The United Kingdom is having a little investigation that is a lot like the 9/11 Commission. Except, instead of trying to figure out how terrorists managed to attack the Pentagon and knock down the Twin Towers, the British are trying to figure out how the hell they wound up invading Iraq. The Iraq Inquiry (aka The Chilcot Inquiry) is currently taking public testimony, and Tony Blair is set to appear before the panel early next year. The inquiry suffers from many of the same faults as the 9/11 Commission, including its inability to collect all relevant testimony and evidence, and the lack of independence and competency of its members. But, still, can you imagine a comparable investigation in this country? I can’t.

What’s already come to light is that the UK was aware that the Bush administration wanted regime change in Iraq as early as February 2001, that Blair signed off an invasion even in the absence of a UN resolution in April 2002, and that Blair knew that an invasion based merely on a desire for regime change would be illegal under international law. Interestingly, Blair admitted this week on BBC1 that he would have invaded Iraq even in the absence of a perceived threat from weapons of mass destruction (emphasis mine).

Tony Blair has said he would have invaded Iraq even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction and would have found a way to justify the war to parliament and the public.

The former prime minister made the confession during an interview with Fern Britton, to be broadcast on Sunday on BBC1, in which he said he would still have thought it right to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

“If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?” Blair was asked. He replied: “I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]”.

Significantly, Blair added: “I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat.” He continued: “I can’t really think we’d be better with him and his two sons in charge, but it’s incredibly difficult. That’s why I sympathise with the people who were against it [the war] for perfectly good reasons and are against it now, but for me, in the end I had to take the decision.”

We already knew that the decision to use the threat of WMD was a bureaucratic decision because Paul Wolfowitz admitted as much in a May 9, 2003 interview with Vanity Fair.

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 as the core reason [to go to war].

I’d like to put that well known quote in its original context (for brevity, I’ll clean up some of the noise in this part of transcript).

Q: And then the last question, you’ve been very patient and generous. That is what’s next? Where do we stand now in the campaign that you talked about right after September 11th?

Wolfowitz: I think the two most important things next are the two most obvious. One is getting post-Saddam Iraq right. Getting it right may take years, but setting the conditions for getting it right in the next six months. The next six months are going to be very important.

The other thing is trying to get some progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. I do think we have a better atmosphere for working on it now than we did before in all kinds of ways. Whether that’s enough to make a difference is not certain, but I will be happy to go back and dig up the things I said a long time ago which is, while it undoubtedly was true that if we could make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue we would provide a better set of circumstances to deal with Saddam Hussein, but that it was equally true the other way around that if we could deal with Saddam Hussein it would provide a better set of circumstances for dealing with the Arab-Israeli issue. That you had to move on both of them as best you could when you could, but —

There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed–but it’s huge–is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It’s been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.

I don’t want to speak in messianic terms. It’s not going to change things overnight, but it’s a huge improvement.

Q: Was that one of the arguments that was raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect, not to connect the dots too much, but the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our troops being there, and bin Laden’s rage about that, which he’s built on so many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there’s a logic of motive or something like that? Or does that read too much into —

Wolfowitz: No, I think it happens to be correct. 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 as the core reason, but — hold on one second —

Wolfowitz: — there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there’s a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two.

The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there’s the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we’ve arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his UN presentation.

Q: So this notion then that the strategic question was really a part of the equation, that you were looking at Saudi Arabia —

Wolfowitz: I was. It’s one of the reasons why I took a very different view of what the argument that removing Saddam Hussein would destabilize the Middle East. I said on the record, I don’t understand how people can really believe that removing this huge source of instability is going to be a cause of instability in the Middle East.

I understand what they’re thinking about. I’m not blind to the uncertainties of this situation, but they just seem to be blind to the instability that that son of a bitch was causing. It’s as though the fact that he was paying $25,000 per terrorist family and issuing regular threats to most friendly governments in the region and the long list of things was of no account and the only thing to think about was that there might be some inter-communal violence if he were removed.

The implication of a lot of the argumentation against acting — the implication was that the only way to have the stability that we need in Iraq is to have a tyrant like Saddam keeping everybody in check — I know no one ever said it that way and if you pointed it out that way they’d say that’s not what I mean. But I believe that really is where the logic was leading.

I always found this exchange to be really refreshing in its candor. The interview came barely a week after Bush’s Mission Accomplished moment on the aircraft carrier, and the administration was suffering from a case of hubristic truimphalism. It was only in this seemingly safe environment that Wolfowitz let the mask slip from catapulted propaganda and told us the real reasons why we invaded Iraq.

It’s fascinating to look at in retrospect because Wolfowitz was clearly wrong in so much of his analysis. But the motives were a bit more high-minded than you might expect. Unfortunately, they were simple-minded and pollyannaish, too. The administration was dismissive of the idea that Saddam’s repressive regime contributed to the stability of the region by keeping the factions within Iraq in check and by acting as a bulwark against Iranian influence in the Gulf. They actually thought a liberated Iraqi Shi’a community would be more of a threat to Iran than a partner. They thought it would be easier to achieve an lasting peace in Palestine without Hussein stoking the fires of terrorism there. And they thought that removing our troops from Saudi Arabia would address the major grievance of al-Qaeda, without considering how invading an occupying a neighboring Arab country would turn bin-Laden’s raving conspiracy theories into something more nearly resembling the truth.

What’s clear to me is that both the Bush and Blair governments were reckless and arrogant and indifferent to the massive amount of suffering they were about to inflict on the world. They made a decision to shake-up the Middle East and then concocted dodgy dossiers and sold us hyped-up terror threats to sell the public on a course of action that experts thought ill-advised at best.

Considering the consequences, we ought to be holding our own Iraq Inquiry to try to assure that the public is not so easily manipulated in the future and that our establishment can put some brakes in place to slow down the kind of rash decision-making that went into invading Iraq. If the British can face up to what happened (at least in part) then we should be able to do it, too.

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