..or not.
Power Line is all over the Haaretz story about Saddam bluffing on WMD.
One quote caught my eye, however:
Senior Iraqi officials told their interrogators that Hussein had no idea what the true state of the country’s weapons was, because everyone lied to him and refrained from giving him bad news for fear of being executed.
Hmmm.
So you get ‘Potemkin weapons’; reports, promises, trailers filled with impressive-looking technical equipment, UAV’s that are really just oversized model airplanes. Occasionally, some competent or especially frightened technician might actually produce something – but almost certainly not on the scale that the dictator believes.
So Saddam believes he has them, and from that, we infer that he does, and what is really going on is a bunch of nervous paper-shuffling.
Of course, if anybody thinks this is going to make a dent in the invincible ignorance of the “Bush lied about WMDs” cult, pray thee think again.
Only 34% of Democrats in the new New Opinion Dynamics poll say that Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein, who is apparently a superior version of JFK (since JFK is suspected to have possessed weapons of mass destruction).
On the other hand, that’s up from 29% in November.
Enough fraternizing, everybody back to work “translating.”:http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/products-docex.htm God knows the CIA isnt intersted.
Glen: Two words of advice: read Hobbes. If this pace of violence and anarchy continue, there will be no more Iraq. There will be Kurdistan, Shiiteville, and Sunniland.
So let me clarify what many liberals think: Kurds and Shiites are better off without Saddam. Sunnis are not better off. Iraq as a unified, functioning state is not better off, since absent an iron-fisted strongman it is unlikely to survive. Hence, “Iraqis” are not better off, since aside from dodging suicide bombers waiting for the electricity to come on, their very nationality is in jeopardy.
Yes, liberals who scoff at national identity as fascist jingoism will indeed mourn the nation-state of Iraq. I don’t doubt that for a second.
/sarcasm
Uh, I wonder if it has occurred to many folks that a state in which even Saddam couldn’t be sure of what he had is a state in which there were no real controls at all. Which also means no real controls on the potential distribution of anything that was successfully created.
Once everything is a Potemkin village, a vanishing act with anything real is no more difficult than creating the appearance of things which aren’t there. At the end of the day, the paperwork is all the same.
Okay, Joe, I see your point, but that doesn’t exactly make the case for removing any more compelling. Kim Jong could very well be running a similar Potemkin operation, and nobody is arguing we should take him out. An incompetent leader may potentially be more reckless, but he’s also more likely to be unable to run the kind of operation to come up with WMD.
frontinus: I don’t scoff at national identity, I just don’t think you can overlook the very weak foundation at the core of Iraq. This is the conservative in me, looking for roots of a country that will get it through hard times. Too much of what the pro-war crowd spouts these days reminds me of the worst dimension of liberalism: a naive hope that good intentions by everyone are enough to overcome any conflict. (As a liberal in San Francisco, believe me I know!) In this case, instead of throwing money at social problems and hoping for the best (a la liberals), we are throwing troops at the problem and hoping for the best. Sorry, but hope isn’t the foundation of a cogent foreign policy.
The reason nobody is advocating getting rid of Kim Jong Il is because that’s not a viable plan of action. An invasion of North Korea would net us nothing, and would create massive problems in Asia. Plus there’s always the possibility that North Korea would start lobbing nukes, in which case the US and China wouldn’t be far behind. AND in adition to all that, there are ways to pressure North Korea politicaly and economicaly.
If it wasn’t for those considerations, you bet your ass I’d be advocating eliminating him. Any resultant instability in North Korea would be a positive thing – instability leads to change, and change can be directed. It’s like tearing down your house in order to build a mansion in it’s place – it looks horrible, and your wife will likely try to kill you when she comes home only to find a smoking crater, however, in the long term you’ve got the opportunity to create something much better. The same situation exists in Iraq; yes, the violence is horrible and makes the invasion seem counterproductive, however, if the US has the staying power and the political will to truly help the Iraqis get back on their feet, then the end result will have been more than worth the short-term bloodshed.
Saddam’s imaginary weapons didn’t constitute much of a threat, did they? But that’s not the number one point I want to make here. Heck, even I thought Saddam likely had some chemical or biological ordnance left over—but nothing nuclear and nothing that was a weapon of mass destruction. The dog that didn’t bark in the night was our treatment of Hans Blix and the UN team. We gave them tips about the WMD (obtained, presumably, from Chalabi’s coached fabricators), which were shown to be “garbage”. Rather than confront the unpleasant possibility that we were all wrong about WMD, and there was no compelling reason to invade Iraq with the domestic political benefits that would accrue to the Administration, we chased the Blix teams out of Iraq, pretty much at gunpoint.
The self-congratulatory tone of the analysis of these documents is ridiculous. We searched Iraq up and down for WMD and not found any, so unless you come across a recipe for poofing entire laboratories into thin air, the issue is closed.
Andrew, if you tell me you’re going to kill me, tell me you have a gun, and reach into your pocket and pull out a pellet gun and then I shoot you, you don’t get to complain.
If Saddam is bound under the conditions of armistice – of a war he started – to surrender his WMD and cooperate in every way, and he not only dodges and ducks but does things which lead his own people to believe that he ahs them – dontcha think that the onus is on him just a little bit?
And given the level of gaming that Herr Blix and his company were facing, it’s hard for me to believe that we, or anyone else, should have taken what they were allowed to see as dispositive.
“Saddam’s imaginary weapons didn’t constitute much of a threat, did they?”
No, but as noone had a way of knowing that they were imaginary until after the invasion, that is sort of the point. Essential, Saddam is the tyrant that ‘cried wolf’. After having been caught red-handed several times working on WMD’s by inspectors after the first gulf war, and having been caught with capacity that analysts no longer believed he had, it simply reached the point that any denial that he was working on or possessed WMD’s was not believed. Nor should it have been given that we could tell from Iraq’s internal chatter that many elements of Iraq’s government, Saddam included believed that they had WMD’s and WMD programs. In fact, during the September before the war, Saddam publicly addressed the Iraqi people with statements that effectively assured them that indeed Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was continuing. Given all this, there is no reason at all to believe that Saddam was not in fact abiding by the terms of the cession of hostilities.
“But that’s not the number one point I want to make here. Heck, even I thought Saddam likely had some chemical or biological ordnance left over—but nothing nuclear and nothing that was a weapon of mass destruction.”
The point I want to make is that this is an unsustainable position after 9/11. A half dozen nerve gas shells could be used this weekend to perpetrate an attack which would dwarf 9/11 in the magnitude of lives it destroyed. After 9/11 any ammount of chemical or biological ordinance has to be considered a weapon of mass destruction which it is intolerable to leave in the hands of avowed enemies of the United States. And, by your own admission, you yourself believed that Saddam continued to retain chemical and biological ordinance. Indeed, for that matter so did Hans Blix. The only question at the time was whether continued inspections, inspections that were only taking place because we’d massed troops on his border, would eventually root out the problem without the need for an invasion.
So what’s your point?
It’s too convenient to blame it on a Potemkin arsenal. Rather overestimate and find he has no arsenal than not plan only to find he does. I’d sooner assume they were spirited away to Syria or someplace than assume there never were any and find them coming at me in ten years’ time when we’re looking the other way. When we invade Iran and Syria the true disposition of the WMDs will become clearer. For now, assume he had them and if he didn’t all well and good.
Alex: I hope you know that he “destabilization leads to change” theory, whether applied to Iraq, Iran, or anywhere, is the very definition of “extreme liberal” view of foreign policy. The idea that with enough gung-ho American can-do we can reshape the world, changing the political, economic, and even cultural framework that other operate captures the essence and arrogance of liberalism.
It’s fine in theory, but America is far too conservative for that kind of policy in the long run. And your theory doesn’t work so well if your wife, seeing the crator you made of her home, leaves you for the asshole across the street in his two-story townhouse.
A.L.: if I tell you that I have a gun and I say am going to shoot you, and a policeman comes up, handcuffs me and starts frisking me, and you tell the policeman to step away, and then you blow me away—did you want to disarm me, or did you want to blow me away? If you want to make an argument that I “deserved” it, that’s one thing, but to claim you were acting in self-defense is unsupportable.
I repeat: the underappreciated (by you) point is our lack of interest in the 2002/3 inspections, and the way our WMD “evidence” was refuted by them. And, yes, I realize that Saddam acquiesced in those only under duress, and to my mind forcing Saddam to accept them was the last intelligent act of Bush’s Iraq policy.
Andrew,
Who is the policeman? Does he have unfetteered access or is it constrained? Can the policeman disarm the arrested or does it he need the national guard?
Telling the policeman that he can look in the room on the warrant between 8 and 10AM on the following day or the following week is not much of an inspection regime.
It is the kind of inspection regime you would institute if you wanted to convince folks you had something which you did not.
I think that Saddam fooled us. Proving that he was too smart by half.
I am sick and tired on this irresponsible and dishonest argument. Andrew, for someone so dogmatic, you sure aren’t paying attention, even as you accuse all of us of “ignoring” the findings of the ISG. To wit, and I will continue to post this very thing from the Kay Report until doomsday, if necessary:
“….We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later:
A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.
A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.
Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist’s home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.
New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.
Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists’ homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).
A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.
Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.
Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km – well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.
Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles —probably the No Dong — 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.
In addition to the discovery of extensive concealment efforts, we have been faced with a systematic sanitization of documentary and computer evidence in a wide range of offices, laboratories, and companies suspected of WMD work. The pattern of these efforts to erase evidence – hard drives destroyed, specific files burned, equipment cleaned of all traces of use – are ones of deliberate, rather than random, acts. For example,
On 10 July 2003 an ISG team exploited the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) Headquarters in Baghdad. The basement of the main building contained an archive of documents situated on well-organized rows of metal shelving. The basement suffered no fire damage despite the total destruction of the upper floors from coalition air strikes. Upon arrival the exploitation team encountered small piles of ash where individual documents or binders of documents were intentionally destroyed. Computer hard drives had been deliberately destroyed. Computers would have had financial value to a random looter; their destruction, rather than removal for resale or reuse, indicates a targeted effort to prevent Coalition forces from gaining access to their contents.
All IIS laboratories visited by IIS exploitation teams have been clearly sanitized, including removal of much equipment, shredding and burning of documents, and even the removal of nameplates from office doors.
Although much of the deliberate destruction and sanitization of documents and records probably occurred during the height of OIF combat operations, indications of significant continuing destruction efforts have been found after the end of major combat operations, including entry in May 2003 of the locked gated vaults of the Ba’ath party intelligence building in Baghdad andhighly selective destruction of computer hard drives and data storage equipment along with the burning of a small number of specific binders that appear to have contained financial and intelligence records, and in July 2003 a site exploitation team at the Abu Ghurayb Prison found one pile of the smoldering ashes from documents that was still warm to the touch.
I would now like to review our efforts in each of the major lines of enquiry that ISG has pursued during this initial phase of its work.
With regard to biological warfare activities, which has been one of our two initial areas of focus, ISG teams are uncovering significant information – including research and development of BW-applicable organisms, the involvement of Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) in possible BW activities, and deliberate concealment activities. All of this suggests Iraq after 1996 further compartmentalized its program and focused on maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW agents….”
It goes on, of course, as does Duelfer’s. But apparently the Lazarus school of Translation reduces that to “and the way our WMD “evidence” was refuted by them.” I suppose its too much to ask to have anyone actually read anything anymore.
Indeed. “Refuted.” And you guys wonder why you can’t win elections. Perhaps you have confidence in Mr Blix to overcome obstruction of this magnitude, but I do not. Bush made the right call, and not soon enough, as far as I’m concerned. Please get this through your skulls: it wasn’t about what we knew, it was about what we didn’t know, and what Saddam refused to tell us, and, I might add, went to great lengths to hide from us.
Only a fool would argue that the “policeman” in your analogy was anything other than powerless without the 133,000 strong heavily armed “swat team” on the borders.