Yep. It does turn out that we found a few rusting, useless stockpiles hidden & lost in the desert.
And like you said, those missiles that had been illegally converted. (Not to hit the USA, modified to hit Israel).
Many thought that, but it didnt seem to occur.
Cheney never said that.
It was Condi Rice.
This tired bullshit again. Yes, an October 2002 report from the CIA was horribly wrong, because it was based on lies from Chalabi’s paid defectors (e.g. “Curveball”), along with sheer guesswork based on projections about what we knew in 1998, which was the last time UN inspectors had been on the ground.
At least you didn’t give a list of quotes from Democrats saying they thought Saddam had WMDs, which were also based on the best (very poor) information available in 2002. Thanks for that.
To be fair, all of the above had to err on the side of caution. But none of that matters, because the UN inspectors went back into Iraq in late November of 2002, and were quickly able to determine that the CIA estimates were ridiculously wrong, and that Chalabi’s paid liars were liars.
Several weeks before Bush invaded, the UN inspectors had visited every single site that the CIA had identified as a possible WMD facility. They used helicopters to swoop in without warning. They used ground-penetrating radar to look for hidden basements. They found zip, zero, nada. Many of the sites had clearly been abandoned for several years. One CIA-designated chemical weapons factory didn’t even have running water.
So Bush knew, weeks before he invaded, that the CIA intel was complete garbage. Yet he and his admin continued to tell the American people that there was NO DOUBT that Saddam had WMDs.
May he burn in hell.
Rachel Maddow made a pretty convincing case that it was all about oil.
The oil conspiracy theory has always been nonsensical. Lose thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, when for a fraction of that the US could have gotten oil out of its shale with no loss of life. Riiight…
Saddam’s death was inevitable. And I think it’s unlikely his regime would have survived his death by long. People like Saddam don’t have strong successors. Because anyone who’s a potential strong successor after you die is a potential rival when you’re alive. The first thing somebody like Saddam does when he seizes power is kill everyone else who is like Saddam and capable of seizing power. (Yes, North Korea seems to have somehow been able to build a cult of personality around a dynasty. But that’s not the way things normally work.)
The problem with Saddam, as far as the Bush administration was concerned, wasn’t that he was going to live forever or that his regime would last forever. The problem was that he probably wasn’t going to die and his regime wasn’t going to collapse while Bush was in office. Unless Bush did something about it.
Considering they predicted the war would only last weeks and wouldn’t cost thousands of lives or trillions of dollars this isn’t really a good criticism.
John Mace, how is the Plame affair not proof that Bush lied about it? Bush said Iraq was pursuing fissile material. Wilson knew that to be a lie and exposed it. Bush outed his wife as revenge.
That and lying about the DOE and State assessments about centrifuge technology are pretty well documented.
If Bush wanted cheaper oil, all he had to do was lift the sanctions that prevented Iraq from selling its oil. One of his alleged reasons to invade was that Saddam was selling more oil than allowed.
ETA: and speaking of Republican logic, many of the same people who say it wasn’t Bush’s fault because he got bad intelligence, have still not forgiven Susan Rice for giving the CIA’s best assessment of Benghazi.
Who said anything about cheaper oil? Bush, Cheney, and pretty much his entire cabinet were heavily invested in oil companies. The last thing they wanted was to see the price of oil come down. They wanted control of Iraqi oil not seeing it get dumped on the world market.
The whole idea behind the movie “Fahrenheit 9/11” is that the Iraq invasion was done to keep Halliburton in business.
Wouldn’t surprise me.
Someone mentioned the PNAC but I don’t think anyone linked to the letter they sent Bill Clinton in 1998. This letter is signed by several people who would become important members of the George W. Bush administration, including Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Armitage. In it, they warn of the thread of WMDs and urge Clinton to seek regime change in Iraq. Apparently the purpose of the letter was just to articulate a viewpoint, since these people clearly had no sway with Clinton. Regardless, Clinton did instigate a brief bombing campaign at the end of the year, approved some funding for Iraqi opposition groups, and bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan due to alleged Iraqi connections. In my view Clinton blundered and didn’t accomplish anything. But I digress.
Money quote from the letter:
“Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.”
Basically, we’ve made up our minds and that’s that. No amount of inspections or intelligence to the contrary can sway us. But… why? Pure stubbornness? To me this would seem to imply that even in 1998, the WMD issue was an excuse, not their actual motivation. I can’t say I know what their actual motivation was. Even if Halliburton was Cheney’s motive, I kind of doubt it was everyone else’s. Cheney wasn’t a member of the PNAC and I have no idea if he was generally on board with them or had his own separate agenda.
This claim, however, is not supported by history. The Shale Revolution was only a speculative goal in 2002. As late as 2004, actual shale oil production was extremely modest and the genuine spike in production did not occur until around 2010. When the war was being plotted around 1998, there was no reason for the average politician or even industry leader to be able to predict Shale Oil production with the speed that it occurred.
Even at the time that the U.S. was making active war preparations, idiots in and alongside the Bush administration were claiming that “Iraq” could use its own oil proceeds to cover the cost of the war, (ignoring the huge debt already claimed by the other Gulf states against Hussein for his little adventure against Kuwait).
I do not know the “real” reasons for Bush’s eagerness to go to war, but a number of points have been mentioned in this thread while several have not.
[ul]
[li]PNAC, supported by the nonsensical term paper from Wolfowitz (that claimed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. liberators with open arms, just as Germans had in 1945) promoted the idea that the U.S. could bring Iraq into “our side” in any regional politics, playing against Iran, Saudi Arabia, and others.[/li][li]PNAC’s claims also included the idea of using Iraqi oil as a counter-weight to OPEC.[/li][li]G W Bush was on the record, prior to the 2000 election, claiming that his father should have not stopped at the end of the First Gulf War, but should have overthrown Hussein and the Baath party at that time.[/li][li]Claims that Bush wanted to retaliate against Iraq for the bungled attempt to assassinate his father are harder to verify, but they appear to be consistent with aspects of his personality.[/ul][/li]
= = =
While these quotes do explain why Bush focused on WMD for his rationalization of the war, they, unfortunately, provide no rationale or justification for the actions he actually took.
They do provide a cover for the claims that he made. However, if one reviews the citations, one will note that every statement was delivered before November, 2002. All sorts of people had all sorts of opinions regarding Hussein’s intentions to create (and, perhaps wield), WMD through October, 2002.
However, beginning in November, 2002, the UN sent in inspection teams who discovered in every case that Hussein had, indeed, dismantled his sites to create, test, store, or launch Weapons of Mass Destruction. By the time that the war was launched, all the serious evidence indicated that Hussein/Iraq was no longer a threat to any of his neighbors, and particularly not to the U.S. On top of the negative results provided by the inspection teams of UNMOVIC and the IAEA, there was the repeated failure of the Bush administration to provide anything not risible to support their claims of continuing WMD activity.
The 18 advertising flacks hired to be the Office of Special Plans, (not reporting to anyone in the intelligence services, although billed to the Pentagon), filtering the actual reports from the CIA and Army Intelligence services in order to provide the best propaganda for the war effort, did a great job in providing Bush and Fox news with talking points–but were repeatedly shown to have lied by press agencies not tied to the administration.
To put a cap on the issue, the armed forces did not bother to seize or even inspect a single alleged WMD site during the invasion, indicating pretty well that everyone in the administration knew that the claims were lies.
In the discussion of the Bush Administration’s real intentions, I am surprised that nobody has brought up this little incident:
I think that it makes clear that there are only two options to seriously consider:
(1) The Bush Administration’s claim of being worried that Saddam had WMD’s that could end up in the hands of terrorists was an utter lie. I am not saying that they knew there were no WMD’s but they clearly weren’t particularly worried about them.
(2) The Bush Administration was so incompetent that an invasion to prevent the WMDs from getting into the hands of terrorists actually became a mission to insure that those WMDs got in the hands of people who would be much more likely than Saddam to sell them to terrorists…or whoever would be willing to give them a little cash. The fact that disaster did not ensue was only because the Administration’s belief that Saddam had such weapons was wrong.
So, if you really don’t want to believe that the Bush Administration was mendacious, you can I guess just believe that they were so mind-bogglingly incompetent that they planned an invasion that maximized the possibility that what they most feared would happen would in fact happen. I don’t really see what the other options are.
[Edit: Whoops…I do see that tomndebb made essentially this point in the last sentence of the previous post. However, it really needs to be emphasized.]
Actually many did welcome us. Some did not.
Well, we knew they were empty.
And, ironically, Saddam Hussain himself. Prior to the First Gulf War, Saddam and Shia Iran fought to a standstill. Then Saddam attacked Kuwait and got his military wrecked by the Americans. Suddenly he was no longer as strong as Iran, which had reasons to flatten him. (For instance, Saddam, a Sunni, ruled over a largely Shia population.)
Saddam had to convince Hans Blix that he wasn’t building WMDs while convincing Iran that he was building WMDs. Saddam only really need to fool Iran. I would hope US intelligence was too sophisticated to fall for that. But it’s very easy to channel misinformation to the person in charge.
Then there was lying by intelligence agents in Iraq (I wonder if they got paid per rumor collected) – I don’t mean agents loyal to Saddam, of course. There were random coincidences (apparently strong rockets “suitable” for carrying WMDs… were built wrongly by a relative of Saddam). Sadly, this meant there was some (very small amount of) “proof” that Saddam had an active WMD program.
Intelligence is an uncertain business at the best of times. You might have four agents telling you there’s no WMDs and one agent telling you there are, and you have to decide if you want to take a chance on that one agent being wrong. A properly-managed program will separate the wheat from the chaff and tell the decision makers what they are sure about and what they’re not sure about. A mismanaged program could deliberately focus on the falsehoods.
I’ve been reading several publications on the White House Chief of Staff system (such as The Gatekeepers and the White House Transition Project). The CoS is supposed to channel everything to the president, through himself or herself, or trusted deputies. Every piece of paper (and I assume every email; the rules are older than email), every meeting, every phone call… and failing to do so has consequences. (Supposedly Nixon’s formerly-reliable CoS Haldemann stopped the first attempt to burgle the Democrats, by telling the “cowboys” to knock it off and forbidding them from meeting with Nixon and feeding Nixon’s paranoid impulses. Unfortunately Haldemann failed to prevent later meetings, and without an “adult in the room” Nixon gave the go-ahead.)
Right now General Kelly is trying to act as Trump’s CoS. He is controlling who Trump meets with, what paper he sees and at least some of his phone calls. It won’t work though. Trump has a cell phone, watches Fox News, reads Breitbart on the internet and won’t stop reading Twitter. He also contradicts his own speeches (written by someone appointed by Kelly) a day or two afterward. That’s one example of when the CoS system breaks down.
With the level of control over who the president speaks with and what he or she sees, it’s easy for a “bad” CoS (or vice president basically acting like one) to feed whatever intel they want to the president. “Digested” intelligence would include some sort of reliability score. Cheney consumed “undigested” intelligence, passing that onto Bush. As a result, it’s possible that Bush truly believed the false information and was effectively blameless. Possible, but not really plausible, IMO. The CoS gets to see the daily brief, but I don’t think they get to edit it.
With the level of control that Cheney exercised and the way in which Cheney accepted/used the output from the Office of Special Plans, Cheney did not have a need to edit the information; it had been edited before he (or Andrew Card) ever saw it.
This does not absolve GWB. It was his lackadaisical acceptance of anything that he felt was true that caused him to accept the OSP bullshit, even when report after report was contradicted by facts presented elsewhere.
I would dial those that welcomed us to some, many actually did not welcome us.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=8222676&postcount=6
I’ve seen the debates over the evidence and the evidence itself, and my opinion has not been changed from what it was at the time. That is, that the Bush administration thought, more or less, that regardless of whether the sanctions were working or not, that Saddam had to go. Period. They really did think that it was for the best. That certainty on their part, contributed strongly to their eagerness to believe the worst possibilities which could be guessed at, based on the intelligence reports, and on Saddam’s own continuously defiant behavior.
I am convinced by the weight of all the evidence, that although the motivations of many individuals in the administration were “colored” by chances for various kinds of personal profit or advancement, that nevertheless, on a rudimentary level, they convinced themselves that it was best for American interests to pretend that the intelligence reports were far more reliable than they seemed to be, when read without the bias that they had.
If nothing else, because they thought that it was an obnoxious accident that the first invasion of Iraq had been halted so early (darn that Saddam for accepting Bush Sr’s terms), and they wanted to go back and “do things right.” I clearly remember there was a great deal of complaining back in 1991, that we HAD stopped before reaching Baghdad, and toppling Saddam, complaints against which had been used here politically to oppose Bush Sr. at the time.
I suggest that the real explanation for the infamous interchange where Bush jr was assured that WMD’s were a “slam dunk,” was not at all about reasons to go to war. It was entirely about after the fact, being able to claim that war was necessary.
In short, my answer to the OP is, that Bush jr was convinced that it was important to take out Saddam; he knew that his opportunity to do so, would be impeded by SEEMING success of the sanctions and inspections; time was running short, as the inspections were gradually becoming less politically viable; so the Bush administration decided to act while they could, and counted on finding just enough left over WMD’s, as well as the much ballyhooed mobile biochemical manufacturing facilities, that the American people and the world in general would, grudgingly or not, accept the fait accompli of the war’s outcome.
Nothing any grander than that, I’m afraid.