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16 "Infamous" Words. Media and Democrats Gone Wild.

THE "INFAMOUS 16 WORDS": "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Tim Russert on Meet the Press described this sentence by President Bush in the State of the Union as "the infamous words the president uttered on January 28th."

All of Washington and the weekend talk shows were in hysterics over the "False Statement in State of the Union Address."

The Democrats running for President think they now have the goods to attack Bush on foreign policy and national security. Forgive me if I think this is all a political sideshow and a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking.

Kate OâBeirne on CNNâs Capital Gang did one of the better jobs of summarizing the facts of this "scandal":

The dishonesty here are all of the people who are ignoring the facts to this hysterical reaction to the 16 words in the presidentâs speech. It is, in fact, not true that a possible nuclear program was the most fundamental reason for going to war.

Colin Powell, when he made his case, which everyone agreed at the time was the most compelling case about the need to defend ourselves at the U.N., never mentioned a nuclear capacity. So thatâs just rewriting history.

Secondly, our intelligence agencies agreed in a confidential report last October, they all agreed, that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear program. They offered six reasons, none of which had anything to do with buying uranium from Africa.

Fact, the president said the British intelligence finds that Iraq has sought to buy uranium from Africa. That was true then, and it remains true. British intelligence still say that is the fact. They havenât shared the intelligence with us, but they still stick by that assessment, and they say it had nothing to do with the forged documents. Niger in the past had sold uranium to Iraq and lied about it. So certainly theyâre not going to be telling Joe Wilson whether or not they did so this time.

In fact, in the early â90s, we found Iraqâs program was nuclear program was far more advanced than either the U.N. or the CIA thought. There should have been a presumption in favor of the British intelligence report being so, and they still stick by it.

Gee, you mean those "infamous words" the president uttered are actually true? Maybe Iâm missing something, but I donât see the huge scandal here. What liberal media? This sentence was a small piece of a very large argument for why the world needed to do something about Saddam Hussein.

The President came to the conclusion after 9/11 that Husseinâs Iraq posed a threat to the U.S. and our allies and he made a decision to act and do something about that threat. A lot of these criticisms are very easy to make with 20/20 hindsight, but you have to remember before any war starts you can not be sure how things may go.

Given their honest belief that Hussein posed a real threat to the U.S., Bushâs administration had an obligation to produce as much public support as possible for the countryâs effort in Iraq. Itâs not a shocking revelation that in attempting to do this the administration would choose to highlight any reasonably credible evidence available at the time that bolstered its argument.

Furthermore, itâs very easy after the fact to say you shouldnât have included this or that piece of evidence. The flaw in this argument is that it assumes the "evidence" contained in the intelligence reports on which the White House rely are akin to simple math problems like 2+2=4 when they are really much more ambiguous documents that force policy makers to make judgment calls. And I would much rather want the President to err on the side of protecting our country, its citizens and its national interest.

Posted by: ColoradoConservative 2003-07-14

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