Wow, just wow.
Juan Cole gets some linky love from the New York Times because he thinks the now debunked Spanish transcript provides a “whole rack of smoking guns.“
For a guy who is a Ph.D. and a college professor, he’s dumb as a brick.
Here is the shocking new “impeachable” information Juan Cole Learned:
The transcript, it seems to me, provides a whole rack of smoking guns that could be a basis for impeaching George W. Bush. The transcript shows that Bush consciously intended to go to war without a United Nations Security Council resolution.The United Nations Charter, to which the United States is a treaty signatory (so that it has the force of American law), forbids any nation to launch an aggressive war on another country. The only two legal mechanisms for war are either that it came in response to a direct attack or that the attacker gained a UNSC authorization. The transcript shows Bush actively plotting to sidestep the UNSC if he could not, gangster-like, threaten its members into compliance.
Maybe Juan forgot United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 which had been passed 5 months before this meeting took place? Bush already had the needed resolution by the time this meeting took place.
But giving Cole the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he meant to type, “The transcript shows that Bush consciously intended to go to war without a [second] United Nations Security Council resolution.”
Even if that’s what he meant Cole is completely out to lunch. Of course Bush thought that… A month before this meeting, on February 1, 2003, President Bush said, “Should the United Nations decide to pass a second resolution, it would be welcomed if it is yet another signal that we’re intent upon disarming Saddam Hussein. But 1441 gives us the authority to move without any second resolution.”
And at the risk of smacking Cole with reality, it was pretty clear Bush was going to go into Iraq without a second resolution because we did! (it was in all the papers 😉
If this is news to Cole, he needs to read a bit more; like maybe his own blog where it was discussed at the time.
Cole’s second smokeless gun:
The second grounds for impeachment is that Bush rejected out of hand a deal brokered by the Egyptians whereby Saddam Hussein would leave the country with a billion dollars and some documents about his WMD program.
STOP. We just caught Cole in a lie. Saddam didn’t want to take “some documents” he wanted to abscond with ALL the information on his Weapons of Mass Destruction. (Which BTW the left says he didn’t have.) You don’t need to know much more than 9th grade Spanish to do the translations yourself:
Parece que ha indicado que estarÃa dispuesto a exiliarse si le dejaran llevarse 1.000 millones de dólares y toda la información que quisiera sobre armas de destrucción masiva.
The bolded part says “and ALL the information” of course. (link in case you missed 9th grade Spanish)
But forgetting that, Cole wants to argue that NOT letting Saddam get away with all his information about WMD is an impeachable offense. The whole point was to disarm Saddam… not give him a billion dollars and instructions on how to make more WMD.
Cole sums up his case, “Going to war unnecessarily is an impeachable offense.”
Heh- To the left, every war is unnecessary…
Sadly, that’s all he has…. no more than two water pistols in his “rack of smoking guns” and a bunch of name calling. About what you would expect from one of the left’s leading intellectuals.
The sad thing here. is that the New York Times, bows to their own bias and sucks it up like a pig in slop. Of course that’s not too surprising, it is the Times we’re talking about.
