Boston Globe op-ed: Did US know Iraq had no WMDs?

[paineinthearse]

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/06/did_us_know_iraq_had_no_wmds/

Did US know Iraq had no WMDs?
By Kevin McKiernan | March 6, 2006

WHAT IF the Bush administration wasn't entirely convinced before the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, but simply invoked those ''mushroom cloud" images to rally necessary public support? One source of such speculation lies in the administration's puzzling prewar failure to supply Iraqi Kurds, Hussein's closest and most likely targets, with gas masks and other promised protection.

While the White House has publicly maintained that the decision to go to war was not made until early 2003 -- and only as a last resort after the failure of both inspections and diplomacy -- I knew a full year before that Kurdish leaders were quietly tipped off to war plans just weeks after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Washington, D.C., representative of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which controlled the eastern portion of the Kurdish region, told me early in 2002 that he and other Kurdish leaders had been summoned to the Pentagon in October 2001 to meet Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense. One of the topics of conversation was the 1988 gassing of the Kurds by the Iraqi regime.

By the time of that Pentagon meeting, Kurdish diplomats had been in Washington since 1991, when a no-flight zone was established to protect Iraqi Kurds. But for those 10 years, Kurdish leaders had been denied all but low-level contacts with US government officials..........

<snip>

Kevin McKiernan has covered the Iraq war for ABC News and he wrote and directed the PBS film ''Good Kurds, Bad Kurds." His new book is ''The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland."

[BlueEyedSon]

1. Of course they did, that's why they invaded with ground troops, no worries

[yurbud]

2. they just figured this out? Or is it just safe to say it now?

[paineinthearse]

3. This is a op-ed! It is not a Globe editorial. nt

[mwb970]

4. Duh. (n/t)