1 Boring Old Man

from President Bush’s State of the Union Speech
January 28, 2003

Today, the gravest danger in the war on terror, the gravest danger facing America and the world, is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. These regimes could use such weapons for blackmail, terror, and mass murder. They could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist allies, who would use them without the least hesitation.

…

Almost three months ago, the United Nations Security Council gave Saddam Hussein his final chance to disarm. He has shown instead utter contempt for the United Nations, and for the opinion of the world. The 108 U.N. inspectors were sent to conduct — were not sent to conduct a scavenger hunt for hidden materials across a country the size of California. The job of the inspectors is to verify that Iraq’s regime is disarming. It is up to Iraq to show exactly where it is hiding its banned weapons, lay those weapons out for the world to see, and destroy them as directed. Nothing like this has happened.

1. The United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax — enough doses to kill several million people. He hasn’t accounted for that material. He’s given no evidence that he has destroyed it.
2. The United Nations concluded that Saddam Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin — enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure. He hadn’t accounted for that material. He’s given no evidence that he has destroyed it.
3. Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands. He’s not accounted for these materials. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.
4. U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them — despite Iraq’s recent declaration denying their existence. Saddam Hussein has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions. He’s given no evidence that he has destroyed them.
5. From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He’s given no evidence that he has destroyed them.
6. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.
7. The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary; he is deceiving. From intelligence sources we know, for instance, that thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors, sanitizing inspection sites and monitoring the inspectors themselves. Iraqi officials accompany the inspectors in order to intimidate witnesses.
8. Iraq is blocking U-2 surveillance flights requested by the United Nations. Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors are supposed to interview. Real scientists have been coached by Iraqi officials on what to say. Intelligence sources indicate that Saddam Hussein has ordered that scientists who cooperate with U.N. inspectors in disarming Iraq will be killed, along with their families.

In the U.S., the Neoconservatives were beginning to push for a Regime Change [War] in Iraq and a group of them formed the Project for the New American Century. The P.N.A.C. sent a letter to then President Clinton to that effect. The assessments of the C.I.A. and the U.N. were that Iraq had been substantively disarmed, and so their responses were diplomatic pressures and warning military strikes. The U.N. disbanded UNSCOM and formed UNMOVIC, United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, a reorganized monitoring group that responded to criticisms from from both sides in its structure.

Probably the best way to characterize this conflict would be to call it a pissing contest between the U.N. and Iraq. In the U.S., another pissing contest developed between the Clinton Administration and the Noeoconservatives over our post-Cold War foreign policy. For fifty years, our policy had been Containment. We had lived with the threat of "Gobal Communism" by fighting skirmishes like the Korean War and the Viet Nam War. The two "Superpowers" plotted and schemed in these lesser wars, while never coming to direct blows with each other. And, for fifty years, the American scene was dominated by conflict, Hawks and Doves. On a good day, the Hawks accused the Doves of being appeasers and perhaps cowards. On other days, they accused the Doves of being subversive. The Doves accused the Hawks of being pugilists who wanted to solve insoluable problems through war that were better left to evolve towards solutions using Containment.

In many ways, the dichotomy of the second half of the 20th century was a reaction to the events of the first half. The Kings and Rulers of Europe had reached the end of the viability of monarchy as a form of government, but didn’t know it. A War broke out [World War I] that was the biggest pissing contest of them all, and they fought a devastating and pointless war in the Trenches of France – a war we entered near its end bringing it to a premature closure. In our mythology, we see going "over there" as heroic. Winston Churchill saw it differently. He saw us as prolonging the war so that Lenin could take over Russia and Germany could be defeated with postwar reprisals that set the stage for World War II.

But, returning to the end of the Cold War, the Hawks saw the fall of Communism as the direct result of Reagan’s toughness. We saw it as in the cards, and a triumph for containment. Shortly afterwards, we fought the first Gulf War over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but in the process, learned that the C.I.A. had grossly underestimated Hussein’s weapons of Mass Destruction program. So by the 1992 election, the Administration had a get tough policy for penny-ante dictators, the nidus of what became the "Bush Doctrine," and as suspicious attitude towards our own C.I.A.

During the Clinton Era, things changed. Hussein continued to bluster around, but was basically defused. We had a new enemy, al Qaeda, and Clinton and the C.I.A. knew it, and were on top of it. But our Republican colleagues were in a time capsule in their think tanks, and had added the thirst for oil to the mix. When they took over, they picked up right where Papa Bush had left off, ignoring the facts of the intervening years. So they ignored al Qaeda, had disdain for our C.I.A. and the U.N. and set out to deal with [the now impotent] Iraq. I personally think it is reasonable to assume that they were after oil.

But after 911, they saw their chance to deal with Iraq. I completely agree that it was time to force the issue of inspections. Bush did that – going to the U.N. threatening war. And it worked! The U.N. inspectors were back in Iraq. He’d won. But he didn’t stop and this 2003 SOTUS speech purports to say why. Unfortunately, it’s essentially a lie, and a conscious lie at that. The first four items are guesses, and bad guesses at that. They are based on mathematical estimates. Iraq had the raw materials or the production capacity to make X amount of these weapons. The inspectors had found Y amounts. So X – Y = Z, some theoretical number which represents what would be missing if Iraq had operated full time at maximal capacity with 100% efficiency. All three are unlikely, and, as it turns out, untrue. So what Bush is calling real, is a figment of the imagination of some mathematician somewhere – not factual intelligence. Number five came from a shaky defector with Chalabi’s INC. Number Six has been heavily studied and is a massive exaggeration of a forged document – a distortion of a known lie. Numbers seven and eight are probable partial truths, proving what we already knew – Hussein was a sleaze bag. Duh!

So, the point is, Bush pushed the issue of the Iraq inspections. He won, but then he kept going. Whether he was motivated by the lust for oil or an anachronistic Hawkish foreign policy is not the central question. It was probably both. The point is that this whole section of the 2003 SOTUS was a boldfaced lie – presenting shaky conjecture and guesstimates as facts. He was going to "solve" the problem of Iraq once and for all, by force, and he lied to get us to go along with it. No matter what his motive, one doesn’t act definitively just because there’s a problem. One acts when there’s a problem and you have the solution. He had no viable solution. So, he lied to allow him to do something really stupid and harmful. He betrayed us and he betrayed the U.N. charter in the process. That is treason by my definition.

Another piece of things. He went for blood. They had a deck of cards of the whole government. They hunted them down, killing some outright, executing others. He didn’t go there after weapons. He didn’t just go there for a regime change. He went there to kill the Iraq government. Kill the Iraqi government. We invaded a country, threw it into chaos, and killed their government based on unsubstantiated guesstimates and known untruths, in order to deal with a hypothetical danger. That is treason by my definition.

and What was true? None of it that really mattered. None of it at all…