I’m sorry but that is simply and plainly false. Even the Bush administration deliberately avoided stating that Iraq was involved in 9/11, and based their case for war on the alleged possession on WMDs. There was no evidence at all Iraq was involved in 9/11 and no informed person believed they were.
Iran wasn’t even a serious Western threat before the “Axis of Evil” speech (which they saw as incredibly offensive and irresponsible, and which may partly be why they’re so stubborn about their nuke program now). Al Qaeda was a bunch of Egyptians and Arabians, with Arabian money. If you’re going to blame a state, blame the states that armed the Afghan mujahadeen back in the 1980’s. Oh, wait, that was us and our allies.
As for Iraqi WMD’s, they were* confirmed destroyed *before the USA went in. We just had really determined propaganda outfits pooh-poohing that. I know, I was taken in.
I have never thought that invading Iraq was a good idea, or that the invasion was justified. I opposed the idea vociferously when US public opinion was in favor of it. At that point in time, my opinion was dismissed out of hand.
But even when I was being dismissed as an out-of-touch wet blanket, I understood that there were solid arguments to support military intervention in Iraq. Those reasons were never expressed more clearly than in the rhetoric put forth by Chistopher Hitchens. Even when the man was wrong, he wasn’t wrong by much.
It pained me to see him dismissed as an apologist for the Neocons, and as a proponent of right-wing imperialism, simply because he made a strong case that the powers-that-were should act to reign in a blatant despot. Saddam was a continuously active threat to his own people, all of his neighbors, and to the larger balance of world peace. He was a festering, malignant, threatening piece of shit.
Hitchens did nor care whether Weapons of Mass Destruction were ever present in Iraq, he just thought that the regime should be ended by means of military force. I only disagree with Hitchens in that I thought the regime could have, and should have, been ended by means that did not involve use of military force.
You’re about half right. No informed person believed that Iraq was in league with al Qaeda, but the Bush administration did everything it could to encourage uninformed people, including the majority of Americans, to believe that it was. Cheney flogged the bogus Atta meeting in Prague long after it was discredited; they used torture to wring a false confession out of some poor bastard that Iraq had an al Qaeda training camp at Salman Pak; Bush’s speeches always seemed to manage to mention 9-11 and Saddam in the same sentence; and the October 2002 so-called authorization for war contained a condition that within 48 hours of invading, Bush had to certify several things to Congress in writing, including that " acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."
No, they weren’t. Blix and his inspectors had been in Iraq for four months, which was not quite long enough to confirm that every last WMD had been destroyed.
However, it was long enough to confirm that our intelligence had been wrong — that there were no WMDs at the facilities that the CIA had identified as factories or stockpiles, and that in many cases the sites were so clearly unsuitable or long abandoned, that it was obvious that they could not have had WMDs for several years. And it was long enough for Blix to report that Iraq was now cooperating with the inspectors not just actively, but proactively, that the remaining unanswered questions (mostly about missing documentation for destroyed weapons) could be cleared up in a few more months, and that as long as the inspectors were there, Iraq was not an international threat.
In other words, there is no doubt that Bush was lying, and knew he was lying, when he signed the letter to Congress saying nothing short of war could protect the US from Iraq.
There was a period of some years in which the words “Saddam” and “9/11” were continually included in the same sentence by Bush. The intention was plain then, as it is now.
You just have to listen to the construction of speech after speeches to see the intent - it seriously contributed to, if memory serves - 69% on the US population believing Saddam was involved in 9/11.
Plus there was this small matter:
You are missing UNSCOM - in situ and inspecting/searching for SEVEN years:
But IIRC they were not allowed access to the Presidential compounds during the 90’s, so the search was not exhaustive.
That aside, Ritter was entitled to his opinion, but he was not authorized to speak for UNSCOM, so until you find an official statement from them, his statement is no more (and no less) than his expert opinion.
In any case, he made the statement in 1999, some six months after the inspectors had left Iraq (and contrary to even the recent MSNBC anti-war documentary, Saddam did not kick them out in December 1998. The UN pulled them out, after Clinton warned the UN that he was about to start bombing.) Even if Ritter was correct in 1999, nearly four years without inspections was more than enough time to render his assessment obsolete by late 2002.
But that’s not really the point, because you set the bar too high. There was no need to confirm that all WMDs had been destroyed; there was only the need to prove that the CIA’s estimates had been wrong, and that Chalabi’s paid defectors had been lying, and that Iraq was no threat to the US. And Blix did prove that before Bush invaded.
My point was you omitted UNSCOM.
In relation to your response, how long do you think it takes to acquire the infrastructure to create WMD - assuming the USA isn’t supplying the raw materials this time? Yiou seem to believe you’ll be up and running in, what 30-40 months? The Winter friggin Olympics takes the better part of a decade …
I’d encourage you to discard your own prejudices and read that final para again - the words of a 7-year, on the ground expert on Iraqi capability.
On what planet? There was no evidence of any Iraqi involvement in 9/11, and no ongoing debate about it because there was nothing to debate. Bush and company sure liked to say 9/11 and Iraq a lot in the same sentence, but not even they said Iraq was linked to 9/11. There was no uncertainty.
Aside from it being chemical rather than biological weapons that Iraq had used in the past, more to the point Iraq had a perfect opportunity to use them against the US and coalition troops back in 1991 while at war with the US and said coalition before their programs and stockpiles were destroyed and chose not to. The idea that Iraq could attack the US soil with chemical weapons in 2003 (or 1991 for that matter) was idiotic to the extreme and had absolutely no credibility to it.
There was nothing to omit. You have yet to produce an official cite from UNSCOM. Ritter was representing only himself when he made the statement you quoted. I grant his expertise, but not his infallibility. And if by chance you do find an official statement from UNSCOM saying there are no WMDs in Iraq, it will still be based on information that was over four years out of date when Bush invaded.
If you already have active chemical factories producing things like bleach or battery acid, as most industrialized countries do, then I would guess it would take only a few months to convert them to something producing chemical weapons. If you mean starting from scratch, I can tell you that in 1943, the site of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in SE Washington was little more than sand and sagebrush, plus a few small farming towns with a combined population of about 1500. By 1945, it had produced the plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. And that was when it had never been done before.
If I am prejudiced on this subject, it’s in the direction of wanting Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice to burn in hell for misleading the US into a horrible war, but I’m not so prejudiced that I can ignore obvious facts. I’ve already conceded that Ritter may have been right when he made that statement in 1999, but if you truly think that his assessment has no expiration date, then I suggest that it is you who are being blinded by prejudice.
Two weeks before Bush invaded, Hans Blix filed a report to the UN Security Council, saying that great progress had been made — more than enough to prove that the CIA worst-case scenarios had been wrong — but that he would need a few more months to fully account for all the previously known WMDs. Blix certainly had access to all the data that UNSCOM had gathered prior to 1999, plus all the data that his UNMOVIC team had accumulated in its four months of intensive inspections from Nov 2002 to March 2003.
Are you seriously maintaining that Scott Ritter, speaking in 1999, had more information on Iraq’s 2003 capability than Hans Blix did? Or are you saying that Blix was incompetent, or Bush’s tool?
I don’t think anybody here has made that claim. Certainly not me.
Really? By that point, Arab Nationalists / Pan-Arabists / Baathist etc. and the various Islamist groups had been mortal enemies for more that fifty years. Anybody familiar with the assassination of Anwar Sadat should have dismissed the the Iraq-9/11 link out of hand. To do otherwise was, if not idiotic, then so profoundly ignorant as to be indistinguishable from the same.
Probably all of them.
As noted, Iraq used chemical, (not biological) weapons, first against Iran and later against dissident Iraqis, but UNSCOM had demonstrated that they had dismantled those programs before 2001. (Appeals to presidential palaces are silly. Whatever they might have been able to store in those locations, (not much), there was ample evidence that there was no production going on, there.) The U.S. proved that we knew that there were no chemical factories when our army bypassed every “suspected” site during the invasion, not even bothering to secure them for future examination. We already knew nothing was there.
Nope. Pretty much idiotic.
Claims for “sponsor[ship] on a regular basis” are utterly absurd.
From the State Department’s Overview of State-Sponsored Terrorism
(This was from the actual State Department web site that was still up in 2004, long after we had made hash of our invasion. It was later removed when it proved to be too embarrassing to the Bush administration:
[url=http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2001/html/10249.htm])
Now let’s examine this list of “support.”
The MEK was/is a group that was directed at destabilizing Iran. They were mostly inactive, but what activity they performed was limited to anti-Iran operations. They were such terrible terrorists, that the U.S. signed them up as allies as soon as we had secured Iraq.
The PKK is one of several groups engaged in long-term power struggles over who will fight Iraq and Turkey to establish a new Kurdish state; they are not active in “international terrorism.” (In fact, U.S. agencies have reported that they foreswore violence, resorting to “diplomatic” channels in 2000, although I would not be surprised that they have been caught up in the current violence). It seems unlikely that they were being supported by Hussein, who would be as threatened by the Kurdish independence movement as Turkey is.
The support of the PLF is not given a date, but then State go on to insinuate a direct connection by discussing activities of the slightly different PLFP. Meanwhile, the most recent attack directly connected to the PLF seems to have occurred in the 1980s. There is no established connection between the PLPF and the pre-invasion Iraq. The insinuation by State is clearly one intended to mislead by innuendo.
Including the Abu Nidal Organization is a bad joke. Prior to 2001, Iraq appears to have allowed Abu Nidal, himself, to retire to Iraq–eleven years after his last terrorist activity, which was, itself, an attack on a PLO officer in a bit of internecine warfare.
al Zarqawi had some surgery or other medical attention and left the country without any connection with the Ba’ath regime.
Beyond that, we have only the sporadic donation of money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. However, Hussein never announced that he would reward the families of all such bombers, (and, in fact, he gave out only a few such donations–much as a few of our Saudi “allies” have done). With his hit-or-miss approach to donations and the fact that he always made the award after the fact, it was clearly a PR move on his part to garner favor with the Arab community that basically hatred and feared him and there is no evidence that his donations actually influenced the decision of any suicide bomber.
So the “support” for terrorism amounts to allowing a couple of people to retire from terrorism, completely, or get medical attention, a failure to attack some groups that were operating within his own borders, and some lip service with no material aid in support of a few Palestinian groups for the purposes of bolstering his own image without actually extending any assistance.
Hussein was clearly in retrenchment at that time, had disassembled his own chemical program, had never provided serious support for any actual terrorists, had let the army deteriorate to the point where several of his generals were willing to surrender their entire divisions when we invaded, and was basically looking to keep his head down and avoid being attacked. There was never a legitimate reason to invade.
I cannot think of any topic on which Hitchens spoke with knowledge or authority, but I suppose if he had recommended a good restaurant I’d have considered it. Even when he came close to making a point, he generally overstated the matter to the point that he usually seemed to be a caricature of himself.
Yeah. I would dismiss him.
Ignorance is always distinguishable from idiocy, Worrying you think otherwise.
The general public mostly neither knew nor cared about the intricacies of middle-east politics. Again, what isn’t in doubt is that Iraq sponsored and supported terrorism, that is enough for many people to swallow any implied links to western attacks. I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to label those people as idiots though.
However, I don’t think Hitchens himself (pretty savvy on that front) was ever convinced of a specific 9-11 link though. I stand to be corrected though.
Nothing at all? not literature? not any historical subject? Even his worst enemies wouldn’t make that claim. Sounds to me like no matter what he says you’d find fault. Hardly makes for reasoned debate.
Well I guess then the important thing is that you’ve found a subject matter that allows you to feel superior to him, good for you.
For the record, statistician and self-described “atrocitologist” Matthew White, author of The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, is mof the stated opinion that the Iraq war casualties probably have been overestimated. He puts the total at around 150,000 (civilians included).
Not that that makes it any less horrible. But it’s important to try and be accurate.
Except it was known at the time that he had forbidden support for any attack against Western interests, including executing someone who suggested it.
Money they desperately needed to live, thanks to the charming Israeli custom of bulldozing the homes of (already dead) suicide bombers, sometimes throwing three or four generations of a family into instant destitution.
I agree with you that it was a PR stunt rather than evidence of his generosity, but Bush and his minions portrayed it as a recruiting aid for suicide bombers, which was ludicrous.