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Comment by scaramanga | Hacker News Reader

It's incorrect to say the evidence on WMD was flimsy, it was very solid. That is to say that it was almost certain that Iraq had no usable WMD. The "evidence" to the contrary were fabrications, obvious at the time, without the benefit of hindsight. As was widely pointed out then.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)

I clearly remember how all that WMD stuff was obvious propaganda at the time. Some of it ("we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud") was even laughable.

Nor did the US or other Western intelligence agencies believe it. Analysts tried to submit good reports, but they were overridden. People have often spoken of an "intelligence failure", but there wasn't such a failure; what there was was a success in politicizing intelligence on the part of political leaders. That of course did not stop them from blaming the analysts later for "failure".

Careful observers have noted signs of significant pushback from the intelligence community in response to political pressure since then.

>>I clearly remember how all that WMD stuff was obvious propaganda at the time.

Interesting, do you have references?

To me, it seems really hard to distinguish "obvious propaganda" from low details due to protection of intelligence sources.

You would naively/cynically assume that if the US army/etc knew they wouldn't find any remaining WMD programs, they would be planted?

Planted? No, they did something much easier--they changed the subject. The "OMG they've got WMD" rhetoric was replaced by something about the freedom of the Iraqi people.

  >>I clearly remember how all that WMD stuff was obvious 
  propaganda at the time.

  Interesting, do you have references?

LA Times opinion piece explicitly calls out the evidence about Iraq as propaganda:

http://articles.latimes.com/2003/jan/05/opinion/op-marshall5

The Christian Science Monitor discusses propaganda that was used to sell the first Gulf War, and warns us about the dangers of propaganda about the situation with Iraq in 2002:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p25s02-cogn.html

The Guardian reports that much of the British evidence for invasion is based not on new intelligence, but cherry picked academic articles and years old intelligence. This is before the invasion:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/feb/08/politics.iraq

Hans Blix reports that no evidence of proscribed activities has been found in Iraq. While he qualifies it that Iraq has not been as cooperative as wished, he believes that the disarmament plan can be completed within a few months given the recent extra pressure. This is also before the invasion:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/07/sprj.irq.un.transcript.blix...

  You would naively/cynically assume that if the US army/etc 
  knew they wouldn't find any remaining WMD programs, they 
  would be planted?

It's not exactly that there were people who knew they wouldn't find any remaining WMD programs, and went ahead anyhow. It's that strong incentives were set up to find evidence that there were WMDs in Iraq, so the evidence presented was weighted much more heavily towards that which found evidence of WMDs or attempts by Saddam to make or buy WMDs.

This was written shortly after the invasion, about how the Bush administration didn't like the intelligence it was getting from the CIA, so it set up its own Office of Special Plans, specifically tasked to find evidence of WMDs in Iraq and ties to Al Qaeda:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact

Well, when the entire purpose of your organization is to find evidence of a particular fact, you will probably find such evidence. That doesn't mean it's true; just that enough dedicated people can find evidence for it. And since you can never conclusively provide evidence of the absence of a WMD program, especially since Saddam wasn't always fully cooperative with inspectors, it was fairly easy to get carried away providing evidence that he had or was developing WMDs, without paying sufficient attention to any counter intelligence.

And of course there's the Downing Street Memo, from July 2002 (nearly a year before the invasion) that reveals that the decision to invade was a fait accompli and the main point of the intelligence and inspections after that point that were just used to provide better political support for the invasion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_memo

Also, not that the didn't have to plant evidence of WMDs in Iraq after the invasion; people found out that there were no WMDs, found out about the Downing Street Memo, and yawned. The media didn't care; the US media barely reported on the Downing Street Memo. The public and politicians didn't care; after September 11th, there were still enough people who thought that "something had to be done", and people who thought that Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda, that there was very little political push against the war.

That's what gets me the most about this; how very apathetic the American public and American politicians have been about the mass slaughter of Iraqis (including thousands of civilians), torture, indefinite detention without trial in Guantanamo, extrajudicial assassination on US citizens, and so on and so forth. It's chilling to think that so few people care.

> That's what gets me the most about this; how very apathetic the American public and American politicians have been about the mass slaughter of Iraqis (including thousands of civilians), torture, indefinite detention without trial in Guantanamo, extrajudicial assassination on US citizens, and so on and so forth. It's chilling to think that so few people care.

But 'they' (speaking in generalisations) never did care iraq is just the latest of a very long series of events where the US slaughters civilians, it's pretty much a consistent theme in US history and ALL of it's conflicts.

I realised I perhaps didn't provide much in the way of citation:

Hiroshima/Nagasaki: Upto 250,000 deaths [1]

Vietnam+Cambodia: 100,000 + 400,000 maimed or killed by agent orange + 500,000 children born with birth defects (also from agent orange [2]

Korean War: 1.5 million civilians killed (both sides (difficult to delineate), 20% of the north koreans population killed. [3]

Gulf War 1: 15000 civilians killed [4]

You then have Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan drone strikes. Paints a fairly compelling picture.

Those of you with the attitude of "That is just a fact of war, civilians die". Given you know this before a war, you therefore know you are going to kill civilians making the action ethically worse, than if you didn't know this "Fact of war".

This isn't even going into the blatant disregard for human life the US demonstrated with slavery (~10 million african slaves killed, admittedly western europe in general shares the blame for that)[5], trail of tears[6] (4000 cherokees killed), etc...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_an...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties#Deaths_c...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#Korean_...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#Coaliti...

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#European_c...

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears

Blix I know about of course, a good source. But he did work for the UN, where quite a few of the parts still are taken over by dictators not criticising each others. (See UNHRC on Wikipedia, for instance. It is the less bad successor of what existed 2001...)

The other claims... well, they couldn't know. The real information was (is?) stamped secret. Downing Street wouldn't release that.

>>Also, not that the didn't have to plant evidence of WMDs in Iraq after the invasion; people found out that there were no WMDs, found out about the Downing Street Memo, and yawned. The media didn't care; the US media barely reported on the Downing Street Memo.

Uh, no.

There is still credibility problems, e.g. recently regarding claims about chemical weapons in Syria. They had to send the UN team there; the claims about listening in to Syrian army communications, etc were not accepted.

I am willing to believe the Bush administration didn't care if they kneecapped the credibility of the next few president administrations. But pure incompetence do seem more likely.

And don't forget the Downing Street Memorandum.

WMD was bullshit, and everyone knew it was bullshit.

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