US justifications for invading Iraq

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The US-Iraq War
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In justifying the US invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush claimed:

  • (a) that there was strong evidence of WMDs, when it seems clear that there was none and that this was well known to Bush and his closest advisors at the time the claims were made 1
  • (a1) Circumstantial evidence: Bush was apparently determined to invade Iraq whether or not evidence was found, but although this indicates dishonesty it does not prove that he actually knew there was no evidence; it just proves that he didn't care whether the invasion was truly justified.
    • "One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief... My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it... If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it." – George W. Bush2
    • 2007-09-06 Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction "Salon exclusive: Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq." by Sidney Blumenthal
  • (b) that Iraq had refused to allow UN inspectors (see 3, final paragraph) to confirm their claimed lack of WMDs, when in fact Iraq did allow the inspectors in and the inspectors had found nothing. ("In 2002, the commission began searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, ultimately finding none." [W] and "The Iraqi government did what it was required in the 1441 resolution and presented a report of its weapons. The US government claimed that the report was false for not recognizing having the WMDs. It announced the invasion in the Spring of 2003." [W])
  • (c) that Iraq was connected to the 9/11 attacks (for which there is no evidence):
    • 2003-03-21 Letter to Congress: "The use of armed forces against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."
    • 2006-03-20 President Discusses War on Terror and Operation Iraqi Freedom: "First, just if I might correct a misperception, I don't think we ever said – at least I know I didn't say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein."
    • 2001-09-12: Richard Clarke says that on September 12, 2001, President Bush "testily" asked him to try to find evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected to the terrorist attacks. After an initial denial, the White House has since conceded that the meeting took place. In response he wrote a report stating there was absolutely no evidence of Iraqi involvement and got it signed by all relevant agencies, including the FBI, and the CIA. The paper was quickly returned by a deputy with a note saying "Please update and resubmit," apparently unshown to the President. [W]
    • 2007-03-04 The Seven War Memo: General Wesley Clark says he was told "We've made the decision we're going to war with Iraq." on or about 2001-09-20. This was soon followed by plans to invade Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finally, Iran.

Sources below have additional points.

Many people 2 4 believe this list constitutes an impeachable offense.

[edit] Sources

[edit] 1

  • 2004-10-03 $Disputed Intelligence on Iraq ($ for full article) abstract reads: "The Bush administration was made aware as early as 2001 that the aluminum tubes used as critical evidence against Iraq were most likely not for nuclear weapons, but White House officials continued to embrace the theory as they led the nation to war."

Another source 2 cites the article as stating that "The CIA inform[ed] the Bush administration that the "aluminum tubes," later to be used as evidence of a nuclear WMD program, were probably not intended for that purpose. In the article, CIA officials and a senior administration official say that Rice's staff had been told in 2001 that Energy Department experts believed the tubes were most likely intended for small artillery rockets, and not a nuclear program."

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[edit] 3

  • 2003-07-14 President Reaffirms Strong Position on Liberia
    • final paragraph: "The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region."

[edit] 4

  • beingism: Charges and Evidence: Impeachment of George W. Bush:

[edit] Comments

[edit] WMDs as justification?! WTF??

The claimed presence of WMDs in Iraq always seemed to me like an extremely good reason not to invade.

Picture the situation in 2002: you have a crazy dictator who has demonstrated that his only interest is power and that he is willing to sacrifice anything, including his own people, to keep it. Add to this an invasion by an incomparably strong foreign power, pushing that dictator back up against the wall: all of his genuine strategic options are used up, he knows he will either be killed or captured by an extremely unsympathetic enemy. If he had actually been in possession of WMDs, what are the odds that he would have taken the humane route and declined to use them?

So I have to ask the question: why did anyone buy the WMDs lie as a reason in favor of invasion in the first place? Oh, certainly, if Saddam had really had WMDs, or been in the process of making them, we couldn't have just stood around doing nothing about it – but bashing the hornets' nest has to be the worst possible way to go about dealing with that situation (unless you know that he hasn't actually got any of them ready yet; Bush did his best to convince us of the opposite, that Saddam was ready to use his WMDs at any time). When a mad bomber terrorist takes hostages, you tread delicately; going in with guns blazing is a recipe for disaster.

Well, we've managed to get our disaster even in spite of the lack of WMDs; we were just damn lucky that the WMDs were a figment of neoconservative ambition, because apparently we happily bash the hornet's nest when The Decider tells us to. The results could have been much, much worse if the WMDs had been anything more real than scrap tubing and twisted words. --Woozle 14:34, 16 March 2007 (EDT)

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[edit] Filed Links

  • 2008-03-21 /S/D/ How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? by Andrew Sullivan: “But my biggest misreading was not about competence. Wars are often marked by incompetence. It was a fatal misjudgment of Bush's sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent — even glib — about the evil that good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions. When I first heard of abuses at Gitmo, I dismissed them as enemy propaganda. I certainly never believed that a conservative would embrace torture as the central thrust of an anti-terror strategy and lie about it, and scapegoat underlings for it, and give us the indelible stain of Bagram and Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib and all the other secret torture and interrogation sites that Bush and Cheney created and oversaw. I certainly never believed that a war I supported for the sake of freedom would actually use as its central weapon the deepest antithesis of freedom — the destruction of human autonomy and dignity and will that is torture. To distort this by shredding the English language, by engaging in newspeak that I had long associated with totalitarian regimes, was a further insult. And for me, it was yet another epiphany about what American conservatism had come to mean.”
  • 2008-01-23 /S/D/ Study: Bush led U.S. to war on 'false pretenses' “The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.” See 2008-01-22 study of Bush Iraq lies for further discussion.
  • 2008-01-23 /S/D/ Study: Falsehoods Preceded Iraq War “A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top Administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks. .. The study concluded that the statements "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses." .. The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.” See 2008-01-22 study of Bush Iraq lies for further discussion.
  • 2006-02-12 /S/D/ All Roads Lead to Dick Cheney Accumulated evidence points to Dick Cheney having laid the groundwork for 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq.
  • 2004-02-20 /S/D/ Soldier for the Truth: Exposing Bush’s talking-points war “The neoconservatives pride themselves on having a global vision, a long-term strategic perspective. And there were three reasons why they felt the U.S. needed to topple Saddam, put in a friendly government and occupy Iraq. .. One of those reasons is that sanctions and containment were working and everybody pretty much knew it. Many companies around the world were preparing to do business with Iraq in anticipation of a lifting of sanctions. But the U.S. and the U.K. had been bombing northern and southern Iraq since 1991. So it was very unlikely that we would be in any kind of position to gain significant contracts in any post-sanctions Iraq. And those sanctions were going to be lifted soon, Saddam would still be in place, and we would get no financial benefit. .. The second reason has to do with our military-basing posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the restrictions on our basing. And also there was dissatisfaction from the people of Saudi Arabia. So we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been searching for since the days of Carter — to secure the energy lines of communication in the region. Bases in Iraq, then, were very important — that is, if you hold that is America’s role in the world. Saddam Hussein was not about to invite us in. .. The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made in the Food for Oil program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long before 9/11, in November 2000 — selling his oil for euros. The oil sales permitted in that program aren’t very much. But when the sanctions would be lifted, the sales from the country with the second largest oil reserves on the planet would have been moving to the euro. .. The U.S. dollar is in a sensitive period because we are a debtor nation now. Our currency is still popular, but it’s not backed up like it used to be. If oil, a very solid commodity, is traded on the euro, that could cause massive, almost glacial, shifts in confidence in trading on the dollar. So one of the first executive orders that Bush signed in May [2003] switched trading on Iraq’s oil back to the dollar.”
  • 2002-10-02 /S/D/ Barack Obama's Iraq Speech “I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. .. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”
  • 2002-09-04 /S/D/ Heading for Trouble "Do we really want to occupy Iraq for the next 30 years?": “America's best military leaders know that they are accountable to history not only for how they fight wars, but also for how they prevent them. The greatest military victory of our time -- bringing an expansionist Soviet Union in from the cold while averting a nuclear holocaust -- was accomplished not by an invasion but through decades of intense maneuvering and continuous operations.” ... “The issue before us is not simply whether the United States should end the regime of Saddam Hussein, but whether we as a nation are prepared to physically occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years. Those who are pushing for a unilateral war in Iraq know full well that there is no exit strategy if we invade and stay.” Makes a clear historical case against invasion.

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  • "I thought they were out of their minds, once I realised that they weren't kidding. The most inappropriate, the most counterproductive thing we could've done would've been to invade Iraq and I rather thought that was self-evident." – Richard A. Clarke, former US Counter-Terrorism Advisor [1]

[edit] Related Information

  • "In 2003, Republicans refused to allow a vote on a bill introduced by Waxman that would have established an independent commission to review the false claims Bush made in asking Congress to declare war on Iraq. That same year, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Porter Goss, refused to hold hearings on whether the administration had forged evidence of the nuclear threat allegedly posed by Iraq. A year later the chair of the Government Reform Committee, Tom Davis, refused to hold hearings on new evidence casting doubt on the "nuclear tubes" cited by the Bush administration before the war. Sen. Pat Roberts, who pledged to issue a Senate Intelligence Committee report after the 2004 election on whether the Bush administration had misled the public before the invasion, changed his mind after the president won re-election. 'I think it would be a monumental waste of time to re-plow this ground any further,' Roberts said." [2]
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