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So it was based on a lie afterall |
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Written by Byron Williams
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Wednesday, 23 February 2011 |
 What was arguably the worst foreign policy decision in U.S. history was indeed based on a lie. An architect of this skullduggery has now substantiated that news.
Last week, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, the defector who had convinced the George W. Bush administration that Iraq had a secret biological weapons program, admitted to the U.K. Guardian that he fabricated his stories.
Why is this important almost eight years after the invasion? Regardless of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's recently published revisionist history memoir, on April 10, 2003, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer stated that weapons of mass destruction, "was what this war was about."
Bush apologists and true believers are no doubt crafting boilerplate talking points to remind me that the Clinton administration had the same intelligence. The difference being the Bush administration actually engaged in a policy that was abhorrent to American values -- the high cost of pre-emption.
Iraq, as a policy, has cost more than $750 billion to date -- largely on borrowed dollars, void of a dedicated line-item in the federal budget, leading to the death of roughly 4,400 U.S. soldiers and 100,000 Iraqis, and tens of thousands of debilitating injuries -- physical and mental -- that occurred because of deception.
Janabi, who U.S. intelligence gave the code name Curveball, manufactured details about mobile bioweapons and secret factories to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime from which he fled in 1995.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell used many of those claims in a speech to the United Nation, to sell the world about the nature of the Iraqi threat in the aftermath of 9/11.
I found it tragically amusing that some would recently opine that Bush deserves some credit for the path toward democracy that Egypt now treads.
How quickly they forget the artisans of the American Revolution were Americans; the artisans of the French Revolution were French, not so for "Operation Iraqi Freedom." That dubious honor was left to the valor of American soldiers.
Moreover, Janabi brazenly displays little remorse for his mendacity. "Believe me," Janabi said, "there was no other way to bring about freedom to Iraq. There were no other possibilities."
I can think of another possibility, it's called self-determination.
How is it that the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq is allowed to stand with competing narratives to explain its genesis?
Americans have displayed more angst that health care legislation passed last year than about the Iraq war.
What was once dismissed as the musing of liberal conspiracy theorists opposed to all things related to Bush now possesses a momentum to answer questions definitively about the pre-emptive invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Too bad there does not appear to be a shared momentum on Capitol Hill or the White House. When has conducting an investigation to ascertain the truth been bad for America?
We don't need witch hunts, political grandstanding or revenge; but we do need the truth. President Barack Obama has repeatedly expressed his desire to look forward on Iraq, but the truth about Iraq lies behind the president.
Pre-emption assumes that one has information on which to act that is superior to a hunch, sixth sense or gut feeling.
In response to Janabi, Powell recently stated:
"The question should be put to the CIA and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) as to why this wasn't known before the false information was put into (a key intelligence estimate) sent to Congress, the president's State of the Union address and my Feb. 5 presentation to the U.N."
But in rare bipartisan unity, Democrats and Republicans appear willing to relegate Iraq to the basement of American antiquity.
Given the cyclical nature of politics, don't we at least owe it to posterity to get answers so they don't risk repeating the same mistakes? After all, they're the ones who literally will pay for the malfeasance in Iraq.
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