World Magazine Blog

This kind of thing happens (Poland's criticism) when you don't pay up to your Coalition of the Billing.

Definitely we should be kinder to our allies, but acting like they were mislead is just idiotic: Everyone was mislead by poor intel.

It is difficult to now act like we are surprised by the poor quality of the intelligence when it was decried as shoddy intelligence from the outset.

Who honestly thought there were significant stockpiles of WMD to be found?

I am pro-war and I was under no such illusion.

"Who honestly thought there were significant stockpiles of WMD to be found?"

Ummm... EVERYONE, from Madeline Albright, to the UN, to President Clinton, to John Kerry, to the intelligence agencies of everyone on the planet. Including, I strongly suspect, you. There was no one credible on the planet who was saying there were no WMDs to be found, there wasnt anyone that thought we would not discover stockpiles of them. Not a single sane person thought otherwise. Taking the position now with 20/20 hindsight and acting as if it was obvious is just deeply absurd.

Which begs the question:
How sure are we, that there were no WMDs?

No need for 20/20 hindsight, CT, a lot of very sane people had sincere doubts about the "intelligence" Bush was pushing out, including many people in the intelligence community.

I wonder what all those big protests were about...

The history rewriting is pathetically transparent.

That's right, Fyne. They could be in Syria now.

We've had a year of unfettered access to everything in Iraq. Hussein was hiding in a hole.

Let it go, folks.

"We've had a year of unfettered access to everything in Iraq."

That's a lie.

That's not exactly true, the war started today a year ago, and we didn't actually take control for a while. Further, some areas have been difficult to go into and deal with due to the intensity of terrorist activity.

Remember, searching a country the size of Iraq is going to take time, I still suspect we'll find more than we have, and we've found stuff already. There were traces of poisonous gasses in the Euphrates river early in the war (dumped there to dispose of them). We've found weapons banned by the UN and the cease fire agreement. We've found documentation and gotten testimony of scientists who were told to store seed quantities of biological weapons in freezers. What we have NOT found are huge piles of weapons and nukes, which apparently is all the left cares about.

"No need for 20/20 hindsight, CT, a lot of very sane people had sincere doubts about the "intelligence" Bush was pushing out, including many people in the intelligence community."

List a few, with pertinent quotes, dated BEFORE the war. And the protests weren't "there are no WMDs" they were "we shouldn't go to war because a Republican is in charge," be honest now. They never said "we shouldn't go to war because Iraq has no WMDs" they said "we shouldn't go to war for oil" or other idiotic stuff.

It's tough for a hyperpower like the US to have real allies. It's obvious that we don't need them. We can do what we want with or without their support, and our allies know it. Actually, I suspect that sometimes they get in our way, like the Canadians tragically killed in Afghanistan. Allies would tend to envy our overwhelming power and influence. Plus there is the other side of the underdog coin - everyone hates Goliath. Furthermore, unlike Goliath, we have traditionally used our power with restraint. We generally don’t compel other nations to support us. Compare our recent treatment of Turkey to the Soviet Union’s treatment of Hungary in 1956.

Add to this the tendency for world stability and peace to benefit us more than it benefits any other nation. We have the most at stake economically, and we are inevitably drawn into or otherwise affected by every conflict. It’s often to other nations’ global advantage to ferment international strife and discord, e.g. France’s maneuvers with China. Who would have to fix each conflict? Not the EU and not China. And we would still end up looking like the bad guys, as we did in Beirut in 1983.

To be a hyperpower is to be virtually alone. They won’t love us like they loved Wilson in 1919 Paris. Wake up! We’re not in the twentieth century anymore. Personally, I’d rather have two real allies who genuinely support our values than fifty who are just in it for the spoils, such as Japan and Italy in WWI.

So it is reasonable to think that after a year is not enough to find something significant? It is not like we are talking about an old woman's watercolor paintings, these WMD take quite a bit of manufacturing capacity and weird chemicals they have to make or get from somewhere.

As far as criticism of the WMD intelligence: What about the inspectors who were in Iraq who consistently found nothing (except some iffy rockets) who were sent on wild goose chases by American intelligence sources ("bio-chemical weapons-making trucks" or "chemical-spraying drones")?
For a long time Blix did his job under tremendous pressure, absolutely savaged by hawks when he said he could find nothing and the hawks have a year and what do they find? Nothing.
How about conflicting US/UK intelligent on the Iraq-alQaeda link?

The criticism was there and it was loud and constant.

My pro-war stance was that the WMD didn't matter, it was about the humanitarian situation, but the vast majority of hawks bought the WMD bunk hook-line-and-sinker and want to now act like (1) the fact that we've found NOTHING SIGNIFICANT doesn't matter and (2) everyone thought there were WMD. Both of those are ridiculous.

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