We were all lied to about WMDs.
I was also on the wrong side of Iraq back then. Although I was one of the first people to question what the goal was as soon as Bush said “we are not in the business of nation building” during his big speech (was it a state of the union?) during the buildup.
It’s interesting to hear it from a now senior GOPer like Vance and the crowd applauded.
We were not lied to. There was intelligence to support the presence of biological weapons. Isolationist revisionists harp on WMD’s as the only reason for getting rid of Saddam. There were other real and important reasons
Saddam had to go.
I think the real, unspoken and unofficial rationale for the Iraq invasion and removal of Hussein’s regime was to pressure Iran. Situated between two new “democratic” Arab nations and heavily supported by US military might, the thought was their govt would fold. It was naive as could be. Those people had no interest at all in becoming westerners. It was nation building from the onset in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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We were all lied to about WMDs.
I was also on the wrong side of Iraq back then. Although I was one of the first people to question what the goal was as soon as Bush said “we are not in the business of nation building” during his big speech (was it a state of the union?) during the buildup.
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That was a different time. When many of us trusted our government. I supported that war too. Now I know better.
“We were all lied to about WMDs”
Really? The largest chemical weapon attack against civilians in history and it was all a lie?
No, we weren't.
The NY Slimes ran with the story in 2014, detailing the injuries to US servicemen who chanced across Saddam's caches of mustard agent and sarin. The Slimes later published the US intelligence report on the events, released under FOIA. It's even been noted on Wikipedia that "... the total number of munitions discovered since 2003 had climbed to 4,990 ...."
The Daily Beast later reported that Bush administration insiders claimed that it was Carl Rove's idea to cover up having found the weapons.
Apparently they were willing to take the hit politically because they saw that as a better option than instigating the largest Islamo-Fascists scavenger hunt in history because the news, if published, would attract terrorist types from all over the planet who lusted after chemical or biological weapons, hoping to find whatever left-overs that Coalition search teams had missed.
And BTW, the war was never about whether Iraq had X, Y or Z, it was about the strong suspicion that Saddam probably had X, Y or Z. He definitely once had had and used used them in the past -- both chemical and biological weapons -- against his own subjects (the Kurds). Iraq even had admitted they once were manufacturing anthrax and botulism. Armed with the certain knowledge they had the capability to produce more of the same, and the equally certain knowledge that Saddam could not be trusted to play nice with them, the world community took the prudent course of insisting that Saddam allow international inspectors free and easy access to anywhere and anything they deemed necessary in order to allay the world's fears that he might still be manufacturing unconventional weapons, whether nuclear, biological, or chemical.
The proximal cause of the war was Saddam's refusal to allow the inspections, his flaunting of the will of the International community, not the suspicion that he did have them.
The plan for war was never the problem. The problem was that Dubya only had one plan for restoring the peace. There was no back-up plan, so when the primary plan failed, Dubya was caught with his fly open and America's lack of forsight was exposed.
* WMD is a disinformation term coined by the Soviets Pre-WWII. The non-pejorative and correct military terminology is either "unconventional" or NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) weapons.
It was worth it. We killed the bad guys and upset their support rather than letting terrorists come here. The changed Iraq changed so much that they provided support to Israel when Iran fired missiles a few weeks back.
It wasn’t all about WMD - but Bush didn’t “LIE” about those. We thought he had them and so did other countries. They DID have WMDs too - not nukes, although they were working to get those.
Were we really? Or was it the MSM who typically lied to us and covered up what really took place?
Pentagon announces 500 tons of Uranium shipped from Iraq to Canada
500 tons of uranium shipped from Iraq, Pentagon says
Syria's Chemical Weapons Came From Saddam's Iraq
Eason Jordan on CNN’s Iraq The News We Kept To Ourselves