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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

Getting iraq not having WMD right probably isn't that hard.

Allegedly canadian intelligence knew this, but had it all marked "for canadian eyes only" because they were worried about consequences if usa found out they weren't on board. I highly doubt canada has super-spies, the problem is usa really wanted there to be WMDs, so they came to the conclusion there was.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-intelligence-asses...

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Sometimes I feel like I was taking crazy pills, but I distinctly remember major news agencies like the BBC calling BS with pretty hard facts about the whole WMD thing, but no one really cared. (In America or Britain anyways)

They did for a bit and then Powell was wheeled out and everyone got in line.

I particularly remember the mainstream media in the US cheerleading for the war and shouting down anybody who raised doubts as being "with the terrorists". The truth is that the intelligence never mattered, it was always meant as an act of revenge against the Arab/Muslim world for 9/11 and a settling of scores from the 90s Gulf War.

I remember when the US invaded Iraq(II) it was treated like a party. The media loved it, it was like a football game. And when out to eat, I saw a lot of Americans were loving it , it was entertainment. Shock and Awe, it was spectacle.

The US definitely got very good at selling wars in the last decades. I remember being fascinated with the cool videos of "surgical strikes" against Iraq in 1991. Only later I read reports that a lot of the strikes weren't exactly surgical and killed thousands of civilians.

Strikes included hospitals, places of worship, civilian homes, and so on. I had no idea at the time either.

It always irked me when people called it the Second Iraq War. From my recollections, people always referred to the war in the 90's as the Persian Gulf War and it was instigated by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The war in the 2000's struck me as the poorly justified invasion of another nation. While there were legitimate grievances against Iraq, they were not the types of grievances that should escalate into war.

I think it is just a colloquial numbering for clarity. That is why I do it.

The 90's war was with Iraq, that is who we were fighting against, and sometimes it is just easier to number them to differentiate from the one in the 2000's.

I remember reading reports by a German UN weapons inspector. The CIA gave them a few of their bests leads but every time the inspectors went there they found nothing or equipment that hadn't been used in years. The CIA's response was to cut them off completely. The US clearly wanted to go to war no matter what. The WMDs were just cover.

Yes - back when the US was threatening war, Iraq let in UN weapons inspectors, who would of course have gladly inspected anywhere the US/UK said the weapons were.

Everyone following the news knew at the time the US & UK couldn't direct the inspectors to the WMDs, because no WMDs existed.

> In 2002, it happened again. The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the rest of the intelligence community had concluded that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was trying to build nuclear weapons

This from the article is false. The CIA never concluded that Iraq had a nuclear program.

In fact, the CIA was ignored when they refuted the politician's claims about the nuclear program.

The film Fair Game is about CIA analyst Valerie Plame and how she was shut out when decisions about WMD presence were made.

True, I think every neutral party at the time knew that Iraq had no WMDs, crazy how just cause might is right we have let the instigators of Iraq war get away with it while they end up destabilizing a whole region

strangely, Wikipedia disagrees [1][2]

It appears as though several countries were happily selling Iraq WMD components and materials. Including the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_weapons_program.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...

i recall GWB speech in UN on this. Literally everybody called BS on this, it was glaringly obvious. Then nations leaned on each side if they simply wanted war to happen (and subsequent contracts from all the change and damage) or not. It wasnt a stellar day for US, and history showed why.

Don't forget Powell throwing away his career by waving a little vial of prop anthrax to get the UN on board.

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