Not the CIA, evidently. Yeah, there have been a few threads around on the "lies" or whatever, but this article really ties it all together. I saw this news piece where the author has interviewed many people in the CIA and Pentagon - the intelligence information the president got was not backed up by the CIA - but by Wolfie/Perle/etc. A very interesting and thorough read. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact "According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States. ... Rumsfeld and his colleagues believed that the C.I.A. was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. “The agency was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,” the Pentagon adviser told me. “That’s what drove them. If you’ve ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.” The goal of Special Plans, he said, was “to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see. Shulsky’s carrying the heaviest part.” ... The former intelligence official went on, “One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with—to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.” He added, “If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.” ... “The whole story is complicated by Strauss’s idea—actually Plato’s—that philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians.” Oh, and there's other really good stuff in there about that terrorist training camp with the airplane - built by america as a "counter-terrorist" training camp.
History will show that WMD's and the Iraq/AQ link were both propaganda put out by the Bush administration. They wanted to save the Iraqi's from a brutal dictator and knew that the American people would never go along with war for humanitarian reasons. So they made it a case of national security. It's all irrelevant now as we saved the Iraqi people and they are now free to practice democracy.. as long as we approve of their candidates.
The price you pay for believing anything written by Sy Hersh. http://politics.slate.msn.com/id/2082639/
I just love all you amateur defense/intelligence experts. I was particularly intrigued by the "supply problems, inflexible planning, incompetent staff work, halt-in-place" analysis stuff during the fighting. Just hilarious from a bunch of college sphomores who've never held a weapon. You do not have the faintest idea what the CIA and or MI knew or did not know, and neither does that pompous windbag Hirsch, who is nothing but a curmudgeon. I'm not saying he's wrong. I'm saying he's taking not much and blowing it up into not much more. And the "we went to war to take out a brutal dictator" theory which some buttsnot above thinks he'll sneer at is at least as true as "we're going to war to steal Iraq's oil and give it to Halliburton" which is most likely HIS take on it. Neither is close to true, but you lot don't know, and don't care to know, what's really going down. A pivotal moent in history and you're more interested in bashing somebody. Infantile dolts. No point wasting electrons telling you.
Hector, what can you tell us about Charles Martel? No, I haven't forgotten how you ran from that little argument like a b****.
Actually, he said we did it to "save the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator", or close. I sneered at the thought of the administration caring one squirt of buttsnot about the regular Iraqi people. And please, give me some credit. Halliburton doesn't get the oil, they only get to fix the oil supply. I don't believe there's any way we can "own" their oil without unanimous world-wide protest. The admin would never be dumb enough to try that. The war was only about oil insomuch as the admin wanted to stop Saddam Hussein from receiving oil revenues, and potentially holding hostage a large % of the worldwide supply. (and I just learned BS automatically edits out the snig$ered word, presumably for a racial misunderstanding)
And I just love the amateur defense/intelligence experts in the administration who never performed meaningful military or intelligence service (or who can't spot a blatantly forged uranium sales document a mile away), but are completely convinced that the CIA doesn't know what its talking about. They're my heros
Actually, this sneering buttsnot (what is a buttsnot exactly?) knows that GWB has way to much integrity to give prizes to friends, business partners, or campaign contributors. He is a Republican after all. The point that I was trying to make (the one that earned me the title of sneering buttsnot) was that we conquered Iraq under the premise that they were a threat to our national security. When that didn't look like it would fly over the long term we changed it to freeing the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator. Now that we have freed them we will help them build a democracy by telling them who they will be allowed to have run their country. Now I never claimed to be an expert on international affairs but I can figure out that the american people are being scammed by watching the "fair and balanced" news on my satellite. If I can figure that out shouldn't the insiders be able to figure it out as well?
People still think this wasn't about oil? Get with the program, people - how much more evidence do you want? Guys, the Clue Train is coming, and your short bus is stalled on the tracks.
> I don't believe there's any way we can "own" > their oil without unanimous world-wide protest. > The admin would never be dumb enough to try > that. Oh, they will try. And I know the game plan. First, while the Ministry of Oil building was saved, all of the local offices and records were left unprotected, even at the repeated request for protection from the oil workers. Important records and equipment were looted and destroyed. At the same time there will be an overall push to privatize all the industry in the nation (can't have Iraqis doing things that we can do, now can we?). Because of the loss of records, Iraq will be incapable of doing things like exploiting new fields by themselves. Thus the national oil company will need to be privatized - some small percent will be set aside for the Iraqis while the bulk of the profit goes to American companies. Doing this will certainly drive the Iraqi people to anger if they knew what was going on, so it will be a test of the spinning ability of the puppet government we put in charge. > The war was only about oil insomuch as the > admin wanted to stop Saddam Hussein from > receiving oil revenues, and potentially holding > hostage a large % of the worldwide supply. And why is this a danger? Because most of the rest of the world is pumping less and less oil. Iraq will become very important in just a few years. The stakes are far higher than just one madman spending bucks on left-over Soviet weapons.
And I suppose when Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other hawks wanted to go after Hezbollah and Syria, that was over oil too. There are different viewpoints in the administration. Some wanted war because of Israel. Others because of potential threat that Saddam would have posed. Getting friendly oil policy from Iraq would be a great reward, however, I don't think it was the main motivation for the war. Bush staked his entire presidency on this war and so far things have gone according to plan. What will happen in the future is still in question. One of the main arguments by liberals against war was we don't know what kind of government will come to power. If that is the case then how do we know we'll get friendly oil policy on a consistent basis?
Ouch. Next time I'll play it safe, and make a space shuttle joke or something. Yeesh. To Elder Statesman: Saudi Arabia gives us oil on a consistent basis, to pick an example completely at random. The probability of significant, perhaps tragic, blowback on this Iraq adventure is about as close to 1.0 as is possible in world politics. Especially given an administration that knows and cares nothing about "nation-building." Establishing a puppet regime like Iran under the Shah is one of the happier options at this point, and we all know how that turned out. I mean, can we finally dismiss the idea that Iraq wants to become pro-Western, pro-American, pro-anything but getting us the hell out of there? And can we finally dismiss the idea that we'd be anywhere near the place but for the oil? If this was to protect Israel, well, we should have started with Syria. Or Saudi Arabia, a course of action which I'd STILL be in favor of. If Bush would hook the House of Saud up to the car battery, then he could pretend to land as many planes on as many aircraft carriers as he pleases. But it ain't gonna happen.
maybe other countries want to see the skeleton, or even a plan, for a working government before they just hand loads of $$$ to the murderous militiamen / tribal leaders who are all claiming power?
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/629xnqei.asp No, it's a danger because Saddam could have sold oil on the black market to fund his WMD programs, giving money to Palestinian terrorists' families, funding Ansar al-Islam terrorists in Kurdish areas, etc. And the connection between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda is fairly clear now, if not neccesarily a direct connection. Saddam and Bin Laden both gave money to the Ansar group for its fight against the Kurds in northern Iraq. There is some evidence that the 2 (or, more accurately, Saddam and what would become al-Qaeda) worked together in the 1993 WTC bombing, and we know that both fund suicide bombers in Israel. There are other examples of probably co-operation between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Yes, al-Qaeda distrusted Saddam and wished to eventually overthrow his government, but they realized that the US was a much more imminent threat and worked together against the common enemy (something like the cooperation between the US/UK and the USSR during WW2).
You are misinformed, and the people you quote have a very narrow vision of Iraq. It was just yesterday that Iraqi oil workers themseves were interviewed about what was happening in southern Iraq. It isn't pretty. http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wfId=1254723 The US will try to privatise the Iraqi oil industry. Lets see if your Weekly Standard feel-good articles continue then. You have no idea what I am talking about. The damage Saddam is capable of in your worst nightmares is nothing compared to the damage that will result to the US if we don't own Iraq in the coming decade.