When I was in combat training (U.S., mid 2000s), a corporal who was teaching a munitions class one day started pointing to things and listing off random objects. Clothes, chairs, computer, projector, weapon lubricant, etc. He asked what all of these had in common. The answer was that they all contain petroleum derivatives. And that's why we go, he said. The 18-year-old idiot me didn't understand, so that night I went into my Green Monster (didn't have internet) and started reading about recent U.S. military involvement. It culminated in a rather dramatic mental image of Iraqi forces retreating through Kuwait and burning hundreds and hundreds of oil wells as they went. I was still very confused, but I was overcome with a sharp feeling that I was a pawn in a game being played by gods I couldn't see or hear or meet or understand, a game that had been going on since before I was born. I became depressed and cursed my father for not teaching me anything at all useful about the world.
I don't know why I wrote all of that. Maybe just to say that I'm sorry for my part in all of this bullshit.
You know, we found WMDs after the attack. They were just the wrong ones.
President George W Bush led the US into war in Iraq on the back of assertions that Saddam Hussein had recently-built weapons of mass destruction, supplies that had only increased in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks.
Yet all the chemical weapons found by soldiers were manufactured before 1991, the Times reported. They consisted largely of 155-millimeter artillery shells or 122-millimeter rockets – not designed for mass destruction, and produced in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.
According to the Times, the reports were embarrassing for the Pentagon because, in five of the six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been “designed in the US, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies”.
Meh, it wasn't so clearcut. You have to remember that Hussein himself deliberately encouraged the belief that he had chemical weapons (perhaps thinking it would be a deterrent) and that he did, in fact, use chemical weapons against the Kurds in previous years.
The information was bad, but it certainly wasn't clear to an 8 year old and probably wasn't even clear to Bush & Co. Given the incredible effort that the US military spent trying to hunt down WMDs after the war, it's clear the belief was genuine. That doesn't make their decisions good, but it makes them somewhat understandable.
I was 30 when the Iraq war started. I had mixed feelings then and to be honest, I still have mixed feelings. I cry not one single tear for Saddam Hussein, though the population of Iraq deserved a better outcome.
Some of us know but would be shunned if we told you. As a combat vet I have spent years since I got out trying to understand the big picture... and all I can tell you is the truth is nastier, and stranger, than fiction. I started out with just Iraq, but by the end of it had learned the GWOT was only the latest iteration of a long game that has been played over centuries.
Hah. Sorry for the empty comment, but it’s so funny that you and I both simultaneously pointed out the Iraq war was based on fake information. And I just realized that 20-somethings today didn’t get to experience what that was like firsthand. Your point about lived experience is fantastic; hats off to you.
My political awareness was forged by participating in the Iraq war on the US side after falling for the massive propaganda before. I've literally never been the same person since, and have spent most of my waking free hours in between the jobs I can barely hold down for my PTSD trying to understand the details behind the global geopolitical situation.
The truth is this is likely just a continuation of the same playbook, and until one understands the true reasons behind the GWOT one will not be able to understand why it seems those "mistakes" haven't been learned from. When I started asking Cui Bono about Iraq (I did not participate in Afghanistan) and the various real results of the war I keep returning to Israel. For example, I know a person who was in the Green Zone when an Iraqi general came and said "I have 40k military men about to have no job, what do you want to do with them, please hire them." and the top-down directive that every boot-on-the-ground with half a brain knew would result in majorly increased chaos was to tell them to f-off! My conclusion after tons of reading is that balkanization was part of the intention as part of prepping for Oded Yinon. (I won't even start on the various secret societies (ancient mystery religions) obsession with Solomons temple and rebuilding the third temple, which would require the destruction of Al Aqsa)
Then as I started truly analyzing 9/11 and doing what the intel bubbas call "threat finance", I keep ending up at deep state actors heavily tied to Israel (and the UK) even within my (US) government. For an example that is even mirrored in this recent escalation, are indicators of pre-knowledge via trading that occurred prior. This happened on 9/11 (by a firm formerly chaired by AB Buzzy Krongard, A.B. Brown, acquired by Banker's Trust turned Banker's Trust-AB Brown) and before 10/7, and in a way that is mathematically provable to be major outliers.
My point is that there are much deeper things going on that surface analysis will fail to provide understanding for. If I went into further detail, I would for sure be seen as a "crazy conspiracy theorist"...
I riff on Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean "You'd best start believing in ghost stories, because you're in one!"
There were over two dozen foreign intelligence agencies that agreed that Saddam either had or was attempting to build or purchase weapons of destruction. Nuclear weapons are extremely difficult to hide anywhere on earth, but many other types of weapons of mass destruction aren't difficult to dispose of.
That's not to say that the invasion turned out to be a good idea, or that we were justified in the attempt, but those agencies represent thousands of really smart people in positions of authority around the world agreeing that Iraq had them or was attempting to develop them, so its hard to argue that anyone with half a brain could have known the truth. If we were wrong, its because a good percentage of all western civilizations were wrong, not just the United States.
You also have to factor in the theory that Saddam himself wanted the world to think that he had them, in an attempt to dissuade Iran from thinking Iraq was vulnerable. Iraq's strange behavior that lead to the invasion can really only be explained in two ways: either he was pretending to hide weapons that didn't exist, or he successfully hid real weapons.
Finally, half a million people were killed in Iraq. Clearly every combatant on the battlefield shares a part of the blame, but that includes the enemy combatants. The overwhelming majority of American Soldiers attempt to avoid civilian casualties, often to their own detriment, yet the organizations we have been fighting against in Iraq deliberately target anyone they can. The larger the body count, the better. They view their fellow Muslims as traitors for failing to take up arms against the United States, and so they target them just the same as Americans.
So, looking at your link and I find and interesting line. "42% of Americans still believe we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" is presented as 42% of Americans are stupid and uniformed. It would seem those "informed" people are not readers of the New York Times as they have an article[1] detailing the WMDs found and the effects on our soldiers. Perhaps these "correct" people don't have friends who served or never served themselves? I suppose they can go with the Mother Jones approach and say there was no "active WMD program". But, that probably wasn't the question asked and I sure families of those veterans would say some were found.
Seems if you only have 140 characters, a short conservation snippet, or a single data item then you might not get the whole story.
Summing up the article as "the end justifies the means" seems appropriate and, to me, is still the simplest definition of evil.
2) "In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act."
They fooled me. I voted for Bush in 2000; I supported the war after the State of the Union address. I maintained that we would find the weapons of mass destruction, long after very many Americans were growing dubious.
Then Rumsfeld said they wouldn't find the WMDs. Then he tried to claim that the war was never about WMDs.
At that point I knew I had been 'had' by a completely (intellectually) dishonest asshole, or perhaps a set of them.
I'm pretty certain that the Bush administration was convinced that Saddam had WMDs. I'm also pretty certain that it was because we gave/sold them to him for his fights with Iran, before the Kuwait invasion.
Now, after we invaded in '03 and couldn't find the WMDs they started lying. Absolutely. But the basis for the war was incompetence.
Russia, France, and Germany seem to have much better intel, but we don't like listening to them. This seems to cross administration lines so it's not quite clear what the problem is (although that doesn't prevent a lot of speculation).
Iraq: The "tubes". They clearly were NOT for gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. The US Department of Energy knew this. But Secretary Rice kept saying that the tubes were evidence of efforts at uranium separation. In fact, as eventually did come out in the media, the tubes were to be bodies of crude rockets. Then W said "tubes" in his big speech. The media didn't clarify the situation and loudly call BS.
The uranium from Niger was maybe not real after all but even if real likely not very important: As I recall, that uranium chemical is a standard industrial item. E.g., one use of uranium is to color plastic lenses for cars or some such. Getting uranium is not so tough; enriching it enough for a bomb is. Running a uranium reactor is not so tough; getting the plutonium, 239 as I recall, and don't want 240 or some such, is tougher. Then to separate the plutonium, use just chemical means. Then to compress it enough to have a critical mass is tricky and likely needs some testing, and tests are now essentially impossible to hide.
The media should have helped make it clear that the evidence that Saddam was close to any very serious WMDs was very thin stuff.
W invaded Iraq on very thin stuff. The media should have made that fact very clear to the voters.
Okay, maybe we should have dumped Saddam. Maybe. I would have tried making him an offer he couldn't refuse, but maybe we're not supposed to do that. So, maybe we should have dumped him.
Getting to Baghdad took, what, 23 days? Then the big mistake started: Bremer decided to do 'nation building'. And his first step was to fire the Iraqi army -- dumb, dumb, dumb. Nearly every common thug criminal, gang leader, organized crime leader, terrorist leader, out of work soldier, Shiite leader, Sunni leader, Kurdish leader, Iranian politician, etc. saw how dumb it was and took advantage. Nearly the only one in Iraq who didn't 'get it' was Bremer.
Our media didn't keep us informed.
On China, it's simple: Our media didn't keep us informed. We still don't know the actual flows. First cut we need to know the flows.
Sometimes the media is silent; sometimes they pay attention to an important topic but make a mess, out of bias or just sloppy work; often they assume that the audience wouldn't want to know; usually it's just a lot cheaper to do sloppy reporting. Whatever, we're, net, getting the mushroom treatment from the media -- keep us in the dark and feed us BS.
Actually likely and apparently quite a lot of quite solid information is available. Likely a lot of it is on the Internet. I keep looking and hoping to find good sources although finding them is not my full time job.
I upchuck at FOX, NYT, LAT, WaPo, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, and about everything else I can find. Law, medicine, engineering, etc. -- in none of these do we try to get by with the mushroom treatment we get from the media. If an airplane were designed with the information quality of the media, then it'd never get off the ground which, net, would be a good thing.
My concern is not partisanship but stupidity.
As voting citizens, we need solid information. With solid information, there's no way we'd be in the mess of The Great Recession or two wars each 10 years old.
I feel that is a really bad example. I was an adult at the time and it was really clear back at the time that the Iraqi wmd was made up allegations, or at least the evidence we got to see was not worth anything.
As someone fairly disassociated from the US armed forces, I wonder how much impact the confirmation that all WMD-related rationale for the Iraq war was fabricated had on troop morale and faith in stated goals.
I don't know why I wrote all of that. Maybe just to say that I'm sorry for my part in all of this bullshit.
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