2.) Read Bob Woodard’s account of then-CIA director’s George Tenet’s briefing of the George W. Bush on the eve of the Iraq war. According to the Washington Post journalist, Tenet told Bush that it was a “slam dunk case” that Iraq had W.M.D.s. Tenet later said he was taken out of context, but that doesn’t seem to be the case and, in any event, Tenet doesn’t deny he was fundamentally confident that Iraq possessed W.M.D.s.
3.) General Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq in 2003, writes in his book that he was not only told by Egyptian and Jordanian leaders that Iraq possessed W.M.D.s, he was also told that Saddam would use them against invading American troops.
4.) Former CIA agent Kenneth Pollock has noted that the world’s most vaunted intelligence agencies, including some of those who opposed the war in Iraq, all believed Saddam Hussein possessed W.M.D.s. These include the intelligence agencies of Germany, Israel, Russia, Britain, China and France.
5.) As President Obama contemplated
whether to authorize the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, he was told by CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell that
the evidence indicating that Iraq had W.M.D.s before the Iraq war was “much
stronger” than the evidence that bin Laden was living in the
Abbottabad compound. “And I’m telling you, the case for W.M.D. wasn’t
just stronger—it was much stronger,” he told the president.5. and 6.)
Add to this list, the fact that Bill Clinton told GW Bush that Iraq had WMD's. The is
A sixth fact in this regard, is Saddam's own claims as to having WMD's coupled with his refusal to allow free and unfettered access to sites that supposed housed these weapons.
A 7th fact are the many pictures of WMDs found in Iraq.
________________________________
After notes:
Points 1 -5 come from the article found here.
“We were wrong just like everyone else” isn’t a particularly compelling or admirable argument, though I suppose that if you’re responsible for one of the modern era’s most significant foreign policy disasters, “shared incompetence” is a more appealing excuse than “willful deception.”
ReplyDeleteIt’s one thing to simply repeat an intelligence assessment that is wrong, and quite another to take a disputed, credibly challenged intelligence assessment and state it as uncontested fact. That’s a lie, and senior Bush officials did it often. There’s no better example of this than the aluminum tubes.
The tubes were at the heart of their case that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a nuclear weapons program, and had been cited as evidence of Hussein’s intentions by Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell. They even earned a mention in George W. Bush’s now infamous 2003 state of the union address.
This was all wrong. And they knew at the time that the intelligence regarding those tubes was nowhere near as strong as they made it out to be. Some intelligence agencies believed that the tubes were, in fact, made for uranium enrichment. There were, however, many dissenting views, including from the State Department and the intelligence arm of the Department of Energy, the agency responsible for maintaining the United States’ nuclear arsenal (i.e. the people who actually know this stuff). DOE determined that the tubes were completely impractical for use in uranium enrichment, and were probably intended for use in conventional rockets. The State Department came to a similar conclusion.
Senior policymakers, including President Bush, were aware of this debate over the tubes by October 2002. But with Dick Cheney calling the shots and applying pressure where necessary, the administration disregarded the dissenting views, prioritized the assessments that aligned with their preferred policy outcome, and hid the debate from the public while offering up the tubes as incontrovertible evidence that Saddam Hussein was in the process of developing nuclear weapons.
That falls pretty squarely in the “lie” category. But if the tubes don’t do it for you, there’s plenty more to choose from – like Dick Cheney’s repeated false insistences that the 9/11 ringleader met with an Iraqi agent in Prague.
Here's a nice compendium of circumstances and lies that led up to the Iraq war.
Bush lied ... people died. Lots of them. Not to mention war crimes and torture.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/leadup-iraq-war-timeline
You really can't concede the point, "We were wrong just like everyone else," (as you put it), and then insist that Bush lied.
DeleteSecondly, there were WMDs. They were buried all over the place and I personally know two men, one a private contractor and the other, a member of of the military, who spent three years, each, in Iraq, disarming WMDs. The private contractor actually worked for me several years ago.
The Twin Towers were bombed back in 1991-92, by confidants of none other than Osama bin Laden. Bill Clinton has admitted that his greatest regret was not killing bin Laden when he had the chance. All of the planning for "9/11" was done during the Clinton years, and it was the Clinton CIA, that swore to GW Bush that Saddam had WMDs.
Congress gave Bush authority for the invasion, and, because of the 2007 surge, Bush won that war in five years and with the lowest casualty total in the history of long-term war . . . . . . ever . . . . . . . in the world.
Joe Biden and Barack Obama both admit that we won that war.
Finally, you don't care if "people died." Or, you would care about the 200,000 who have died since Obama lied about the "red line," or the four who died in Benghazi, two of them five hours after Obama went to freaking bed.
weak... very weak response.
DeleteThe chemical weapons 'discovered' were manufactured before the 1991 invasion of Kuwait, and [such pre-1991 chemical-weapons shells (often empty) were the same found by the U.N. weapons inspectors just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Former Bush administration officials admitted that the "presence of ancient chemical weapons in Iraq did not vindicate George W. Bush's case for war. because the Bush administration, by contrast, staked its WMD claims on an active, on-going program that was restarted after the Kuwait conflict." The so-called WMD's Smithson refers to are ancient decaying stockpiles.
Bush lied. That is documented for the history books. Game over.
We are not going to argue the Bush war in Iraq. I have made the case. The chemical/and weapons grade munitions I am calling WMDs were not part of Saddam's "ancient stockpiles." Saddam had 14 months notice before the 2003 invasion, to move his current supply of weapon grade munitions and chemicals into Syria. Where the hell do you think Assaud got his original stockpile? What he did not move, he buried. The chemical weaponry you are talking about was stored in "ancient" warehouses and abandoned chemical plants. The WMDs picture in the main post, were buried all over Iraq. Pictures don't lie. Neither did Bill Clinton or George Tenet or the personal of the world's intel organizations.
DeleteThe private contractor who worked for me, spent 3 yrs defusing wmd supplies. I asked, "Whby did not Bush tell the world about these weapons?" His answer: "The weapons had markings written in English. They came from the United States and Bush did not want implicate the States in a bad way."
Ditto for the young man who came to our church and spoke about his mission, as a soldier in Iraq, again, spending nearly three years defusing WMDs. Same question, same answer.
Nothing weak about the truth, and this is the last word on the matter. We won the war. In Dec of 2011, Obama said," We leave behind an Iraq that is strong, stable and sovereign" (or words to that effect). And, with those words, he owns what has happened since. Period.
The two men I mentioned in my above response, were assigned the task of DISARMING weaponry. You don't disarm chemicals. You disarm bombs, IUD, and the like. MOre than this, Saddam was financing the new breed of suicide bombers, giving their families $2,500 for the sacrifices of their sons. And Bill Clinton told Bush about Saddam's WMDs . . . . that is where Bush got the idea, from Clinton and his CIA Director, George Tenet . . . . along with every other major intel organization in the world.
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DeleteAs I have said, in my previous response, we are not going to continue this discussion. All this is, for the Left, is a way to divert attention away from the disaster Obama has and is creating in Iraq. You want to discuss Obama's War(s), let's do that. Bill Clinton and his CIA director convinced Bush of the existence of WMDs. So, if anyone lied, it was Clinton and Tenet (the CIA director).
DeleteThere were "live" WMDs and a number of Americans were used to disarm them. These are the facts, whether the Lame Stream cares to report this. A good article on the subject can be found here: http://spectator.org/articles/60689/new-york-times-rediscovers-weapons-mass-destruction-iraq." The reader should know that a significant number of military personnel became sick handling the chemical weapons, a reality that lead the Times to its investigative report, summarized here (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?_r=0).