Darth Cheney's dark WMD fantasies

Dick Cheney remains unrepentant.  He hasn't learned a darn thing from his mistakes.  In fact, once in the Bush Administration, Cheney unlearned his own warnings about occupation and quagmire in Iraq.  Because of him, America spent over 4,000 lives and $1 trillion to neutralize a threat that never existed, yet Cheney maintains we're all "better off" for this colossal blunder.  Ah, but what can we say or do now that it's too late, except, "Go away, and never come back!"? 

Dick Cheney's Fantasy World

By Scott Ritter

December 16, 2008  |  The Guardian

 

In yet another attempt at revisionist history by the outgoing Bush administration, vice-president Dick Cheney, in an exclusive interview with ABC News, took exception to former presidential adviser Karl Rove's contention that the US would not have gone to war if available intelligence before the invasion had shown Iraq not to possess weapons of mass destruction. Cheney noted that the only thing the US got wrong on Iraq was that there were no stockpiles of WMD at the time of the 2003 invasion. "What they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic feed stock."

The vice-president should re-check both his history and his facts. Just prior to President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, the UN had teams of weapons inspectors operating inside Iraq, blanketing the totality of Iraq's industrial infrastructure. They found no evidence of either retained WMD, or efforts undertaken by Iraq to reconstitute a WMD manufacturing capability. Whatever dual-use industrial capability that did exist (so-called because the industrial processes involved to produce legitimate civilian or military items could, if modified, be used to produce materials associated with WMD) had been so degraded as a result of economic sanctions and war that any meaningful WMD production was almost moot. To say that Saddam had the capability or the technology to produce WMD at the time of the US invasion is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.

While one can make the argument that Saddam had the people, insofar as the scientists who had participated in the WMD programmes of the 1980s were still in Iraq and, in many cases, still employed by the government, these human resources were irrelevant without either the industrial infrastructure, the economic base or the political direction needed to produce WMD. None of these existed. The argument Cheney makes on feed stock is even more ludicrous. Precursor chemicals used in the lawful manufacture of chemical pesticides were present in Iraq at the time of the invasion, but these were unable to be used in manufacturing the sarin, tabun or VX chemical nerve agents the Bush administration claimed existed inside Iraq in stockpile quantities prior to the invasion.

The same can be said about Iraqi biological capability. The discovery after the invasion of a few vials of botulinum toxin suitable for botox treatments, but unusable for any weapons purposes, does not constitute a feed stock. And as for the smoking gun that the Bush administration did not want to come in the form of a mushroom cloud, there was no nuclear weapons programme in Iraq in any way shape or form, nor had there been since it was dismantled in 1991. Cheney's dissimilation of the facts surrounding Iraqi WMD serves as a distraction from the reality of the situation. Not only did the entire Bush administration know that the intelligence data about Iraqi WMD was fundamentally flawed prior to the invasion, but they also knew that it did not matter in the end. Bush was going to invade Iraq no matter what the facts proved.

Cheney defended the invasion and subsequent removal of Saddam from power by noting that "this was a bad actor and the country's better off, the world's better off with Saddam gone". This is the argument of the intellectually feeble. It would be very difficult for anyone to articulate that life today is better in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra or any non-Kurdish city than it was under Saddam. Ask the average Iraqi adult female if she is better off today than she was under Saddam, and outside of a few select areas in Kurdistan, the answer will be a resounding "no".

The occupation of Iraq by the United States is far more brutal, bloody and destructive than anything Saddam ever did during his reign. When one examines the record of the US military in Iraq in terms of private homes brutally invaded, families torn apart and civilians falsely imprisoned (the prison population in Iraq during the US occupation dwarfs that of Saddam's regime), what is clear is that the only difference between the reign of terror inflicted on the Iraqi people today and under Saddam is that the US has been far less selective in applying terror than Saddam ever was.

At a time when the US and the world struggle with a resurgent Iran, the Iranian-dominated Dawa party of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki governs Iraq today in name only. The stability enjoyed by Iraq today has been bought with the presence of 150,000 US troops who have overseen the ethnic cleansing of entire neighbourhoods in cities around Iraq, and who have struck temporary alliances with Shia and Sunni alike which cannot be sustained once these forces leave (as they are scheduled to do by 2011).

Invading Iraq and removing Saddam, the glue that held that nation together as a secular entity, was the worst action the US could have undertaken for the people of Iraq, the Middle East as a whole and indeed the entire world. For Cheney to articulate otherwise, regardless of his fundamentally flawed argument on WMD, only demonstrates the level to which fantasy has intruded into the mind of the vice-president.

Finally, the truth is official

Some of you will say, "Oh, just get over it." Personally, I don't like being deceived by the highest elected official in the land, resulting in thousands of lives and half a trillion dollars lost. But that's just me.

Just think: if they had told the truth back then, there would have been no Iraq invasion or occupation, and there would be no divisive, painful debate today about withdrawal vs. staying the course.


The Truth About the War
New York Times Editorial
June 6, 2008

It took just a few months after the United States' invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.

It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion. On Thursday — after years of Republican stonewalling — a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee gave us as good a set of answers as we're likely to get.

The report shows clearly that President Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did not conform with intelligence reports. In other cases, he could have learned the truth if he had asked better questions or encouraged more honest answers.

The report confirms one serious intelligence failure: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials were told that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons and did not learn that these reports were wrong until after the invasion. But Mr. Bush and his team made even that intelligence seem more solid, more recent and more dangerous than it was.

The report shows that there was no intelligence to support the two most frightening claims Mr. Bush and his vice president used to sell the war: that Iraq was actively developing nuclear weapons and had longstanding ties to terrorist groups. It seems clear that the president and his team knew that that was not true, or should have known it — if they had not ignored dissenting views and telegraphed what answers they were looking for.

Over all, the report makes it clear that top officials, especially Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew they were not giving a full and honest account of their justifications for going to war.

The report was supported by only two of the seven Republicans on the 15-member Senate panel. The five dissenting Republicans first tried to kill it, and then to delete most of its conclusions. They finally settled for appending objections. The bulk of their criticisms were sophistry transparently intended to protect Mr. Bush and deny the public a full accounting of how he took America into a disastrous war.

The report documents how time and again Mr. Bush and his team took vague and dubious intelligence reports on Iraq's weapons programs and made them sound like hard and incontrovertible fact.

"They continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago," Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 26, 2002, adding that "we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons."

On Oct. 7, 2002, Mr. Bush told an audience in Cincinnati that Iraq "is seeking nuclear weapons" and that "the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." Saddam Hussein, he said, "is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon."

Later, both men talked about Iraq trying to buy uranium in Africa and about the purchase of aluminum tubes that they said could only be used for a nuclear weapons program. They talked about Iraq having such a weapon in five years, then in three years, then in one.

If they had wanted to give an honest accounting of the intelligence on Iraq's nuclear weapons, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney would have said it indicated that Mr. Hussein's nuclear weapons program had been destroyed years earlier by American military strikes.

As for Iraq's supposed efforts to "reconstitute" that program, they would have had to say that reports about the uranium shopping and the aluminum tubes were the extent of the evidence — and those claims were already in serious doubt when Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney told the public about them. That would not have been nearly as persuasive, of course, as Mr. Bush's infamous "mushroom cloud" warning.

The report said Mr. Bush was justified in saying that intelligence analysts believed Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But even then, he and his aides glossed over inconvenient facts — that the only new data on biological weapons came from a dubious source code-named Curveball and proved to be false.

Yet Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney persisted in talking as if there were ironclad proof of Iraq's weapons and plans for global mayhem.

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies and against us," Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 29, 2002.

Actually, there was plenty of doubt — at the time — about that second point. According to the Senate report, there was no evidence that Mr. Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, and the intelligence community never said there was.

The committee's dissenting Republicans attempted to have this entire section of the report deleted — along with a conclusion that the administration misrepresented the intelligence when it warned of a risk that Mr. Hussein could give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. They said Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney never used the word "intent" and were merely trying to suggest that Iraq "could" do those terrible things.

It's hard to imagine that anyone drew that distinction after hearing Mr. Bush declare that "Saddam Hussein would like nothing more than to use a terrorist network to attack and to kill and leave no fingerprints behind." Or when he said: "Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX nerve gas or someday a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally."

The Senate report shows that the intelligence Mr. Bush had did not support those statements — or Mr. Rumsfeld's that "every month that goes by, his W.M.D. programs are progressing, and he moves closer to his goal of possessing the capability to strike our population, and our allies, and hold them hostage to blackmail."

,

Claims by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld that Iraq had longstanding ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups also were false, and the Senate committee's report shows that the two men knew it, or should have.

We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq. But when the president withholds vital information from the public — or leads them to believe things that he knows are not true — to justify the invasion of another country, that is bad enough.

Hitler Analogies RIP

Before posting this I thought to myself, as I often do, Why should I even have to say this? As in, "See, the sky is blue!" Justin Logan's argument should be patently obvious to any American with a rudimentary knowledge of history... and yet it isn't. It isn't! And that is why, sadly, I have to promulgate this article. Logan, by the way, is a libertarian.


It's Past Time to Bury the Hitler Analogy
By Justin Logan

November 6, 2007 | Prospect.org

If you live in the United States and want to start a war, the first step is to compare the foreign leader to Adolf Hitler. This technique was on display in a recent PBS NewsHour debate between Norman Podhoretz, a foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, and Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International. At least four times during the debate, Podhoretz likened the clerical regime in Tehran to the Nazis. He argued that there is a danger that Iran may "replace [the existing global order] with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism."

This is a ridiculous claim, and it exalts Iran to status it does not deserve. Podhoretz and his confreres have a sad and curious track record of crying wolf, seeing Hitlers and appeasement nearly everywhere. The danger of embracing the Munich analogy as a catch-all analytical tool for international politics is that it overstates the implications of each international conflict, and demeans the importance -- and uniqueness -- of the threat posed by Hitler. By invoking the Hitler analogy over and over, American leaders and intellectuals put us on a path to war, in many cases where we need not be, and risk numbing the American people to the since-unrivaled consolidation of power and evil under the Nazi party in Germany.

Podhoretz penned a meandering essay in Harper's in 1977 titled "The Culture of Appeasement" which likened antiwar sentiment in post-Vietnam America to the wariness of war in Britain after World War I, and then linked the latter to a homosexual yearning for relations with all the young men who perished in the Great War. In Podhoretz's view, "the best people looked to other men for sex and romance," and as a result, didn't much like them being killed by the score on the Continent. "Anyone familiar with homosexual apologetics today will recognize these attitudes."

Tying things back into the 1970s, Podhoretz pointed to the "parallels with England in 1937" and warned that "this revival of the culture of appeasement ought to be troubling our sleep." (A correspondent in a subsequent issue of Harper's would admit that he "had not previously realized that Winston Churchill fought the Battle of Britain almost singlehandedly while England's ubiquitous faggotry sneered and jeered from below.")

As Zakaria pointed out in their debate, Podhoretz retained his paranoia (without the salacious themes) into the Reagan years, even accusing President Reagan, whom neoconservatives have since tried to retrofit as a neocon, of a kind of appeasement. Podhoretz wrote in 1982 that the Reagan administration was "following a strategy of helping the Soviet Union stabilize its empire, rather than ... encouraging the breakdown of that empire from within." Less than 10 years later, of course, the Soviet Union had finished breaking down from within.

The Hitler analogy has a long pedigree. After Egpytian President Gamel Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, British Labor leader Hugh Gaitskell warned prime minister Anthony Eden that the threat posed was "exactly the same that we encountered from Mussolini and Hitler in those years before the war." Yasser Arafat, Hugo Chavez, and even Manuel Noriega have been vaulted to status worthy of comparison to Hitler.

Sometimes the analogy has been used to start hot wars rather than fan cold ones. In 2002, Richard Perle, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler. Arguing for war with Iraq, Perle noted that "a preemptive strike at the time of Munich would have meant an immediate war, as opposed to the one that came later. Later was much worse."

The Hitler delirium is not limited to the right, either. In 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright bluntly admitted the lens through which she viewed war and conflict abroad: "My mind-set is Munich." And one of the more absurd invocations of the analogy came from President Bill Clinton, who, in arguing for war against Serbia, wondered "what if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?" To be fair, Slobodan Milosevic was engaged in ethnic cleansing at the time, but to liken the scale of the slaughter in the Balkans -- let alone its international implications -- to that under the Nazis was historical malpractice of the first order. When Americans hear "Hitler," they think World War II.

This Hitler mania has many pernicious implications. First, and most obviously, seeing Hitler and appeasement everywhere risks plunging the United States into endless war. By representing the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, for example, as Hitlerian, one stymies debate about policy. (Are you opposed to confronting Hitler?) It is particularly bizarre that those who view American power as having an almost magical ability to transform the world also believe that any number of two-bit dictators measure up to the threat posed by Hitler.

In truth, the gap between a Saddam Hussein or an Ali Khamenei and Adolf Hitler is enormous. All of the supposed modern day Hitlers have presided over sclerotic economies and led states with barely a hope of defending themselves, let alone overrunning an entire continent or the world. Hitler, by contrast, existed in an entirely different environment. The military balance in 1930s Europe made it far from irrational for Hitler to think that it may be possible for Nazi Germany to consolidate control over the continent.

As economic historian Mark Harrison has pointed out, "in the years 1935-9 Germany had procured a volume of combat munitions far greater than any other power, and equal in real terms to the munitions production of all her future adversaries combined." Hitler was aggressive, disgusting, and genocidal, but the thinking that led to the attempt to dominate Europe was not entirely irrational. For Iran to make a play at dominating a continent, let alone the globe, the leadership would have to be quite literally insane. Yet no evidence has been offered to support this thesis.

As Jeffrey Record of the Air War College observed in his book The Specter of Munich, "no post-1945 foreign dictatorship bears genuine comparison to the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler." Record argues that "the problem with the Munich analogy is that it reinforces the presidential tendency since 1945 to overstate threats for the purpose of rallying public and congressional opinion, and overstated threats encourage resort to force in circumstances where nonuse of force might better serve long-term U.S. security interests."

All of which brings us back to Iran. Another AEI scholar, Michael Ledeen, has argued that there is a danger that Washington may decide to "surrender" to Iran's desire to "create a global caliphate modeled on the bloodthirsty regime in Tehran." But how would this would this work, exactly? Do we have reason to believe that anyone -- the Russians, or the Chinese, to say nothing of ourselves -- are going to somehow acquiesce to Iranian domination of the world order? It's never spelled out.

It is unfortunate that Hitler seems to be the only historical analogy that Americans understand. (For many, the name Franz Ferdinand more readily conjures an indie rock band than a key figure at the center of one of history's great tragedies.) But the ultimate danger of rolling out the Hitler analogy over and over again is that if another Hitler should ever emerge, we may be so sick of hearing about the next Hitler that he just might be ignored.

Justin Logan is associate director of foreign policy studies at the [libertarian] Cato Institute.

P.S. -- In Budapest they have the outdoor museum Statue Park, with its collection of Soviet monuments to Lenin, Stalin, etc. It's a popular kitschy tourist attraction. Similarly, America could attract tourists and teach a little history by making a Hitler Park, (or Almost Hitler Park), with statues of Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Manuel Noriega, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Hugo Chavez, et al. Such a park could be like the "Hoop Dreams" for wanna-be, has-been Hitlers: a way for them to nevertheless achieve immortality without having reached their unattainable goal of world domination.

Reply to Uncle T.: Bush 'duped' by CIA on Iraq aftermath?

Uncle T.,
Hooray for whose side? I'm rooting for America, and I hope you believe that anyone who wants us to get out of Iraq feels that way because he thinks it's best for our country.

You've basically adopted the line that Bush was "duped" by bad intelligence and a CIA itching for war with Saddam, because that helps you feel better about your President and your party. And it helps you feel better about giving up on the Iraq war now. So be it.

But the facts of recent history don't support your view. There was plenty of uncertainty about Iraq, and what would happen after a U.S. invasion. According to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, two intelligence assessments before the Iraq invasion accurately predicted that toppling Saddam could lead to a dangerous period of internal violence and provide a boost to terrorists.

In January 2003, two months before the invasion, the U.S.National Intelligence Council warned that after Saddam was toppled, there was "a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other and that rogue Saddam loyalists would wage guerilla warfare either by themselves or in alliance with terrorists."

Former CIA Director George Tenet (whom Bush awarded a Medal of Freedom) included in his book the CIA's warning to the Administration dated August 13, 2002, six months before the invasion:

"The United States will face negative consequences with Iraq, the region and beyond which would include:

* Anarchy and the territorial breakup of Iraq;
* Region-threatening instability in key Arab states;
* A surge of global terrorism against US interests fueled by (militant) Islamism;
* Major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic Alliance."

Wrote William Harlow, part of Tenet's senior intelligence staff and co-author with Tenet on his book: "Although the intelligence got the WMD case in Iraq wrong, it got the dangers of a post-invasion Iraq quite right. They raised serious questions about what would face U.S. troops in a post invasion Iraq. The intelligence laid out a number of issues of concern. It's unclear if administration officials paid any attention to those concerns."

Even retired CIA analysts were so concerned, they spoke out in an open letter in February 2003 before Bush's imminent invasion of Iraq. Amazingly prescient, they wrote:

"Indeed, it is our view that an invasion of Iraq would ensure overflowing recruitment centers for terrorists into the indefinite future. Far from eliminating the threat it would enhance it exponentially.

"As recent events around the world attest, terrorism is like malaria. You don't eliminate malaria by killing the flies. Rather you must drain the swamp. With an invasion of Iraq, the world can expect to be inundated with swamps breeding terrorists. In human terms, your daughters are unlikely to be able to travel abroad in future years without a large phalanx of security personnel.

"We recommend you re-read the CIA assessment of last fall that pointed out that 'the forces fueling hatred of the US and fueling al Qaeda recruiting are not being addressed,' and that 'the underlying causes that drive terrorists will persist.'"

Bush either ignored these warnings, or his pro-invasion cabal refused to present them to the President. They all (including Colin Powell) chose to believe the rosiest of all possible scenarios, that we would be " greeted as liberators" in Iraq.

Barely 5 hours (!) after the plane hit the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was telling aides to come up with plans to attack Iraq. He refused at first to believe al Qaeda attacked us, he was so focused on Iraq, even though the CIA had intercepted a phone call that morning from an al Qaeda operative in Afghanistan to another in Georgia (former USSR) talking about the "good news" and more to come -- indicating he knew that the plane over Pennsylvania was yet to crash. Rumsfeld was told by the "bumbling" CIA that they had connections to the USS Cole bombing. Rumsfeld replied the evidence was "vague" and "might not mean something." Later that same day, Rumsfeld noted: "best info fast. Judge whether info good enough to hit S.H." -- meaning Saddam Hussein -- "at same time. Not only UBL" -- Usama bin Laden.

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark said on Meet the Press that the White House called him on 9/11 -- while he on CNN -- telling him 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' Clark asked them for evidence, but never received any.

Even as Bush said he preferred diplomacy, disarmament and the UN route, the Iraq invasion was being planned all throughout 2002. Former Bush Treasury Sec. Paul O'Neil said invading Iraq was " topic A" 10 days after Bush's inauguration!

Former Bush Admin. official Richard Clarke wrote this amazing insider's revelation:

"I expected to go back to a round of meetings [after September 11] examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting Al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq."

Richard Clark wrote further:

"By the afternoon on Wednesday [after Sept. 11], Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and "getting Iraq." Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda. Relieved to have some support, I thanked Colin Powell. "I thought I was missing something here," I vented. "Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor."

On 9/13, ex-CIA chief, prominent neocon, and outspoken advocate of invading Iraq even before 9/11, James Woolsey published an op-ed urging an attack on Iraq, writing famously: "absence of evidence [of Iraq's involvement in 9/11] is not evidence of absence," (a line that both Cheney and Rumsfeld would borrow months later, this time when no WMD could be found in Iraq). In October 2001, Woolsey met with the Iraqi National Congress in London at the request of Wolfowitz. Bush had also asked Woolsey to lead the investigation into any possible links between Iraq, 9/11, and the DC anthrax attacks (which are still unsolved). Woolsey commented that there were "substantial and growing indications" that a state was behind the attacks." Commenting on the tenuous nature of Iraq's connection to al Qaeda (via Mohammed Atta in Prague) he said: "Hearsay is not admissible as evidence and almost all intelligence is hearsay. Evidentiary standards are the wrong standards. I would talk about indications, information." Woolsey added: "The United States has not yet decided it is at war with Saddam Hussein but Saddam Hussein may have decided he is at war with the United States."

On Sept. 15, Bush and his advisers met at Camp David. According to Bob Woodward's 2002 book, Bush at War, Wolfowitz advocated an attack on Iraq, perhaps even before an attack on Afghanistan. There was a 10 to 50 percent chance that Iraq had been involved in 9/11, he argued, concluding that Saddam's "brittle, oppressive regime" might succumb easily to an American attack -- in contrast to the difficulties involved in prosecuting war in the mountains of Afghanistan. Powell asked to focus on Afghanistan, not Iraq, and Bush agreed. But later at Camp David, Bush told his neocon advisor Richard Perle that once Afghanistan had been dealt with, it would be Iraq's turn.

The next day Rumsfeld asked again, "Is it now time to attack Iraq?" despite no evidence that Iraq was involved.

On Sept. 17 Bush issued a TOP SECRET directive to the Pentagon to plan for an attack on Afghanistan. Without any evidence that Iraq was involved in 9/11, Bush wrote a footnote asking them to start planning an Iraq attack as well. Plans to attack Iraq took on a momentum of their own, so much so that State Dept. officials were out of the loop, therefore they could not help plan for a post-invasion strategy.


It goes on and on like this, from 9/11/2001 all the way to 3/19/2003, when we invaded Iraq. 9/11 was just a pretext. Bush, and especially his neocon circle of advisers, were never interested in evidence or intel.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, and a cabal of others inside and linked to the Bush Admin. saw 9/11 as an opportunity to take care of unfinished business and spread democracy in the Mideast; they did not believe that Iraq presented a clear and present danger to America.

Do you really believe that all the testimony from Administration insiders, and inside journalists like Bob Woodward and Seymour Hersh is because they're all partisan hacks with an axe to grind? With all the information that's out there about what REALLY happened, can you still seriously trust that Bush, et all were just innocent victims of the incompetent CIA?

I seriously doubt you'd be willing to believe the very best about Bill Clinton's intentions if he had done the exact same things as George W. Bush.

On 7/18/07, Uncle T. wrote:

So is this US intelligence better than the US intelligence that got us into the war in the first place or is it just a wild ass guess. My belief is that it is the latter . It may be true or it may be wholeheartedly wrong. Anyone who declares otherwise simply has blinders on. Hence this is another example of an article that says nothing other than "hooray for my side."

Hitchens: Don't blame us, history did it!

Hitchens is considered one of the more compelling and eloquent apologists of the Iraq invasion. So I take special care to rebut his desperately childish arguments.

Appointment in Mesopotamia

Iraq's problems existed long before 2003.

By Christopher Hitchens

February 5, 2007 | Slate

Replying to Fareed Zakaria's observation in Newsweek, about Iraq and the Iraqis—that "We did not give them a republic. We gave them a civil war."—Charles Krauthammer, in our common sister paper the Washington Post, expressed a fine contempt:

Did Britain "give" India the Hindu-Muslim war of 1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically cleansed 12 million more? The Jewish-Arab wars in Palestine?

Alas, the answer to the above sarcastic questions is "yes." (In the first instance by staying several decades too long and then compounding the mistake by leaving much too fast—even unilaterally advancing the date of independence so as to speed up the scuttle—and by capitulating to Muslim League demands for partition; and in the second instance by promising Palestine at different times to both the Zionist and Arab nationalist movements.) However, this unpleasant historical fact—which has its own implications for Iraq—does not acquit Zakaria's remark of the charge of being morally idle. In many other people's minds, too, there is the unspoken assumption that what the United States does in Iraq is a fully determined action, whereas what other people do is simply a consequence of that action, with no independent or autonomous "agency" of its own.

[The real assumptions of the anti-war crowd are indeed serious and "adult:": (1) every person, nation, or "agency" must be held responsible for its own actions; (2) before acting, every person/nation/agency must consider, first and foremost, the likely consequences of its actions – including others' likely reactions; and (3) every person/nation/agency should act with the intention of doing more good than harm – and preferably no harm at all. We must admit that, in our daily lives, this is basically how we make decisions.

So why do Hitchens and his ilk insist that America's preventive invasion of Iraq be exempt somehow from these basic rules of decision-making?

Because it suits them, that's why. It suits Hitchens because he doesn't care about doing more good than harm, only the selective good of having relieved the West – and particularly America – of Saddam Hussein.

The truth is, we still don't know how bad Iraq will get. We don't know how or when this violence and chaos will end. And we don't know whether a U.S. presence, no matter at what level of strength, will have any positive effect, much less bring about an end to it all.

If Hitchens can't or won't satisfactorily address these "known unknowns" – which boil down to: Is America ready and capable of ensuring a good outcome in Iraq? – then he must admit that America's Iraq policy is not very serious or grown-up. Policies whose successes depend on half-hopes and unlikely outcomes are fundamentally irresponsible and dangerous. A nation ought to enter such conflicts only when the situation is desperate, and the stakes immense. Saddam's Iraq, pre-invasion, was ugly, belligerent, and brutal to its own people, but it fit neither of these two criteria from the West's perspective. There was no urgency for outside nations to intervene, and no "adult" level of certainty that intervention would lead to something better. – J]

This mentality was perfectly expressed, under the byline of Marc Santora, in the New York Times of Jan. 31. Santora explained the background of the murderous attacks on the Shiite festival of Ashura: "At Ashura, Shiites commemorate what is for them the most formative event of their faith, a celebration that had been banned under Saddam Hussein. In recent years, Sunni militants, caught up in a renewed sectarian split, have attacked worshippers on the holiday." (My italics.)

I suppose that might be one way of putting it. But a factually neutral way of phrasing the same point would be to say that three years ago, the leader of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia wrote to his guru Osama Bin Laden, saying that there was a real danger of the electoral process succeeding in Iraq and of "suffocating" the true Islamist cause. The only way of preventing this triumph of the democratic heresy, wrote Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was to make life so unbearable for the heretical Shiites that they would respond in kind. The ensuing conflict would ruin all the plans of the Crusader-Zionist alliance. I can still remember the chill that went through me when I read this document and realized that it combined extreme radical evil with a high degree of intelligence. Santora's reportage is not alone in slightly declining the responsibility for facing this central truth.

If there is a sectarian war in Iraq today, or perhaps several sectarian wars, we have to understand that this was latent in the country, and in the state, and in the society all along. It was not the only possible outcome, because it had to be willed and organized, but it was certainly high on the list of probabilities. (The Saddam Hussein regime, which thrived on the worst form of "divide and rule," certainly represented a standing invitation to run this risk.)

In other words, those who now deplore and decry the "civil war" (or the "civil wars") must, in order to be serious, admit that they would have deplored such an outcome just as much if it had not happened on America's watch or had (like Rwanda) been something that we could have pretended to watch as disinterested or—even worse—uninterested spectators.

[To repeat: If civil war was always a likely possibility, then it was absurdly irresponsible and dangerous of the U.S. to invade and "liberate" Iraq in the first place, unleashing a sectarian battle for control.

Anyhow, Hitchen's hypothetical argument about "how we would have felt" under different circumstances is absurd and irrelevant, because it ignores actual circumstances, i.e. recent history. We "know" why we invaded Iraq – or at least we've been given several reasons why. And none of those reasons included preventing a possible civil war that could eventually happen someday in Iraq's future. – J]

The habit of viewing Iraq as a crisis that only began in 2003—a lazy habit that is conditioned by the needs of the impending 2008 election—is an obstacle to understanding. Everybody has their own favorite alternative scenario of how things might have evolved differently or better. In some weak moments, I can picture taking the alternative advice from the European Union and the United Nations in 2003—let's just see how Iraq develops if left alone as a private fiefdom of the Saddam Hussein dynasty—and only then deciding that things have deteriorated to the point where an international intervention is necessitated. That would have been much less upsetting and demanding than the direct assumption of responsibility, and could have been triggered by the more familiar images of unbearable suffering and carnage, and could have summoned the Darfur-like emotions of guilt and shame, but it would perforce have been begun very much later—and perhaps too late altogether.

Iraq was in our future. The specter, not just of a failed state, but of a failed society, was already before us in what we saw from the consequences of sanctions and the consequences of aggressive Sunni fascism at the center of the state. Nobody has ever even tried to make a case for doing nothing about Iraq: Even those who foresaw sectarian strife were going by a road map that was already valid and had been traveled before. Thus it seems to me quite futile to be arguing about whether to blame the Iraqis—or indeed whether to blame the coalition. Until recently, no Iraqi was allowed to have any opinion about the future of his or her country. How long did we imagine that such a status quo would have remained "stable"? Charles Krauthammer might be wrong about his specific historical comparisons, but he is quite right to lay stress on the point that—absent a complete evacuation of Iraq and the region—there was a rendezvous in Mesopotamia that could not have been averted. A general refusal to confront this fact is actively revealed by the use of the passive voice.

[Yes, indeed it is absurd to argue about whether to blame Iraqis or ourselves. We should blame ourselves, because that's what adults do: Act as wisely as possible, and then take responsibility for what they've done. Adults know they can't control what others do, only what they themselves do. But adults also live in the real world; they take into account others' possible reactions, which are often predictable. So, when an adult acts in a way that produces a predictably negative reaction from another, a real adult must place some of the blame for that negative reaction on himself.

It's another argument for another day, but it suffices to say that we could not have been certain in 2003 that Iraqis would not someday overthrow Saddam's tyranny (or his sons'), and make something at least marginally better out of Iraq, with less sectarian strife, bloodshed, and potential for regional spillover than there is now.

Hitchens, a war cheerleader from the start, only makes excuses for the Iraq disaster, and takes no responsibility. In fact, in his view it's silly to lay blame on anyone, what with all these "latent" conflicts and unavoidable "rendezvous" with destiny in that inexorable honeypot of Mesopotamia.

He may write prettily, but at heart he's an irresponsible child who won't 'fess up to a mistake. Hitchens' argument is, "Don't blame me; history did it." We adults in the room shouldn't let him get away with it. – J]

Taibbi: How we screwed up Saddam's death

THE LOW POST: Hussein in the Membrane

Making lemonade in Iraq

MATT TAIBBI | Rollingstone.com

"The president's view is that in the absence of a U.N. endorsement, this war will become 'self-legitimating' when the world sees most Iraqis greet U.S. troops as liberators. I think there is a good chance that will play out."

-- Thomas Friedman, The New York Times, March 2003

I thought of Thomas Friedman over the weekend as I watched the United States proudly gallop into its 9,598th consecutive gargantuan P.R. fuckup in Iraq, better known to the rest of the world as the execution of Saddam Hussein. In fact, I thought specifically of the above-mentioned column of Friedman's, written right on the eve of the initial invasion almost four years ago.

It was in that particular column ("D-Day," March 19, 2003) that Friedman long-windedly lamented President Bush's failure to secure broader international support for his invasion, which he feared would detract from the legitimacy of the operation. This was a blow to the Iraq war effort, in Friedman's mind (excuse me: in what passes for Friedman's mind), but in that "D-Day" piece of his he said that we could all still make things work in Iraq -- all we had to do, he said, was to "turn these lemons into lemonade."

Lemons into lemonade! That line has been stuck in my head throughout this war. It would be absolutely impossible to find a better example of just exactly why we should never have gone into Iraq.

Remember that this war was cooked up by American bureaucrats, people who know an awful lot more about bowling than they do about Islam. True, there were a few genuine lunatics involved in dreaming up the invasion -- that crazy fraternity of neocon academics, wanna-be revolutionaries who spent the whole 1990s bitter about Clinton and wired on coffee and Goldwater biographies, waiting for their Big Chance. Those people came up with the specific details of the Iraq plan (when, where, ostensibly why) and it's doubtful that anyone else but a lunatic could have dreamed up those particulars, since their logic generally eludes the sane and the normal.

But the engine behind this entire escapade was really the great mass of ordinary Beltway apparatchiks and media creatures who cheerfully assented once the idea squirted out of Bush's mouth. You're talking about a bunch of half-bright golfers from the Virginian suburbs, people raised on Archie comics and fuzzy patriotic platitudes and old saws gleaned from William Holden war movies and their postwar corporate-executive dads. They went for the war because people they trusted told them it was a good idea, and some of them even ended up running parts of the operation, either in Iraq or in positions of responsibility here at home.

Tom Friedman is the oracle of this crowd, the tormented fat kid with a wedgie who got smart in his high school years and figured out that all he had to do to be successful was shamelessly and relentlessly flatter his Greatest-Generation parents, stroke their outdated prejudices, sell them on the idea that the entire aim of the modernization process is the spreading of their amazing legacy through the use of space-age technology.

So he goes into America's sleepy suburbs with his Seventies porn-star mustache and he titillates the book clubs full of bored fifty- and sixtysomething housewives with tales of how the Internet is going to turn Afghanistan into Iowa. The suburban guys he ropes in with a half-baked international policy analysis -- what's "going on" on "the Street," as Friedman usually puts it -- that he cleverly makes sound like the world's sexiest collection of stock tips: "So I was playing golf with the Saudi energy minister last week, and he told me..."

This is just a modern take on the same old bullshit rap that traveling salesmen all over America have been laying on wide-eyed yokels at 99 Steak Houses and Howard Johnsons hotel bars for decades: So I was having lunch with Jack Welch at the Four Seasons last week when I heard about this amazing opportunity.... And these middle-manager types who live in Midwestern cubicles or in the bowels of some federal bureaucracy in Maryland eat it up: They buy every one of Friedman's books, treat his every word like gospel and before you know it they're all talking about Israeli politics and "the situation" in Yemen or Turkey or wherever like they're experts.

And so this is how we got where we are. You get a whole nation full of people who spend 99 percent of their free time worrying about their lawns or their short iron game, you convince them that they know something about something they actually know nothing about, and next thing you know, they're blundering into a 1,000-year blood feud between rival Islamic groups, shooting things left and right in a panic, and thinking that they can make it all right and correct each successive fuckup by "keeping our noses to the grindstone" and "making lemons out of lemonade."

The whole war has been characterized by this kind of behavior. The Americans continually make ghastly mistake after ghastly mistake, and they keep responding to their mistakes by digging down and seeking the aid of the same homespun American pseudo-folk wisdom that got them into this mess in the first place. Our foreign policy initiatives in the area resemble attempts to mend fences with a neighbor whose lawn has been mussed by bringing him a tuna casserole cooked specially by wifey; only in Iraq, when casserole-presenting Dad ends up with his eyes gouged out and his skull charred black, hanging upside down from a telephone wire and impaled on the shards of the casserole dish, the neighborhood committee convenes and...decides to bake a bigger casserole.

This is what I was thinking about this weekend, when the U.S. and the news media "celebrated" the hanging of Saddam Hussein by wallpapering the planet with video images of the execution on New Year's Eve. The execution was a complete and utter fiasco. When what is supposed to be a P.R. coup for the United States devolves into a situation where a crowd of Shia fanatics is chanting "Moqtada! Moqtada! Moqtada!" under the swinging feet of a new Sunni martyr, something has gone horribly wrong.

Not only did Saddam's execution serve notice to the entire world that the United States has essentially become the easily manipulated muscle for Shiite extremists in Iraq, but it infuriated the entire Sunni world by its timing -- the execution coincided with the Islamic holiday Eid.

Moreover, the U.S. even managed to alienate Shiites around the world by intervening in the execution process -- not enough to stop or slow the execution, mind you, but just enough to take Saddam's body away from the Shiites and force them to deliver it back to Saddam's home city for a "decent burial."

Now we've pissed off both the Shiites and the Sunnis and gotten both sides markedly more pissed off with each other (not just in Iraq but around the world), and we've done so by accelerating the execution of a prominent Sunni politician whose fate was the one card the United States was really holding with a Sunni minority already deeply upset at being made the subjects -- at the end of an American bayonet -- to a Shiite-led government.

Not only that, but the execution put the finishing touches on the "democracy lesson" we've supposedly been giving the Iraqi people, who, thanks to this move, still have yet to experience a government where a leader can leave power without losing his life. That is some interesting-tasting lemonade, I must say.

Rhetorical question: if you're going to offend the earth's entire Sunni population by letting a Shiite mob hang a prominent Sunni politician on a Muslim holiday -- on television on a Muslim holiday -- why bother interfering in the burial question? Seriously, why? To curry favor with the Sunnis? Because it's "the right thing" to do? What kind of deranged lunatic hangs "the Sunni sword" at the end of Ramadan and then tries to make up for it with the world's Sunnis by allowing a "civilized" burial? "We will all become a bomb," is how one Palestinian responded to this latest act of decency and goodwill on the part of the United States.

I'm not saying Saddam Hussein deserved to live. Fuck Saddam Hussein. The point is that his execution is a symbol of America's cultural blindness. America has one gear in its head: Saddam was a monster and a mass-murderer, so he should be executed and everyone should love us for doing it. Right? I mean, who doesn't like a tuna casserole?

Friedman, it must be said, predicted that we might have such troubles. Nearly four years ago, he came up with a clever way of phrasing what he meant, saying that the Bush team needed an "attitude lobotomy," that it needed to "get off its high horse" and "start engaging people on the World Street, listening to what's bothering them, and also telling them what's bothering us." He also said that we needed something like the Marshall Plan, something that was "both a handout and a hand up." This was "D-Day for our generation," he said.

That was our attitude on the eve of war -- we sounded like we were preparing for a sales conference in Memphis, not a Middle Eastern bloodbath. It was like nobody in America noticed that all this catchy talk about high horses and handouts and hand ups was completely meaningless to anyone except the sloe-eyed residents of the American suburbs, people raised on this language of corporate memos and canned efficiency slogans and pep talks. If George Bush had gone on al-Jazeera after the invasion and promised to "get off his high horse," the Arab world would have stared back in amazement. What horse? What the fuck is he talking about? Why does this man invade us and then start talking about a horse? Are these people crazy?

That didn't happen, but it might as well have, because we're still doing basically the same thing. This isn't a pile of lemons we're dealing with, and there's no way to make it into lemonade. This is the Middle East, a place populated with Muslim people, and we know absolutely nothing about them and have no business being there. There's no horse to get off and no one there is looking for a handout or a hand up. They just want us to get the fuck out of there. How long is it going to take for people to figure this out?