Some
popular
myths
about the Iraq War. Conditions for Iraqis have
not improved, despite
their having traded in a dictatorship for a democracy, the agreements
reached between the US and Iraq are
not
victories for the US
and the "surge" of US troops into Baghdad was not irrelevant to
the following reduction in violence, but neither was it the sole cause
of that reduction. Very disturbingly,
9.
Bush
went to war in Iraq because he was given bad intelligence
about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction capabilities. In
fact, the State Department's Intelligence & Research (I & R)
division cast doubt on the alarmist WMD stories that Bush/Cheney
put out. The CIA refused to sign off on the inclusion of the Niger
uranium lie in the State of the Union address, which made Bush source
it to the British MI6 instead. The Downing Street Memo revealed that
Bush fixed the intelligence around the policy. Bush sought to get up a
provocation such as a false flag attack on UN planes so as to blame it
on Iraq. And UN weapons inspectors in Feb.-Mar. of 2003 examined 100 of
600 suspected weapons sites and found nothing; Bush's response was to
pull them out and go to war.
I
must say that it greatly bothers me to see Bush (and his enablers)
claiming that "Aw c'mon guys, gee, going to war in Iraq wasn't
my
fault, the intel was bad!" This particular evasion of
responsiblity is extremely harmful to any sort of democratic,
ballot-box accountability. How are citizens supposed to hold
politicians accountable for their actions when politicians don't admit
their own culpability? No matter where the intel originated from,
it was
Bush's responsibility to check it out
thoroughly
and to make
100% sure that it was solidly reliable.
