----- Original
Message -----
Sent:
Friday, July 23, 2004 6:54 PM
Subject:
[Longwaves Forum]Report exonerates Bush, Blair of
Lying
âââ¬a¬Ã&â¬SHow was it
that critics thought that Washington and London were wrong to act on
fragmentary and uncertain intelligence in the case of Iraq -- and wrong
NOT to act on fragmentary and uncertain intelligence in relation to Sept.
11,âââ¬a¬Ã said PM Blair.
My computer
interferes with my sending addresses at times. There is a very good
article by Sullivan in the Jul 20 Chicago Sun Times on this
subject.
Dean:
You probably
mean this one http://www.suntimes.com/output/osullivan/cst-edt-osul20.html, which
includes the following excerpt:
"According
to Butler, Saddam had earlier built up WMD stockpiles. He had programs in
place to reconstitute them. He was seeking uranium from other countries
(including Niger so that, as Mark Steyn pointed out here on Sunday, "Bush
Lied!" would have to be replaced by "Wilson Lied!"). And he would almost
certainly have restored the WMD threat once the sanctions regime against
him broke down or was abandoned -- as was happening in the period running
up to the war.
These
conclusions may be excessively modest. Saddam's restoration of his WMD
threat would likely have been even faster than Butler thinks since, as we
know from the U.N.'s Oil for Food scandal, the sanctions regime against
Saddam was extraordinarily porous -- if porous is the right word to
describe a system where the sanctions enforcers accepted a cut of the
profits in return for assisting in the sanctions-busting.
And
it may be the case that Saddam did possess WMD at an early stage of the
crisis and that the intelligence services were not wholly wrong. Some new
evidence suggests something along these lines. A report to the U.N.
Security Council in June this year by the acting executive head of the
United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission claims
that before, during and after the war, Saddam shipped WMD and medium-
range ballistic missiles to countries in Europe and the Middle East.
[and the question of the 20 tons of chemicals (including VX and sarin)
that was moved from Syria, which does not have the capacity to produce
them in that tonnage, to Jordan in an attempt to execute a terrorists
attack].
U.N.
officials say they do not yet have a full accounting of exactly what
weapons passed out of Iraq in this way, but that entire factories were
among the items transported abroad. If that is so -- and this report may
turn out to be exaggerated -- then our current conventional wisdom will
have to be overturned."
Along the same
lines, the following is an excerpt
from Sestanovich's
article (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/21/opinion/21sest.html).
Setanovich is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a
professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University. From 1997 to
2001 he was United States ambassador at large for the former Soviet
Union:
"When America
demanded that Iraq follow the example of countries like Ukraine and South
Africa, which sought international help in dismantling their weapons of
mass destruction, it set the bar extremely high, but not unreasonably so.
The right test had to reflect Saddam Hussein's long record of acquiring,
using and concealing such weapons. Just as important, it had to yield a
clear enough result to satisfy doubters on both sides, either breaking the
momentum for war or showing that it was
justified.
Some
may object that this approach treated Saddam Hussein as guilty until
proved innocent. They're right. But the Bush administration did not invent
this logic. When Saddam Hussein forced out United Nations inspectors in
1998, President Clinton responded with days of bombings - not because he
knew what weapons Iraq had, but because Iraq's actions kept us from
finding out.
A
decision on war is almost never based simply on what we know, or think we
know. Intelligence is always disputed. Instead, we respond to what the
other guy does. This is how we went to war in Iraq. The next time we face
such a choice, whether our intelligence has improved or not, we'll almost
surely decide in the very same way."
Bill
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