Skip past the first few paragraphs – this Slate article offers a neat summary of all the damning revelations this week. Conclusion?
“The sanctions were working; they were keeping Saddam Hussein in his box.”
Following closed hearings today where Charles A. Duelfer, the author of the latest report which categorically removed once and for all the Bush administration’s reasons for going into Iraq, Senate Intelligence Committee member Senator John D. Rockefeller said:
“The administration would like the American public to believe that Saddam’s intention to build a weapons program, regardless of actual weapons or the capability to produce weapons, justified invading Iraq. In fact, we invaded a country, thousands of people have died, and Iraq never posed a grave or growing danger.”
Its interesting to note that the author of the report is clearly more sympathetic to the Bush administration yet was unable to find any facts to twist in favour of the Iraq invaders. Feeling vindicated no doubt is former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who resigned from the task pre-war claiming at that time that it was pointless to go on since the Bush admin was going to war regardless of anything UN inspectors had reported. I still remember seeing the hatchet job the Bush administration did on Ritter at that time.
Keep lining up the dots and the inescapable conclusion is we were all lied to.
And on a purely mercenary note, imagine what could have been done with the 120 Billion already spent and the additional 80 Billion which will be spent in the next fiscal year and no doubt 50 – 100 Billion in each of the next several years. Its not hard to picture Iraq costing the US half a trillion dollars before all is said and done – and for what? Will a stable Middle East result?
Doesn’t seem likely at this point.
U.S. Report Finds Iraq Was Minimal Weapons Threat in ‘03 (NY Times):
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 â Iraq now appears to have destroyed its stockpiles of illicit weapons within months of the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and by the time of the American invasion in spring 2003, its capacity to produce such weapons was continuing to erode, the top American inspector in Iraq said in a report made public today.
At the time of the American invasion, Mr. Duelfer concluded, Iraq had not possessed military-scale stockpiles of illicit weapons for a dozen years and was not actively seeking to produce them.
The Bush administration could dismiss this as hindsight, except that it knew many of these facts before the ok to invade was given. It knew that the now-famous nuclear smoking gun – the aluminum tubes – were deemed wholly inappropriate for use in nuclear weapons production. The best experts in the world – US experts – concluded this and reported this to the very people who would authorize war against Iraq. And the Whitehouse knew this before 9/11.
It isn’t possible for a thinking person to come to any conclusion but that the Bush administration purposely deceived the world and its own people to cover its single track ambition to put troops in Iraq.
Colin Powell was seen as a reluctant supporter of going to war with Iraq and no doubt a great many Americans and others around the world were willing to support the action because of his personal credibility. We don’t know whether he was kept in the dark or not, but regardless – the credibiity of the rationale for going in is now shot, and the only rational course is for people to punish the politicians that foisted this poor policy on us all.
No clear “winner” in this debate. One can see how Cheney will appeal to those who already believe in him, or to those who are fearful of every shadow. Edwards will appeal to those that already wanted change, and for the undecided, he probably did himself a favour by avoiding being labelled Dan Quayle II.
The Bush/Cheney campaign, indeed their entire presidency post-9/11, has used fear as their principal campaign weapon. Make no mistake about it, the campaign for 2004 started on September 12, 2001.
This isn’t a cynical or heartless comment on my part. The Bush administration contains the most right wing, aggressively neoconservative inner circle of any administration in history. They are telling the absolute truth when they say they want to change things – folks like Pearle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld want to use force or whatever means to fundamentally change all middle east countries to democracies.
Its a worthy aspiration to want to see democracy spread throughout the world, but in my opinion it is wrong-headed to believe that it can be done through the use of force by the US acting pre-emptively.