Take a deep breath, Larry, and very slowly repeat after me: the antiwar folks who doubted that Saddam had WMD were right. Every responsible player who believed the weapons were there was wrong.

I thought it was only leftists like Mrs. Clinton who make arguments by telling people to “take a deep breath.”

Besides, antiwarrior’s statement is untrue. I don’t remember antiwar writers making the non-existence of WMDs a major argument, or even any argument at all. (It’s possible some people said that, I don’t remember.) Almost all of the time, what they emphasized was that we had nothing to fear from Hussein, because (1) there was no nexus between secular Saddam and religious Osama (which has since been proven spectacularly wrong by the way), and (2) deterrence would work. In other words, they accepted both the present existence of the Iraqi weapons programs and the prospect of Hussein’s developing them further. They just felt that war to get rid of the WMDs was unnecessary, and would be ruinous.

So we’re dealing with another self-justifying lie from the antiwar right analogous to the kind of thing we’ve heard from the anti-anti-Communist left in the wake of the Cold War: “The fall of the U.S.S.R. proves what we said all along, that the Soviet Union is no danger, that it is weak and will fade away. Therefore the Cold War was unnecessary.” In fact, during the Cold War, those same leftists were not saying that the Soviet Union would fade away, but rather that the West should converge with the Soviet Union.

Lawrence is correct, most of the antiwar critics did not claim that there were no WMD’s, but based their case (such as it was) on arguments against “imperialism”, the likely loss of civilian lives, that it would be yet another Vietnam (that ones getting tired), the notion that such a war was illegal under international law, and various other arguments, all of which were equally nonsense.

Fact. None of the dire predictions made by the antiwar right/left about a quagmire and another Vietnam came true.

Fact. Given that the U.S invaded a country the size of France, the actual number of civilian casualties was remarkably low.

Fact. Two international terrorists were found in Iraq, one who had been in Afghanistan working with Al-Qaeda, and one who was responsible for the death of an American citizen.

Fact. Given Saddam Hussein’s record the idea that we could simply trust that he did not have WMD’s and the he would not sell them to terrorists, was, especially after 911, a risk that no moral leader of the U.S could take.

Fact. Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate George Bush snr. He tried to assassinate the President of the United States! And the paleocons wanted us to simply take this attack upon our nation, and DO NOTHING.

That my friends is nothing more than moral abdication and cowardice, dressed up in psuedo conservative rhetoric.

It does not matter if we do not find any WMD’s in Iraq. At least we know now for sure, and at least we have removed a very real threat against our country. That is all that matters.

i thought only the war-party bushie schills over at news max were in denial, but nope. they’re in denial over here as well. do ya get the impression some people weren’t real sharp at playing connect the dots games?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 02, 2003 12:56 PM
“Let us also remember that in 1998 then-President Clinton formally declared that Hussein’s WMDs program represented an ongoing threat …..”

this argument doesn’t wash because of the time lapse between now and then.

Posted by: Shawn on June 2, 2003 11:01 PM
“most of the antiwar critics did not claim that there were no WMD’s, but based their case (such as it was) on arguments against “imperialism””

what difference does that make? the bushies are still guilty of cooking intel. to justify war.

the anti-war right said hussein wasn’t a threat because his only track record of using w.m.d. was when he was the u.s. lap dog using u.s. supplied w.m.d.. now we know why. he didn’t have any, and the bushies knew it.

since we know the straussians believe lying is just dandy, and love imperialism; and since we know the evangelicals are are american exceptionalists which amounts to the same thing, my dot connecting draws a very pretty manifest destiny gone global picture.

Abby says that Clinton’s determination that Iraq was in position of dangerous weapons materials in 1998 was too long ago to be relevant.

In fact, national security officials in the Clinton administration have agreed with the Bush administration on the existence of Iraqi WMDs right up to the recent war debate. As Byron York reports at NRO, in January of 2003, former Clinton administration officials Kenneth Pollack and Martin Indyk wrote in the New York Times that Iraq “must be made to account for the thousands of tons of chemical precursors, the thousands of liters of biological warfare agents, the thousands of missing chemical munitions, the unaccounted-for Scud missiles, and the weaponized VX poison that the United Nations has itself declared missing.”

Here Christopher Ruddy of NewsMax draws an subtle but important distinction explaining the nature of our knowledge of Hussein’s WMDs prior to the war:

Any honest appraisal of the cause of this war would show that WMDs were a legitimate, priority item.

The war was not fought because we knew for sure that Saddam Hussein had nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

THE WAR TOOK PLACE PRECISELY BECAUSE WE DID NOT KNOW FOR SURE WHAT THIS MANIAC WAS UP TO.

We knew that based on his previous activities (using chemical weapons against the Kurds), his own wild statements against the West and the statements of many defectors, including his chief nuclear bomb maker – Saddam posed a tremendous threat to the United States and her allies.

Saddam made his intent clear: If he did obtain such weapons, he would likely use them.

But again, we did not attack Iraq because he was developing these weapons. We attacked Iraq because he did not allow us to verify this fact. It is a subtle but important distinction.

Saddam flouted one U.N. resolution after another for well over a decade.

Had he given the U.N. inspectors unfettered access, and all had been kosher, he would have been free to do as he pleased.

But Saddam wouldn’t go for that.

This situation could be compared to evidence of a man illegally building a bomb in his own home.

Let us suppose that the police are informed of this development by the man’s neighbors, family and friends. Some have even seen bomb-making equipment and heard this man’s threat to use the bomb.

When the police ask the man to voluntarily agree to a search, the man refuses.

When the police get a legal search warrant and the man refuses to accede to the court order, the police are justified in breaking down his door. If he violently resists, they can shoot him.

If, hypothetically, the police were to do just that and ended up killing the man to conduct the search – and then found no bomb or evidence of the bomb in the house – are they at fault?

Most reasonable people, and certainly the man’s neighbors, would agree that the police a) did the right thing in searching for the bomb-making equipment; b) unfortunately, the man paid a price for not agreeing to the court order; and c) the man probably had likely hid the bomb-making material after so many people had testified to its existence.

Similarly, Saddam could have saved himself by agreeing to wishes of the international community and to agreements his own government had signed to.

Instead, Saddam forwent an estimated $100 billion in oil revenues that he lost due to U.N. sanctions – precisely because he did not allow U.N. inspectors unfettered access.

While it is certainly fair for critics of President Bush to question his strategy in dealing with Saddam, it is unfair for them to question the justness of his cause or his motives.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/6/2/222011.shtml

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 3, 2003 12:29 PM
“In fact, national security officials in the Clinton administration have agreed with the Bush administration on the existence of Iraqi WMDs right up to the recent war debate…..”

ya know somebody’s case is terminal when he starts using the most ethical administration in history for support. competence was never one of the clintonista administration’s strong points.

let’s say l.a. is right, the busies aren’t liars and didn’t have war with that man to gratify imperialist urges, but instead are just more incompetent than the clintonistas. where does that get us? just big time incompetence deserving of derision.

after all, the bushies have to be pretty big time incompetent to blow up a nation getting thousands of people killed over thousands of tons of chemicals and thousands of missiles, drones and stuff that don’t exist. the bushies also have to be big time incompetent to believe they can turn iraq into a democracy, when the only thing we’re going to get is another nation where everyone keeps themselves warm at night burning american flags.

at least clinton entertained us with his outrageous lies, bush’s lies are getting people killed, and that’s no laughing matter.

Abby has now changed her charge against Bush from saying that Bush and his people were lying or cooking the evidence, to saying that they were incompetent. Abby has thus agreed with my article, which argued that the charge of lying is unsustainable.

The great advantage of debating with anti-war people like Abby is that, driven by sheer negative emotion rather than reason, they are so eager to say something, ANYTHING, against Bush, that they will pick up any available argument that comes to hand, not realizing that by doing so they’ve refuted their own previous arguments.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 3, 2003 02:57 PM
“Abby has now changed her charge against Bush from saying that Bush and his people were lying or cooking the evidence, to saying….”

nope, i said either way you look at it, lying or incompetence, the bushies should be tossed out on their ears.

i think they’re deluded evangelicals (am i being redundant?) and straussian liars shooting for an imperialist moon.

It’s hard to know what to make of Mr. Auster’s comment that he doesn’t “remember antiwar writers making the non-existence of WMDs a major argument”. Could Mr. Auster’s support for the war have been simply a mistake arising from missing important arguments of the antiwar people?

Jude Wanniski, for example, had argued long and hard that there was insufficient reason to believe that Saddam had WMD. I’m sure any simple google search will pull up a ton of his articles on the matter.

On a different note, I notice in Mr. Auster’s reply to Abby a curious way of arguing. In political debate, it is common enough for someone to grant a premise for the sake of argument—“the busies aren’t liar’s” or “Saddam has WMD” or “illegal immigrants have terrific family values”—in order to show that even granted this premise the asserted conclusion does not follow. L.A. treats this as a serious concession, and reacts as if his interlocutors were somehow cheating by changing their arguments.

The truth is that the wickedness or stupidity of many political programs is over-determined: they are bad for a number of reasons. If someone cannot be made to agree that one part of their argument is wrong, it often makes sense to show them that the other part is wrong.

Is Antiwarrior seriously suggesting I’m responsible for having read every single article by the antiwar side? I read many of them, and the ones I remembered did not say there were no WMDs. I didn’t want to say for sure that no one on the antiwar side had ever denied the existence of WMDs, so I added the qualification that as far as I remembered the antiwar side had not made that argument. So, because for the sake of honesty I made that qualification, antiwarrior jumps on me and says that if I had read some obscure article that I didn’t read (an article that contradicted what everyone else including war critics accepted as true), then my whole view of the war would have been different, and therefore my support of the war was intellectually irresponsible. Please.

As for my way of replying to Abby, the subject of my article was the charge that the Administration from the start had either lied or said things it should have reasonably known were untrue about WMDs. I attacked that view at length. Then Abby, instead of defending the charge against Bush that I had attacked, conceded that even if what I said was true, the Bush adminstration was still bad for some other reason, that it was incompetent. She wasn’t able to defend her original “Bush was lying” charge, so she switched to another charge, just as the antiwar side always does.

In the end, Abby said in effect: “Bush successfully orchestrated a scam of superhuman complexity, or Bush is a total incompetent who can’t read an intelligence report. I’ll take either one, as long as the conclusion is that Bush is bad.” People who argue in this way cannot be taken seriously.

So Auster finally decides to break his silence over the growing suspicion that no WMD might be found in Iraq, and yet he continues to sing the same old song about the moral necessity to go to war. It seems that Auster has invested so much moral capital in this war and in his demonization of the antiwar right as smelly troglodytes that nothing can wrest him from this quagmire. Instead of noticing the neoconservative penchant for playing fast and loose with the truth, the typical Straussian deceptions of Kristol’s and Wolfowitz’s empire, Auster suggests that Bush was forthright, played by the rules, and the antiwar critics are giving aid and comfort the enemy.

Now, this is the sort of analysis I would expect from a Hannity or Limbaugh, who simply act as shills for the President and countenance his every decision. If Auster wishes to throw away his brain and just run a website that operates as an echo chamber for neoconservative talking points, I wish he would save us the time of reading his commentary and just provide a re-direct to Frum’s blog at NRO. Wouldn’t this be more convenient for all of us?

Auster’s basic point is that Bush could not have been deliberatley lying to so many people, that he could not have bamboozled the intelligence community and the UN into thinking that Iraq was still in possession of WMD, but that our intelligence was solid, verifiable, and not politicized. Of course such a grand conspiracy is not likely and no one that I know of has suggested it. Auster is really setting up a strawman to portray the critics of the war as coteries of David Icke. Actually if Auster had bothered to listen to our reasons before the war, he wouldn’t be making such preposterous allegations.

There was not a grand conspiracy to trick America — and Britain — into a war, but there was a deliberate and calculated effort among the neoconservatives to politicize certain information, ignore contrary information, and whip-up public hysteria to justify the war. If Saddam has been continuing the development of bio-chemical agents since inspectors were forced out in 1998, why did Saddam only become a threat to America after the attacks of 9-11? Why didn’t Bush pledge to wipe Saddam off the map during the Presidential campaign? Was he not a threat then? Was civilization not hanging by a thread when Bush and Gore were wrangling over the details of Bush’s healthcare policies in Texas?

Someone with a healthy skepticism would have immediately felt the contrived nature of the war against Iraq. In the public’s mind Iraq had been slipping into obscurity for over ten years, but then all of a sudden Saddam becomes a threat to America almost overnight. What changed?

Well, two things changed, but none of them had to do with the fact that Saddam posed a threat to America. Obviously, there were the terrorist attacks on 9-11 that heightened Americans sense of vulnerability and made them more susceptible to arguments justifying a pre-emptive war. The other — and most significant — change was the complete ascension and control of neoconservatives at almost every level of the Bush Admininstration. Members of PNAC and the AEI who have long favored topping Hussein’s regime were now in control of American foreign policy and they were willing to concot whatever was needed to mobilize America for war.

As Robert Novak pointed out in one of his columns “The real reason for the war against Iraq has always been disconnected from its public rationale.” The “public rationale” is of course WMD. However, the Novak column shows that the Bush Administration only decided to make WMD the issue when Colin Powell said that the US needed to seek approval from the UN before committing our troops to war. In other words, the decision to wipe out Iraq had already been decided, the neocons were just looking for a legal justification to hang the war on. Additionally with the memories of 9-11 still fresh in the public’s mind concoting ominous scenarios about “mushroom clouds” blossoming in America, gas attacks in US subways, and little children dying of anthrax poisioning helped build the case for war. To Americans Bush was essentailly saying: Either we take care of Saddam now or American corpses will be strewn all across the countryside.

However, critics of the war were well aware of the agendas of PNAC, AEI, Wolfowitz and Perle. Their agenda was insuring that America face no strategic competitors, that he have access to the world’s most valuable resouces, and that Israel’s enemies be taken care of. Therefore, we were very skeptical of the claims coming out of the Bush Administration. Plus, Bush’s record is hardly impeccable. In his State of the Union Address he mentioned that Iraq attempted to purchase 100 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger to build nuclear weapons. Later these documents were exposed as forgeries, but do we really believe the intelligence community was duped so easily? After all the IAEA exposed it as a fraud within 24 hours. Bush used this key piece of “evidence” to get Congressional authority to wage war and refused to hand over the document to the IAEA for over 5 months. Why sit on the evidence for so long if you are sure of its veracity?

Also, we know that Rumsfeld grew impatient with the intelligence information he was receiving from the CIA, so he created his own “intelligence” community, the Office of Special Planning, headed by Wolfowitz, to uncover “evidence” to justify a war against Iraq. Instead of seeking corroboration and reliable sources, they relied on a convicted felon and fraudster, Chalabai, head of the Iraqi National Congress and his list of defectors. In fact, the CIA released declassified documents last October arguing that Iraq was not likely to use any bio-chemical weapons against the US unless provoked.

So before the onset of war I was not sure if Saddam had any WMD or not. Although I thought it was possible. However, other writers like Jude Wanniski wrote back in February that Saddam has been disarmed, that all discrepancies have been resolved, and that the moral argument for war was absent. Scott Ritter has also claimed that he verified a 90-95% disarmament of Iraq, and that there has been NO PROOF that Iraq has reconstituted its bio-chemical weapons program. So Saddam’s phantom WMD were never the reason for war, they were just a propaganda tool, a lubricant to grease the wheels of war, to allow neoconservatives to build an American empire and redraw the lines on the Middle East.

So how can Auster claim the war was just and moral when it was built on a stockpile of lies and deceptions?

“nope, i said either way you look at it, lying or incompetence, the bushies should be tossed out on their ears.”

Wrong on both accounts. The Bush administration recognised that Saddam Hussien represented a long term security risk to the U.S, and took appropriate actions. The idea that Saddam should have been left alone to continue pursuing WMD’s, and the very real danger that he could have passed these on to terrorists, is so absurd that it suggests that those who propose it have given up on reason all together.

And notice that neither antiwarrior nor abby have responded to some of the most important facts I posted.

When a foriegn power attempts to assasinate our President, and gives shelter to international terrorists responsible for murdering American citizens, what should our response be? Can either of our friends answer that?

Or does being a conservative now mean being so weak and cowardly that we allow foriegn powers to murder Americans with impunity? Is that really anti-imperialism?

“i think they’re deluded evangelicals (am i being redundant?) and straussian liars shooting for an imperialist moon.”

The standard paleocon response when it is revealed that they have no rational or intelligent argument, is to simply repeat the mantra “evangelicals, Israeli Firsters, Straussians, neocons, imperialism!”. This does not add up to a defense of your position, it does not even add up to an argument.

Edwin Weller returns to VFR after a long absence, with a 1,100 word comment filled to the brim with assertions that have already refuted and discredited, some of them many times. No way I’m going to go back over all these arguments again. You’ve wasted your energy, Mr. Weller.

But I do want to respond to one or two points. Mr. Weller writes: “If Auster wishes to throw away his brain and just run a website that operates as an echo chamber for neoconservative talking points …” It doesn’t seem to occur to Mr. Weller that the ideas and analyses in my article were my own, which came from reading the different charges against Bush. Also, as Mr. Weller well knows, I’ve agreed with the pro-war argument from the start, so by his standards it’s been at least a year since I threw my brain away and began just serving as an echo of neoconservative talking points. Why is he just discovering that now? The antiwar right, who are tribal in their thinking, can’t conceive that other people think the things they think because they think them, because they think they’re true, not because they have signed on to some faction or tribe.

Second, Mr. Weller blatantly contradicts himself. First he indignantly denies that ANYONE has charged that Bush lied about the weapons (which is not at all true—many people have said it, repeatedly), then he continues:

“There was not a grand conspiracy to trick America — and Britain — into a war, but there was a deliberate and calculated effort among the neoconservatives to politicize certain information, ignore contrary information, and whip-up public hysteria to justify the war.”

Got that? In Mr. Weller’s mind, charging “a grand conspiracy to trick America into a war” is different from charging “a deliberate and calculated effort among the neoconservatives to politicize certain information, ignore contrary information, and whip-up public hysteria to justify the war.” In other words, Mr. Weller has just said: “How dare you say there was A? There was not A. But there was A.”

Finally, I want to point out the people Mr. Weller cites as his authorities: Scott Ritter and Jude Wannisky. Too bad you didn’t add Chomsky, and you would have had a trifecta.

In the midst of this long thread, no one from the antiwar side has addressed this question from my article:

“Given that these countries [France, Germany, Russia, China] were behaving as virtual enemies of the U.S., if they had had any information that the weapons didn’t exist, a revelation that would have shattered the U.S. position, wouldn’t they have said so at the time?”

The antiwar people can’t get away from the fact that every involved country and international organization, most of whom were AGAINST the U.S. policy, believed the weapons were there. If even the people who were AGAINST the war believed there were weapons, why blame the people who were FOR the war for making a false case?

In other words, since France and Germany were obviously not driven to THEIR belief in the weapons by an ulterior motive, why should we think that the Bush people were driven to THEIR belief in the weapons by an ulterior motive? Hmm?

Regarding the suggestion that I have turned this website into “an echo chamber for neoconservative talking points,” maybe it’s the other way around. Tony Blankley (not a neocon exactly but certainly a good conservative) has an excellent column on the WMDs issue which picks up a couple of the themes from my article:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/tonyblankley/tb20030604.shtml

Auster writes “You’ve wasted your energy, Mr. Weller.”

Well, it is not my energy that I’ve wasted time and time and time again, Mr Auster. :-)

Auster writes “First he indignantly denies that ANYONE has charged that Bush lied about the weapons…”

I am uncertain about the role Bush has played in the scheme to topple Hussein’s regime. Whether he was an unwitting dupe who came to believe he was on some Messianic mission from God or whether he was a nefarious character like Perle is difficult to determine. We do know that he “lied” about Iraq’s purchase of yellowcake uranium from Niger, although I can’t say for sure he knew it was lie when he told it. Does it matter?

There was not a grand conspiracy at work at all levels of the government. There was a propaganda campaign to emphasize WMD and exaggerate the threat Saddam posed to the United States.

I do not know how you can classify Ritter, Wanniski and Chomsky as representing a common intellectual perspective. Ritter proudly fought in the first Gulf War, is a registered Republican and even voted for Bush in 2000. Wanniski is a supply-sider who consistently supports most Republican issues. Chomsky, however, is far out leftist who wishes to overturn our whole free market economy.

Regardless of how you feel about Ritter or Wanniski they seemed to be accurate about Iraq’s cache of WMD. So why should we ignore their pontifications when they have been consistently more prescient than yours?

Auster writes “…what is the significance of the anti-war critics’ using our failure to find the weapons to attack Bush?”

This is so stupid a point, I can’t even believe Auster would make it. It makes perfect sense to attack Bush because he is the one who claimed with certainty that Iraq was in possession of banned WMD, and then launched a war without the sanction of the United Nations. The other nations signed on to Resolution 1441 to verify that Iraq was not in violation of the cease fire treaty concluding the first Gulf War. Since I am not aware of any first hand source that Iraq was actively pursuing a large bio-chemical arsenal, I would like to know where Bush acquired the information that Saddam had over 500 tons of chemical weapons. Did any other intelligence agency outside of the United States or Britain make similar accusations?

Finally, Auster entirely avoided the most significant point of the failure to uncover large quantites of WMD. If it turns out that Iraq did not have any WMD at all, will he concede that the war against Iraq was groundless? Or will he continue to slither and slouch, make excuses for the War Party, and invent rationales to retroactively legitimize the war?

Prior to the war, we had vast amounts of intelligence—from satellites, from human agents in Iraq, from defectors, from the UN inspectors, from Iraq’s own occasional admissions to the UN inspectors—of the existence of all kinds of programs. Iraq had admitted to huge amounts of biological agents that it then never accounted for. As Powell showed in his February 5 speech to the UN Security Council, we also had direct intelligence of Iraq’s systematic efforts to hide things from the inspectors in last 2002 and early 2003, all, of course, on penalty that any material failure to assist in the inspections was a material breach that would bring war. The current mystery over the WMDs does not change by one iota the situation we were in before the war and compelling reason we had not to permit this threatening situation to continue.

One example. Powell at the UN told how the Iraqis’s biological weapons production was in 18 mobile labs in trucks or train cars. Human intelligence on the ground saw these vehicles, they had the markers of biological labs. One of these labs in a month could produce substances that could wipe out cities. But 18 vehicles in a country the size of California could be anywhere. They could be over the border, they could be hidden.

We acted on the knowledge we had then. That knowledge was as solid as it could be under the circumstances. So the rationale for the war has not changed at all. And neither has the irrational need of the anti-war people to separate themselves from the actual danger that America faced from Hussein and our need to do something about it.

I invite any anti-war people reading this to click on the link below to watch Powell’s UN speech. Just don’t look for holes in his presentation, since the nature of the case did not admit of direct evidence but of a vast amount of indirect but still compelling evidence; and then ask yourself what you would have done under these circumstances had you been, not some person tossing off opinions on the Internet, but the President of the United States.

http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2003/17300.htm

Of course I don’t think Mr. Auster is responsible for reading everything written by those who opposed this spring’s Iraq war, and I don’t think anything I wrote could plausibly be read to imply such a thing. But I do find it very strange that he cannot remember anyone doubting the existence of WMD. The existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was very much in doubt, which is why Powell and Blair had to go through such elaborate exercises to persuade various audiences that such weapons did exist. The doubters and the doubts were not at all obscure.

To the extent that Mr. Auster is correct that “most of whom were AGAINST the U.S. policy, believed the weapons were there” it is because Powell, Blair et. al. persuaded many of these people to give up or suspend their doubts. It turns out, however, that this was a mistake. Why shouldn’t the people who were wrongfully persuaded by the pro-war crowd be contemptuous of those who misled them?

If I was talking instead of posting I would be getting hoarse in the throat by now.

Once again, can ANY of the anti-war brigade here tell me what the response of the U.S should be to a countries government that attempts to assasinate our President and habours terrosists responsible for murdering American citizens?

“If Auster wishes to throw away his brain and just run a website that operates as an echo chamber for neoconservative talking points”

It is the paleocons who have thrown their brains away, and not onlt their brains, but their courage and their patriotism, and their right to even be considered conservatives. The paleocon argument is simple. Any nation can walk all over the U.S, kill our citzens, threaten our allies, attempt to assasinate our leaders, harbour terrorists, and we should do nothing, because doing anything makes us neocon imperialists.

To put it bluntly, this is horse shit. The claim that this war was only about a neocon agenda is not only a lie, it is a shallow attempt to to pretend that paleocon cowardice is somehow a principled stand.

The only mistake the administration made was in framing the Iraq issue solely in terms of WMDs. There were in fact a large number of strategic reasons for getting rid of the Baathist regime, and Bush should have made a much wider case.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 4, 2003 02:18 AM
“Prior to the war, we had vast amounts of intelligence—from satellites, from human agents in Iraq, from defectors, from the UN inspectors, from Iraq’s own occasional admissions to the UN inspectors—of the existence of all kinds of programs…..”

l.a. offers us a choice, we either had vast amounts of intelligence which was dead wrong. or the bushies lied us into war.

which one is more plausible?

http://billmon.org/archives/000172.html

“The only mistake the administration made was in framing the Iraq issue solely in terms of WMDs. There were in fact a large number of strategic reasons for getting rid of the Baathist regime, and Bush should have made a much wider case.”

Just as Clinton had so many scandals going on that it was impossible to focus on one and nail him, there were several reasons to attack Iraq—the broken commitments, the refusals to allow inspections and destroy WMDs, the ongoing existence of WMDs, the cruel and dangerous tyranny, the terror connections—which, they though all interrelated as part of one situation, made explaining the case difficult, and therefore the fact that Bush and others would emphasize different reasons at different times gave the antiwar people an opening to say gotcha.

That’s all they are good for, by the way. They have nothing positive to contribute. They don’t even go through the motions of being a loyal opposition. All they are is a mirror image of the left.

One point the anti-war folks have gotten wrong is the notion that the war was at least partly to ‘make the world safe for Israel.’ If the WMDs were never there to begin with, Iraq didn’t constitute any real threat to Israeli security. To top it off, now that the war is won Blair and Bush are busy at work shoving the “road map” down Israeli throats - a plan to create a hostile Arab state on Israel’s doorstep. This is a significantly greater threat to Israeli security than Iraq. The theory that the war was a proxy war on Israel’s behalf falls flat in light of these events.

Also, the people defending the war policy including me have been too quick to concede that no WMDs or production facilities have been found. I earlier mentioned the bioweapon production trucks that Powell spoke of at the UN. He also played a tape of two Iraqi officials concerned about evacuating such units from an certain facility before the UN inspectors arrived. Two of those mobile biolabs have been found. Based on the equipment in them, and the fact that they were mobile, there’s no doubt what their purpose was.

Here’s Terry Jeffrey writing at TownHall.com (Jeffrey was Patrick Buchanan’s campaign manager and is now the editor of Human Events, not exactly neocon credentials):

On May 28, the CIA released a paper entitled, “Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants.” It describes three vehicles recovered in Iraq by U.S. forces — a truck fitted with a “toxicology laboratory” that “could be used to support BW or legitimate research” and two tractor-trailers similar to the mobile units described by Powell at the United Nations.

“We have investigated what other industrial processes may require such equipment — a fermentor, refrigeration, and a gas capture system — and agree with the experts that BW agent production is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles,” concluded the CIA.

The New York Times reported May 21 that the units “could be used to produce an estimated 500 liters of liquid anthrax and 50 liters of botulinum toxin per batch within two to three days — millions of lethal doses.”

“The manufacturer’s plates on the fermentors list production dates of 2002 and 2003 — suggesting Iraq continued to produce these units as late as this year,” said the CIA.

U.S. intelligence, it turns out, found some very deadly needles in a haystack as big as Iraq.

Why did the U.S. change the regime in Baghdad? President Bush stated it plainly in his State of the Union Address: “Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.” Those who argue that what has been discovered in Iraq thus far changes this calculation must answer one question: How many secret Iraqi bio-weapons factories would have been too many?

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/terencejeffrey/tj20030604.shtml

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 4, 2003 03:47 AM
“Also, the people defending the war policy including me have been too quick to concede that no WMDs or production facilities have been found.”

yup, l.a. is not conceeding that no wmds have been found. never mind that no wmds have been found.

maybe the wmds l.a. is refering to is the depleted uranium we saturated iraq with. or maybe those tens of thousands of cluster bombs we dropped.

the iraqis are finding to those bright shiny gifts we scattered about the country side. cluster bombs: the gifts that keep on giving for years to come.

those production facilities were never used. you’d think if they were ever going to be used for wmds, a life threatening war would have been the time to use them. but they weren’t used.

http://www.ucomics.com/tomtoles/2003/05/29/

I find it disturbing that Auster would suggest that Powell’s presentation before the UN was based on highly reliable information concerning Saddam’s program to develop WMD. In fact, not only was the evidence shaky and often erroneous, but Powell relied on a student’s grad paper from back in the 1980’s. Additionaly, the places that Powell designated as chemical weapons sites have been inspected and nothing has turned up. In other words, virtually all the information he presented to the UN has been false.

This is why George Tenet last week convened a meeting of retired CIA officials to discuss the “intelligence” on Iraq before the war and compare it with what we have discovered after the war. So no longer is there a hunt for WMD; there is an effort to try and ascertain why our intelligence was so wildly wrong.

This doesn’t surprise me or the rest of us on the antiwar right because we knew this war was one great and immense deception from the start. Iraq has always been in the crosshairs of the neocons, and they were not going to let something as insignificant as the truth hamper their imperialistic plans.

This is why Rumsfeld shortchanged the CIA in exchange for the “intelligence” that came of the Iraqi National Congress and his own OSP. In fact, Hussein Kamil who defected from Iraq in the mid 90’s admitted that Iraq had completely destroyed all of its banned weapons. Even if Iraq was unable to account for all of the weapons it doesn’t much matter because the chemical and biological weapons degrade within a few years time, so old stockpiles that they might have missed are no longer deadly.

When Bush would deliberately and dishonestly frighten the American people by claiming that Iraq has 500 tons of chemical weapons, this was not based on any first hand source. It was a simple extrapolation: If Saddam has continued his bio-chemical program since 1998, he would have produced a quantity of 500 tons of chemical weapons. However, Bush and Company were claiming that Saddam did possess such weapons, not that he might have them if his factories were working at full capacity.

So Auster wishes to think that our “intelligence” prior to the war was solid, and the only explanation must be that Iraq’s bio-chemical arsenal is some elusive phantom that no one can catch or find. Instead of trying to extricate himself the neoconservative web of deceit, he should just realize that neocons are pitiful liars and exercise some prudence in accepting their claims.

Now that we are seeing in the flesh the great deception of the neoconservative agenda and how it has even infected our own intelligence community and Colin Powell, I wonder who has less credibility in the eyes of the world now: the Neoconservatives who invent fake intelligence or the Raelians who clone phantom babies? It’s a tough question.

Good posts, Mr Weller. Because you so thoroughly refuted Auster, he will probably ignore them.

“The War Party told us Iraq had huge stocks of biological and chemical weapons, that Saddam was building nuclear weapons, that he had a role in 9-11, that he was harboring al-Qaida, that victory would trigger democratic revolutions across the Middle East, that Iran would be intimidated by our ‘shock and awe’ campaign.”

“None of this is panning out. A month after victory, Iran and North Korea are conducting crash programs to build atomic weapons and or so we are told the mullahs are back in the terrorism game, aiding al-Qaida in carrying out that triple-bombing in Saudi Arabia.”

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=32845

Can ANY of the anti-war brigade here tell me what the response of the U.S should be to a countries government that attempts to assasinate our President and habours terrosists responsible for murdering American citizens?

——-waiting.

I’ve reached the point where the patience I’ve already shown with a yapping dog like Edwin Weller has run out. It was probably a mistake to get into an exchange with a person like this in the first place. I’ll just reply to what has the appearance of being substantive, and ignore the yammer about evil neocon conspiracies:

“Additionally, the places that Powell designated as chemical weapons sites have been inspected and nothing has turned up. In other words, virtually all the information he presented to the UN has been false.”

Mr. Weller evidently dwells on some other planet, where the atmosphere is not made of air but of fire. If he had listened to or read Powell’s remarks, he would know that the Iraqis were involved in a vast effort of continually moving around and concealing their stuff during the whole period that Powell was describing. Powell’s speech was delivered February 5. The war began at the end of March. Got it, Mr. Weller?

“When Bush would deliberately and dishonestly frighten the American people by claiming that Iraq has 500 tons of chemical weapons, this was not based on any first hand source. It was a simple extrapolation: If Saddam has continued his bio-chemical program since 1998, he would have produced a quantity of 500 tons of chemical weapons. However, Bush and Company were claiming that Saddam did possess such weapons, not that he might have them if his factories were working at full capacity.”

The only way a person could make this argument is that (1) he’s indefeasably ignorant of the war debate that went on for an entire year, or (b) he is in bad faith. Is it really necessary to rehearse the entire history of this saga, of Hussein’s kicking out the inspectors, of his refusal to present proof of the disposition of the chemicals, of his jerking around the UN when the inspectors went back in 2002, and so on—and of the unavoidable conclusions that our government AND EVERY OTHER GOVERNMENT drew from this?

Oh, yeah, Mr. Weller hasn’t once acknowledged my argument on that point, which I’ve now repeated several times—another reason this will be my last reply to him. He’s free to continue posting, but I’ve already given him far more than he deserves.

By the way, the same goes for Abby.

Why Didn’t Iraq Use Chemical and Biological Weapons Against U.S. Troops?
by Ted Galen Carpenter

http://www.cato.org/dailys/06-02-03.html

Not a single soul from the anti-war brigade has had the courage to answer one simple question.

I don’t see much use in writing a reply to Auster’s latest screed since he’s already let it be known that he has no intention of responding. Nevertheless, I thought I would add just a few tidbits for the record.

Auster writes “If he had listened to or read Powell’s remarks, he would know that the Iraqis were involved in a vast effort of continually moving around and concealing their stuff during the whole period that Powell was describing. Powell’s speech was delivered February 5. The war began at the end of March. Got it, Mr. Weller?”

I’ve read over Powell’s presentation before the UN at least twice and the evidence he cited simply lacked credibility. The areas that Powell identified as facilities that produce chemical weapons have been inspected and it turned out that such facilities were not involved in the production of chemical weapons.

Moreover on Marth 20 Donald Rumsfeld said “We know where the chemical weapons are. They are in the areas around Baghdad and Tikrit.”

These comments were made a few days prior to the war, and if Mr Rumsfeld was able to make such a confident statement about the location of WMD, why are the allied forces now unable to turn up even a single drop of mustard gas?

Auster writes “Is it really necessary to rehearse the entire history of this saga, of Hussein’s kicking out the inspectors, of his refusal to present proof of the disposition of the chemicals, of his jerking around the UN when the inspectors went back in 2002, and so on—and of the unavoidable conclusions that our government AND EVERY OTHER GOVERNMENT drew from this?”

Actually in 1998 the weapons inspectors were ordered out by the United States, not by Saddam. Actually, after the UN passed Resolution 1441 the Iraqis produced a 12,000 page dossier detailing their weapons inventory. Blix’s UN inspection team was even in the process of having Iraq destroy its Al-Samoud missiles when Bush obviously got too nervous about the facts of Saddam’s cooperation and decided to launch a war anyway. Notice that the failure of the Iraqis to produce evidence of their bio-weapons program presumes they had one. They can not provide evidence for something that does not exist.

Since it is impossible to prove a negative and Iraq’s less than complete cooperation might invite one to speculate that Saddam was still working on building a bio-chemical arsenal, proof to justify a war requires something more substantial. Is Auster saying that it is possible to infer that Saddam has 500 tons of chemical weapons because his cooperation was less than total?

Auster writes “Oh, yeah, Mr. Weller hasn’t once acknowledged my argument on that point, which I’ve now repeated several times—another reason this will be my last reply to him.”

I believe Auster’s point is that because the French, Russian, German etc. governments did not produce direct evidence of the ABSENCE of banned WMD, the US was perfectly within its rights to go to war. This argument is really quite funny. While other countries can not prove that Iraq does not have banned WMD — you can’t prove a negative — the arguments to go to war on the grounds that Iraq was in possession of WMD was made by the US. The other countries wanted the weapons inspections to proceed; they did not want to rush headlong into war behind George Bush. So the fact that the other intelligence agencies were unable to prove a negative does not absolve Bush of responsibility for the war. Actually it is quite funny to watch Auster — and other pro-war imperialists — seek solace in the arms of the French.

Shawn writes “Can ANY of the anti-war brigade here tell me what the response of the U.S should be to a countries government that attempts to assasinate our President and habours terrosists responsible for murdering American citizens?”

Yeah, my response is the response of the entire American government and civilized world: nothing. The attempt to assasinate Bush I and the murder of Klinghoffer occured over a decade ago. I am not aware of any contingent in American politics who were agitating for war against Iraq solely on these grounds. If this was enough to garner support for an invasion of Iraq, why didn’t Bush II inform the American people he was going to sack Iraq if he got elected? How come the American people were not demanding we act?

This is really a very poor argument. I think I’ll only give you a C for this attempt to re-write history. You really give sophistry a bad name. It reminds me of those who say that Saddam was his own weapon of mass destruction.

Whatever

Sinc I’ve taken the time to respond to Auster’s question, I wonder if he will grant me the same courtesy.

In an earlier post I wrote “If it turns out that Iraq did not have any WMD at all, will he concede that the war against Iraq was groundless? Or will he continue to slither and slouch, make excuses for the War Party, and invent rationales to retroactively legitimize the war?”

Will Auster face the essential question about the failure to uncover WMD, or does he not even wish to acknowledge he was conned by the neo-Cons.

Previously I gave as one of my reasons for ending my exchange with Mr. Weller the fact that he hadn’t responded to a point I’d repeatedly made. Since he has now, he says, replied to that point, and, in the name of “courtesy,” no less, he asks me to answer, I suppose I’m required to say something.

Yet his reply was not at all apt. I had made the simple logical point that it wasn’t just the U.S., but every country, including those who fiercely opposed Bush’s regime-change policy, that believed the WMDs were in Iraq. If the war opponents were not motivated in their belief in WMDs by a desire to make war on Iraq, then why should one conclude that the Bush administration were motivated in their belief in WMDs by their intention to make war on Iraq? The inference is that this was a good-faith belief, based on the whole history of this saga and the best available contemporary evidence, and shared by all the responsible parties.

Thus Mr. Weller’s putative reply to me, which I quote below, is not a reply at all. No one suggested, as he now says, that the Europeans were required to produce evidence of an absence of WMDs; the question of their proving a negative never came up, because NO ONE INVOLVED IN THIS DEBATE SUGGESTED THAT THE WEAPONS DIDN’T EXIST. So Mr. Weller is just tossing around words. And to prove how unserious he is, he makes a cheap point about funny it is that I’m now seeking the support of the French, just as earlier, he or someone thought it was funny that I was seeking the support of Clinton. Obviously, the issue was not whether I like Clinton or the French. The issue was the logical argument I have made over and over and how that relates to Bush’s motivations and honesty.

Here’s Mr. Weller’s comment:

“I believe Auster’s point is that because the French, Russian, German etc. governments did not produce direct evidence of the ABSENCE of banned WMD, the US was perfectly within its rights to go to war. This argument is really quite funny. While other countries can not prove that Iraq does not have banned WMD — you can’t prove a negative — the arguments to go to war on the grounds that Iraq was in possession of WMD was made by the US. The other countries wanted the weapons inspections to proceed; they did not want to rush headlong into war behind George Bush. So the fact that the other intelligence agencies were unable to prove a negative does not absolve Bush of responsibility for the war. Actually it is quite funny to watch Auster — and other pro-war imperialists — seek solace in the arms of the French.”

Undoubtedly, Mr. Weller will post again crying that I’m “avoiding the tough questions,” and cowardly refusing to engage him in the issue, when in fact I’ve dealt with the questions over and over as best I can. Yet he just doesn’t want to hear it.

Leaving aside the question of WMD for a moment, is there any doubt that Saddam Hussein was in violation of the ‘91 Ceasefire? Weaponry was of course a part of that, but there were other provisions, such as how he was to treat his own people. His expulsion of the inspectors in ‘98 certainly represented a violation of his obligations.

This was sufficient reason to go in and take him out. If a ceasefire agreement can be flagrantly violated — in the teeth of the world’s remaining superpower no less — than such agreements become utterly meaningless.

Where no treaty was signed, but only a _conditional_ ceasefire, IT MUST BE ENFORCED..

I agree with Joel that the violation of the ‘91 ceasefire would have been sufficient reason to invade Iraq; this of course had been a huge problem for the U.S. for the previous decade. But in the practical world, that factor alone was not enough to make U.S. leaders and public actually want to go to war. It’s the same for Hussein’s brutality to his people. By itself, it was not enough to make us want to go to war. There were also neoconservative promoters of spreading “democracy” who wanted to invade Iraq solely for that reason, and felt that was sufficient justification. But we didn’t go to war for that reason either. It was 9/11 and the WMDs/terror nexus that made it an unavoidable necessity to remove that regime.

This is why I am somewhat impatient with people who make their own reasons—ending dictatorship, spreading “democracy,” and so on—the “real” reason for the war, and act as if the WMDs issue wasn’t the decisive reason after all. I’m not saying those reasons aren’t legitimate, and that the removal of that tyranny and the finishing off of that 12-year-old unfinished business was not a great thing. I’m just saying that war supporters should not forget the decisive reason that we actually went to war.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 8, 2003 12:12 AM
“I had made the simple logical point that it wasn’t just the U.S., but every country, including those who fiercely opposed Bush’s regime-change policy, that believed the WMDs were in Iraq.”

‘believed’, is the operable word. its coming out there was “no reliable information”.

the bush administration went to war on ungrounded faith, but told the u.s. citizens “the Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons. The Iraqi regime is building the facilities necessary to make more biological and chemical weapons.”

“”a Defense Intelligence Agency report on chemical weapons, widely distributed to administration policymakers around the time of the president’s speech, stated there was “no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons or whether Iraq has or will establish its chemical agent production facilities.”

“The disparities between the conviction with which administration officials portrayed the threat posed by Iraq in their public statements and documents, and the more qualified reporting on the issue by intelligence agencies in classified reports, are at the heart of a burgeoning controversy.”“

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26487-2003Jun6.html?nav=hptop_tb

Chris Ruddy’s powerful argument on the missing WMDs issue that I quoted earler is worth recapitulating since people may have missed it:

The police are informed by a man’s neighbors, family and friends that he is illegally building a bomb in his home. Some have even seen bomb-making equipment and heard the man threaten to use the bomb.

When the police ask the man to agree to a search, he refuses.

When the police get a legal search warrant and the man refuses to accede to the court order, the police are justified in breaking down his door. If he violently resists, they can shoot him.

Now suppose all that were to happen and the police ended up killing the man to conduct the search—and then found no bomb or evidence of the bomb in the house—are they at fault in the man’s death? Most reasonable people, and certainly the man’s neighbors, would agree that the police a) did the right thing in searching for the bomb-making equipment; b) the man paid a price for not agreeing to the court order and then resisting the police; and c) the man had likely hid the bomb-making material after so many people had testified to its existence.

A poster at Lucianne.com:

“Why is it harder to believe that he did have them and hid them (esp given all the time he had while Dubya and Powell were giving the UN their 18th resolution chance) than he didn’t have them and Dubya was lying?”

Second poster:

“Simple: Pure, seething, overwhelming hatred.”

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 8, 2003 12:56 PM
“Chris Ruddy’s powerful argument on the missing WMDs issue that I quoted earler is worth recapitulating since people may have missed it:…”

granting for the sake of argument the flaws in ruddy’s metaphor, it turns out the search warrant was based on fraudulent information.

most reasonable people would agree that those who supply fraudulent information in such a serious circumstance should be prosecuted.

congress as judge issued the warrant based of bush’s fraudulent information. the next warrant and indictment handed down from the judge, congress, should be for bush to stand trial for perjury.

in the following civil suite, the sky would be the limit for awarded damage.

cnn is coming around.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/06/06/findlaw.analysis.dean.wmd/

when fox news follows, the fat lady will sing.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 8, 2003 12:57 PM
“A poster at Lucianne.com:

“”Why is it harder to believe that he did have them and hid them (esp given all the time he had while Dubya and Powell were giving the UN their 18th resolution chance) than he didn’t have them and Dubya was lying?”

Second poster:

“Simple: Pure, seething, overwhelming hatred.””

this poor attempt at insight into those who think bush is lying, says far more about war party member who wrote it.

“Yeah, my response is the response of the entire American government and civilized world: nothing.”

Either Mr Weller did not understand the question, or he is advocating total pacifism in the face of direct attacks upon our President and citizens.

The question was, what SHOULD be the response of the United States to these attacks?

“The attempt to assassinate Bush I and the murder of Klinghoffer occurred over a decade ago.”

So what? Does the passing of time make them any less an attack upon our nation?

” I am not aware of any contingent in American politics who were agitating for war against Iraq solely on these grounds. If this was enough to garner support for an invasion of Iraq, why didn’t Bush II inform the American people he was going to sack Iraq if he got elected?”

It SHOULD have been enough, but the post 60’s liberal left, and their paleocon fellow travellers have weakened our nations resolve, and sapped our military spirit, turning much of the country into cowards and weaklings.

“I think I’ll only give you a C for this attempt to re-write history.”

In what way am I re-writing history? Saddam Hussein attempted to have our President assassinated. That is a fact. He was giving shelter to at least two well-known terrorist groups. One responsible for the death of an American citizen, and one with links to Al-Qaeda, responsible for the Sept.11 attacks. There is no re-writing of history here. These are facts, facts that Mr Weller has conveniently ignored. Not only has he ignored them; he has again totally failed to answer my question. What Mr Weller, SHOULD the response of the U.S be to a nation that attempts to assassinate our leaders, kills our citizens, and harbours terrorists linked to Al-Qaeda? In plain English please.

shawn insists on casting stones from his glass house.

since shawn is an evangelical american exceptionalist, no amount of evidence and examples of u.s. destabilization of foreign nations and the resulting deaths will convince him of the hypocrisy of his position.

See this article by Stanley Kurtz on the nuclear materials in Iraq:

http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz060903.asp

Here’s the opening of the article:

The United States has discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I know this because I read it on the front page of the very liberal New York Times. Of course, the Times was only trying to hurt the administration. In the rush to Baghdad during the war, our troops bypassed and failed to secure one of Saddam’s key nuclear facilities. That facility was looted by local villagers, who ransacked vaults and warehouses looking for anything of value. Many of the villagers took home radioactive barrels, and are now suffering from radiation poisoning. According to the Times, the looted nuclear facility, “contained ample radioactive poisons that could be used to manufacture an inestimable quantity of so-called dirty bombs.”

So in the course of trying to embarrass the administration, the Times has inadvertently raised a very important point in the administration’s defense. Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program contained sufficient material to pose a serious threat to the United States. In the hands of terrorists, nuclear dirty bombs supplied by Saddam could have rendered landmarks and key sites in American cities uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.

And why did Saddam have a nuclear facility in the first place? It was, of course, part of his effort to produce a nuclear bomb.

keeping it all in perspective. watching the bushies squirm is lots of fun, but is beside the point.

“No WMDs? Fabulous, but Still Beside the Point”
by batthew barganier june 9, 2003

http://www.antiwar.com/barganier/ba060903.html

Auster writes “If the war opponents were not motivated in their belief in WMDs by a desire to make war on Iraq, then why should one conclude that the Bush administration were motivated in their belief in WMDs by their intention to make war on Iraq? The inference is that this was a good-faith belief, based on the whole history of this saga and the best available contemporary evidence, and shared by all the responsible parties.”

If I understand him correctly, Auster is saying that Bush and his regime would not deliberately concoct evidence of intelligence concerning Iraq’s possession of WMD because other countries — France, Germany, etc. — all thought that Iraq had WMDs. In other words, how can we blame Bush for thinking this when all other nations thought the exact same thing?

Well, this hardly absolves Bush and his administration of responsibility for the war since they are the ones that said unequivocally that Iraq had WMD, that WMDs were an imminent threat to the United States, and thus military action was urgent.

But the important question is where did the “intelligence” that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction come from? Well, most of the intelligence came from the US and the British; they were the ones making the claims about the specific nature of Iraq’s WMD program — even specifying how much anthrax, sarin gas, vx nerve gas etc Iraq had. But was this “intelligence” reliable and credibile, or were the intelligence teams just using discepenancies in Iraq’s reported inventories and how much weapons he could produce if he had reconstituted his bio-chemical weapons program? It seems as if it was speculation, but they sold it to the American people and the UN as a certainty. So the French and German governments were in no position to refute the intelligence of the Americans and the British. I imagine that when Bush made the claim in his State of the Union Speech about Iraq attempting to procure 100 tons of uranium ore from Niger, other nations like France and Germany assumed it was true. In reality, though, it was a lie. So it is very possible a similar thing occured with intelligence regarding Saddam’s WMD program — evidence was massaged to make the case for war. Any uncertainity was thrown out the window.

Moreover, Saddam did not throw out weapons inspectors, he accepted them. Iraq also produced a 12,000 page dossier on their weapons inventory and were in the process of destroying their Al-Samound missiles when the war began. Note that Hans Blix was not complaining to the Hungarians, Finns, or Poles about the poor intelligence he was receiving — he was complaining to the Americans. Simply, it was American intelligence that built the case for war by providing certain information about Saddam’s WMD program. That is why if no WMD turn up it will be a on the hands of the Americans and the British, not the French, Poles or Romanians.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 9, 2003 12:47 PM
“The United States has discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq…”

this story is the most sickening yet, and falls into the category of the bushies jumping out of the frying pan and into ground zero and taking us with them.

the u.s. goes to war over wmd, but lets looters carry off barrels of radioactive materials. not only did the bushies lie us into war, but far worse, didn’t even have the competence to secure those materials which could be used for terrorism. swell.

all is not lost however, the u.s. military did secure the oil ministry for the merchants of death so they can still make a buck off the selling of stolen oil.

how can a government be so sickenlingly inept that it secures the oil ministry but not nuclear sites with radioactive materials?

call me naive, i thought the storys about the u.s. letting looters get their hands on such materials had to be made up.

anyone who supports the war after this revelation needs a brain adjustment.

more on the times article

“No conspiracy theories needed here; no need to read the entrails of the various Administration announcements about if, where, when, why, what weapons of mass destruction Saddam had; no need to posit theories of deception and cravenness - this one is clear cut.

The “coalition” forces knew exactly where this site was; they knew exactly what it had in it; they knew precisely the risk it posed, not just of contamination of civilians but as a source of materials for a “dirty bomb” one of the actual bogeyman scenarios the whole stupid war was meant to eliminate not facilitate and yet, despite controlling the area and knowing what was at stake, “coaltion” forces failed to secure the site for “days”.

If George Bush ever comes out of hiding and gives an actual press conference and the press manages to ask actual questions, this would be as good a one as any: How did you manage to leave one of the most well-documented nuclear storage sites unprotected for days?”

“Don’t you eat that yellow snow June 09, 2003”
http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/

Good post, Edwin. The war on Iraq was predicated on lies, which Lawrence Auster bought hook, line and sinker.

Since it appears that WMD are not going to be found in the quantities initially thought, the pro-war partisans have been shifting gears and turning their heels in the sand hoping — desperately hoping — for another argument to fly in and save the day. At least I give credit to Auster who refuses to budge on the question, and keeps insiting that WMD were the casus belli of the war, and that it is inappropriate to pick new ratioanales out of thin air hoping one of them will stick.

Shawn writes “Either Mr Weller did not understand the question, or he is advocating total pacifism in the face of direct attacks upon our President and citizens.”

I understood the question and am not advocating total pacifism in the face of “direct attacks.” Shawn wants to try and claim the war was legitimate because a) Abu Abbas was in Iraq b) and Saddam tried to assassinate Bush senior. Now if this isn’t a blatant attempt to re-write history I don’t know what is. Let’s be clear: no one ever thought that Abu Abbas’ presence in Iraq merited a war and regime change. No one thought that Saddam’s (alleged) assassination attempt of Bush senior meritied a war. Clinton did lauch a missle strike against Iraq in response to the assassination attempt on Bush’s life. Perhaps you thought Clinton’s response was too lackluster and anemic, but again there was not large political contingent advocating a regime change for reasons a and b. This hardly places me outside the political mainstream. In fact, Joe Guzzardi (I think it was) had a column on VDARE a few months back highlighting the problem America is having with suspected criminals (including murders) who flee to Mexico to avoid US justice. The Mexican government even knows where many of these suspected murders are but refuses to hand them over because they disagree with the death penalty. So Mexico is harboring known thugs and murders but chooses not to cooperate with America. How is this different from what Saddam was doing? Are you saying we should invade Mexico now and instigate a regime change?

Shawn writes “It SHOULD have been enough, but the post 1960;s liberal left, and their paleocon fellow travellers have weakened our nations resolve, and sapped our military spirit, turning much of the country into cowards and weaklings.”

This is an obvious descent into tomfoolery. Paleocons have wielded enough influence to weaken our nation’s resolve, you say? That is incredible, yet for some reason the Paleocon magic hasn’t invigorated Americans’ sense of nationhood in prompting for immigration restrictions. Even more amazing is the fact that the refuse of the 1960’s had sufficient resolve to wage war againt Serbia.

P.S. While it is generally acknowledged that Saddam did try to assassinate Bush, it is not proven. Jude Wanniski has reviewed the evidence and suggested it does NOT implicate Saddam. Usually I wouldn’t give much credence to this notion, but seeing how he was accurate about Saddam’s WMD program, I am willing to give his comments more weight.

Here’s Best of the Web commenting on John Dean’s accusation of “impeachable offenses” by President Bush in his claims of WMDs:

———————————-
In a commentary for Findlaw.com, reprinted on CNN’s Web site, Watergate figure John Dean goes on at great length (more than 2,700 words) about the phony scandal involving Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Here’s the passage that caught our eye:

—-
Recent statements by one of the high-level officials privy to the decision making process that lead to the Iraqi war also strongly suggest manipulation, if not misuse of the intelligence agencies. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, during an interview with Sam Tannenhaus [sic] of Vanity Fair magazine, said: “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.” More recently, Wolfowitz added what most have believed all along, that the reason we went after Iraq is that “[t]he country swims on a sea of oil.”
—-

If Dean is going to throw around charges that the president has committed an “impeachable offense,” you’d think he could at least take the trouble to check out his sources. He appears not to have read the Tanenhaus article about Wolfowitz or the Pentagon transcript of the interview, but only Vanity Fair’s misleading press release (or news accounts thereof).

And he seems unaware that the Guardian, the source of the apocryphal claim that Wolfowitz said the war was about oil, has repudiated its own story—most recently in a Saturday columnist by readers’ editor (i.e., ombudsman) Ian Mayes: “Mr Wolfowitz, in fact, had said nothing of the kind, as a deluge of email, most of it from the US, was quick to point out.” The original Guardian report was a “nasty slip” based on a faulty translation from a German news report.

How does that old saying go, a lie can travel halfway around the world, but the truth never catches up with John Dean?
[end of Best of the Web excerpt]
—————————

And here is a link to the Guardian story retracting and apologizing for its outrageously false report, a report which credulous Bush-haters all over the world swallowed without a moment’s doubt that if such a thing had been true, Wolfowitz would have openly said it! People have got to have their brains turned off to have believed something like that. But that’s become the m.o. of half the Western world, hasn’t it?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,972482,00.html

Is Auster addressing the anti-war war posters on this site or is he just amusing himself in a soliloquy?

““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.””

Even if this quote by Wolfowitz is taken out of context, I don’t see why Auster is bringing it to our attention.

Auster writes “And here is a link to the Guardian story retracting and apologizing for its outrageously false report, a report which credulous Bush-haters all over the world swallowed without a moment’s doubt that if such a thing had been true…”

Let me get this straight. Auster expresses outrage over the fact that “Bush-haters” were eager to harp on this quote by Wolfowitz, but doesn’t give a second thought to the fact that Wolfowitz and others in Bush’s Administration took intelligence out of context and then used it to launch a war!

My Goodness, is Auster delirious.

adding my two cents, as if its worth that much.

Wolf out of the bag?
http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/001195.php

not so fast, the anti-war right didn’t just leap on the guardian quote and run with it.

“Is Auster addressing the anti-war war posters on this site or is he just amusing himself in a soliloquy?”

Soliloquy. He lost the argument, Edwin, he just doesn’t have the guts to admit it.

“My Goodness, is Auster delirious.”

:-)

It seems to me that there is a group for whom the purported existence of current active WMD programs in Iraq was the singular decisive issue that got them to support the war. Those people no doubt have a reasonable expectation that in the long run the evidence and analysis had better come down on the side of Bush.

Those are the only people the issue is relevant for though. Oddly, I haven’t heard a peep from anyone in any news story or blog saying “I firmly supported the war based primarily on the WMD claims, but now that a few weeks have gone by and we haven’t turned up a nuke I feel betrayed.” They are probably there, but that isn’t where all the noise is coming from. When it comes to the issue of active WMD programs the only people we are hearing from are those who don’t really care about it. Unless Mr. Weller, Abby at al are willing to say “OK, if a barrel of mustard gas is found in Iraq I will take it all back and retroactively support the war”.

Well? How many of those currently anti-war, supposedly because Bush is either lying or imcompetent, are going to become retroactive war supporters if the Bushies produce concrete evidence (beyond the chem suits etc that we already have) of an active chemical weapons program? Henry? Abby? Mr. Weller? Antiwarrior? Sign up now, here is your chance to put your money where your mouth is.

Matt points to the bad faith on the part of many who are sounding the drums about missing WMDs. Their arguments imply that if the WMDs exist, then the war is justified. But before the war, these same people opposed the war even though they accepted the existence of the WMDs.

matt misses the point and should read the opening post by auster.

if he did, he would know argument is over whether “Bush was stretching or cooking the evidence”. auster says such a “theory… is unsustainable”. others disagree.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 10, 2003 12:33 PM
“Matt points to the bad faith on the part of many who are sounding the drums about missing WMDs. Their arguments imply that if the WMDs exist, then the war is justified.”

our arguments imply no such thing. the argument over the missing wmds centers on whether bush lied to congress, the american people, the u.n and the world.

i didn’t think the war was justified either way, wmds or not, but that is not to the point. the point discussed here is whether bush lied, and used those lies to launch a war.

the rats are jumping ship.

Kristol: Bush Made Misstatements on Iraq WMDs
http://www.newsmax.com/showinside.shtml?a=2003/6/8/131424

Abby writes:
“i didn’t think the war was justified either way…”

Precisely. That was the point of my post: to emphasize that those who are now making noise are not people who believed Bush and now think he lied or was duped. Those who are making noise now don’t actually care about WMD programs in Iraq at all, and are simply making noise about them for some perceived polemic value. People who actually supported the war specifically and primarily because of claims about current WMD programs in Iraq are for the most part silent.

Bush’s implied contract isn’t with those who opposed war anyway; it is with those who strongly supported the war based on Bush’s WMD claims — and specifically a perception of the status of current programs — as a primary or sole determinant. As I said, those folks may have a legitimate beef with Bush.

Abby on the other hand has no legitimate beef. Those like Abby and the rest of the Left who opposed war anyway, and refuse to specify under what conditions the Iraq war would in fact be justified, are irrelevant by self-election. They never agreed to anything at all (even in principle) anyway, so it isn’t possible to break an agreement with them through dishonesty or whatever.

As to whether in fact Bush lied or was duped, obviously it is far too soon to pronounce on that definitively (in particular when dealing with such a maddeningly patient man). That is why antiwar posters will not sign up to a change of heart if certain specific factual evidence is ultimately revealed. The possibility that the facts might interfere with their ideological stance is to be ruled out ahead of time.

I am no fan of Bush in general, and I think neocons are more of a threat to the West than plain old ordinary liberals. I would not be surprised if it turns out that there was some WMD book cooking going on, although as I’ve pointed out many times the status of current programs is hardly the only objectively legitimate justification for the war. The current crowd of detractors have no credibility, though: Abby says herself that current WMD programs aren’t a significant determining issue with the war anyway.

matt,

your argument on credibility is an ad hominem, as is auster’s comment on “bad faith”.

arguments, like truth itself, is not relative to the person speaking them, they stand alone.

Pointing out that someone’s argument is self-discrediting isn’t ad hominem any more than pointing out ad hominem is ad hominem, though. Abby’s argument requires us to simultaneously stipulate the relevance and irrelevance of Iraq’s WMD programs. A requirement for A and not-A in the same time and manner is contradictory, and the person/people who assert such arguments are self-discrediting.

you attack the author, i.e. “the current crowd of detractors have no credibility”, not the argument, that’s an ad hominem.

whether or not wmds justified war, and whether or not the bushies lied about the existence of wmds are two separate arguments.

a self contradictory arguments would have something as its major premise like, all truth is relative or subjective. or credibility or truth is relative to the person saying it. gee, how interesting, that’s what you said isn’t it? hmm.

The crowd of detractors, including Abby, indeed have no credibility. She might be able to gain some by engaging the discussion and saying exactly under what factual circumstances she would retrospectively consider the war justified, but she won’t do that because she has abdicated from that discussion and yet wants to criticize it at the same time. Claiming ad hominem is just another side track: another attempt to mount a polemic without actually engaging the argument.

On the technical matter of formal logic Abby seems to see the “same time and manner” criteria as not being satisfied, and therefore claims that her argument does not in self-contradictory fashion claim that the status of Iraqi WMD programs is simultaneously relevant and irrelevant to her argument. She seems to be saying that Bush definitely lied about something irrelevant and should be held accountable even though it was irrelevant. Abby doesn’t seem to have any justification other than ignorance though: she doesn’t know that Bush told the truth, therefore he lied. Whatever. As I mentioned it is only those who made up their minds that Bush is evil long ago who are criticizing now; whether Bush will ultimately stand or fall, in the eyes of those who aren’t consumed by hatred, remains to be seen.

I’ve mentioned before that I think it likely his thought process went as follows:

“Yippee kai-yay. We need to go whup some Arab butt in order to cow those towel-heads in the middle east into helping us rather than helping the islamofascist terrorists. We need show them we’re willing to march in on the ground and kill them when they threaten and attack us: the reason they feel free to attack us is they think we are wussies — Osama-mama said so himself. We’ve got several options as to who we can whup with no moral qualms whatsoever. Hussein tops the list. It would be a good humanitarian thing to do on the moral side, and a great prophylactic on the other since he’s the one who has defied us the most overtly. Anyone who objects on moral grounds is objectively with the plastic-shredder boys, so screw ‘em. It comes down to a simple prudent judgement call, and we can’t be afraid of making a decision. Even if Hussein doesn’t have active WMD programs he sure acts like he does, and I’m not putting up with any more rope-a-dope defiance of the cease-fire while the twin towers burn.”

You have to think like a Texan. To Bush, Abby is lower than dirt because she objectively supports the Hussein boys and their plastic shredders. He has no moral obligation to her in his own mind, and he hasn’t told any lies. He’s given everyone a reason to get on board and plenty of time to do so, and anyone who isn’t holds the moral low ground anyway so tough cookies.

As I said, I am not a Bush fan. I understand how things work far too well to ever be a politician — all politicians in a liberal polity are without exception either corrupt, clueless, or both. It is a prerequisite for that sort of participation. The case that Bush lied is worse than objectively weak, though: it is itself clueless.

This excellent column by Terry Jeffrey (Buchanan’s campaign manager in the early ’90s) carefully examines the statements made about a particular chemical plant discussed by Secretary Powell at the UN. Powell had said, this plant was producing chemical weapons on November 10, but by Decemeber 22 the site had been sanitized. Jeffrey points out that the statement that the plant was producing weapons on November 10 is either true or not true. Then he turns to Sen. Bob Graham, who suggested recently on tv that the administration had “manipulated” the intelligence on WMDs. But when Terry checked with Graham’s communications director, the aide affirmed that Graham, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, fully agreed with Powell that the intelligence indicated that that plant was active on November 10th. So it turns out that his charge of “manipulation” was just an irresponsible statement by a politician looking for votes.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/terencejeffrey/tj20030611.shtml

And this column by David Limbaugh sums up the Democratic-leftist campaign to paint the president as having deliberately lied us into war. As Limbaugh points out, this reckless charge must have the very effect it is supposedly aimed at preventing—the undermining of our credibility with foreign nations. But what would you expect of the left? What are they ever after, other than generating hatred against our country and our civilization?

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/dl20030611.shtml

As for the Democrats charging that the administration lied about the WMDs, here is a collection of statements by leading Democrats stating their own belief in the existence of Hussein’s WMDs:

http://www.rightwingnews.com/quotes/demsonwmds.php

Matt writes “How many of those currently anti-war, supposedly because Bush is either lying or imcompetent, are going to become retroactive war supporters if the Bushies produce concrete evidence (beyond the chem suits etc that we already have) of an active chemical weapons program?”

Well, just for the recond Bush is a liar and is incompetent. However, WMD were never the crux of the argument for war. The argument for war was that Saddam was an imminent threat to the United States. I was far — very far — from being convinced that Iraq was an imminent threat to the US, especially in light of the fact the the Bush regime did nothing to secure the border, regulate the flow of Visas to Saudi Arabia, reform the INS etc. So I knew Saddam could not be a real threat to America, because if he was there would be a real and proactive effort to increase border security. How can Saddam be a threat if Bush leaves our borders just as unguarded as always? So I knew the war had nothing to do with making America safer or more secure. That was obvious.

Of course if you think Saddam really was a threat — if you believed neocon rubbish — then you should demand Bush be impeached for how derelict he has been in protecting the border. Either way, Bush looks dirty.

Of course the argument FOR the war was not that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, but that he is a THREAT to the United States. The argument against the war was NOT that Saddam doesn’t necessarily have WMD, but that he was NOT a threat to the United States. Possessing WMD and being a threat to this country are two separate arguments. Al-Qaida does not have any WMD, but I would argue they are still a threat to this country.

However, the pro-war agument tried to make the case that Saddam’s possession of WMD in itself proved he was an imminent threat to the United States. So if turns out that Saddam had no WMD then the whole anti-war case is bankrupt. On the contrary, any discovery of any WMD will not refute the anti-war right because our argument was that Saddam was not an imminent threat to the country, not that he didn’t have any WMD.

Mr. Weller: thanks for the confirmation. (And by the way, if you are looking for someone to defend Bush on immigration and open borders you are in the wrong place. Try down the hall and to the left).

“However, the pro-war agument tried to make the case that Saddam’s possession of WMD in itself proved he was an imminent threat to the United States.”

I must have missed that one. If I start snoring again during meetings of the Neocon Imperialist Cabal Local Chapter 667 will someone wake me up?

“If one single act suggested to me more than any other that there was something seriously amiss with the claims about WMD in Iraq, it was George Bush’s recent claim that “we have found weapons of mass destruction” where he was referring to the two vans that were supposedly mobile WMD labs. The fact that Bush was willing to state this so categorically at a time when there was so much serious doubt around about not just the vans but the entire WMD program indicated that here was a guy willing to say anything if he thought he could get away with it.”

http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/001242.php

the part that really gets me is how could the guy be such a goof as to believe he could get away with it, or to say it without knowing with certainty that it was true?

lies then, lies now. nothing changes but the faces of those who must pay the price of deception.

http://hnn.us/articles/1489.html

As I suspected, it looks as if our intelligence was deliberately manipulated to foster a war with Iraq. Auster’s pathetic fallback position that the French and German governments were essentially in line with the Bush Administration on the presence of WMD in Iraq is starting to crumble.

I imagine when the dust finally settles, there will only be a handful of neoconservative villians who talked Bush — and the whole country — into war.

“French intelligence was telling us that there was effectively no real evidence of a WMD program That’s why France wanted a longer extension on the weapons inspections. The French, the Germans and the Russians all knew there were no weapons there — and so did Blair and Bush as that’s what the French told them directly. Blair ignored what the French told us and instead listened to the Americans.”

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0601-02.htm

So how much longer will Auster continue to spread pro-war propaganda and mock war opponents as “conspiracy theorists?”

Evidence is now starting to emerge that there was no INDEPENDENT verification of US intelligence regarding WMD in Iraq. This obliterates Auster’s last argument, his only weapon of defense against the anti-war crowd. After all, Auster argued, the Bush Administration’s “intelligence” on WMD in Iraq simply reflected the international consensus. However, it is starting to appear that this also is another case of neoconservative mendacity. When will Auster come to his senses and realize you can’t defend neoconservatives with the truth?

I’ve found this information via a couple of targeted google searches.

http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/usallieswmd.html

“Specifically targeting the CIA report, Putin said, ‘Fears are one thing, hard facts are another.’ He goes on to say, ‘Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners yet. This fact has also been supported by the information sent by the CIA to the US Congress.’”

“French intelligence services did not come up with the same alarming assessment of Iraq and WMD as did the Britain and the United States.”

“France, Russia, and Germany did not find Powell’s ‘evidence’ strong enough to support the U.S.’s stance on the Iraqi threat.”

“Will Blair’s Iraq Firestorm Burn Bush?”

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/karon/article/0,9565,460083,00.html