Brooks (NYT): The real story of the Duelfer Report

The times missed the angle basso because they are not bending over backwards trying to wipe the egg that the President & co. sandblasted over themselves in the process of singlehandedly creating the greatest foreign policy disaster of the last 30 years

witnesseth:

I literally fell on the floor laughing when I read that yesterday morning. It was the funniest thing I saw all day yesterday. Thanks David Brooks!

I can only imagine the column he would have written if they had found some rusty old drums of nerve gass somewhere. I guess it would have been on the verge of Klingon style domination or sometehing.

"Report shows no WMD program, war rationale justified!"

yeah, I'm shocked that nobody is buying this pile of sh-t that the right has been selling this week; absolutely shocked.

 

That would make me feel silly.

 

Does this really justify 1000+ dead soldiers? Does this really justify $120-150 billion cost? Pres. Bush used terms such as "mushroom cloud" and "stockpiles of WMD's" when describing the rationale for war and both have been shot down.

 

Already put this in another thread, but I'll repeat myself.

We should take action against anyone who poses a threat.

We shouldn't invade everyone who poses a threat.

Even though Sadaam posed a future threat, that doesn't justify how this war was waged. That you continue to justify it in the face of overwhelming evidence debunking the administrations original rationale for invasion... I don't get it. I know why they're doing it- they want to get re-elected. I don't know why anybody with some intelligence and capable of an ounce of critical thought is willing to joing Bush & Co. in this full retreat from Reality.

 

You and John Edwards!

 

Read the report. Or just read the Key Findings part. Here's a link.

It's very clear in the report that Saddam was playing the UN and the international community like a fiddle in order to preserve his regime with the goal or reconstituting his weapons programs. He was not a crumbling has-been. People who want to dismiss Saddam as "contained" and "not a threat" are the ones in "full retreat of reality."

Note: I'm not arguing for or against the war nor am I arguing for or against how the war was prosecuted. I am, however, pointing out that Saddam was a real threat and that he was not contained as so many people want to argue.

 

Scott Ritter: If you had seen what I have seen
The inspection process was rigged to create uncertainty over WMD to bolster the US and UK's case for war

10 October 2004

It appears that the last vestiges of perceived legitimacy regarding the decision of President George Bush and Tony Blair to invade Iraq have been eliminated with the release this week of the Iraq Survey Group's final report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The report's author, Charles Duelfer, underscored the finality of what the world had come to accept in the 18 months since the invasion of Iraq - that there were no stockpiles of WMD, or programmes to produce WMD. Despite public statements made before the war by Bush, Blair and officials and pundits on both sides of the Atlantic to the contrary, the ISG report concludes that all of Iraq's WMD stockpiles had been destroyed in 1991, and WMD programmes and facilities dismantled by 1996.

Duelfer's report does speak of Saddam Hussein's "intent" to acquire WMD once economic sanctions were lifted and UN inspections ended (although this conclusion is acknowledged to be derived from fragmentary and speculative sources). This judgement has been seized by Bush and Blair as they scramble to re-justify their respective decisions to wage war.

"The Duelfer report showed that Saddam was systematically gaming the system, using the UN oil-for-food programme to try to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions," Bush said. "He was doing so with the intent of restarting his weapons programme once the world looked away." Blair, for his part, has apologised for relying on faulty intelligence, but not for his decision to go to war. The mantra from both camps remains that the world is a safer place with Saddam behind bars.

But is it? When one examines the reality of the situation on the ground in Iraq today, it seems hard to draw any conclusion that postulates a scenario built around the notion of an improved environment of stability and security. Indeed, many Iraqis hold that life under Saddam was a better option than the life they are facing under an increasingly violent and destabilising US-led occupation.

The ultimate condemnation of the failure and futility of the US-UK effort in Iraq is that if Saddam were released from his prison cell and participated in the elections scheduled for next January, there is a good chance he would emerge as the popular choice.

But while democratic freedom of expression was a desired outcome of the decision to remove Saddam from power, the crux of the pre-war arguments and the ones being reconfigured by those in favour of the invasion centre on the need to improve international peace and security. Has Saddam's removal accomplished this?

To answer this question, you have to postulate a world today that includes an Iraq led by Saddam. How this world would deal with him would be determined by decisions made by the US, Britain and the international community in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

One of the key historical questions being asked is what if Hans Blix (who gives his own view, right) had been given the three additional months he had requested in order to complete his programme of inspection? Two issues arise from this scenario: would Blix have been able to assemble enough data to ascertain conclusively, in as definitive a fashion as the Duelfer ISG report, a finding that Saddam's Iraq was free of WMD, and thus posed no immediate threat; and would the main supporters of military engagement with Iraq, the US and Britain, have been willing to accept such a finding?

The answer to the first point is that Blix and his team of inspectors were saddled with a complicated list of "cluster issues", ironically assembled by Duelfer during his tenure as head of the UN weapons inspectors, that would have needed to be rectified for any finding of compliance to be made.

These "clusters" postulated the need for Iraq to prove the negative, something that is virtually impossible to do. We now know that Iraq's WMD were destroyed in 1991. The problem wasn't the weapons, but verification of Iraq's declarations. The standards of verification set by Duelfer-Blix were impossible for Iraq to meet, thus making closure on the "cluster" issues also an unattainable goal.

This situation answers the second point as well. Since the inspection process was pre-programmed to fail, there would be no way the US or the UK would accept any finding of compliance from the UN weapons inspectors. The inspection process was rigged to create uncertainty regarding Iraq's WMD, which was used by the US and the UK to bolster their case for war.

It appears that there was no way short of war to create an environment where a finding of Iraq's compliance with its obligation to disarm could be embraced by the US and British governments. The main reason for this was that the issue wasn't WMD per se, but Saddam.

The true goal wasn't disarmament, but regime change. This, of course, clashed with the principles of international law set forth in the Security Council resolutions, voted on by the US and UK, and to which Saddam was ostensibly held to account. Economic sanctions, put in place by the UN in 1990 after Saddam's invasion of Iraq and continued in 1991, linked to Saddam's obligation to disarm, were designed to compel Iraq to comply with the Security Council's requirements.

Saddam did disarm, but since two members of that Security Council - the US and the UK - were implementing unilateral policies of regime change as opposed to disarmament, this compliance could never be recognised. Sadly, when one speaks of threats to international peace and security, history will show that it was the US and Britain that consistently operated outside the spirit and letter of international law in their approach towards dealing with Saddam.

This blatant disregard for international law on the part of the world's two greatest democracies serves as the foundation of any analysis of the question: would the world be better off with or without Saddam in power? To buy into the notion that the world is better off without Saddam, one would have to conclude that the framework of international law that held the world together since the end of the Second World War - the UN Charter - is antiquated and no longer viable in a post-9/11 world.

Tragically, we can see the fallacy of that argument unfold on a daily basis, as the horrific ramifications of American and British unilateralism unfold across the globe. If there ever was a case to be made for a unified standard of law governing the interaction of nations, it is in how we as a global community prosecute the war on terror. Those who embrace unilateral pre-emptive strikes in the name of democracy and freedom have produced results that pervert the concept of democracy while bringing about the horrific tyranny of fear and oppression at the hands of those who posture as liberators.

If Saddam were in power today, it would only have been because the US and Britain had altered course and joined the global community in recognising the pre-eminence of international law, and the necessity of all nations to operate in accordance with that law. The irony is that had the US and Britain taken this path, and an unrepentant Saddam chosen to defy the international community by acting on the intent he is alleged to have harboured, then he would have been removed from power by a true international coalition united in its legitimate defence of international law.

But this is not the case. Saddam is gone, and the world is far worse for it - not because his regime posed no threat, perceived or otherwise, but because the threat to international peace and security resulting from the decisions made by Bush and Blair to invade Iraq in violation of international law make any threat emanating from an Iraq ruled by Saddam pale in comparison.

Scott Ritter is a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq (1991-1998) and the author of 'Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America', published by Context Books


link

 

More from Ritter on Duelfer's motives and credibillity.
Don't forget that this is Bush's handpicked buy designed to do the report. It is telling that this his wasthe best he could do for Bush. Like Powell, Bremer and others Duelford is trying to cya for the "catastrophic victory" as Bush call his Iraq mess.
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Charles Duelfer has to date provided no documentation to back up his assertion regarding Saddam's "intent". Nor has he produced any confession from Saddam Hussein or any senior Iraqi official regarding the same. What has been offered is a compilation of hearsay and conjecture linked to unnamed sources whose identities remain shrouded in secrecy.

There is one source I am certain will not be quoted in Duelfer's report - a former officer in Saddam Hussein's intelligence service, who was interviewed by the ISG repeatedly in the summer of 2003. Given the ongoing violence in Iraq today, this officer, who is well known to me, has asked that his name not be published. From 1992 until 2003, he headed a branch of Iraqi intelligence responsible for monitoring the work of the UN weapons inspectors. His office intercepted their communications, and recruited spies among their ranks in Baghdad, Bahrain, New York and elsewhere.

The mission of this intelligence unit was to discern the true intent of the UN weapons inspectors. Conventional thinking would hold that this was being done so that Iraq might better hide its WMD stockpiles. The Iraqi officer has long denied this, stating that instead his job was to find out why the UN refused to accept the Iraqi version of events, and to determine if the UN weapons inspectors were operating inside Iraq for purposes other than the disarmament.

This officer claims to have intercepted conversations between Charles Duelfer, during the time he served as deputy executive chairman of the UN inspection teams, and senior US government officials, in New York and Baghdad, where a US agenda (supported by the British) for removing Saddam Hussein was discussed. I can confirm that such discussions frequently took place.

According to this officer, after 1995 UN weapons inspectors were blocked by Iraq only when their actions were determined by the Iraqi government to represent a direct threat to the president of Iraq, a reality the intercepted Duelfer conversations and ongoing CIA efforts to mount a coup d'etat would seem to underscore.

Duelfer is not an unbiased observer in this matter. For this reason alone, his ISG report must not be allowed to hide its findings behind a wall of secrecy. Far from showing the intent of Saddam Hussein to keep WMD, I believe a full review of all material relevant to the ISG's report will instead portray a dictator whose only desire was to retain his hold on power in the face of a US government which intended to do anything, including violate international law, to prevent this.

The US Congress and British parliament should insist on a full declassification of the ISG report, as well as the sources used to compile it. During this critical time in both our nations' histories, with the war in Iraq playing such a central role in the selection of America's next president as well as the political future of Britain's prime minister, the American and British people deserve to know the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about the casus belli that collectively got us into the ongoing quagmire that is Iraq today.

link

 

Hey! Don't attack the source, attack the arguement. Glynch's response is the ONLY substantiated counter to the Duelfer report posted so far. How accurate it is and how much of it is opinion has yet to be determined but Scott was on the ground in Iraq for a long time.

Clearly this issue is not so clear. What we are left with is a bunch of "what ifs?" Kind of like "what if we had stopped Hitler after he invaded Poland would there still have been a WWII?" Or "what if the US had kept going into Bagdad in GWI (instead of backing off at the request of the International Community) would we be in this mess today?" or "what if the US had never dropped atomic bombs on Japan, would the war still have ended soon and with less loss of life?"

You can argue back and forth about "what if we had let the inspectors stay in Iraq?" or "what if we had taken Saddam out sooner" but the fact remains that there are legitimate arguments for getting rid of Saddam and waiting things out. Time will tell.

 

George W. Bush has less credibility regarding Iraq than Scott Ritter does. Put that in your crackpipe and smoke it.

 

Actually Scott Ritter is the one person with probably the most credibility in the whole saga. It was former weapons inspector Scott Ritter who said from the very beginning that almost all of Saddam's WMD's were destroyed during previous weapons inspections.

Scott Ritter was called a liar, a traitor, a Saddam lover, etc. But in the end Scott Ritter is the one who was right. An Iraqi business man financed a film for Scott Ritter to go and document the Iraqi people. For this people said he was making a pro-Saddam propoganda film.

When the CIA, UN, European leaders, John Kerry, and virtually everyone else believed Saddam had WMD, Scott Ritter had the courage to come out and say that Saddam didn't. He was called vile names, and accused of horrible things such as not liking the U.S. and loving Saddam.

Ritter said along that Saddam was a horrible dictator, but maintained that he didn't possess WMD's.

Scott Ritter was right, and despite all of the slander against him, stuck to his guns(the truth). It's odd that you say Ritter has no credibility, when he was right about Iraq far more often than this administration and even the CIA.

 

Not trying to bust your chops here, chase, just attempting to clear up a little history. (hi, giddy! )

The great gamble Hitler took, when France had a vastly superior military, and could have easily crushed Germany, was when he reoccupied the Rhineland in March of '36, in clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The French Prime Minister made a strong radio address to the French people, threatening war, and consulted with the British. However, with elections in a few weeks, and with little encouragement from the UK, the French PM decided not to act. Everything that unfolded afterwards came from this moment of weakness and political calculation. Hitler was encouraged to do more, believing the Allies would do nothing. The invasion of Poland didn't occur until March 1, 1939. On March 3rd, France and Great Britain declared war and WWII was begun.


Keep D&D Civil!!

 

Thanks for the info (I actually knew that Hitler invaded the Rhineland but I couldn't remember it's name - I could remember Poland he he he).

 

The thing is that virtually nobody disagrees that the action we took in '91 was the right action to take. Virtually the entire world was on our side, we had foreign troops on the ground, foreign funds helping to pay for it, and we had a very clear objective and exit strategy. I fully supported GHWB's actions and thought he showed himself as a very effective leader during that time.

VERY different from GWB's war.

 

Bingo.