Political Venting, The Ongoing Soap Opera

[pantryslut]

"Such weapons [of mass destruction] require substantial industrial plants and a large work force," [Robin Cook, former British foreign secretary] said. "It is inconceivable that both could have been kept concealed for the two months we have been in occupation of Iraq."

Mr. Cook said that his experience convinced him that "instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base a decision about policy, we used intelligence as the basis on which to justify a policy on which we had already settled."

Quoted, a little out of order, from The New York Times, which also goes on to say:

"Mr. Blair has been undermined by controversies from two intelligence reports, put forth at the time with great fanfare, that sought to swing public opinion behind his conviction that Mr. Hussein and his unconventional arms were an immediate threat. At the time, Britain took on the assignment of disclosing intelligence findings because, the thinking then went, the information would be more credible to critics of the military preparations and in the Muslim world if the source were London rather than Washington." (emphasis mine.)

The full article is here.

I note in passing also that "the intelligence community" seems to have sprung a lot of leaks lately. Probably because they know that they're going to be blamed, again -- "oh, it wasn't a lie, it was an intelligence failure" -- and they've got nothing to lose if they leak the truth.

And while I'm here, the UK Guardian may have taken back deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz's "swimming in oil" comment, but he did still say that weapons of mass destruction were essentially a bureaucratic rationalization for a war they'd already decided to pursue. Vanity Fair quotes him as saying "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on;" the Weekly Standard contends he was misquoted, and instead gives us "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction." I don't see it as a misquote, but I've left the link in so you can make up your own mind.

And finally, I'm just going to say it: incidental good is not sufficient reason to wage war.

Charlie Stross on rec.arts.sf.composition today says, "Some of the rhetoric coming out of the US government today -- combined with the thousands of civilians being killed in other countries, the total disdain for international law and war crimes conventions, and so on -- is pretty chilling. You *are* the bad guys in someone else's novel."

Comments

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

There was something I ehard Robin Cook say yesterday on the radio which reinforced my own unease with Blair's stance throughout this. I had several conversations with people while I was in the States about why Blair, who hitherto seemed moderately sensible about things like foreign policy (I know, this is relative) threw in his lot with Bush, when he could surely see that Bush was basing his desire for war on nothing other than that a successful war would look good on the electoral CV. I said then that what struck me about Blair was that he seemed to be driven by some mysterious higher purpose which would become clear to us all later and we would then understand why he'd done it. Eyebrows were raised at this on occasion, but Blair has always seemed to me to be giving off this sub-biblical, quasi-mesesianic sense of being so morally in the right it's untrue. (This, by the way, is the man who has had to be told by the Roman Catholic Archbishop to stop taking communion at the Brompton Oratory because he isn't actually a Catholic.)

Yesterday, Robin Cook talked about Blair's 'burning conviction' that prosecuting the Iraq war was absolutely the right thing to do. 'Burning' and 'conviction' are not two words I like to see in close proximity to one another in a political context.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

It's actually been my suspicion for some time that, at the root of it, this isn't Bush's war, but Blair's. Blair and Bush got real close after 9/11 -- just before the moment that Bush suddenly decided beating the war drums for a campaign against Iraq. It could be coincidence, or it could not. But I definitely think that the impetus to war in Iraq came out of those conversations, and that if it wasn't Blair's idea, it was certainly a shared brainstorm, and not at all a case of Blair hitching his wagon to Bush's post hoc.

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

I don't think it was Blair's idea directly - until this business, I had actually thought he was making a reasonable fist of being a statesman, and keeping some sort of brake on GWB's tendency to act first and then find a justification for what he'd done later, if at all, because of course it was all so obvious it didn't need an explanation and if you didn't get it, well obviously, there was something wrong with your politics, etc. But Iraq seems to have pressed some little button down in Blair's hind brain, and I really can't fathom what it is.