Whitewashing History

Why would anyone trust these people?

One of the more troubling trends to come out the past 15 years is the complete re-writing of the reasons we got involved in the Iraq War.  The reasoning behind the war now falls primarily on bad intelligence.  Simply if our intelligence hadn't been so wrong about weapons of mass destruction then the Bush administration wouldn't have led us into war.  I can forgive someone who wasn't politically aware at the time for believing this, but having been politically aware at the time; I can say that this is complete bullshit.

Part of the chorus of apologists is NY Times columnist David Brooks whom recently wrote an editorial oddly titled "Learning From Mistakes":

...The first obvious lesson is that we should look at intelligence products with a more skeptical eye.  There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war.

I don't think the intelligence to go into war was deliberately cooked by the Bush administration.  What certainly did happen is intelligence was cherry picked, dissent was ignored, and evidence was carelessly accepted so long as it supported the narrative for war.  Plenty of people knew this at the time, even conservative republicans within the intelligence community, that the intelligence was anything but certain.  Take weapons inspector Scott Ritter's interview with Salon in 2002 for example:

Q. The argument from those who push for action against Saddam Hussein, including some high-level government officials, is that Iraq, with all its weapons, poses a serious threat. Are you saying they are lying? 

A.  ...When asked about what justification we have to go after Saddam, Richard Perle [chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon] cites “self-defense.” That is, Saddam’s continued existence is a threat to the U.S. because of weapons of mass destruction and because Saddam might take these weapons and give them to terrorists. Although nothing in the history of past Iraqi actions suggest this. It is pure fabrication, but that is the basis around which Perle, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are working.

Intelligence is often wrong and has been throughout the history of warfare, but shoddiness of the intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq should have raised the eyebrows of anyone with a GED, but evidently not the New York Times' Judy Miller, many members of Congress, or the Bush Administration.  Much of the intelligence about Iraqi WMDs and connections between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda was gathered from a single source, an Iraqi opposition group named the Iraqi National Congress led by a man named Ahmed Chalabi.

From left to right: Ahmed Chalabi, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Bremer.  On a side note:  Why haven't we killed Chalabi?

Chalabi was convicted of bank fraud in Jordan, a fact well known back in 2002 when intelligence was being gathered.  Yet this man was relied on for intelligence leading us to war.  Never mind the man had his own ambitions and may have been working as an Iranian spy.  Unsurprisingly much of the intelligence that came from Chalabi was false.

Let's ignore the intelligence for a minute and just focus on the underlying premise for war that if Iraq had WMDs it posed some kind of existential threat to the United States.  This idea couldn't have been more false.  Saddam Hussein, as evil as he was, was concerned with one thing:  the survival of Saddam Hussein.  Hussein was secular and during the first gulf war, Osama Bin Laden had tried to convince the Saudi leadership to let him lead resistance instead of Westerners.  Hussein was a ruthless dictator and a despicable person, but not a Jihadist.  This was common knowledge, I mean I knew it and I was a mediocre student.  The point being:  How would've Hussein benefited from waging a chemical or biological attack against the most powerful military in the world?

That is a question I'd still like to hear from all those people who just think this was one giant intelligence screw-up.  This goes especially for the democrats who voted to give the Bush Administration authority to wage a war. Cough Hillary Clinton, cough John Kerry, cough Joe Biden.  Even if the intelligence was right and Hussein had chemical or biological weapons, he was not a threat to us.  Period.  If he had nuclear weapons then an argument could be made, but no one with any knowledge of Iraq and WMDs ever thought that.

Furthermore, there were countries, namely Pakistan, which had nuclear weapons, were run by dictators, and had much closer ties to Al-Qaeda than Iraq did.  Yet no one was publicly calling for war with Pakistan if they didn't surrender their WMDs.

I honestly believe that the Bush Administration thought there were WMDs in Iraq.  I also believe they wanted to invade Iraq no matter what.  Those statements aren't mutually exclusive.  The WMDs simply made a more compelling case for war in Iraq.

As for the notion that this would be cheap and easy as Brooks cops to," Many of us thought that, by taking down Saddam Hussein, we could end another evil empire, and gradually open up human development in Iraq and the Arab world."  Who thought that?  If you believed that then you were completely ignorant of history.  Even Dick Cheney knew somewhere in his syphilitic brain that removing Hussein and occupying Iraq was a bad idea:

...And the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don't think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties. And while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the (1991) conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war.  And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq...

The excuses don't hold water.  If we don't address our mistakes, we will have the same stupid people making the same stupid decisions.  It's a national disgrace that the same people who helped make these foolish decisions, decisions with consequences payed for primarily by our troops, their families, and numerous civilians in the region formerly known as Iraq and Syria, are put in front of a microphone as if they should be taken seriously.  David Brooks should not be listened to, nor should Thomas Friedman, Judith Miller, Lindsay Graham, John McCain, any member of the Bush Administration, or the democrats who voted for the use of force authorization.  These people who all claimed to have been fooled by bad intelligence are too foolish to hold office or have a following.  I wouldn't want them running a McDonalds.