Thursday, March 21, 2019

Well, Ari lied, anyhow

Baghdad, 2003. via a valuable article at Strategic Culture.

It's the 16th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, and Ari Fleischer, the artist formerly known as the most dishonest presidential press secretary in American history (until Sarah Huckabee Sanders ran away with the title), couldn't restrain himself from weighing in:
Immediately I'm suffused with the same old helpless rage and can't think about anything else. Ari goes on, of course, for a dozen and more tweets, explaining that when "the intelligence services of Egypt, France, Israel and others concluded that Saddam had WMD" they all made a mistake, but that's not the same as lying—not mentioning, naturally, that the intelligence services of Egypt and France certainly didn't convince their governments from there that a war was necessary:

CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) -- Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak says the U.S.-led war on Iraq would produce "one hundred new bin Ladens," driving more Muslims to anti-Western militancy.
"When it is over, if it is over, this war will have horrible consequences," Mubarak told Egyptian soldiers in the city of Suez on Monday.
"If it is over." Funny to think US troops in Iraq have outlasted the Mubarak reign by many years now.

In a dramatic break with the United States, President Jacques Chirac said tonight that France would veto a United Nations resolution threatening war against Iraq.
''My position is that whatever the circumstances, France will vote no,'' Mr. Chirac said. He added that he had ''the feeling'' that Russia and China, which also have veto power in the Security Council, are prepared to follow France's lead.
I think it's an insufficiently noted point, that if it had been true that Iraq had gone shopping for uranium recently, and the aluminum tubes it had purchased were really suitable for centrifuges, and those two trailers had really been used for germ weapons manufacturing (as British forces had found out by June 2003 they were actually "for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons" as the Iraqi government had repeatedly explained), if all that had been true, if these random facts had been real evidence of an active WMD program, it still wouldn't have been a legitimate case for war, and I don't believe the intelligence community was asked to give an assessment on that.

They were, however, asked to see if they could find some dirt on the UN weapons inspectors who were finding no evidence of a significant WMD program: "The Washington Post reported that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had requested a CIA investigation of Blix's performance at IAEA and had "hit the ceiling" when nothing could be found to undermine Blix and the inspection program. According to the Post, Wolfowitz allegedly feared that the inspections could "torpedo" plans for military action against Saddam Hussein."

Bush later claimed, several times, that the US had been forced into war because of Saddam Hussein's expulsion of those same inspectors, which is one of his most flagrant lies: Hans Blix's and Mohamed ElBaradei's outfits. UNMOVIC and IAEA, were there until the very end, when UN Secretary General Kofi Annan ordered them out to protect themselves because Bush refused to delay the US invasion while they finished their work:
"Obviously we seen to be at the end of the road here," Annan told reporters. "I have just informed the council that we will withdraw the UNMOVIC and atomic agency inspectors. We will withdraw the U.N. humanitarian workers.
"It's a sad day for everybody. War is always a catastrophe."

And the case for WMD was ridiculously weak:

Here are some other lies:



I really think there is a little bit of George W. Bush left on the floor that's entitled to some kind of rehabilitation; he was manipulated himself, by the Wolfowitz cabal and by Tony Blair, told "they tried to kill your daddy" and so on, and he never really did know anything about the situation. He was in many ways just as ill-equipped to be president as Donald Trump is and he should never have run, but I don't suppose anybody explained that clearly to him. I also believe, as I think I've said before, he came to understand somewhat, between Katrina and the mortgage crisis, how much he had been manipulated, when he finally managed to fire Rumsfeld and push Cheney to the sidelines and called some of his father's loyalists in to help clean up. Though that didn't make him capable of doing his own job.

Nevertheless, he did lie, and lots of people died, if memory serves. The slogan is just fine.

More (with some overlap) from Lemieux.
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