The thread on Joe Wilson got me thinking about this, but I didn’t want to start a hijack. Besides, this question deserves its own debate.
Here’s the timeline, as posted in the other thread:
Here’s how we know the documents were forged (from The New Yorker 03/31/03):
More here.
So who forged the documents? The article suggests it was British intelligence, but leaves the question open, also mentioning The Iraqi exile community, the Italians and the French (??) as suspects. More detail on those theories here. After two years of investigation of the matter, the FBI seems to have come up with bupkis.
Who had a motive? This seems fertile ground for conspiracy theorists, so surely there must be plenty of ideas around. Here are some possible suspects, starting with those mentioned by The New Yorker:
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British intelligence. (Were the British really that eager to go to war?)
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The Italians. The Italians may have been the conduit for the documents but I’d be surprised if they were the source. No motive. (Though there is the notion that the Italians were conned into buying the documents by a grifter who forged them.)
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The French. Huh? What possible motive would the French have? Well, according to the Italians, the French wanted to trick the US into making unsupportable claims, thus making supporters of war look foolish. Cite. Seems implausible.That’s a plan that could (and did) backfire, if its goal was to keep the US out of a war with Iraq.
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Iraqi exiles. Plausible. One can at least see their motive. And it would explain the amateurish quality of the documents.
(on to the conspiracy theories…)
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Iranian intelligence. The US goes to war, takes out the hated Sunni/Baathist regime in Iraq and opens the door for Iraq’s Shiite majority (who will presumably be friendly to their ideological brethren in Iran).
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Israel. A US war against Iraq helps Israel deal with its most formidable enemy in the region. On the other hand, the faked documents sound amateurish. Not what you’d expect from Mossad.
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US Intelligence. The Bush administration needed casus belli. Did US operatives try to create documents that would justify war? Not likely. The US seems to have been suspicious of the documents all along. (Which is why Wilson was sent to investigate.)
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[Your theory here.]
So who forged these documents? And why? And why haven’t they been traced to their ultimate source by now?