Re: Iraq ... no name calling, just challenging logic
They Lied About the Reasons for Going to War
by Jacob G. Hornberger
by Jacob G. Hornberger
DIGG THIS
In determining whether someone has lied, circumstantial evidence can oftentimes be as critical as direct evidence. For example, suppose someone says, “I was outside all last night and it did not rain.” A person who was inside might be tempted to conclude, “Well, since I wasn’t outside, I must assume that he is telling the truth.” However, if the person on the inside looks outside and sees that everything – the houses, yards, driveways, and cars – are wet and that streams of water are running in the streets, his conclusion might be different. Using such circumstantial evidence, he might well conclude that the person who is claiming that it did not rain is lying.
The circumstantial evidence with respect to the invasion of Iraq leads inexorably to but one conclusion: President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and other U.S. officials lied about their reasons for invading Iraq. Those lies have profound consequences not only for the Iraqi people, who have borne the brunt of the invasion and subsequent occupation of their country, but also for the American people, including U.S. soldiers who have killed and maimed people whose government never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so.
Among the many justifications that the administration relied upon in the months leading up to invading Iraq were:
To protect the American people from an urgent and imminent threat of a WMD attack by Saddam Hussein;
To enforce UN resolutions requiring Saddam to disarm; and
To liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam’s tyranny.
The first justification was the one on which most Americans relied. In the critical months leading up to the invasion, which we here at FFF were ardently opposing, we were being inundated every day with critical emails taking us to task for not trusting our public officials, who obviously had access to secret information that they could not share with the public. There was no doubt that the senders of those critical emails were convinced that the United States was under an urgent threat of an impending WMD attack. “What would you do?” they nervously asked. “Wait until the nuclear bomb goes off?”
Most of the fear revolved around a nuclear attack, which was not surprising, given the statements that federal officials were feeding their minds.
In his speech to the United Nations, President Bush tried to shut down the political speculation. This is a life-and-death matter, the President insisted. “Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year,” he told the U.N. General Assembly in New York Thursday.
To those who say, we want more evidence that there’s a real threat, the Administration says, we can’t wait for a smoking gun to turn up. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on CNN’s Late Edition recently. (CNN.com, September 12, 2002)
Some people suggest that President Bush and Vice President Cheney just made an honest mistake in relying on faulty intelligence reports about the threat posed by Saddam’s WMDs. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that that the mistake was not an honest one – that they “cherry-picked” the parts of the intelligence reports to support what they wanted to believe.
However, while most of the postwar debate has revolved around whether Bush and others lied about or intentionally exaggerated the WMD threat posed by Saddam, the circumstantial evidence leads to but one conclusion on something much more important – that Bush, Cheney, and other U.S. officials were knowingly and intentionally lying with respect to the real reason that they were invading Iraq.
Let’s review that circumstantial evidence.
1. Prior to the actual invasion, President Bush spent months lobbying the UN Security Council to unanimously grant him authority to invade Iraq to enforce the UN resolutions that required Saddam to rid himself of his WMDs. Ultimately, once Bush realized that he was going to be unable to secure the votes of all the permanent members of the Security Council, he decided to invade anyway, with the assistance of a “coalition of the willing” – a coalition of nations that were willing to participate in the enforcement of the UN resolutions requiring Saddam to “disarm.”
Now ask yourself: If a foreign nation was really about to attack the United States, especially with WMDs, would any president spend any time whatever going to the UN to seek permission to attack that nation first or spend time to round up a group of countries to participate in a “coalition of the willing”? That is beyond the realm of reasonable probability. In a real-life situation in which America was about to come under a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack the president would strike hard immediately to defend the nation against such an attack without first seeking anyone’s consent or approval.
Indeed, if an enemy nation was really about to attack the United States, would the president even be talking about the importance of enforcing UN resolutions? Who in his right mind would care about the importance of enforcing UN resolutions if another nation was about to fire nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons at our country? All that would matter would be taking out attacking missiles immediately.
Yet even while feeding the fears of the American people by suggesting extreme urgency because of Saddam’s WMD threat, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Powell were lobbying UN officials – that is, officials of other nations – for a new resolution authorizing them to enforce previous UN resolutions that required Saddam to “disarm.” Indeed, recall that when Powell made a famous speech with charts detailing Saddam’s WMDs that he would soon be firing at the United States, Powell was at the UN seeking a resolution, not at the Congress of the United States seeking a declaration of war against a nation that supposedly was about to attack the United States with WMDs.
Then, once it became clear to Bush that the UN was not going to give him the resolution he sought, the situation became “Hurry, hurry, hurry.” We can’t let those hapless UN inspectors continue searching for Saddam’s WMDs, Americans were told, because the situation is too dire and urgent. We’ve go to invade now because otherwise we might well see a mushroom cloud tomorrow. And there is no doubt that most Americans who supported the invasion believed it.
2. Among the alternative rationales that Bush, Cheney, and other U.S. officials relied on to justify their invasion of Iraq was to free the Iraqi people from Saddam’s tyranny. Granted, that wasn’t the primary justification – that is, it wasn’t the one that resonated deep within American people, like the threat of a nuclear attack did – but it certainly was one of reasons given for invading. Ask yourself: If our nation was really about to be attacked by an enemy nation, especially with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, what is the likelihood that U.S. officials would be justifying their preemptive strike to take out those missiles by arguing that a collateral benefit of a preemptive strike would be to free the people of the enemy nation from tyranny? Would U.S. officials, including those in the military, really be thinking about such benefits? Not a chance. If our nation was really about to be attacked by an enemy nation, U.S. officials would strike them hard, without considering how this would help the people of the targeted nation.
In fact, the use of alternative and secondary rationales for invading Iraq is itself strong circumstantial evidence that the primary rationale given for invading – the dire threat of an imminent WMD attack – was bogus, because if such a threat really existed no one would be bothering to come up with alternative and secondary reasons for attacking.
3. On September 7, 2002 – that is, on the eve of the 2002 congressional elections – White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., provided an additional piece of circumstantial proof that U.S. officials were lying about the urgent threat of an imminent WMD attack on the United States by Saddam Hussein. Card said, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
What was Card referring to? He was referring to the methods by which the Bush administration was selling the necessity of a war against Iraq. Keep in mind that this was the period of time when Democratic congressional candidates in the 2002 election were terrified that Bush and the Republicans would accuse them of being soft on terrorism and of being unpatriotic. Thus, Bush and his people knew that the best time for getting a congressional resolution authorizing Bush to declare war on Iraq was before, not after, the November 2002 election.
So what Card was suggesting was that in August people are on vacation and their minds are on the summer, fun, and their families. Therefore, the best time to produce the arguments for going to war on Iraq would be in September, when people were once again focused on politics and business, which would still provide plenty of time to terrify people before the November election into thinking that a WMD attack could come at any time.
