Sunday, September 30, 2007

Iraq's WMD Myth

Counterpunch Weekend Edition
September 29 / 30, 2007

Why Clinton is Culpable




It was March 1997. For six years the UN inspectors had been probing the secrets of Saddam's weapons programs, in the process destroying huge quantities of chemical munitions and other production facilities. To enforce Saddam's cooperation, Iraq was subject to crushing sanctions.


At the time, he declared that although there were some loose ends to be cleared up, "not much is unknown about Iraq's retained proscribed weapons capabilities."


Saddam would be off the hook and, more importantly for the Clintonites, the neo-conservative republicans would be howling for the president's blood.

The only hope was somehow to prevent Ekeus completing his mission.




Sure enough, the following day he got an angry call from Tariq Aziz, Saddam's deputy prime minister and emissary to the outside world. "He wanted to know why Iraq should work with us any more."




Finally, following 9/11, the war party in George Bush Jr's administration was able to make the case for invasion on the grounds that Saddam had refused to comply with UN resolutions on disarmament by refusing to grant access to the weapons inspectors. The Iraq disaster has many fathers.




Andrew Cockburn is the author of Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy.

Friday, September 14, 2007

An Inverse Echo?

In praise of appeasement

Edward Pearce

September 13, 2007 12:00 PM

There is something indecent about the attempts of the Bush people to pretend that Iraq and the Iraq war and the occupation of Iraq are things now quietly getting better. President Bush also invites a comparison with Vietnam and says that "if only the boys hadn't been withdrawn, if only we had fought on".

That plaint is, if you know your history, an echo of a legend familiar in 1920s Germany, the dolchstoss, the stab in the back, the great national betrayal - by student protesters and the McGovern Democrats or by Prince Max of Baden. Either way, a duty was abandoned and a victory spurned. We should have fought some more, died and killed some more. The governments of countries fighting wars lose sight of what war actually is, who dies, who suffers, who endures the ancillary awfulness of it, the man described by Patrick Cockburn who, in the fifth year of Iraqi democracy, squelches through green sewage to reach the nearest stand-pipe.

The people who govern do not really mind about their boys, or the Sun's boys (why boys?) the men, dead or amputated, who they sent off to such trumpets and falsehoods. But they mind far more about those men, potential losers of votes, than they will ever mind about the dead of the other side.

To a greater degree than anyone will acknowledge, the Iraqi dead, do not register, do not matter. Yet across the spectrum, left to right, the burden of the argument for withdrawal, British or American, comes back to British or American casualties.

It will be argued, tediously, that most of the Iraqi dead were killed by other Iraqis. They were killed because advice given by the state department, the Foreign Office or the CIA, advice which itself rests upon commonplace good sense, that a confessional war for mastery would be the certain outcome of invasion, was wholly disregarded. The war was murderous, was vanity, was grotesquely negligent in conception, was in the teeth of history, and please; it was against all rational, selfish pursuit of American and British interests. The US has been in smouldering contention with Iran for 60 years, and for 25 imposed a brutal government there. The possibility that it will bomb Iran is real, is actually canvassed, and may be the valiant decisive thing of 2010.

Yet despite such a preoccupations, the other assured thing which will come out of the terror and counter-terror which the invasion released, is the near accomplished creation in Iraq of a regime of Shia Islam, of those now manning the militias, from whose threats the British army has now been withdrawn to an airport.

Give or take enclaves, Moqtada al-Sadr or his nominee will soon rule Iraq. That government will be on terms of friendship with the government of Iran. The Shia crescent will shine bright upon the Euphrates. Yet from Gertrude Bell down to George Bush senior, it has been the Anglo-Saxon view that the 20% Sunni must rule the 65% Shia. This is because Shia Islam, the minority creed, has historically been more extreme, more theocratic, more of a western enemy.

Never mind our liberal motives or our concern at terrible violence, this failed invasion flew clean against the interests of the US. It has destroyed a tyranny indeed, a tyranny nationally stable and internationally quiescent, one at odds with both Iran and al-Qaida. This invasion has installed social breakdown, the rolling expulsion of the Sunni, and an Iranian writ running everywhere.

We onlookers should mind and mourn the dead, but players of power politics should mind the total reversal of all their objectives. This has been an inverse Munich, an insistence upon pointless action, a failure to see the perfect utility of doing nothing at all. By valiant, decisive action and at some slight expense, the American government has empowered the enemies of America.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

DoD postwar planning

From The Times

September 13, 2007

Washington 'misled' Blair over plans for postwar Iraq

Greg Hurst, Political Correspondent

Britain's outgoing Ambassador to Washington has accused the Bush Administration of misleading Tony Blair over its much-criticised plans for the reconstruction of Iraq after the invasion of 2003.

Sir David Manning, who leaves his post at the end of this month, said that Britain was left in the dark as Donald Rumsfeld, the former US Defence Secretary, overruled the plans for postwar Iraq drawn up by Colin Powell and the US State Department.

"There were plans made and deployed in the State Department, but in the end the State Department wasn't allowed to take the job," Sir David told the New Statesman.

"I did not know that [Rumsfeld's Defence Department] was going to take over the running of the country. We didn't have any sense that that was about to be the way postwar Iraq was going to be run."

Sir David, who at the time of the invasion was a key member of Downing Street's unofficial war cabinet as the Prime Minister's foreign policy adviser, also claimed that Mr Blair never wanted to go to war in Iraq and instead wanted a diplomatic solution.

"I don't think he ever wanted to go by the military route," Sir David said. "He accepted it might come to this, but he always wanted to do it in a different way. I've always believed he would much rather it hadn't taken place."

His comments follow claims in Washington that President Bush was taken aback by some of the decisions in running postwar Iraq, such as dismantling the Iraqi army.

Paul Bremer, who headed the coalition provisional authority which ran Iraq after the invasion, produced documents that appeared to show that he told Mr Bush that he planned to dissolve Saddam's military and intelligence structures, and was informed he had the President's full support.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Bush briefed - no WMD

Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction
By Sidney Blumenthal







-- By Sidney Blumenthal

Friday, September 07, 2007

The Basra Debacle

Why the British Deployment was Doomed from the Start


September 5, 2007









Could the British have done any better?



In fact, an increasing number supported armed resistance.



Brits Flee from Basra


September 3, 2007















