hold-up<\/em> constitutionnel que constitua le vote impos\u00e9 au Congr\u00e8s en 2002 des pouvoirs de guerre pour l’Irak.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tDo you wish you’d voted differently in October of 2002, when Congress had a chance to authorize or not authorize the invasion? Have you read that resolution?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tI have.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tIt’s not quite the way it’s been framed by a lot of people, as a resolution to go to war. That’s not quite what the resolution said. It said, to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq. In the event that all other options failed. So it’s not as simple as I voted for the war. That wasn’t the resolution.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tBut there was a decision whether to grant the president that authority or not. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tExactly right. And if you recall, the White House had announced that they didn’t need that authority from Congress.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tWhich they seem to say about a lot of things.<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tThat’s right. Mr.<\/em> [Alberto] Gonzales was the president’s counsel at that time, and he wrote a memo to the president saying, You have all the powers that you need. So I called Andy Card, who was then the chief of staff, and said, Andy, I don’t think you have a shred of ground to stand on, but more to the point, why would a president seriously consider taking a nation to war without Congress being with him? So a few of usJoe Biden, Dick Lugar, and Iwere invited into discussions with the White House.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tIt’s incredible that you had to ask for that.<\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tIt is incredible. That’s what I said to Andy Card. Said it to Powell, said it to Rice. Might have even said it to the president. And finally, begrudgingly, they sent over a resolution for Congress to approve. Well, it was astounding. It said they could go anywhere in the region.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tIt wasn’t specific to Iraq?<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tOh no. It said the whole region! They could go into Greece or anywhere. I mean, is Central Asia in the region? I suppose! Sure as hell it was clear they meant the whole Middle East. It was anything they wanted. It was literally anything. No boundaries. No restrictions.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tThey expected Congress to let them start a war anywhere they wanted in the Middle East?<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tYes. Yes. Wide open. We had to rewrite it. Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and I stripped the language that the White House had set up, and put our language in it.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tBut that should also have triggered alarm bells about what they really wanted to do.<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tWell, it did. I’m not defending our votes; I’m just giving a little history of how this happened. You have to remember the context of when that resolution was passed. This was about a year after September 11. The country was still truly off balance. So the president comes out talking about weapons of mass destruction that this madman dictator Saddam Hussein has, and our intelligence shows he’s got it, and he’s capable of weaponizing, and so on.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tAnd producing a National Intelligence Estimate that turned out to be doctored.<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tOh yeah. All this stuff was doctored. Absolutely. But that’s what we were presented with. And I’m not dismissing our responsibility to look into the thing, because there were senators who said, I don’t believe them. But I was told by the presidentwe all werethat he would exhaust every diplomatic effort.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tYou were told that personally?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tI remember specifically bringing it up with the president. I said, This has to be like your father did it in 1991. We had every Middle East nation except one with us in 1991. The United Nations was with us.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tDid he give you that assurance, that he would do the same thing as his father?<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tYep. He said, That’s what we’re going to do. But the more I look back on this, the more I think that the administration knew there was some real hard question whether he really had any WMD. In January of 2003, if you recall, the inspectors at the IAEA, who knew more about what Saddam had than anybody, said, Give us two more months before you go to war, because we don’t think there’s anything in there. They were the only ones in Iraq. We hadn’t been in there. We didn’t know what the hell was in there. And the president wouldn’t do it! So to answer your questionDo I regret that vote? Yes, I do regret that vote.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tAnd you feel like you were misled?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tI asked tough questions of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld before the war: How are you going to govern? Who’s going to govern? Where is the money coming from? What are you going to do with their army? How will you secure their borders? And I was assured every time I asked, Senator, don’t worry, we’ve got task forces on that, they’ve been working, they’re coordinated, and so on.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tDo you think they knew that was false?<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tOh, I eventually was sure they knew. Even before we actually invaded, I had a pretty clear sense of itthat this administration was hell-bent on going to war in Iraq.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tEven if it meant deceiving Congress?<\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tThat’s right.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tMis en ligne le 26 janvier 2007 \u00e0 15H54<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
D’accord, il nous est dit, par les plumes les plus avis\u00e9es, que le grand moment de l’unipolarit\u00e9 de l’Am\u00e9rique est pass\u00e9. Mais quel fut ce grand moment ? Est-il si glorieux ? M\u00e9rite-t-il de rester dans l’Histoire comme un \u00e9v\u00e9nement exceptionnel? Pas si l’on en croit le s\u00e9nateur r\u00e9publicain Chuck Hagel, ou bien le qualificatif… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6364,3285,4841,3531,5193],"class_list":["post-68453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloc-notes","tag-adlinistration","tag-congres","tag-hagel","tag-senat","tag-tromperie"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}