KO on The Downing Street Memos

[Nitrogenica]

Run time: 06:12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo8xsVAYIJA   Posted on YouTube: January 27, 2007 By YouTube Member: jaysonnitro Views on YouTube: 889   Posted on DU: January 30, 2007 By DU Member: Nitrogenica Views on DU: 492

 
There are now 8 leaked Downing Street Memos. Olbermann discusses some of the most important revelations.

[Jack Rabbit]

1. They made the decision to go war and then looked for a case to support it

Is any one surprised?

One could argue that the reasons they found for going to war against Saddam were genuine, even in spite of the ass-backwards approach to decision making, but it's not very convincing, especially in light of the fact that everything the regime spokespeople claimed about Saddam's militiary capabilities and current programs was wrong.

Shortly after the invasion, during the controversy about Ambassador Wilson's article in The New York Times, I wrote this for Democratic underground. I laid out my thesis on how the rhetoric related to the decision to go to war, and it's still a good one:

• The war against Iraq and the occupation of that nation is colonial.
• The purpose of the war and occupation is:
• To take control of Iraq's natural resources and place them in the hands of multinational corporations based in the US which paid the bills for Mr. Bush's political career;
• To assure that the business of reconstructing the infrastructure of a post-Saddam Iraq would go to multinational corporations based in the US which paid the bills for Mr. Bush's political career;
• To impose the neo-liberal economic paradigm on Iraq in order to open markets for multinational corporations based in the US which paid the bills for Mr. Bush's political career and with which native Iraqi businesses cannot compete;
• To initiate the implementation of a grand colonial design put forward in the last decade by a group of rightwing ideologues under the name Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
• The war had nothing to with fighting terrorism, disarming a rogue state of weapons of mass destruction, enforcing UN resolutions or liberating anyone from a brutal dictator.
• Everyone in the Bush administration knew very well they could not sell the war to the American people or to the world for the real reasons.
• In order to sell the war, they alternately claimed the war to be about fighting terrorism, disarming a rogue state of weapons of mass destruction, enforcing UN resolutions and liberating the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator;
• Since those weren't the real reasons for the war, but merely pretexts for public relations purposes, the veracity of facts used to support them were not as important as the impact they had on the public.

As this pertains to the Niger document, the hypothesis would continue that nobody was concerned about it being a forgery because nobody was really concerned whether Saddam was trying to obtain material for nuclear weapons. Regardless of Mr. Bush's personal knowledge of the reliability of the document, the information was seen as something on which to sell the war, not as anything that was an actual concern. The information would be used for public relations.

I heard nothing in this report that disuades me from that theory. I've heard quite a bit that confirms much of that.