Condi Rice is not only far more intelligent than Hillary...she's a person of high character who was respected throughout Washington. I only wish we had someone like her running things.
Yeah - this was super smart

That yellowcake and aluminum tubing crap only cost hundreds of thousands of innocent lives and a couple trillion.
"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly Saddam can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
What in that statement by Rice is in any way not spot on? We knew Saddam was attempting to get nukes...as Rice made clear...it was better to be safe than sorry!
better safe than sorry? tell that to all our heroes who died for republican lies
What lies would that be? Oh, that's right...you on the left just CLAIM that there were lies told when in fact none were told! You've been doing that for years now! The Downing Street memos proved that both the US and Britain were convinced that Saddam had WMD and might use them in the advent of an invasion.
The Bush Administration got rid of a dangerous tyrant...the Obama Administration allowed ISIS to take his place with a premature withdrawal from Iraq...and the Trump Administration has been responsible for the defeat of ISIS in Iraq!
s there anything important in the Downing Street memo? This is the now-notorious secret transcript of a British ministerial meeting on July 23, 2002—obtained and published by the
Sunday Times of London just this past May Day—which seems to suggest that, nine months before the war in Iraq got started, the Bush administration a) knew Saddam Hussein didn't pose a threat; b) decided to overthrow him by force anyway; and c) was "fixing" intelligence to sell the impending invasion to a duped American public.
ADVERTISING
FRED KAPLAN
Fred Kaplan is the author of
Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War.
Many critics see the memo as the ultimate proof of Bush's duplicity—and, given that no U.S. newspaper picked up the story for two weeks (and then buried it deep inside), as further evidence of the mainstream media's cravenness. Others, and not just Bush apologists, see the affair as overblown and the document's contents as no big deal.
So, let's go to the memo. Actually, let's go to seven memos: the
famous minutes; a secret
Cabinet Office report written two days before the ministers' meeting (published last weekend by the
Sunday Times and the
Washington Post); and
five eyes-only memos, written around the same time, about various official British meetings with President Bush, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. (These memos, described in today's
Los Angeles Times, have been available in full for some time now on the Think Progress Web site.)
What in these documents is new and significant? What's old hat or trivial? What do they say—and not say—about the Bush administration's prevarications? And should the mainstream media be pardoned or lashed for selling the story so short?
The "killer quote" in the original
SundayTimes story is this passage from the July 23 ministers' meeting:
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
"C" is the code name for Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, the British foreign intelligence service. His "recent talks in Washington" would almost certainly have been with his counterpart, George Tenet, then-director of the CIA. Tenet would have told him about the "perceptible shift in attitude." What accounts for it? "Bush wants to remove Saddam through military action."
This is about as solid as the evidence gets on these matters: By mid-summer 2002—at a time when Bush was still assuring the American public that he regarded war as a "last resort"—the president had in fact put it on his front burners.
Some who have read the memo shrug. Even former
Slate Editor
Michael Kinsleywonders what's new here. After all, we've read over and over that Bush was hellbent on war even earlier than this. The point has been made in Bob Woodward's
Plan of Attack, Richard Clarke's
Against All Enemies, and Ron Suskind's
The Price of Loyalty, as well as in articles by Seymour Hersh in
The New Yorker and Walter Pincus in the
Washington Post.
True, but let's get serious. When the scholars write the big tomes on this sordid saga, they'll want to base their findings on primary-source documents—and here is one, flashing right before us. The Downing Street Memo will be a key footnote in the history books; it should have made front-page headlines in the daily broadsheets of history's first draft.