I took America to war in Iraq. It was all me.
OK, I had some help from a duplicitous vice president, Dick Cheney. Then there was George W. Bush, a gullible president who could barely locate Iraq on a map and who wanted to avenge his father and enrich his friends in the oil business. And don’t forget the neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon who fed cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, to reporters like me.
None of these assertions happens to be true, though all were published and continue to have believers. This is not how wars come about, and it is surely not how the war in Iraq occurred. Nor is it what I did as a reporter for the New York Times. These false narratives deserve, at last, to be retired.
Hat tip: Daily Kos
Being part of the initial invasion of Iraq, our chemical warfare detectors were constantly alarming. Occasionally, they would alarm during a firefight. It wasn’t because our sensors were set to the most sensitive level. We assumed they were detecting something. A few months later, we learned a chemical stockpile had been buried in an area, we had passed through, many years earlier. Some have argued, here and elsewhere, these “old” agents didn’t pose a danger. More recently, it’s been determined Iraqi chemical weapons (GB and VX) had a higher purity level than previously assumed. To those who doubt WMDs in Iraq, “old, decaying” chemical agents are just as dangerous as newly prepared agents. Saddam could have easily ordered the firing of his “old, decaying” weapons. It was surprising he didn’t.
@David: The left will keep repeating the “Bush lied and people died” crap because they are braindead. I’ve yet to see one answer ‘yes’ when asked if they would be willing to expose themselves to those “nonexistent” or “old” chemical agents. My former training NCO now works with someone who served with two individuals who died from exposure to those “old”/”nonexistent” chemical agents. The building we set up shop in on OIF 1 had chemical mortar rounds in the basement. The building was a clinic at LSAA. My XO from my second deployment died from brain cancer compliments of being exposed to buried uranium near the Iranian border on OIF 1. A number of Soldiers from his unit were diagnosed with health problems resulting from the exposure to low levels of radiation while housed at a munitions dump.
As for no ties to AQ, as soon as we hit the ground the Iraqi’s who were friendly to us began pointing out who were Saddam loyalists and who were AQ. Obviously they knew the difference since they knew who lived there and who didn’t. How did AQ get there so fast? I don’t recall them rolling north with us during the invasion, how about you?
My biggest complaint about Bush’s handling of the war was that he didn’t hit back anywhere hard enough against the leftist liars. Obviously they wanted to keep quiet about all the WMD that was discovered there to avoid a mad dash there by terrorists to get their hands on it, but nonetheless, he let the left define the argument.
At least you had a chemical warfare detector.
I had a friend who did laser sighting of targets from the ground during the 1st Bush war in Iraq.
He had been special forces and spoke Arabic and was swarthy, so he could pass as a native there on the ground.
After he came home he was sick for the rest of his life.
He stoically covered it up as best he could most of the time.
But at one point he showed up for a work get together and got so weak a big guy had to carry him to the work nurse.
He had the same kind of symptoms those Viet Nam vets who got exposed to agent orange had.
He died of multiple organ failure only a few years after I met him, maybe 10 years after his exposure.
Absolutely Saddam had and used chemicals against his own people, and used them domestically in his own streets during the 1st Bush action.
BTW, here’s a good article (but with no actual proof) that all the top leaders of ISIS are Saddam’s old Baathist leaders. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/the-hidden-hand-behind-the-islamic-state-militants-saddam-husseins/2015/04/04/aa97676c-cc32-11e4-8730-4f473416e759_story.html
I suppose one of the myths is that Iraq is in such better shape now than before the invasion/occupation?
The group that killed the most Americans was the Mahdi Army Sadr’s militia
Guess who runs Iraq now?
@Nanny G:
Another leftist myth destroyed- that Saddam wasn’t religious and would never get in bed with fundamentalists. Robison exposed this fallacy in his book as well. His source? Captured Iraqi intel documents.
There were weapons of mass destructon there. It’s not a secret. Only lefties with an agenda would say otherwise.
Iraqis who I met just shook their heads at the statements of liberals who continued to deny WMD in Iraq. A frequent statement was “Saddam was himself a WMD!”.