Some Conservatives Ask Questions

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

With my rant against Cal Thomas out of the way, I was going to write on something else this evening.  Then, something happened.  I was asked by the Director of the Disability Vocational Rehabilitation center a question.

He asked me, “you were in Iraq… what the hell happened?  And, how did we get it so wrong?”

And with that, let me go on…

(cross-posted at Daily Kos)

I didn’t get the chance to answer him.  He is a busy man, being the Director and all, but, he and I chatted for a few minutes.  Afterwards, he told me that he wanted to speak with me later, at length, about the subject.

“What the hell happened? And, how did we get it so wrong?”, he asked.

I will tell you, here, what I will tell him when he gets back from a forced vacation to bury his son-in-law at Arlington Cemetery.

What he is asking about are the WMD’s that we didn’t find in Iraq.  The invasion.  The revelation that we got the intelligence all wrong.

In order to get that answer, I have to start in the mid-1980’s, after the Iranian revolution, when we supported Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

When we supported Saddam Hussein, we sent him ordnance to help him in his fight with Iran.  We know what we sent him.  That was cataloged.  But, Saddam also got arms from other countries, as well.  He got them from wherever he could.  China.  Russia.  United States.  He got conventional ordnance.  He also got chemical ordnance.  Some of the chemical ordnance was Iraqi made, as well.  When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, we had a good understanding of what he had in his arsenal.  It was called, the Iraqi Order of Battle.  The problem was, it wasn’t 100% accurate.  This is where fact of what we knew mixed with what we thought.

We compiled what we knew with what we thought, and then, we sent that out to everyone else in the intelligence community.  Many didn’t know any more than we did.  But, they cataloged what we sent them in 1990 as fact.  We began the first gulf war, of which, I was party to.

I knew then that Saddam Hussein didn’t have mass stockpiles of chemical ordnance simply because, in the months I was in Iraq doing ordnance disposal, we never once found a huge cache of chemical ordnance.  In fact, we found not ONE single chemical ordnance round.  But, we claimed he had them even then.

The UN inspectors went into Iraq.  They found some, yes.  And those were disposed of accordingly.  The problem was, the inspectors were working off of a list that we, ourselves, compiled based on our best guess of what he had.  So, when they didn’t find everything on the list, it left questions.  Did he have them?  Where were they?

The members of our Congress were briefed on Iraq capabilities based on what we thought he had.  This is why members of Congress believed he had what he didn’t.  This is why intelligence communities said what we said, because we gave them that intelligence, and they could not prove it one way or the other.

The UN inspectors in Iraq did their job.  The problem was, they were infiltrated with CIA operatives.  This is proven fact.  It is why Saddam Hussein threw the UN inspectors out of the country.  The CIA was using the inspector teams as a means to gain access to places inspectors had no reason to go, or, inspect.  This was during President Clinton’s years, btw.

The UN inspectors found, and disposed of, all of the chemical munitions found.  But, because they were working off of a list that we compiled, based on best guess, when the numbers didn’t match up, it gave George W. Bush the space to claim that Saddam was hiding huge stockpiles.  He wasn’t.  They didn’t exist.  But, Bush decided to push another meme — Saddam had secret programs for chemical and nuclear programs.

Nobody knew if this was true or not.  Chalabi, a con-artist, saw that Iraq was going to be attacked by the U.S., and thought he could insinuate himself into our good graces.  The end-game for Chalabi was to be installed as leader of Iraq, just as we helped Karzai install himself as President of Afghanistan.  Then, Bush got another boon — curveball.  He was a discredited Iraqi that came to light through the German intelligence services.

But, as we learned from the Downing Street Memo, by this point, we were going to invade, and Bush needed facts to push that invasion.  The facts were simply being formed to the policy right or wrong.

The problem came from Tyler Drumheller, CIA.  He told the Bush administration in the fall of 2002 that the CIA had penetrated Saddam’s cabinet and that there was no WMD programs.  That was dismissed entirely and never released to the public until later.  

The Bush administration took another tact — Al-Qaida had found refuge in Iraq.  This was true.  Well, partially true.  The cell Bush referenced only found themselves in Iraq AFTER the Afghanistan invasion, and, they were right at the parallel, in the mountains, where Saddam’s forces couldn’t go because of our no-fly zones.  Our own forces knew they were there, but, were told NOT to attack.  Yes, we gave that Al-Qaeda cell protection FROM attack because it gave Bush the ability to say Al-Qaeda was in Iraq.

So… we invaded.  We didn’t find the WMD’s we said were there.  We whined everyone else said they were there.  Yet, the facts didn’t matter.  We had, single-handedly, arbitrarily decided what Saddam should have had, were wrong, yet, got away with the invasion because Bush left the ICC, blackmailed UN countries to sign bi-lateral immunity agreements, and have occupied Iraq ever since.

Why?

Because George W. Bush wanted to be seen as a “war president”.  He thought that being a war president was the pinnacle of being a leader.  Dick Cheney knew that Iraq had huge amounts of oil reserves, but, they were shielded because Saddam had nationalized the oil in Iraq.  So, our invasion did a few things:

– We deposed Saddam.

– Bush got to be a war president.

– Cheney got to oust the Iraqi government and open the Iraqi oil reserves to western oil companies.

How did we get it so wrong?  We didn’t.  The intelligence was there, irrefutable in the fall of 2002.  George W. Bush ignored it.