Reminds me of the Downing Street Memo, which was an equal nonstory for anyone who stops and thinks about the desirability of the President being prepared for reasonably likely contingencies. If he wasn't, the NYT would run a story about that instead: more evidence of hasty planning and poor forethought leading to disaster, etc. You can't win once there's a preconceived storyline about you that all new information will be jammed into fitting one way or another, or else simply ignored.

You're kidding me right? No big deal? The fact that President Bush and PM Blair both stated that regardless of International Cooperation, war was and is the only answer to Iraq. Even if there was no WMDs. Even if Saddam wouldn't be provoked into an attack.

And there was poor planning. Former Administration members have stated such things in the past year. Heck here's Bush's own words that he doesnt think inter-religious warfare would be a problem.."was unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups". (BBC article)

What gets me is that most diehard republicans refuse to believe that there is more wrong here than what is leaked out every day. First its no WMDs. Then there's no AlQueda connection. then there's no yellowcake from Sudan. Then there's hitting Plame. Then there's high oil prices, still. Iraq's in a very close civil war. No one admits not planning, blame it on the DoD. No one admits at fault for speeches leading up to war. President Bush saying he never said "Alqueda = Iraq". Now US and UK seen directly planning for war regardless of what the UN finds. Hell lets paint a US plane UN colors!

Come on.

Strange that you haven't already explained that you were completely wrong last month about the memo. I hope it doesn't slip your mind.

Nick D,

As I alluded to in my post, folks such as yourself drifting in on your tin-foil parachutes from the Huffington Post and Peter Daou's site can't seem to grasp that combat operations don't happen over night. These notes came from January 2003, just a few months before the invasion.

You must have forgotten that WMDs and terrorism were not our only reason to invade Iraq. Is that information to hard for you to find? Look at the White House web site, and read why there. Funny how you always tend to forget things like that, just as you always forget that all Saddam had to do to prevent a war was to step down.

No WMDs? Tell that to Georges Sada. Tell that to other sources that also insist the weapons were shipped out by plane and truck to Syria in the weeks before the war.

No terrorist connection?
The 1993 WTC bomb builder Abdul Rahman Yasin flew back to Baghdad where he lived as Saddam's guest until the 2003 War. Saddam's other Baghdad guests were Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas, two of the world's most infamous terrorists before Osama bin Laden came around. As for al Qaeda, Zarqawi came into Iraq in late 9/11 and has stayed there ever since, while Saddam financed al Qaeda franchise Abu Sayyaf and is famous for giving money to Palestinian suicide bombers.

No Yellowcake from Sudan?
We never claimed there was. But the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report and the U.K.'s Butler Report both concluded he was making contacts in Niger and other parts of Africa to secure yellowcake, but it didn't say he was successful in obtaining it yet.

After that I just kind of lost interest in what you had to say, as facts aren't something you seem interested in as much as rhetoric.

grh,

When I see something more credible that an exact rehash of what I've already forcefully debunked once before, I'll worry about printing an update. If you read closely, the Times is very careful to say the idea of the U-2 was attributed to Bush. That is a far cry from them claiming the comments actually came from Bush, isn't it?

As my previous post on the subject states (and former and active duty military pilots corroborated in the comments), if we wanted to use planes flying a U.N. mission as the excuse, we had our choice to choose form, with attacks of this type occurring consistently since the 1991 Gulf War.

Sometimes, the lack of reading comprehension and critical reasoning skills displayed by folks such as yourself is frightening.

So GWB planned this war in advance. and this is where we are 3 years in.

Genius, I mean Jenius.

Of course this isn't news to you.

So are you saying bush is not evil, he's just an idiot and incompetent?

Agreed.

Re: movement of WMDs to syria.

So Iraq moved them WMDs to syria weeks before the war that you say we had been planning for months (BTW, I say years) and we didn't see it happening?

Do me a favor. Write about NOTHING on your blog other than calling for the President to step down and take the morons he plans wars with.

There should be nothing more important to you (or any American) than getting this idiot frat boy who's in a job WAY over his head out of his position and replaced with an adult.

Not immigration, not iran, not katrina, not the supreme court, not abortion, not euthanasia, not global warming, nothing.

That is a far cry from them claiming the comments actually came from Bush, isn't it?

Not if we're using the English language, no.

But since you're so interested in this, maybe we can agree on something: that the U.S. and England should release the records of this meeting, including the British memo. What do you say?

As my previous post on the subject states (and former and active duty military pilots corroborated in the comments), if we wanted to use planes flying a U.N. mission as the excuse, we had our choice to choose form, with attacks of this type occurring consistently since the 1991 Gulf War.

Nope. The U.S. and U.K. flights were not flying U.N. missions, nor were they flying under U.N. colors.

I realize there's some tiny percentage of people who believe they were, but then there's a tiny percentage of people who believe the holocaust didn't happen. In both cases I think it's better to go with the judgement of the majority.