The administration needed a simple sound-biteable reason to to got war in Iraq: 'threat' is the simplest of reasons; agreed.
Threat is not just the simplest reason, it’s the one that was most likely to evoke a supportive response from the electorate.
the missing step is: the administration decided, for various reasons, to go the UN for support. This required the US to argue as a main reason, that Saddam was in breach of UN resolutions, most of which dealt with disarming and weapons inspections. Ergo.
Ergo, baloney. The administration never gave a rat’s ass about the UN. They went to the UN for two reasons: to convince Americans that they were making a real effort at negotiation, and to have something to do while troops moved into place. WMD were made the issue because the electorate wouldn’t ride the program without a threat. That’s so obvious that it’s almost beyond description; trying to blame the UN is beyond clutching at straws, more like clutching at wind. The question of whether the effort to use the threat issue to rally popular support involved deliberate distortion is another question, one still unresolved. Certainly the motive to distort existed; that does not in itself mean that deliberate distortion occurred, but it certainly raises suspicions.
It does seem likely, to me, that administration officials above the intelligence level gave excessive weight to potentially biased information. It is an axiom in the intelligence world that any information coming from a source with vested interests must be regarded as suspect. If intelligence operatives passed on material coming from sources with a clear vested interest in encouraging an invasion… say Iraqi exiles, or those “sources” that Debka is so fond of quoting, they would have attached caveats to that effect as a matter of course. I think it entirely likely that such caveats were overlooked, and questionable intelligence given weight it did not deserve. Again, it is hard to know whether this would have been an issue of deliberate distortion or incompetence. It’s also hard to know which possibility is more troubling.
I think if the administration had skipped the UN, as the hawks wanted to do, they would have argued more about the breakdown of containment, and how Saddam was building palaces with the oil-for-food money while starving his people, and what he planned to do if he kicked us out of the Gulf, and the support he was giving to terrorists.
Ridiculous. Americans don’t go to war because corrupt leaders mistreat their people. If they did, we’d have invaded half of Africa long ago. The notion of Saddam kicking us out of the Gulf is not a red herring, it’s a dead herring: Saddam couldn’t have kicked us out of the gulf without massive WMD capabilities, which takes us in a neat little circle. The terrorist support wasn’t based on past support, it was based on the threat of WMD in the hands of terrorists. In short, it all rolls back to WMD.
The “reasons” you cite may have been enough for hardcore neocons, but they wouldn’t have cut ice with the public for a minute. Wolfowitz and Perle may not have known that, but Rove sure as hell did. They needed a threat; nothing else would suffice.
I still think the stuff was moved to Syria and hidden. We'll find out in time.
Yep. They gave the ring of power to the hobbit, who in a burst of misplaced heroism walked all the way to Damascus and tossed it into Assad’s back pocket. They hung the galaxy on the collar of Uday’s cat.
Get real. You’re talking about moving a complete weapons program, complete with ancillary facilities (secure storage, etc.) under massive attention from the most sophisticated surveillance system ever devised. We aren’t talking about something you slip into your pocket.
The funny thing about this is that there’s such an easy way out. They just need to say that currently available information indicates that a large quantity of low-grade material was destroyed before the war, equipment was buried, smaller amounts of high-grade material may have been hidden in Iraq, retained with Saddam, or smuggled to Syria, and we are investigating those possibilities. That sounds possible and credible, and is hard for doubters to argue with, though at some point evidence would have to be produced. “They took it to Syria” is not going to make it.
I don't get too excited about people who are "shocked, shocked" to discover that politicians will sometimes make a case using imperfect intelligence. 99 times out of 100, imperfect intelligence is all that's available.
This gets tiresome.
Please read the following two sentences. Read them three times. Read them aloud, if it helps.
Nobody is worried about the possible use of imperfect intelligence. People are worried that intelligence may have been deliberately distorted to achieve a political goal.
Is that clear, or does it have to be tattooed on your forehead?
I sure could do with less screaming about it.
I don’t doubt it. Before the war, every other post you wrote conjured up the image of Saddam as colossus, astride the Gulf with a fist full of nukes in one hand, a chemical and biological arsenal in the other, and America quivering in the corner. Now it seems that all he had in his hand was a limp one, and you don’t want to talk about it.
Tant pis, cherie. |
