Who lied about WMD?

To me, the big lie about WMD was when our troops discovered the chemical suits in Iraq and I saw Donald Rumsfeld on live television tell the world that the United States doesn't have any chemical or biological weapons.

The two whoppers I would accuse the Bush administration of are the lie about evidence of imminent threat and the lie about Iraq's ties to al Qaeda. Bush ignored majority dissent among the intelligence community about these two claims in favor of trumped up evidence generated by an ad-hoc group of hand-picked career neocons reporting directly to Dick Cheney that was tasked with substantiating the case against Iraq. Incidentally, in 2001 the Bush administration also received but ignored key intelligence from reliable sources about an imminent attack on the United States using commercial airplanes as missiles. This guy doesn't know how to use intelligence. Like science, it isn't supposed to just take requests.

Heck, I thought there may be chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, and have remarked before on my surprise that abolutely nothing was found. However, I can tell you from my own knowledge about biological agents that whatever Iraq possessed represents a much smaller threat than the weapons grade anthrax that came out of our own defense labs and was used against (liberal) American citizens. The accusations Scott Ritter endured in response to his apparently accurate analysis of Iraq's weapons program were unfounded, but there are few apologies from the worst culprits. Outing a CIA operative is also extremely poor form, but it shows just how committed to the agenda these folks are.

We completely controlled Iraq's airspace and access points. We had the support of all its neighbors. Testimony about the destruction of chemical and biological agents in Iraq during the 90's was given (but frequently expunged) in interrogations. Any known stockpiles of biological agents would have expired. The UN teams were actively dismantling weapons in Iraq, and the whole world was examining Hussein's regime under a microscope. To be clear, nobody, including me, thought Saddam was clean and trustworthy, but we gave Iraq reasons to distrust the inspection process and cried foul even when Saddam complied. It was a no faith effort on our part.

The endless testimony on Saddam Hussein's reign unanimously decries an asshole. We can name several more world leaders that fit a similar shoe, and Saddam isn't the only one we helped usher to power. We invaded Iraq specifically because that is what the Bush administration and its core constituency wanted to do, before Sept 11 and even before his election. For some, maybe even before the first crusade. The deposing and imprisonment of Hussein is simultaneously a testament to the effectiveness of our military forces and the dramatic failure of traditional Republican strategic foreign policy.

Lies about weapons are nothing new. For me, the WMD conversation is more a sideshow to the ethnic prejudice that lets the faux al Qaeda link get a bye and the real crises of terrorism lose spotlight. Al Qaeda's very existence is predicated on the reality that many of the despots of the Middle East, including Saddam, have been elevated and empowered through United States action. The fact that Bush repeatedly used 9/11 and the war on terror to leverage support for this unrelated and completely counterproductive action is a dishonesty that sticks in my craw.

The idea that Saddam Hussein was sharing weapons with al Qaeda was entirely unfounded and counterintuitive, end of story. If the only required evidence is the erstwhile presence of an al Qaeda operative, I could name several known for executing the most horrifying terrorist act in modern American history that lived, planned, and trained right here in my home state of Florida. Much as I'd like an exercise of regime change to put Jeb to the curb before he does any more harm, I have to judge this criteria deficient.

In an age of television attention spans, this is old news anyway, right? Now our resources are waist-deep, attempting to rearrange Iraq to something that supports our interests while repeatedly ignoring this silly notion the Iraqi people have developed that democracy involves allowing them to vote on something... just like that other kneeslapper the Palestinians and Kurds occasionally get about sovereignity. As to the government they have now, we selected the members, empowered it as we've seen fit, and enclosed them in the very palaces we chide Hussein for having built at the expense of his people. We busily indulge in brazen and vulgar war profiteering right in front of the educated, but still unemployed Iraqi citizens. We count the dead American soldiers, which is a toll unto itself, but we sometimes forget about the nearly 10,000 Iraq non-combatants that gotted shipped to the netherworld along the way to victory. Is this the war on terrorism? It's as if we're growing and harvesting it!

Look at the plain facts: acts of terrorism are significantly more common worldwide since we took Baghdad.

I contend we have invigorated terrorism with our behavior, and I can thank everyone who supported this misadventure with devotion for, as they say, bringing it on. I'm sure there are many fine examples among the thousands of our regular, guard, and reserve uniformed services deployed at any one time in Iraq that make excellent emissaries of better American values, but that doesn't mean there are any lasting signs of repentence from our national leadership. Sometimes, despite the many explanations and justification for the chaos of accidents that war must be, it can be difficult to forget who it was that shot your mother and sister in the back, and what he wore.

Don't think it stops with 2003. It's just not sincere to make altruistic claims about human rights in Iraq while consistently ignoring them in our ties with places like China and Saudi Arabia. While did do a good job of ignoring places where we could've made the most positive difference at the lowest cost, like Liberia (or Compton, NJ frankly), we are actively deployed and engaged in many countries to brew bad voodoo against the very democratic values we're supposed to be proliferating. Haiti. The Phillipines. Israel. Colombia. Zimbabwe? The big good news: complicity from Qadafi. Wasn't he the hot-topic wack-job of the mid-80's? Welcome aboard, Colonel, just in time to watch while we drop big balls on more formidable nuclear threats like North Korea or Pakistan. It's the New American Century, here to speed us through thinly disguised imperialism on a vector to holocaust with arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, and a notably unenlightened self-interest. Bubba, if that's American, this compatriot isn't buying.

Let's try a wacky experiment and look at 2003 from the perspective of the rest of the world for a change. Do you think there are any other countries that might now have intelligence to support the notion that the United States could be an imminent threat from their perspective? Several for sure, but all of them in theory. Not that we have any ugly WMD to worry them, like Donald says, but the crispy critters that result from depleted uranium detonations are in fact pretty scary looking and those tactical nukes are in the mail. On the question of what to do, you can guess each country will consider how his big brother, the role model of nations, behaves when he gets nervous. Sounds to me like the war has just begun, with a starting price at +7% at least this year.

We spent more on our national defense in 2003 than all other nations on earth combined spent on theirs. Who are you afraid of?

Who should you be afraid of?