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>>Neither do I. Especially, there was a large shift in emphasize - first, "we must seek wmd", later, "how fortunate that evil dictator is no longer in power".
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>I'm not sure why everone keeps saying this.
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>When I was debating the war before it started, which was years ago, we talked about the Bush Doctrine, the idea that we no longer tolerate the dictators.
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>This was a major part of the discussion in the lead up to the war, yet most of the anti-war party seems to think it was something that showed up later. (Which is too bad because for a vocal group of people it would be nice if they were aware of the actual debate they thought they were taking part in.) In fact, the WMD claims showed up later when it looked like there wasn't enough support on the idea that democracy would be better for Iraq.
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>Given the average Joe's inability to really give a shit about Iraqi freedom, maybe lieing about the WMD was the right thing to do, at least inasfar as the world will be a better place for it?

It's a good thing you put a question mark at the end of that. It indicates to me that you're pulling that out of your ass, or more far-fetchedly out of a conspiracy theory.. (e.g. "subliminimal" messages)

The way I see it is this: there was a struggle to come up with a reason to attack Iraq and the administration thought the more plausible was the WMD farce. I would've been content with some sort of "cut-terrorism-at-the-knees" preemptive use of force tripe, at least it would've been easier to sustain on any vague intelligence report. Now I don't know about staying there this long.

But to be fair you may be on to something there, as the current speeches on "pandemics" and some similarly silly older ones seem to come from a preconceived notion that the average U.S. citizen is an idiot: ready to consume, digest and assimilate anything that comes out in the news. (It was catalogued yesterday that the Prez used the word 75 times during the speech..)

That's my rant for now..