Trump Ambassador Ric Grenell vs Obama Spokesman Jenn Palmieri at CPAC on Ukraine, Iraq, Russia.
Objective reality matters....
Ambassador Grenell, who was also a long time State Department official and the former Director of National Intelligence, had a soft debate with former Obama spokesman Jenn Palmieri. Palmieri deserves credit for showing up as most Democrats simply wouldn’t.
Palmieri displays what we at PoliticalArena have been critical of for far too many in politics, specifically putting narrative and/or cute talking points ahead of objective reality. In foreign policy and national security such behavior puts people and country at risk.
Europe needs strong American leadership and Europe suffers in its absence. Ambassador Grenell quite correctly critiques Democrats in that they give flawed European leaders some magical deference, and the result is more chaos just as it has in the Balkans.
Grenell explains how much of the Iraq War intelligence was wrong and how government makes mistakes. Notice he did not say that they lied, which is today’s popular narrative even on Tucker Carlson.
There is an objective reality to the Iraq War intelligence that is missed simply because people are not willing to do the homework.
Yours truly did extensive study into the reports of both Iraq weapon inspection teams. They discovered through interrogation, documents and physical evidence that Saddam Hussien at one point did have a large stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) but after the UN inspectors started looking around, he destroyed and/or exported most of his WMD stockpile while still telling his generals and other field commanders that he had retained the stockpile.
Saddam had to maintain the WMD threat so as to keep his enemies from moving on him, namely the Kurds, Shia tribes and Iran.
While it is true that the inspectors found few such weapons, most of which had been degraded from time, Saddam did illegally maintain the labs, manuals, equipment, raw materials, and the expertise to begin making WMD’s within months. Inspectors also found that Saddam’s long range missile program had continued to progress unabated.
This piece is not just some defense of the Bush’s presidency. No matter who it hurts or helps, nuanced or not, objective reality matters.