Quick post-script. When did I say it was about oil? It didn't even make my list of reason we attacked Iraq in reality, nor did WMD of course. That's not to diminish the obvious fact that at least indirectly everything we do in the middle east ultimately has to do with domestic energy security on some level but it doesn't explain why we went after Iraq rather than some other place. Iraq was low-laying fruit. Some people believed we had to make a violent statement to the "Muslim world" to prove we were serious and not to mess with us. Neocons were among them and also provided the philosophical rationalizations so they sounded much higher-minded than they really were on TV. Neither group would have gotten very far without the other.
Here's Wolfowitz on WMD:
Quote:
The decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for "bureaucratic reasons", according to the US deputy defence secretary.
But in an interview with the American magazine Vanity Fair, Paul Wolfowitz said there were many other important factors as well. The famously hawkish Mr Wolfowitz has been a long-time proponent of military action against Iraq.
Picking weapons of mass destruction was "the one reason everyone could agree on", he says in the interview.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2945750.stm
He goes on to cite the opportunity to pull American troops out of Saudi Arabia as a big reason for the war, so we could lower tensions with the wahabbis over the presence of foreign pariahs from the holy land. Of course, given all the other reasons we've seen tossed at the wall hoping they'd stick this strikes me as just another one. You don't see anyone else really mentioning that claim much elsewhere. It also strikes me as very naive, to the point of disingenuous, to think an American invasion and overt occupation of a Muslim power would be less disruptive, somehow, than a peaceful security force somewhere else - it's not as if we actually had troops in Mecca and Medina no matter how al Qaida was trying to spin it. Iraq's been infinitely better for recruiting for them in the long run.
If you don't like the word cabal you should be more careful about tossing out phrases like tin-foil helmet or mouthpiece. Makes ya look a bit desperate.
Also check this out from that very useful Wilkerson interview you linked to:
Quote:
I have basically been supportive of the administration's point that it was simply fooled - that the intelligence community, including the UK, Germany, France, Jordan - other countries that confirmed what we had in our intelligence package, yet we were all just fooled.
Lately, I'm growing increasingly concerned because two things have just happened here that really make me wonder.
And the one is the questioning of Sheikh al-Libby where his confessions were obtained through interrogation techniques other than those authorised by Geneva.
It led Colin Powell to say at the UN on 5 February 2003 that there were some pretty substantive contacts between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. And we now know that al-Libby's forced confession has been recanted and we know - we're pretty sure that it was invalid.
But more important than that, we know that there was a defence intelligence agency dissent on that testimony even before Colin Powell made his presentation. We never heard about that.
Follow that up with Curveball, and the fact that the Germans now say they told our CIA well before Colin Powell gave his presentation that Curveball - the source to the biological mobile laboratories - was lying and was not a trustworthy source. And then you begin to speculate, you begin to wonder was this intelligence spun; was it politicised; was it cherry-picked; did in fact the American people get fooled - I am beginning to have my concerns.
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