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TechnoratiFor Bush - and Obama - a Gut Check
George Bush's candid interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson has one moment of awful truth - when the president, asked if he'd have gone to war had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, stated: "That's a do-over that I can't do." If only he could.
More than 4,207 US service members, 314 coalition troops (including 176 British fatalities) and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis might be alive, including, of course, Saddam Hussein, the former ruler of Iraq whom Bush promised to disarm together with America's "friends of freedom". Saddam, Bush proclaimed in the weeks leading up to his decision to invade, and subsequently occupy, Iraq, was "a dangerous, dangerous man with dangerous, dangerous weapons." The Iraqi dictator was "a danger to America and our friends and allies, and that is why the world has said 'disarm'".
Bush, in his revealing interview, claimed he wished "that the intelligence had been different", but that was never really the point. Bush, like so many others, had made up his mind regarding Saddam independent of the facts of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Try as he might to spread responsibility for his actions by pointing out that "a lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein," the fact is WMD was simply an excuse used by the president to fulfil his self-proclaimed destiny as a war-time president who would avenge his father's inability (or, more accurately, sage unwillingness) to finish the job back in 1991, in the aftermath of the first Gulf war.
As pre-war British government discussions with Bush administration officials reveal, there was never a solid case to be made on Iraq's possession of WMD in the months leading up to the decision to invade, simply a sophomoric cause-effect relationship linking regime change (the preferred policy) and WMD (the excuse) "in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD" (quoting Blair).
The intelligence on Iraq's WMD was whatever the president and his cronies (including his erstwhile ally at 10 Downing Street) wanted it to be. Over seven years of UN-mandated weapons inspection activity, conducted from 1991 until 1998, had produced a well-defined (and documented) record of disarmament which, while not providing absolute verification of the disposition of every aspect of Saddam's WMD programmes, did allow any observer interested in the facts to ascertain that Iraq was fundamentally disarmed from a qualitative perspective. This, coupled with the presence of the world's most technologically advanced and intrusive arms control regime monitoring the totality of Iraq's industrial infrastructure, provided a high degree of confidence that Saddam had neither retained nor reconstituted his WMD programme.
There was a gap in inspection coverage of Iraq from December 1998 until November 2002, brought on by the removal of weapons inspectors at the behest of the United States (during the administration of Bill Clinton). However, no verifiable intelligence emerged during this time to credibly suggest that Iraq had sought to reconstitute its WMD programme. Instead, the Bush administration developed arguments that spoke of a "re-examination" of the "facts" from the perspective of a "post-9/11 world".
But the diversionary tactic of bait and switch, where the so-called global war on terror was used to justify an attack on Iraq, did not in any meaningful way alter the reality that Iraq had been disarmed. The Pentagon tried to provide glossy satellite images and hyped-up speculation about what Saddam was up to in September 2002 (and the British followed suit, publishing their since-discredited "dossier"), but by that November UN weapons inspectors were back in Iraq, and by January 2003 had discredited the entire intelligence case the Pentagon (and the British) had so clumsily cobbled together.
I and others did our very best to highlight the factual vacuum in which Bush and Blair operated while making their case for war, but to no avail. The decision to invade had been made months before the UN weapons inspectors returned to Iraq. Their work, and the intelligence they provided, was not only ignored, but indeed was never relevant to the larger issue, centred as it was on regime change, not disarmament.
The most important aspect of Bush's interview rests not in what he admits, but rather in what he avoids, when he stated that the failure to find WMD in Iraq was "the biggest regret of all the presidency." He doesn't regret the decision that led America to war, or the processes that facilitated the falsification of a case for war. He doesn't regret the violation of international law, the deaths of so many innocents, the physical destruction of Iraq or America's loss of its moral high ground. He merely regrets the fact that his "gut feel" on Saddam's WMD arsenal was wrong.
In this, truth be told, Bush is no different from the majority of society in both America and Great Britain. It is easy to moralise today, armed with the certainty of 20/20 hindsight, that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, the case for war a fabrication. But how many people will admit that Iraq was better off under Saddam than it is today, ruined by conflict generated by the destruction of Iraqi society prompted by the toppling of the Iraqi dictator? How many people will decry the kangaroo court and the lynch mob that convicted and executed Saddam as a travesty of both law and justice? Unless one is willing to repudiate all aspects of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, inclusive of the termination of Saddam's regime, then any indignation shown over the so-called intelligence failure represents nothing more than hypocrisy.
American policy in Iraq must not be viewed in isolation, but rather as part of a larger problem set, one that Barack Obama will have to deal with if he is to avoid repeating Bush's mistakes. America, and indeed the world, may very well have serious issues with the governments of nations such as Syria, North Korea and Iran. However, the solutions to these problems rest not in the form of unilateral policies formulated and implemented from Washington DC. That is how we got into Iraq to begin with. Rather, Obama must put action to his promise to embrace multilateral solutions to the problems of the future.
This means foregoing ideologically (or politically) driven pressure to act void of international consensus driven by a collective appreciation of international law (ie, no regime change, unless the world properly mandates it). It means trusting in the integrity and ability of organisations such as the UN Special Commission (the UN weapons inspectors), even if their product contradicts US intelligence sources. It also means trusting such organisations enough to share such intelligence so that it might be thoroughly investigated. And, if and when a rogue regime is overthrown and its leaders brought to justice, it means supporting an international court of law in which to try them for any of their alleged crimes.
The latter is of particular importance, especially when it comes to Obama, given his proclivity for announcing his intention to "hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden". Such bravado could become his undoing, just as gunning for Saddam was the undoing of Bush. America seemed content to let the perpetrators of the Srebrenica atrocities, who murdered some 8,000 Bosnian men and boys, be apprehended in accordance with accepted international practice, and be tried in an international court. Yet somehow the murderer of 3,000 Americans deserves special, unilateral American justice. There is an inherent inconsistency here.
In order for a multilateral solution to be genuine, it must be the product of a multilateral consensus driven by accepted ideals and principles, and not simply a unilateral dictate imposed on others by the strong. Let there be no doubt, the Iraq war was a product of American bullying, not just of Iraq, but the entire world. The current conflict in Afghanistan, threatening as it is to spill over into neighbouring Pakistan, is no different.
The unilateral desire of the US to exact revenge disguised as justice for the crimes committed on 9/11 has overshadowed the mission of creating a stable and moderate government in post-Taliban Afghanistan, to the detriment of both missions and the people of the region. Obama's singular focus on bringing bin Laden to heel will simply perpetuate this failure.
Obama would do well to embrace those international multilateral institutions, such as the UN and the International Court of Justice in the Hague, which his predecessor eschewed. Subordinating the American desire for revenge in the interest of regional and international stability would represent the living manifestation of the multilateralism Obama has stated he wants to pursue. Leadership is the product of much more than simple rhetoric, and simply saying something "is" does not make it so. Putting action to words is the challenge, and the mark, of any true leader. I am hopeful Barack Obama can be the genuine leader he aspires to be. America, and the world, will much better for it.
25 Comments so far
Show AllA couple of points.
Even by the most conservative estimates, at Iraq Body Count's site, the loss of Iraqi innocents stands at around a 100 thousand deaths...in approximately 69 months of the Rape of Iraq. This works out to 1449 deaths per month, or 17391 per annum. Saddam is reported to have been responsible for the killing of around 300,000 Iraqi's during his 21 years as dictator. That works out to a per annum death toll of 1190. Get the point? Bush is quite literally, worse than Saddam to average Iraqis. Bush, during his Rape of Iraq, has consistently killed more Iraqis than Saddam ever did, on a per annum basis. Expand Bush's reign of terror in Iraq to 21 years, and the number of innocent dead Iraqi's would be 365,148...about 18% more than Saddam's reign of terror.
It is important to remember that the IBC numbers are the absolute minimum death count, based on death certificates. Clearly, the number they've published is a fraction of the real deaths. If you take the per annum criteria to include a death toll today, of say, 1.5 million, which is not an outrageous extrapolation based on the Lancet studies, and others...then Bush death numbers dwarf Saddam's. The adjusted numbers for this as the upper limit of mortality stats in Iraq, indicate a per month death rate of 21,739, and a per annum rate of 260,869. Take this out to Saddam's 21 year rate and you have a total of 5,478,260 deaths. This works out to almost 20 times the deaths that Saddam was responsible for.
The point being, there is no comparison between George W. Bush and Saddam when it comes to murdering innocent Iraqis. George W. Bush is the true Butcher of Baghdad, not Saddam Hussein. Saddam was an amateur when it came to wholesale slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians.
And the other point.
In early 2003, or perhaps late 2002, Bush demanded that Saddam provide unconditional access to the weapons inspectors. Saddam FULLY complied. He provided open, unfettered access to ALL sites the inspectors wanted to see. Then Bush gave the inspectors 90 days to find WMD. He also, shortly thereafter, claimed that Saddam was not cooperating, which of course, was a lie...a lie he continues to recount to this very day. Basically, what he did was demand that the inspectors find him a reason to attack Iraq, or he would attack Iraq! There was no contingency for NOT attacking Iraq. Uncovering WMD would have provided him a legitimate reason to attack, but with his 90 day limitation, and the ludicrous nature of proving a negative (that Saddam didn't have WMD) in a nation the size of California, attacking Iraq was a fait accompli.
So, the conclusion is, the Rape of Iraq was predetermined regardless of evidence to confirm or deny Saddam's having WMD. Which is to say, the liar Bush, continues lying about his illegal evisceration of an entire country, still claiming he did everything he could to avoid war. The exact opposite is the truth, he did everything he could to avoid peace. And this is the real legacy of the real Butcher of Baghdad, George W. Bush. The blood of uncounted hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women, children, babies and unborn babies (for you pro-life warmongers!) is not just on Bush's hands, he's totally drenched in their viscera and blood...and he appears to be quite content with that.
Thanks, Scott, for all you tried to do!
Scott, you are a real American patriot. I would have liked to see you and people like you in Obama's cabinet, but of course, we all know that is a pipe dream!
As the waters of Bush's astonishing eight year debacle recede, the facts lie on the sand like hundreds of dead carp. He will not finally succeed, I don't believe, in rewriting the history of it, since it involves simply denying what we have all witnessed with our own eyes. I'm more concerned that his people have infected our language with some destructive fictions, simplistic terms like The War on Terror, that will be much harder to purge from the American lexicon going forward.
jonabark
Excellent point.
The horror of the fiction you refer to is that we continue to blame or ignore the victims of the War and refuse to take any responsibility for the suffering America releases with our bombs and torture and lies. Us soldiers cannot be terrorists no matter what they do to non-combatants. Isn't it wonderful to invent a crime one can never commit. "Afghanistan is the central front of the War on Terror" says Obama, and who in the mainstream press challenges this Orwellian newspeak? A fiction that became suspect in the mouth of an international fool and notorious liar, is now put forth by one of the few leaders left with a reputation for honesty.
There is another possibility here. Obama uses the language and people and machinery at his disposal to implement a kind of multilateral Marshall plan starting in Afghanistan and if the stars align , moving to Iraq. This would be very effective domestically if he can simultaneously stave off economic collapse, and would would be very hard because we were rich after WW2 and had not built up as much mistrust. Obama sees the sharks in the water and clearly intends to lead a group that is tough enough to survive and succeed. What he really has in mind is still not on the table. I think we are about to watch the last attempt at benign imperialism.
Can the whole world look like Europe and Japan? Will religious people ever accept such a world? I guess we could do worse.
The mayor of Kabul (who along with the US still imagines himself the President of Afghanistan) Hamid Kharzi formerly sat on the board of Unocal oil company (just like Condoleezza Rice formerly sat on the board of Chevron, and Richard cheney presided over Haliburton).
Proposed pipelines to transport Central Asian oil and gas are to be built through Afghanistan and so you can bet the farm that both Bush and Obama will keep the war going and an expanded US military presence there in Afghanistan as well as Pakistani meddling. What will be most interesting to watch will be how far the Chinese let this farce continue before trying to do something about it.
Poet
Also,
The Bush administration has vehemently opposed a pipeline from Canada's oil sands to the west coast. Again, to deny access to Canadian oil for China.
Bush lied about the war, and he is still lying about it. WHY? Because he is a war criminal. He made up the intelligence report, and now has the audacity to blame the faulty data that he and his henchmen made up. It is why they tried so hard to tie Saddam in with 9/11. It is why more than half the soldiers in Iraq say that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Lies work, unless they get confronted.
And the fucken democratic party won't impeach him. WHY? Because they are complicit, from Hillary, to Obama, and all the way through.
And people still find the lesser of two evils a viable choice?
"...and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis might be alive"
uh...i have a lot of respect for Mr. Ritter so maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant to say "tens of hundreds of thousands" I mean come f%^&ing on. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were dead in the first few months as we systematically destroyed the infrastructure to maintain clean water, electricity, etc. You can't count just the Iraqis blatantly murdered by "coalition" forces.
We all wish the intelligence had been different between Bush's ears. There are many reasons why Americans sat in stupified silence during our terroristic occupation of Iraq. First and formost is the uncanny ability of GW to keep his lips moving while never actually saying anything.
Circumlocution is a nessisary skill to all BSers.
Media manipulation supported GW's never ending diatribe,see
It is impossible to support our troops if they had no business there, thats why the flags and stickers were distributed hours befor the first deployment, Remember? ? That is called grand standing! Rally round the flag indeed.
Since the 30's American intrests and livelyhood have depended upon forign oil. Carter was the first and only president to actually explain honestly what actions were required if Americans continued to require an abundant supply of crude oil.
We would have to establish an American military presence in the mid east.
And we did. I do not believe Al'kidah ever had any involvement in 911 masacre. People please pay attention.
Didn't Richard Clarke do his best to tell Bush there was no bomb, no WMD, no chemical wagon, etc., but was treated like a know-nothing? Now Bush says if only he had known. What a joke!
If they elect Jeb Bush to anything in government, this country will not have learned anything from the Bush years. We have had enough of the Bushes! Let them all retire and enjoy their oil money.
"Let them all retire and enjoy their oil money."
Our money?
Good one.
".. the president, asked if he'd have gone to war had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq..."
Why, after all this time, are they still pretending that Bush didn't know?
Exactly. Bush knew.
"Bush, in his revealing interview, claimed he wished "that the intelligence had been different"
The Liar in Chief may get away with it if Obama is content with being the first brown Pres. and won't prosecute so as not to appear to be an extremist minority member to the mostly white conservative establishment he swims in.
All this talk about Bush as though we should give him even an inkling of a benefit of a doubt that he was just doing his job when he is actually one of the most notorious mass-murderers in our nation's history. America will someday realize just what this man has done and maybe then he will get the trial and prison sentence he so deserves.
Voters need to quit trusting exspurts. Keep in mind that "ex" is a has been and "spurt" is a drip under pressure.
If voters used common sense rather than relying on exspurts when the cases were made to invade Iraq, build border fences, bailout the finacial industry, etc., we would not be mired in all of these problems that are rapidly turning the US in to a third world country.
At the end of World War 2 Palestine was a British mandate of the League of Nations. The mandator (Britain) was obliged to develop home-grown governance in the mandate, something the British never did in Palestine or anywhere else in their Empire.
When the United Nations was founded it inherited all of the still "active" LoN mandates from the Paris Peace talks after WW1.
The fundamental question was then: what right did the UN have to divide the mandate of Palestine into two parts, a Jewish and an Arab part? None I think. Where in International Law or in the UN Charter was the UN allowed to do this? Nowhere I think. Wasn't the UN obliged to complete the LoN mandate for Palestine? Yes, you must finish what you inherit. The UN should have insisted on a one-state solution. It was browbeaten into submission by the Zionist terrorism of the Irgun.
I am not arguing that the UN actions of 1947 should be reversed because that is impossible. However, I do argue that the UN committed suicide in 1947. It is therefore equally suicidal politics to rely on this totally dysfunctional organization for conflict resolution, especially in the Middle East where the UN f****d up royally. Without a fundamental reorganization of the UN that organization remains next to worthless in promoting conflict resolutions which are opposed by at least one of the permanent members of the Security Council. Mr. Ritter, count the number of times when we were opposed to conflict resolutions and you may wake up.
I am really disappointed to see the otherwise excellent Mr. Ritter propose naive nonsense.
So because the UN failed to carry out responsibilities it inherited, it has no legitimate role? Iraq is a case where the UN would have prevented this horrible war, and also should be given more credibility for the accuracy of their pre-war assessments. I don't think there is any indication here that Ritter thinks the UN can't be improved or even fundamentally reorganized. He is, with a great deal of historic weight, warning Obama against the allure of unilateral American power and the the whole fuck you we will go where we want , capture who we want kill who we want attitude that is the current inheritance of the US executive.
I thought this was a very serious and well stated warning from a man whose warnings deserve attention.
Bush: " That the intelligence had been different ".Okay,how come me and millions more knew the intelligence on WMD's was a canard to go to war and you didn't? If you are telling the truth for once in your life-----! Then you must be more egregiously, stupid than I thought!
The bloody irony that will haunt the United States forever is that once we finally extricate our ass from Iraq, it will eventually wind up looking, more or less, like Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The eventual dictator may wear kid gloves instead of the mailed fist of Saddam but he'll still be a dictator and a brutal one if necessary. And the government and military of this nation will have learned absolutely nothing from the experience, just as we learned absolutely nothing from Vietnam. Need proof?: McCain got 46% of the vote, despite the fact that the Republicans have ruined the United States. And now Jeb Rancid Bush is making noise, talking about a Republican "shadow government" and considering a run for the senate in 2010. Those MoFo's do not give up.
re: the "shadow government". The long knives are already out. The talk-radio addled proles are flocking to gun shops to stock up. Defenders and enablers of empire pulling every available lever and calling in marks to keep the Obama train on the imperial track. Scott Ritter's comments though accurate, forthright and maybe prescient, will no more reach Obama's ears or eyes than did Ritter's comments reach Joe Biden's stage-managed committee hearings on the 2002 Iraq War resolution. Maybe Obama thinks he can placate the forces of empire by listening to his team of imperial "rivals". Maybe Obama thinks he can finesse this; charm all these people as well as the armies of war profiteers, fixers, apparatchiks, corrupt financiers, and boondoggle-funded "entreprenuers" who write the checks. Maybe he thinks the only way actual change can come to this society is somehow, miraculously, right straight through the heart of the very machine that is eating this society up and spitting out blood, foreclosed homes and despoiled landscapes in its wake. Who knows what Obama thinks; every time he opens his mouth, he emits bland generalities with a vaguely pro-empire slant. So, maybe Obama doesn't think any of this. Maybe Obama is just the latest, slickest con man to sell empire to the flailingly, hopelessly clueless home market. No wonder Bill Clinton hates Obama so much; Obama is better at Clintonism than Clinton.
Or maybe Obama thinks he can really thread this needle and produce something of lasting significance and value to the average American, thereby actually delivering on a promise to the electorate and simultaneously delivering a long term majority to the center-left. Will it be change we can believe in or change we can see? I don't know but I wouldn't want to be living in the western border regions of Pakistan right now...
Obama is just a typical politician going with the flow wherever it may take him (much like Hillary), as opposed to Bush who is a class warrior for the upper class and McCain who is a disturbed, mentally unbalanced man determined to prove he is a greater warrior than his father and grandfather, and not shy about risking nuclear war and human extinction in order to do it. These are the sort of choices that the vote provides the US population in the early 21st Century, given the environment, including the media, the culture, the political structure, etc...
"Bush who is a class warrior for the upper class"
So succinct, so accurate. I like it.