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Paul Mauro's avatar

I don't think Obama anymore. I think that ship sailed with switching Joe out for Kamala. But to answer your question: I wish I knew. Some 25-year old with a "Co-Exist" sticker on her Prius.... Or maybe the military. I would go so far as to question the validity of these pardons and commutations he's been issuing. I don't think Biden is actually signing them.

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Dan Segal's avatar

• On the second Iraq War: back during the Clinton Administration, even before Operation Desert Fox, a limited but still major military engagement…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_bombing_of_Iraq

…it was made official US policy to seek regime change in Iraq:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Liberation_Act

• As for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, Mark Lowenthal, Intelligence guru, former CIA analyst, author of the standard textbook in the intelligence field, and Jeopardy! Grand Champion, tells us that,

“Everybody thought there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. EVERYBODY! The French, the Germans, the Russians. The only debate at the UN was the best way to get rid of them, not does he or doesn’t he have them. So the fact that we wrote this estimate for the President saying we think he has weapons, we are convinced he has weapons of mass destruction didn’t exactly put us in the great minority.

“There was a vibrant speech by the French foreign minister de Villepin saying of course there are weapons of mass destruction, war is not the answer.

So, you know, we all got it wrong. The only difference is the United States went to war, based on…..we did NOT go to war based on the estimate. That is NOT true. Thank God we don’t write estimates that send people to war. That is much more power than I ever wanted in my life. We went to war for a whole bunch of other reasons. The estimate was not the reason, in fact, here’s a data point for you. We wrote this estimate. The Senate received the estimate. Six members of the Senate, SIX! read the estimate. This is an unclassified fact. We made them sign for it. Seventy-seven members of the Senate voted to authorize the use of force. So at least seventy-one of them, if not more, voted to go to war in Iraq having never touched the estimate. So the estimate really had nothing to do with anyone’s decision making. On the other hand the estimate was wrong. We know that. But everybody thought there was WMD.

“You know what the funny thing is, it’s still the best answer to the question. TONIGHT [June 16, 2014] it would be the best answer to the question even though you know it’s wrong. There’s only three answers, he has it, he doesn’t have it, we don’t know. Okay, you get paid a lot of money not to say we don’t know. It’s not an acceptable response. The best answer, analytically, remains the answer yes, he has it, it just happens to be wrong, and that’s one of the conundrums of doing intelligence…”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4MapLTtI2-A

(1:22:17 - 1:24:15)

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