Come Clean
One telling moment in Scott Shane's NYT piece on the FBI's 2004 interrogations of Saddam Hussein, just released through the invaluable labors of the National Security Archive, is this FBI summary trying to explain why Saddam wanted to thwart UN inspections and cover up his non-possession of WMD. This is not brand new stuff, but still revelatory. Saddam told the FBI he
was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq's weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions [from] the United States for his refusal to allow U.N. inspectors back into Iraq. [Inspections] would have directly identified to the Iranians where to inflict maximum damage to Iraq.
Shane then quotes the US's former chief weapons inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, attempting to explain why Saddam would have wanted to fake WMD possession. Evidently it did not occur to the geniuses then on a mission to run American foreign policy for God that Saddam, having warred with Iran at the cost of millions of casualties for eight years, might fear the Islamic Republic.
"We did not appreciate how large the threat of Iran loomed in [Saddam's] thinking," Mr. Duelfer said, calling the United States' understanding of Iraq in 2003 "cartoonish."
This insult to the subtlety of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote must not be allowed to stand.
But seriously, the FBI documents, though remarkable, are incomplete. The redacted sections are voluminous, and whatever appeared there is intended to remain classified until 2034. What are the subjects closed to investigation until then? The National Security Archive says:
Not included in these FBI reports are issues of particular interest to students of Iraq's complicated relationship with the U.S. - the reported role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba'ath party's rise to power, the uneasy alliance forged between Iraq and the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war, and the precise nature of U.S. views regarding Iraq's chemical weapons policy during that conflict, given its contemporaneous knowledge of their repeated use against Iranians and the Kurds....This series of interviews also does not address chemical warfare in Kurdish areas of Iraq in 1987-1988, although an FBI progress report says Saddam was questioned on the topic.
I suppose it's a backhanded tribute to the new-era FBI that the redactions are whited-- rather than blacked--out. But that's not quite the change we had the right to expect from the transparency-claiming Obama administration.
Bring out the rest of this history, people. We have a right to know.
What is missing from the discussions is why the US might want to battle Saddam. Aside from self-delusion there are usually other factors at work.
It was Clinton who enforced no-fly zones and other sanctions which seemed, even at the time, aimed at destabilizing the regime.
Even the arguments about gaining control of the oil don't seem adequate. Why not just pay for it as does everyone else and as does the US in places where we don't like the government?
There seems to have been a motivation towards gaining a permanent foothold in the region so that we could push our aim of dominating the region and forcing change in states like Syria, Libya and their neighbors. This goal seems to have been accomplished. We are now making semi-permanent use of the dozens of bases we have built in Iraq and our recent "withdrawal" is a sham.
It is also a mistake to think of the US government and policy as coordinated. It ranges from the paranoid, delusional ideas of Cheney to the detailed plans for future combat over natural resources in DoD planning documents.
As political winds shift different views within the government get more or less notice, but the groups with the viewpoints continue to exist, even when disfavored.
The real question is: what are we going to do next? Are we going to continue to try to dominate the region, including Pakistan and Afghanistan? Are we going to push for a change in policies over Palestine? Are we going to continue to prop up the large number of anti-democratic governments such as in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, or are we going to apply our propaganda goal of fostering democracy more generally?
Without clear goals one gets muddled policies and contradictory efforts.
July 3, 2009 12:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
How shocking it is to learn that our government leadership and those implementing their misguided policies were completely and totally wrong about Saddam and WMDs and failed to take into considerations what motivations he might have for faking possession of WMD's. Then again, since the leadership was well aware of the fact that he had no WMD's or willfully ignorant that he didn't possess them it compounds the Bush regimes war crimes because their misinforming and misleading underlings to believe in the WMD hoax caused even more damage to the US and led to even greater war crimes. It is utterly appalling that Obama doesn't have the guts or integrity to obey our own and international law and let justice be done with respect to the vast and continuing crimes launched under Bush on behalf of the United States.
July 3, 2009 12:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
July 3, 2009 5:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Transparency and justice under Obama? That'll be the day. Meanwhile, Bush era policies are slowly being entrenched in a useful bipartisan manner:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2009/07/02/savage/index.html
"Today, in the NYT, Savage has another article examining the same topic, headlined: "To Critics, New Policy on Terror Looks Old." In it, he explores this question: "Has [Obama], on issues related to fighting terrorism, turned out to be little different from his predecessor?" A key point from Savage's article -- which I've tried to emphasize several times -- is that whereas these policies were supported by roughly half the population (Republicans) in the Bush era but vehemently opposed by the other half (at least ostensibly), Obama's embrace of them is now causing a large part of the other half of the population (Democrats) to support them as well, thus entrenching them as bipartisan consensus:
In any case, Jack Balkin, a Yale Law School professor, said Mr. Obama’s ratification of the basic outlines of the surveillance and detention policies he inherited would reverberate for generations. By bestowing bipartisan acceptance on them, Mr. Balkin said, Mr. Obama is consolidating them as entrenched features of government.
"What we are watching," Mr. Balkin said, "is a liberal, centrist, Democratic version of the construction of these same governing practices."
That was the point former Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith made when arguing last month that Obama is actually strengthening (rather than "changing") the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism even more effectively than Bush did by entrenching those policies in law and causing unprincipled Democrats to switch from pretending to oppose them to supporting them, thus transforming them into bipartisan dogma."
July 3, 2009 5:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is an erroneous but widespread meme circulating that Saddam didn't let the inspectors back and wanted Iran to believe he had WMDs.
This conflates Iraq circa 2000, when the inspectors had been kicked out with the reality that the inspectors were back upon Saddam accepting UNSC 1441 in Nov. 2002. They then failed to turn up WMDs and the US simply asserted Saddam had them anyway and proceded to go to war.
This tripe in the Times is misleading as hell.
In a series of interrogations before his execution, Saddam Hussein told an F.B.I. agent that on the eve of the 2003 American invasion, Iraq was trapped between United Nations orders to demonstrate that it had disarmed and a fear that appearing too weak would invite attack from its powerful neighbor and foe, Iran.
Here's the actual Saddam transcript. Note they were discussing Iran-Iraq in 2000 and there is absolutely nothing that suggested Saddam was pushing this in late 2002 let alone 2003.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/24.pdf
July 3, 2009 5:52 PM | Reply | Permalink