War & Peace: June 2003 Archives

He's been too much of an apologist for Bush lately (and having to put himself through more and more contortions to explain how he supports Gulf War II, but not for the reason the Bush adminstration gave, but still...) However, I'll forgive him, because this is a good column, properly critical of Sharon's actions over the last few years, which have not increased security.

--> June 15, 2003, "The Reality Principle", New York Times , www.nytimes.com/2003/06/15/opinion/15FRIE.html

Good column by John Dean in Findlaw (other than him repeating the erroneous version of the Wolfowitz quote from the Guardian article I wrote about earlier this week...) He lists off all the specific allegations Bush made about Iraq's capabilities in the lead-up to the war, gives the reasons that the President could have been given the benefit of the doubt at the time (surely there were checks and balances in the White House, as there usually are in each administration...) Of course, nothing found since has backed up those allegations, and now it seems that there was political pressure on the CIA and on the Pentagon to produce evidence that would support the rush to war. (Even so, the Pentagon released a report last year stating that although the Iraqis were behaving suspiciously, there was no reliable information that Iraq was producing or stockpiling WMDs.)

Krugman is right to suggest a possible comparison to Watergate. In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.

As I remarked in an earlier column, this Administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, it was not, in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held accountable.

To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be "a high crime" under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony "to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose."

--> writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030606.html

In an object lesson on why you should double-check and triple-check everything you see and hear, the Guardian posted a notice on its front page today retracting the news story I posted about yesterday. They've also removed it. However, it's found new life elsewhere. It's unlikely Khilafah.com will reprint the retraction, though. Anyway, I post all three documents here for your amusement...

(Edited to add: the Guardian has some more information about this misinformation here)

So all of my assertions that Gulf War II being more than about oil have just been blown out of the water. "'No blood for oil'" is too simplistic!" I said. But then Paul Wolfowitz opens his yap...

"Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil", London Guardian, June 4, 2003. www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,970331,00.html

The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil.

The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.

Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

Mr Wolfowitz went on to tell journalists at the conference that the US was set on a path of negotiation to help defuse tensions between North Korea and its neighbours - in contrast to the more belligerent attitude the Bush administration displayed in its dealings with Iraq.

His latest comments follow his widely reported statement from an interview in Vanity Fair last month, in which he said that "for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction."

At least you can't say he puts a pretty face on his true beliefs, unlike some of his cronies. Wonder if he's still going to have a job by the end of the week.

Addition: Yeah, he'll still have a job. The quote was taken out of context (and apparently translated from English to German and back to English)

www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/ tr20030531-depsecdef0246.html