Life occasionally affords us some really tasty "I told you so moments" and this morning's interview with Scott Ritter on Democracy Now was one of them. If you haven't heard it, you should:
http://www.democracynow.org/Some of us here have argued from the beginning that the most fundamental arguments advanced to justify the invasion of Iraq were bullshit from the start, and that the congressional leadership should have known it. Arguments such as "Saddam might have WMDs stashed out in the desert," "Saddam has ongoing WMD development or production programs," "Saddam kicked out the weapons inspectors, "Iraq didn't cooperate with the U.N. inspections," "well, Saddam SAID he had WMDs so we all thought he actually had them," and my personal favorite, "even if he did say there were no weapons, we couldn't trust Saddam Hussein." Today Ritter acknowledged the falsehood of each of those arguments.
In summary, he said (paraphrased from memory):
1) The U.S. drafted, pressed, and voted for the UN-SC Resolution calling for sanctions against Iraq
until their WMD programs had been halted and the WMD arsenal destroyed, i.e. until Iraq was disarmed. Yet only a few months later, G. H. W. Bush publicly pledged that the U.S. would never lift sanctions, even if Iraq complied with the disarmament mandate. He compared Hussein to a "middle east Hitler," with whom we could never negotiate. Economic sanctions and further military harassment ultimately resulted in the deaths of approximately one million Iraqi civilians, including 500,000 children by 2000.
2) By 1992 UNSCOM pressure had resulted in Iraq being what Ritter characterized as "as close to totally disarmed as was possible." He said that Iraq and UNSCOM had accounted for nearly all the weapons and for ALL the documentation about the weapons programs. He suggested that the few accounting gaps were simply the result of shoddy bookkeeping, and more importantly, that that was the belief among the inspectors at the time. Let me emphasize this--
by summer of 1992 UNSCOM inspectors agreed that Iraq was as completely in compliance with the U.N. disarmament resolution as could ever be demonstrated. Economic sanctions should have been lifted then.3) The incoming Clinton administration had attempted to verify that Iraq was disarmed and that sanctions could be lifted, but Congressional leaders balked, saying "now that Saddam has been equated with Hitler, we can never explain to Americans why we're negotiating with him." Clinton dropped the plan for lifting sanctions and became an Iraq hawk, essentially for political reasons.
4) Iraq did not "kick out the inspectors," and was in fact very cooperative with the inspections process after 1991. Ritter said that Iraq restricted only three or four percent of the sites that UNSCOM requested access to, and only because they feared that the CIA was using the inspections process to gather intelligence for assassination attempts. The sites in question were all linked to presidential security issues, like the Ba'athest Party Headquarters. Nonetheless, they allowed access even to those sites with the caveat that only four inspectors could visit at once-- Bush and later Clinton cited this as evidence the Iraqis were "completely uncooperative" and Bush withdrew the inspectors-- not Saddam Hussein-- before they could fill the last accounting holes in the WMD destruction process. We now know that they did indeed succeed in filling those holes in the disarmament process itself-- the WMDs were gone-- but that they did not complete the accounting. In any event, Ritter said that Iraqis were generally very cooperative and helpful except when the U.S. was manipulating the inspections to achieve other intel ends.
5) Most importantly, Ritter asserted that by 1992, and certainly by 1995, the CIA, British, German, and Israeli intelligence services all KNEW that Iraq was disarmed and had completely ceased WMD development and manufacture by 1991,
and that it was no longer a threat to anyone. They KNEW it. This created a foreign policy nightmare for the U.S., whose leaders had characterized Hussein as equivalent to Hitler, and who therefore had to maintain the embargo and military harassment to save face at home. They simply could not allow Iraq to be certified as in compliance with the disarmament mandate unless Saddam Hussein was deposed, so they manipulated the inspections process and ultimately resorted to bald-faced lies.
Our government has been lying to us about Iraq since the early 1990's. It did so to prop up its own corrupt foreign policy ambitions in the middle east and to save American politicians from embarrassment. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were murdered to maintain that falsehood. When the neocons came to power in 2000, that foundation of lies provided the pretext they needed to justify the invasion of Iraq and to plunder the American treasury for their corporafascist sponsors.
We told you so. In recent months the chorus of voices here has become overwhelmingly opposed to the war against Iraq, but in the year or so after the invasion I argued these points with many DUers, many of whom ultimately fell back on the "but we couldn't trust Saddam Hussein to tell the truth" argument which, although hardly a sufficient pretext for war-- after all, we can't trust our own leaders so why should we expect Hussein to be our rock of Gibraltar-- turns out to not be true. Hussein and Iraq were not only telling the truth from 1992 onward, but according to Ritter, this was widely known, and certainly known to the American intel services.
We told you so. American political leadership exploited the last remaining accounting holes to re-frame the question to their advantage, but with a subtle deceit at its heart. By asking the intel community "can you say for sure that Hussein is disarmed" they provided cover for the continued position that absent that proof, they had to assume that Hussein was still a recklessly dangerous and ticking time bomb. But they knew all along that it was a lie, or at least many of them knew it and they all should have. Including the effects of economic sanctions, over a million Iraqi civilians have died for that lie. All of the American military personal who died in Iraq-- and it almost seems pitiful to even mention them, in the context of all those dead Iraqis-- all of them died in vain for a lie.
I'd like to say that this has been one of the most shameful episodes in American history, but to my disgust, I'm afraid it probably isn't. Still, it has defined my response to my government even more than Watergate did. I am utterly ashamed of what my government has done in my name.
We told you so. I wish there was some joy in having been right.
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