Gautam Mukunda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> asks
What would you have to believe to believe that the
Bush Administration faked WMD evidence in order to
invade Iraq?
First, you would have to believe that the Bush Administration had
other reasons to invade Iraq, such as a desire to intimidate other
Arab dictatorships. (As far as I remember, only US Secretary of State
Powell has said this. Wolfowitz, an official in the US Department of
Defence, did not say this; he only said that the Bush Administration
was not going after WMD primarly.)
Second, you need to believe -- but it is reasonable to so believe --
that to act on this desire, the Administration agreed with all those
who said that US policy with respect to the Moslems over the past
generation or so was wrong; and that a portion of the Moslem
population not only did not like the US, but were willing to die in
war against the US. Moreover, you need to believe that the US through
its actions could not hope to reverse this over a period of fewer than
five or ten years. This second set of beliefs provides the
Administration with a motive.
You would have to believe that they invaded Iraq
knowing that, after the country was defeated, it would
be revealed that there was nothing there.
Third, yes, this is true. You are right about this. This is the
single strongest argument for why the Administration did not have the
army search the site then listed by the Pentagon as potentially
dangerous in the latter part of April. If the Administration believed
there was something there -- as I for one thought -- then a search,
even a search of the kind the army would make, would have be better
than leaving the sites unsearch by the US and available to enemy
guerilla soldiers and others.
Certainly, if there had been a search, and nothing was found, except
for a few more ready-to-load chemical shells, some radioactive fuel
for the old nuclear reactor, some hospital equipment, some anti-vermin
equipment, and the like, then I would have been surprised. I know
that if a search had been made and found little, that many would have
figured that Ritter, a former UN inspector, was right, and that Saddam
Hussein had been bluffing.
But the search was not made, so we don't know. (I personally think
that Saddam Hussein was not bluffing, and that the US has failed to
destroy or capture all the various banned weapons or the instructions
for creating them; but I am not now nor was I ever responsible for
searching for banned weapons.)
You would have to believe either that every other government in
the world was complicit in the deception (despite, in many cases,
opposing the war) .... _or_ that the Administration was somehow
able to trick every other government in the world.
Right. First, I think that those who favored the war thought the
major purpose was to intimidate other Arab dictatorships. Second,
more importantly, according to Blix's report to the UN in January, the
Iraqi government were not cooperating with the UN inspectors. This
meant either that they were bluffing or that they were hiding
something. If the US, which is often thought to have the best
intelligence in the world, said that Blix and the UN inspectors were
right about the lack of cooperation, and also said that the lack was
because the Iraqi government were hiding something, then that is a
good reason for thinking so.
Certainly the prime reason to argue that the US Administration thought
otherwise than it said in its public statements prior to April is in
its actions of late April.
You would have to believe that after expelling the
inspectors in 1998 Saddam Hussein _chose_ to destroy
the WMD that he already had, and then chose not to
tell anyone, maintaining the sanctions on his own
country.
A good many people have argued this. They said that the Iraqi
government decided to preserve power by pretending to have strong
weapons, but destroyed them so as to get along with the US and the UN.
As I said, I do not believe this; but then I was not the person who
decided against investigating hundreds of suspected weapons sites
before non-friedly people could get to them.
You would further have to believe that, after
expelling the inspectors, Saddam made no efforts not
to reconstitute them, despite his decades-long
attempts to acquire them, and his demonstrated
willingness to use them.
Right. Let me say again, I do not believe that the Iraqi government
did this. That is why I think the US should have investigated the
sites on its then current list. It is the inaction by the US
Administration in late April that suggests that they believed this.
(As I have said several times earlier, it is obvious the then listed
sites would not be exhaustive. Iraq is big. Equally obviously,
soldiers can only find some obvious things: but still a major search
in late April would have done more than leaving, as of 30 May, some
700 sites in the then US list still uninvestigated by the US.)
I know that Gautam said that
20,000 soldiers is a hell of a lot, and the US has more
urgent/important things to do than sending them traipsing around
the Iraqi desert sounds like a pretty good one.
[Brin-l Digest, Vol 178, Issue 47; Sat, 31 May 2003]
The question is whether leaving some 700 sites available to
non-friendly people was urgent or important. Gautam said that it was
not. But to believe that, you need to believe also that Ritter was
right, and enemy soldiers or others could not have found anything
capable of killing or scaring large numbers of people -- if only local
Shiites -- from one of those uninvestigated sites.
The problem with chemical, radiological, nuclear, and biological
weapons is that they are `force multipliers'. They can be used to
transform a previously weak military force into one that can kill or
scare many people. Hence the issue of what becomes considered `urgent
or important' in one's best judgement.
Also on 31 May 2003, John D. Giorgis wrote that, after the fighting in
March and early April, `Restoring Civic Order' was more important than
searching for chemical, radiological, nuclear, and biological weapons.
He went on to say that the US occupied Iraq in order
... to prevent Saddam Hussein from using the WMD's he had against
primarily us, and secondly against his neighbors - and also to
prevent him from developing any more WMD's. Moreover, in my mind,
the liberation of 38million oppressed people, the establishment of
Western Civilization in an Arab country, and the elimination of
Hussein's military threat - leading to the ability to remove our
garrisons in Saudi Arabia are all *equally* important reasons.
I agree with the short term humanitarian benefits of restoring civic
order in the days immediately following mid-April. It would have been
good to prevent of looting of any sort immediately, to end
unpredictable violence by crooks or guerillas, to establish order and
then law (so the nature of order can be understood and predicted), and
eventually to create a felt sense of justice. This is the least a
civilizing power can do.
But the question is still whether it was more urgent or more important
to investigate the hundreds of sites that the US military had listed,
or to leave them available to people hostile to the US.
What if the contents of some barrels of nuclear waste from the old
reactor were stolen rather than dumped into the river by local people
who are using the emptied barrels? (I read a report saying this
recently but cannot remember where. The claim was that the
radioactive material was dumped into a river and diluted. The locals
use the cleaned barrels. I think the writer was talking about 50
gallon drums filled with of radioactive waste, most of which,
presumably, is not very radioactive. The question is whether
civilians would be scared if radioactive material, even if only mildly
radioactive, were spread over their fields and homes by enemy
soldiers.)
John goes on to say
Just because you somehow think that "finding WMD's" was quote,
"the point", doesn't make it so. As Wolfowitz recently noted,
there are a difference between the legal/bureaucratic reasons and
the moral/strategic reasons for this war.
which says that the Bush Administration was trying to mislead the
public. This leads credence to the thought that the Administration
did not search for banned weapons in the latter half of April because
they did not believe they were any significant numbers of them -- that
the Administration (but not me, as I have said before) agree
fundamentally with Ritter, that Saddam Hussein was bluffing and had
few banned weapons left.
Or else the Administration really did think that endangering more
Americans, more Iraqis, and others was less urgent than restoring
civic order. Perhaps the latter is true. If so, the question is
whether you think that was a good judgement call?
--
Robert J. Chassell Rattlesnake Enterprises
http://www.rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
http://www.teak.cc [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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