As a supporter of the Iraq War, if you knew then what you know now….

Flopping Aces ^ | 05-18-15 | Wordsmith

[Starman417]

Paul Krugman:

Thanks to Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion we should have had a decade ago.

But many influential people — not just Mr. Bush — would prefer that we not have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on.

Well, let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who was involved in the debate over the war knows that it’s false. The Iraq war wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that. We were, in a fundamental sense, lied into war.

The lies come from the liars like Krugman:

Excerpt from the Silberman-Robb Report:

The Commission also found no evidence of “politicization” even under the broader definition used by the CIA’s Ombudsman for Politicization, which is not limited solely to the case in which a policymaker applies overt pressure on an analyst to change an assessment. The definition adopted by the CIA is broader, and includes any “unprofessional manipulation of information and judgments” by intelligence officers to please what those officers perceive to be policymakers’ preferences (p. 188).

We conclude that good-faith efforts by intelligence consumers to understand the bases for analytic judgments, far from constituting “politicization,” are entirely legitimate. This is the case even if policymakers raise questions because they do not like the conclusions or are seeking evidence to support policy preferences. Those who must use intelligence are entitled to insist that they be fully informed as to both the evidence and the analysis (p. 189; footnote omitted).

Excerpt from the SSCI Report on Iraq Prewar Intelligence:

The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgements related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities (p. 284).

The Committee found that none of the analysts or other people interviewed by the Committee said that they were pressured to change their conclusions related to Iraq’s links to terrorism. (p. 363)

The gift of 20/20 hindsight can make liars of us all. However, the question being fielded to GOP presidential candidates is a bogus one.

Mike Morrell (previously quoted):

I think it’s a totally unfair question, right, for somebody to say knowing what we know now, would you do something. That makes no sense, right? You never know what you know how when you’re making a decision. You only know what you knew then. So I think it’s a much more reasonable question to say if you knew then what President Bush knew, what you would do, and then it gets really tough, right? Because again, it’s all about the context, Hugh, and the context was, again, 3,000 people had just been killed, the CIA telling you that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, including restarting a nuclear weapons program that he had once and had stopped, the CIA telling you that he supports Palestinian terrorist groups, and not al Qaeda, but Palestinian terrorist groups, and the President sitting there thinking you know, I can’t afford to take the risk of this guy use those weapons of mass destruction against me directly, or I can’t take the risk of him giving those weapons to a terrorist group. So when you put the context around anything, right, you look at it in a different light. So I think people have been completely unfair to Governor Bush here. The question is not given what you know now. The question really is given what you know then, that’s the question I think he thought he was answering. And given all the members of Congress at the time who voted to go to war in Iraq and given what the President thought, I think the Governor is on solid footing.

An interesting email sent to Hugh Hewitt from a radio listener:

From December of 1998 to April of 2000, I was an operator, as the job description says “Listening to routing foreign language communication” in Arabic. In this time, I heard regularly, not through hearsay or second hand, but personally, that Iraq (and Syria) were maintaining chemical weapons. I would on occasion hear that Iraq was doing rocket tests for rockets designed to carry nuclear payloads. From April of 2000 to October of 2002, I was a cryptanalyst, breaking codes in addition to listening. In this job, we heard the Iraqis regularly lock on or attempt to lock on SAMs against our planes patrolling the no fly zone. There was no doubt in our minds that Iraq still had the WMDs it had used against its own people in the 90s and against Iran in the 80s.

I have heard enough of this said publically, that I do not think it is still classified. But the fact is, even at my very very low level, we heard multiple confirmations that the chemical weapons Saddam used in the Iran-Iraq War and in the early 90s against his own Kurds still existed and were being maintained. We heard references to other WMD types (specifically Nuclear). In the year I served post 9-11, there was massive amounts of truck traffic from Iraq into Syria. All of this was known. All of this has been said elsewhere. And yet high level intel people from that era now say there were no WMDs and our intel was a mistake. These statements are what lead to the pressure for people to say “Knowing what we know now, I would not go into Iraq.” As your guest stated, that question is kind of irrelevant and unfair, but it also is incomplete. There were WMDs. They may have been old and poor quality, but they still existed and the military was still training as if to use them.

Will goes on to list several thoughtful reasons as to why executing the Clinton-era official U.S. policy of "regime change" in regards to Iraq was a mission worthy of respect. Please take the time to go read them.

He concludes with this:

[arthurus]

Iran first. Iran was and is the proximally most dangerous of them. Knocking off Iran and unlimited fracking in the US and around the world would relegate Arabia to continuous shrinkage.

[867V309]

Worst thing to happen was the end of the Iran-Iraq war, thanks to errant US missile.

Moslem vs. moslem; ISIS vs. Iran brings back the good old days.

[Brad from Tennessee]

Obama began dealing with the Iranians even before he was elected. One prime demand of the mullahs in order to do business with the U.S. was that Obama withdraw from Iraq. I'm just speculating but I believe the Iranians offered to stand down their Shia proxies in Iraq to allow a smooth withdrawal. Outside of Chicago Obama is a rube and the Iranians have had him jumping through hoops for six years. His whole Middle East policy has been predicated on the national interests of Iran. Without understanding this things look very confusing.