Thought? No. Rhetoric? Yes. How else would you explain gems such as “Big Government Liberals?” So if your contention was that letting politicians off the hook for sneaky language doesn’t violate conservative thought - only rhetoric - fine by me.

The UK and NZ folks could check me on this, but IIRC there is a such thing in their Parliaments as a “vote of conscience” - that is, the party leadership releases their members from any party discipline and tells them to vote as their own consciences dictate. I wonder if Pelosi would have the courage to do the same?

If the UK/NZ/Aus contingent would indulge me further; is taking a bill like this and adding another 25% of the total spending amount in completely extraneous spending to try to get members to vote for it a common occurrence there?

Robert, all I can say is that I quiver for the future of conservatism if it has so betrayed its focus group tested anti-government hardline to let politicians who use their signature oily language off the hook. Oh, he prefaced so and so with ‘could be’, or that ‘he thinks’; therefore, he’s in no way responsible for other three-quarters of the sentence that he’s addressing the nation’s representatives (or worse, the nation directly) with. Yeesh.

Even at the arbitrary place where you set the bar, though, we find NewsMax - no, seriously - denouncing an administration official for promising a cakewalk:

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/1/12/85454.shtml

(A few addenda here: JakeSquid, you missed Ken Adelman, who in fact promised a cakewalk and, alas, forgot to add an ‘I believe’ or even an ‘IMO’, which of course would have exonerated him of all accountability for what he said. The writer of the article there is Paul Craig Roberts - his right-wing bona fides may have been revoked a long time ago, but hey, Newsmax is Newsmax.)

Just google ‘Iraq cakewalk’ or something and you’ll find more than enough. Really, no one can rationally dispute the role that ‘optimism’, if you want to call it that, played in the buildup to the war. No one talked of the difficulties of building a democracy - that particular ad hoc re-justification would have to wait until the WMD’s proved to be a no-show.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1636543,00.html (in reference to the earlier 2004 study)

[quote] … The standard response, exemplified by a letter from the BBC’s online news service last week, is that the study’s “technique of sampling and extrapolating from samples has been criticised”. That’s true, and by the same reasoning we could dismiss the fact that 6 million people were killed in the Holocaust, on the grounds that this figure has also been criticised, albeit by skinheads. The issue is not whether the study has been criticised, but whether the criticism is valid.

As Medialens has pointed out, it was the same lead author, using the same techniques, who reported that 1.7 million people had died as a result of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). That finding has been cited by Tony Blair, Colin Powell and almost every major newspaper on both sides of the Atlantic, and none has challenged either the method or the result. Using the Congo study as justification, the UN security council called for all foreign armies to leave the DRC and doubled the country’s UN aid budget. [/quote]

The following I include only because it talks about the more recent 2006 study, though Monbiot’s article is far better.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/10/how_to_not_lie_with_statistics.html

Your argument about how removing Saddam Hussein equates removing Hitler is old and tired. More thoughfull neocons have tried it, abused it. It fails, among many things, cause the US intervention in Iraq was NOT about removing a murderous dictator, no matter how many times you repeat that nonsense.

Concerning Hussein supposed agression, the only ones you can claim are the attacks on US and British planes on the non fly zones, but the I don´t think those fly zones were legal at all to start, since they were not authorized by the UN. And since you haven´t bothered to present any other possible evidence, I do not see why we should accept your point.

It might be helpful to analogize this to World War II. When Hitler started rattling sabers, the Allied powers hesitated and appeased. They have been roundly criticized for that ever since - all the trouble and bloodshed that could have been saved.

Saddam Hussein began rattling his saber in earnest when he annexed Kuwait. Instead of appeasement, he was met with a savage rebuke and knocked back into his borders by an international coalition.

In subsequent years it became clear that the dictator was not going to chill out and be a nice player, and had to be taken out. If in the late 1930s the Allies had stood up to Hitler, we know as a matter of Hitler’s own word that he would have retreated, withdrawn - but not given up. The world stood up to him this time around, and eventually ended up taking him down.

The problem with the world isn’t that there are so many stories like Saddam Hussein’s, it is that there are so few. It takes a lot of time, trouble, blood and suffering to do what we’re trying to do - some of it ours, most of it theirs. But the potential outcome - a nation turned into another Germany or Japan, strong, free and nearly always at peace - is proving hard to realize. Well, we knew it would be hard going in, any of us with sense, and there’s no use pretending otherwise.

This concludes my Iraq war bloviating, unless someone pushes one of my buttons. ;)

There are many criticisms to be made of the handling of the war in all its aspects, and I’m sure you, Jake and Sergio, among others will be making them. I don’t think - though maybe I’m wrong - that smearing the Bush administration for talking about the future in hopeful tones will contribute to that process.

The legal record is readily available for public research, Sergio; for the third time, you have some reading to do.

Exactly how Iraq violated the cease fire? You are the one divagating here to justify what has no justification, sorry.

No, I am looking at the moral framework of the war (since many “legal things” are usually inmoral, and that will include this war if it was legale, which is not). But it looks to me is YOU who is completly missing the facts on this discusion when you claim the invasion of Iraq was a war that Saddam Hussein started when he invaed Kwait 13 years…which is simply not true, and a way to evade the fact that the US is the agressor here

There’s an ongoing guerilla war in Iraq, Charles. I would never dispute that.

That doesn’t make “mission accomplished” insane. It means that we live in a universe where events continue to occur even after we draw assessments of them - or over-optimistically think we’ve reached an end point.

So far you’ve made three substantial claims.

1.”a major selling point of the war was that it was going to be a cakewalk.”

You haven’t demonstrated this. People hoping that it’s going to be a cakewalk are not people saying that it will be a cakewalk.

Even if they had, that doesn’t make it a major selling point. As I recall, the major selling point of the war was that Iraq was a dangerous regime pursuing WMDs, not “this will be easy so let’s do it”.

2. “They said it will be quick and easy for us to accomplish our goals and put a stable democracy in place in Iraq.”

You have provided nothing to support this.

3. “Even 6 months after the invasion, Bushadminco was promising us that we’d be out of there in a year.”

You have provided nothing to support this.

Was there a UN resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq?

Robert, this is just sad.

You have tortured the language so badly that it has died on you.

Oh, but those things don’t matter, Ron. They’re part of the “geopolitical context” that Sergio doesn’t give a damn about.

And by historical standards we haven’t. In four years of war, we’ve lost fewer troops than we lost in the first hours of D-Day. And again, not material to your claim.

That’s very, very funny. No logical gymnastics on your part there.

And, hey! Wasn’t my claim that Bushadminco claimed Iraq would be a cakewalk? Let’s check and see, shall we? Oh, here it is from comment # 42: You may have been under no such illusion, but that does nothing to refute the fact that a major selling point of the war was that it was going to be a cakewalk. Well, I’ve provided the evidence that Bushadminco made lots of statements indicating that the war would be short & we’d be home quickly.

How ’bout this one?

Robert - comment # 43:
Republican Senators saying “our boys will be home by Christmas” in front of cheering crowds?

Robert - comment # 53:
John McCain is not part of the Administration.

Geeze. Rough crowd. You provide what they ask for and then they say that it is meaningless.

And we did. Again, winning the conflict and creating a democracy, not the same thing.

We won the conflict? Then why are our troops in Iraq? It really seems, to most rational people, that the conflict is still going on 4 years later.

Cheney: Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. [Meet the Press, 3/16/03]

And as noted, we were, briefly. Again, not a promise.

This is perhaps the most odious of your evasions. “Promise,” is your word, not mine. My words are “selling point.” The fact is that Cheney, among others - including, as requested, a Republican Senator - claimed that the Iraq war would be fast, easy, that Iraq would pay most of the rebuilding costs and that we wouldn’t have to be there for an extended period of time. I have provided cites, as requested, that address the fact that Bushadminco & their allies (including Republican Senators) sold Iraq as a cakewalk. Somehow you think that this is immaterial to the claim that Bushadminco sold Iraq as a cakewalk.

The justification for the war was that Saddam Hussein repeatedly defied 16 different U.N. resolutions that required, among other things, that he open up his nuclear and other WMD facilities, and that if he did not there would be severe consequences. He refused to do so. The fact that there may not have been WMDs in Iraq by the time the invasion was over and we could look for them does not mean that there were not such at the time before the invasion. In any case, all Saddam had to do was to comply with the resolutions and neither the blockade nor the invasion would have happened.

that was sold to the world using lies;

Not established. There may have been some bad mistakes, but it’s not at all established that there was any deliberate deception by either the President or his direct reports.

It a war that is being fought to preserve the ugly interests of oil companies, military contractors and its friends, the members of the republican - and lets admit it- democratic party (who voted for this war too).

Sheer speculation.

If you recognize that,

Kind of hard to recognize something that there’s no evidence for.

the whole subject of “how the war is going” is irrelevant.

Not to the people of Iraq. Nor, I suspect, to the Islamic facists in Syria or Iran or the Taliban, or the remnants of the Baathists. I bet they think it’s damned important, and they have repeatedly stated that they don’t want the U.S. to leave until the terrorists and insurgents have been put down.