Conservative Radio
- Thread starter Jose
- Start date
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004660
There was probably no way to know about the absence of Iraqi weapons.
BY R. JAMES WOOLSEY
Saturday, February 7, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
So which is it: Are America's spies a gaggle of fools for believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Or is the Bush administration a gang of knaves for lying us into a war?
Take the spies-as-fools allegation first.
There was no substantial disagreement between the U.S. and other countries before the war about the likelihood--based on a history of deception--that Saddam Hussein retained weapons of mass destruction. Jacques Chirac warned last February about "the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq" and added "the international community is right . . . in having decided that Iraq should be disarmed." David Kay has spoken of German and Russian intelligence reports that "painted a picture of Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction." The Israelis procured gas masks for every citizen. If Saddam actually disposed of all his weapons and stocks of chemical and biological agent well before last year's war began, many countries were deceived.
But we are now learning something further from Mr. Kay's recent disclosures: that there were quite specific prewar indications of WMD--"reports of movement" of weapons themselves, of "weapons being assigned to specific units as well as specific locations." This may explain the press reports that appeared in this newspaper and elsewhere late last year. Each captured Iraqi general being interrogated was convinced that, although his own unit had no chemical weapons, the units on his right and left flanks certainly did.
There are several possible explanations for such indications of the presence of actual weapons. First, Saddam, knowing that he had destroyed his stockpiles, might have spread false stories that he knew would reach our ears in order to intimidate us. We pulled up short of Baghdad in 1991 and he might have thought such lies could help deter us again. He might also have wanted to maintain his reputation for having WMD, as Mr. Kay suggests, to look formidable in the Arab world and intimidate his own people. The oddest possibility Mr. Kay suggests is that Saddam may have been deceived himself by some of his own scientists into paying for non-existent WMD programs while the scientists pocketed the funds. This would amount to his having been our co-victim in a fraud run by other Iraqis.
A second possibility is that stockpiles were destroyed, but some only at the last minute--as war began--so that these latter did exist when the intelligence estimates were made. There have been intriguing press reports on this point, including a story in the New York Times last April about an Iraqi intelligence officer who said he was asked to destroy chemical weapons material just as the war started. Such a last-minute cleaning up would fit with reported Franco-Russian efforts early last year to help Iraq obtain a cease-fire coupled with thorough inspections.
Third, reports from both Mr. Kay and earlier ones from intelligence imagery analysts have indicated that some WMD-related material probably crossed into Syria early last year. So some stockpiles may have been exported as the war began. Others may have been hidden then.
But for last-minute destruction, shipment or hiding, the volumes of biological or chemical agent would have to have been small. Wouldn't stockpiles of WMD themselves be massive, as former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook is fond of suggesting?
Actually, no. Why? Stockpiles would normally have been composed of biological or chemical "agents," ready to be inserted into weapons. Take anthrax. The Iraqis admitted they had made 8,500 liters (8.5 tons), and Colin Powell in his February speech to the U.N. Security Council noted that the U.N. inspectors thought Saddam could have about three times as much. But even this larger amount would weigh only some 25 tons in liquid form--slightly more than one tractor-trailer load. If reduced to powder, as Mr. Powell suggested in his speech, it could be contained in a dozen or so suitcases. Saddam's "stockpile" of biological agent wasn't in his spider hole with him. But it could have been.
Where does this leave the idea of an outside investigation? There were six ongoing investigations in the U.S.--two in Congress, three in the Executive, and one under Charles A. Duelfer, Mr. Kay's successor--before President Bush yesterday announced the creation of another commission. It would seem reasonable to have let them finish before starting a seventh. But to jump ahead in a thought-experiment, how might such an outside review propose correcting the spies' foolishness, assuming it found such?
Take the solution most often proposed--including by Mr. Kay: Put less emphasis on technical intelligence and more on human collection. Well, suppose that CIA director George Tenet had emphasized human intelligence even more than he does already and had succeeded a year ago in recruiting a batch of Iraqi generals as spies--an incredible achievement. But then each one had honestly but falsely reported that Saddam had WMD, at specific locations. We would still have an intelligence failure. What Mr. Kay has described as Iraq's "vortex of corruption" seems to have created an intelligence twilight zone. Maybe better human intelligence could have detected that zone and helped foster more skepticism. There are probably a variety of things that we will be able to learn from the prewar history of WMD estimates. But the indignant should give the rest of us a hint about how U.S. intelligence should have proceeded to get to the truth about the Iraqi WMD programs in these circumstances.
What about the Bush administration's alleged knavery?
Mr. Kay dismisses the idea that knavery existed. There is, however, an element of misjudgment within the White House that should be noted. A year ago September it set out a sound policy for the post-Cold War era of rogue dictatorships, terrorism and proliferation of WMD. It said, essentially, that if a terrible dictatorship has both WMD programs and ties to terrorists it may be a candidate for preventive war--in no small measure because such a regime may supply WMD to terrorists. But in the run-up to the war, instead of equally emphasizing the nature of Saddam's regime, with its massive human-rights violations and its ties to terrorist groups, the administration focused almost exclusively on WMD, especially in Mr. Powell's speech to the Security Council.
It has been suggested that bureaucratic compromises drove that decision--since WMD was the one issue all relevant agencies could agree on. But the history of murder, rape and torture by Saddam's regime is one of the most extraordinary in human history. If one counts the Iranians who died in his war of aggression in the 1980s, he has killed two million people--about 10 times the number killed by Slobodan Milosovic, with whom the Clinton administration went to war twice in the 1990s on human-rights grounds.
And Iraq's ties with terrorist groups in the '90s are clear. Even if one focuses only on Iraqi ties to Abu Nidal and Ansar-al-Islam, the requirements of the administration's policy would seem to be met. And in the fall of 2002, Mr. Tenet wrote to Congress outlining a decade of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda, including training in poisons, gases and explosives. There was no need to show that Iraq participated in 9/11 or even that it directed al Qaeda in any operations--describing occasional cooperation of the sort that is well chronicled was quite sufficient. The Baathists and al Qaeda were like two Mafia families--they hated, insulted and killed one another, but readily cooperated from time to time against a common enemy. Why not say so?
Such a three-part emphasis on human rights, terrorist ties and WMD programs would have been solidly in line with the president's own explicit policy. A three-legged stool is more stable than a one-legged one, but for some reason the administration decided not to make all three parts of its case in justifying the decision to go to war. As a result, its very heavy emphasis on WMD to the exclusion of the other two bases of its strategy has left the administration vulnerable to the failure to find WMD stockpiles. Whoever caused that decision to be made may have succeeded in papering over some bureaucratic feuding, but reaped a political whirlwind.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Woolsey, director of central intelligence from 1993 through 1995.
There was probably no way to know about the absence of Iraqi weapons.
BY R. JAMES WOOLSEY
Saturday, February 7, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
So which is it: Are America's spies a gaggle of fools for believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Or is the Bush administration a gang of knaves for lying us into a war?
Take the spies-as-fools allegation first.
There was no substantial disagreement between the U.S. and other countries before the war about the likelihood--based on a history of deception--that Saddam Hussein retained weapons of mass destruction. Jacques Chirac warned last February about "the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq" and added "the international community is right . . . in having decided that Iraq should be disarmed." David Kay has spoken of German and Russian intelligence reports that "painted a picture of Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction." The Israelis procured gas masks for every citizen. If Saddam actually disposed of all his weapons and stocks of chemical and biological agent well before last year's war began, many countries were deceived.
But we are now learning something further from Mr. Kay's recent disclosures: that there were quite specific prewar indications of WMD--"reports of movement" of weapons themselves, of "weapons being assigned to specific units as well as specific locations." This may explain the press reports that appeared in this newspaper and elsewhere late last year. Each captured Iraqi general being interrogated was convinced that, although his own unit had no chemical weapons, the units on his right and left flanks certainly did.
There are several possible explanations for such indications of the presence of actual weapons. First, Saddam, knowing that he had destroyed his stockpiles, might have spread false stories that he knew would reach our ears in order to intimidate us. We pulled up short of Baghdad in 1991 and he might have thought such lies could help deter us again. He might also have wanted to maintain his reputation for having WMD, as Mr. Kay suggests, to look formidable in the Arab world and intimidate his own people. The oddest possibility Mr. Kay suggests is that Saddam may have been deceived himself by some of his own scientists into paying for non-existent WMD programs while the scientists pocketed the funds. This would amount to his having been our co-victim in a fraud run by other Iraqis.
A second possibility is that stockpiles were destroyed, but some only at the last minute--as war began--so that these latter did exist when the intelligence estimates were made. There have been intriguing press reports on this point, including a story in the New York Times last April about an Iraqi intelligence officer who said he was asked to destroy chemical weapons material just as the war started. Such a last-minute cleaning up would fit with reported Franco-Russian efforts early last year to help Iraq obtain a cease-fire coupled with thorough inspections.
Third, reports from both Mr. Kay and earlier ones from intelligence imagery analysts have indicated that some WMD-related material probably crossed into Syria early last year. So some stockpiles may have been exported as the war began. Others may have been hidden then.
But for last-minute destruction, shipment or hiding, the volumes of biological or chemical agent would have to have been small. Wouldn't stockpiles of WMD themselves be massive, as former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook is fond of suggesting?
Actually, no. Why? Stockpiles would normally have been composed of biological or chemical "agents," ready to be inserted into weapons. Take anthrax. The Iraqis admitted they had made 8,500 liters (8.5 tons), and Colin Powell in his February speech to the U.N. Security Council noted that the U.N. inspectors thought Saddam could have about three times as much. But even this larger amount would weigh only some 25 tons in liquid form--slightly more than one tractor-trailer load. If reduced to powder, as Mr. Powell suggested in his speech, it could be contained in a dozen or so suitcases. Saddam's "stockpile" of biological agent wasn't in his spider hole with him. But it could have been.
Where does this leave the idea of an outside investigation? There were six ongoing investigations in the U.S.--two in Congress, three in the Executive, and one under Charles A. Duelfer, Mr. Kay's successor--before President Bush yesterday announced the creation of another commission. It would seem reasonable to have let them finish before starting a seventh. But to jump ahead in a thought-experiment, how might such an outside review propose correcting the spies' foolishness, assuming it found such?
Take the solution most often proposed--including by Mr. Kay: Put less emphasis on technical intelligence and more on human collection. Well, suppose that CIA director George Tenet had emphasized human intelligence even more than he does already and had succeeded a year ago in recruiting a batch of Iraqi generals as spies--an incredible achievement. But then each one had honestly but falsely reported that Saddam had WMD, at specific locations. We would still have an intelligence failure. What Mr. Kay has described as Iraq's "vortex of corruption" seems to have created an intelligence twilight zone. Maybe better human intelligence could have detected that zone and helped foster more skepticism. There are probably a variety of things that we will be able to learn from the prewar history of WMD estimates. But the indignant should give the rest of us a hint about how U.S. intelligence should have proceeded to get to the truth about the Iraqi WMD programs in these circumstances.
What about the Bush administration's alleged knavery?
Mr. Kay dismisses the idea that knavery existed. There is, however, an element of misjudgment within the White House that should be noted. A year ago September it set out a sound policy for the post-Cold War era of rogue dictatorships, terrorism and proliferation of WMD. It said, essentially, that if a terrible dictatorship has both WMD programs and ties to terrorists it may be a candidate for preventive war--in no small measure because such a regime may supply WMD to terrorists. But in the run-up to the war, instead of equally emphasizing the nature of Saddam's regime, with its massive human-rights violations and its ties to terrorist groups, the administration focused almost exclusively on WMD, especially in Mr. Powell's speech to the Security Council.
It has been suggested that bureaucratic compromises drove that decision--since WMD was the one issue all relevant agencies could agree on. But the history of murder, rape and torture by Saddam's regime is one of the most extraordinary in human history. If one counts the Iranians who died in his war of aggression in the 1980s, he has killed two million people--about 10 times the number killed by Slobodan Milosovic, with whom the Clinton administration went to war twice in the 1990s on human-rights grounds.
And Iraq's ties with terrorist groups in the '90s are clear. Even if one focuses only on Iraqi ties to Abu Nidal and Ansar-al-Islam, the requirements of the administration's policy would seem to be met. And in the fall of 2002, Mr. Tenet wrote to Congress outlining a decade of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda, including training in poisons, gases and explosives. There was no need to show that Iraq participated in 9/11 or even that it directed al Qaeda in any operations--describing occasional cooperation of the sort that is well chronicled was quite sufficient. The Baathists and al Qaeda were like two Mafia families--they hated, insulted and killed one another, but readily cooperated from time to time against a common enemy. Why not say so?
Such a three-part emphasis on human rights, terrorist ties and WMD programs would have been solidly in line with the president's own explicit policy. A three-legged stool is more stable than a one-legged one, but for some reason the administration decided not to make all three parts of its case in justifying the decision to go to war. As a result, its very heavy emphasis on WMD to the exclusion of the other two bases of its strategy has left the administration vulnerable to the failure to find WMD stockpiles. Whoever caused that decision to be made may have succeeded in papering over some bureaucratic feuding, but reaped a political whirlwind.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Woolsey, director of central intelligence from 1993 through 1995.
so do you think if after Bush threatened war, and Sadaam said, "you know what, I was lying, heres my stockpiles of poison gas, WMD etc etc, and you and the UN inspectors can have complete access to Iraq including all my palacesm," that Bush woud have shown leniency like with Libya or would he have gone to war anyways?
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20040210092709990002
Updated: 06:03 PM EST
Pundit O'Reilly Now Skeptical About Bush
WASHINGTON (Feb. 10) - Conservative television news anchor Bill O'Reilly said on Tuesday he was now skeptical about the Bush administration and apologized to viewers for supporting prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The anchor of his own show on Fox News said he was sorry he gave the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's weapons program poised an imminent threat, the main reason cited for going to war.
"I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America."
"What do you want me to do, go over and kiss the camera?" asked O'Reilly, who had promised rival ABC last year he would publicly apologize if weapons were not found.
O'Reilly said he was "much more skeptical about the Bush administration now" since former weapons inspector David Kay said he did not think Saddam had any weapons of mass destruction.
While critical of President Bush, O'Reilly said he did not think the president intentionally lied. Rather, O'Reilly blamed CIA Director George Tenet, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton.
"I don't know why Tenet still has his job."
He added: "I think every American should be very concerned for themselves that our intelligence is not as good as it should be."
O'Reilly anticipated the presidential election would be a close race, adding he thought Democratic front-runner Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts would be a formidable opponent against Bush.
"It will be a very close race. The nation is divided," he said.
02/10/04 09:25 ET
Copyright 2004 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
Updated: 06:03 PM EST
Pundit O'Reilly Now Skeptical About Bush
WASHINGTON (Feb. 10) - Conservative television news anchor Bill O'Reilly said on Tuesday he was now skeptical about the Bush administration and apologized to viewers for supporting prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The anchor of his own show on Fox News said he was sorry he gave the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's weapons program poised an imminent threat, the main reason cited for going to war.
"I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America."
"What do you want me to do, go over and kiss the camera?" asked O'Reilly, who had promised rival ABC last year he would publicly apologize if weapons were not found.
O'Reilly said he was "much more skeptical about the Bush administration now" since former weapons inspector David Kay said he did not think Saddam had any weapons of mass destruction.
While critical of President Bush, O'Reilly said he did not think the president intentionally lied. Rather, O'Reilly blamed CIA Director George Tenet, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton.
"I don't know why Tenet still has his job."
He added: "I think every American should be very concerned for themselves that our intelligence is not as good as it should be."
O'Reilly anticipated the presidential election would be a close race, adding he thought Democratic front-runner Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts would be a formidable opponent against Bush.
"It will be a very close race. The nation is divided," he said.
02/10/04 09:25 ET
Copyright 2004 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
So if Sadaam had WMD and gave them up, Bush would let him stay in power, and Sadaam could continue with his butchering of people, the rape rooms, and all his other crimes against humanity?
Thats what I think is funny. Many of these conservative radio people and their fans constantly flip their stories around like pancakes. First its about WMD. When that doesn't pan out, the war is STILL justified because as it turns out it's about "a variety of reasons," such as "we're liberating the Iraqis," "he tried to kill my Dad", "the mass graves."
But when confronted, WMD IS the main reason, and only if Sadaam would have given up the WMDs we all could have avoided war and Sadaam could continue being "the butcher of Bagdad."
For example of this:
Caller: we it looks as if Sadaam didn't have WMD
Sean Hannity: What are you talking about?!? Sadaam had weapons of mass destruction. He used them!
What he forgets to mention is that the use he refers to happened during the early 80s against the Iranians, when this animaly was our (the US) ally. The world is not simply black and white, good vs evil like Sean Hannity would like us to think, as evidenced by the fact we helped and supported a murderous regime because we didn't want Iran to win and horde the oil.
Thats what I think is funny. Many of these conservative radio people and their fans constantly flip their stories around like pancakes. First its about WMD. When that doesn't pan out, the war is STILL justified because as it turns out it's about "a variety of reasons," such as "we're liberating the Iraqis," "he tried to kill my Dad", "the mass graves."
But when confronted, WMD IS the main reason, and only if Sadaam would have given up the WMDs we all could have avoided war and Sadaam could continue being "the butcher of Bagdad."
For example of this:
Caller: we it looks as if Sadaam didn't have WMD
Sean Hannity: What are you talking about?!? Sadaam had weapons of mass destruction. He used them!
What he forgets to mention is that the use he refers to happened during the early 80s against the Iranians, when this animaly was our (the US) ally. The world is not simply black and white, good vs evil like Sean Hannity would like us to think, as evidenced by the fact we helped and supported a murderous regime because we didn't want Iran to win and horde the oil.
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"
"i will not trust the bush administration again"