully. Hopefully, that as a result of the pressure that we have placed -- and others have placed -- that Saddam will disarm and/or leave the country.”
[Source: White House Web site]

Fact: "The inspections are not getting us there, the president said, getting down to business. The U.N. inspectors were just sort of stumbling around, and Hussein was showing no intention of real compliance. 'I really think I'm going to have to do this.' The president said he had made up his mind on war. The United States should go to war.” 1/13/04
[Source: from Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward, reprinted in Washington Post, 4/18/04]

Speaker: Bush, George - President
Date: 2/8/2004
Claim: "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I look back, was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions. And it's lessons that any president must learn, and that is to the set the goal and the objective and allow the military to come up with the plans to achieve that objective. And those are essential lessons to be learned from the Vietnam War.”
[Source: Meet the Press transcript]

Fact: "Donald Rumsfeld has become the Iraq conflict's McNamara. His second-guessing of the deployment orders in the months before the fighting started is being blamed by retired and serving officers alike for the thinly protected 300-mile supply lines on which US troops are now depending.”
[Source: Guardian, 3/31/03]

Speaker: Bush, George - President
Date: 12/28/2001
Claim: "I'm right now focused on the military operations in Afghanistan”
[Source: White House Web site]"

Fact: "Following an important meeting on Iraq war planning in late 2001, President Bush told the public that the discussions were about Afghanistan. He made no mention afterward about Iraq even though that was the real focus of the session at his ranch."
[Source: AP, 4/18/04]

Speaker: Bush, George - President
Date: 12/15/2003
Claim: "In Iraq, there was a lot of diplomacy that took place before there was any military action.”
[Source: White House Web site]

Fact: "Time Magazine reports that as early as March, 2002, President Bush showed little interest in debating what to do about Saddam. Instead, he became notably animated, according to one person in the room, used a vulgar epithet to refer to Saddam and concluded with four words that left no one in doubt about Bush's intentions: 'We're taking him out.' “
[Source: Time, 5/5/02]

Speaker: Bush, George - President
Date: 10/22/2003
Claim: "I made it clear that a [diplomatic] process had gone on way before I made the decision to use military force.”
[Source: White House Web site]

Fact: "According to Bush’s State Department Director of Policy and Planning Richard Haas, the decision to go to war had been made by July of 2002 – 8 months before the invasion. When asked whether there was a particular moment when he realized war in Iraq was definite, Haas said, The moment was the first week of July (2002), when I had a meeting with Condi…She said, essentially, that that decision's been made, don't waste your breath.”
[Source: New Yorker, 3/31/03]

Time reported in May (2002) that in late March of 2002 Vice President Dick Cheney told Senators The question was no longer if the U.S. would attack Iraq...The only question was when.”
[Source: Time, 5/6/02]

Speaker: Bush, George - President
Date: 10/17/2003
Claim: "The force must be strong enough so that the mission can be accomplished.”
[Source: White House Web site]

Fact: According to testimony from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 10/16/03 the Bush Administration had deployed 1 soldier for every 189 people in Iraq, and 1 soldier for every 1,913 people in Afghanistan. Both were dramatically worse ratios than Kosovo (1 per 48), Bosnia (1 per 58) and East Timor (1 per 86)--the deployments of the Clinton years which Bush maligned during his campaign.
[Source: http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2000c.html and http://foreign.senate.gov/testimony/2003/LindborgTestimony031016.pdf]

But there is some GOOD NEWS - Joined by stalwarts of the civil rights movement, President Bush on Thursday signed into law a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act, the historic legislation that opened up the ballot box to millions of African Americans across the South in the 1960s.

Quickies:
Senate and House leaders have made plans to adopt vastly scaled-back versions of their lobbying reform packages. "I'm happy where things are right now," said Paul Miller, president of the American League of Lobbyists.

Exxon earned $1,318 every second in the second quarter, "topping forecasts" but coming in "just shy of a record."

The "tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind" Hezbollah, turning the group's leader Nasrallah "into a folk hero." Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which initially had criticized the group, are now publicly "scrambling to distance themselves from Washington."

President Bush’s meeting with American Idol finalists at a moment of heightened tensions in the Middle East “demonstrate[s] a lack of seriousness.” Darrell West, a political scientist at Brown University: "There's the risk that people will ask, 'Doesn't this guy have something better to do? Shouldn't he be solving foreign crises?'"

U.S. Sgt. Lemuel Lemus has said in a sworn statement that he was given an order to “kill all military-age men” during a raid in Baghdad by a colonel and a captain. The colonel, Lemus' commanding officer, has refused to testify at any stage of the court-martial, a "very rare" occurrence.

The Commerce Department reported today that the “growth of employee compensation, already thought to be the slowest in any post-World War II recovery, has been even weaker than previously assumed.” Compensation grew a mere 2.3 percent between 2003 and the end of 2005.

After public criticism of its management of the disastrous Big Dig project in Boston, the federal government is now dropping contracting giant Bechtel from a project to build a high-tech children’s hospital in Iraq "after the project fell nearly a year behind schedule and exceeded its expected cost by as much as 150 percent."