Iraq War – Remembering the Causes: Part II

If you need to catch up, Iraq War- Remebering the Causes: Part I can be found here.

David Kay rightly admits that somehow we made some decisions based on bad intelligence.  But it was Saddam Hussein who put forth a great effort to make our bad intelligence on WMDs look good.  UNSCOM was blocked from inspecting sites that they wanted access to in Iraq.  Iraqi escorts forbid UNSCOM from taking any photographs during inspections.  Various Iraqi personnel were not allowed to answer UNSCOM’s questions.  And worst yet, UNSCOM inspectors would be forced to wait outside of building, sometimes for up to twenty-four hours, while trucks would leave filled with who-knows-what.  When they would finally be allowed in the buildings would be empty; no furniture or documents.  Obviously weapons inspectors were never intended to find any evidence of WMDs.  Most of this information is from the testimony of Charles Duelfer, the former vice-chair of UNSCOM.  David Kay filled in this odd gap of “We can’t find weapons” – “Saddam doesn’t seem to have any, yet he acted like he did.”  God Bless him, Saddam thought he had WMDs.  He was paying big money for materials and scientists and he was getting robbed blind.  This means he had every intention of developing these weapons but only through his own dumb fault it didn’t work out.  That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard happen to a tyrant since the seventy straight years of “bad weather” that prevented the Soviet Union from growing any food and being the workers’ paradise it should have been.  Meanwhile, during his testimony Kay made an observation that should have caught everyone’s attention.  Kay believes, “this may be one of those cases where it was even more dangerous than we thought.  [When] we have the complete record, you’re going to discover that after 1998 it became a regime that was totally corrupt.  Individuals were out for their own protection.  And in a world where we know others are seeking WMD, the likelihood… of a seller and a buyer meeting up would have made that a far more dangerous country than even we anticipated…  We know that terrorists were passing through Iraq.  And we now know that there was little control over Iraq’s weapons capabilities. … Iraq was a very dangerous place.”   

It will be tempting for political enemies of George W. Bush to say that he lied and manipulated the American people to get us into a war with Iraq.  But follow that through to its logical conclusion.  To have lied, he would have had to know that the intelligence of the United States, Great Britain, Israel, France, Germany, Australia and the United Nations was false.  George W. Bush and Tony Blair made the best decision they could with the information they had.  Countless other people examined the same intelligence and came to the same conclusion.  Bush and Blair had two choices, put their trust in their own and their allies’ intelligence or in promises from Saddam Hussein, a warmongering madman, who has pursued nuclear weapons more than once and used chemical weapons on his own people.  In the end, there was intelligence that was perfectly accurate – Hussein was hiding that he was actively pursuing WMDs.

For Iraq War – Remembering the Causes: Part III click here.