Arraya: How about Saddam’s use of chem weapons at Halabja and throughout the Iran – Iraq War? I’d also point out that Saddam was actively seeking to weaponize both anthrax and botulin for strategic/theater-wide use. While I now realize that the Iraq war was ill-considered, given that there were no WMDs (and the fallback excuse of removing Saddam as a dictator is thin soup, given how many of his ilk we’ve supported over the years), there was credible intel on his weapons program over the years, supported by events like Halabja. Further, the Brits, French and Germans had actionable intel on the same programs. It wasn’t cut from whole cloth as many on the Left assert (especially given that a good many Dems were also stridently for regime change).[/quote]
Well, it’s interesting. Saddam came to power in a coup a few months before the Iranian revolution. A few months after the revolution he attacked Iran.
It came out in congressional testimony that western firms “unwittingly and wittingly” helped him with his chemical weapons.
As well, when Iran went to the UN to complain about the chemical weapons, the US and Britain blocked any serious condemnation. So, I have a hard time when people condemn his use of chemical weapons, as some sort of horror without them acknowledging that western powers helped him with attaining them as well as protected him from international response. 1.5 million people died in that war.
As far as the intel we had, well yeah, we sold him the weapons back in the day so it’s understandable that we think he might have them. Though, I would say, that the aggregate of intel would not be labeled “actionable” by 2000. With an overall assumption, that he was not even a threat to his neighbors at that point. The, spotty at best, intel was trumped up by a magnitude. Most of the fear mongering was think tank twisting of data. This can be tracked back to a few think tanks.
Actually, there was practically an intelligence community revolt over the misuse of intelligence.
From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us could do about it.
I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.
I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.
The “downy street memo” was the acknowledgment by the M16 that the case was paper thin and not supported by the intelligence community.
What you have are either manipulations of facts based on extreme and detrimental paranoia(with nobel intent) with those manipulations expressed to the public as fact or the twisting was done for ulterior motives.
Regardless of motivations, which can never be proven,(though I think an analysis of the confluence of interests in power at the time could give a good hint), the complete abandonment of standard operating procedure, in the form of, I guess what you could call, intelligence management towards policy, turned out to be wrong.
