The Achilles Trap: how the US fatally failed to read Saddam
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Edit: This might be what I'm remembering...
""" On 5 February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the UN to present evidence that Iraq was hiding unconventional weapons. However, despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service and the British Secret Intelligence Service that the source was untrustworthy, Powell's presentation included information based on the claims of Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed "Curveball", an Iraqi emigrant living in Germany who also later admitted that his claims had been false.[80] """
The House Democrats still had a majority that voted against. (61%)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...
Aside from Lieberman, who had already been a VP nominee, all of these Senators were rewarded by the Democratic party after the debacle. They failed upward.
The US decimated Iraq (literally) because Bush wanted to put thousands of angry teenagers and 20-somethings onto a battlefield for revenge for 9/11 when it was the Saudis all along.
All the "intelligence" after that was reverse engineered to make that invasion and war happen.
Agreed. Any article about "Desert Storm" which does not mention the Project for the New American Century [0], and the Office of Special Plans [1] is a greatly lacking piece of writing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
They also knew they didn’t have WMD. Who would attack a county that could deliver WMD in 15 minutes or whatever that ludicrous claim was. Why do you think no-one’s talking about invading North Korea?
This is the reasoning that they openly gave for invading Iraq. Taking it as the "history" is just accepting propaganda. The US knew full well that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. We immediately knew who was responsible, and in the aftermath went out of our way to protect our relationship with Saudi Arabia and to defend them to the US public.
Also, countries don't do things out of "revenge," that's a soap opera view of international politics. Administrations might take advantage of mean girl style narratives in order to sell something they want to do to parts of the public, but you can't mistake emotional propaganda for material causes.
They invaded cause they wanted to invade.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/movie-plot-t...
It is a tale of mutual misunderstanding, often told from a western perspective but now, for the first time in depth, from Saddam’s idiosyncratic point of view. The Iraqi dictator believed the CIA to be all-knowing and all-powerful, so assumed George W Bush’s administration knew very well Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) left after Saddam ordered their destruction in the 1990s.
The threatening rhetoric coming out of Washington was just propaganda, Saddam concluded, as he kept up a pretense of possessing WMD to deter his enemies, Iran in particular.
“He was trying to signal his pride and his fear of humiliation and of vulnerability to both internal attacks and potentially external attacks,” Coll said.
In apparent moments of doubt, Saddam would occasionally buttonhole ministers to ask if they had hidden any remnants of the nuclear, chemical or biological programmes he started.
“Do we have any programmes going on that I don’t know about?” he demanded to know from his deputy prime minister in 1998. He was reassured that everything had been dismantled. "
Unbelievable!
The US wanted an excuse to invade because Saddam had pissed some people off in the gov't, and they found it. It was transparent BS at the time to people who cared to look, most didn't care to look and therefore it was sufficient to get the votes they needed.
Tail wagging the dog.
While this was successful, the US government was aggressively involved in trying to learn everything they could about the program (people, places, research notes) so that they could double check and make absolutely sure everything was shut down. Saddam's gov eventually gets frustrated with this level of invasiveness and doesn't want to list high value military locations for fear of letting Iran know about them. The records end up getting destroyed.
Saddam's gov thought "Hey, we burned all the notes involved in the weapons program, there's no way we can restart." Hawks in the US admin thought "They're hiding something that they don't want us to know about, they must still have a weapons program".
Notable Hawks who took this position in the H.W. Bush admin were Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld who went on to hold offices of higher power in the W. Bush admin.
So it goes.
https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Bombs-Challenges-Dangers-Pro...
The biggest idiots, as usual, were in our government. Or maybe they knew the truth too and just didn't care.
You had to have known they were full of crap when Rumsfeld said, "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." The last sentence would be almost hilarious if it didn't lead to so much death and devastation.
I think that's far too strong. Just because UN inspectors couldn't find anything didn't necessarily mean there wasn't anything to find.
It's easy to say in hindsight "well of course there weren't any WMDs!" but with the knowledge of what was available to the public, it really wasn't that clear, and it very well could have been true.
The evidence was fabricated because people thought there really were WMDs: "we know Saddam has WMDs, we just can't find good evidence for it, so we'll just have a little white lie now and find the evidence later, and it will all work out fine".
I mean... that's the best evidence for or against. Are you going to believe the UN inspectors on the ground in Iraq, or are you going to believe CIA "analysts" who never met foreign interference they didn't like? The CIA is one of the least trustworthy organizations in history.
> It's easy to say in hindsight "well of course there weren't any WMDs!" but with the knowledge of what was available to the public, it really wasn't that clear, and it very well could have been true.
I said it with foresight. And I was far from the only one. Before the invasion there were massive anti-war protests worldwide.
Not everything the CIA does is bad, and it wasn't only "the CIA" in the first place – that's hugely reductionist. British Intelligence claimed they had evidence, and politicians claimed the evidence was good, etc.
There have been protests to stop musicians from inserting subliminal Satanic messages in music, and protests to "stop the steal", and against some basic COVID measures. I'm just saying ... because there are protests doesn't mean anyone is correct there.
At the time I was opposed to the war our of principle (who isn't a optimistic pacifist in their youth?), but it was a lot less clear to me whether Saddam did or didn't have WMDs.
I think that it wasn't all that clear at the time is evidenced by the fact that many other well-intentioned reasonably informed people felt the time. Of course, you can do the smug "they were idiots and/or malicious" thing, but I don't think that's the case, and ultimately not hugely helpful.
Name one good thing.
> There have been protests to stop musicians from inserting subliminal Satanic messages in music, and protests to "stop the steal", and against some basic COVID measures. I'm just saying ... because there are protests doesn't mean anyone is correct there.
This is a ridiculous response. I said massive protests. The 2003 anti-war protests are actually in the Guiness Book of World Records: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/74335-lar...
My point wasn't even about who was correct. My point was that not everyone believed the lies. In fact a very large number of people disbelieved the lies at the time and didn't need "hindsight".
Eh: "Everyone sane knew at the time that Iraq had no WMD".
Anyway, this is going nowhere fast and this entire thread has been a waste of time. Good day.
> Eh: "Everyone sane knew at the time that Iraq had no WMD".
You're misrepresenting the order of the conversation, and you cut off the end of the above quote that mentioned "hindsight". My citation of the protests was in response to this claim:
> It's easy to say in hindsight "well of course there weren't any WMDs!" but with the knowledge of what was available to the public, it really wasn't that clear, and it very well could have been true.
I understand that you don't like my initial statement "Everyone sane knew at the time that Iraq had no WMD", because of what it might imply about you personally. However, when I said "My point was", I was referring to the protests and hindsight. There's a myth that everyone at the time believed Iraq had WMD, but no, a large number of people did not believe it. You were trying to dismiss the protesters by comparing them with cranks, but they were actually the largest protests that the world had ever seen.
I think it's safe to say that the US as a whole wasn't particularly sane after 9/11. We went out of our minds, invading two sovereign nations, creating a vast extra-legal apparatus of secret unaccountable courts and domestic spying that still exists today, imprisoned people for years under inhumane conditions in Gitmo without trial or any legal rights, committed torture, etc. The response was vastly disproportionate and irrational (much like the Israeli response now).
Pretending otherwise is just gonna make the next time (and there will be one) easier to sell. It was transparent crap and the American public has blood on its hands—and so do the media, and many still-active members of both major political parties. Ignorance becomes criminal at some point, and that met the mark.
I don’t get Saddam’s described point of view here. Even if he assumed the CIA was all-seeing and, as a result, aware that he had canceled his programs, wouldn’t the fact that we were building (from his point of view) an intentionally fabricated case to invade his country indicate that we really intended to invade it? Why would we fabricate a cause to attack him, if we weren’t planning on it?
But repainting Saddam as a misunderstood author who had nothing but a desire to preserve well written Arabic is revisionist and wrong.
Even the article notes that he randomly suspended a journalist for 6 months for a grammar mistake.
America was wrong. Saddam was evil. They can both be true.
Is there a word in psychology for people not being able to process such thinking?
Many such cases on web-forums frequented by otherwise intelligent people
This is excellent and just opened up a whole new part of human history to me. Thank you!
> Manichaeism teaches an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came.
No one faced war crime tribunals. Torturers who destroyed Congressional evidence were given promotions. The chief Democrat cheerleader for that war, who blocked key witnesses that could have prevented it all kicking off, was made Vice President for 8 years. And then President. And is running again, despite seemingly not remembering what years he was Vice President. The guy who exposed a small fraction of the war crimes which resulted has been tortured for the last decade.
So. no, I don't think it's very well understood at all.
> repainting Saddam as a misunderstood author who had nothing but a desire to preserve well written Arabic is revisionist and wrong.
That's not what the article was saying. It was saying that Saddam had no WMDs, nor intention to gather them - and we should have known that. We didn't do our due diligence before spending 8 trillion dollars creating a vastly less safe world.
If there's revisionism to be found in tfa, it's that the invasion of Iraq was somehow inevitable; just like, part of that 90's vibe. It wasn't inevitable at all - many people made fucked up choices to make that chaos happen, and the whole world is suffering to this day and for the foreseeable future as a result.
We haven't learned a thing if we're blaming Saddam for all that.
Since when is inaction "keeping"?
If anything makes the world less safe it's a power vacuum, rise in extremist groups, destabilizing a geopolitically crucial region for decades, torturing thousands, killing millions, displacing tens of millions, setting our international reputation on fire, and laundering trillions of tax dollars through the military industrial complex.
> Saddam Hussein was a huge regional threat to US allies - Israel and Saudi Arabia,
I hate to break it to you, but if you have a thing against mass murder, Israel and Saudi Arabia might not be the best "allies" to bring up... Not to mention the US itself lacking so much as a stub of a leg to stand on.
Regardless - we could have spent all that money achieving energy independence instead of propping up some of the world's most heinous regimes with mass murder and terror. We could have ended world hunger and domestic homelessness with the change. Basically any use of those resources would have been better, and people were screaming this from the rooftops. The world's largest protests were ignored by neocons/neoliberals and the media class, and now we're all living in the consequences.
So, to hear you say the world is safer since the 2003 invasion, I have to wonder: When are we going to tear apart the propaganda machine that leaves people with such ghastly and malinformed delusions? It's been 20 years - we've seen the effects. There's no debate here - it was a monumental clusterfuck, and unfathomably bad for world safety.
That's why ever since - literally every year since 2003 - the world has seen the US as the number one threat to world peace, democracy, and stability. Americans need to start understanding this. The world isn't jealous of us, it's justifiably terrified. Far, far far more than it ever was of Saddam.
Whatever one can say about the Iraq War, Saddam really was a horrible dictator. While the worst of his crimes (Iran war, genocide of Kurds) had been quite a few years in the past, there are many stories even from the late 90s/early 00s which demonstrate it was still a hugely dictatorial and oppressive regime.
I don't think the Iraq War was a good move, for a long list of reasons, but that doesn't mean deposing Saddam was, in principle, a good thing by any reasonable standard.
So to go back to the top post: "America was wrong. Saddam was evil. They can both be true".
I'll go a step further and say: "The Iraq War was a bad idea. Deposing Saddam was a good idea. They can both be true".
You seem to have missed the point of that sentence, apparently by ignoring everything around the words "power vacuum". It was well known that Iraq would be a quagmire and a clusterfuck, for many reasons and not just that one.
> So to go back to the top post: "America was wrong. Saddam was evil. They can both be true".
At no point in any of my comments have I argued that America was right, or that Saddam was a nice guy.
> I'll go a step further and say: "The Iraq War was a bad idea. Deposing Saddam was a good idea. They can both be true".
In the real world, outside of hypothetical vacuums entirely, deposing Saddam was a terrible idea and W's Administration knew it. They said so themselves!
Then they found a way to profit from it. Or should I say, profit again - because it was a lot of the same Admin who sold Saddam weapons and intel in the first place.
Context matters.
As the saying goes, "It's obvious now in hindsight that NFTs are a scam, but to be fair, it was also obvious at the start, and in the middle too"
The US and their allies did do their due diligence. They knew with near-certainty that he didn't have WMDs. All the 'evidence' was purely hypothetical (e.g. he could evade detection by building mobile labs inside semitruck trailers), hearsay from known-bad sources, or outright forged.
Saddam was bad, but no worse than the dictators that the US is neutral or friendly towards.
That's a reductive and completely inaccurate characterization of the book.
The article uses words like “meticulous” and “tactful” to describe the dictator. He was “slowing down.” He “didn’t think the US was serious.”
I imagine that the book brings out nuance that the article skips, but I reread the article and I stand by my characterization of it. It sounds like you have read the book, so would you be up for explaining where I’m being reductive?
I have personal connections to many Iraqi’s, and having a full understanding of what led to that war is genuinely important to me.
Was it? Getting rid of dictators should never be wrong in itself, and the US military can steamroll just about everyone than Russia and China.
The thing that the US did fuck up - both in Iraq and Afghanistan - was the post-war / recovery / rebuild phase. They didn't provide a clear path towards success for the everyday people.
So yes, we were wrong. And we should have known it at the time. It didn’t exactly take a crystal ball to tell what the likely outcomes were (though I admit I didn’t see the effects bleeding over to Europe so strongly!)
Syria was a result of the Arab Spring, people were fed up with Assad, and instead of supporting the opposition Obama didn't care about any "red lines" and eventually Russia moved in.
Iraq, I partially agree - had the West actually done something to mediate the old conflicts, to provide the people with a source of income, or to prosecute corruption, the country would have had a way better run.
The entire Arab Spring's handling by the West was madness. We could have helped actual, legitimate democracy grow on the foundations of the fed-up masses in the region, by providing aid and assistance as well as act as an oversight authority to keep corruption and crime in check, but no, we just looked the other way as many thousands were killed or tortured, and eventually the old elites took power again - and the "soft power", the prestige the US enjoyed, all went down the drain, with the final nail in the coffin being the handling of the Kurds in Syria.
Of course none of that happened because the situations just aren't comparable in any meaningful way.
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Before one of the Dutch missions to Afghanistan there was a lot of talk of "winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people". Unlike the strict and "mean" US we'd be more friendly and charming. There is perhaps some truth to that, but none of that really changes the fundamentals.
One of the reports about this had some embedded journalist accompanying Dutch troops doing their patrols in the Afghan villages checking for Taliban. They knock on a door. No one answers. They kick in the door and search the house. Later the owner comes back so they explain the situation and give him some money for the door after which they leave, having found nothing.
The journalist asks the man what he thought of the Dutch troops to see if we had "won the hearts and minds". He stands there, with the money in his hand, and just says "they just destroyed my door". And what more is there to say?
Imagine something like that would happen to you or me: the military would completely wreck our door and search our house while we're at work. No warrant. No probably cause. No nothing. Only "we were just checking". We'd cry authoritarian jackbooted fascists, and rightfully so. Now imagine they're foreign soldiers from the other side of the world who don't even speak your language.
My point being: I'm not sure if it was ever going to be a success unless control could be handed over very quickly, and it always unlikely that was going to result in success – Afghanistan had been in a civil war for 10 years already, and Iraq is one of those fundamentally unstable post-colonial countries.
>America was wrong. Saddam was evil. They can both be true.
I disagree with this statement, especially when talking about the war, for above reasons.
America was wrong and evil.
Edit: Word, him - > Iraq