Fisk - Don't Say We Were Not Warned About This Mess

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Don't Say We Were Not Warned About This Mess

by Robert Fisk The Independent (UK)

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=4144

September 07, 2003

How arrogant was the path to war. As President Bush now desperately tries to cajole the old UN donkey to rescue him from Iraq--he who warned us that the UN was in danger of turning into a League of Nations "talking shop" if it declined him legitimacy for his invasion--we are supposed to believe that no one in Washington could have guessed the future.

Messrs Bush and Blair fantasised their way to war with all those mythical weapons of mass destruction and "imminent threats" from Iraq--whether of the 45-minute variety or not--and of the post-war "liberation", "democracy" and map-changing they were going to bestow upon the region. But the record shows just how many warnings the Bush administration received from sane and decent men in the days before we plunged into this terrible adventure.

Take the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in Washington on the eve of war. Assistant Under Secretary Douglas Feith, one of Rumsfeld's "neo-cons", revealed that an office for "post-war planning" had only been opened three weeks earlier. He and Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman conceded that the Pentagon had been "thinking" about post-war Iraq for 10 months. "There are enormous uncertainties," Feith said. "The most you can do in planning is develop concepts."

US senators at the time were highly suspicious of the "concept" bit. When Democrat Joe Biden asked if anyone in the Bush administration had planned the post-war government of Iraq, Grossman replied that "There are things in our country we're not going to be able to do because of our commitment in Iraq." Richard Lugar, the Republican chairman then asked: "Who will rule Iraq and how? Who will provide security? How long might US troops conceivably remain? Will the United Nations have a role?"

Ex-General Anthony Zinni, once the top man in US Central Command with "peacekeeping" experience in Kosovo, Somalia and (in 1991) northern Iraq, smelled a rat and said so in public. "Do we want to transform Iraq or just transition it out from under the unacceptable regime of Saddam Hussein into a reasonably stable nation? Transformation implies significant changes in forms of governance... Certainly there will not be a spontaneous democracy..."

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