Bush misled the nation about the threat Iraq posed. But so did the Clinton administration.

madfloridian

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Sun Apr-13-08 10:38 PM
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Bush misled the nation about the threat Iraq posed. But so did the Clinton administration.

Edited on Sun Apr-13-08 10:46 PM by madfloridian

Many of the Democratic candidates in the 2004 primary said they were urged by advisors from the Clinton administration to support giving George Bush authority to use arms in Iraq. Bill Clinton himself said he approved of what Bush was doing as late as 2004. Senator Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War Resolution.

This is a long article from Mother Jones back in 2004. It will be hard to choose just some excerpts.

A Legacy of Lies

Faced with the need to justify an economically devastating and internationally unpopular embargo of Iraq, the Clinton administration engaged in a pattern of stretching and distorting weapons data to bolster their claim that Saddam Hussein was still hiding an illicit arsenal. The Clinton White House never used that "intelligence" to push for an invasion of Iraq, as Bush so effectively did. But in its desperate quest to salvage a crumbling Iraq policy, the Clinton White House laid the groundwork for the deceptions of their successors.

In a November 1997 Sunday morning appearance on ABC, Defense Secretary William Cohen held up a five-pound bag of sugar for the cameras to dramatize the threat of Iraqi anthrax: "This amount of anthrax could be spread over a city -- let's say the size of Washington. It would destroy at least half the population of that city. One breath and you are likely to face death within five days."

"It could wipe out populations of whole countries!" Cokie Roberts gasped as Cohen described the Iraqi arsenal. "Millions, millions," Cohen responded, "if it were properly dispersed."

A year later, at a nationally televised town hall meeting on Iraq at Ohio State University, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright brought home the dangers: "Iraq is a long way from Ohio, but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face. The evidence is strong that Iraq continues to hide prohibited weapons and materials."

The article goes into the UN testimony of Hussein Kamel about the destruction of the weapons in the early 90s. It is pretty long, and we have cover it here before. Here is part though that I never saw.

There is now little doubt that Kamel was telling the truth. The strongest evidence -- evidence so unimpeachable it invites the word "proof" -- came in the form of a captured Iraqi document obtained in January by Barton Gellman of The Washington Post. The memo was composed five days after Kamel's defection, on August 13, 1995, and its author was Hossam Amin, Iraq's chief liaison to the U.N. inspectors. It was addressed to Qusay Hussein, Saddam's son. The letter was a piece of damage assessment. Kamel was expected to blow all Iraq's cover stories to the inspectors, and the regime needed to prepare itself for the fallout. So Amin proceeded to lay out for his boss, in minute detail, two separate storylines: The version Iraq had told the inspectors about each weapons program, and what the truth was. (Or, as the memo itself put it: "the matters that are known to the traitor and not declared" to the U.N.)

Among the memo's statements of fact was that "destruction of the biological weapons agents took place in the summer of 1991" In a comprehensive evaluation of the evidence, Gellman stood Kamel's 1995 briefing to the U.N. against the real story laid out in Amin's memo. The comparison, he concluded, "suggests that Kamel left little or nothing out."

Iraq had eliminated all its weapons of mass destruction by the summer of 1991, and the U.S. had been told of it in 1995. The rest is history.

I posted not long ago an article that was written in September 2002 before the vote on the IWR. It was written by Jay Bookman, an editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. We talked of here at DU then. It was like a ray of hope for us.

We even thought we could get Congress to listen after some other articles came out. But we could not. They did not pay attention to the hundreds of thousands of marchers, the calls, the emails. They voted on to give Bush that awesome power in early October 2002.

Here is the column which is now at the Information Clearing House. Still available after all these years.

The president's real goal in Iraq

The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence. The pieces just didn't fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing. In recent days, those missing pieces have finally begun to fall into place. As it turns out, this is not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions.

This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the "American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were.

Bookman quoted Donald Kagan as saying we were "Gary Cooper."

"If our allies want a free ride, and they probably will, we can't stop that," he says. But he also argues that the United States, given its unique position, has no choice but to act anyway.

"You saw the movie 'High Noon'? he asks. "We're Gary Cooper."

Accepting the Cooper role would be an historic change in who we are as a nation, and in how we operate in the international arena.

It did change who we are as a nation. It changed our party to the extent that many have never been willing to accept their flawed role in giving an incompetent president such power.