05/30/08 – Victor Navasky – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our first guest today is Victor Navasky, he's the publisher emeritus at The Nation Magazine, he is the chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, and I'm not sure if he's the president or the CEO of the Institute of Expertology, but I guess we'll find out.
Welcome to the show, Victor.
Thanks, I'm not sure either.
Oh, you're not sure either, you're one or the other, is that it?
I'm one or the other.
Alright, so Victor Navasky, he's the president or CEO of the Institute of Expertology, and I guess being the publisher emeritus at The Nation, you sound like quite an expert yourself there.
Well, you know, Chris Cerf and I, who did this book, Mission Accomplished, we founded the Institute of Expertology 25 years ago, and we did a study of experts from every field from the beginning of time, and we couldn't find one who was right.
And so people said, who are you to say the experts are right or wrong?
If experts are all wrong, maybe you're wrong.
And our view is, we're not experts, we're meta-experts, we're expertologists, we study the experts.
So there it is.
I see.
So you get to exclude yourself from the category.
That's it.
That's right.
Okay, so now that first book, that was called The Experts Speak, the definitive compendium of misinformation, and I think I remember when that came out, you guys were the ones who proved that the experts are no more right than the average goofball's chance on the street?
No, the average goofball is much better than the experts, and he's not a goofball either.
You know, in this new book that we've done, people have accused us of being partisan, because we point out that both Hillary Clinton and McCain each thought this war would be over in a matter of months, Hillary voted to authorize it, McCain, who says he opposed it from the beginning, actually said, they're going to greet us as liberators, and people said, but you don't have anything about the other candidate, Barack Obama, who actually was against the war from the start, and we said, yeah, but that's because everyone agrees he had no experience, or he wasn't an expert, or he's excluded from our study.
Right, and Ron Paul, now he was right from the beginning too, only he's some sort of political ideologue, and they taint your sample too, right?
That's right.
We concede that there are some people who got it right, but they tend to be extremists on the left, or the right, or the libertarians, and so we excluded them from our study too, because they would pollute our sample.
I see, and I guess, you know, the guys at Knight Ritter newspapers, they don't count, it's the goof, the people who got it all wrong are the true experts here in our society.
Well, you know, but it's not just politicians, although obviously Bush and Cheney, and they're at the center of our study, but scholars, like the scholar Fuad Ajami, who is from the Johns Hopkins political science faculty, or the scholar Kenon Makiya, who's one of the world's leading islamicists, they had disputes among themselves, but their disputes were over things like, Ajami said, we would be greeted with kites and boomboxes, and Kenon Makiya said, no, we would be greeted with kisses and flowers, so that was the nature of their difference.
Yeah, well, that was a very serious debate, I remember being very caught up in that, yeah, in 2002 there, and now you also point out that the fact that the neocons and the liberal hawks agreed with each other should have been our first clue that they were all wrong.
Well, it's not, yeah, but it's not just, you know, it's the press itself, and Bill O'Reilly, of course, who said it would be over in a matter of weeks, but, and not just the conservative press, Richard Cohen, who's the liberal columnist for the Washington Post, wrote after Cohen Powell gave his speech at the UN, he said now that he's given that speech, no one can doubt that Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons, and he said, only a fool or possibly a Frenchman could think otherwise.
Now, Victor here, I want to play this clip, I stole some audio from Norman Solomon's film War Made Easy, and this is a little medley of, well, basically what the press thought of the experts, the pundits and the reporters and experts thought of Colin Powell's great speech there.
Trust me, trust me.
Did Colin Powell close the deal today, in your mind, for anyone who has yet objectively to make up their mind?
I think for anybody who analyzes the situation, he has closed the deal.
This irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence today, Colin Powell brilliantly delivered that smoking gun today.
Colin Powell is outstanding today.
I mean, it was lockstep, it was so compelling, I don't see how anybody at this point cannot support this effort.
He made a wonderful presentation.
I thought he made a great case for the purpose of disarmament.
It was devastating, I mean, and overwhelming, overwhelming abundance of the evidence.
Point after point after point, he just flooded the terrain with data.
It's the end of the argument phase.
America has made its case.
The Powell speech has moved the ball.
All right, so there you go.
That's the expert speaking on the Colin Powell speech.
You got him, and you got him in their own voices.
It was funny, I saw one of the quotes that you use of George W. Bush, we had put on a bumper sticker, which was that one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect the war in Iraq to the war on terrorism.
Yes, and he managed to do it.
But you know, the thing is, it's just so that nobody holds these folks to account.
That's why we, in the last couple of days over Tom Dispatch, we put out, we took McCain's statements, because he is so insistent that from the beginning, he was opposed to this war.
And I could, if you want, I could go down and give you his answers to some of the key questions that were asked.
You know, they asked how American troops would be greeted.
On March 20th, he said, I believe the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators.
Did Saddam Hussein have a nuclear program that posed an imminent threat to the United States?
On October 10th, 2002, he said, Saddam Hussein is on a crash course to construct a nuclear weapon.
Of course, it turned out not to be true.
Will the war in Iraq be long or short?
On March 23rd, he said, this conflict is going to be relatively short.
How is the war going?
In September of 2003, he said, and this is a guy who describes himself now as the war's greatest critic.
On September of 2003, he said, I would argue that the next three to six months will be critical.
And then he said in October, when you ask how the war was going, two months after that, he said, I think the initial phases of the war were so spectacularly successful that it took us all by surprise.
And then in the following year, is this war really necessary?
He said, only the most deluded of us could doubt the necessity of the war.
So it just, you know.
Yeah.
And by the way, everybody can find this article at TomDispatch.com.
We're also running it today at Antiwar.com.
McCain Miss Speaks by Christopher Cerf, Victor S. Navasky, and Tom Englehart.
It's at Antiwar.com slash Englehart.
And of course, you also single McCain out here for all of his propaganda about the surge working.
This has been a major turning point in this past six months.
Yes.
Isn't your book obsolete now that the surge has worked?
Well, I'm glad you asked.
We have a lot of respect for the turning point thesis.
And so we go back in time and we show that, well, all of the people who talked about the turning point way back from 2002, you know, I can jump in at any point here.
Douglas Feith in July of 2003 said, this month will be a political turning point.
On November 6, 2003, President Bush said, we've reached another great turning point.
And on June 16, 2004, Bush claimed a turning point will come two weeks from today.
And in 2005, every year, one of them said in 2005 in February, Donald Rumsfeld said, on January 30th in Iraq, the world witnessed an important moment in the global struggle against tyranny, a moment that historians might one day call a major turning point.
And then on March 7, 2005, William Crystal, who was the editor of The Standard, he now writes a column in The New York Times, wrote, the Iraqi election of January 30th, 2005, will turn out to have been a genuine turning point.
And then on December 18th of that year, as the year ended, Vice President Cheney, while conceding that the level of violence has continued, assured ABC News, I do believe that when we look back on this period of time, 2005 will have been the turning point.
So we found those quotes in 2006, 2007.
Now the surge is said to be the turning point.
McCain, the last time he spoke on this, said that he stakes his campaign on it.
So let's see what happens.
Yeah, it's funny.
You know, you go back and actually see what those turning points were, such as Bremer handing over sovereignty to Iyad Alawi, or the election of the Supreme Islamic Council and Dawah Party to power in 2005.
I guess they were turning points to a degree.
But if they were wanting us to believe they were turning points toward the direction of peace and safety for the average Iraqi, it sure wasn't headed that way.
Yeah, no, it's quite astounding when you look at the record of what all these folks had to say.
And one of my favorite quotes is from Paul Wolfowitz, who you'll recall was the Undersecretary of Defense Department.
And what he said, I want to get his exact words, so I'm looking them up now.
But Paul Wolfowitz, on July 22, 2003, he was the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
Here's his statement.
I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq.
Think about that.
I hear that and I say, yeah, absolutely.
He's right.
Just a minute.
What is he?
What are we?
So it was surreal.
It's another universe.
You know, that was what Bush said, too, when the Lebanese were holding their election and Bush was trying to force the Syrian troops out of southern Lebanon.
He said, it's impossible.
How could anybody believe that any country could have free and fair elections in the presence of an occupying army of foreign troops?
Yes.
Well, no irony whatsoever.
I wonder if it's the pills.
You think they got all these guys eating Prozac and stuff up there?
I don't know.
I mean, some of the things that were said were we threw them in our book because they were so grotesque.
I mean, President Bush literally said he was honor at some ceremony at the hospital.
He said, I'm proud to shake the hand of the of the man who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein.
Yeah.
No late night comedian would have the courage to write such a line.
That's funny.
Everybody, it's Victor Navasky.
He is the co-author of the new book Mission Accomplished or How We Won the War in Iraq.
He's the CEO or the president, not sure which, of the Institute of Expertology.
And let me ask you this.
Were these people all just a bunch of goofball bozos, group thinkers?
Did they know they were lying?
No, I don't think so.
That's the tragedy of it.
I think that Dick Cheney and the president and all the rest of them, Richard Perle and Wolfowitz and the commentariat and the press thought they were telling the truth.
I mean, they shaded some of the people in the administration shaded the truth in the interest of what they believed to be the higher truth.
But I think they believed it.
Sort of just the emperor's new clothes syndrome, right?
Nobody wants to be the one to admit that they're not fit for their job, so they go along.
Well, that's that's an ancient way to put it.
Yes, that's funny.
You know, George Bush one time said, well, I guess this is the Bush version of Hitler's big lie.
He just said, well, sometimes you just have to repeat a phrase over and over and over again to sort of catapult the propaganda.
They recycled phrases and repeated things each other said with our credit, for example, early on, Condoleezza Rice said, we don't want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud.
Well, that's pretty vivid metaphor.
Then two weeks later, President George Bush said, we don't want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud.
They like the way these things sounded.
And then they would repeat them.
Yeah, I'll use that one, too, once at least, I think.
And then sometimes they would vary it like like Ken Adelman said at first that the the invasion of Iraq would be a walk in the park.
And then later on, he said it would be a cakewalk, which that's the difference.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that was a Richard Perle line to the cakewalk.
That's funny.
And, you know, as far as turning points go, we have this whole surge is working meme.
But just a few weeks ago, there was the big attack in Basra where Maliki's forces led an attack against the Saudis down there.
And not not only Bush, but all the rest of them came out with these grandiose statements about what a historic day this is in the history of Iraq.
Yes.
But it's, you know, some of the things that were said are outrageous.
I mean, you know, Michael Ledin, who's a freedom scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, here's what he said.
I'm coming through.
He says, every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small, crappy little country and throw it against the wall just to show the world we mean business.
Yeah.
And that's quoted by Jonah Goldberg, his buddy.
That's right.
You got it.
And then, you know, doctor.
Right.
No, but but it's not just the point is not just neoconservatives like Ledin or Goldberg.
It's right after that.
Peter Barnard, who is the editor of the New Republic, said we need a little bit of logistical support, but we don't need the moral support of anyone because we're on the side of the angels in this.
Maybe.
Well, let me give you an opportunity to pick on Tom Friedman, because for some reason, you know, they called Ronald Reagan the Teflon president.
This guy is the Teflon pundit.
Apparently, it doesn't matter that he's never been right about anything ever in that column of his.
It just keeps turning out.
And people that I love and care about say things to me like, well, did you see the new Tom Friedman column?
He says some very interesting things in there.
Yeah.
Well, you know, first of all, for many years, I was editing and then publishing the Nation magazine.
And I blame myself because the first time Tom Friedman wrote a column in favor of the war in Iraq, he said, my wife disagrees with me on this.
So I said to Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who became the editor of Nation, Katrina, why don't we ask Tom Friedman's wife to write an article for us?
We didn't get around to doing it.
Let me read you, not to put too much of a burden on you.
You tell me how many you can take, because I've got scores of them.
Oh, go for it.
We want to know.
We want to hear them all.
Well, let me.
Well, you'll stop me.
But here it is.
Tom Friedman.
You know, every six months, Friedman would predict that we'll know in six months whether this war is working or not.
So I'm going to start reading you.
November 30th, 2003.
In fact, someone in the blogosphere called it a Friedman unit.
Six months, he was so insistent.
So here's Friedman, November 30th, 2003.
The next six months in Iraq, which will determine the prospect for democracy building there, are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time.
November 30th, 2003.
Now, six months later, June 30th, 2004, he's interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air.
What I absolutely don't understand is just at the moment, when we finally have a U.N.
-approved Iraqi caretaker government made up of, I know a lot of these guys, reasonably decent people, and more than reasonably decent people, everyone wants to declare it's over.
I don't get it.
It might be over in a week.
It might be over in a month.
It might be over in six months.
But what's the rush?
Can we let this play out, please?
Then, five months later, October 2004, what we're going to find out, Bob, he's talking to Bob Schieffer at CBS and Space Nation.
What we're going to find out, Bob, in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war.
Okay.
But then, November 2004, improv time is over.
This is crunch time.
Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months, but it won't be won with high rhetoric.
It will be won on the ground in the war over the last mile.
Oh, man.
Then, nine months later, September 25, 2005, on Meet the Press, he says, I think we're in the endgame now.
I think we're in a six-month window here where it's going to become very clear.
Then, September 28, that year, maybe the cynical Europeans were right.
Maybe this neighborhood is just beyond transformation.
That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be.
If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it.
If they won't, then we are wasting our time.
Then, on December 18, we've teed up this situation for Iraqis, and I think the next six months really are going to determine whether this country is going to collapse into three parts or more or whether it's going to come together.
Then, in January of the following year, he says, I think we're going to know after six to nine months whether this project is any chance of succeeding.
Wait, wait, wait.
Now, let me stop you there just to ask you, how many more of these do you have?
How many more of these do I have?
I can't, you know, I don't have the higher math.
It goes over the horizon.
You can't see that far.
But I got, you know, you give me the year, and I'll tell you what I have.
My God.
Okay.
Let me ask you this, Victor.
Did he ever say what it would mean to win?
Because this is the thing that drives me crazy more than anything else is, you know, we'll settle nothing less for victory, and I guess it sort of goes without saying that that means figuring out a way to bring all the different armed factions together into one sort of unity government, and yet there's never any progress toward that.
I mean, the Sunni insurgency being brought back in under the Maliki government, that's not happening, and no progress toward that happening has ever been made.
Does anybody, especially Friedman or Bill Kristol, do these people ever even say what victory means?
Well, you know, at various times, you've got to acknowledge what he says.
He says a decent, stable Iraq.
He says bring democracy to the Middle East.
He says if there's, in six or nine months, he said in April 2006, we'll know whether, six weeks or months, we'll know whether there's an Iraq there worth investing in in the next weeks or months.
And then in May 2006, he says, well, I think that we're going to find out, Chris.
He's talking to Chris Matthews and Hardball.
I think we're going to find out in the next year to six months, probably sooner, whether a decent outcome, decent outcome, that is possible there, and I think we're going to have to just let this play out.
So a decent outcome.
So no, they don't do it with specificity.
Yeah, that's great.
You know, somebody who gets let off the hook all the time, and just like McCain, has attempted to go back and rewrite history as though we don't all have Google, but William Jefferson Clinton, I remember seeing with my own eyeballs on the David Letterman show about three, it couldn't have been more than three or four weeks before the invasion of Iraq, assuring David Letterman, oh, don't worry, it'll only take a week.
I'd be amazed if it took more than a week, David, it'll be great.
Yeah, no, Clinton, you know, they were wrong about the timetable.
They were wrong about weapons of mass destruction.
They were wrong about the cost of war.
Wolfowitz said it would be self-financing through Iraqi oil revenue.
They were wrong about the number of troops that would be needed.
They were wrong about the number of casualties.
At one point, Bush said that there would be no casualties.
I mean, it's an incredible thing.
Right.
That's what he told the Pat Robertson, right?
I'd forgotten that one.
Yes.
No casualties.
Imagine everybody, the president of the United States, upon starting this war, convinced himself that there would be no American casualties.
Wow.
That talk about detachment from reality there, huh?
Yes, yes.
That's really is incredible.
Now, I'm led to believe that you guys have an appendix on this new book, Mission Accomplished, or How We Won the War in Iraq.
And this is about the experts speaking on Iran.
Well, you know, when they publish a new mystery book, at the end of it, they give you the first chapter of a sneak preview of the next mystery book.
Right.
So we felt as a service to our readers, we printed a special bonus section, which includes a sneak preview of our forthcoming book, The Experts Speak About Iran.
And if you'd like a sample or two, you know, George Bush said in 2005, the notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous.
Having said that, all options are on the table.
Yep.
And Henry Kissinger in July of 2006, if Tehran insists on combining the Persian imperial tradition with contemporary Islamic fervor, then a collision with America is unavoidable.
Iran simply cannot be permitted to fulfill a dream of imperial rule in a region of such importance to the rest of the world.
And then my the most definitive of them all, I mean, we've got a whole bunch of quotes here, but it's Norman Patoritz, who was the longtime editor of Commentary and was a senior political advisor to Rudy Giuliani in his Republican campaign for the presidency, who, by the way, all the experts said was going to be the nominee.
Here's what Patoritz said.
He's talking about Iran.
None of the alternatives to military action, negotiations, sanctions, provoking an internal insurrection can possibly work.
There are all ways of evading the terrible choice we have to make, which is either to let Iran get the bomb or to bomb them.
We've got three carriers in the region and a lot of submarines.
It would take five minutes.
You'd wake up one morning and the strikes would have been ordered and carried out during the night.
All the president has to do is say go.
Yeah, he's also the guy who admitted that.
Well, yes, if we did this, it would unleash a wave of anti-Americanism around the world that would make our current situation look like a walk in the park.
But anyway, let's go ahead and do it.
Yeah, let me let me ask you this.
Do you have in there in your Iran section?
Do you have any Bill Kristol quotes about how the Iranian people want to be bombed so they can take the opportunity to rise up, overthrow their government and install an America friendly dictatorship?
Well, let me read you a couple of crystal quotes that we do have.
We have we have to be ready.
This is in 2006, July 19th.
And then he had another quote the week later.
And in the weekly standard, we have to be ready to use military force against Iran.
We have to stop them from getting nuclear weapons.
We can try diplomacy.
I'm not hopeful about that.
We have to be ready to use force.
And then he says we might the following week, we might consider a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.
Why wait?
Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained that the current regime will negotiate in good faith?
It would be easier to act sooner rather than later.
Yes, there would be repercussions and they would be healthy ones showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.
Man, that guy really is a piece of work that Bill Kristol.
And you know what's funny about him, too?
Glenn Greenwald wrote this thing all about how Irving Kristol and I think it's Abe Rosenthal over at The New York Times are our buddies and their sons are buddies.
And here's this guy.
He's never been wrong or anything.
He keeps getting promoted simply through sheer nepotism.
Yes.
You know, it's the old Peter principle.
People get promoted to the position of their incompetence.
I like that one.
Hey, now, let me ask you in this entire book of experts, do you have anybody who actually got it right, who counts as an expert?
Well, you should ask that.
We found we did find one expert who got it right.
And we don't like to, you know, that's a sort of surprise and we save it to the end of the book and we do give it away.
It's that we put it in the epilogue and it's a surprise who it is.
It was in an interview that was conducted at the American Enterprise Institute, which we call the rival institute to our Institute of Expertology.
And let me tell you who it is.
Actually, I got the clip right here.
You want to play it?
Pardon me?
Oh, but you have the clip.
I have the clip.
I'll play it right now if you like.
Great.
All right.
Here it is, everybody.
The one person who got it right about Iraq, but did not, by definition, exclude themselves from the category of expert.
Here it comes.
Do you think that U.S. or U.N. forces should have moved into Baghdad?
No.
Why not?
Because if we'd gone to Baghdad, we would have been all alone.
There wouldn't have been anybody else with us.
It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq.
None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place?
That's a very volatile part of the world.
And if you take down the central government in Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off.
Part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west.
Part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim fought over for eight years.
In the north, you've got the Kurds.
And if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you've threatened the territorial integrity of Turkey.
It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
The other thing was casualties.
Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had.
But for the 146 Americans killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war.
And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?
And our judgment was not very many.
And I think we got it right.
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy.
Is that just the definition of irony or what?
Well, you know, Dick Cheney said those words in 1984.
And he was 1994.
I'm sorry.
And he was the former secretary of defense.
And in the intervening years, what you know, people ask, well, what happened between then and now?
I mean, all I can do is look at his record.
He left government, first then as chairman and CEO of Halliburton, from whom he still, by the way, receives deferred compensation.
And then he returned to the public sector as vice president of the United States.
So we congratulate Cheney on his recommendation that we not go in there.
It's funny, too, because going back even to the first Gulf War, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker and George Bush, Sr., they've all explained this.
Numerous times that you don't want to do that.
In fact, I remember there was a Tom Clancy book that I was unfortunate enough to read not too long before September 11th.
And the plot was that the Iranians have an assassin on Saddam Hussein's bodyguard detail and he kills Saddam Hussein and that that's it.
Snap of a fingers.
Automatically, Iran inherits the south of Iraq.
Right.
But anyway, I guess I wouldn't expect any of these goofballs in Washington, D.C. to be familiar with the Tom Clancy novel.
Right.
Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
All right.
One more thing before I let you go here, Victor, is I kind of want to give a little bit of credit to where it's due and complain that all the people who get it wrong get promoted.
And people like Eric Margolis, for example, who, you know, I don't know of any reason that, you know, even among officialdom that he does not have, you know, establishment credibility as a journalist.
Here's a guy who's covered 15 wars, who's been right about everything this whole time.
And I still can't find Eric Margolis on my TV set ever.
You know, you know, he's marginal because he got it right.
Yeah.
Yes, that's what it comes down to.
All right.
Well, oh, one more question.
Is it the case, do you think, that only through satire can this kind of point be made to the American people?
Is that why you chose this venue?
People won't really take it in unless you make it a joke.
Well, you know, it is said that, yeah, it's satire, but Mark Twain used to talk about the assault of laughter.
And I think satire is a legitimate form of social criticism.
But in this case, a number of people have said to Chris Cerf and me, I looked at these quotes and I laughed till I cried.
Yeah.
All right, everybody.
That's Victor Navasky.
He's the co-author with Christopher Cerf or Kerf?
Cerf.
Christopher Cerf of Mission Accomplished or How We Won the War in Iraq, The Experts Speak.
And you can find their Tom Dispatch article at antiwar.com slash Englehart today.
It's called McCain Miss Speaks by Christopher Cerf, Victor S. Navasky and Tom Englehart.
Thanks very much for your time today, sir.
Thanks a lot.
And by the way, if you'd like to hang on, I'm going to play my favorite clip of Tom Friedman on the way out here.
Now that the war is over and there's some difficulty with the peace, was it worth doing?
I think it was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.
And I think that looking back, I now certainly feel I understand more what the war was about.
We needed to go over there basically and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and and burst that bubble.
There was only one way to do it.
And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying, which part of this sentence don't you understand?
You don't think we care about our open society?
You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow?
Well, suck on this.
That, Charlie, was what this war was about.
We could have hit Saudi Arabia.
It was part of that bubble.
Could have hit Pakistan.
We hit Iraq because we could.
That's the real truth.
There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
Weapons of mass destruction.
Botulin, VX, Sarin, nerve agent.
Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda.
Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Terrorism.
Cyber attacks.
Nuclear program.
Biological weapons.
Cruise missiles, ballistic missiles.
Chemical and biological weapons.
Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
President Bush has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
Tony Blair has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
Donald Rumsfeld has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.
Richard Butler has said they do.
The United Nations has said they do.
The experts have said they do.
Iraq says they don't.
You can choose who you want to believe.
Did Colin Powell close the deal today in your mind?
Trust me.
Trust me.
Saddam Hussein's intentions have never changed.
He is not developing the missiles for self-defense.
These are missiles that Iraq wants in order to project power, to threaten, and to deliver chemical, biological, and, if we let him, nuclear warheads.
Did Colin Powell close the deal today in your mind for anyone who has yet, objectively, to make up their mind?
I think for anybody who analyzes the situation.
He has closed the deal.
This irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence today, Colin Powell brilliantly delivered that smoking gun today.
Colin Powell was outstanding today.
I mean, it was lockstep.
It was so compelling.
I don't see how anybody at this point cannot support this effort.
He made a wonderful presentation.
I thought he made a great case for the purpose of disarmament.
It was devastating, I mean, and overwhelming.
Overwhelming abundance of the evidence.
Point after point after point, he just flooded the terrain with data.
It's the end of the argument phase.
America has made its case.
The Powell speech has moved the ball.
I think case is closed.
The White House says it can prove that Saddam Hussein does have weapons of mass destruction, claiming it has solid evidence.
The White House insisted again today it does have solid evidence that Saddam Hussein is hiding an arsenal of prohibited weapons.
They might fight dirty using weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, or radioactive.
There are ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
Anthrax, smallpox.
Dirty bomb.
Dirty bomb.
Iraq-Al Qaeda connections.
Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda share the same goal.
They want to see, both of them want to see Americans dead.
President essentially giving Saddam 48 hours to get out of Dodge.
War now seems all but inevitable.
Short of a bullet to the back of his head or he leaves the country, war is inexorable.
Well, I think that's exactly right.
War is inevitable.
And it is approaching inexorably.
Is war with Iraq inevitable right now?
I think it's 95% inevitable.
You, at this point, right now, tonight, don't see any other option but war.
Do you?
I'm asking you, Ambassador.
I agree.
I don't think there's a viable option for the administration at this point.
We're way too far out front in this.
Send us over there, guys.
Let's get on with it.
Let's get it over with.
Showdown Iraq.
If America goes to war, turn to MSNBC and The Experts.
I must say, I was trying to think of something that would be appropriate to say on an occasion like this.
And as is often the case, the best you can come up with is something that Shakespeare wrote for Henry V, wreak havoc and unleash the dogs of war.