printIn a letter to Barely a Blog, in response to Tibor Machan’s Iraqi War Blues,” Lawrence Auster writes rather impatiently:
For the ten thousandth time, the whole world, including those opposing the war, believed Iraq had WMDs, and there was ample reason for that belief.”
This is absolutely false. As someone who was on top of every fallacy promoted by this administration from the onset (as of September 19, 2002, to be precise), and who has been proven right on each and every point, I refuse to countenance this Sean-Hannity inanity. It seems that those who were 100% wrong on the war want to, somehow, retain their credibility and pretend that those of us who got it 100% right, did so by coincidence.
Not if I can help it.
There were many experts, credible ones, who absolutely rejected the contention that there were WMD in Iraq. They were as numerous as the loud voices who promoted this lie. However, the media, the Hannities, the Judith Millers, the dissidents, their handlers, and their followers—shut them, and us, out.
In What WMD?,” I wrote that, in his attempt to find the missing weapons,” David Kay, a former top U.S. weapons inspector who endeared himself to the media as an invasion enthusiast, had done no more than validate some very old verities. No, not everyone was bullish about the Bush administration’s WMD balderdash:
What Kay now parrots,” I averred, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei told the U.N. Security Council before the war: There were no nuclear-designated aluminum tubes in Iraq; no uranium was imported, and no nuclear programs were in existence. Between 1991 and 1998, the IAEA had managed to strip Iraq of its fuel-enriching facilities, tallying inventories to a T. Or in Kay’s belated words: “Iraq’s large-scale capability to produce, and fill new CW munitions was reduced, if not entirely destroyed, during Operation Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of U.N. sanctions and U.N. inspections.”
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Congress in 1999 was privy to intelligence reports which similarly attested to a lack of “any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox (1998) to reconstitute its WMD program.” Accounts of this nature have evidently been available to Congress for years. They reiterated, as one report from the Defense Intelligence Agency does, that, “A substantial amount of Iraq’s chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were [sic] destroyed between 1991 and 1998.”
“Kay’s news ought not to have been new to the blithering boobs in Congress,” I observed. The CEIP further bears out that in October of 2002, Congress was apprised of a National Intelligence Estimate, a declassified version of which was released only after the war. Apparently, entire intelligence agencies disputed key contentions that the administration—its experts, and its congressional and media backers—seized on and ran with.”
“While clearly pandering to policy makers, U.S. intelligence reports were still heavily qualified by conjectural expressions such as, “we believe Iraq could, might, possibly, and probably will.” The State Department and the White House, however, cultivated a custom of issuing “fact” sheets with definitive statements from which all traces of uncertainty had been removed.”
“Condoleezza Rice (who had categorically denied she possessed the analytical wherewithal to connect the dazzlingly close dots between Arab men practicing their aeronautical take-off skills and terrorism) was suddenly doing nothing but connecting disparate dots. She, Powell, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush never stopped gabbling about a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear-weapons program, chemical and biological blights, Scuds and squadrons of unmanned aerial vehicles streaking U.S. skies, and traveling laboratories teeming with twisted scientists. The language they used… ignored the deep dissent in the intelligence community.”
All that information addressing pre-war knowledge was culled from my column, What WMD?”
Coalesced in Ink Stains and Blood Stains” is information I had given my readers in 2003-columns such as Bush’s 16 Words Miss the Big Picture” and “High crimes vs. Hillary & Her husband,” among others. In Bush’s 16 Words Miss the Big Picture,” I beseeched readers to somehow show an ability to “see Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was”:
The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework, it wasn’t about an Iraq that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes; it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.
By all means,” I implored, “dissect and analyze what, in September 2002, I called the “lattice of lies leveled at Iraq: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible meetings with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized.”
“But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you?”
In Rationalize With Lies” I dealt a blow to the Hannity inanity Mr. Auster now advances, namely the creative post-hoc arguments made to justify the unnecessary war the United States waged on a sovereign nation that had not attacked us, was no threat to us and was certainly no match for us.” The argument resembles the one Tibor Machan makes today on Barely a Blog. I wrote:
“To say that Saddam may have had WMD is quite different from advocating war based on those assumptions. It’s one thing to assume in error; it’s quite another to launch a war in which thousands would die based on mere assumptions, however widely shared. It was not the anti-war-on-Iraq camp that intended to launch a war based on the sketchy information it had. The crucial difference between the Bush camp and its opponents lies in the actions the former took.”
Second, it matters a great deal when during the last decade someone said Saddam was in possession of impermissible weapons. To have said so in 1991 is not the same as saying so in 2003, by which time Iraq had so obviously been cowed into compliance and was crawling with inspectors.”
Naturally, at certain times during Iraq’s belligerent history, opponents of this war would have agreed he had a weapons program. But by 1998, sensible people realized that Operation Desert Storm, followed by seven years of inspections, made the possibility of reconstituting such a program remote. The Defense Intelligence Agency reached the same conclusion in September 2002, writing that, “A substantial amount of Iraq’s chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998.” President Jacques Chirac said as much to both Bush and Blair, who pretended not to hear.”
I (and my fellow libertarians) was right all along because I am not a partisan who genuflects to Our Side. To arrive at the correct conclusions about Bush’s undeniable drive to war, I employed facts and reality, the Jewish teachings which instruct Jews to robustly and actively seek justice, Just War Theory, developed by great Christian minds like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, the libertarian axiom, which prohibits aggression against non-aggressors, the natural law, and what the Founding Fathers provided”:
A limited, constitutional republican government, by definition,” I wrote in March 12, 2003, doesn’t, cannot, and must never pursue what Bush is after—a sort of 21st-century Manifest Destiny.”
I was right because, like many of the silenced, I adhered to reality and followed immutably correct intellectual and moral principles. I’ll be damned if I allow anyone to deflect from the intellectual and moral corruption of those who failed to do the same.