This may come as a shock to, well, virtually no one, but the United States’ Iraq Survey Group, led by Charles Duelfer who took over for David Kay in January, has concluded what we’ve all believed for a long time: Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before we invaded.
A new report on Iraq’s illicit weapons program is expected to conclude that Saddam Hussein’s government had a clear intent to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons if United Nations sanctions were lifted, government officials said Thursday. But, like earlier reports, it finds no evidence that Iraq had begun any large-scale program for weapons production by the time of the American invasion last year, the officials said.
So, the primary rationale for this disastrous war was wrong, but some anonymous government official wants to us to know that Saddam Hussein had the “intent” to develop the weapons he didn’t have. That, of course, doesn’t change the bottom line — a costly war sold to the public under false pretenses, and the immediate and imminent threat was neither — but it does raise another question.
A draft report of nearly 1,500 pages that is circulating within the government essentially reaffirms the findings of an interim review completed 11 months ago, the officials said. But they said it added considerable detail, particularly on the question of Iraq’s intention to produce weapons if United Nations penalties were weakened or lifted, a judgment they said was based on documents signed by senior leaders and the debriefings of former Iraqi scientists and top officials, as well as other records.
OK, so Iraq didn’t have WMD, but if U.N. trade and economic sanctions were lifted, Hussein very well may have tried to start developing these weapons programs again. Got it.
Refresh my memory; who was it that circumvented those sanctions that were created to keep Hussein in check? I think his name is Dick “Go F— Yourself” Cheney.
As Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, Cheney helped lead a multinational coalition against Iraq and was one of the architects of a post-war economic embargo designed to choke off funds to the country. He insisted the world should “maintain sanctions, at least of some kind,” so Saddam Hussein could not “rebuild the military force he’s used against his neighbors.”
But less than six years later, as a private businessman, Cheney apparently had more important interests than preventing Hussein from rebuilding his army. While he claimed during the 2000 campaign that, as CEO of Halliburton, he had “imposed a ‘firm policy’ against trading with Iraq,” confidential UN records show that, from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, Halliburton held stakes in two firms that sold more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was in charge. Halliburton acquired its interest in both firms while Cheney was at the helm, and continued doing business through them until just months before Cheney was named George W. Bush’s running mate.
I wonder if Cheney ever gets tired of being so wrong, so often.