[casi] A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies.

["as-ilas" <as-ilas@DELETETHISgmx.de>]

http://www.harpers.org/online/revision_thing/?pg=1

The Revision Thing
A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies.

by Sam Smith


All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers.
In places, tenses have been changed for clarity.

Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of
civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely
different era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had
never seen before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this
country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war
against them. It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between
evil.

It was absolutely clear that the number-one threat facing America was from
Saddam Hussein. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts that
went back a decade. We learned that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in
bomb making and deadly gases. The regime had long-standing and continuing
ties to terrorist organizations. Iraq and Al Qaeda had discussed safe-haven
opportunities in Iraq. Iraqi officials denied accusations of ties with Al
Qaeda. These denials simply were not credible. You couldn't distinguish
between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talked about the war on terror.

The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And
the answer was, absolutely. His regime had large, unaccounted-for stockpiles
of chemical and biological weapons--including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and
mustard gas, anthrax, botulism, and possibly smallpox. Our conservative
estimate was that Iraq then had a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of
chemical-weapons agent. That was enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield
rockets. We had sources that told us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized
Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons--the very weapons the
dictator told the world he did not have. And according to the British
government, the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in
as little as forty-five minutes after the orders were given. There could be
no doubt that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons and the capability to
rapidly produce more, many more.

Iraq possessed ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of
miles--far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations.
We also discovered through intelligence that Iraq had a growing fleet of
manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical
or biological weapons across broad areas. We were concerned that Iraq was
exploring ways of using UAVs for missions targeting the United States.





      Saddam Hussein was determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. We
knew he'd been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and
we believed he had, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. The British
government learned that Saddam Hussein had recently sought significant
quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources told us that he
had attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for
nuclear-weapons production. When the inspectors first went into Iraq and
were denied-finally denied access, a report came out of the [International
Atomic Energy Agency] that they were six months away from developing a
weapon. I didn't know what more evidence we needed.

      Facing clear evidence of peril, we could not wait for the final proof
that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. The Iraqi dictator could
not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and
diseases and gases and atomic weapons. Inspections would not work. We gave
him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. The
burden was on those people who thought he didn't have weapons of mass
destruction to tell the world where they were.

      We waged a war to save civilization itself. We did not seek it, but we
fought it, and we prevailed. We fought them and imposed our will on them and
we captured or, if necessary, killed them until we had imposed law and
order. The Iraqi people were well on their way to freedom. The scenes of
free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down
the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad were breathtaking.
Watching them, one could not help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

      It was entirely possible that in Iraq you had the most pro-American
population that could be found anywhere in the Arab world. If you were
looking for a historical analogy, it was probably closer to post-liberation
France. We had the overwhelming support of the Iraqi people. Once we won, we
got great support from everywhere.

      The people of Iraq knew that every effort was made to spare innocent
life, and to help Iraq recover from three decades of totalitarian rule. And
plans were in place to provide Iraqis with massive amounts of food, as well
as medicine and other essential supplies. The U.S. devoted unprecedented
attention to humanitarian relief and the prevention of excessive damage to
infrastructure and to unnecessary casualties.

      The United States approached its postwar work with a two-part resolve:
a commitment to stay and a commitment to leave. The United States had no
intention of determining the precise form of Iraq's new government. That
choice belonged to the Iraqi people. We have never been a colonial power. We
do not leave behind occupying armies. We leave behind constitutions and
parliaments. We don't take our force and go around the world and try to take
other people's real estate or other people's resources, their oil. We never
have and we never will.

      The United States was not interested in the oil in that region. We
were intent on ensuring that Iraq's oil resources remained under national
Iraqi control, with the proceeds made available to support Iraqis in all
parts of the country. The oil fields belonged to the people of Iraq, the
government of Iraq, all of Iraq. We estimated that the potential income to
the Iraqi people as a result of their oil could be somewhere in the $20
[billion] to $30 billion a year [range], and obviously, that would be money
that would be used for their well-being. In other words, all of Iraq's oil
belonged to all the people of Iraq.

      e found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological
laboratories. And we found more weapons as time went on. I never believed
that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. But
for those who said we hadn't found the banned manufacturing devices or
banned weapons, they were wrong, we found them. We knew where they were.

      We changed the regime of Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people. We
didn't want to occupy Iraq. War is a terrible thing. We've tried every other
means to achieve objectives without a war because we understood what the
price of a war can be and what it is. We sought peace. We strove for peace.
Nobody, but nobody, was more reluctant to go to war than President Bush.

      It is not right to assume that any current problems in Iraq can be
attributed to poor planning. The number of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf
region dropped as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This nation acted to
a threat from the dictator of Iraq. There is a lot of revisionist history
now going on, but one thing is certain--he is no longer a threat to the free
world, and the people of Iraq are free. There's no doubt in my mind when
it's all said and done, the facts will show the world the truth. There is
absolutely no doubt in my mind.

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