Oversold

by digby

So Holy Joe agrees with the far right neocon nutballs that the real reason we went into Iraq was to “pop the head of the snake in Iran” and himself says, “if I fault the administration for anything before the war — ’cause I think we did the right thing in going in to overthrow Saddam — it’s that they oversold the WMD part of the argument….”

Man oh man, the guy has brass ones.

MR. RUSSERT: And we’re back with Senator Joe Lieberman. Can the president commence military action against Iraq without a smoking gun?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: There are smoking guns, and that’s the important point to make. Look, I think that the president has to do a better job of explaining what we mean by a smoking gun. There’s a way in which people are now looking at the U.N. inspectors in Iraq as if some local prosecutor has sent people in to investigate an innocent man for a suspected crime and find the evidence. Saddam Hussein is not an innocent man. He made clear he wants to dominate the Arab world, which would be terrible for the Arab world and the rest of the world. He invaded his neighbors. He’s killed hundreds of thousands of people. We know that he had weapons of mass destruction.

You want to find the smoking guns? There are thousands of them in the report issued by the United Nations inspectors after they were kicked out of Iraq in 1998. Thousands of tons of chemical agents, thousands of liters of biological agents, and the aim of the United Nations resolution, in my opinion, was to send those inspectors in and to force Saddam Hussein to say, “I’ve destroyed the smoking guns that you knew I had in 1999.” He hasn’t done that, and unless he does, we’re going to have to take action to disarm him. Nobody wants to go to war, but sometimes you have to go to war to protect the lives of the American people. This may be one of those cases.

MR. RUSSERT: In your guess, it probably will be necessary?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Well, so far, he’s done nothing but continue to deny and deceive and cheat. And I don’t want to look
back one day after he uses those chemical and biological weapons against Americans and ask ourselves: “Why didn’t we act to protect our security?”

Yeah, no overselling there. He’s a foreign policy genius.

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