The latest
revelations in
The New York Times (actually reported in the British press last month) of Bush and Blair's scheming to go to war against Iraq regardless of facts or authorization from the United Nations is only further evidence that the invasion had nothing to do with what they claimed and that they knew the evidence against Saddam was weak and deliberately lied to make it sound certain.
Last year I got into a debate with some conservative posters at the website of
The Nation. My contention is that the Downing Street Memo's "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" meant facts were being fabricated; the Bushbots argued that "fixed" meant that facts (presumably real ones, even if erroneous) were simply being used to document a case for war.
My argument was (and continues to be) that a well informed person had reason prior to the actual invasion to challenge and reject the junta's case for war against Saddam. Scott Ritter, the former chief UN weapons inspector, asserted that 95% of Saddam's weapons were destroyed when the inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 and that any biological agents Saddam had left for making weapons would have expired by the time the Bush regime began beating the drums of war in the Autumn of 2002. There was the evidence that General Hussein Kamel, then chief of Iraq's chemical weapons production, ordered all chemical weapons destroyed shortly after the end of the Gulf War in 1991. He certainly told the United Nations inspectors that.
There was reason to believe that Saddam had little or nothing. The Bushbots argued by attacking the credibility of Major Ritter and General Kamel. However, UN inspectors in Iraq prior to Bush's invasion found nothing. That is best explained by the obvious fact that there was nothing for them to find. Of course, Bush's defenders would counter that claims that Saddam was cleverly hiding the weapons was a genuine concern and not just noise, but every attempt they made to direct the inspectors where to look turned out to be bogus information.
The undeniable fact is that Major Ritter was correct and General Kamel told the UN inspectors the truth. By the time in question, Bush was demanding that Saddam disarm, yet Saddam had long before disarmed.
The Downing Street Memo tells us that the case against Saddam was "weak". Even the neocons knew this. Yet General Powell went before the United Nations Security Council and told them and us exactly how much of what chemical agents Saddam had, and Mr. Rumsfeld publicly stated exactly where they were. It should be plain by now that neither statement had any basis in fact. At best, the evidence against Saddam was inconclusive and did not warrant such strong and clear statements of fact from General Powell, Mr. Rumsfeld and others in the US regime.
The latest memo, according to
The Times, confirms that Bush and Blair were aware of the weakness of their case: "The memo . . . shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq."
If there was no evidence of weapons, then what was their case for war? It was based demanding Saddam prove a negative -- something akin to defying the law of gravity -- and at best some hunches based on inclusive evidence.
Bush's defenders also resort to their tired tactic of blaming Clinton: "But Clinton thought Saddam had weapons, so he was lying, too." Horsepucky. There are two things wrong with that appeal. First of all, Clinton may have
thought Saddam had weapons, but he never said he
knew it for a fact and didn't go to war saying he knew it for a fact; in that, Bush lied and Clinton did not. Second, Clinton left office on January 20, 2001 and the invasion did not begin until March 18, 2003. What were the Bushies doing all this time? Was there nothing new to confirm that Saddam had weapons? If so, why didn't they share it with the world? If not, why did they make the case against Saddam sound more certain than it was?
Obviously, they had no such evidence. They knew they didn't and lied when they said they did.
Another reason to believe that members of the Bush regime were lying is that were acting like liars. Even though Major Ritter came forward and was willing to testify that Saddam had little in 1998 and even less by late 2002, he was ignored. Suggestions that he was taking money from Saddam were even made. The regime would even resorted to character assassination and Ritter found himself answering questions about stories about his being a pedophile; whether those stories were well founded or not is a red herring in any discussion of whether Ritter was an authority on what Saddam had in the way of biochemical weapons. When Saddam realized that UNSC Resolution 1441 put him in a tight corner, he invited inspectors back to Iraq. The Bush regime's informal Ministry of Truth wasted no time in attempted to undermine the revised inspections. Rather than tell the inspectors where the goods could be found (remember, they "knew" where they were), the regime put its efforts into questioning the integrity or competence of the inspectors and claiming that if they found nothing it was because Saddam was so good at hiding them. It may have been impossible for Saddam to prove he had no weapons, but the last thing the war mongers in the Bush regime wanted was for a thorough search to be made of Iraq for those weapons and find little or nothing. It was not in Mr. Bush's interest to wait for the inspectors to complete their task, and he didn't.
The pattern of character assassination, used against Major Ritter and the UN inspectors, continued after the invasion was a
fait accompli. When Ambassador Joseph Wilson came forward in a piece for
The New York Times to show how Mr. Bush used erroneous information in his 2003 State of the Union about Saddam's alleged attempts to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, we suddenly found out that Mrs. Wilson worked for the CIA and were told she may have arranged for his fact finding mission in 2002 ("nepotism"). The charges of nepotism ignored the fact that Wilson, a former acting Ambassador to Iraq and a recognized expert on the African uranium industry, was one of the best qualified people available for the job. The assertion that "The President
(sic) and Ambassador Wilson wrong" is simply false. The document that purported to show that Saddam was looking to buy yellowcake from Niger turned out to be a forgery; Ambassador Wilson reported that there was no evidence of an attempt by Saddam to buy yellowcake from Niger and that even if he tried, he probably couldn't get his hands on it, any way. That was Wilson's conclusion and it was also what the US Ambassador to Niger had earlier concluded.
The Wilson affair reveals how far the regime's Ministry of Truth is willing to go over so little. After all, Ambassador Wilson did not completely undermine the Bush's pre-war case against Iraq. He only showed that a sentence in Mr. Bush put in his 2003 SOTU was incorrect and that people in the White House should have know that it was. However, Wilson's story doesn't present a problem to the regime because Bush said Saddam was attempting to buy yellowcake when he should have known that there was nothing to support the assertion. If that was the only problem with the regime's case for war, who would care? Even if an erroneous statement found its way into the SOTU, who would care? If US soldiers had marched up the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and found Iraq awash in weapons-grad chemicals and biological agents and archives full of documentation of the Iraqi government supplying al Qaida, who would have cared about Mr. Bush talking about one little uranium deal in the SOTU that turned out to have never happened? Would Wilson have even bothered to write his piece for
The Times? It would have been forgotten as fast as it was read.
The problem that members of the regime had with Wilson's story is not that it showed that they got something wrong, but it focused attention on how they managed to get everything wrong. Broadly speaking, there is not one pre-war assertion by the Bush regime or the Blair government about Saddam's weapons or his ties to al Qaida or other international terrorists that has panned out. That is even more remarkable than if they had managed to get everything right. Wilson's story shows that at best, Bush and his aides were not concerned about the facts. Rather, they were busy fixing facts to the policy, whether they knew they were real facts or not.
And "fixed" in this case means "fabricated." They either knew the statements were false or that they were not based on inconvertible evidence. When they said they knew, they didn't. They lied.
It was not lost on me that the Bush apologists at
The Nation, while making feeble attempts to refute my arguments, did not address the evidence of the very existence of the Office of Special Plans. Long before Seymour Hersh detailed the OSP's operations in the
New Yorker (May 2003, just after Saddam's fall from power), it was reported in the British press. I first learned of it in an
article by Julian Borger in
The Guardian in October 2002. Again, if members of the Bush regime had any confidence in the case they were making, they wouldn't have tasked Doug Feith to cherry pick intelligence reports or edit ambiguous language out of them. The existence of the OSP and the systematic politicization of intelligence was, for me, the single greatest piece of evidence
prior to the war that the case against Iraq was not based on facts. This is how liars behave, not honest men.
When I marched against the war prior to its initiation, I did so as an informed citizen. Today, when I call for the impeachment of Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other members of the regime and their indictment and trial for war crimes, I do that also as an informed citizen. Bush and his aides, with their silly unitary executive theory, are guilty of many betrayals of American democratic principles. However, there can be no greater betrayal of a democratic state than when the commander-in-chief lies to the citizens about his reasons for going to war.
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