Bush bashes Tory leader!

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

So have we all agreed that Howard is the Anti-Christ? Excellent. I've held that opinion since about 1986.

[OPD]

Howard is really quite poor, he doesn't really have much chance of winning the next election. He's more about uniting the party and holding things together while they work towards something new.
The main selling point of Howard was that he would give Blair a hard time in the house of commons.

[Ned]

OPD, well, I hope this row with Bush shows the Tories just how incompetent Howard is. He clearly is an idiot.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Actually he seems to be much more intelligent than Bush. This spat may win him a bunch of votes.

[Ned]

Imran, I bet Margaret is upset with Howard too. She would never have put up with an appeaser in the Tory ranks. Howard has gone soft. I doubt it gets him any votes even as it get him the disrespect of British patriots.

[Imran Siddiqui]

That's nice, but Howard isn't appeasing anyone... only ultra right winged numbskulls may think so, but that doesn't make it true.

[MikeH]

Originally posted by Straybow

If WMD wasn't the reason then our leaders lied to us.

No, it was WMD programs and the intent Saddam to develop and possibly use them, and if you misunderstood that it's your fault.

The Prime Minister produced a report to Parliment that said that Saddam's troops had WMD that they could deploy in battle in 45 minutes. What about that suggests weapons programs / misunderstanding on my part?

Saying now it was all about weapons programs is just rewriting history, that's certainly not what they were saying here.

[Ned]

And, MikeH, was Blair lying?

[MikeH]

That all revolves around whether you think he thought the information he was presenting was true or not.

[Ned]

Precisely. In the US, the Dems say Bush is lying simply because the information turned out to be untrue.

[MikeH]

It's more a case in both places that the governments used the worst case intelligence, not the best quality intelligence. They wanted to go to war and needed some excuse.

[Drake Tungsten]

Shouldn't leaders be worried about worst-case scenarios?

[Bosh]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Shouldn't leaders be worried about worst-case scenarios?

Yes, but they shouldn't present the worst-case scenarios as "slam dunk" definites, and strip all the qualifiers that they're given when they present them to the world.

[MikeH]

Exactly.

[Drake Tungsten]

When's the last time any politician presented a case with all (or, frankly, any) of the qualifiers that they're given by their advisers?