Why we were sold only one reason to go to war in Iraq

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,995986,00.html

Both the American and British governments tried to give the impression that Saddam had serious stocks of unconventional weapons and might be trying to restart his nuclear programme. But, as Thomas Friedman and others implied, that was because the real justifications for war could not be presented to a public conditioned to believe that war is only an acceptable risk if a clear and present danger can be demonstrated.

So we had the spectacle of the arguments being conducted on two distinct levels. One involved disputable claims about the extent of Saddam's weapons holdings, probably wholly specious claims about his connections with al-Qaida, and questions to do with the role of inspectors and the UN.

The other involved forecasts of the threat that Saddam might present if left alone, and, even more difficult to assess, calculations that his removal from power would change the Middle East in ways which would weaken the forces of Islamic extremism in the region and therefore the terrorist threat to the US and Europe. Present on both levels of argument was the humanitarian case for military action, but that was not the primary focus of either discussion.

Neither the British nor the American peoples, let alone the French or the Germans, would go to war on the basis of this second set of arguments. They were too vague, too intuitive, too liable to be proved spectacularly mistaken, and too unlike the normal arguments for war. But they would, or they might, on the first.

(snip)

[Festivito]

1. One reason? NOT! They're hiding their other lies.

If they convince people of a history including only WMD as a reason, then the other reasons will not be persued. Next the WMD will become "plans for WMD." Finally, people with lives other than keeping track of politics will think Iraq invasion was justified because Iraq did have "plans" for WMD.

FORGOTTEN:
People being shredded made credible by Regis Philbin of all people on his morning Live show. Reminds me of the babies thrown out of incubator story from Iraq I. Convince him the night before at a party and get a million dollar advertisment on the next morning.

Nuclear program that they knew was false.
Those reports presented to the UN that were misleading.
Saddam's connection to 9/11 that does not exist.

The article is a bunch of convoluted sentences for the sake of being convoluted, unclear, and divisively distracting against a reader's personal memory.

[Paschall]

2. I think this piece is rather interesting

This piece explains why the WMD argument was selected, what Perle (was it?) meant when he said WMD were the "bureaucratic" choice.

But it also speaks to an issue that I haven't seen discussed before. It scratches the surface of the Saddam problem. Not his WMD, but his portrayal by the pro-war camp.

The questions I see raised today about Saddam's character generally boil down to one: If Saddam was so bad, why didn't he have WMD? He played such a dark role in this drama that it was impossible to see he had other arms to throw at the massed coalition forces. But there is no reason for our intelligence analysts to have missed this. What were the Pentagon scenarios--and risk assessments--that got left on the cutting room floor?

No one has even bothered to ask how much our bribes to the Baghdad generals, which spared the lives of all those Iraqi troops, might have served Saddam, or might serve him in the future.

<snip> But it is possible to speculate that in this, as in so much else, Saddam Hussein was his own worst enemy. So important to him was his image among his own people, and in the region, as a man capable of outwitting the Anglo-Saxons and hanging on to his weaponry, that he may have chosen to carry on with his obstructive manoeuvres long after he had anything much to hide.

How else to explain, for example, the insistence, at a very late stage, that interviews with Iraqi scientists be tape recorded, or the ban on their being interviewed abroad?

In the first half of the 90s, Saddam tried to bluff to cover his continued possession of the weapons, and it may be that, in the second half, he bluffed to cover his loss of them. This is Tony Blair's real argument in defence of his pre-war position - that Saddam acted "as if" he had weapons - but he cannot apparently bring himself to put it.

If our intelligence services were not good enough to penetrate such a second bluff, then that is as legitimate a subject of inquiry as the question of whether Bush and Blair pumped up the intelligence advice they were getting. They could hardly have done so if the agencies had committed themselves to the view that Saddam's arms cupboard was completely bare. ...

The British and American inquiries into the possible misuse of intelligence should be conducted, if they are to be honest, with a proper attention to those problems, which deserve an equal and a related scrutiny. </snip>

[T_i_B]

3. It was Wolfowitz...

...who said that WMD was cooked up for "bureaucratic" reasons.

If WMD was a flimsy pretext, then we have to look for other motives as to why Iraq was invaded, and these are almost all ulterior motives, be it stealing Iraq's oil, imperialism or whatever.

Whichever way you look at it, the invasion of Iraq was a fraud IMHO.