As Stanley Kurtz points out, not only did Iraq have WMDs, the New York Times has reported on them.
The United States has discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I know this because I read it on the front page of the very liberal New York Times. Of course, the Times was only trying to hurt the administration. In the rush to Baghdad during the war, our troops bypassed and failed to secure one of Saddam’s key nuclear facilities. That facility was looted by local villagers, who ransacked vaults and warehouses looking for anything of value. Many of the villagers took home radioactive barrels, and are now suffering from radiation poisoning. According to the Times, the looted nuclear facility, “contained ample radioactive poisons that could be used to manufacture an inestimable quantity of so-called dirty bombs.”
So in the course of trying to embarrass the administration, the Times has inadvertently raised a very important point in the administration’s defense. Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program contained sufficient material to pose a serious threat to the United States. In the hands of terrorists, nuclear dirty bombs supplied by Saddam could have rendered landmarks and key sites in American cities uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.
And why did Saddam have a nuclear facility in the first place? It was, of course, part of his effort to produce a nuclear bomb. In fact, the nuclear site reported on by the Times was connected to the facility bombed years before by the Israelis, who had become convinced that Saddam was attempting to build a nuclear weapon. Thank goodness the Israelis acted. Thank goodness we did too.
And let’s not forget (as, I’ll confess, I have) that justification for the Iraq War was not just what Saddam currently had, but what he was capable and willing of producing.
Umm, no. The war was waged to rid Saddam of WMD.
Read this:
http://billmon.org/archives/000172.html
This is the attributable record of administration quotes regarding why we went to war.
Bush Lied, People Died.
The NRO is the RNC propaganda organ.
Judith Miller NYT has been already been pretty much discredited for her WMD reporting. She was trumpeting the GOP party line and printing anything Chalabi told her.
And I’m still trying to figure out when the NYT became a liberal paper? Isn’t this the same paper that had a direct feed from Ken Starr and Olsen?
The more important problem is that fact that the Nuclear facility in question was left unguarded for several weeks. That the nearby people now have radiation poisoning from all of the stuff that they have taken from the site (Barrel’s, water, etc). The IAEA has already reported that things have gone missing from where they were there prior to the war.
And if I remember correctly 1444 was only in regards to past and present WMD production, not future. The fact that Bush is still following the PNAC game plan taints things a bit.
Scott, I don’t see anything nearly so damning in the list of quotes you provide. “We believe there are WMDs there” is what they all say. Well, duh. We know Iraq had them. We know Iraq used them in the past. UN teams in the 90s found them and destroyed some of them before having to leave in the face of Iraqi intransuigence. The UNSC — all of whom have their own intelligence agencies — said they had them and had to cooperate in an inspections regime to prove otherwise. Hans Blix, who led the chem/bio side of those inspections, certainly thought they still had them — or at least weren’t being honest about how much they’d produced and how much they’d destroyed.
And then there are the forceful assertions of Iraq’s WMD capabilities by such PNAC minions as Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean. Of course, they were merely duped by the Dubyites, which is why they will make such fine commanders-in-chief.
Al Gore noted, back in September, “Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power. […] We know he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country”
And, of course, there’s Dubya’s ultimate partner-in-neocon-crime, Bill Clinton, who declared an unequivocal belief (echoed by UNSCOM) in February 1998 that Iraq still had substantial WMD stockpiles. “Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons.”
Former Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen was clearly in on the conspiracy, when he said, back in April:
“I believe that Saddam [Hussein] was successful in concealing an arsenal that may have been destroyed before the war began — something that may or may not be true,” Cohen said.
Or, Cohen said, Hussein’s regime moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria — a country he said supports terrorist groups and could present a challenge to the United States.
“They do possess nuclear, chemical and biological agents [and] missile technology,” Cohen said.
So was Jacques Chirac, in February. “Are there other [non-nuclear] weapons of mass destruction? That’s probable. We have to find and destroy them.”
Indeed, it seems (if you believe that Iraq was fully disarmed) that the only person who was telling the truth about Saddam’s WMDs was Saddam himself.
Now, a number of the folks above disagreed on the best way to deal with Iraq’s WMD probrams — sanctions, diplomacy, inspections, or war. But they did not disagree on their existence. If the Bushies were setting up some sort of frame, they were stunningly successful (and have been inexplicably clumsy, then, in not having fabricated some WMD discoveries since the end of the war).
As to the “reasons” for the war, the issue of WMDs and disarmament was the legal sticking point for the UN resolutions that permitted military action. The UN’s shown no interest in intervening over such issues as internal repression, government-sanctioned mass murder, ecological ruination, or support for regional terrorism (both financially and through tacit or explicit cooperation with terrorist organizations). WMDs were not the only reasons given for the war in many or even most of the pre-war statements quoted in the Whiskey Bar set of quotes; you can find plenty of references, even in Bush’s comments (as well as in the Wolfowitz Vanity Fair bit), about links to terrorism and the murderousness of the Iraqi regime being justifications provided.
Bush Lied, People Died makes a great bumper sticker, but it’s not much more substantive than I Lost 50 Lbs. – Ask Me How!
Stan, UNSCR 1441 referred to ongoing proliferation and ongoing programs, too. Full text can be found here.
Dave
It was never about WMD’s…
It was never about Al Qeada…
And only when it suits us, do we care about the murderousness of a regime.
If it had been we would have provided proof prior to going to war, instead of relying on the old “have you stopped beating your wife” ploy. The scant info we provided to Blix would have lead somewhere.
The stench from the right was the reason I was opposed to this war and the way it was sold to the world. If, from the start it had been about the Evils of the Iraqi Government (and if we had followed this up with putting Zimbabwe, Congo, Liberia, and other hell holes on notice of things to come), while illegal, still would have had the moral clarity that I could have stood behind. If we are going to pursue Pre-emptive wars against sovereign nations, we had better have all of our ducks in a row.
As to the politico’s not standing up to Bush…that is a whole other rant. But think, Who is providing, sifting, massaging, and filtering the information in the first place. Who frames the discussion, and even how it is going to be discussed. I found it interesting that (now that we know) that the government would leak the info to Judith Miller, and then cite her as common knowledge later on in the week.
P.S. my bad…1441
Interesting interviews with Hans Blix today. Among other bits:
“He [Saddam] was an ancient type ruler who got control of a country with an oil income and could use 21st century weapons. That was a very dangerous combination, and I think we all feel a great relief that he is put out of action”
and
And he wished the U.S. teams now searching for banned weapons in Iraq “good luck.”
“I think we should all be looking to truth,” he said. “We want to find out what was the real truth” — whether Saddam was concealing illegal weapons or had destroyed them before he was attacked.
and
“The longer that one does not find any weapons in spite of people coming forward and being rewarded for giving information, etc., the more I think it is important that we begin to ask ourselves if there were no weapons, why was it that Iraq conducted itself as it did for so many years?” Blix said.
“They cheated, they retreated, they changed figures, they denied access, etc. Why was that if they didn’t have anything really to conceal? I have speculations, one could be pride,” he said.
He also adds he thinks inspections should have been given a longer time to operate, that he believes that there were smear jobs being made on him both out of the Pentagon and from Baghdad, and that Bush was sincere in wanting an inspections regime to work, at least at the beginning.
Stan, I disagree, but I think that gets down to fundamental differences in perception of what went on (is going on) that probably aren’t amenable to discussion.
I will say that it was never just about only WMDs, or only about al-Qa’eda, or only about terrorism, or only about human rights, or only about oil, or only about any single factor. Any one of those would provide a dozen counter-examples, as you note. I maintain that it was a combination of those factors, along with the strategic and geopolitical situation of Iraq, that made the war reasonable and possible.
Another collection of “I’m convinced of the Iraq WMD danger” quotes here. (The actual citations are not given, unfortunately, but I recognize some of them from the list I gave above.
Yes, some of the folks involved could have been misled by a Dubya/PNAC/neocon conspiracy to twist intelligence information (though some were convinced enough to believe it, not enough to favor a war, which seems like a pretty inefficient conspiracy). Others, either predating 2001 or not dependent on the CIA and Pentagon for intelligence, were not in that position to be deceived.