Go read the speech President George Bush delivered on Goree Island, Senegal, on July 8th, 2003, posted on Opinion Journal.
Too bad the liberals are distracting the country from Bush's trip to Africa by complaining about 16 words from a speech six months ago.
Well, I did plenty of complaining about this particular speech back when it was delivered, too. And I'm unimpressed by the kind of critical thinking that would give Bush a free ride when he's been caught red-handed having lied to justify going to war, but would assert that some pretty phrases someone wrote for him in an effort to make some points with black voters are somehow more deserving of our attention.
One thing I do enjoy when Bush reads these sorts of things is finding how many phrases there are that, viewed from a different point of view, are indictments of his own administration. Like this passage:
Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters. Years of unpunished brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added hypocrisy to injustice. A republic founded on equality for all became a prison for millions. And yet in the words of the African proverb, "No fist is big enough to hide the sky." All the generations of oppression under the laws of man could not crush the hope of freedom and defeat the purposes of God.
(me again) Sure sounds like the Dubyafication of America to me.
Bush didn't need to lie to justify the war, Congress had already approved it three months before this speech was made.
Your implication is that he was telling the truth prior to the State of the Union. He wasn't. He'd already been lying continuously about the nature of Saddam's threat to the US since reaching the decision to go to war, something that happened somewhere around March of 2002, as near as I can tell.
Oh, I was focusing on the SotU speech and the phrase that's been in the news recently about the uranium. If you want to argue about generalities then that's different. Everyone (including the White House) acknowledges that the yellowcake uranium report was probably wrong, but there's no such concensus on whatever other issues you're alluding to.
That statement makes no sense. Assessing "the nature of Saddam's threat" wasn't a factual dispute whereby one could judge YES or NO whether Saddam constituted a threat. It was (and is) a debate about degrees of threat.
You could argue that Bush's reasoning was poor and that of the many Democrats who voted for military action, but not that they lied about the big picture.
When I said he'd been lying about the nature of Saddam's threat, I assumed you'd be able to flesh that out to get my full meaning, which was that he'd been lying about the nature of Saddam's threat in order to make the case that Saddam constituted an imminent danger to the people of the United States. Bush (by which I mean both Bush and the members of his administration) consistently overstated the extent of Saddam's WMD capabilities, and consistently overstated the linkages between Saddam and al Qaeda.
Those lies were not all black and white misstatements, like the SOTU assertion that the British had learned (not "believed", as in they might be wrong, but "learned", as in the thing that they'd learned was factually correct, something the people vetting the speech knew to be false) that Saddam was seeking yellowcake from Niger. They included lots of more-nuanced assertions, allegations, and just vague implications of things not true.
Some of them were obvious lies at the time. Others have been revealed as such only as evidence (or rather, non-evidence) has emerged post-conquest.
It was a consistent pattern. A consistent effort to frighten the American people into supporting an unprovoked invasion of another country. True, another country run by a very bad man, but still, an invasion undertaken at great (and ongoing, and still not fully acknowledged) cost to the people of this country. And, in my opinion, at least, an invasion that will end up making us far less secure against terroist attacks, rather than more secure.
I realize I'm going beyond things I can objectively prove in saying these things. Just like Bush's supporters are going beyond things they can objectively prove in crafting best-case scenarios for interpreting Bush's actions in the best possible light.
Whatever. This is my sense of the big picture as of today. Doubtless that picture will change over time. Maybe some aspects of the big picture you see will change over time, too. Years from now we can all sit down and share a beer and laugh about what stupid tools we were.