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June 04, 2004
Why Tenet Did Not Resign
Still on the road so let me make a few brief notes to be followed later with more detailed analysis.
I don't presume to know why Tenet resigned now and what internal political balance of forces caused it to happen the way it did happen. But here's what does seem clear to me: he did not resign because of "Intelligence Failures" leading up to the invasion of Iraq. We did not invade Iraq because of faulty intelligence -- almost all available credible intelligence and evidence at the time had already shown what newspapers now are coming around to admitting is the case.
What about WMD reports and "intelligence failures"?
It was pretty obvious at the time, and I stress at the time in 2002 and 2003, that Iraq's WMD stocks were either very little to none and certainly had no reliable delivery mechanisms and that Saddam Hussein had no appetite or wish for taking on the United States.
It was also pretty clear that the United Nations and other inspections had uncovered most of what Iraq had developed. It was also clear that Saddam Hussein posed little threat to anyone besides the people of Iraq -- he had become a disarmed, boxed-in, power-hungry tyrant in a broken country.
The "Intelligence Failure" meme seems to be picked up by the media to help cover up the fact that they either ignored or dismissed many, many analysts who had been pointing out that the United States had decided to invade Iraq, come hell of high water, sometime in 2002. In fact, the United States government torpedoed attempts to address any possible concern the world community could possibly, possibly raise with regards to the specific threat posed by Saddam Hussein's government.
And, worse yet, most of these attempts were documented in real time. This list of documented pattern of obstruction and deceipt is long. It includes everything from the unprecedented pre-invasion dismissal of Jose Bustani, who was working towards persuading Saddam Hussein to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention and thus starting unannounced chemical weapons inspections on Iraq to using UNSCOM for illegal spying and thus destroying its mandate and legitemacy and to the increased bombing of Iraqi air defenses in Fall of 2002 as a pre-invasion prepatory measure -- to say nothing of the obviously false claims of nuclear weapons capabilities that Iraq had supposedly achieved.
As I said, I'm on the road so I will not spend time formatting the links and providing more detail now but check out the following articles and press releases from 2002, 2003 and 2004.
http://www.empirenotes.org/intelligence.html
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/04/16/a-war-against-the-peacemaker/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/10/08/thwart-mode/
http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR031803.htm
http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR020304.htm
http://www.accuracy.org/bush/
http://www.accuracy.org/2003/
All this "we didn't know," "CIA misled us," "Chalabi fooled us," "Iranians roped us in," and "it was faulty intelligence" rhetoric is the real fraud. They wanted to invade Iraq really badly and proceeded to destroy all obstacles in that path even if it meant increasing the real risks of WMD proliferation and wider dispersal and recruitment sources for radical Islamist terrorist networks.
Posted by zeynep at June 4, 2004 01:45 PM
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