What Flavor Is Your Kool-Aid™?

Matthew Alexander

2010-06-06T22:38:00.000-07:00

Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym) is a former senior military interrogator and author of How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq. He led an elite interrogation team in Iraq that located Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader, who was killed in a subsequent airstrike. He has conducted more than 300 interrogations and supervised more than 1,000. Alexander has served for 17 years in the Air Force and Air Force Reserves. He is currently a Fellow at the Open Society Institute. When Bush made the comment while speaking to the Economic Club of Grand Rapids, Mich. (June 2nd, 2010) that, "Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed... I'd do it again to save lives," Matthew Alexander responded that Bush's statement

is de facto approval of the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of American soldiers in Iraq who were killed by foreign fighters that Al Qaida recruited based on the President's policy of torture and abuse of detainees.

At least now we know where the blame for those soldiers' deaths squarely belongs. President Bush's decision broke with a military tradition dating back to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War and the consequences are clear: Al Qaida is stronger and our country is less safe.

George W. Bush

2009-08-31T08:16:00.000-07:00

According to Sig Christenson, on 11-Nov-1997, George Bush defended his father's decision during the Gulf War not to remove Saddam Hussein.

There are a lot of Americans (who say), 'Why didn't you go get him?' Well, I'm confident that losing men and women as a result of sniper fire inside of Baghdad would have turned the tide of public opinion very quickly. . . would have transformed the battle from a desert conflict to an unpopular guerrilla war.

In Airforce Magazine, John T. Correll wrote that the Evolution of the Bush Doctrine in foreign policy began with the future 43rd president's September 1999 address at The Citadel where he said,

Sending our military on vague, aimless, and endless deployments is the swift solvent of morale. ... I will work hard to find political solutions that allow an orderly and timely withdrawal from places like Kosovo and Bosnia. We will encourage our allies to take a broader role. We will not be hasty. But we will not be permanent peacekeepers, dividing warring parties. This is not our strength or our calling.

Two Years Before 9/11, candidate Bush was already talking privately about attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz, who has quoted Bush as saying:

One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. . . My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. . . . If I have a chance to invade - if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.

Herskowitz also reports,

He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake. That was one of the keys to being a leader.

Paul O'Neill, Bush's first Secretary of Treasury (fired) saw documents showing that in early 2001 the administration was already considering the use of force to oust Saddam, as well as planning for the aftermath.

From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go. . . For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap. . . . It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this'.

In the interview in December 2001, only three months after the 911 attacks, Bush admitted that "there was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11" about al-Qaeda and the threat it posed to the United States.

Before the attacks, he said:

I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace, and I knew he was a problem. I knew he was responsible, or we felt he was responsible, for the previous bombings that killed Americans. I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice, and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling.

Robert Parry, Bush's Alderaan: Time magazine reported that in March 2002 – a full year before the invasion – Bush outlined his real thinking to three U.S. senators. Bush disclosed this after sticking his head in the door of a White House meeting between National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and three senators who had been discussing strategies for dealing with Iraq through the United Nations. The senators laughed uncomfortably at Bush’s remark when he said,

Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.

Ironically, it was during a March 23rd press conference that Bush, in answering a question about Osama bin Laden, said

Deep in my heart I know the man is on the run, if he's alive at all. Who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not; we haven't heard from him in a long time. And the idea of focusing on one person is -- really indicates to me people don't understand the scope of the mission.

Terror is bigger than one person. And he's just -- he's a person who's now been marginalized. His network, his host government has been destroyed. He's the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it, and met his match. He is -- as I mentioned in my speech, I do mention the fact that this is a fellow who is willing to commit youngsters to their death and he, himself, tries to hide -- if, in fact, he's hiding at all.

So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you.

. . . . as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country.

. . . . we shoved him out more and more on the margins. He has no place to train his al Qaeda killers anymore.

Remarks by President Bush and President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia in Photo Opportunity,(September 25, 2002):

The war on terror, you can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.

7-November-02:

He's (Saddam) a threat because he is dealing with al Qaeda.

January 2003; the President invited three members of the Iraqi opposition to join him to watch the Super Bowl. In the course of the conversation the Iraqis realized that the President was not aware that there was a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. He looked at them and said,

You mean...they're not, you know, there, there's this difference. What is it about?

Devos Performance Hall, Grand Rapids, Michigan, (January 29, 2003):

My point is, our presence in the world is more than just our might; but our might is needed in the world right now to make the world a more peaceful place. The war on terror is not confined strictly to the al Qaeda that we're chasing. The war on terror extends beyond just a shadowy terrorist network. The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein and his willingness to terrorize himself (Sic!).

Saddam Hussein has terrorized his own people. He's terrorized his own neighborhood. He is a danger not only to countries in the region, but as I explained last night, because of al Qaeda connections, because of his history, he's a danger to the American people. And we've got to deal with him. We've got to deal with him before it is too late.

Before September the 11th, during a period when a lot of us thought oceans would protect us forever from gathering threats far from our land, the thought of containing somebody like Saddam Hussein made sense -- so we could step back in America and say, gosh, well, don't worry, he's only a threat to somebody in the neighborhood, and we might pick or choose whether or not we're going to help in the neighborhood.

But, see, our fellow citizens must understand that September the 11th, 2001 changed the equation. It's changed the strategic outlook of this country, because we're not protected by oceans. The battlefield is here. And therefore, we must address threats today as they gather, before they become acute.

Pat Robertson, founder of the U.S. Christian Coalition and an ardent Bush supporter, recounted on CNN telling Bush before the invasion of Iraq that he should prepare Americans for the likelihood of casualties.

And I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. . . . I warned him about casualties. . . . And I was trying to say, 'Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.' I mean, the Lord told me it was going to be A, a disaster, and B, messy.

But the president told him,

We're not going to have any casualties.

Robertson described the president at that meeting to CNN's Paula Zahn as

. . . the most self-assured man I've ever met in my life. You remember Mark Twain said, 'He looks like a contented Christian with four aces.' I mean he was just sitting there like, 'I'm on top of the world.'

US President George W. Bush and former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar discussed plans to go to war with Iraq even while claiming to be seeking a peaceful solution through the UN Security Council, according to the minutes of a meeting in Crawford Texas on 22-Feb-03, less than a month before the 20-Mar-03 invasion. The minutes of that meeting (released by EL PAÍS on 26-Sep-07), show that Bush told Aznar,

There are two weeks left. In two weeks we will be ready militarily… We’ll be in Baghdad by the end of March. We’ll destroy the loyal troops and the [Iraqi] army will really know what this is about. We have given a clear message to Saddam Hussein’s generals: they’ll be treated as war criminals. We’re planning for a post-Saddam Iraq and I think there are grounds for a better future.

The President detailed threats against recalcitrant Security Council members and added,

The more the Europeans attack me, the stronger I am in the United States.

Aznar response was that

The only thing that worries me is your optimism.

Replied the obtuse Bush

I'm optimistic because I believe I'm right. I'm at peace with myself.

It was not until March 16, during a meeting in Portugal’s Azores Islands, that Bush, Aznar and Blair publicly announced their war plans. In the intervening period, they had tried and failed to get a new UN resolution approved that would legitimize the invasion, although all three, the minutes indicate, knew that they would go to war even without international support.

After his invasion, asked by Tom Brokaw on 24-April-03 about Shock and Awe as a revolutionary military doctrine, the President observed:

Yes, I think it's true. I think that's an accurate look back. Shock and awe said to many people that all we've got to do is unleash some might and people will crumble. And it turns out the fighters were a lot fiercer than we thought. Because, for example, we didn't come north from Turkey, Saddam Hussein was able to move a lot of special Republican Guard units and fighters from north to south. So the resistance for our troops moving south and north was significant resistance. On the other hand, our troops handled it, handled that resistance quite well.

Brokaw:

Did that give you a pause for a while?

The President:

Well, first of all, I had confidence in the plan, because I've got confidence in my national security team. Remember, my advisors are people such as Dick Cheney, who had been through the war before as the Secretary of Defense; Colin Powell, who's not only an Army general, but also had been through a war before; Don Rumsfeld, who's a very successful man in the private sector, but also has got great judgment when it comes to the military; Tommy Franks, I really trust Tommy, we speak the same language -- after all, Tommy went to Midland Lee High School, graduated in 1963, one year ahead of Laura; Condi. I get good, solid advice from people who analyzed this war plan, analyzed the strategy, looked over it in depth, had looked at it for quite a bit of time and convinced me that it would lead to victory. . . .

Brokaw:

There used to be an American doctrine about when we go to war it's overwhelming force. Now it's speed and flexibility, based on Iraq, and instant communication -- not only behind the scenes, but everybody gets to look in on the battlefield.

The President:

Well, the instant communications part was one of the reasons why I was comfortable in giving Tommy Franks and the commanders in the field the go-ahead to take the shot at Saddam Hussein on the first day. Because there in the Oval Office we were getting near instant feedback from eyes on the ground what he was seeing, what he felt the conditions were like. It was an amazing moment to think that a person risking his life, viewing the farms, watching the entries, seeing, observing what was taking place inside one of Saddam's most guarded facilities, was able to pick up a device, call CENTCOM, and CENTCOM would call us in near real-time.

And the ability to communicate has changed the nature of warfare. It allows for more interoperability; more ability for the Navy and the Air Force and the Special Ops and the Army and the Marines to work side by side in a coordinated basis. Which makes it easier to fight a war with flexibility and speed and precision. So the doctrine really has changed.

As well, it's an amazing concept when you think about real-time TV focusing on war. . . . rocketing across the desert. It's an amazing feeling.

Brokaw asked Bush about borrowing some perspectives and wisdom from his father (the 41st President). Bush admitted that however closely his dad followed the news, he wasn't asking for help or advice. His father,

. . . .follows everything in the news and the opinion . . . he's an every word man.

Well, I really don't spend a lot of time hashing over policy with him. He knows that I am much better informed than he could possibly be. He gives me -- our relationship is more of, and our conversations are more along the line of a dad and a son, a dad conveying to his son how much he loves him. Which is important, even at the age of 56 years old it's important.

When Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May Day, it appeared that every detail of the day's events had been carefully planned, including the president's arrival in the co-pilot's seat of a Navy S-3B Viking after making two flybys of the carrier. The exterior of the four-seat S-3B Viking was marked with "Navy 1" and "George W. Bush Commander in Chief.":

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. (Applause.)

. . . . carried out with a combination of precision and speed and boldness the enemy did not expect, and the world had not seen before. From distant bases or ships at sea, we sent planes and missiles that could destroy an enemy division, or strike a single bunker. Marines and soldiers charged to Baghdad across 350 miles of hostile ground, in one of the swiftest advances of heavy arms in history.

The character of our military through history -- the daring of Normandy, the fierce courage of Iwo Jima, the decency and idealism that turned enemies into allies -- is fully present in this generation.

. . . . We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.

The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 -- and still goes on.

. . . . Our war against terror is proceeding according to principles that I have made clear to all: Any person involved in committing or planning terrorist attacks against the American people becomes an enemy of this country, and a target of American justice.

. . . . Americans, following a battle, want nothing more than to return home. And that is your direction tonight. (Applause.) After service in the Afghan -- and Iraqi theaters of war -- after 100,000 miles, on the longest carrier deployment in recent history, you are homeward bound.

Remarks by President Bush and Prime Minister Howard of Australia at the Bush Ranch in Crawford Texas (May 3, 2003)

Question:

Is there a possibility that you may never find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? And how would that square with your rationale for going to war?

The President:

Yes -- the question is about weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The United States -- United Nations Security Council voted 1441, which made the declaration it had weapons of mass destruction. It's well-known it had weapons of mass destruction. And we've also got to recognize that he spent 14 years hiding weapons of mass destruction. I mean, he spent an entire decade making sure that inspectors would never find them. Iraq's the size of the state of California. It's got tunnels, caves, all kinds of complexes. We'll find them. And it's just going to be a matter of time to do so.

Interview of the President by TVP, Poland (May 29, 2003):

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.

As Jay Garner, replaced as director of the Iraq Reconstruction Group was on his way out the door 18-June-03, he was slapped on his back by Bush:

Hey Jay, you want to do Iran?

The Israeli paper Haaretz (online 25-Jun-03), that Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Abu Mazen, meeting recently with militants to enlist their support for a truce with Israel, said that, when they met in Aqaba, President Bush had told him this:

God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act. . . .

President George W. Bush, challenging militants attacking U.S. forces in Iraq, July 2, 2003 (CNN):

There are some who, uh, feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is: Bring 'em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.

UN speech (9/23/03):

The regime of Saddam Hussein cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction.

During the Radio & Television Correspondents' Association Dinner on March 24, 2004, Bush was mocking himself in a slide show including images of him searching under furniture in the Oval Office for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction:

. . . . tonight I'm going to do one of my slide shows. These are actual, unstaged photos pulled from the files of the White House Photo Office. So, ladies and gentlemen, I present a White House election-year album.Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere. (Laughter and applause.)

As you can tell from the look on Andy Card's face, we've become a little concerned about the Vice President lately. (Laughter.)

Nope, no weapons over there. (Laughter and applause.) Maybe under here. (Laughter.) Oops, this photo wasn't supposed to be in here. This is the Skull and Bones secret signal. (Laughter.)

I'm not paranoid. (Laughter). . . .

Press Conference by the President (August 21, 2006): A Question:

Quick follow-up. A lot of the consequences you mentioned for pulling out seem like maybe they never would have been there if we hadn't gone in. How do you square all of that?

The President:

I square it because, imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who was paying suiciders to kill innocent life, who would -- who had relations with Zarqawi. Imagine what the world would be like with him in power. The idea is to try to help change the Middle East.

Now, look, part of the reason we went into Iraq was -- the main reason we went into Iraq at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction. But I also talked about the human suffering in Iraq, and I also talked the need to advance a freedom agenda. And so my question -- my answer to your question is, is that, imagine a world in which Saddam Hussein was there, stirring up even more trouble in a part of the world that had so much resentment and so much hatred that people came and killed 3,000 of our citizens.

You know, I've heard this theory about everything was just fine until we arrived, and kind of "we're going to stir up the hornet's nest" theory. It just doesn't hold water, as far as I'm concerned. The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

Question:

What did Iraq have to do with that?

The President:

What did Iraq have to do with what?

Question:

The attack on the World Trade Center?

The President:

Nothing, except for it's part of -- and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a -- the lesson of September the 11th is, take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq. I have suggested, however, that resentment and the lack of hope create the breeding grounds for terrorists who are willing to use suiciders to kill to achieve an objective. I have made that case.

And one way to defeat that -- defeat resentment is with hope. And the best way to do hope is through a form of government. Now, I said going into Iraq that we've got to take these threats seriously before they fully materialize. I saw a threat. I fully believe it was the right decision to remove Saddam Hussein, and I fully believe the world is better off without him. Now, the question is how do we succeed in Iraq? And you don't succeed by leaving before the mission is complete, like some in this political process are suggesting.

Bush, in an interview with Brian Williams (29-Aug-06):

No, I don't see that at all. The fundamentalist world attacked the United States and killed 3,000 people before I even thought about removing Saddam Hussein from power. I just don't buy that argument. It is an argument that's not based upon fact.

Bush, Sept. 6, 2006:

You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.

Bush, (24 September 2006):

I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma.

Dick Cheney

2006-08-30T06:50:00.000-07:00

Secretary of Defense
Dick Cheney 1991 (Blogs on Bush):

Once you get to Baghdad, it's not clear what you do
with it. It's not clear what kind of government you
put in place of the one that's currently there now.
Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime, a
Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists,
or one that tilts toward Islamic fundamentalists?
How much credibility is that going to have if it's
set up by the American military there? How long
does the United States military have to stay there
to protect the people that sign on for that government,
and what happens once we leave?

In 1994, invading Iraq was not rationally in the national interests of the United States!
Even when the Vice President appears on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, (September 16, 2001):

Saddam Hussein's bottled up, at this point, but clearly, we continue to have a fairly tough policy where the Iraqis are concerned.

But by the time the Vice President speaks at VFW 103rd National Convention,(August 26, 2002), he had changed his views:

. . . .The Taliban has already learned that lesson, but Afghanistan was only the beginning of a lengthy campaign. Were we to stop now, any sense of security we might have would be false and temporary. There is a terrorist underworld out there, spread among more than 60 countries.

. . . . The case of Saddam Hussein, a sworn enemy of our country, requires a candid appraisal of the facts

. . . . .Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth.

. . . .Another argument holds that opposing Saddam Hussein would cause even greater troubles in that part of the world, and interfere with the larger war against terror. I believe the opposite is true. Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the region. When the gravest of threats are eliminated, the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace. As for the reaction of the Arab "street," the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are "sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans." Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced. . . .

"Meet The Press" March 16, 2003:

We know he's been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.

"Meet the Press," March 16, 2003:

Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . . .

QUESTION:

If your analysis is not correct, and we're not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?

Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. . . . The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.

Meet The Press, (14-September-03)

Well, it’s significant, Tim. Any loss of life or injuries suffered by American military personnel is significant. Everyone wishes that that weren’t necessary. But from the standpoint of the activity we’re engaged in over there and what we’ve been able to accomplish over the last two years, I think it’s important to keep all of this in perspective. I looked at some numbers yesterday. I had them run the numbers, for example, in terms of our casualties since we launched into Afghanistan, began the war on terror a little over two years ago now. And the number killed in combat, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, as of yesterday, was about 213. When you add in those from non-hostile causes—the plane crashes, helicopter goes down without hostile fire—we’ve got a total of 372 fatalities since we started the war.

Remember, we lost 3,000 people here on 9/11. And what we’ve been able to accomplish—although I must say we regret any casualties. You’d like to be able do everything casualty-free.

When you think about what we’ve accomplished in terms of . . . . launching an attack into Iraq, destroying the Iraqi armed forces, taking down the government of Iraq, getting rid of Saddam Hussein, capturing 42 out of the 55 top leaders, and beginning what I think has been fairly significant success in terms of putting Iraq back together again, the price that we’ve had to pay is not out of line, and certainly wouldn’t lead me to suggest or think that the strategy is flawed or needs to be changed.

In his remarks at McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma (December 22, 2003), Cheney endorsed the policy of preventive war:

In a sense, 9/11 changed everything for us. 9/11 forced us to think in new ways about threats to the United States, about our vulnerabilities, about who our enemies were, about what kind of military strategy we needed in order to defend ourselves. And we've been actively and aggressively involved in doing that now for more than two years. It's a combination of strategy that involves not only going after the individuals who perpetrate terrorist attacks -- we've done that before. But we've got to go far beyond that. We've got to take down the financial networks that support them. We've got to mount military operations whenever that's necessary and appropriate, in order to take out the bad guys before we can launch further attacks against the United States.

Vice President Cheney, 1/22/04:

There's overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government. I am very confident that there was an established relationship there.

Larry King Live, (6/20/05):

I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.

Meet the Press (September 10, 2006):

If we had to do it over again, we would do exactly the same thing.

Cheney told Juan Williams (24-Oct-06).

I would have expected that the political process we set in motion -- the three national elections and so forth -- would have resulted in a lower level of violence than we're seeing today. It hasn't happened yet. I can't say that we're over the hump in terms of violence, no.

Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room (January 24, 2007), Cheney said:

There's problems -- ongoing problems -- but we have in fact accomplished our objectives of getting rid of the old regime, and there is a new regime in place that's been here for less than a year, far too soon for you guys to write them off. Bottom line is that we've had enormous successes and we will continue to have enormous successes.

In a June 1st 2009 interview with Fox News' Greta van Susteren ex-Vice President confesses:

On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9-11, there was never any evidence to prove that.

Don Rumsfeld

2006-08-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

At a press conference at NATO Headquarters in Brussels in June 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said:

Now what is the message there? The message is that there are no 'knowns.' There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.

Rumsfeld, a political survivor of the Watergate era whose main goal was to exorcise the ghost of Vietnam forever—restoring American power and prestige in the world—was outraged in the fall of 2002 at the very suggestion of a resemblance with Iraq.

Vietnam? You think you have to tell me about Vietnam? Of course it won't be Vietnam. We are going to go in, overthrow Saddam, get out. That's it.

Rumsfeld: January 15, 2003

The fact that the inspectors have not yet come up with new evidence of Iraq's WMD program could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq's noncooperation. We do know that Iraq has designed its programs in a way that they can proceed in an environment of inspections and that they are skilled at denial and deception.

A month before the unprovoked invasion of Iraq, (February 20, 2003) Rumsfeld was asked by PBS's Jim Lehrer:

Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?

And Rumsfeld responded:

There is no question but that they would be welcomed. Go back to Afghanistan--the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the Al Qaeda would not let them do.

10 days after the launch of the invasion, Secretary Rumsfeld was interviewed on ABC "This Week with George Stephanopoulos", (March 30, 2003):

Mr. Stephanopoulos:

Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. . . . None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven't found any weapons of mass destruction?

Sec. Rumsfeld:

Not at all. If you think . . . the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat. . . .

Mr. Stephanopoulos:

Do you think we'll still be fighting in Iraq six months from now?

Sec. Rumsfeld:

Oh, goodness, you know, I've never -- we've never had a timetable. We've always said it could be days, weeks, or months and we don't know. And I don't think you need a timetable. What you really need to know is it's going to end and it's going to end with the Iraqi people liberated and that regime will be gone.

June 24, 2003:

I don't know anybody that I can think of who has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons.

Responding to a U.S. soldier serving in Iraq who asked him why troops had to dig through scrap metal to armor vehicles, Dec. 8, 2004 (PBS):

As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Charles Krauthammer

2006-08-26T22:00:00.000-07:00

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer cheerleading about Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech, Washington Post, (February 1, 2002):

Bush is using his war popularity to seek support for more war -- far wider, larger and more risky. . . . what really moves him. . . .

Which is why this speech, unlike most State of the Union addresses, will be remembered. It was important. It redefined the war.

Until now the war had been about Sept. 11. The campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda is a campaign of revenge and justice. That campaign is not yet over, but the war, the real war, is not about last Sept. 11. It is about preventing the next Sept. 11. . . .

The joint resolution Congress passed on Sept. 14 simply authorized the use of force against those who perpetrated Sept. 11. This is seriously shortsighted. . . . .

We have serious enemies with bottomless hatred and, soon, the weapons to match. Whether they were involved in Sept. 11 is irrelevant. We are in a race against time. We have to get to them before they get to us.

. . . . Which brings us to Iraq. Iraq is what this speech was about. If there was a serious internal debate within the administration over what to do about Iraq, that debate is over. The speech was just short of a declaration of war.

It thus addressed the central war question today: After Afghanistan, where do we go from here?. . . . But this is all prologue. Stage Three is overthrowing Saddam Hussein. . . . between this year's State of the Union and next year's, the battle with Iraq will have been joined.

That was the unmistakable message of this astonishingly bold address. This is not a president husbanding political capital. This is a president on a mission. We have not seen that in a very long time.

In the middle of the invasion's offensive, (19 April 3003), Krauthammer wrote in Inside Washington, WUSA-TV:

The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington.

Fox News' Special Report With Brit Hume, (1 June 04):

It's the beginning of the end of the bad news. I mean, we're going to have lots of attacks, but the political process is under way.

Time (7-March-05):

Three Cheers for the Bush Doctrine: History has begun to speak, and it says that America made the right decision to invade Iraq:

. . . . The Administration went ahead with this great project knowing it would be hostage to history. History has begun to speak. Elections in Afghanistan, a historic first. Elections in Iraq, a historic first. Free Palestinian elections producing a moderate leadership, two historic firsts. Municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, men only, but still a first. In Egypt, demonstrations for democracy -- unheard of in decades -- prompting the dictator to announce free contested presidential elections, a historic first.

. . . . And now, of course, the most romantic flowering of the spirit America went into the region to foster: the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, in which unarmed civilians, Christian and Muslim alike, brought down the puppet government installed by Syria. There is even the beginning of a breeze in Damascus. More than 140 Syrian intellectuals have signed a public statement defying their government by opposing its occupation of Lebanon.

William Kristol

2006-08-26T11:29:00.000-07:00

William Kristol, one of the most influential neo-conservative thinkers in Washington and a proponent of what has become known as the Bush Doctrine, is the editor of The Weekly Standard and chairman of The Project for the New American Century.

He has written that the significance of President George W. Bush's State of the Union address in 2002 (the "axis of evil" speech) is too easily forgotten -- that it was a rare moment, "the creation of a new American foreign policy".

On September 11, 2002, as the Bush administration began its sales campaign for the coming war, Kristol suggested that Saddam Hussein could do more harm to the United States than al Qaeda had:

we cannot afford to let Saddam Hussein inflict a worse 9/11 on us in the future.

On September 15, 2002, Kristol claimed that inspection and containment could not work with Saddam:

No one believes the inspections can work.

Actually, UN inspectors believed they could work. So, too, did about half of congressional Democrats. They were right. On September 18, 2002, Kristol opined that a war in Iraq

could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.

On September 19, 2002, Kristol once again pooh-poohed inspections:

We should not fool ourselves by believing that inspections could make any difference at all.

During a debate with David Corn on Fox News Channel, after Corn noted that the goal of inspections was to prevent Saddam from reaching "the finish line" in developing nuclear weapons, Kristol exclaimed,

He's past that finish line. He's past the finish line.

On November 21, 2002, Kristol maintained,

. . . we can remove Saddam because that could start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy.

The Republicans in the Senate called the likes of William Kristol to testify before their Foreign Relations Committee. What's Next in the War on Terrorism?(7-Feb-02):

The larger question with respect to Iraq, as with Afghanistan, is what happens after the combat is concluded. [...] And, as in Kabul but also as in the Kurdish and Shi'ite regions of Iraq in 1991, American and alliance forces will be welcomed in Baghdad as liberators. Indeed, reconstructing Iraq may prove to be a less difficult task than the challenge of building a viable state in Afghanistan.

The political, strategic and moral rewards would also be even greater. A friendly, free, and oil-producing Iraq would leave Iran isolated and Syria cowed; the Palestinians more willing to negotiate seriously with Israel; and Saudi Arabia with less leverage over policymakers here and in Europe. Removing Saddam Hussein and his henchmen from power presents a genuine opportunity -- one President Bush sees clearly -- to transform the political landscape of the Middle East.

Weekly Standard(April 28, 2003):

The United States committed itself to defeating terror around the world. We committed ourselves to reshaping the Middle East, so the region would no longer be a hotbed of terrorism, extremism, anti-Americanism, and weapons of mass destruction. The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably. But these are only two battles. We are only at the end of the beginning in the war on terror and terrorist states.

On February 20, 2003, Kristol summed up the argument for war against Saddam:

He's got weapons of mass destruction. At some point he will use them or give them to a terrorist group to use...Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world....France and Germany don't have the courage to face up to the situation. That's too bad. Most of Europe is with us. And I think we will be respected around the world for helping the people of Iraq to be liberated.

On March 1, 2003, Kristol dismissed concerns that sectarian conflict might arise following a US invasion of Iraq:

We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they've never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together.

He also said,

Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.

And Kristol maintained that the war would be a bargain at $100 to $200 billion. The running tab is now nearing half a trillion dollars. On March 5, 2003, Kristol said,

I think we'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq.

Then on NPR, on (April Fools' Day, 2003), he uttered the words that Al Franken never gets tired of playing:

There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular.

Condoleezza Rice

2006-08-24T07:18:00.000-07:00

Airing July 29, 2001, CNN Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer:

I can be certain of this, and the world can be certain of this: Saddam Hussein is on the radar screen for the administration. The administration is working hard with a number of our friends and allies to have a policy that is broad; that does look at the sanctions as something that should be restructured so that we have smart sanctions that go after the regime, not after the Iraqi people; that does look at the role of opposition in creating an environment and a regime in Baghdad that the people of Iraq deserve, rather than the one that they have; and one that looks at use of military force in a more resolute manner, and not just a manner of tit-for-tat with him every day.

...let's remember that his country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.

This has been a successful period, but obviously we would like to increase pressure on him, and we're going to go about doing that.

In July 2001, the Administration was told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles. And, according to the LA Times, on August 6, 2001, the President personally

received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane.

Nevertheless National Security Advisor told her Press Briefing of May 16, 2002, that

I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.

Sept. 26, 2002:

There clearly are contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq that can be documented; there clearly is testimony that some of the contacts have been important contacts and that there's a relationship here.

. . . We clearly know that there were in the past and have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of al Qaeda going back for actually quite a long time," Rice said. "We know too that several of the (al Qaeda) detainees, in particular some high-ranking detainees, have said that Iraq provided some training to al Qaeda in chemical weapons development.

On July 3rd, 2008, as Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice summed up the Bush legacy in Iraq, she saying she was proud of the decision to Invade:

Yes, it’s been very, very tough. But I know that great historical events go through difficult phases and often emerge with the world left for the better. And I am proud of the decision of this administration to overthrow Saddam Hussein. I am proud of the liberation of 25 million Iraqis.

Ted Rall

2006-04-02T22:25:00.000-07:00

Cartoonist and conspiracy-theory book author Ted Rall, April 2, 2003:

Regardless of their political affiliations, patriotic Iraqis prefer to bear the yoke of Saddam's brutal and corrupt dictatorship than to suffer the humiliation of living in a conquered nation. . . . The thought of infidel troops marching through their cities, past their mosques, patting them down, ordering them around, disgusts them even more than Saddam's torture chambers.

Please Sign Our Guest Book?

2006-04-01T19:05:00.000-08:00

I am saving this space for the purpose of making my own comments at a later time. In the meantime I didn't want to miss any feedback from readers who were inclined to disclose theirs.

Paul Wolfowitz

2005-03-17T21:09:00.000-08:00

Promoted to President of the World Bank, March 2005

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was an example of key planners of the invasion and occupation of Iraq who have been rewarded – not blamed – for their incompetence.

Questions following a Policy address to the Council for Foreign Relations in New York City (January 23, 2003)

Question:

I think, Mr. Wolfowitz, your answer amounts to: "We can't tell you what we have of information, but trust us. It's there." Now, isn't the fundamental principle of a democratic free nation precisely not to trust government? Why should Americans trust their government? We've heard that before in Vietnam, we've heard it many times: "Trust us," and it turned out to be untrustworthy.

I don't see how this administration thinks it can build a policy for war, preventive war, that would be accepted by our allies and by American citizens on the basis of "We've got the info; we can't tell you how we got it or where we got it; we got it, trust us." And isn't that a foolish and ultimately self-destructive way for this administration to proceed?

Wolfowitz:

In some cases, we can tell very clearly where we got information from. In some cases, you would put somebody's life at risk if you told how you got it. That's a fact of life; it's not something you can overcome.

I must say I sort of find it astonishing that the issue is whether you can trust the U.S. government. The real issue is, can you trust Saddam Hussein? And it seems to me the record is absolutely clear that you can't. And we're going to have to have some very powerful evidence that he has changed and that we can trust him, because otherwise, we are trusting our security in the hands of a man who makes ricin, who makes anthrax, who makes botulism toxin, who makes aflatoxin, and who has no compunctions whatsoever about consorting with terrorists. Who do you want to trust?

Question (Kathleen McCarthy, the Graduate Center, City University of New York):

My question is this: Why is it a much more important immediate short-term goal to disarm Iraq than North Korea, when we know that North Korea also has a very sophisticated arsenal and ties to terrorist groups. Why is supporting and promoting freedom in Iraq more important than promoting freedom in North Korea, when we also know that the administration there is very cruel as well?

Wolfowitz:

It's a reasonable question and I hear it a lot . . . . These are different cases, different countries. The North Korean people suffer as much, maybe worse, if it's possible. They're the only candidates in the world for suffering worse than the Iraqi people.

But again, it is a different case. We have different partners, different countries to work with. We have got to have a strategy that doesn't just do one problem at a time, take the most important one and wait for everything else. We're trying, in a reasonable way, to focus now where we have the world's entire attention focused, to clean up something that's 12 years old.

Wolfowitz, on Feb. 19, 2003:

We're seeing today how much the people of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe appreciate what the United States did to help liberate them from the tyranny of the Soviet Union. I think you're going to see even more of that sentiment in Iraq. There's not going to be the hostility that you described Saturday. There simply won't be.

Wolfowitz, testifying before the House Budget Committee prior to the Iraq war, Feb. 27, 2003:

It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.

House subcommittee on Iraq testimony (February 28, 2003):

I can't imagine anyone here wanting to spend another $30 billion to be there for another 12 years.

27-March-03:

We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.

Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair in May 2003 that the members of Bush's war cabinet couldn't make up their minds on the reasons for the invasion of Iraq:

The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but . . . there have always been three fundamental concerns. One was weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people.

Wolfowitz, later embarrassed by the publication of this quote, claimed Vanity Fair misconstrued his remarks; but this quote comes from a transcript that was posted on the Department of Defense web site.

Paul Wolfowitz June 4, 2003:

Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.

Roger Hedgecock Show (February 6, 2004):

This word imminent keeps coming up. The President never said that there was an imminent threat. . . . . Look, intelligence is an uncertain business. As I said a few minutes ago, you don't have the luxury before the fact of basing your decisions on what you may learn later. . . . . I mean stop and think about that hole in which we found Saddam Hussein hiding. He hid in a hole like that for nine months. That's a big enough hole to contain enormous lethal quantities of anthrax or other biological weapons. There could be such stashes still in Iraq. . . . .

(World Bank Days) March 17, 2005):

....the importance of leadership and what it consists of: not lecturing and posturing and demanding, but demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished, and that those who refuse to support you will regret having done so.

Jonah Goldberg

2005-02-05T12:33:00.000-08:00

Jonah Goldberg, who needs no introduction from those who quench their thirst from swill of the National Review, proposed this bet with Juan Cole (Informed Comment) on 5-Feb-02:

Anyway, I do think my judgment is superior to his when it comes to the big picture. So, I have an idea: Since he doesn't want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let's make a bet. I predict that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it.

David Petraeus

2004-09-26T19:00:00.000-07:00

Petraeus wrote more as a cheerleader than as a reporter in the Washington Post: Battling for Iraq (Sunday, September 26, 2004):

18 months after entering Iraq, I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up.

...The institutions that oversee them are being reestablished from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously in the face of an enemy that has shown a willingness to do anything to disrupt the establishment of the new Iraq.

....there are reasons for optimism. Today approximately 164,000 Iraqi police and soldiers (of which about 100,000 are trained and equipped) and an additional 74,000 facility protection forces are performing a wide variety of security missions. Equipment is being delivered. Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired. Command and control structures and institutions are being reestablished.

Most important, Iraqi security forces are in the fight. . . .

Six battalions of the Iraqi regular army and the Iraqi Intervention Force are now conducting operations. Two of these battalions, along with the Iraqi commando battalion, the counterterrorist force, two Iraqi National Guard battalions and thousands of policemen recently contributed to successful operations. . . .

Iraqi National Guard battalions have also been active in recent months. Some 40 of the 45 existing battalions -- generally all except those in the Fallujah-Ramadi area -- are conducting operations on a daily basis, most alongside coalition forces, but many independently. Progress has also been made in police training. In the past week alone, some 1,100 graduated from the basic policing course and five specialty courses. By early spring, nine academies in Iraq and one in Jordan will be graduating a total of 5,000 police each month from the eight-week course, which stresses patrolling and investigative skills, substantive and procedural legal knowledge, and proper use of force and weaponry, as well as pride in the profession and adherence to the police code of conduct.

. . . . despite the sensational attacks, there is no shortage of qualified recruits volunteering to join Iraqi security forces. In the past couple of months, more than 7,500 Iraqi men have signed up for the army and are preparing to report for basic training to fill out the final nine battalions of the Iraqi regular army. Some 3,500 new police recruits just reported for training in various locations. . . .

That was in 2004. . .

George Tenet

2004-04-19T22:32:00.000-07:00

Winner, Presidential Medal of Freedom.

As CIA Director, Tenet was responsible for gathering information on Iraq and the potential threat posted by Saddam Hussein. According to author Bob Woodward, Tenet told President Bush before the war that there was a “slam dunk case” that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Tenet remained publicly silent while the Bush administration made pre-war statements on Iraq’s supposed nuclear program and ties to al Qaeda that were contrary to the CIA’s judgments. Tenet issued a statement in July 2003, drafted by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, taking responsibility for Bush’s false statements in his State of the Union address. Tenet voluntarily resigned from the administration on June 3, 2004. He was later awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

CNN, (19 April-04):

It’s a slam dunk case.

Richard Perle

2003-09-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

Richard Perle, A.K.A., “Prince of Darkness,” was the chairman of Defense Policy Board during the run-up to the Iraq war. He suggested Iraq had a hand in 9-11. In 1996, he authored “Clean Break,” a paper that was co-signed by Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and others that argued for regime change in Iraq. Shortly after the war began, Perle resigned from the Board because he came under fire for having relationships with businesses that stood to profit from the war. Currently, Perle is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he specializes in national security and defense issues. He has been investigated for ethical violations concerning war profiteering and other conflicts of interest.

In the New Statesman on December 16th, 2002 John Pilger, one of the most respected journalists in Britain, captured Perle's prophecy of Bush's grand idea:

This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just Let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

In February 2003 when Operation Iraqi Freedom was less than a month away, he told David Rose,

Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform. It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding.

Six months later, after Bush's 'mission' was 'accomplished', at in his address at the AEI Luncheon Keynote (Monday, September 22, 2003):

And a year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they’ve been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation.

Three years later, in October 2006, under the shadows of a looming Democratic election victory, Perle experienced bitter aftertaste in talking with David Rose:

The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity . . .

I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.'

. . . Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have.

Stephen Hadley

2003-07-22T21:32:00.000-07:00

Promoted to National Security Advisor, January 26, 2005

As then-Deputy National Security Advisor, Hadley disregarded memos from the CIA and a personal phone call from Director George Tenet warning that references to Iraq’s pursuit of uranium be dropped from Bush’s speeches. The false information ended up in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address.

Press Briefing on Iraq WMD and SOTU Speech, 22-July-03:

I should have recalled at the time of the State of the Union speech that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue. … And it is now clear to me that I failed in that responsibility in connection with the inclusion of these 16 words in the speech that he gave on the 28th of January.

Tom Friedman

2003-05-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

On the Charlie Rose (for a whole hour) 30-May-2003:

I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.

...We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.

...What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

Andrew Natsios

2003-04-23T22:23:00.000-07:00

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Andrew Natsios, then the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, went on Nightline and claimed that the U.S. contribution to the rebuilding of Iraq would be just $1.7 billion. When it became quickly apparent that Natsios’ prediction would fall woefully short of reality, the government came under fire for scrubbing his comments from the USAID Web site. Natsios stepped down as the head of USAID in January and is currently teaching.

Nightline, (23-Apr-03):

The American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for any further-on funding for this. Any more are . . . outlandish figures I’ve seen, I have to say, there’s a little bit of hoopla involved in this.

Eric Alterman

2003-04-21T22:37:00.000-07:00

Eric Alterman in the April 21, 2003, issue of the Nation:

Is Wolfowitz really so ignorant of history as to believe the Iraqis would welcome us as 'their hoped-for liberators'?

Edward Said

2003-04-17T22:34:00.000-07:00

Edward Said in the April 17, 2003, London Review of Books:

Al-Jazeera has had reporters inside Mosul, Baghdad and Nasiriya...and they have presented a much more detailed, more realistic account of what has befallen Baghdad and Basra, as well as showing the resistance and anger of the Iraqi population, dismissed by Western propaganda as a sullen bunch waiting to throw flowers at Clint Eastwood lookalikes. . . . The idea that Iraq's population would have welcomed American forces entering the country after a terrifying aerial bombardment was always utterly implausible.

Joe Scarborough

2003-04-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

Joe Scarborough has been the host of MSNBC's Morning Joe since July, 2007. He had publicly supported George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Previously, Scarborough captured the élan of those heady days so long ago when the Iraq war smelled like victory to the mightiest minds of our political discourse. On April 10, 2003, the day after the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Firdos Square, Scarborough remarked:

I'm waiting to hear the words, 'I was wrong,' from some of the world's most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types. . . . Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Tom Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don't call them 'elitists' for nothing.

Michael O'Hanlon

2003-04-09T21:05:00.000-07:00

Michael O'Hanlon is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Letter Signatory for the Project for the New American Century, Member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Council on Foreign Relations and a Former Analyst for the Institute for Defense Analysis. Although frequently posing as a critic of the War in Iraq, O'Hanlon has been among its most promient rosy-eyed cheerleaders. On April 9, 2003, in an essay Hanlon wrote:

Three weeks into the war, with the conflict's outcome increasingly clear, it is a good time to ask if General Myers was right. Will war colleges around the world be teaching the basic coalition strategy to their students decades from now, or will the conflict be seen as a case in which overwhelming military capability prevailed over a mediocre army from a mid-sized developing country?

Six months after the invasion (September 2003) O'Hanlon wrote:

How can we really determine if the Iraq mission is going well? . . . To convince a skeptical public about progress in Iraq, the Bush administration would do well to provide more systematic information on all of these and other measurable metrics routinely -- even when certain trends do not support the story it wants to sell.

The administration should want to do this, because on balance the Iraq mission is going fairly well . . . But most indicators are now favorable in Iraq . . . . Around Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, and other parts of the northern "Sunni triangle," for example, former regime loyalists have been sufficiently weakened that they need reinforcements from other parts of Iraq to continue many of their efforts. Most Baathists from the famous "deck of cards" are now off the street; many second tier loyalists of the former regime are also being arrested or killed on a daily basis. . . . In these counterinsurgency operations, American troops are following much better practices than they did in Vietnam . . . . Coalition forces and other parties were slow at times to anticipate such tactics, resulting in excessive vulnerability to the kinds of truck bombings witnessed in August and the kinds of assassination attempts that just took the life of a member of the Governing Council, Akila al-Hashimi. But these mistakes are being corrected, and future such attacks are unlikely to be as devastating.

And at Brookings, 9/30/03]:

But the Iraqis we met were nonetheless grateful for the defeat of Saddam and passionate about their country’s future. Their enthusiasm, and their desire to work together with U.S. and other coalition forces, warmed the heart of this former Peace Corps volunteer. Maybe that is why, on balance, I couldn’t help but leave the country with a real, if guarded and cautious, feeling of optimism.

O'Hanlon testified in the House Armed Services Committee in October of 2003,

In my judgment the administration is basically correct that the overall effort in Iraq is succeeding. By the standards of counterinsurgency warfare, most factors, though admittedly not all, appear to be working to our advantage. While one would be mistaken to assume rapid or easy victory, Mr. Rumsfeld's leaked memo last week probably had it about right when he described the war as a "long, hard slog" that we are nonetheless quite likely to win. . . . That said, on the prognosis of Iraq's future, the Bush administration is at least partly and perhaps even mostly right. Negative headlines need to be quickly countered with good news, of which there is an abundance. . . Most of Iraq is now generally stable . . . Things are getting gradually better even as we progress towards an exit strategy that could further diffuse extremist sentiment.

One year after Bush's invasion, O'Hanlon on March 19, 2004:

At that pace, one might think the war should be won by summer. . . .Overall, the glass in Iraq is probably about three-fifths full. Considering the growing strength of Iraqi security services and the fact that $18 billion in American money (as well as a few billion more from other foreign donors) is beginning to flow into Iraq, it is likely to get somewhat fuller soon.

Even as O'Hanlon began expressing increasing concerns about instability in Iraq, it was almost always tempered with rosy overall assessments of the occupation, such as this, from May 16, 2004:

While the overall situation is disconcerting, there is still hope -- especially if the standard for success is defined realistically as an absence of civil war, a gradually improving economy, and slowly declining rates of political and criminal violence. The scheduled transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi caretaker government on June 30 may at least begin to defuse the growing anti-American anger that is helping fuel the insurgency. And most American assistance, tied up in bureaucratic red tape until now, should begin to jump-start Iraq's economy in the coming months, with a likely beneficial effect on security as well.

Fast forward to 2007: in a July 30, 2007 op-ed piece in the New York Times O'Hanlon and co-author Kenneth M. Pollack, just back from eight days in Iraq, found progress being made.

As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily 'victory' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Source

James K. Galbraith

2003-04-01T22:24:00.000-08:00

James K. Galbraith on the American Prospect website, April 1, 2003:

If history is a guide, you cannot subdue a large and hostile city except by destroying it completely. Short of massacre, we will not inherit a pacified Iraq. . . . To support 'the groundwork' for this effort is to support a holocaust, quite soon, against Iraqi civilians and also against the troops on both sides. That is what victory means.

"Old Europe"

2003-03-31T22:19:00.000-08:00

Der Spiegel, March 31, 2003:

Gruesome days for the German foreign minister: Every morning at nine, [Joschka Fischer's] staff briefs him on the situation in Iraq in the ministry's underground situation room. His worst fears are coming true: The U.S. military appears to be stuck in its tracks in the desert, and civilian casualties are multiplying. It has never been so painful to have been in the right, murmurs the foreign minister, with a worried look on his face. . . .

President Chirac accuses the Americans of having made both a strategic and a political mistake:

They thought they would be greeted as liberators and that the regime would collapse like a house of cards. But they underestimated Iraqi patriotism. They would have been better off listening to us.

Peter Arnett

2003-03-30T22:15:00.000-08:00

Peter Arnett on Iraqi state television, March 30, 2003:

The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. . . . Clearly the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces. And I personally do not understand how that happened, because I've been here many times and in my commentaries on television I would tell the Americans about the determination of the Iraqi forces. . . . But me, and others who felt the same way, were not listened to by the Bush administration.

James Webb

2003-03-30T22:12:00.000-08:00

James Webb, in the New York Times, March 30, 2003, You've got your war novelist, phoning it in from his experiences in Vietnam, 30 years ago:

Visions of cheering throngs welcoming them as liberators have vanished in the wake of a bloody engagement whose full casualties are still unknown. . . . Welcome to hell. Many of us lived it in another era. And don't expect it to get any better for a while.

At the time of this posting, of course, it's Senator-Elect Webb.

R.W. Apple Jr

2003-03-30T22:09:00.000-08:00

New York Times "news analyst" R.W. Apple Jr., March 30, 2003:

With every passing day, it is more evident that the allies made . . . gross military misjudgments. . . . The very term 'shock and awe' has a swagger to it, no doubt because it was intended to discourage Mr. Hussein and his circle. But it rings hollow now.

Scott Ritter

2003-03-25T22:08:00.000-08:00

Scott Ritter, on a South African radio station, March 25, 2003:

The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated....We do not have the military means to take over Baghdad and for this reason I believe the defeat of the United States in this war is inevitable. . . . [W]e will not be able to win this war, which in my opinion is already lost.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

2003-03-23T07:11:00.000-08:00

On 23 March 2003, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. asked his fellow Americans to wake up and smell the coffee. He published in the Los Angeles Times, Today, it is we Americans who live in infamy:

We are at war again -- not because of enemy attack, as in World War II, nor because of incremental drift, as in the Vietnam War -- but because of the deliberate and premeditated choice of our own government.

Now that we are embarked on this misadventure, let us hope that our intervention will be swift and decisive, and that victory will come with minimal American, British and civilian Iraqi casualties.

But let us continue to ask why our government chose to impose this war. The choice reflects a fatal turn in U.S. foreign policy, in which the strategic doctrine of containment and deterrence that led us to peaceful victory during the Cold War has been replaced by the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. The president has adopted a policy of "anticipatory self-defense" that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy. The global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism. Public opinion polls in friendly countries regard George W. Bush as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein. Demonstrations around the planet, instead of denouncing the vicious rule of the Iraqi president, assail the United States on a daily basis.

The Bush Doctrine converts us into the world's judge, jury and executioner -- a self-appointed status that, however benign our motives, is bound to corrupt our leadership. As John Quincy Adams warned on July 4, 1821, the fundamental maxims of our policy "would insensibly change from liberty to force ... [America] might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit." Already the collateral damage to our civil liberties and constitutional rights, carried out by the religious fanatic who is our attorney general, is considerable -- and more is still to come.

What drove the rush to war? Hussein has a significantly smaller military force than he had in 1990, and he has grown weaker as more weapons have been exposed and destroyed under the United Nations' inspection regime. The cause of our rush to war was so trivial as to seem idiotic. It was the weather. American troops, our masters tell us, will lose their edge in the Persian Gulf's midday sun; so we had to go to war before summer. This is a reason to rush to war? We have, after all, a professional army -- and a professional army ought not to lose its edge so quickly and easily.

There is a base suspicion that we are going to war against Iraq because that is the only war we can win. We can't win the war against Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda strikes from the shadows and disappears into them. We can't win a war against North Korea because it has nuclear weapons. Indeed, the danger from North Korea is far more clear, present and compelling than the danger from Iraq, and our different treatment of the two countries is a potent incentive for other rogue states to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

How have we gotten into this tragic fix without searching debate? No war has been more extensively previewed than this one. Despite pro forma disclaimers, President Bush's determination to go to war has been apparent from the start. Why then this absence of dialogue? Why the collapse of the Democratic Party? Why let the opposition movement fall into the hands of infantile leftists?

I think the media are greatly to blame. There have been congressional efforts to jump-start a debate. Democratic Sens. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia have delivered strong and thoughtful speeches opposing the rush to war. They have been largely ignored by the media. Some philanthropist had to pay the New York Times to print the text of Byrd's powerful Feb. 12 speech in a full-page advertisement -- a speech ignored by the media when delivered. The media have played up mass demonstrations at the expense of the reasoned case against the war.

According to polls, a near majority of ill-informed Americans believes Hussein had something to do with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon and resulting massacre of nearly 3,000 innocent people. Hussein is a great villain, but he had nothing to do with 9/11. Many, perhaps most, Americans believe a war against Iraq will be a blow against international terrorism. But evidence from the region indicates very plainly that it will make recruitment much easier for Al Qaeda and other murderous gangs.

What should we have done? What if opposition to war had received a fair break from the media? There are two strong arguments for the war -- that Hussein might down the road acquire nuclear weapons, and that the people of Iraq deserve liberation from his monstrous tyranny.

Unlike biological and chemical weapons, nuclear arms -- and their production facilities -- are hard to conceal. Inspection, surveillance, tapping telephone calls and espionage could check any nuclear initiative on Hussein's part. He is containable, and he is not immortal.

The more powerful argument is humanitarian intervention. This comes with ill grace from an administration that includes people who showed no objections to Hussein's human rights atrocities when he was at war with Iran. But do we have a moral obligation to fight despicable tyrants everywhere?

Hussein is unquestionably a monster. But does that mean we should forcibly remove him from power? "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled," Adams said in the same July 4 speech, "there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." We are now going abroad to destroy a monster. The aftermath -- how America conducts itself in Iraq and the world -- will provide the crucial test as to whether the war can be justified.

America as the world's self-appointed judge, jury and executioner? "We must face the fact," President John F. Kennedy once said, "that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient -- that we are only 6% of the world's population -- that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind -- that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity -- and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."

John McCain

2003-03-23T05:17:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it's because of his cultivated image of being a Republican maverick, Senator John McCain has never been as closely identified with the Iraq invasion and occupation as he is now. In fact, he has been a below-the-radar cheerleader from before the very beginning.

Recently unearthed video shows that just two months after 9/11, John McCain was not only fully aware of the Bush Administration's Iraq War Agenda, but also that he actively helped make the argument for war. In an interview broadcast November 28, 2001 on ABC News Nightline, McCain:

Said that the Bush Administration would build a case for military conflict with Iraq, and expressed his support for such action
Advanced false claims made by the Bush Administration about the threat of Iraqi WMD
Connected Iraq with 9/11 by repeating the false claim that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with Iraq intelligence authorities in Prague before 9/11.

Here's the video:
And John McCain, on CNN, (24-Sep-02):

Because I know that as successful as I believe we will be, and I believe that the success will be fairly easy, we will still lose some American young men or women.

CNN, (29-Sep-02):

We’re not going to get into house-to-house fighting in Baghdad. We may have to take out buildings, but we’re not going to have a bloodletting of trading American bodies for Iraqi bodies.

MSNBC (22-Jan-03):

But the point is that, one, we will win this conflict. We will win it easily.

McCain, writing for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, (March 12, 2003):

Isn’t it more likely that antipathy toward the United States in the Islamic world might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis celebrating the end of a regime that has few equals in its ruthlessness?

McCain on March 23, 2003:

I believe that this conflict is still going to be relatively short.

The transcript of Meet the Press for June 19th 2005 shows McCain affirming George Bush to the max:

... on the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I've been totally in agreement and support of President Bush .... I will also submit that my support for President Bush has been active and very impassioned on issues that are important to the American people. And I'm particularly talking about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, national security, national defense, support of men and women in the military, fiscal discipline, a number of other issues. So I strongly disagree with any assertion that I've been more at odds with the president of the United States than I have been in agreement with him.

McCain in December 8, 2005:

Overall, I think a year from now, we will have a fair amount of progress [in Iraq] if we stay the course.

John McCain in Des Moines 17-Feb-07:

I don't know what the other options are because if we fail here I think it's going to be very difficult to maintain the support of the American people. And when the American people don't support a war ... then we aren't able to maintain a foreign endeavor.

Derry, New Hampshire Town Hall meeting, (3-Jan-08):

Make it a hundred years in Iraq ... that would be fine with me.

Associated Press, (4-Jan-08):

A thousand years. A million years. Ten million years.

Robin Cook

2003-03-19T20:43:00.000-08:00

Personal and political loyalty should not trump personal integrity and patriotism.

It is said that open societies, republics and parliamentary democracies place public trust in government of laws and not of men. But such systems require men and women of sufficient wisdom, conscience, integrity and courage to make the system work. Because the Republican Party and the Labour party have lacked personnel of this depth and stature, the Anglo-American partnership today finds itself waste-deep in blood and red ink in Iraq. Both societies have slipped under this red tide of militarism despite the heart-breaking and heart-stopping efforts of a Robin Cook.

The grave stone of former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook stands at Grange Cemetery in Edinburgh, Scotland, Tuesday Jan. 9, 2006. Cook was a fierce opponent of the Iraq war and an outspoken critic of the UK Government's decision to topple Saddam Hussein's Iraq regime, quitting his post as Leader of the House of Commons in 2003 in protest. Now, on this January 9th, set in stone as a lasting epitaph, the headstone bears the legend

I may not have succeeded in halting the war, but I did secure the right of Parliament to decide on war.

The night after Robin Cook resigned his post as Leader of the Commons, the House voted 396 to 217 to defeat an amendment by his colleagues that declared the case for war "has not yet been established."

Tony Blair then prevailed in the Commons vote on the war by a vote of 412 to 149 to use "all means necessary" to disarm Iraq.

From my historical perspective, here is my version of Robin Cook's farewell speech. If readers don't trust my rendition, they may read or hear (even better!) the original:

This is the first time for 20 years that I have addressed the House from the back benches. I must confess that I had forgotten how much better the view is from here.

None of those 20 years were more enjoyable or more rewarding than the past two, in which I have had the immense privilege of serving this House as Leader of the House, which were made all the more enjoyable, Mr Speaker, by the opportunity of working closely with you.

It was frequently the necessity for me as Leader of the House to talk my way out of accusations that a statement had been preceded by a press interview. On this occasion I can say with complete confidence that no press interview has been given before this statement.

I have chosen to address the House first on why I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support.

The present Prime Minister is the most successful leader of the Labour party in my lifetime. I hope that he will continue to be the leader of our party, and I hope that he will continue to be successful. I have no sympathy with, and I will give no comfort to, those who want to use this crisis to displace him.

I applaud the heroic efforts that the prime minister has made in trying to secure a second resolution.

I do not think that anybody could have done better than the foreign secretary in working to get support for a second resolution within the Security Council.

But the very intensity of those attempts underlines how important it was to succeed.

Now that those attempts have failed, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance.

France has been at the receiving end of bucket loads of commentary in recent days.

It is not France alone that wants more time for inspections. Germany wants more time for inspections; Russia wants more time for inspections; indeed, at no time have we signed up even the minimum necessary to carry a second resolution.

We delude ourselves if we think that the degree of international hostility is all the result of President Chirac.

The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner - not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council.

To end up in such diplomatic weakness is a serious reverse.

Only a year ago, we and the United States were part of a coalition against terrorism that was wider and more diverse than I would ever have imagined possible.

History will be astonished at the diplomatic miscalculations that led so quickly to the disintegration of that powerful coalition.

The US can afford to go it alone, but Britain is not a superpower.

Our interests are best protected not by unilateral action but by multilateral agreement and a world order governed by rules.

Yet tonight the international partnerships most important to us are weakened: the European Union is divided; the Security Council is in stalemate.

Those are heavy casualties of a war in which a shot has yet to be fired.

I have heard some parallels between military action in these circumstances and the military action that we took in Kosovo. There was no doubt about the multilateral support that we had for the action that we took in Kosovo.

It was supported by NATO; it was supported by the European Union; it was supported by every single one of the seven neighbours in the region. France and Germany were our active allies.

It is precisely because we have none of that support in this case that it was all the more important to get agreement in the Security Council as the last hope of demonstrating international agreement.

The legal basis for our action in Kosovo was the need to respond to an urgent and compelling humanitarian crisis.

Our difficulty in getting support this time is that neither the international community nor the British public is persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling reason for this military action in Iraq.

The threshold for war should always be high.

None of us can predict the death toll of civilians from the forthcoming bombardment of Iraq, but the US warning of a bombing campaign that will "shock and awe" makes it likely that casualties will be numbered at least in the thousands.

I am confident that British servicemen and women will acquit themselves with professionalism and with courage. I hope that they all come back.

I hope that Saddam, even now, will quit Baghdad and avert war, but it is false to argue that only those who support war support our troops.

It is entirely legitimate to support our troops while seeking an alternative to the conflict that will put those troops at risk.

Nor is it fair to accuse those of us who want longer for inspections of not having an alternative strategy.

For four years as foreign secretary I was partly responsible for the western strategy of containment. Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam's medium and long-range missiles programmes.

Iraq's military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war.

Ironically, it is only because Iraq's military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam's forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days.

We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.

It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories.

Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?

Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam's ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors?

Only a couple of weeks ago, Hans Blix told the Security Council that the key remaining disarmament tasks could be completed within months.

I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but 12 years in which to complete disarmament, and that our patience is exhausted. Yet it is more than 30 years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply.

I welcome the strong personal commitment that the prime minister has given to middle east peace, but Britain's positive role in the middle east does not redress the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest.

Nor is our credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.

That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war.

What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops.

The longer that I have served in this place, the greater the respect I have for the good sense and collective wisdom of the British people.

On Iraq, I believe that the prevailing mood of the British people is sound. They do not doubt that Saddam is a brutal dictator, but they are not persuaded that he is a clear and present danger to Britain.

They want inspections to be given a chance, and they suspect that they are being pushed too quickly into conflict by a US Administration with an agenda of its own.

Above all, they are uneasy at Britain going out on a limb on a military adventure without a broader international coalition and against the hostility of many of our traditional allies.

From the start of the present crisis, I have insisted, as Leader of the House, on the right of this place to vote on whether Britain should go to war.

It has been a favourite theme of commentators that this House no longer occupies a central role in British politics.

Nothing could better demonstrate that they are wrong than for this House to stop the commitment of troops in a war that has neither international agreement nor domestic support.

I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action now. It is for that reason, and for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government.

At 59, Cook died in 2005 after collapsing while hill-walking in north-west Scotland with his wife, Gaynor.

Britain followed Bush into a un-provoked, unnecessary, largely unilateral invasion and unplanned occupation of Iraq (UULUIUOI) because there were not enough Robin Cooks on their side of the pond. And on my side, my only hope for a cook to spoil Bush's brew was Colin Powell. And he lied to the United Nations and in front of the World.

Now, the question for my fellow Americans is can we muster in Congress - in either party - any who can match the statesmanship and patriotism of a Robin Cook? Now, in this late hour of our need?

David Brooks

2003-03-10T22:46:00.000-08:00

David Brooks has served as a reporter for the Washington Times, and op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, and a commentator on NPR and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Brooks also writes articles and makes television appearances as a commentator on various trends in pop culture. Before the Iraq War, Brooks argued forcefully on moral grounds for American military intervention, echoing the belief of neoconservative commentators and political figures that American and British forces would be welcomed as liberators.

Ten days before Bush’s invasion, Brooks wrote in the The Weekly Standard (10-Mar-03):

The American commentariat is gravely concerned. Over the past week, George W. Bush has shown a disturbing tendency not to waffle when it comes to Iraq. There has been an appalling clarity and coherence to his position. There has been a reckless tendency not to be murky, hesitant, or evasive. Naturally questions are being raised about President Bush’s leadership skills.

Meanwhile, among the smart set, Hamlet-like indecision has become the intellectual fashion. The Liberal columnist, E. J. Dionne wrote in the Washington Post that he is uncomfortable with the pro- and anti-war camps. He praised the doubters and raised his colors on behalf of ‘heroic ambivalence’. The New York Times, venturing deep into the territory of self-parody, ran a full page editorial calling for ‘still more discussion’ on whether or not to go to war.

In certain circles, it is not only important what opinion you hold, but how you hold it. It is important to be seen dancing with complexity, sliding among shades of gray. Any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion – that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed – but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis.

But those who actually have to lead and protect, and actually have to build one step on another, have to bring some questions to a close. Bush gave Saddam time to disarm. Saddam did not. Hence the issue of whether to disarm him forcibly is settled. The French and the Germans and the domestic critics may keep debating, which is their luxury, but the people who actually make the decisions have moved on to more practical concerns ….

Two weeks later in the Weekly Standard, after the invasion, Brooks published more of the same:

The president has remained resolute. Momentum to liberate Iraq continues to build. The situation has clarified, and history will allow clear judgments about which leaders and which institutions were up to the challenge posed by Saddam and which were not.

Over the past 12 years, the United States has sought to disarm or depose Saddam - more forcibly since September 11 than before. Throughout that time, France and Russia have sought to undermine sanctions and fend off the ousting of Saddam. They opposed Clinton's efforts to bombe Saddam, just as they opposed Bush's push for regime change. Through the fog and verbiage, that is the essential confrontation. Events will show who was right, George W. Bush or Jacques Chirac.

What matters and what ultimately sprang the U.N. trap, is American resolve. The Administration simply wouldn't let up. It didn't matter how much Hans Blix muddied the waters with his reports on this or that weapons system. Under the U.N. resolutions, it was up Saddam to disarm, administrative officials repeated ad nauseam, and he wasn't doing it. It was and is sheer relentlessness that has driven us to where we are today.

Which is ironic. We are in this situation because the first Bush administration was not relentless in its pursuit of Saddam Hussein. That is the mistake this Bush administration will not repeat.

Three days and three years after Brooks published that, the Weekly Standard had second thoughts:

Many who supported the parade invasion have taken this anniversary to argue that it all would have been worthwhile if things had been run better …. We doubt it. The last three years have shown how little our national leaders understood Iraq, and have reminded us how badly attempts at liberation from the outside have gone in the past. Given where we are now, the question of whether a botched invasion created a lost opportunity might be moot .....

And the Weekly Standard joined the revisionist wing of the NeoCon's war party, blaming the whole thing on Rumsfeld.

Douglas Feith

2003-03-01T21:21:00.000-08:00

As Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Feith spearheaded two secretive groups at the Pentagon — the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans — that were instrumental in drawing up documents that explained the supposed ties between Saddam and al Qaeda.

Colin Powell referred to Feith’s operation as the Gestapo. In Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, former CentCom Commander Gen. Tommy Franks called Feith the “fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.”

Feith voluntarily resigned from the Defense Department shortly after Bush’s reelection. Feith is currently teaching at Georgetown. Feith’s secretive groups at the Pentagon are under investigation by the Pentagon and the Senate Intelligence Committee for intelligence failures.

In the run up to the 2003 war, Juan Cole (Informed Comment) relates, Douglas Feith was challenged by a State Department official who knows the Middle East about what in the world the US would do in Iraq once it won the war.

State Dept. Official:

Doug, after the smoke clears, what is the plan?

Feith:

Think of Iraq as being like a computer. And think of Saddam as like a processor. We just take out the old processor, and put in a new one--Chalabi.

State Dept. Official:

Put in a new processor?

Feith:

Yes! It will all be over in 6 weeks.

State Dept. Official:

You mean six months.

Feith:

No, six weeks. You'll see.

State Dept. Official:

Doug.

Feith:

Yes?

State Dept. Official:

You're smoking crack, Doug.

Feith:

Oh, so you're disloyal to the President, are you?

Washington Post 13-July-05:

I am not asserting to you that I know that the answer is — we did it right. What I am saying is it’s an extremely complex judgment to know whether the course that we chose with its pros and cons was more sensible.

P.J. Crowley, a retired Air Force colonel and a senior fellow at the Center of American Progress, said (10-Feb-07) that the intelligence peddled by Feith tainted the public dialogue.

They weren't creating intelligence, but they were assembling the pieces to create a rationale for war. Their production was discredited, but they had the desired effect. The little pieces ended up infecting the process.

John Brady Kiesling

2003-02-27T20:06:00.000-08:00

John Brady Kiesling is a career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Yerevan. Kiesling was the first of three U.S. diplomats to resign in 2003 to protest the impending invasion of Iraq. He is the author of "Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower" (Potomac Books 2006). The following is the text of John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

Dear Mr. Secretary:

I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States and from my position as Political Counselor in U.S. Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so with a heavy heart. The baggage of my upbringing included a felt obligation to give something back to my country. Service as a U.S. diplomat was a dream job. I was paid to understand foreign languages and cultures, to seek out diplomats, politicians, scholars and journalists, and to persuade them that U.S. interests and theirs fundamentally coincided. My faith in my country and its values was the most powerful weapon in my diplomatic arsenal.

It is inevitable that during twenty years with the State Department I would become more sophisticated and cynical about the narrow and selfish bureaucratic motives that sometimes shaped our policies. Human nature is what it is, and I was rewarded and promoted for understanding human nature. But until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer.

The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.

The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves. Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo?

We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners. Even where our aims were not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests. Have we indeed become blind, as Russia is blind in Chechnya, as Israel is blind in the Occupied Territories, to our own advice, that overwhelming military power is not the answer to terrorism? After the shambles of post-war Iraq joins the shambles in Grozny and Ramallah, it will be a brave foreigner who forms ranks with Micronesia to follow where we lead.

We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of our friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital built up over a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less that war is justified than that it would be perilous to allow the U.S. to drift into complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal. Why does our President condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this Administration is fostering, including among its most senior officials. Has “oderint dum metuant” really become our motto?

I urge you to listen to America’s friends around the world. Even here in Greece, purported hotbed of European anti-Americanism, we have more and closer friends than the American newspaper reader can possibly imagine. Even when they complain about American arrogance, Greeks know that the world is a difficult and dangerous place, and they want a strong international system, with the U.S. and EU in close partnership. When our friends are afraid of us rather than for us, it is time to worry. And now they are afraid. Who will tell them convincingly that the United States is as it was, a beacon of liberty, security, and justice for the planet?

Mr. Secretary, I have enormous respect for your character and ability. You have preserved more international credibility for us than our policy deserves, and salvaged something positive from the excesses of an ideological and self-serving Administration. But your loyalty to the President goes too far. We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America’s ability to defend its interests.

I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current U.S. Administration. I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and prosperity of the American people and the world we share.

Elliot Abrams

2003-02-25T21:52:00.000-08:00

Abrams was one of the defendants in the Iran-Contra Affair, and he pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress. He was appointed Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs during Bush’s first term, where he served as Bush’s chief advisor on the Middle East. His name surfaced as part of the investigation into who leaked the name of a undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Abrams was promoted to deputy national security adviser in February of 2005.

CNN, (25-February-03):

We recognize that military action in Iraq, if necessary, will have adverse humanitarian consequences. We have been planning over the last several months, across all relevant agencies, to limit any such consequences and provide relief quickly.

Senator Robert Byrd

2003-02-12T19:27:00.000-08:00

Senator Robert Byrd's Senate Floor Speech - Wednesday, February 12, 2003:

. . . and this is no small conflagration we contemplate. This is no simple attempt to defang a villain. No. This coming battle, if it materializes, represents a turning point in U.S. foreign policy and possibly a turning point in the recent history of the world.

This nation is about to embark upon the first test of a revolutionary doctrine applied in an extraordinary way at an unfortunate time. The doctrine of preemption -- the idea that the United States or any other nation can legitimately attack a nation that is not imminently threatening but may be threatening in the future -- is a radical new twist on the traditional idea of self defense. It appears to be in contravention of international law and the UN Charter. And it is being tested at a time of world-wide terrorism, making many countries around the globe wonder if they will soon be on our -- or some other nation's -- hit list . . . . What could be more destabilizing and unwise than this type of uncertainty, particularly in a world where globalism has tied the vital economic and security interests of many nations so closely together? There are huge cracks emerging in our time-honored alliances, and U.S. intentions are suddenly subject to damaging worldwide speculation. Anti-Americanism based on mistrust, misinformation, suspicion, and alarming rhetoric from U.S. leaders is fracturing the once solid alliance against global terrorism which existed after September 11.

. . . . this Administration has failed to find Osama bin Laden. In fact, just yesterday we heard from him again marshaling his forces and urging them to kill. This Administration has split traditional alliances, possibly crippling, for all time, International order-keeping entities like the United Nations and NATO. This Administration has called into question the traditional worldwide perception of the United States as well-intentioned, peacekeeper. This Administration has turned the patient art of diplomacy into threats, labeling, and name calling of the sort that reflects quite poorly on the intelligence and sensitivity of our leaders, and which will have consequences for years to come . . . .

Colin Powell

2003-02-05T22:45:00.000-08:00

On the occasion Powell's visit to Cairo, during a press conference on 24 February 2001, he answered a question about the adequacy of US-led sanctions against Iraq:

We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq...

Furthermore, on 15 May 2001, Powell testified before the Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Later scrubbed from State Department site, Lexus-Nexus salvaged the content. Here are some extracts. Senator Bennett asked:

Mr. Secretary, the U.N. sanctions on Iraq expire the beginning of June. We've had bombs dropped, we've had threats made, we've had all kinds of activity vis-a-vis Iraq in the previous administration. Now we're coming to the end. What's our level of concern about the progress of Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons programs?

Secretary Powell:

The sanctions, as they are called, have succeeded over the last 10 years, not in deterring him from moving in that direction, but from actually being able to move in that direction. The Iraqi regime militarily remains fairly weak. It doesn't have the capacity it had 10 or 12 years ago. It has been contained. And even though we have no doubt in our mind that the Iraqi regime is pursuing programs to develop weapons of mass destruction -- chemical, biological and nuclear -- I think the best intelligence estimates suggest that they have not been terribly successful. There's no question that they have some stockpiles of some of these sorts of weapons still under their control, but they have not been able to break out, they have not been able to come out with the capacity to deliver these kinds of systems or to actually have these kinds of systems that is much beyond where they were 10 years ago.

So containment, using this arms control sanctions regime, I think has been reasonably successful. We have not been able to get the inspectors back in, though, to verify that, and we have not been able to get the inspectors in to pull up anything that might be left there. So we have to continue to view this regime with the greatest suspicion, attribute to them the most negative motives, which is quite well-deserved with this particular regime, and roll the sanctions over, and roll them over in a way where the arms control sanctions really go after their intended targets -- weapons of mass destruction -- and not go after civilian goods or civilian commodities that we really shouldn't be going after, just let that go to the Iraqi people. That wasn't the purpose of the oil-for-food program. And by reconfiguring them in that way, I think we can gain support for this regime once again.

When we came into office on the 20th of January, the whole sanctions regime was collapsing in front of our eyes. Nations were bailing out on it. We lost the consensus for this kind of regime because the Iraqi regime had successfully painted us as the ones causing the suffering of the Iraqi people, when it was the regime that was causing the suffering. They had more than enough money; they just weren't spending it in the proper way. And we were getting the blame for it. So reconfiguring the sanctions, I think, helps us and continues to contain the Iraqi regime.

Thus, four to seven months before 9/11--and just 15 to 18 months before the drive to attack Iraq seriously revved up--the Secretary of State trumpeted that Iraq had a decimated military, no "significant capabilities" regarding WMD, and was so feeble that it couldn't even threaten the countries around it with conventional military power. Before the U.N., (5-Feb-03) Powell said,

What you will see is an accumulation of facts and disturbing patterns of behavior. . . .

Indeed, the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction. . . . .

Iraq's goal was to give us, in this room, to give those us on this council the false impression that the inspection process was working. . . . .

My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. . . . .

Our sources tell us that, in some cases, the hard drives of computers at Iraqi weapons facilities were replaced. Who took the hard drives. Where did they go? What's being hidden? Why? There's only one answer to the why: to deceive, to hide, to keep from the inspectors. . . . .

We must ask ourselves: Why would Iraq suddenly move equipment of this nature before inspections if they were anxious to demonstrate what they had or did not have?

. . . . Ladies and gentlemen, these are not assertions. These are facts, corroborated by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other countries.

The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world. Let me now turn to those deadly weapons programs and describe why they are real and present dangers to the region and to the world.

Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.

Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly 5 times the size of Manhattan.

. . . . The United States will not and cannot run that risk to the American people. Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world.

In September 2005, Powell said of his U.N. speech that it was a “blot” on his record. He went on to say, [ABC News, (9-Sept-05):

It will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It’s painful now.

Governor Howard Dean

2003-02-01T20:57:00.000-08:00

Howard Dean, then a candidate for president and now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, February 2003:

I firmly believe that the president is focusing our diplomats, our military, our intelligence agencies, and even our people on the wrong war, at the wrong time. … Iraq is a divided country, with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries and access to large quantities of arms.

Senator Russ Feingold

2002-10-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

Senator Russ Feingold, October 2002:

I am increasingly troubled by the seemingly shifting justifications for an invasion at this time. … When the administration moves back and forth from one argument to another, I think it undercuts the credibility of the case and the belief in its urgency. I believe that this practice of shifting justifications has much to do with the troubling phenomenon of many Americans questioning the administration’s motives.

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi

2002-10-11T20:43:00.000-07:00

Representative Nancy Pelosi, now the House speaker-elect, October 2002:

When we go in, the occupation, which is now being called the liberation, could be interminable and the amount of money it costs could be unlimited.

Rep. John Spratt

2002-10-11T20:40:00.000-07:00

Representative John Spratt, October 2002:

The outcome after the conflict is actually going to be the hardest part, and it is far less certain.

Nicholas D. Kristof

2002-10-04T22:06:00.000-07:00

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, October 4, 2002:

Iraqis hate the United States government even more than they hate Saddam, and they are even more distrustful of America's intentions than Saddam's. . . . [I]f President Bush thinks our invasion and occupation will go smoothly because Iraqis will welcome us, then [he] is deluding himself.

Barack Obama

2002-09-11T20:36:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama, then a congressman - now a United States senator, (September 2002):

I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

Al Gore

2002-09-11T20:33:00.000-07:00

President-Elect Al Gore, September 2002:

I am deeply concerned that the course of action that we are presently embarking upon with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.

Congressman Ike Skelton

2002-09-11T20:31:00.000-07:00

Representative Ike Skelton, September 2002:

I have no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq’s forces and remove Saddam. But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it.

Chris Matthews

2002-08-25T22:04:00.000-07:00

Chris Matthews, San Francisco Chronicle, August 25, 2002:

This invasion of Iraq, if it goes off, will join the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Desert One, Beirut, and Somalia in the history of military catastrophe. What will set it apart, distinguishing it for all time, is the immense--and transparent--political stupidity.

Michael Ledeen

2002-08-06T05:54:00.000-07:00

Michael Ledeen was a consultant for Douglas Feith, another Neoconservative who ran the Office of Special Plans. In that capacity, Ledeen has been accused of being involved in the forgery which claimed that Saddam Hussein had bought yellowcake in Niger.

By December of 2002, Ledeen was quoting that U.S. troops could be put at risk in order to

. . . liberate all the peoples of the Middle East. . . . If we come to Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran as liberators, we can expect overwhelming popular support.

He scolded Brent Scowcroft in an August 6, 2002 article in the National Review, Scowcroft Strikes Out;

. . . .it's good news when Scowcroft comes out against the desperately-needed and long overdue war against Saddam Hussein and the rest of the terror masters. As usual, Scowcroft has it backwards: He's still pushing Saudi Arabia's Prince Abdullah's line that you've just got to deal with the Palestinian question. Blessedly, President Bush knows by now that the Palestinian question can only be addressed effectively once the war against Saddam and his ilk has been won. And then Scowcroft says "Saddam is a problem, but he's not a problem because of terrorism."

This is the head of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Commission? Doesn't he read the newspapers? He doesn't seem to realize that Saddam is actively supporting al Qaeda, and Abu Nidal, and Hezbollah.

However, nobody is perfect, and Scowcroft has managed to get one thing half right, even though he misdescribes it. He fears that if we attack Iraq "I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror."

One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists.

That's our mission in the war against terror.

The most dangerous course of action is Scowcroft's: Finesse Iraq, and squander our energies fecklessly trying to broker peace between Israel and the terrorists.

A week later, Ledeen participated in an interview published in the FrontpageMagazine. The other participants: Vladimir Bukovsky, Richard Pipes and Fred Barnes. Ledeen's participation is excerpted below.

Gentlemen, should we go to war against Iraq?

We have been at war with Iraq for years, since we performed victory interruptus at the end of the Gulf War phase. Iraq has attempted to assassinate a former American president, broken the agreement to permit international inspectors, aided anti-American terrorists both internationally and within the United States, and called for anti-American jihad with monotonous regularity. The only question is whether or not we're prepared to finally wage the war in such a way as to win it.

Okay, well if we are all so certain about the dire need to invade Iraq, then when do we do so?

Yesterday.

Aside from the "invasion idea," does the State Department's idea of a coup make any sense?

The idea of a coup is very bad because we want to change the regime, not replace the tyrant. We want a freer Iraq, not merely to topple one military despot and install a successor.

The impression appears to be that the American government is very isolated in its fear of Saddam getting his hands on nuclear weapons? Why is this?

We're not isolated. Allied governments are reluctant to publicly announce their support until and unless they see we are serious. Once that happens they will be begging to participate. Or do you think they really want to be locked out of the oil market?

Let us suppose that, for one reason or another, the U.S. suddenly becomes afraid to act and does not invade Iraq. What are the consequences?

If we don't remove Saddam, we will not only encourage him to use his most terrible weapons, first against Israel and then against us, but also encourage the entire terror network and the other "terror masters," Syria and Iran. Finally, it will strengthen the radical wing of the Saudi royal family, which will in turn reinforce the ideological assembly line of terrorists: the worldwide network of radical schools and mosques funded by the Saudis.

I know we have all gone over this a thousand times, and at the risk of repeating a broken record, let me ask this one more time: was it a mistake not to take Saddam out in the Gulf War? Part of the wisdom not to have unseated him was, apparently, the philosophy of the evil we know is better than the evil we don't know. In other words, maybe some fanatical Islamo-Fascists might have replaced him. There was also the fear of igniting mass hatred from the Arab world. Do these considerations matter anymore in the context of the upcoming war?

Yes we should have removed Saddam in '91, only the 41 loyalists and assorted fools think otherwise.

Let's put Saddam aside for a moment. Personally, I am very pessimistic about the West's ability to defeat this new threat in militant and radical Islam. I think that the Soviet and Fascist threats were easier to deal with. In the end, I fear that the radical Muslims, especially in the Arab world, will always stick together, and we will be dealing with millions upon millions of religious fanatics who not only seek our death, but also their own. How can we be confident in facing Islamic messianism? I don't think we've ever seen a threat like this and I doubt that our Western democracies have the resolve or capability to defeat it. Please tell me I am wrong.

Yes of course we're going to win, and we're going to remove the tyrannies in Iran and Syria, and either Saudi Arabia is going to change their policies -- shutting down the radical schools and mosques -- or we will have to go after them as well. Remember there are lots of overqualified unemployed Hashemites nowadays. You don't believe we will win because you haven't studied our history. If it were Europe you might be right; Europe is ready to surrender to anyone. They tried hard to surrender to the Soviet Union but it just didn't work out for them, poor things. But we are talking about America, and Americans love to fight and love to win.

From Ledeen's 2003 book, The War against the Terror Masters:

The awesome power of a free society committed to a single mission is something [our enemies] cannot imagine. ... Our unexpectedly quick and impressive victory in Afghanistan is a prelude to a much broader war, which will in all likelihood transform the Middle East for at least a generation, and reshape the politics of many older countries around the world.

Kenneth Pollack

2002-03-10T21:34:00.000-08:00

Kenneth Pollack is a noted former CIA intelligence analyst and expert on Middle East politics and military analysis. He has served on the National Security Council staff and has written several articles and books on related topics. From 1988 until 1995, he was analyst on Iraqi and Iranian military issues for the Central Intelligence Agency. He spent a year as Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs with the United States National Security Council. In 1999, he rejoined the NSC as the Director for Persian Gulf Affairs. His book, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq was published in September, 2002.

In Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002,

What should the United States do about Iraq? Hawks are wrong to think the problem is desperately urgent or connected to terrorism, but right to see the prospect of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein as so worrisome that it requires drastic action. … The United States has no choice left but to invade Iraq itself and eliminate the current regime.

New York Times, (26-Sep-02):

Given Mr. Hussein’s history of catastrophic miscalculations and his faith that nuclear weapons can deter not him but us, there is every reason to believe that the question is not one of war or no war, but rather war now or war later–a war without nuclear weapons or a war with them.

The Threatening Storm, (2002):

Increasingly, the option that makes the most sense is for the United States to launch a full-scale invasion, eradicate Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and rebuild Iraq as a prosperous and stable society-for the good of the United States, the Iraqi people, and the entire region.

New York Times, (2/21/03):

Given Saddam Hussein’s current behavior, his track record, his aspirations and his terrifying beliefs about the utility of nuclear weapons, it would be reckless for us to assume that he can be deterred. Yes, we must weigh the costs of a war with Iraq today, but on the other side of the balance we must place the cost of a war with a nuclear-armed Iraq tomorrow.

Think Progress

Kenneth Adelman

2002-02-28T20:58:00.000-08:00

Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing:

. . . . I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk. Let me give simple, responsible reasons: (1) It was a cakewalk last time; (2) they've become much weaker; (3) we've become much stronger; and (4) now we're playing for keeps.

. . . . Today Iraqi forces are much weaker. Saddam's army is one-third its size then, in both manpower and number of divisions. It still relies on obsolete Soviet tanks, which military analyst Eliot Cohen calls "death traps." The Iraqi air force, never much, is half its former size.

Iraqi forces have received scant spare parts and no weapons upgrades. They have undertaken little operational training since Desert Storm.

. . . . In 1991 we engaged a grand international coalition because we lacked a domestic coalition. Virtually the entire Democratic leadership stood against that President Bush. The public, too, was divided. This President Bush does not need to amass rinky-dink nations as "coalition partners" to convince the Washington establishment that we're right. Americans of all parties now know we must wage a total war on terrorism.

. . . . Measured by any cost-benefit analysis, such an operation would constitute the greatest victory in America's war on terrorism.

By October, 2006, Adelman had buyer's remorse, saying,

I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.

The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and Paul Bremer—three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There's no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq.

Adelman, denying he was a Neocon,became an Obamacon (Republican for Obama) on 24-Oct-08, writing in Huffington Posts:

I've long prided myself in being a staunch conservative ..... Not a neo-con ..... Granted, McCain's views are closer to mine than Obama's. But I've learned over this Bush era to value competence along with ideology. Otherwise, our ideology gets discredited, as it has so disastrously over the past eight years .....

McCain's temperament -- leading him to bizarre behavior ..... depressed me into thinking that "our guy" would be a(nother) lousy conservative president. Been there, done that.

..... I'd rather have a competent moderate president. Even at a risk ..... I concluded that McCain would not -- could not -- be a good president. Obama just might be ..... That's become good enough for me .....

General Wesley Clark

2001-09-21T08:18:00.000-07:00

Bill Ayers

2001-09-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

On the 11th of September, 2001, the NYT published Dinitia Smith's account of her interview with Bill Ayers No Regrets For A Love Of Explosives which grossly distorted Ayer's positions as stated in his book Fugitive Days. Four days later, Ayers responded in a letter-to-the-editor of the NYT entitled, Clarifying the Facts. In his letter, Ayers quoted from his book the whole context of his remarks which smith had twisted and distorted. In his book, the disputed passage read:

We’ll bomb them into the Stone Age, an unhinged American politician had intoned, echoing a gung-ho, shoot-from-the-hip general… each describing an American policy rarely spoken so plainly. Boom. Boom. Boom. Poor Viet Nam. Almost four times the destructive power Florida… How could we understand it? How could we take it in? Most important, what should we do about it? Bombs away. There is a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance. The rhythm of B-52s dropping bombs over Viet Nam, a deceptive calm at 40,000 feet as the doors ease open and millennial eggs are delivered on the green canopy below, the relentless thud of indiscriminate destruction and death without pause on the ground. Nothing subtle or syncopated. Not a happy rhythm. Three million Vietnamese lives were extinguished. Dig up Florida and throw it into the ocean. Annihilate Chicago or London or Bonn. Three million—each with a mother and a father, a distinct name, a mind and a body and a spirit, someone who knew him well or cared for her or counted on her for something or was annoyed or burdened or irritated by him; each knew something of joy or sadness or beauty or pain. Each was ripped out of this world, a little red dampness staining the earth, drying up, fading, and gone. Bodies torn apart, blown away, smudged out, lost forever.

In his 15-Sept-01 letter, Ayers concluded,

I wrote about Vietnamese lives as a personal American responsibility, then, and the hypocrisy of claiming an American innocence as we constructed and stoked an intricate and hideous chamber of death in Asia. Clearly I wrote and spoke about the export of violence and the government’s love affair with bombs.

Just as clearly Dinitia Smith was interested in her journalistic angle and not the truth. This is not a question of being misunderstood or “taken out of context,” but of deliberate distortion. Some readers apparently responded to her piece, published on the same day as the vicious terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, by associating my book with them. This is absurd.

My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy. It begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima and comes of age in the killing fields of Southeast Asia. My book criticizes the American obsession with a clean and distanced violence, and the culture of thoughtlessness and carelessness that results from it. We are now witnessing crimes against humanity in our own land on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we might soon see innocent people in other parts of the world as well as in the U.S. dying and suffering in response.

All that we witnessed September 11—the awful carnage and pain, the heroism of ordinary people—may drive us mad with grief and anger, or it may open us to hope in new ways. Perhaps precisely because we have suffered we can embrace the suffering of others and gather the necessary wisdom to resist the impulse to lash out randomly. The lessons of the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s may be more urgent now than ever.

William Ayers' clairvoyant statement four days after 9/11 clearly demonstrates he was awake and drinking coffee when millions of Americans were thirsting for Kool-Aid.

Source

Presidential Daily Briefing

2001-08-06T00:24:00.000-07:00

Presidential Daily Briefing AUGUST 6, 2001

Presidential Daily Briefing
bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US
AUGUST 6, 2001
Page 1

Declassified and Approved for Release: April 10, 2004

Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct foreign terrorist attacks on the U.S. Bin Ladin implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a [deleted] service.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [deleted] service at the same that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Ladin's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own U.S. attack.

Ressam says Bin Ladin was aware of the Los Angeles operation.

Although Bin Ladin has not succeeded, his attacks against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Ladin associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al Qa'ida members - including some who are U.S. citizens - have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa'ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were U/S. citizens, and a senior member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [deleted] service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" Umar 'Abd al-Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.

For the President Only
6 August 2001

Declassified and Approved
for Release, 10 April 2004

Bill Clinton

2000-01-24T07:14:00.000-08:00

President George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft

1991-12-11T20:26:00.000-08:00

Former President George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, explaining in 1998 why they didn’t go on to Baghdad in 1991:

Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.