Put on Your Hairshirt and Repent

Martin Longman

19 years ago

Both Susan and I jumped on this morning’s front-page Washington Post article. I read it last night and decided to stick it in the face of Bush voters. I woke up this morning, and I still feel like sticking it in the face of Bush voters.

Behind the scenes, British officials believed the U.S. administration was already committed to a war that they feared was ill-conceived and illegal and could lead to disaster.

Okay. Get it? Read it again. Digest it.

There are three points. The most important point is that the war was illegal from Britain’s point of view, unless we could get a UN Security Council resolution authorizing force. Cheney didn’t give a shit about the war being illegal until it was pointed out to him that we would need to use British bases, like Diego Garcia, even if the Brits sat the war out. So, we devised a wicked plan to entrap Saddam into failing to comply with inspections. But before we could do that, we had to get Resolution 1441 passed. Here’s a snip from 1441:

[The Security Council] [d]ecides, while acknowledging paragraph 1 above, to afford Iraq, by this resolution, a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations under relevant resolutions of the Council; and accordingly decides to set up an enhanced inspection regime with the aim of bringing to full and verified completion the disarmament process established by resolution 687 (1991) and subsequent resolutions of the Council;

The Downing Street Leaks clearly show that we did not have the ‘aim’ of disarming, but of ‘wrong-footing’. The terms of 1441 were negotiated, but the Anglo goal was to entice Saddam into non-compliance. Short of that, we hoped to convince the Security Council to pass a second resolution that would make the war legal.

We failed on both counts. Which leads to the next point. The war was ill-conceived.

“I think there is a real risk that the administration underestimates the difficulties,” David Manning, Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote to the prime minister on March 14, 2002, after he returned from meetings with Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, and her staff. “They may agree that failure isn’t an option, but this does not mean they will necessarily avoid it.”

We did not avoid it. Iraq is a disaster. It’s a disaster for all the people that have died. It’s a disaster from a fiscal point of view. It’s a disaster from a military readiness point of view. It’s a disaster from a public relations point of view. And tonight Bush is going to give a speech where he tells us it was all worth it, it was well-planned, it was legal, and it is going well.

Bullshit. While the right-wing was busy tearing down the French and exalting Tony Blair, Blair and his advisors secretly agreed with Chirac. No one believed Bush except the Kool-Aid drinkers. And now you Kool-Aid drinkers need to step away from the punch bowl, put on an hairshirt, cover yourselves in ashes, and begin to repent your biggest sin: that you ever believed a word that this administration and their bought and paid for corporate media sold you.

It was all lies. All of it.

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