Salon: Juan Cole Gets It Right ("The Lies That Led To War")

[Hissyspit]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/19/lies/index.html

From Daily Kos thread
Juan Cole gets it right
by starkness

Not a big surprise there, but his article that just went up on the front page of Salon.com puts the pieces together in a way that makes perfect sense. And it makes perfect sense out of information that once led many of us to grasp at straws, trying to understand it. It actually brings me a certain amount of peace to see such a clear timeline of events; overlaying rational explanations on top of the baffling actions that brought us to where we are today. But enough with the self-reflection, let's get started on the flip.

Many of us always suspected that George W. Bush had a desire to depose Saddam Hussein even before Bush was elected president. Juan Cole confirms that suspicision with this account:

I was in the studio with Arab-American journalist Osama Siblani on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" program on March 11, 2005, when Siblani reported a May 2000 encounter he had with then-candidate Bush in a hotel in Troy, Mich. "He told me just straight to my face, among 12 or maybe 13 Republicans at that time here in Michigan at the hotel. I think it was on May 17, 2000, even before he became the nominee for the Republicans. He told me that he was going to take him out, when we talked about Saddam Hussein in Iraq." According to Siblani, Bush added that "he wanted to go to Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, and he considered the regime an imminent and gathering threat against the United States." Siblani points out that Bush at that point was privy to no classified intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs and had already made up his mind on the issue.

So Bush had plans for the Iraq war all along. After finding himself in power, the question is, how do you sell the war to the American people?

An Iraq war might have been a hard sell, even for the skilled and highly manipulative Bush team. But Sept. 11 ensured that they could get congressional approval and public support for a war. Americans were angry and willing to lash out in any direction specified by the president. Former terrorism czar Richard Clarke related that on the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, Bush "grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. 'Look,' he told us, 'I know you have a lot to do and all ... but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way...'" When Clarke protested that it was clearly an al-Qaida operation, Bush insisted, "Just look. I want to know any shred ... Look into Iraq, Saddam." According to Clarke, Bush said it "testily."

Ok. September 11 happened, which provided the Bush administration with an overabundance of "political capital", if you will. But still, the evidence pointed to Afghanistan, not Iraq.

Astonishingly, the Bush administration almost took the United States to war against Iraq in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. We know about this episode from the public account of Sir Christopher Meyer, then the U.K. ambassador in Washington. Meyer reported that in the two weeks after Sept. 11, the Bush national security team argued back and forth over whether to attack Iraq or Afghanistan. It appears from his account that Bush was leaning toward the Iraq option.

This might explain why Saddam Hussein is in jail, and Osama Bin Laden is not.

After the "success" of the war in Afghanistan, the door was open for a continued war against terorrism, which included Iraq. Or did it? The case still had to be made that Saddam Hussein was a threat. The Downing Street memo indicated that intelligence was being fixed, but Tony Blair knew that the United Kingdom could be tried for war crimes if the war was illegal, so how could they produce irrefutable evidence that war was the only option?

Because the United Kingdom, unlike the United States, is a member of the International Criminal Court, its officials had to worry about being tried for war crimes if they became involved in an illegal war of aggression launched by Bush and lacking U.N. Security Council sanction. Prime Minister Tony Blair put his hopes in a ploy. He thought that Bush should arrange for the United Nations to demand a return to Iraq of weapons inspectors, with the hope that Saddam Hussein would refuse, thus creating a legal justification for war acceptable to the international community.

There you have it. Give Saddam Hussein an ultimatum you know he won't comply with, and you have your case for war.

Now go read the article!

[FloridaPat]

1. Thanks

[knowbody0]

2. thanks

good article. these guys are horrific

[Starfury]

3. Excellent summary of timeline and relevant quotations! Thanks! n/t

These articles show that the Bush/Iraq timeline goes even further back than Juan's article indicates:
http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold01172003.html
http://www.gnn.tv/articles/article.php?id=761

From the counterpunch article:

"Back in 1999, just as today, there was no evidence that Iraq concealed any such weapons. Bush was governor of Texas at the time and the presidential race was still one year away. Bush couldn't have possibly had any intelligence information, which he claims he presently has but refuses to make public, that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Still, Bush knew exactly what he would do first when he got to office: bomb Iraq.

"Gov. George W. Bush of Texas talks about contingencies in which he would use American military power to ''take out'' Iraq's illegal weapons" if elected president, according to a Dec. 12, 1999 editorial in the New York Times. The Times editorial was headlined Rhetoric and Reality on Iraq and it too presumed that Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction but the editorial offered no evidence."

[Voltaire99]

4. Cole's "Informed Comment" is a great blog.

www.juancole.com

[Hissyspit]

5. Good reminders of how far back the Iraq invasion obsession goes...

(specifically with Bush, yes, I know it goes back further with PNAC)and how corrupt the idea was and is, and its connection with the UK/Iraq Memo.

[bejammin075]

6. See the BBC documentaty "Iraq, Tony & the Truth"

type in that title in quotes in google, and you will find downloadable or viewable formats of this documentary that aired 3/20/05 in the UK. It makes a very very strong case that Blair (and Bush) knew exactly how bad the intelligence was, but they agreed to go to war in advance. About 3-4 million in the UK tuned in.

IT'S A VERY VERY GOOD DOCUMENTARY!!