Speedkill

Ok then.

This post of Mark’s got me thinking. I’m not trying to pick on him specifically, however.

During the run up to the Iraq war I was definitely in the far-left opposition camp. I can’t say I ever believed Iraq had WMDs. I turned out to be right, but I held the position with much more certainty than was warranted. I didn’t buy the other two arguments (links to al Qaeda and democracy) either. Of course, now that you’ve dismissed the main arguments a sort of logic compels you to come up with alternate explanations. Such explanations seemed to have little actual grounding. There’s the common oil argument, the Euro-Dollar currency conflict theory, containment of Russia, containment of China, and on and on. What such theories have in common is a complete lack of evidence. Does the Bush administration have connections to the oil industry? Absolutely. What does that prove? Very little, really. It gives you a place to start, but it isn’t evidence. Neither is CeCe’s post that Mark linked, for example; our government is perfectly capable of pushing for such agreements after invading Iraq for any reason.

The inner workings of our government are secret for decades, if not longer. We don’t have much to go on regarding contemporary issues. We have the work of enterprising journalists and not much else. If you read someone like Seymour Hersh, it very much appears that there weren’t really any sort of hidden sinister motivations behind the war. The neoconservatives in the administration have wanted Saddam gone for years, as part of a sort of “America as international messiah” ideology. That happens to be what they claim to believe, too (well, obviously they don’t put it like that).

That’s an explanation that does a pretty good job explaining the war and relies on little in the way of speculation. It’s based on the ideology held by influential people in the administration and people like Hersh have come to that conclusion through their investigative work. So I continue to be perplexed that people still insist on other motives. Let’s see the evidence.

Wacko Lib sees one of the gang at WRiM giving a different justification for the Iraq war than we heard pre-war.

You’ve heard it before: Saddam supported terrorists, so we had to take him out. What terrorists? Palestinian terrorists.

There are a myriad of problems with this. First is the sleight of hand the President and his supporters have used in defining our current “war on terror.” It’s not a war on terror. We aren’t taking domestic terrorism seriously, we aren’t trying to stop the Tamil Tigers, etc. We’re trying to stop terrorism used against us by Islamist terrorists. Regardless of how broad the term “war on terror” is, this is what we’re doing. Are we threatened by Palestinian terrorists? Absolutely not. There simply isn’t much crossover. Al Qaeda, an anti-American group, generally attacks us and those who directly support our policies. Hamas, for example, attacks Israel exclusively. Hezbollah, the only anti-Israel group to target Americans, is the exception that proves the rule. We were directly supporting Israel in Lebanon when they attacked our Marines.

That still leaves a lingering justification, of course. Can’t we justify attacking Iraq as supporting our ally, Israel? Some of the more paranoid among us think that is what we did. In any case, attacking Iraq in support of Israel is about the stupidest strategic move possible. Saddam provided funding for the families of suicide bombers. Does anyone actually think the pool of potential suicide bombers is going to shrink significantly without Saddam’s funding for their families? I hope not. If only it were that easy.

Now, it’s inarguable that Iraq is now a front in the war on terror. I think most liberals (Tester included) recognize this, but have been sloppy in expressing it. Iraq had nothing to do with our war on terror before it was attacked. Now it does because we made it so.

I’m not sure that’s an argument for staying in the country, though. Insurgent terrorism is driven by our presence, consistent with almost every other suicide bombing campaign. If we withdraw it will stop. We will also stop creating new terrorists. The flip side is that Iraq will continue to devolve into a failed state like Afghanistan and will be a safe haven for terrorists motivated by other policies of ours. That may happen anyway, of course. We also have to consider the continued loss of life and the obligation we have to rebuilding something we destoyed. I haven’t decided exactly how I weigh these things. I sympathize with the proponents of withdrawal, but I’ve always leaned towards staying and making the best of it. It’s a hard decision that deserves careful thought.

Of course, we get partisan bickering instead. What a pity.

WND seems to think we’ve found WMDs in Iraq:

The U.S. has located some 500 chemical weapons in Iraq since 2003 with more likely to be found, according to two Republican members of Congress trumpeting a newly declassified portion of a government report.

“We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons,” Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said at an afternoon news conference.

Shocking! The next paragraph gives us the details:

Santorum read from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, which noted: “Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.”

Oh. Well then.

“I never doubted for a second that this day would come because we knew [Saddam Hussein] had them,” said host Sean Hannity on “Hannity & Colmes.” “It’s funny to watch liberals [who complain], ‘Bush lied! He hyped! He misled!’ … How about liberals now apologize to the country?”

How about Hannity comes back to reality first?

WND then debunks their own article:

“These are not the weapons that we went to war over,” Democrat strategist Laura Schwartz responded. “It does not tell us that Saddam Husssein had an ongoing, active weapons program.”

One senior Defense Department official told Fox News the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions.

“This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991,” the official said, adding the munitions “are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war.”

Which, of course, was obvious after reading any part of the declassified section of the document. I can only interpret the next couple paragraphs as an attempt to rebut the previous ones:

Also appearing on Fox News was former U.N. weapons inspector Tim Trevan, who said some of the weapons could still have posed a danger, even in a deteriorated state.

“Sarin could be a danger,” he said. “The mustard, the problem is when it sits in the munition for a very long time in these high temperatures, it polymerizes. It goes from a liquid to a gooey mass.”

Pretty weak.

So, we have another false stir in the conservative circles due to poor reading comprehension skills. Who’d a thought?

I can actually say something nice today. We finally got al-Zarqawi. And only two years later than we should have. Better late than never, I guess. Of course, it cost us who knows how many lives, but still.

Ok, that wasn’t very nice. Moving on, the estate tax repeal failed in the Senate. It and the other two issues I mentioned in my last post constitute the holy trinity of republican idiocy at the moment. We must make something that affects no one but the very rich a key issue! Like I said, vacuous.

Taking a break from Christmas-related issues, let’s talk about Iraq. I’ve been growing increasingly irritated with the letters in the Chronicle from war supporters. Opponents of the war haven’t put up much of a defense. So, I hope my contribution will help. You may notice that it’s shamelessly cribbed from Kevin Drum’s excellent list of intelligence distortions.

If you believe supporters of the Iraq war, Bush was perfectly honest with us about pre-war intelligence because Clinton thought Iraq had WMDs too. I hope people realize that this is nothing more than a partisan attempt to avoiding answering substantive questions about Bush’s pre-war conduct.

Clinton didn’t go to war with Iraq. This is the central fact. Leaders that take us to war are to be held to the highest standard. They must evaluate all the evidence thoroughly. Only then should they be given the benefit of the doubt if they turn out to be incorrect. It should also be pointed out that most of the claims the Bush administration made were not made by Clinton. Only the broad opinion that Iraq had some for of WMDs or WMD programs was shared. Did Bush meet the necessary standard? Absolutely not. Let’s take a look at what we now know.

In Powell’s 2003 UN speech he relied on claims by an al-Qaeda prisoner that Iraq had trained members of al-Qaeda. We now know the DIA believed that information to be incorrect. Powell’s chief of staff claims they were not aware of this information.

The claim that Iraq had mobile bio-weapons labs was based on a defector named “Curveball” who was considered him unstable and his allegations second-hand by German intelligence. The only American agent to meet with him found him to be an unreliable alcoholic. It’s possible that the Bush administration didn’t know of this, but if they didn’t, it seems to indicate pressuring the CIA for a desired conclusion, according to this quote:

As I said last night, let’s keep in mind the fact that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn’t say, and the Powers That Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he’s talking about. However, in the interest of Truth, we owe somebody a sentence or two of warning, if you honestly have reservations.

Aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were deemed “irrefutable” evidence of a nuclear program by Cheney. We now know that the Department of Energy (after consulting centrifuge experts) and the State Department believed otherwise. This one is my mind is particularly egregious.

The infamous yellowcake from uranium claim. As best we can tell, this was based on crudely forged documents from Niger. The CIA attempted to persuade the Bush administration not to make this claim in the SOTU, but was overruled.

The claim that Saddam possessed aerial drones that could attack the U.S. with biological or chemical weapons has also been shown to have been suspect. The Air Force believed they could not reach the U.S. and doubted they were made to deliver WMDs.

The overall claims of Iraq-al-Qaeda connections have turned out to be wrong and distorted. The CIA told Bush in September of 2001 that there was little evidence of any significant connection between the two. Also witness the claims of Cheney about Atta’s meeting in Prague, claims that were made after they were debunked by the FBI and Czech intelligence. Also, consider the claims of defector that he helped Saddam’s men bury WMDs in Iraq that were cited by the White House. The defector failed a polygraph and the CIA believed he had made up the account in attempt to get a visa.

This isn’t everything. The Bush administration frequently went beyond simply believing Iraq had WMDs and claimed they “knew” it to be true and knew where the weapons were specifically. There was never agreement about Iraq having a nuclear program, yet the specter of a mushroom cloud was invoked. When the UN inspectors, armed with intelligence shared by us, failed to find an WMDs, this didn’t give the administration a moment of pause. This demonstrates a pattern of at best negligence and at worst outright distortion. This is not the standard we should require of our leaders in taking us to war. I hope that war supporters will eventually put aside partisan politics and engage in a real debate about this issue. Perhaps a case can be made that these errors were honest and understandable mistakes. We won’t know until war supporters ditch the vacuous talking points.

Obviously my submitted letter will be a bit shorter, but I like the full one better.

It seems submitting letters is broken at the moment. Comical indeed.

I haven’t pointed out any stupid letters to the editor lately. I haven’t noticed any particularly crazy ones, except for one person declaring “we don’t kill enough evil people” in this country. That one was kinda strange. Anyway, today we get not a crazy one, but a stupid one:

History shows country tied to terrorism

Bob McClellan’s Aug. 8 letter to the editor, in which his incoherent statements indicated that Iraq had no ties to terrorism and that no terrorist group “dared” to operate within Saddam Hussein’s country, was completely ridiculous. The facts speak otherwise.

Do they? Of course not, except when Meldrum, the author, attacks a strawman.

First, he obviously hasn’t read the 9/11 commission report, which clearly shows relevant ties between Iraq and not only terrorism but also al-Qaida as well.

Oops! Meldrum hasn’t read the 9/11 commission report either, apparently. A quote:

But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.

A couple meetings that led to nothing are not “relevant ties.”

Secondly, before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, one of the largest training camps known to us was in northern Iraq, operated by Anslar-al-Islam, which has not only ties to al-Qaida but others as well.

Oh, so close! Ansar al-Islam operated in Kurdish territory and was outside of Saddam’s control. And who can forget that the administration had a chance to destroy them before the war but didn’t, to avoid damaging their case for invasion.

Furthermore, Saddam has openly promoted and marketed for more than a decade a cash reward of $50,000 to any family of a suicide bomber who blows himself up in Israel.

Hey, that’s true! Then again, the letter Meldrum is responding to doesn’t say he didn’t. Skipping some of Meldrum’s pointless rhetoric:

McClellan also stated it’s a sad day in our history because we’ve created this terrorism, which is perplexing, especially because terrorists have been killing Americans since 1983, when they murdered 254 Marines with a truck bomb in Beirut. I guess George Bush was responsible for that, too.

Another strawman! And a bad strawman at that. Do I even need to quote McClellan’s letter? I think you can guess what he actually said.

Why does the Missoulian publish such tripe? I’ve seen much better pro-war letters in the paper.

I have a comment on the Downing Street Memo, as it’s being called, prompted by Matt’s post. I haven’t been paying much attention to politics lately (I don’t have the desire to at home, for some reason), but is this memo that damning? I do think it would be damning for Blair, having one of his aides say all of this. However, it does seem like the focused upon statement in the memo, “But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” is simply the opinion of the aide. That’s certainly damaging to the Bush administration, but not profoundly. Maybe I’m just misjudging the reaction to it.

That said, there are other interesting things in it. This appears to almost an admission that the invasion was illegal:

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

There are also other things that confirm anti-war arguments, like “There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

It looks like the Iraqi elections yesterday went ok. The triumphalism of the Iraqi hawks is pretty odd, though, considering that thi election is essentially due to Sistani, over the objections of the Bush administration. The day was fairly violent: 44 deaths and 260 attacks. Considering the massive security measures in place, that may not be a good sign. We still don’t know about turnout, which is a big deal. Early estimates had turnout at 72% overall, though now it appears to be down to 60%, with Sunni turnout at 20%. I wanted to point out some of the interesting commentary on the elections:

Eric Alterman compares the situation to San Salvador in 1984. He has a turnout figure of 53%, which I can’t find a source for. Also, scroll down to Charles Pierce’s contribution.

Juan Cole has a couple interesting posts. Definitely required reading.

This Bull Moose post is your third required reading piece.

UPDATE: There’s a bit more on the turnout figures here, but the numbers still haven’t been announced. (via Altercation).

Cpl. Raleigh Smith

December 7th, 1983 – December 23rd, 2004