NationStates Jolt Archive

The following article is an interesting read for people who knew the War in Iraq was waged for all the wrong reasons.

Patriotic Freedom-Loving Americans can ignore the following article because we all know Paul Pillar is a Commie-Liberal Traitor who works for Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore and Osama Bin Ladin.

Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq (http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301faessay85202-p0/paul-r-pillar/intelligence-policy-and-the-war-in-iraq.html)

So basically it boils down to the fact that Shrub was looking to topple Saddam from Day One and that 9-11 plus cherry-picked intelligence data was just a convenient excuse that fell into place for him. That and United States Intelligence has been corrupted by the executive branch into an excuse slip.

Before the war in Iraq intellegence analists predicted the result we have right now.

It never ends with Bush does it? Makes you wish 2008 would come faster.

"intelligence" has been misused in regard to iraq since the first iraq war. it helped us get into the war (since we weren't all that fond of kuwait at the time anyway), as a justification for keeping sanctions going after the war(they were originally passed for the purpose of forcing iraq out of kuwait), in an effort to get the iraqis to remove hussein from power. not a full civil war, that would have destablized the country, so we let hussein brutally put down the kurds and shiites who tried to depose him. we wanted his close associates to assassinate him and put another bathist into power so things could go on as before but without "the hitler of the middle east" in power.

so they lied about wmd, about assassination plots, about prisoners of war, about iraqs desire to strike the united states. they did this for 10+ years until bush finally pushed us into this extremely ill advised war on trumped up charges.

It never ends with Bush does it? Makes you wish 2008 would come faster.
Put wishes in one hand and shit in the other and see which piles up faster...

It never ends with Bush does it? Makes you wish 2008 would come faster.

Why? So you can vote in liberal swinging Hillary Clinton? You wanna see how bad our nation can get, then vote for Clinton...

Why? So you can vote in liberal swinging Hillary Clinton? You wanna see how bad our nation can get, then vote for Clinton...
You get a D for that. You obviously haven't studied the subject.

While we're on it ...
*ahem*

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0602110110feb11,1,352886.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

Book: Bush, Blair were set on Iraq war despite UN
British author writes 2 leaders conspired (Bush's Bitch! -O3d)

By John Daniszewski
Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times
Published February 11, 2006


LONDON -- It was the end of January 2003. Secretary of State Colin Powell was five days away from giving a key speech at the UN Security Council, laying out the case that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction and posed a danger to world peace.

But huddled with aides at the White House, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were not sure there was enough evidence to convince the Security Council. Without the council's explicit authorization, their plans for an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein could be difficult to defend under international law.

Bush proposed an alternative: Paint a U.S. spy plane in UN colors and see whether they couldn't tempt Saddam Hussein's forces to shoot at it. In any case, he said, the war was "penciled in" for March 10 and the United States would go ahead with or without a second UN resolution.

Blair replied that he was "solidly with" the president.
-
Source unidentified

That is the gist of an account of the Jan. 31, 2003, meeting contained in the new edition of a book, "Lawless World," by British author Philippe Sands. The author has not identified the writer of a memorandum on which the account is based, but British press reports say it was one of the aides in attendance: Sir David Manning, then security adviser to Blair and now the British ambassador in Washington. (See Downing Street Memos - O3d)

A spokesman for Blair on Friday refused to address the allegations but repeated Downing Street's insistence that there was no decision to commit British forces to war in Iraq until after it was authorized by Parliament on March 18, 2003, two days before the invasion began. (see "Old news" comment - O3d)

A spokesman for Manning said that the ambassador would not comment.

In Washington, Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said, "We are not going to comment on private conversations between the president and another world leader."

Sands, 45, is an international law professor and a founding member of the Matrix law office in London where Cherie Blair, the prime minister's wife, also works. His book, which was first published last year, is not primarily about the decision to go to war in Iraq. Rather, it examines a range of issues in which he argues that the Bush administration, with Britain's complicity, has undermined the "rules-based" international system of which the United States and Britain were the principal architects after World War II.

Author defends authenticity

Sands said there was no doubt about the authenticity of the documents that he quotes in his book.

"They have not been denied and they cannot be denied," he told the Times this week. Britain's Channel 4 News says it has also seen the document outside of Britain. Its journalist Jon Snow presented excerpts in a broadcast last weekend.

The text, in Sands' view, shows that U.S. and British leaders had determined six weeks before the invasion to launch a war to disarm Hussein, even without explicit United Nations approval.

According to the secret notes of the meeting, as paraphrased by Sands in his book and then quoted directly by Channel 4, Bush told Blair that "the U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colors. If Saddam fires on them, he would be in breach."

Bush also was quoted as saying that an Iraqi defector might make a public presentation about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that there was a small possibility that the Iraqi leader would be assassinated.

The accounts say Bush promised to put the full weight of the United States behind getting another UN resolution but if that failed, military action would follow, anyway. And he is quoted as saying he thought internecine warfare in Iraq was unlikely. (see Civil War - O3d)

Blair is quoted as saying that a second Security Council resolution is desirable to "provide an insurance policy against the unexpected, and international cover--including with the Arabs." But he is also quoted as saying he is behind Bush.

"The documents ... indicate very clearly that neither man considered that the British or American governments had enough evidence," Sands said.

Ian Gleeson, a spokesman for 10 Downing Street, said Britain had waited until March 18 to commit its forces and earlier pursued "all other avenues" to compel Hussein to disarm.

Sands said he disagreed with the assertion that Blair's conduct had already been investigated, and said that the documents now coming out could form the basis of a motion of impeachment against the British prime minister.
-----

And this might also be of interest ....

*ahem*

Ex-C.I.A. Official Says Iraq Data Was Distorted
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: February 11, 2006

WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 — A C.I.A. veteran who oversaw intelligence assessments about the Middle East from 2000 to 2005 on Friday accused the Bush administration of ignoring or distorting the prewar evidence on a broad range of issues related to Iraq in its effort to justify the American invasion of 2003.

The views of Paul R. Pillar, who retired in October as national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, echoed previous criticism from Democrats and from some administration officials, including Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism adviser, and Paul H. O'Neill, the former treasury secretary.

But Mr. Pillar is the first high-level C.I.A. insider to speak out by name on the use of prewar intelligence. His article for the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs, which charges the administration with the selective use of intelligence about Iraq's unconventional weapons and the chances of postwar chaos in Iraq, was posted Friday on the journal's Web site after it was reported in The Washington Post.

"If the entire body of official intelligence on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war — or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath," Mr. Pillar wrote. "What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in decades."

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Pillar said he recognized that his views would become part of the highly partisan, three-year-old battle over the administration's reasons for going to war. But he said his goal in speaking publicly was to help repair what he called a "broken" relationship between the intelligence produced by the nation's spies and the way it is used by its leaders.

"There is ground to be replowed on Iraq," said Mr. Pillar, now a professor at Georgetown University. "But what is more important is to look at the whole intelligence-policy relationship and get a discussion and debate going to make sure what happened on Iraq doesn't happen again."

President Bush and his aides have denied that the Iraq intelligence was politicized. Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said in November, "Our statements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein were based on the aggregation of intelligence from a number of sources, and represented the collective view of the intelligence community. Those judgments were shared by Republicans and Democrats alike."

Reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the presidential commission on weapons intelligence headed by Laurence H. Silberman, a senior federal judge, and Charles S. Robb, the former Virginia governor and senator, found that C.I.A. analysts had not been pressed to change their views. A second phase of the Senate committee review, on how administration officials used intelligence, has not been completed.

Mr. Pillar alleged that the earlier studies had considered only "the crudest attempts at politicization" and that the real pressures were far more subtle. "Intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions that had already been made," chiefly to topple Mr. Hussein in order to "shake up the sclerotic power structures of the Middle East," he wrote.

According to Mr. Pillar's account, the administration shaped the answers it got in part by repeatedly asking the same questions, about the threat posed by Iraqi weapons and about ties between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda. When intelligence analysts resisted, he wrote, some of the administration's allies accused Mr. Pillar and others of "trying to sabotage the president's policies."

In light of such accusations, he wrote, analysts began to "sugarcoat" their conclusions.

Mr. Pillar called for a formal declaration by Congress and the White House that intelligence should be clearly separated from policy. He proposed the creation of an independent office, modeled on the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office, to assess the use of intelligence at the request of members of Congress.

Mr. Pillar suggested that the root of the problem might be that top intelligence officials serve at the pleasure of the president.


A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, said the agency had no comment.

Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that the C.I.A. had long resisted intervention in Iraq, and that internal pressure on analysts to resist war was greater than any external pressure.

"If the C.I.A. had spent less time leaking its opinions, throughout the 1990's, opposed to any conflict with Iraq, and more time developing assets inside Iraq, the agency would have more credibility and better intelligence," said Ms. Pletka, who served for a decade, until 2002, as a Republican staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.