A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in
lies
Harpers
November 7, 2005
Posted on Monday, November 7, 2005. All text is verbatim from senior Bush
Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for
clarity. Originally from Harper's Magazine, October 2003. By Sam Smith.
Sources
Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of
civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely different
era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had never seen
before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this country. Now, under
the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war against them. It was a
struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil.
It was absolutely clear that the number-one threat facing America was from
Saddam Hussein. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts that
went back a decade. We learned that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in bomb
making and deadly gases. The regime had long-standing and continuing ties to
terrorist organizations. Iraq and Al Qaeda had discussed safe-haven
opportunities in Iraq. Iraqi officials denied accusations of ties with Al
Qaeda. These denials simply were not credible. You couldn't distinguish between
Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talked about the war on terror.
The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And
the answer was, absolutely. His regime had large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of
chemical and biological weapons--including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard
gas, anthrax, botulism, and possibly smallpox. Our conservative estimate was
that Iraq then had a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons
agent. That was enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. We had sources
that told us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to
use chemical weapons--the very weapons the dictator told the world he did not
have. And according to the British government, the Iraqi regime could launch a
biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the
orders were given. There could be no doubt that Saddam Hussein had biological
weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.
Iraq possessed ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of
miles--far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations. We
also discovered through intelligence that Iraq had a growing fleet of manned
and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or
biological weapons across broad areas. We were concerned that Iraq was
exploring ways of using UAVs for missions targeting the United States.
* * *
Saddam Hussein was determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. We knew
he'd been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we
believed he had, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. The British government
learned that Saddam Hussein had recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources told us that he had attempted to
purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear-weapons production.
When the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied-finally denied access,
a report came out of the [International Atomic Energy Agency] that they were
six months away from developing a weapon. I didn't know what more evidence we
needed.
Facing clear evidence of peril, we could not wait for the final proof that
could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. The Iraqi dictator could not be
permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases
and gases and atomic weapons. Inspections would not work. We gave him a chance
to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. The burden was on
those people who thought he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the
world where they were.
We waged a war to save civilization itself. We did not seek it, but we
fought it, and we prevailed. We fought them and imposed our will on them and we
captured or, if necessary, killed them until we had imposed law and order. The
Iraqi people were well on their way to freedom. The scenes of free Iraqis
celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of
Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad were breathtaking. Watching them, one
could not help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the
Iron Curtain.
It was entirely possible that in Iraq you had the most pro-American
population that could be found anywhere in the Arab world. If you were looking
for a historical analogy, it was probably closer to post-liberation France. We
had the overwhelming support of the Iraqi people. Once we won, we got great
support from everywhere.
The people of Iraq knew that every effort was made to spare innocent life,
and to help Iraq recover from three decades of totalitarian rule. And plans
were in place to provide Iraqis with massive amounts of food, as well as
medicine and other essential supplies. The U.S. devoted unprecedented attention
to humanitarian relief and the prevention of excessive damage to infrastructure
and to unnecessary casualties.
The United States approached its postwar work with a two-part resolve: a
commitment to stay and a commitment to leave. The United States had no
intention of determining the precise form of Iraq's new government. That choice
belonged to the Iraqi people. We have never been a colonial power. We do not
leave behind occupying armies. We leave behind constitutions and parliaments.
We don't take our force and go around the world and try to take other people's
real estate or other people's resources, their oil. We never have and we never
will.
The United States was not interested in the oil in that region. We were
intent on ensuring that Iraq's oil resources remained under national Iraqi
control, with the proceeds made available to support Iraqis in all parts of the
country. The oil fields belonged to the people of Iraq, the government of Iraq,
all of Iraq. We estimated that the potential income to the Iraqi people as a
result of their oil could be somewhere in the $20 [billion] to $30 billion a
year [range], and obviously, that would be money that would be used for their
well-being. In other words, all of Iraq's oil belonged to all the people of
Iraq.
* * *
We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories.
And we found more weapons as time went on. I never believed that we'd just
tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country. But for those who said
we hadn't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they were
wrong, we found them. We knew where they were.
We changed the regime of Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people. We didn't
want to occupy Iraq. War is a terrible thing. We've tried every other means to
achieve objectives without a war because we understood what the price of a war
can be and what it is. We sought peace. We strove for peace. Nobody, but
nobody, was more reluctant to go to war than President Bush.
It is not right to assume that any current problems in Iraq can be
attributed to poor planning. The number of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf
region dropped as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This nation acted to a
threat from the dictator of Iraq. There is a lot of revisionist history now
going on, but one thing is certain--he is no longer a threat to the free world,
and the people of Iraq are free. There's no doubt in my mind when it's all said
and done, the facts will show the world the truth. There is absolutely no doubt
in my mind.
About the Author
Sam Smith is the author of four books, the latest of which is Why Bother?:
Getting a Life in a Locked Down Land. He is the editor of The Progressive
Review.
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