WMD

The Report of the Iraq Inquiry was published on July 6, 2016. Named the Chilcot Report after its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, it was a public inquiry into Britain's role in the Iraq War. It is another view, quite unflattering towards Britain's leadership--and the Americans'.

So what should we think about Iraq, WMDs, Bush and the "coalition?"

Carne William Ross, former British diplomat, writing on Iraq and WMD: "The UK and US believed that Iraq may have had some residual stocks of WMD (in particular BW or CW, but not nuclear) but at no point from 1998-2002, during the years I worked on the issue, did we believe that there was anything like sufficient to constitute a threat to Iraq's neighbors, let alone to the UK or US.  The claim, repeated ad nauseam to this day, that Bush and Blair were "misled" by intelligence that there was a threat is not true."

 

Christopher Hitchens, writing in the Sept. 5, 2005 issue of the "Weekly Standard": "You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had friends in al Quaeda...Blah, blah, pants on fire". I have had many opportunities to tire of this mantra. It takes ten seconds to intone the said mantra. It would take me, on my most eloquent C-SPAN day, at the very least five minutes  to say that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad; that Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam's senior physicist, was able to lead American soldiers to nuclear centrifuge parts and a blueprint for a complete centrifuge (the crown jewel of nuclear physics) buried on the orders of Qusay Hussein; that Saddam's agents were in Damascus as late as February 2003, negotiating to purchase missiles off the shelf from North Korea; or that Rolf Ekeus, the great Swedish socialist who founded the inspection process in Iraq after 1991, has told me for the record that he was offered a $2 million bribe in a face-to-face meeting with Tariq Aziz. And these eye-catching examples would by no means exhaust my repertoire, or empty my quiver. Yes, it must be admitted that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case, largely because they preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them. Still, the only real strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem". 

 

After U.S. forces failed to find Iraq's WMD stockpiles, administration sources told author Bob Woodward that Tenet had assured them on the eve of the war that finding such weapons would be a "slam dunk." In his 2004 book, Plan of Attack, Woodward wrote that Tenet made the "slam-dunk" comment while briefing Bush and Cheney in December 2002, three months before the invasion of Iraq began.

Former CIA director George Tenet says in an interview to be aired Sunday that the Bush administration made him the scapegoat for the Iraq invasion by twisting his words to make it seem he was certain Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Tenet says in a 60 Minutes interview that after no weapons were found, the administration planted stories that the United States invaded Iraq based on the erroneous intelligence Tenet provided.

 

Former CIA deputy director Mike Morell, in his book, “The Great War of Our Time,” write about Tenet, intel and WMD.“When we wrote pieces for the president, the analysts wrote with authority on the [weapons of mass destruction] issue,” Morell writes. “This is why I personally never found fault with George Tenet’s alleged “slam dunk” comment.”
“The way the [intelligence] analysts talked and wrote about their judgments,” Morell adds, “would have led anyone to think it was a slam dunk— that is, that Saddam definitely had active WMD programs. No one ever said to me, [agency analyst Jami] Miscik, [ex-director John] McLaughlin, Tenet, [Condoleezza] Rice, or the president, ‘You know, there is a chance he might not have them.’ Such a statement would have gotten everyone’s attention,”  Morell writes.

 

So many axes. So many grinders. A blizzard of contradictory opinions. And from intelligent and knowledgeable people. Inquiring minds want to know.

 

If you were to ask the single most disturbing question about Iraq and WMDs it would be this: How could they not find the WMDs--or at least report that they had. After all, that is what Intel agencies do; they create circumstances that benefit their nation. If they did not find WMDs, why did they not just say they did?

Giving Peace a Chance

A lot has gone wrong in Iraq and Iran and more information is out that shows more went wrong than we thought.

Emma Sky is a British, Oxford-educated political analyst who served as a humanitarian worker in the Middle East for a decade before helping the US rebuild Iraq. Her new book, "The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq," is not kind to the Obama administration's handling of Iraq.
Somehow, from 2007 to 2010, Sky was the political adviser to U.S. Gen. Ray Odierno when he served as deputy American commander in Iraq and then the US-led mission's top commander. During Sky's time with Odierno, violence in the country plummeted after a U.S. troop surge and crucial Sunni tribal cooperation stabilized the country. Odierno "wanted U.S. engagement with Iraq to continue for years to come, but led by U.S. civilians, not the military," Sky wrote. He estimated 20,000 or so U.S. troops would be needed to stay in Iraq beyond 2011.
The Obama administration, however, eventually went along with the plan backed by Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. That plan called for no U.S. troops beyond 2011 and relied on the continued support of the authoritarian Iran-backed regime of Nouri al-Maliki, then Iraq's prime minister. Maliki's new lease on life led him to steer Baghdad "toward a very pro-Iranian and sectarian agenda, which inevitably disillusioned and disenfranchised Sunni Arabs for a second time."
The rise of ISIS is partly a manifestation of this Sunni discontent.
"The Obama administration wanted to see an Iraqi government in place before the U.S. midterm elections in November," Sky said. "Biden believed the quickest way to form a government was to keep Maliki as prime minister and to cajole other Iraqis into accepting this." Despite the best efforts of Sky and her colleagues, she could not convince the administration otherwise.

"Biden was a nice man, but he simply had the wrong instincts on Iraq," Sky writes. "If only Obama had paid attention to Iraq ... But his only interest in Iraq was in ending the war."

Tim Arango, the Baghdad bureau chief for The New York Times, told Reddit in September that "after 2011 the administration basically ignored the country. And when officials spoke about what was happening there they were often ignorant of the reality."

"In the Arabic media, there was confusion as to why the United States and Iran should both choose Maliki as prime minister, and this fueled conspiracy theories about a secret deal between those two countries," Sky noted. (Much from Yahoo)

Jon Stewart and the News

Former New York Times journalist Judith Miller appeared on “The Daily Show” and went head-to-head with Jon Stewart over her reporting during the lead up to the Iraq War. She has a book to sell; he has a position. The exchange, sometimes intense, is illuminating and shows that sometimes entertainment can be constructive.

Miller’s reporting of Saddam Hussein‘s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) both before and after the 2003 invasion sparked intense controversy when it was discovered to be based on faulty information — especially from now-discredited source Ahmed Chalabi — and Stewart was quick to point the finger of blame for the conflict at the journalist.

"I hoped that people like you would read it and determine that it was really, really hard to do this kind of reporting,” said Miller, referring to her new book, “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey.”

“I wasn’t alone, I had lots and lots of company. The intelligent sources we were talking to had never been wrong before,” she said. Rather than coming from Dick Cheney or George W. Bush, “the information came from the men and women who had steered me right on Al Qaeda and 9/11, who had told me that the former Soviet Union had a huge cache of biological weapons that they had never acknowledged and they were right,” she said.

While Miller claimed she reported “what the intelligence community believed,” Stewart said she wrote what the White House was feeding her. He did not have specifics.

“These discussions always make me incredibly sad because I feel like they point to institutional failure at the highest levels and no one will take responsibility on it and they pass the buck,” Stewart continuing his own path to its conclusion.

“I think they point to intelligence failures that I still worry about — we are still relying on the same information on Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and the other countries,” Miller replied.

Morally Repugnant Elites (MRE)

So now we are in the distribution phase of the Iraq disaster: Who will end up with the Old Maid card? The new and improved maniacs are taking more and more territory, the Americans have washed their collective hands of it and Obama apparently agrees. Quo Vadis?

Well, where did the creature come from in the first place?
In 1998 President Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 into law which supported regime change in Iraq; he gave a speech on the dangers of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
After 9/11 both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution authorizing the removal of Saddam Hussein by force. Support was unusually bipartisan with Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Harry Reid all speaking on the Senate floor in support of the bill. Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Rep. Nancy Pelosi spoke in the House about the dangers of Saddam's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. (They were not nuts; they drew on the same classified domestic and foreign intelligence reports that had led Bush to call for Saddam's forcible removal. They all heard the same evidence.)
There were 23 points offered as reason to get rid of Hussein, most of them unconnected to 9/11. His attempts to commit genocide against the Kurds, the Shiites and the Marsh Arabs, his attacking four of his neighbors, his attempt to arrange the assassination of a former U.S. president (George H.W. Bush), his bounties for suicide bombers on the West Bank, his harboring of global terrorists, and his almost maniacal flouting of U.N. no-fly zones.
George Will, David Brooks, William F. Buckley, Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius and Thomas Friedman all wrote in support of the action.
But....no WMDs. Now virtually no Iraq.

So who is to blame? Everyone? No one? Well I nominate arrogance. I nominate the astonishing confidence that led a Western nation whose graduate school students couldn't find Iraq on a map to think they could remake an ancient land in their own image. I nominate the pride of a monolithic bureaucracy that sees everything else as a monolithic bureaucracy when all the evidence is that our mortal enemies are miniaturizing and downsizing like American start-ups.

Guard the borders. Buy Geiger counters. Invest in immunology.
Winter is coming. 

Unasked Question from Iraq

So the Americans are withdrawing from Iraq without anyone raising the obvious question:
How can it be that a group of politicians (conservatives), ostensibly philosophically opposed to the notion of the ability of government to plan and develop the political and economic structure of a state efficiently and accurately, moves into a foreign state with the confidence that they can completely refashion it from the top down?
And how can it be that a group of politicians (progressives), ostensibly confident in government's ability to plan and develop the political and economic structure of a state efficiently and accurately, opposes that effort to recreate that state with the opinion that such a refashioning can not be done?