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[...] speak for myself; but can only encourage those reading this to do as John McCain has done; do as Scott suggests; do as decent Americans do and put country first: Respect the electoral process and congratulate [...]

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@Larry Weisenthal:

the WMD — the centerpiece of the justification presented to the UN and to us American citizens

Colin Powell is the one who unilaterally placed heavy emphasis on the WMD angle in his speech to the UN General Assembly; something Rumsfeld and Powell and Bush were not on board with doing.

There would have been nothing but nothing which would have shut up the critics — at home and around the world — than the verification that the WMD

~~~

— actually did exist and were a potential threat to American security.

Yes, but why does the absence of WMD STOCKPILES invalidate the justification(s) for war?

All available evidence and history of behavior and rhetoric from Saddam himself, pointed to him as a wmd threat.

In point of fact, I paid attention to every single time that the President addressed this issue. If memory serves, he did this — specifically — four different times.

Each time, he was quite specific.

“We were wrong.”

“Bad intelligence.”

“Bad intelligence.”

“We were wrong.”

It’s too late at night for me to look these up myself. Please find the relevant quotes. Accuracy and context are important. (I hope you looked over my MtP Cheney interviews in the link to my post I provided; you didn’t follow up with that discussion).

I’ll be willing to consider the possibility that the WMD of which Colin Powell spoke did, indeed, exist, when the 43rd President of the USA tells me that they did, indeed, exist.

But, then, I’ll be waiting for him to explain to me why he told us that they did not, indeed, exist — on four separate occasions.

The reasoning for the removal of Saddam has been largely obfuscated by the media and by poor communication on the part of the Administration itself.

The problem here, is in the belief that not finding wmds invalidated the reasoning behind war, as well as the dangers of leaving Saddam in power. And it simplifies what was found in post-war Iraq by the Iraq Survey Group: intention and capability.

You ignore how Saddam relates to the war on terror.

What would the world look like today, had we not removed him from the equation?

I’d type more, but I’m going to bed.

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Actually, I’ve always listened to George W Bush, as regards the WMD.

President Bush had every motivation to tell the world that Saddam’s notorious weapons really did exist. There was a time, not so very long ago, when the safety of our soldiers and marines were dependent upon the credibility of The Mission. There would have been nothing but nothing which would have shut up the critics — at home and around the world — than the verification that the WMD — the centerpiece of the justification presented to the UN and to us American citizens — actually did exist and were a potential threat to American security.

In point of fact, I paid attention to every single time that the President addressed this issue. If memory serves, he did this — specifically — four different times.

Each time, he was quite specific.

“We were wrong.”

“Bad intelligence.”

“Bad intelligence.”

“We were wrong.”

I’ll be willing to consider the possibility that the WMD of which Colin Powell spoke did, indeed, exist, when the 43rd President of the USA tells me that they did, indeed, exist.

But, then, I’ll be waiting for him to explain to me why he told us that they did not, indeed, exist — on four separate occasions.

- Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach

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[...] speak for myself; but can only encourage those reading this to do as John McCain has done; do as Scott suggests; do as decent Americans do and put country first: Respect the electoral process and congratulate [...]

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Larry, if you think that what Saddam told George Piro after his capture is proof that the existence of WMDs and/or programmes is “thoroughly discredited”, well… just don’t know what to say to you.

Obviously you read none of my links to UNMOVIC quarterly reports that document Saddam’s proscribed missiles that he acquired *after* 1998 were abandoned in a Netherlands junk yard. You put George Piro’s account of jailed Saddam’s repeated words as gospel above that of Georges Sada’s… a man who was in Saddam’s AF for years. And he most certainly tells the world what happened to the WMDs in his book, Saddam’s Secrets. Sada’s brother (in-law?) is Syria’s president. And he has spent some time trying to get him to come clean on Syria’s receipt of many of Saddam’s programme materials.

You also ignore the Iraqis, leading the ISG (as in the Iraq Survey Group… not the bozos called the Iraq Study group) to four underground bunkers that are supposed to store WMDs. Bunkers they had neither the manpower nor capability to pursue exploring.

Mr. Gaubatz would not disclose the names of his Iraqi sources, but he said they were “highly credible” by his supervisors. He said some of them were members of the new government and others are now in America. “The four sites were corroborated with more than one source. The sources were deemed highly credible due to access and knowledge of the sites. Many of these sources and ourselves put their lives on the line to assist in identifying WMD. The sources would continuously ask us when the inspectors were going to come to the sites with heavy equipment to uncover the WMD,” he said.

Mr. Gaubatz said each site he visited had similar characteristics. “Everything was buried and under water. They would drain canals and parts of the rivers. They would build tunnels underneath and they would let the water come back in,” he said. But the water would only be allowed back into the tunnels after concrete walls were installed sealing off the secret caches of unconventional arms, Mr. Gaubatz said. He added that the tunnels in all four sites were wide enough for tractors. One of the giveaways, he said, was that homes near the sites were equipped with gas masks and other items to protect against a chemical weapons attack.

As for Rummie…. let me remind you of the conversation….

Wordsmith:Larry,

Did you know that Rumsfeld warned that not finding wmd stockpiles might be a distinct possibility?

You: Wordsmith; no, I didn’t realize that Rumsfeld warned that WMD might not be found. Do you have a citation?

Rumsfeld quote: And I’m — we never believed that we’d just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. Saddam Hussein was, and entire his regime, learned to live with U.N. inspections. They fashioned their arrangements and their — how they did things and where they did things so that they could nonetheless persuade inspectors that they didn’t have them. And the intelligence shows that they were systematically trying to prevent the inspectors from finding them. We’re going to find what we find as a result of talking to people, I believe, not simply by going to some site and hoping to discover it.

And you say thanks, but Rummy seems to me to be referring to the possibility that we might not find the WMD which certainly were (in Rummy’s view) there, because they might be hidden or dispersed, not because they did not exist in the first place, in the form represented by Powell in his UN presentation.

Wordsmith did not say the WMD didn’t exist in the first place. And neither did Rummie. That wasn’t the gist of the conversation.

Lastly, INRE the fact that the gullible American believes the Iraq and 911 are linked, which you blame on the WH.

Personally, I blame it on the media. It was the media’s 24/7 parroting of such a lie that embedded that into the minds of too many. ‘Tisn’t my fault that the world so easily falls prey to a western media with… as we have clearly seen this election season… an agenda that they no longer try to conceal.

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@Larry Weisenthal:

I think it’s very clear that the idea that Saddam shipped the phantom WMD off somewhere for “safe keeping” was fanciful on its face and, in any event, thoroughly discredited.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/24/60minutes/main3749494.shtml

You might be interested in checking out Scott’s series of posts:

Did Saddam’s WMD Go to Syria? Part I

Did Saddam’s WMD Go to Syria? Part II

Did Saddam’s WMD Go to Syria? Part III

Did Saddam’s WMD Go To Syria? Part IV

Did Saddams WMD Go to Syria? Part V

U.S. official: Iraqis told me WMDs sent to Syria

I simply keep an open mind on this issue, as unresolved.

Bush never said that Saddam was complicit in 9/11. But what he did, in the run up to war, is never once talk about Saddam and not juxtapose “9/11″ in the speech at least a half dozen times. It is a fact that, on the eve of the invasion, polls showed that 70% of Americans believed that Saddam was complicit in 9/11 — a misunderstanding which persisted for more than three years thereafter. This was a misunderstanding which I personally felt was intentionally fostered by the Administration.

Larry, you might be interested to check out my post on the matter. You might not agree with my argument and what I concluded, but I do bring up interesting points of contention.

It is perpexing to me, why on earth there is any confusion regarding Iraq and 9/11 being made in the same breath (other than lack of repeated communication and clarity on the part of the Administration). They are tied together in the war that President Bush stated early on, which was more than simply using the law-enforcement approach to going after only those directly responsible for 9/11.

The Administration’s mentality wasn’t to seek revenge; it was asking how best to safeguard the U.S. from the next terror attack.

In regards to the Rumsfeld quote, I actually was referring to the “Parade of Horribles” memo Rumsfeld drew up, detailing everything he could think of that could possibly go wrong- a worst-case scenario list. It appears in Feith’s book, War and Decision. It’s in my car at the moment, and I’m too lazy to step out and go grab it. But essentially, this link looks to provide the relevant excerpt:

The ‘Parade of Horribles’

Rumsfeld resolved to give the President a comprehensive list of possible calamities in the event of military action against Iraq. The decision on war was pending, and Rumsfeld, of course, would be associated with it. Weighing risks had naturally been part of the policy-making and planning processes on Iraq all along, but Rumsfeld thought it would be valuable to review all together the major problems we could anticipate, to get them in writing and air them with the President and the National Security Council— well before irrevocable decisions were made. No one asked him to do this, but an exercise of this kind was an important check on the assumptions underlying our planning (1).

Rumsfeld had shown me a version of this list back in August, and I had given him some written comments in response. Now, in mid-October, Rumsfeld called a “drop everything” meeting with Wolfowitz, Myers, Pace, and me. As we sat down at his office conference table, Rumsfeld handed each of us the draft of his list of possible problems and disasters, which had been substantially revised since the August version. Highlighting roughly twenty items, it made for grim reading.

After letting the four of us absorb it for a minute or two, the Secretary asked us to sharpen the list, add to it, or otherwise improve it. We spent more than two hours in intense discussion reworking the paper. To relieve some of the tension inherent in the task, I began referring to the memo as the “Parade of Horribles.” By the time we finished with our revisions, it had grown by another ten items or so.

The ultimate version of the Parade of Horribles memo was dated October 15, 2002. Its key political warnings can be summarized as follows:

• The United States might fail to win support from the United Nations and from important other countries, which could make it harder to get international cooperation on Iraq and other issues in the future. We might fail here by not properly answering the question: If the United States preempts in one country, will it do so in other countries, too?

• The war could trigger problems throughout the region: It could widen into an Arab-Israeli war; Syria and Iran could help our enemies in Iraq; Turkey could intervene on its own; friendly governments in the region could become destabilized.

• The United States could become so absorbed in its Iraq effort that we pay inadequate attention to other serious problems—including other proliferation and terrorism problems. Other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere might try to exploit our preoccupation to do things harmful to us and our friends.

• The war could cause more harm and entail greater costs than expected, including possibly a disruption in oil supplies to world markets.

• Post-Saddam stabilization and reconstruction efforts by the United States could take not two to four years, but eight to ten years, absorbing U.S. leadership, military, and financial resources.

• Terrorist networks could improve their recruiting and fundraising as a result of our being depicted as anti-Muslim.

• Iraq could experience ethnic strife among Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia.

Most of these dangers, Rumsfeld noted, would become more likely and more severe with a longer war, underlining the tactical importance of speed and surprise (2). This was one of the factors arguing for a smaller force.

In addition, the memo included these three notable items:

• “US could fail to find WMD on the ground in Iraq and be unpersuasive to the world.”

• “World reaction against preemption or ‘anticipatory self-defense’ could inhibit US ability to engage [in cooperation with other countries] in the future.”

• “US could fail to manage post-Saddam Hussein Iraq successfully, with the result that it could fracture into two or three pieces, to the detriment of the Middle East….”

This was a serious and disturbing memo. The concerns it listed included military, diplomatic, and economic matters. The list was more wide-ranging and hard-hitting than any warning I saw from State or the CIA— even though their leaders are widely viewed as the Administration’s voices of caution on the war. Even so, this memo did not anticipate postregime violence of the type that we have encountered in the insurgency—an effort organized, financed, and directed largely by former Baathist officials, in strategic alliance with al Qaida fighters and other foreign “holy warriors.”

Rumsfeld distributed the Parade of Horribles memo at a National Security Council meeting and discussed the items one by one. (That meeting was “principals only”—I was not present.)

One of the standard accusations made against the Pentagon’s leadership (and other Administration officials who supported the President’s war policy) was that we “cherry-picked” intelligence. The term implies that we tried to manipulate the President by highlighting bits of information that argued for war while obscuring or hiding other material. The fact is that Pentagon officials were not in a position to cherry-pick. We did not control the flow of intelligence to the President; he received it daily, directly, and voluminously from the CIA.

But, more important, Rumsfeld and his team did not operate that way. The Parade of Horribles memo was typical of how we viewed our responsibility to advise the President. Had we worried that our views required protection from inconvenient facts, we would not have embraced those views in the first place. Our strategy in interagency debates was to put forward our own ideas together with countervailing thoughts. We often heard the comment that we set out the case against our own ideas more compellingly than our opponents did. We figured if we showed how our analysis withstood strong criticism, we could be more effective—not to mention more honorable—than if we tried to keep the President in the dark about relevant facts or analyses. Our approach, as reflected in this important memo, was precisely the reverse of cherry-picking.

Beyond its influence on the rest of the Administration, the work on this list helped guide our own Iraq planning efforts. For example, when the Joint Staff briefed the Principals Committee two months before the war, its presentation of “Some Potential Post-War Challenges” mapped more than a dozen issues of concern, many of them rooted in Rumsfeld’s memo. In particular, the list of dangers sharpened our appreciation of the value of tactical surprise and of maximizing the speed of major combat operations. A number of the potential calamities—humanitarian crises, Saddam’s destruction of Iraq’s oil fields, regional instability, and terrorism by Iraqi agents against the United States, for example—were likelier to happen, and to be more severe, if the fighting to overthrow Saddam were prolonged.

The fact that we anticipated various problems, of course, did not mean the Defense Department or the Administration could avert them all. Even the best planning cannot ensure a problem-free war. Nevertheless, it’s fair to ask whether the department and the Administration took the exercise seriously enough and performed all the practical follow-up work that was called for. This is a subject that deserves comprehensive review, building on the several “lessons learned” studies that have already been done by the Joint Staff, the Joint Forces Command, and other military organizations.

(1) Rumsfeld noted at the end of the memo that it would have been possible, of course, to write a similar memo listing the dangers involved in leaving Saddam in power.

(2) Speed and surprise did indeed prove important: Our troops found that Iraq’s bridges and oil fields had been prepared for demolition—but the wiring had fortunately not been completed.

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Mata and Stix:

Bush never said that Saddam was complicit in 9/11. But what he did, in the run up to war, is never once talk about Saddam and not juxtapose “9/11″ in the speech at least a half dozen times. It is a fact that, on the eve of the invasion, polls showed that 70% of Americans believed that Saddam was complicit in 9/11 — a misunderstanding which persisted for more than three years thereafter. This was a misunderstanding which I personally felt was intentionally fostered by the Administration.

With regard to the Rumsfeld quote, thanks, but Rummy seems to me to be referring to the possibility that we might not find the WMD which certainly were (in Rummy’s view) there, because they might be hidden or dispersed, not because they did not exist in the first place, in the form represented by Powell in his UN presentation.

I think it’s very clear that the idea that Saddam shipped the phantom WMD off somewhere for “safe keeping” was fanciful on its face and, in any event, thoroughly discredited.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/24/60minutes/main3749494.shtml

<<<>>

- Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA

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Larry, the comment Wordsmith is likely referring to is from an interview of Fox News Sunday with then anchor Tony Snow…. who I sorely miss. This was May 4th, just weeks after the US Coalition entered Baghdad.

Secretary Rumsfeld, one of the things President Bush has been saying is that a number of key people in American jurisdiction and who have been apprehended by coalition forces are lying about weapons of mass destruction. You’ve got Tariq Aziz. You have the former head of the weapons development program in Iraq. You have the former spokesman for the weapons development program. They all say that there are no weapons of mass destruction. Why are you confident that they’re lying?

RUMSFELD: Well, we have had over the period of time, the intelligence community has, the Central Intelligence Agency, a good deal of intelligence information which, when you put it all together, it makes a very persuasive case. And I’m — we never believed that we’d just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. Saddam Hussein was, and entire his regime, learned to live with U.N. inspections. They fashioned their arrangements and their — how they did things and where they did things so that they could nonetheless persuade inspectors that they didn’t have them. And the intelligence shows that they were systematically trying to prevent the inspectors from finding them. We’re going to find what we find as a result of talking to people, I believe, not simply by going to some site and hoping to discover it.

The reason Rummie said this is obvious… Saddam had ample warning. And unless you believe he was smuggling the palace patio furniture in conveys to sundry places, the “smoking gun” of WMD’s was never likely to be found intact.

I posted quite a bit back on my own shared blog, Sea2Sea on this. Here’s a few links to those posts that provide many hotlinks to other docs.

Not so fast on that “no WMDs” claim…. 11/20/07

Getting to the truth of WMDs, Mar 11, 2006

MSM and WH ignore new WMD evidence, 2/28/06

Bush was Right per UNSCOM member, 2-22-06

Saddam’s WMD Stashes Underground, 2/8/06

UN and World Ignore proof of WMDs, 11/21/05

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@Larry Weisenthal: As you said with @Wordsmith: show me proof that Bush said this. I do not remember him ever saying Iraq had anything to do with 9/11.

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