Hagel gets tough, but Tyson is tougher

Lots a chatta about what flew out of Chuck Hagel's mouth yesterday! Good for him. He is a true maverick in the Republican party if he is starting to talk sense. Perhaps it was all those years in Vietnam.

However, I won't regurgitate what you can already find on 19 other blogs (according to the nifty technorati box). Nay. I will point out the last few paragraphs that perhaps nobody got far enough into since they probably read Hagel's stuff and went directly to their blogs.

This is a good few graphs to point to whenever a rightwing nutjob brings up that whole "but Clinton said Iraq had WMD's too.":

Rumsfeld described an evolution of U.S. policy toward Iraq embraced by Democrats and Republicans. He read several quotes from 1998 from then-President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger. They predicted that Hussein, if unchecked, would again use weapons of mass destruction.

However, many of the comments cited by Rumsfeld were used to justify continued sanctions on Iraq, not to invade it. Moreover, the Clinton administration officials did not cite the problematic intelligence that formed the core of the Bush administration's case for an invasion, such as allegations that Iraq sought uranium in Africa and tried to obtain aluminum tubes as part of a resurgent nuclear program.

Rumsfeld also pointed to congressional actions in 1998 and 2002 calling for Hussein's removal. But the 1998 law, signed by Clinton, said "nothing in this act shall be construed to authorize or otherwise speak to use of United States Armed Forces" to implement it.

Thanks Ann Tyson, for pointing out the obvious. Yes, perhaps Clinton was concerned, but not concerned enough to kill 2060+ Americans and 100,000+ Iraqis, and waste $300 billion in the process.