Iraqi WMDs Revisited - The Redux

[OddjobXL]

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:

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.

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:

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.

[The Avon Lady]

Why don't you read past the interview to understand how the crackpots at Vanity Fair twisted and corrupted what Wolfowitz said?

Go running around the Internet to see what a hatchet job Vanity Fair has been consistantly doing when it comes to scalping anything not leftist at any price.

Well, what other way was there to save the dying magazine from Chapter 11!

UPDATE: See What Wolfowitz Really Said.

[OddjobXL]

My first reaction, of course, is that you link to a DoD press release, where Wolfowitz worked, rather than the real article? And then you claim Vanity Fair is hopelessly biased? Alright, let's have a look.

Priceless.

Wolfowitz: Well, there've been disputes within the intelligence community on the exact nature of that one. There's been very little dispute about the WMD, except for some of the borderline issues.

Oh, boy.

Wolfowitz: Well, but they hadn't had 12 years to build mobile production facilities

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy:

DeYoung: Okay, let me just... But do you think that you might have oversold the whole WMD thing last fall? With the sort of, not only do they have production facilities, they actually have weapons that are ready to be used?

Wolfowitz: I don't think so. I mean, I think we were working from, as I told you, one of the most widely shared intelligence assessments I kn
ow of.

DeYoung: And even if we end up not finding...?

Wolfowitz: We're a long way from...

Kellems: We can't go there. Karen, come on! [Laughter] That was a trick question.

Ahahaha...cough, cough.

Look, I can't read that transcript the same way you do. It's impossible. I've seen too much evidence about Wolfowitz's hard shoving behind this war. When someone in the administration questioned it, it was always Wolfowitz pushing back. When someone changed their mind the saying was "Wolfowitz got to him." He was Douglas Feith's boss - the guy who ran the Office of Special Plans, he signed off on PNAC's main report and the In Defense of the Realm (sic - not sure that's the exact title) study done for Israel.

If there was anyone who knew how shaky the case for war based on WMDs was, and how unlikely Saddam's implied ties to al Qaida were, and did more to promote all of it than Wolfowitz then it could only be Dick Cheney. Was there anyone else pulling nearly the used car salesmen act with Congress than Wolfowitz? "It will pay for itself." "We don't need many troops." "They'll welcome us as liberators."

They had to know better. They were in the goddamn Pentagon. They had serious career, military, analysts around. Either they ignored them all without even looking at the homework or they deliberately lied.

So if you're capable of believing a word out of Wolfowitz's mouth, more's the power to you, but I can't. I see him as inherently deceitful. He may have believed he was merely achieving a means to a good end but I personally don't much like being played. If they had an argument they should have come out and made it instead of scaring people with boogeymen so they, and the politicians who depend on their votes, were forced into compliance.

[The Avon Lady]

See my additional link to the Weekly Standard article.

[OddjobXL]

Weekly Standard? Wait, that sounds oddly familiar. Now why would that be? Oh, right - William Kristol's magazine. Now why would I be any more at ease trusting material this guy gave a thumbs up to (correction actually wrote!)? Isn't there a link to the original article anywhere? I'm guessing not, or at least not easily found. Seems these two links, when you google, are precisely the first two that come up defending Wolfowitz. Hey, I do that too sometimes. It's part of why I get into these debates. You always learn something new and sometimes that means hitting the old google to defend a point you might have stepped too far out on.

...reading...reading...reading...

Alright, seems to me that once you wade through the defensiveness and rhetoric, and if you trust a secret tape recording the Pentagon made of the interview and only entrusted William Kristol with, Kristol has something of a point. He claims the interviewer made Wolfowitz sound like a nut because he conflated the answer about Saudi Arabia with that about WMD. I'm even willing to grant that this tape is probably legitimate because this is such a minor point if you were really going to distort evidence you'd do something much more useful than this.

Ultimately, the statement that deciding to make the focus on WMD because it was convenient stands. Now I don't doubt that many intelligence services, including our own and even the CIA, suspected there were probably chemical weapons in Iraq. But that never was the whole WMD case. The stuff people actually remember has to do with mushroom clouds and Saddam's association with al Qaida. Hell, Kristol even sings that song when he talks about the al Qaida people killed in Northern Iraq without bothering to mention that is Kurdish controlled Iraq which even back then was known. What wasn't common knowledge at the time was that our intelligence services asked permission to take them out before the invasion, before they could scatter, and they were told no because it would undermine the case for war.

You starting to see where I'm coming from? I'm not some freak wearing a papermache Uncle Sam head and prancing around in protest marches to pick up hairy chicks. I'm no actual expert on these issues either. But I am a guy who has been reading waaaay too much for too long to believe alot of stuff some people still insist on seeing as the gospel truth.

[Heibges]

If Iraq was a credible threat regarding WMD's, Israel would have taken care of it long before the the United States got around to invading. Afterall, Israel has always taken care of it's own dirty laundry.

As they did when they bombed the Osiraq Nuclear Reactor in 1981.

As they did when they assassinated Dr. Gerald Bull in Brussel's outside his apartment with 5 shots to the back of the head in 1990.

[Ishmael]

I found this little strip amusing four years later. But then "This Modern World" is one of my favorites. It's called,"What They Really Said"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-to...d_b_46907.html

Regarding intelligence failures:

Look at this BBC Documentary called "The Power Of Nightmares" for more info:

http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmaresDVD

We know that PNAC called for a US invasion of Iraq in 1994. We know that most of the PNAC members obtained positions in the White House & Defense Dept. policymaking branches , including the Pentagon Office of Special Plans.

We know from Richard Clarke that the Bush transition team didn't want to hear briefings about Al Qaeda, only Iraq in late 2000.

We know from one of the few records released from Cheney's secret Energy Task Force meetings was a map of Iraqi oil fields.

We know from the Downing Street Memos that the intelligence on Iraq was being fixed around the policy.

We know that the intelligence services determined the Niger memo was a fake as did Joe Wilson who was sent there as a result of a direct request from the Vice-President's office not, as widely propogated in the Right Wing press & blogosphere, by his wife.

We know that, as a result of Joe Wilson's report and later op-ed, his wife, a covert intelligence operative was compromised by the Bush Admin. to marginalize him befroe the war.

We know that Valerie Wilson's front company, Brewster-Jennings which had spent 15 years constructing a human intelligence network in the Mideast to track WMDs & various governments & groups efforts to obtain them including Al-Qaeda, Iraq & Iran, was neutralized in a matter of hours and putting who knows how many lives in jeopardy.

An interesting side note in the Niger memos. Wayne Madsen has found links between the forgery, a burglary of the Niger Embassy where the only things taken were official stationary and a government seal, SISME the Italian Itelligence Service & Michael Ledeen of the aforementioned Office of Special Plans.

So my question to my conservative friends still stands. After all of the demonstrable lies, falsehoods, misjudgements & incompetence of these guys, how can you believe anything they say?