Just How Did It Happen?

Often decisions in government – and I presume elsewhere – are made on the “I’ve made up my mind. Don’t confuse me with facts,” system.

My GUESS is that this tried and true method got us into the situation in Iraq. Let me make it perfectly clear; this posting is no more than conjecture.

For all of the reasons enumerated in the press, on television, and on numerous blogs, including this one, we wanted to go to war against and to topple the Saddam regime in Iraq. This hypothetical case does not address arguments of preemption and preventive action that I and many others have raised numerous times.

Before the final decision was made, there were some uncomfortable issues on the table concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The U.N. inspection teams operating in the country had been unable to find any, and there some folks – certainly not including me – who doubted elements of the intelligence, for example that involving alleged purchases of yellow cake uranium.

The decision makers, including high ranking officers preparing to invade, military and civilian leaders at the Pentagon, other high ranking executives at the CIA and other intelligence agencies, at the State Department and elsewhere, as well as the Vice President and, ultimately, the President had to weigh the inability of the U.N. inspectors to locate caches and protestations of the Iraqis that there weren’t any forbidden weapons.

Our own intelligence and that of our allies indicated to almost a certainty that there were such weapons or programs to develop them in Iraq. So, if WMDs were the rationale for the war, why not go ahead and cause regime change? What could be the downside?

Under those conditions, based on my own government experience, if the big boys wanted war, most of the bureaucrats I’ve known and the political leaders would have attacked in a heart beat. The underlying thought was almost certainly that Saddam just wouldn’t have given up these weapons; it’s as simple as that. Our leaders – not just the people in this administration whom I’ve beaten about the head and shoulders for so long – but virtually all of them are rather cynical when it comes to the motives and actions of the leaders of other nations, especially petty third world tyrants.

We constantly ascribe completely cynical motives to them and believe that they maintain power through the unsentimental use of power to crush their enemies and in lying about it to the world at large. Therefore, in my view, it would have been incomprehensible to almost any high level appointee that I ever knew that someone like Saddam wasn’t telling bald faced lies when he denied having such weapons that he did in fact once have.

Therefore, without trying to slander some very fine public servants I’ve known, I’m convinced that virtually no one in the advisory or decision making chain ever dreamed that we wouldn’t find enough WMDs, such as canisters of poison gas, to be able to point to when the dust settled and say, “See, told you so.”

So while opponents of the war like me rant and rave about the lack of WMD evidence, at least in my case, I’m shocked to this day that we didn’t find them.

In my mind, the argument about WMDs was never essential; it was the lack of threat to us and our allies, the terrible precedent of preemption, and our failure to secure U.N. approval for the war.

As Saddam tends his flowers at the Baghdad International Airport Hilton, I wonder whether his action to dispose of the chemical, biological and radiological programs was made in case such an attack would come, a decision that was made by others without his knowledge, or just dumb luck.

In any case, the failure to locate these weapons gave the U.S. a huge black eye. Had I been in the chain, I'd be sporting one too.

Blog on!

Wild Bill