Yes, We Have No WMDs

postedPosted in Politically Incorrect, Rants, War In Iraq on January 26th, 2004 by glennm

The chief U.S. weapons-hunter in occupied Iraq, David Kay, now says that “we are very unlikely to find large stockpiles of weapons. I don’t think they exist.” Ex-Iraq Arms Hunter Blames Data for Failure | LATimes.com. So White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan announced in reaction that “Saddam Hussein’s regime was a gathering threat, and in a post-Sept. 11 world, we must confront gathering threats before it is too late.”

That’s well and true. But is it necessary to lie to your own people, and the world, in order to do so? The sad part is that the Bushies would have had the same overwhelming support of Americans — and the same opposition from the goodie-goodies and pacificsts at the UN and the EU — had they come straight and not manufactured stories about Saddam’s WMD stockpiles. Now, in hindsight, the whole thing is looking very much silly.

It’s way too late to argue that imminent threat of WMDs was not the principal justification for the war. That the Bush Administration’s continued efforts to try to deny and deflect reality shows only their disdain for real democracy or their underlying hubris — or maybe both.

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Internationalizing the Iraqi Occupation

postedPosted in War In Iraq on September 3rd, 2003 by glennm

So having passed the landmark point at which U.S. military deaths in Iraq after the May 1 end of the war — the “cessation of major hostilities” — are more than during the war itself, the Bush Administration is now looking for international and United Nations assistance in the occupation. U.S. Wants Larger U.N. Role in Iraq [washingtonpost.com].

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Car bombs, murdered clerics and busted up water systems are making Iraqis mad and Americans dead. It’s the first sign of the United States retreat, and all because Bush never thought through what would happen after the war in Iraq was over. Repeat after me: “planning is good.”

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Reasons To Believe

postedPosted in War In Iraq on July 10th, 2003 by glennm

America and the Bush Administration are taking a worldwide and much-deserved beating after Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said yesterday that the US “did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass murder.” For instance, the Candian Globe and Mail reports that “US Changes Reason for Invading Iraq.” Rumsfeld’s comments come on the heels of a White House announcement that a previous assertion that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Africa was false. President Bush had included the accusation in his January 28 State of the Union address, even though Sec. of State Powell refused one week later to make the same claim to the United Nations.

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Since Iraqi WMDs are proving elusive at best, this is certainly not going to help the standing of the United States in the global community. Unilateralism is one thing — something I most definitely can approve of — but ginning up fake rationales is quite another. Indeed, conservatives like Dan Pipes have taken things even further than the Administration, arguing that:

WMD was never the basic reason for the war. Nor was it the horrid repression in Iraq. Or the danger Saddam posed to his neighbors.

Talk about political damage control!! Using a public justification that is different from the hidden internal reason for the Iraq war, and one that is increasingly being shown to be based on false or overstated intelligence, makes the Iraq invasion seem much more like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution — a deliberate lie that launched the Vietman War — than the liberation mission it was advertised as to the American people and the world at large.

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