FAIR takes a look at what pundits had to say about Iraq back in the spring of 2003. Some of my favorites:
“The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war.”
(Fox News Channel‘s Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)
“What’s he going to talk about a year from now, the fact that the war went too well and it’s over? I mean, don’t these things sort of lose their–Isn’t there a fresh date on some of these debate points?”
(MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, speaking about Howard Dean–4/9/03)
“Over the next couple of weeks when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing, the fact that this war was attacked by the left and so the right was so vindicated, I think, really means that the left is going to have to hang its head for three or four more years.”
(Fox News Channel’s Dick Morris, 4/9/03)
“Speaking to the U.N. Security Council last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell made so strong a case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is in material breach of U.N. resolutions that only the duped, the dumb and the desperate could ignore it.”
(Cal Thomas, syndicated column, 2/12/03)
It would be nice if we could hold politicians responsible for their actions.
Who do you think everyone will blame for the massive Federal debt in forty years?
Mike Sylvester
I just heard recently that documents found show that Saddam’s top generals that reported directly to him thought he had the WMDs. They planned on using them when attacked. It was not until the eve of the invasion that he told them that Iraq really didn’t have them, at least not anymore.
I know many will try to test the validity of that, and we couldn’t prove or disprove that here.
Just assume for a second that this is true. Does that change anything? If he convinced his closest military leaders that he had WMDs, how could we not be convinced as well? Can the CIA or NSA ever get better intel than the military leaders of a given country have on their own operations?
Links on above documents:
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20060316.aspx
http://www.postchronicle.com/news/security/article_21210467.shtml
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/694980.html
Jason, there is a difference. Saddam’s generals assumed that he had WMD. They had no reason to disbelieve the impression he left on them, and certainly had no reason to investigate within their own government. Do you investigate everything your boss tells you or implies to you, or do you mostly take his or her word for it?
The United States claimed to have irrefutable, objective, direct evidence of Saddam’s WMD. Colin Powell stood in front of the United Nations with aerial photos, explaining what various things were and how they were related to Iraq’s WMD program. Saddam’s generals believed that he had WMD because they made a reasonable assumption that the leader of a country would be forthright with his military about the assets at their disposal. The US government was not relying on Saddam’s word. They were relying on supposedly objective evidence that was spectacularly and inexcusably wrong. If we are going to fight a war that results in the death of thousands of young soldiers and many more civilians, then yes, I expect there to be damn good evidence supporting our reason for going in there.
Right, the US was not relying on Saddam’s word, at least not directly. I assume that Powell was not just lying his butt off, some think he was. So, my assumption is that they had these arial pictures showing boxes, trucks, buildings, etc. Then, when they showed these to their sources inside Iraq, they said “That is the mobile biowarfare lab, that is the nuke plant, etc…”. I really think the US sources felt they knew what they were talking about. After all, they had heard their commanders talk about those places.
So, even with photos and other hi-tech methods to spy, we end up depending on the intel given to us from people on the inside. That is the source (at least I assume) of Powell’s explaniations. When they heard the same thing from 2, 5 or 10 people, they start to say that the evidence is “irrefutable”.
If not this way, then how to we get “irrefutable” evidence? James Bond?
I guess I forgot to include Colin Powell’s whopper to the UN:
The Bush administration was wrong about the need to rush in. You can ascribe the best of intentions, I don’t, but it doesn’t matter. They were wrong. The Bush administration was wrong about the danger posed by Iraq. You can ascribe the best of intentions, I don’t, but again it doesn’t matter. They were wrong. The Bush administration was wrong about the resources needed to occupy Iraq after the invasion was completed. Again, you can ascribe the best of intentions. But, still, they were wrong.
On a decision of this magnitude, intentions don’t matter a great deal. Because the Bush administration was so horribly wrong, America is suffering greatly in blood and treasure. How much more wrong do they and their supporters have to be before you throw the bums out and decide to conduct a withering examination to determine exactly how and why they screwed it up so badly? If their screw ups were honest, just get rid of them. If their screw ups were the result of negligence or nefarious intent, punish them.
As a conjecture, Saddam, having used poison gas on the Iranian Army and his own people, would have had an interest in those people believing he still had WMD for the terror effect of such weapons, while not giving the US any pretext for an invasion by destroying the weapons. How do you go about achieving these two utterly contradictory goals? By getting rid of the weapons and then playing a hide and seek game with the international inspectors. In this way his own citizens wouldn’t know whether he had the weapons or not, but he could count on the US to keep pointing a finger at him. This solidified his position inside Iraq by sowing doubt in Iraqis as to whether he really did still have the weapons while leaving the international community divided about what was going on.
“If their screw ups were honest, just get rid of them. If their screw ups were the result of negligence or nefarious intent, punish them.”
Agreed on the second point. However, if the screw up was honest, do you really feel someone else would not have been fooled? With the same information, would President Gore had made the same choice? If the answer to that is “No”, then is that a good thing? If another situation came up with the same level of risk and intel, would it be irresponsiable NOT to act?
We can look back and decide that we were fooled and the invasion was wrong. But was it wrong because of what we know now, or should we have known then?
Do I wish we could go back and inform the people of 2003 what we know now, sure. Do I want someone in office that would have refused to act with that level of information in their hands? I’m not sure.
I would have more respect for a 2008 candidate who says:
“If I were reading the same informaion as the Pres had in 2003, I would have acted the same way. (Or, in the case of many in Congress, I DID act the same way). However, with what we have learned in Iraq, this (insert plan here) is how we will avoid future mistakes without failing to react when needed.”
However, replacing everyone simply because they were wrong with someone else who would be just a wrong does not float. Again this leaves out thoughts of bad intent or ignorance.
I agree with Jason – our Government acted on the best info it had including info supplied by other allies. Let’s not forget the truck convoys that were observed leaving Iraq going into Syria or the 14 bunkers that were so radioative they couldn’t be entered (which by the way have not been mentioned again) as reported on Fox. Of course the thousands of civilianst killed by Saddam yearly, the utterly deployable state of everyday living endured by the Iraq people probably wouldn’t have resulted in our intervention but in a perfect world…I’ve find nothing more distasteful than a “woulda, coulda, shoulda” attitude adopted by folks that have never been called on to serve.
Seems to me that if you have a business and the management team intiates a screw up of this magnitude, regardless of intentions, you fire them. I’m not sure why we should give more leniency to the folks who brought us the Iraq War.
And that’s assuming their intentions were pure. For my part, I think the neo-cons who dominated the early Bush administration wanted to go to war in Iraq for the reasons expressed in, among other places, PNAC’s 1998 letter to President Clinton. I think 9/11 gave them a window of opportunity to effect regime change in Iraq. So, you witnessed a parade of administration officials making public statements conflating al Qaeda, 9/11, Saddam Hussein, and Iraq. In public, at least, they emphasized any scrap of evidence that suggested Iraq posed a threat and minimized or ignored any evidence that questioned that assumption. The rush to war in 2003 had nothing to do with any imminency of the alleged threat to the United States by Iraq and everything to do with the potential for the closing of the window of opportunity to invade Iraq as 9/11 retreated into the past.
Would a President Gore have made a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Quaeda? Would a President Gore have a cabinet full of neoconservatives who were itching to finish the job in Iraq? I doubt it. I’m not saying I would have wanted Gore as President, but we cannot assume that one administration would have had the same motives and goals as another. Whether President Bush personally believed/es in the exact same things his advisors and cabinet members did/do is one thing, but he certainly surrounded himself with people who had the goal of effecting regime change in Iraq, long before September 11th.
That’s all I’m going to say on the matter. Honestly. :)
OK, so we have intel that says there are WMD. We have pictures of buildings that are making it. We have Iraqis saying “yes, that is the building we are making it in.” That’s where we were up until late 2002. If the story ended there, then we could all buy the neocon/con/Bush-apologist line about “we all thought they were there” so we were justified and there’s no fault in it. But there was that little interlude of a few months where our inspectors went to all those little buildings and there was nothing there and had never been anything there (unless Iraq has the world’s best Hazmat cleanup, there weren’t any traces of anything anywhere). People like to leave that time period out of the discussion. But it was what showed all our intelligence to be complete crap, before the bombs ever fell. With just a bit of effort, we could have then discovered that most of the crap we were being told was single-sourced–obtained from known scoundrels/Iranian spies or agents, or an intel shop that was nothing more than a neo-con circle-jerk.