[lit-ideas] Re: Hitchens' Hypothetical Iraq War
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 21:14:53 -0800
A further comment on a paragraph from Lawrence:
I think it was Eric who brought up the subject of the Saddam tapes
showing that Saddam was worse than thought, that evidence was being
translated that indicated all the fears were true…
Yet according to the best evidence to date, it was not true
1) that Iraq had an ongoing chemical weapons program; nor
2) that Iraq had tried to acquire 'yellow cake' uranium from Africa in
order to build an atomic weapon (Bush's State of the Union Speech); nor
3) that 'suspicious vans' were actually mobile chemical weapons labs,
and that Iraq was developing chemical weapons in them (Colin Powell's UN
speech in February 2003) nor
4) that Iraq had sought to buy for about a year, aluminum tubing 'the
diameter, thickness and other technical specifications' of which meant
that they were for use in building atomic weapons.
Each of these claims has now been disavowed by the Administration,
although Rumsfeld is on record as claiming that (2) was 'technically
correct' because the British had told the US that it had happened.
There is no evidence from what you're calling the 'Saddam tapes' that
(1) through (4) are true yet these are the reasons the Administration
gave for its preemptive strike against Iraq. Nor is there, if I'm
reading the Foreign Affairs paper correctly, any evidence that Saddam
was 'worse than we thought.' On the contrary, the evidence seems to be
that Saddam was nuttier than we thought, seriously deluded, yet, as was
Stalin, unapproachable by those who tried to inform him of the actual
state of affairs—unapproachable because those who disagreed with him
feared for their lives.
The first of the Web pages you cited
http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=20&artnum=1&issue=20060328
suggests that the CIA did not come up with any genuine reasons for going
to war with Iraq and leaves in place the universally acknowledged
conclusion that the 'information' it did provide was either baseless, or
politically spun because of demands from the Administration not to
provide it with any information it didn't want to hear.
This site says that the CIA _failed_ and gives various exculpatory
reasons why it did; but if the CIA failed what it told the
Administration was not true. If you accept this, then you cannot say
that the Administration, relying on the CIA, told the truth. That it is
now claimed that the 'Saddam tapes' reveal that Saddam was a genuine and
immediate threat to the US does not show, or go anywhere near showing,
that the Administration was right to go to war, anymore than the fact
that a broken clock is 'right' twice every 24 hours shows that it's a
reliable clock. Unless the Administration now claims to have been
clairvoyant, it cannot claim that anything now revealed would justify
its having gone to war.
You cannot believe both that the CIA dramatically failed and that Bush
told the truth.
Robert Paul
The Reed Institute
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