Letters to the Editor

• An enjoyable well written but highly flawed article

  [Read the article: What George Tenet really knew about Iraq]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  isn't it interesting the kind of cast and crew from ally intelligences that just happened to be hanging around on Sept the 11 in Washington

  David Manning, Richard Dearlove and Eliza Manningham-Buller were all in NY on 9/11 as indeed famously was Mahmood Ahmad the now ex-head of the CIA who was also there

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieutenant_General_Mahmoud_Ahmad

  Read that entry it's salutary with regards to Ahmad and Mohammed Atta.

  Thomas says Blix thinks that Saddam was trying to bluff Iran about WMD, but instead ended up deceiving the US. This claim is absurd, we even have both Powell and Rice saying in Feb and July 2001 that 'Saddam is no threat'

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KudQoNR4J8

  Saddam was old news to very nearly the entire world except Cheney, the neocons and the people behind PNAC who were obsessed with toppling him for a very complex mix of motives, one of which was oil.

  To say that the US themsevles were deceived by Saddam ignores the swathes of evidence about Cheney's coterie consisting of Rumsfeld, wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Lutti et al, the Office of special plans, stove-piping...come on, how could these not make it into this article?

  The exasperation of Cheney with long-winded routes is not I believe because of some ticking clock of danger, but rather because, now they had a golden opportunity to 'fit up' an old enemy for their own nasty motives, but crucially to a democratic timeline, and obviously a military choice of the best month to go in (too hot and it will be harder) . Rove is behind this, he wanted them to be in Iraq and covered in garlands and adoring masses so that the republicans could turn '04 into a slam dunk. The Bush administration literally had no domestic agenda and Rove was planning his big realignment to put the Republicans in power permanently (for the historically minded this has unsavoury echoes).

  However perfidious the British/US axis was they certainly believed that it would be easy to topple Saddam and that they would be received as heroes, otherwise their haste would simply be irrational. They may be horribly flawed people but there was method in their madness. I don't believe that either army was worried about being attacked with WMD, they weren't in the first gulf war, and in any case the British didn't even have enough bullet-proof vests. Armies are tools of empire, you have to praise them to the skies in public as you stiff them privately. How long did it take for the MSM to break the walter reed scandal? 2 years later than Salon.

  The Democrats went along with all this nonsense because they too thought that the US would prevail and easily, so they didn't want to be seen to oppose the most successful 'freedom' operation of modern times. Saddam was a sadist and a psycho, and as a citizen of Iraq you'd welcome anyone to help you get him off your back.

  Saddam wrong-footing the English plan to set him up, is what necessitated the endless months of charade with the UK/US axis pretending and there can be no other word, that it was WMD that was their principal concern and if things weren't so serious after 9/11 we wouldn't be being in such a haste, 'come on guys give us a break, we're trying to protect the free world' was the general vibe. I recall clearly at the 11th hour Jack Straw replying to the question "admit that you've already decided to go to war" with "not at all, right now it's 70/30 against if Saddam co-operates"

  It was a high risk game, I think they thought they would find some cache of WMD to trumpet to the world, but nothing significant, then everyone would forget all the alarmism because, hell we've taken a broken country and fixed it. If only.

  Nobody in the article comes out of this looking good, since they are all world class liars. They are all human at the end of the day, they were caught in a maelstrom of their own making, they heaped good lie onto bad thinking that all would come out roses. Since it so patently hasn't, they can't bring themselves to say, "yes we lied but we thought everyone would win, the Iraqi people and our corporations' etc..etc.. so when they put pen to paper, expect obfuscaion and selective recall because the intuitve truth that the Americans did it for oil and commerce and regional domination with a side benefit of ridding Iraqis of Saddam and installing some captilatistic neoliberal puppet is something they can never bring themselves to admit. To be fair to Tenet I don't think he's part of this cabal to get at Iraq, he was mesmerised by the projected power of the swaggering Bush administration and he simply caved in. An authentic mea culpa on his part would probably have something about the Milgram experiments were people cave in to authority even when being asked to go against their own sounder instincts.

  Now they have Iran (another oil-rich country) in their sights, and the threat that Iran poses to the world with its centrifuges is just Iraq redux.

  That they seem to be getting away with it again is truly depressing.

  we are lied to endlessly for a very simple reason.

  it is considered bad form to be open about one's low motive, so human beings will go to any length to get what they actually want whilst trying to maintain the fiction to others and often themselves that they are good people doing the right thing. Ironically only a psycho like Saddam used to give speeches saying exactly what he thought prior to going on murderous sprees

  we on the other hand are too civilized for that, and the whole spectacle of 'democracy', the MSM and books like Tenets are all part of the commercial mix of our intellectually bankrupt and honour-free public life.

  Permalink Monday, July 2, 2007 04:53 AM