[extropy-chat] Mr. Bush's Magical Effectiveness

[Lee Corbin]

Randall writes

> On Apr 28, 2007, at 10:01 PM, Lee Corbin wrote:
> 
>> Goering understood Germany of the first half of
>> the 20th century, but he did not truly understand
>> the nature of freer countries where dissent had
>> a long tradition. Do you think that Bush today
>> could simply fabricate a "Gulf of Tonkin incident"
>> the way LBJ did and get a declaration of war
>> out of Congress against Iran?   Of course not.
> 
> Of course, he could.

And now with a Democratic Congress????   What
are you smoking.  He can't even keep the leader
of the House of Representatives from executing
her own foreign policy.  Somehow I just think that
if Bush said that a terrrrrrible event happened in
the Persian Gulf and we needed to go to war with
Iran right now, he'd be asked for a lot of evidence.
Actually, the understatement of my last sentence
is staggering.

> It would be a lot harder now than the mere
> suggestion of WMDs was, but he could certainly
> do it and have a good chance of working, for a while.

No way.  Besides, as I said earlier, for a lot of us
the WMD wasn't really the issue.  On the Extropians
list at the time I listed *five* reasons that I thought
invading Iraq was a good idea.  The WMD was
probably about reason #4.  (The idea being that
while there was no immanent threat, just as Bush
said, it seemed clear that Hussein's heart was set
on getting some nukes sooner or later, and he seemed
just crazy enough to use them on us, or have some
unaccountable stooges do it for him.

But that's not the main point.  You don't think---
especially since there has been no serious terrorist
attack against the U.S. in the last five years that
a (now Democratic controlled!) Congress would
give him carte blanche all over again??

Lee