Bush and Iraq Revisited

Bush supporters fall somewhere between rewriting history or ignoring it as it happens. And then when you get to talking about what happened, you are accused of rewriting history.  Here's a little History 101 for Bushaphiles.

Following UN Resolution 1441, UN inspectors combed Iraq finding nothing except some chemical containing rockets that they saw destroyed. Iraq filed a compliance statement in 12000 pages detailing their compliance with Resolution 1441. The UN inspector then said on the record that Iraq had not accounted for some worrysome weapons including anthrax and nerve gas and that while not found, there was no proof it was destroyed.

The UN refused to act further. Resolution 1441 was not self-executing, meaning it did not authorize the use of force against Iraq. Ambassador Negroponte (the Bush appointed representative to the UN) himself said it was not self-executing.

Even so, Bush & Blair declared that Resolution 1441 was violated and that the USA and the UK had the right to use force under 1441 without further UN authorization. Which was their justification for invading Iraq.

Now the U.S. claimed, under Bush, to have found traces of chemical substances. The UN concluded years after the invasion that Iraq had destroyed its chemical weaponry back when Clinton was president.

Why was Bush so certain Saddam had WMD? Mainly it all boiled down to a single source, codenamed "Curveball." Curveball's uncorroborated reports were discounted by the Germans who debriefed him.

Not, apparently, by the CIA, who gave Colin Powell data concerning all kinds of non-existent Iraqi activities, some concerning al Quaida training facilities, others including Curveball's reports.

This has been old news for years now. See the New York Times in 2005:
"...The defector's claims were not discredited by the C.I.A. until May 2004, 15 months after they featured prominently in Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's address to the United Nations Security Council that made the case for war.

"Among Curveball's most alarming claims was that Iraq had assembled a fleet of mobile laboratories to manufacture biological weapons without being detected.

"The commission described the episode as a remarkable breakdown in tradecraft and communication, and said it had contributed heavily to the broader failure of American intelligence to learn that Iraq did not in fact possess chemical or biological weapons at the time of the American invasion in March 2003...."

The Germans concluded in 2002 that Curveball was telling lies and so informed the CIA.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9507E7D8173EF93BA35757C0A9639C8B63

Curveball's misstatements were aired on 60 Minutes in 2005. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/06/opinion/main685931.shtml   Part of the book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq Invasion by Ischikoff and Corn, published 2006, had to do with Curveball.

Still the saga continues. The Guardian published a follow-up last month, after Curveball finally confessed to reporters. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/15/curveball-iraqi-fantasist-cia-saddam

So, the whole lethal mess came down to the Bush administration accepting one primary, dubious intelligence source. Was Bush at fault, or was he an unwitting dupe?

I am critical of Bush, because if someone tells me something important, my first inquiry is, "How solid is this information?" Before launching a war and ending the lives of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, Bush should have dug for answers instead of taking a report at face value.

"George [Tenet], jes' how good is this info?" "A single source you say?"   "The Germans have got 'im? What do they think about him?" "Well, don't you think we'd better get on the horn and check with German intelligence--or do you want me to call Chancellor Merkel? I like to give her back rubs you know."

That's all it would have taken to derail the invasion.   Bush didn't do it.

IMO, Bush had a reason for not digging. He wanted an excuse for invading Iraq, because of the investment opportunities for his friends and in order to clear what he saw as a glaring failure in his father's record (and perhaps as he said, because Saddam tried to kill his dad).    And nothing, not a paucity of intelligence, not the fact that he had no legal grounds for war under international law, would stop him.