Posted on 05/19/2003 9:49:46 AM PDT by Nonstatist
Did the Bush administration deliberately mislead the nation and the world when President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and others so confidently suggested, as their casus belli, that Saddam Hussein had hundreds of tons of banned chemical and biological weapons and a program to build a nuclear bomb?
What if Saddam destroyed most, or all, of his weapons of mass destruction years ago?
That suspicion is taking root in much of the world. I think it is wrong. But I also fear that the administration may have done grave damage to its own credibility abroad by overstating the quality of its intelligence and creating an expectation that it would find large arsenals of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq -- an expectation that officials are no longer confident they can fulfill.
Unless we find such arsenals, or solid proof that Saddam had them until recently, people may be hard to convince that the administration is not crying wolf the next time it accuses a rogue nation of developing doomsday weapons.
To be sure, some suggest that Bush "doesn't owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue)," in the words of New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, because ending Saddam's bloody tyranny was ample justification for the war.
This sort of logic may be good enough for the American electorate, at least for now. But it should not be. As Republicans used to stress, the president of the United States should tell the truth. Especially when he is beating war drums, and when the credibility of the nation is at stake.
Bush sold this war as pre-emptive self-defense against the threat posed by Saddam's chemical and biological weapons (and quest for nuclear weapons), not as a precaution against future production of chemical and biological weapons. Before the invasion, he spoke of liberating the Iraqi people as a happy side effect of war, not as a necessary or sufficient reason for it. He assured the United Nations that if Saddam disarmed, the U.S. would not disturb his brutal tyranny.
At this writing, no chemical or biological weapons have turned up in Iraq, to the apparent surprise and chagrin of high-level administration officials. No mustard gas. No VX. No anthrax. Not one vial.
U.S. investigators have found what they believe to be one or more mobile biological weapons laboratories -- a potential semi-smoking gun, in the view of one well-placed official. They have also found protective suits and atropine to ward off chemical weapons, and materials that could be used to make chemical weapons. But it remains to be seen whether the mobile labs could have had benign purposes and the protective equipment could have been intended for defensive use.
On May 13, Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division in northern Iraq, told reporters: "There's no question that there were chemical weapons years ago," but "I just don't know whether it was all destroyed years ago," or "destroyed right before the war," or "whether they're still hidden" (emphasis added).
This is not what one would have expected after pre-war statements such as Bush's March 17 assertion to the nation that "intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Or such as portions of Colin Powell's February 5 speech to the U.N.: "This is evidence, not conjecture. This is true. This is all well documented.... Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.... Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons.... And we have sources who tell us that he recently has authorized his field commanders to use them."
Now, by contrast, the official line about weapons of mass destruction seems to be morphing from 1) unqualified assertions that "we will find them," as Bush told NBC's Tom Brokaw on April 24; to 2) suggestions that Saddam may have quickly destroyed WMD or shipped them off to Syria in recent months to avoid detection by U.N. inspectors; to 3) speculations that perhaps Saddam had ended the deployment of large stocks of difficult-to-maintain WMD years ago, choosing instead to build mobile labs and the like to give himself the capability of making WMD whenever he chose.
The first theory may prove to be true, but it looks increasingly forlorn in the context of statements such as those by Gen. Petraeus.
The second theory improbably posits that after spending billions on WMD, Saddam decided, under threat of invasion and death, to get rid of them clandestinely rather than trying to save himself by either surrendering them publicly or using them to stop the invaders. This theory is also hard to square with the pre-war administration claims that WMD had been deployed to Iraqi units. (If so, why didn't coalition troops find any of them after overrunning those units?) And it would tend to support the anti-war mantra that the U.N. inspections could contain any Iraqi threat. Besides, if indeed Saddam did send his WMD abroad, the Bush policy may have exacerbated the proliferation that it was supposed to prevent.
The third theory may be the most plausible. But if Saddam did get rid of his WMD years ago, it means that Hans Blix was right to accuse the administration of relying on "shaky" intelligence; that U.S. officials misled the world, negligently albeit not deliberately; and that Bush miscalculated Saddam's intentions as badly as Saddam miscalculated Bush's.
This does not mean that Saddam was not a threat. Three pillars of the administration's WMD case are clearly true: U.N. inspectors found vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear program in Iraq during the 1990s; lots of the weapons had not been destroyed before those inspectors were forced out of the country; and those weapons remain unaccounted for to this day, because Saddam contemptuously spurned many chances to show the U.N. any documentation of their destruction.
The administration assumed, logically enough, that Saddam had kept these weapons. After all, if he had destroyed them, wouldn't he have proved it to the world rather than seeing his country suffer through years of devastating U.N. economic sanctions and exposing himself unnecessarily to invasion and death?
Perhaps not, theorizes David Rivkin, a Washington lawyer who served in the Reagan and first Bush administrations and has close ties to the current administration. Perhaps Saddam got rid of his weapons (but not his development programs) to make sure that U.N. inspectors did not stumble across them, but hoped that -- by bluffing that he still had them -- he could continue to intimidate his neighbors and could deter Bush from marching into Baghdad. Perhaps he assumed that the surest way to invite an invasion would be to show Bush how defenseless he was.
And once the world's attention had turned elsewhere, Rivkin's theory suggests, Saddam could have used his blueprints to develop new chemical, biological, and, ultimately, nuclear weapons: "What mattered the most, and provided the most compelling strategic justification for the regime change, was Saddam's unshakable commitment to retain, on a long-term basis, a viable WMD effort."
Rivkin may be right. But Seymour M. Hersh may also be right in contending (in the May 12 New Yorker) that the administration gave undue credence to ideology-driven intelligence analyses prepared by the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. That unit was set up in late 2001 by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz because Pentagon hawks were dissatisfied with the reluctance of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to support their claims that Iraq was both awash in banned weapons and allied with Al Qaeda. These analysts, claims Hersh, persuaded the White House to trust Iraqi defectors of questionable veracity and to brush aside evidence inconsistent with their speculations and hawkish assumptions.
In a speech last October, for example, Bush made much of Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law and weapons chief, whose defection to Jordan in 1995 forced Saddam's regime "to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents." But Bush and other officials have ignored Kamel's statements to U.N. interviewers that all of these weapons had been produced before the 1991 Gulf War and destroyed during the early 1990s. (Kamel was killed after being lured back to Iraq with his family in 1996.)
If the world ends up concluding that Saddam did destroy most or all of his WMD years ago, both the president's credibility and America's security will have suffered a serious self-inflicted wound.
Err...um...I was addressing the fact that this was laid at the feet of "Bush & Co." Even so, thank God there are some who can think strategically. Folks like you benefit from our prescience.
Not quite true. People who say that our failure to find WMDs means there may not have been any are, in effect, saying that the Hussein regime's stated summary of their information was better than ours (since "we don't have any" was their official position). Best,
I am glad our troops were not exposed to WMD, but I realize that it is hard eating crow. I can remember the criticisms of the UN inspectors, Scott Ritter as being guilty of treason, etc. and now they are proven right and the credibility of the United States being destroyed. It is not a pretty sight. You can only holler wolf so many times and expect support when it is needed. This is the tragedy.
-PJ
Ok then what about the former? what were the tubes for?
Another thing I find interesting is that no one ever seems to mention the audiotape of Iraqi military discussing hiding stuff from the inspectors. What exactly do people think they were talking about?
I'll take your word for it that this was how most freepers argued against you. However, speaking for myself, it ("clear and present danger") was not the reason I advocated war, at least not without elaboration on just what, exactly, is the definition of "clear and present" (i.e. "missiles are incoming" is too late, for me).
After all, once a person crosses the line from the traditional American emphasis on defensive war to embracing wars of conquest
What "war of conquest" would you be referring to?
and Wilsonian "nation building"
What "Wilsonian 'nation building'" would you be referring to?
I believe we should be a defense oriented Republic not a Wilsonian empire....
Hey, me too. Don't know what a "Wilsonian empire" is, but don't like the sound of it.
Alternative explanations that are consistent with the lack of any misrepresentations: (1) they were destroyed just before the war began or (2) they were hidden just before the war began. You don't say that we "misrepresented" the fact of Saddam's existence just because he is currently missing and unaccounted for, right? Same logic applies here as well.
You cannot say that anything was misrepresentated, much less deliberately misrepresented, unless and until you have actual evidence that he had no WMD's prior to the war (i.e. if he did have such WMDs, there was no misrepresentation because the representation at that time was that he did have such weapons). So far you can say only that to date we haven't yet found any significant stockpiles of WMDs -- but this fact doesn't even get you to first base, much less all the way home.
I didn't say any such thing. Nor did anyone promise that the war on Iraq would end the threat of terrorism, any more than law enforcement operations and the punishing of criminals can end the threat of crime. It is true, however, that we have eliminated a major source of terrorism by eliminating Saddam and the Baathists in Iraq (who, incidentally, are themselves terrorists as well as supporters of other terrorist organizations).
This is really funny. I don't think you are a troll, so let me suggest that you wait a few weeks or months and then see if you still believe this nonsense. Eventually we will get the real story on what happened to the WMDs from the people who know first hand -- members of the Iraqi scientific and military establishments.
Right. Not only all that, but recall how Saddam responded to the 17 UN resolutions, cumulating in Resolution 1441? His actions were not exactly consistent with those of a person who is innocent of the charges and has nothing to hide. If he really had no WMDs, he would have given the UN a full and truthful declaration and then cooperated fully and proactively with UN inspectors -- especially in light of the obvious fact that his very survival depended upon full compliance with Resolution 1441 and such cooperation would have had immense propaganda value to him.
LOL....Yeah right. Anyone who believes this is a possibility isn't playing with a full deck. So we haven't found anything in a month and a half, big freakin' deal. There are thousands of places we have yet to look within Iraq ....let alone Syria. The libs are just setting themselves up for yet another egg-on-face session. I think they're probably addicted to it by now.
ok, that's your assumption. Understood
From what I heard of the recordings( assuming they were even authenic) they could have been talking about almost anything.
Such as?
Do you agree we need an investigation to see who feed us the lies about the yellowcake
Possibly. To be honest I have no idea what this "yellowcake" stuff you're talking about is, this is the first time in my life I've heard that word outside of a dessert context. ;-)
or should we just ignore the sources that made us look like lying fools to the rest of the world?
I wholeheartedly endorse rooting out bad/lying sources, if that's what you're saying. Best,
It is very easy to dispose of Chemical or Biological weapons and to do it in a hurry. But why wouldn't Sadaam have used them against our troops? If even a few dozen grizzley deaths among our troops from chemical or bio attack were reported by our media it would have had some effect on the home front. Further it would have severely altered the war plans and delayed- for weeks or a couple of months the fall of Baghdad as we are a nation very sensitive to casualties.
And I disagree with you statement above. That is not at all clear. Sadaam had every incentive to give WMD's to terrorist contacts or cutouts once we invaded. We are less secure now than we were before the war in my opinion. Forces that are not a geographic state, that do not rely on terror to ensure loyalty among it's members, and are international (namely AQ) most likely got a good share of WMD's that Sadaam had at one point. This war has not demonstrated that we a safer as a nation even a little bit.
Several possible explanations exist. Saddam could have destroyed or hidden WMDs just before the war began. We may have destroyed them ourselves in air strikes, artillery strikes, or by other means. The Iraqis may have heeded our warnings not to use these weapons. The Iraqis may have realized that we were too well protected, or at least that we were much better protected for such attacks than they were. Or some combination of the foregoing.
We are less secure now than we were before the war in my opinion.
I certainly disagree. If Saddam could give Al Queada (or whoever) WMDs during the war, he certainly could have given them these weapons at any time, and in much greater quantities, than he can now. Iraq under Saddam was no different in principle from the Taliban prior to 9/11, except that Iraq could potentially cause us much more harm if and when it finally did attack (either directly or through a terrorist organization).
I thought of that before you posted your reply. We did extensive psy-op work in Iraq before the invasion making the point that any commander who used chem or bio weapons would meet a bad end. That may have had an effect. But I still can't see at least some of those die hard Baathist or "Fedeyeen" types not using them at least once.
I think the reason Iraq would not have given WMD's to AQ or other such types before the war is that he valued his life and regime. And surely if we had such info that he did we would have made it public. Chem and Bio weapons have "signatures" once used and can be traced. Sadaam was just like Stalin- a murderous madman. And just like Stalin he loved his power and wanted to stay alive. I don't see Sadaam giving WMD to extremists like Osama in peacetime. But - with nothing to lose and America about to invade- why not give WMD to whomever? I don't think we are safer. Maybe - if Iraq does indeed become a stable Democratic regime and example of prosperity to the rest of the Middle East and thus cause revolutions then we will be ultimatley secure. But I Don't see that security for 5 to 10 years.
Can't name any of them, but I'd be willing to bet they were some of the ones who insisted the CIA celebrate gay day at Langley.
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