Who Lied?
By Callimachus | Related entries in History, In The News, The War On TerrorismLots of interesting stuff in this talk by Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department. It’s been widely linked, and among the sections many commentators have picked out is this one, reminding those who easily forget such things how broad was the consensus in early 2003 that Saddam Hussein had some sort of WMD program that was far in advance of what’s been found in Iraq since his fall.
This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2005 and is filed under History, In The News, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled with it. I don’t know – and people say, well, INR dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios. Carl Ford and I talked; Tom Finger and I talked, who is now John Negroponte’s deputy, and that was the way INR felt. And, frankly, I wasn’t all that convinced by the evidence I’d seen that he had a nuclear program other than the software. That is to say there are some discs or there were some scientists and so forth but he hadn’t reconstituted it. He was going to wait until the international tension was off of him, until the sanctions were down, and then he was going to go back – certainly go back to all of his programs. I mean, I was convinced of that.
But I saw satellite evidence, and I’ve looked at satellite pictures for much of my career. I saw information that would lead me to believe that Saddam Hussein, at least on occasion, was spoofing us, was giving us disinformation. When you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical weapons ASP – Ammunition Supply Point – with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they’re there, you have to conclude that it’s a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the U.N. inspectors wheeling in in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP and everything is changed, everything is clean. None of those signs are there anymore….
The consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming. I can still hear George Tenet telling me, and telling my boss in the bowels of the CIA, that the information we were delivering – which we had called considerably – we had called it very much – we had thrown whole reams of paper out that the White House had created. But George was convinced, John McLaughlin was convinced that what we were presented was accurate. And contrary to what you were hearing in the papers and other places, one of the best relationships we had in fighting terrorists and in intelligence in general was with guess who? The French. In fact, it was probably the best. And they were right there with us.
October 24th, 2005 at 4:07 pm
Callimachus,
We get it the shole world believed Iraq was a bad guy. So is iran, Libya, Pakistan (even though we turned that dictator into a president), N. Korea, Syria… should I continue on with that? Those countries are also quite a bit MORE cozy with Terrorists, under less scrutiny by the UN, and more likely to be a threat to our national interest. Why did we attack Iraq? Because we could. It would be an easy win, and this administration knew it. The knew it so much they underestimated the insurgency that was bound to crop up after the war. So, I’m tired of Righties and Talking heads keep saying “Everyone thought they had WMD!” Who cares! The initial reason to go to war was flawed regardless.
October 24th, 2005 at 6:38 pm
Because “the whole world” told us over and over and over after 9-11, “don’t just go kill terrorists; address the root cause of terrorism.” And that’s what we’re doing in Iraq, that was part of the plan all along. Get rid of the kind of tyrants who make life in the Islamic Middle East such a hopeless experience that young men turn into mass killers. So much the better if he’s a tyrant we bear a large share of responsibility for maintaining over the years. Show that America is willing to devote our lives and our fortunes to pulling a Muslim country out of hell and giving its people a chance to set itself up as a strong, free beacon of liberty in the region.
You can’t do that just anywhere. Iraq was the best candidate for it. But even there, the administration miscalculated, or listened to the wrong advice. The country’s economy, and its former middle class, was far more wrecked by Saddam’s rule than we suspected.
Make you a deal, John: I’ll not say another word about WMD when you convince your friends in the anti-war movement to let it drop.