George Bush thought Saddam Hussein (a) was hiding WMDs and (b) had ties to al Qaeda. An FBI agent who interrogated the former Iraqi dictator for seven months elicited information suggesting that Bush was wrong on both counts.
If you are a standard emotional left-wing surface-scratcher, you actually believe that George Bush lied about these issues because (a) it is not possible for a president to be wrong and (b) he needed some justification to invade Iraq in order to serve corporate interests (or fulfill a Christian prophecy or whatever). But the truth is a lot more interesting than that, and we’ve known the truth for a long time. In case you don’t know, the truth is that Saddam Hussein lied about his WMDs. That is, he deliberately deceived the world into thinking that his WMD program was still intact, and he had a very good reason for doing so. In an interview with 60-Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, the FBI’s chief Saddam interrogator (George Piro) explained this old news:
“And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?” Pelley asks.
“He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s. And those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq,” Piro says.
“So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk, why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?” Pelley asks.
“It was very important for him to project that because that was what kept him, in his mind, in power. That capability kept the Iranians away. It kept them from reinvading Iraq,” Piro says.
Before his wars with America, Saddam had fought a ruinous eight year war with Iran and it was Iran he still feared the most.
“He believed that he couldn’t survive without the perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?” Pelley asks.
“Absolutely,” Piro says.
All of this was documented long ago by the Iraq Survey Group (as I discussed here), but you may be hearing this news for the first time. If so, you really need to think through the implications. Like a lot of Americans, you may think that, in retrospect, George Bush should have allowed the UN inspectors to continue their work in Iraq instead of rushing to war. After all, even though Saddam Hussein was not being fully cooperative (which was the do-or-die condition set forth by George Bush), UN inspectors indicated that they were making progress anyway. That being the case, why not let the inspection process continue for a while? Perhaps the inspectors would have eventually concluded with a high degree of confidence that Iraq was free of WMDs, in which case we could have been spared this unnecessary war.
Much, much more follows…
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