8 ms·

The Achilles Trap: how the US fatally failed to read Saddam

30 points by curiousObject 3y ago

iambateman 3y ago
I’d say the false pretenses to go to war in Iraq are pretty well understood, now, and there’s no question we were misled by the government. But repainting Saddam as a misunderstood author who had nothing but a desire to preserve well written Arabic is revisionist and wrong. Even the article notes that he randomly suspended a journalist for 6 months for a grammar mistake. America was wrong. Saddam was evil. They can both be true.
- rat9988 3y ago
  Why not the opposite, America was evil, Saddam was wrong?
  - 20after4 3y ago
    All of the above.
- kiba 3y ago
  It can also be true that Saddam wants to be a novelist. People can have many facets after all.
- consumer451 3y ago
  > America was wrong. Saddam was evil. They can both be true. Is there a word in psychology for people not being able to process such thinking?
  - postsantum 3y ago
    Manichean delirium Many such cases on web-forums frequented by otherwise intelligent people
    - consumer451 3y ago
      > Manichean delirium This is excellent and just opened up a whole new part of human history to me. Thank you! > Manichaeism teaches an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism
      - jcranmer 3y ago
        I find it interesting that Manichaeism is used as a synonym for dualism despite the fact that dualistic cosmologies predate Manichaeism by at least a millennium--Zoroastrianism relies heavily on dualistic cosmology, and probably exists in a similar form in the older Indo-Iranian religion that Zoroastrianism (and Hinduism, for that matter) is based on.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I don’t know about in psychology, but it’s just black-and-white thinking, informally, right?
    - Log_out_ 3y ago
      Tribalism. People actually have a aversion to heated public debate, fearing the tribe breaks up. That's also why there can always be only one plan.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  > I’d say the false pretenses to go to war in Iraq are pretty well understood, now, and there’s no question we were misled by the government. No one faced war crime tribunals. Torturers who destroyed Congressional evidence were given promotions. The chief Democrat cheerleader for that war, who blocked key witnesses that could have prevented it all kicking off, was made Vice President for 8 years. And then President. And is running again, despite seemingly not remembering what years he was Vice President. The guy who exposed a small fraction of the war crimes which resulted has been tortured for the last decade. So. no, I don't think it's very well understood at all. > repainting Saddam as a misunderstood author who had nothing but a desire to preserve well written Arabic is revisionist and wrong. That's not what the article was saying. It was saying that Saddam had no WMDs, nor intention to gather them - and we should have known that. We didn't do our due diligence before spending 8 trillion dollars creating a vastly less safe world. If there's revisionism to be found in tfa, it's that the invasion of Iraq was somehow inevitable; just like, part of that 90's vibe. It wasn't inevitable at all - many people made fucked up choices to make that chaos happen, and the whole world is suffering to this day and for the foreseeable future as a result. We haven't learned a thing if we're blaming Saddam for all that.
  - genman 3y ago
    You are arguing that keeping a mass murderer with a large army in power is a "more secure word". Saddam Hussein was a huge regional threat to US allies - Israel and Saudi Arabia, he was also a huge international threat by supporting terrorism. No, the world is a safer place without his presence.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      > keeping Since when is inaction "keeping"?
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      > No, the world is a safer place without his presence. If anything makes the world less safe it's a power vacuum, rise in extremist groups, destabilizing a geopolitically crucial region for decades, torturing thousands, killing millions, displacing tens of millions, setting our international reputation on fire, and laundering trillions of tax dollars through the military industrial complex. > Saddam Hussein was a huge regional threat to US allies - Israel and Saudi Arabia, I hate to break it to you, but if you have a thing against mass murder, Israel and Saudi Arabia might not be the best "allies" to bring up... Not to mention the US itself lacking so much as a stub of a leg to stand on. Regardless - we could have spent all that money achieving energy independence instead of propping up some of the world's most heinous regimes with mass murder and terror. We could have ended world hunger and domestic homelessness with the change. Basically any use of those resources would have been better, and people were screaming this from the rooftops. The world's largest protests were ignored by neocons/neoliberals and the media class, and now we're all living in the consequences. So, to hear you say the world is safer since the 2003 invasion, I have to wonder: When are we going to tear apart the propaganda machine that leaves people with such ghastly and malinformed delusions? It's been 20 years - we've seen the effects. There's no debate here - it was a monumental clusterfuck, and unfathomably bad for world safety. That's why ever since - literally every year since 2003 - the world has seen the US as the number one threat to world peace, democracy, and stability. Americans need to start understanding this. The world isn't jealous of us, it's justifiably terrified. Far, far far more than it ever was of Saddam.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pvg 3y ago
  But repainting Saddam as a misunderstood author who had nothing but a desire to preserve well written Arabic is revisionist and wrong. That's a reductive and completely inaccurate characterization of the book.
  - iambateman 3y ago
    Perhaps, but not the article. The article uses words like “meticulous” and “tactful” to describe the dictator. He was “slowing down.” He “didn’t think the US was serious.” I imagine that the book brings out nuance that the article skips, but I reread the article and I stand by my characterization of it. It sounds like you have read the book, so would you be up for explaining where I’m being reductive? I have personal connections to many Iraqi’s, and having a full understanding of what led to that war is genuinely important to me.
    - pvg 3y ago
      That's not the tone and meaning of the article either, you're reacting to individual words. Simply trying to describe his mental state, possible motivations, etc does not somehow imply apologia. I'm not sure how discussing the book (I did just finish it and recommend it, you're right!) is going to help much, though, if just a basic description of some of its points seem so imbued with value judgement to you - it just isn't there, really.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > America was wrong. Was it? Getting rid of dictators should never be wrong in itself, and the US military can steamroll just about everyone than Russia and China. The thing that the US did fuck up - both in Iraq and Afghanistan - was the post-war / recovery / rebuild phase. They didn't provide a clear path towards success for the everyday people.
  - vundercind 3y ago
    We killed a hell of a lot of civilians and destabilized the area in predictable ways, while giving Iran a new playground (also, predictably). There’s a straight line between this, to Syria, to the immigrant crisis in Europe. Hell, Brexit may have failed or not even gotten momentum to become A Thing if not for it. So yes, we were wrong. And we should have known it at the time. It didn’t exactly take a crystal ball to tell what the likely outcomes were (though I admit I didn’t see the effects bleeding over to Europe so strongly!)
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      > There’s a straight line between this, to Syria, to the immigrant crisis in Europe. Syria was a result of the Arab Spring, people were fed up with Assad, and instead of supporting the opposition Obama didn't care about any "red lines" and eventually Russia moved in. Iraq, I partially agree - had the West actually done something to mediate the old conflicts, to provide the people with a source of income, or to prosecute corruption, the country would have had a way better run. The entire Arab Spring's handling by the West was madness. We could have helped actual, legitimate democracy grow on the foundations of the fed-up masses in the region, by providing aid and assistance as well as act as an oversight authority to keep corruption and crime in check, but no, we just looked the other way as many thousands were killed or tortured, and eventually the old elites took power again - and the "soft power", the prestige the US enjoyed, all went down the drain, with the final nail in the coffin being the handling of the Kurds in Syria.
      - vundercind 3y ago
        The Syrian civil war was cross-border. ISIS held a large chunk of Iraq at one point. I doubt it’d have lasted as long as it has if that hadn’t been a factor (and the US deliberately making it last longer but not acting decisively enough to end it in victory for “our” side, but that’s a separate matter)
- jadtz 3y ago
  They aren't repainting Saddam's image; that's simply who he was during that period. While I acknowledge he was evil for a lot of his lifetime, it doesn't necessarily justify what USA later did to Iraq. The time period the author is talking about, Saddam was in fact not the perpetrator. >America was wrong. Saddam was evil. They can both be true. I disagree with this statement, especially when talking about the war, for above reasons. America was wrong and evil. Edit: Word, him - > Iraq
ck2 3y ago
No rewriting history. The US decimated Iraq (literally) because Bush wanted to put thousands of angry teenagers and 20-somethings onto a battlefield for revenge for 9/11 when it was the Saudis all along. All the "intelligence" after that was reverse engineered to make that invasion and war happen.
- consumer451 3y ago
  > All the "intelligence" after that was reverse engineered to make that invasion and war happen. Agreed. Any article about "Desert Storm" which does not mention the Project for the New American Century [0], and the Office of Special Plans [1] is a greatly lacking piece of writing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans
  - vundercind 3y ago
    It’s a pretty incredible case of a “conspiracy theory” that unfolded so publicly that it’s not even really a conspiracy or a theory. It’s just a bunch of public facts about some assholes saying they have some bad ideas for stuff they’d like to do for bad reasons, then gaining power, then doing them. It’s hardly a conspiracy if you publish exactly what you’re gonna do, then do it.
    - consumer451 3y ago
      Next one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
- jonplackett 3y ago
  Iraq wasn’t about revenge. They did Afghanistan for that. He (or at least Cheney) was plotting to invade Iraq before 911. It was just an excuse to do something they already wanted to do. And they knew full well Iraq had nothing to do with al qaeda or 911. They also knew they didn’t have WMD. Who would attack a county that could deliver WMD in 15 minutes or whatever that ludicrous claim was. Why do you think no-one’s talking about invading North Korea?
xeromal 3y ago
"Coll, an American journalist and author, fought a legal battle to gain access to a tranche of the material which is now the basis for his book, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq. It is a tale of mutual misunderstanding, often told from a western perspective but now, for the first time in depth, from Saddam’s idiosyncratic point of view. The Iraqi dictator believed the CIA to be all-knowing and all-powerful, so assumed George W Bush’s administration knew very well Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) left after Saddam ordered their destruction in the 1990s. The threatening rhetoric coming out of Washington was just propaganda, Saddam concluded, as he kept up a pretense of possessing WMD to deter his enemies, Iran in particular. “He was trying to signal his pride and his fear of humiliation and of vulnerability to both internal attacks and potentially external attacks,” Coll said. In apparent moments of doubt, Saddam would occasionally buttonhole ministers to ask if they had hidden any remnants of the nuclear, chemical or biological programmes he started. “Do we have any programmes going on that I don’t know about?” he demanded to know from his deputy prime minister in 1998. He was reassured that everything had been dismantled. " Unbelievable!
- lazide 3y ago
  The biggest mistake (IMO) is thinking that anything he would or could have done would have resulted in a different outcome. The US wanted an excuse to invade because Saddam had pissed some people off in the gov't, and they found it. It was transparent BS at the time to people who cared to look, most didn't care to look and therefore it was sufficient to get the votes they needed. Tail wagging the dog.
- kiernanmcgowan 3y ago
  "Twilight of the Bombs" opens with a recounting of the time period between the Gulf and Iraq wars. In this period the US discovers that Iraq was trying to build a nuclear weapons program and gets the international community heavily involved in shutting it down. While this was successful, the US government was aggressively involved in trying to learn everything they could about the program (people, places, research notes) so that they could double check and make absolutely sure everything was shut down. Saddam's gov eventually gets frustrated with this level of invasiveness and doesn't want to list high value military locations for fear of letting Iran know about them. The records end up getting destroyed. Saddam's gov thought "Hey, we burned all the notes involved in the weapons program, there's no way we can restart." Hawks in the US admin thought "They're hiding something that they don't want us to know about, they must still have a weapons program". Notable Hawks who took this position in the H.W. Bush admin were Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld who went on to hold offices of higher power in the W. Bush admin. So it goes. https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Bombs-Challenges-Dangers-Prospects/dp/0307387410 https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Bombs-Challenges-Dangers-Pro...
reducesuffering 3y ago
While the article mentions Bush's motivation, I feel it's incomplete without the context that 263 / 270 (97%!) of US Republican congress voted for this invasion.[0] It wasn't some lone White House decision. The House Democrats still had a majority that voted against. (61%) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002#United_States_House_of_Representatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lapcat 3y ago
  Sadly, though, a majority of Democratic Senators voted for the invasion, including Genocide Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Chuck Schumer. Aside from Lieberman, who had already been a VP nominee, all of these Senators were rewarded by the Democratic party after the debacle. They failed upward.
bee_rider 3y ago
I guess there’s a whole book about it, so I could look it up if I wasn’t lazy. But I am. I don’t get Saddam’s described point of view here. Even if he assumed the CIA was all-seeing and, as a result, aware that he had canceled his programs, wouldn’t the fact that we were building (from his point of view) an intentionally fabricated case to invade his country indicate that we really intended to invade it? Why would we fabricate a cause to attack him, if we weren’t planning on it?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- vundercind 3y ago
  He seemed to realize near the end, and offered improved access for inspections. But we’d already spent billions moving forces into place, so nothing short of his surrender was gonna cut it by then (if it ever would have—inspectors were active and said they had pretty good access until we told them to GTFO because we were coming in no matter what they said)
- resolutebat 3y ago
  The article notes that Saddam was being deliberately ambiguous in public communications about whether he actually had WMDs, in order to scare his enemies. It's only natural to assume to the US was doing the same.
lapcat 3y ago
Everyone sane knew at the time that Iraq had no WMD, and this was merely a pretense for invasion. The United Nations weapons inspectors were in Iraq and found absolutely nothing! Because of course there was nothing. The biggest idiots, as usual, were in our government. Or maybe they knew the truth too and just didn't care. You had to have known they were full of crap when Rumsfeld said, "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." The last sentence would be almost hilarious if it didn't lead to so much death and devastation.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- arp242 3y ago
  > Everyone sane knew at the time that Iraq had no WMD I think that's far too strong. Just because UN inspectors couldn't find anything didn't necessarily mean there wasn't anything to find. It's easy to say in hindsight "well of course there weren't any WMDs!" but with the knowledge of what was available to the public, it really wasn't that clear, and it very well could have been true. The evidence was fabricated because people thought there really were WMDs: "we know Saddam has WMDs, we just can't find good evidence for it, so we'll just have a little white lie now and find the evidence later, and it will all work out fine".
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > Just because UN inspectors couldn't find anything didn't necessarily mean there wasn't anything to find. I mean... that's the best evidence for or against. Are you going to believe the UN inspectors on the ground in Iraq, or are you going to believe CIA "analysts" who never met foreign interference they didn't like? The CIA is one of the least trustworthy organizations in history. > It's easy to say in hindsight "well of course there weren't any WMDs!" but with the knowledge of what was available to the public, it really wasn't that clear, and it very well could have been true. I said it with foresight. And I was far from the only one. Before the invasion there were massive anti-war protests worldwide.
mjevans 3y ago
Offhand, weren't there 'expert witnesses' that reported what the government wanted to hear as well? Edit: This might be what I'm remembering... """ On 5 February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the UN to present evidence that Iraq was hiding unconventional weapons. However, despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service and the British Secret Intelligence Service that the source was untrustworthy, Powell's presentation included information based on the claims of Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed "Curveball", an Iraqi emigrant living in Germany who also later admitted that his claims had been false.[80] """ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War#Pre-war_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War#Pre-war_events
Ygg2 3y ago
I call BS. They invaded on a Michael Bay level of unbelievablity[1]. They invaded cause they wanted to invade. [1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/movie-plot-the-rock-inspired-mi6-sources-iraqi-weapons-claim-chilcot-report https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/movie-plot-t...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

30 points by curiousObject 3y ago

I’d say the false pretenses to go to war in Iraq are pretty well understood, now, and there’s no question we were misled by the government. But repainting Saddam as a misunderstood author who had nothing but a desire to preserve well written Arabic is revisionist and wrong. Even the article notes that he randomly suspended a journalist for 6 months for a grammar mistake. America was wrong. Saddam was evil. They can both be true.

rat9988 3y ago
Why not the opposite, America was evil, Saddam was wrong?
- 20after4 3y ago
  All of the above.
kiba 3y ago
It can also be true that Saddam wants to be a novelist. People can have many facets after all.
consumer451 3y ago
> America was wrong. Saddam was evil. They can both be true. Is there a word in psychology for people not being able to process such thinking?
- postsantum 3y ago
  Manichean delirium Many such cases on web-forums frequented by otherwise intelligent people
  - consumer451 3y ago
    > Manichean delirium This is excellent and just opened up a whole new part of human history to me. Thank you! > Manichaeism teaches an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism
    - jcranmer 3y ago
      I find it interesting that Manichaeism is used as a synonym for dualism despite the fact that dualistic cosmologies predate Manichaeism by at least a millennium--Zoroastrianism relies heavily on dualistic cosmology, and probably exists in a similar form in the older Indo-Iranian religion that Zoroastrianism (and Hinduism, for that matter) is based on.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I don’t know about in psychology, but it’s just black-and-white thinking, informally, right?
  - Log_out_ 3y ago
    Tribalism. People actually have a aversion to heated public debate, fearing the tribe breaks up. That's also why there can always be only one plan.
mandmandam 3y ago
> I’d say the false pretenses to go to war in Iraq are pretty well understood, now, and there’s no question we were misled by the government. No one faced war crime tribunals. Torturers who destroyed Congressional evidence were given promotions. The chief Democrat cheerleader for that war, who blocked key witnesses that could have prevented it all kicking off, was made Vice President for 8 years. And then President. And is running again, despite seemingly not remembering what years he was Vice President. The guy who exposed a small fraction of the war crimes which resulted has been tortured for the last decade. So. no, I don't think it's very well understood at all. > repainting Saddam as a misunderstood author who had nothing but a desire to preserve well written Arabic is revisionist and wrong. That's not what the article was saying. It was saying that Saddam had no WMDs, nor intention to gather them - and we should have known that. We didn't do our due diligence before spending 8 trillion dollars creating a vastly less safe world. If there's revisionism to be found in tfa, it's that the invasion of Iraq was somehow inevitable; just like, part of that 90's vibe. It wasn't inevitable at all - many people made fucked up choices to make that chaos happen, and the whole world is suffering to this day and for the foreseeable future as a result. We haven't learned a thing if we're blaming Saddam for all that.
- genman 3y ago
  You are arguing that keeping a mass murderer with a large army in power is a "more secure word". Saddam Hussein was a huge regional threat to US allies - Israel and Saudi Arabia, he was also a huge international threat by supporting terrorism. No, the world is a safer place without his presence.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    > keeping Since when is inaction "keeping"?
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    > No, the world is a safer place without his presence. If anything makes the world less safe it's a power vacuum, rise in extremist groups, destabilizing a geopolitically crucial region for decades, torturing thousands, killing millions, displacing tens of millions, setting our international reputation on fire, and laundering trillions of tax dollars through the military industrial complex. > Saddam Hussein was a huge regional threat to US allies - Israel and Saudi Arabia, I hate to break it to you, but if you have a thing against mass murder, Israel and Saudi Arabia might not be the best "allies" to bring up... Not to mention the US itself lacking so much as a stub of a leg to stand on. Regardless - we could have spent all that money achieving energy independence instead of propping up some of the world's most heinous regimes with mass murder and terror. We could have ended world hunger and domestic homelessness with the change. Basically any use of those resources would have been better, and people were screaming this from the rooftops. The world's largest protests were ignored by neocons/neoliberals and the media class, and now we're all living in the consequences. So, to hear you say the world is safer since the 2003 invasion, I have to wonder: When are we going to tear apart the propaganda machine that leaves people with such ghastly and malinformed delusions? It's been 20 years - we've seen the effects. There's no debate here - it was a monumental clusterfuck, and unfathomably bad for world safety. That's why ever since - literally every year since 2003 - the world has seen the US as the number one threat to world peace, democracy, and stability. Americans need to start understanding this. The world isn't jealous of us, it's justifiably terrified. Far, far far more than it ever was of Saddam.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pvg 3y ago
But repainting Saddam as a misunderstood author who had nothing but a desire to preserve well written Arabic is revisionist and wrong. That's a reductive and completely inaccurate characterization of the book.
- iambateman 3y ago
  Perhaps, but not the article. The article uses words like “meticulous” and “tactful” to describe the dictator. He was “slowing down.” He “didn’t think the US was serious.” I imagine that the book brings out nuance that the article skips, but I reread the article and I stand by my characterization of it. It sounds like you have read the book, so would you be up for explaining where I’m being reductive? I have personal connections to many Iraqi’s, and having a full understanding of what led to that war is genuinely important to me.
  - pvg 3y ago
    That's not the tone and meaning of the article either, you're reacting to individual words. Simply trying to describe his mental state, possible motivations, etc does not somehow imply apologia. I'm not sure how discussing the book (I did just finish it and recommend it, you're right!) is going to help much, though, if just a basic description of some of its points seem so imbued with value judgement to you - it just isn't there, really.
mschuster91 3y ago
> America was wrong. Was it? Getting rid of dictators should never be wrong in itself, and the US military can steamroll just about everyone than Russia and China. The thing that the US did fuck up - both in Iraq and Afghanistan - was the post-war / recovery / rebuild phase. They didn't provide a clear path towards success for the everyday people.
- vundercind 3y ago
  We killed a hell of a lot of civilians and destabilized the area in predictable ways, while giving Iran a new playground (also, predictably). There’s a straight line between this, to Syria, to the immigrant crisis in Europe. Hell, Brexit may have failed or not even gotten momentum to become A Thing if not for it. So yes, we were wrong. And we should have known it at the time. It didn’t exactly take a crystal ball to tell what the likely outcomes were (though I admit I didn’t see the effects bleeding over to Europe so strongly!)
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > There’s a straight line between this, to Syria, to the immigrant crisis in Europe. Syria was a result of the Arab Spring, people were fed up with Assad, and instead of supporting the opposition Obama didn't care about any "red lines" and eventually Russia moved in. Iraq, I partially agree - had the West actually done something to mediate the old conflicts, to provide the people with a source of income, or to prosecute corruption, the country would have had a way better run. The entire Arab Spring's handling by the West was madness. We could have helped actual, legitimate democracy grow on the foundations of the fed-up masses in the region, by providing aid and assistance as well as act as an oversight authority to keep corruption and crime in check, but no, we just looked the other way as many thousands were killed or tortured, and eventually the old elites took power again - and the "soft power", the prestige the US enjoyed, all went down the drain, with the final nail in the coffin being the handling of the Kurds in Syria.
    - vundercind 3y ago
      The Syrian civil war was cross-border. ISIS held a large chunk of Iraq at one point. I doubt it’d have lasted as long as it has if that hadn’t been a factor (and the US deliberately making it last longer but not acting decisively enough to end it in victory for “our” side, but that’s a separate matter)
jadtz 3y ago
They aren't repainting Saddam's image; that's simply who he was during that period. While I acknowledge he was evil for a lot of his lifetime, it doesn't necessarily justify what USA later did to Iraq. The time period the author is talking about, Saddam was in fact not the perpetrator. >America was wrong. Saddam was evil. They can both be true. I disagree with this statement, especially when talking about the war, for above reasons. America was wrong and evil. Edit: Word, him - > Iraq

ck2 3y ago

No rewriting history. The US decimated Iraq (literally) because Bush wanted to put thousands of angry teenagers and 20-somethings onto a battlefield for revenge for 9/11 when it was the Saudis all along. All the "intelligence" after that was reverse engineered to make that invasion and war happen.

consumer451 3y ago
> All the "intelligence" after that was reverse engineered to make that invasion and war happen. Agreed. Any article about "Desert Storm" which does not mention the Project for the New American Century [0], and the Office of Special Plans [1] is a greatly lacking piece of writing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans
- vundercind 3y ago
  It’s a pretty incredible case of a “conspiracy theory” that unfolded so publicly that it’s not even really a conspiracy or a theory. It’s just a bunch of public facts about some assholes saying they have some bad ideas for stuff they’d like to do for bad reasons, then gaining power, then doing them. It’s hardly a conspiracy if you publish exactly what you’re gonna do, then do it.
  - consumer451 3y ago
    Next one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
jonplackett 3y ago
Iraq wasn’t about revenge. They did Afghanistan for that. He (or at least Cheney) was plotting to invade Iraq before 911. It was just an excuse to do something they already wanted to do. And they knew full well Iraq had nothing to do with al qaeda or 911. They also knew they didn’t have WMD. Who would attack a county that could deliver WMD in 15 minutes or whatever that ludicrous claim was. Why do you think no-one’s talking about invading North Korea?

xeromal 3y ago

"Coll, an American journalist and author, fought a legal battle to gain access to a tranche of the material which is now the basis for his book, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq. It is a tale of mutual misunderstanding, often told from a western perspective but now, for the first time in depth, from Saddam’s idiosyncratic point of view. The Iraqi dictator believed the CIA to be all-knowing and all-powerful, so assumed George W Bush’s administration knew very well Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) left after Saddam ordered their destruction in the 1990s. The threatening rhetoric coming out of Washington was just propaganda, Saddam concluded, as he kept up a pretense of possessing WMD to deter his enemies, Iran in particular. “He was trying to signal his pride and his fear of humiliation and of vulnerability to both internal attacks and potentially external attacks,” Coll said. In apparent moments of doubt, Saddam would occasionally buttonhole ministers to ask if they had hidden any remnants of the nuclear, chemical or biological programmes he started. “Do we have any programmes going on that I don’t know about?” he demanded to know from his deputy prime minister in 1998. He was reassured that everything had been dismantled. " Unbelievable!

lazide 3y ago
The biggest mistake (IMO) is thinking that anything he would or could have done would have resulted in a different outcome. The US wanted an excuse to invade because Saddam had pissed some people off in the gov't, and they found it. It was transparent BS at the time to people who cared to look, most didn't care to look and therefore it was sufficient to get the votes they needed. Tail wagging the dog.
kiernanmcgowan 3y ago
"Twilight of the Bombs" opens with a recounting of the time period between the Gulf and Iraq wars. In this period the US discovers that Iraq was trying to build a nuclear weapons program and gets the international community heavily involved in shutting it down. While this was successful, the US government was aggressively involved in trying to learn everything they could about the program (people, places, research notes) so that they could double check and make absolutely sure everything was shut down. Saddam's gov eventually gets frustrated with this level of invasiveness and doesn't want to list high value military locations for fear of letting Iran know about them. The records end up getting destroyed. Saddam's gov thought "Hey, we burned all the notes involved in the weapons program, there's no way we can restart." Hawks in the US admin thought "They're hiding something that they don't want us to know about, they must still have a weapons program". Notable Hawks who took this position in the H.W. Bush admin were Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld who went on to hold offices of higher power in the W. Bush admin. So it goes. https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Bombs-Challenges-Dangers-Prospects/dp/0307387410 https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Bombs-Challenges-Dangers-Pro...

reducesuffering 3y ago

While the article mentions Bush's motivation, I feel it's incomplete without the context that 263 / 270 (97%!) of US Republican congress voted for this invasion.[0] It wasn't some lone White House decision. The House Democrats still had a majority that voted against. (61%) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Iraq_Resolution_of_2002#United_States_House_of_Representatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lapcat 3y ago
Sadly, though, a majority of Democratic Senators voted for the invasion, including Genocide Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Chuck Schumer. Aside from Lieberman, who had already been a VP nominee, all of these Senators were rewarded by the Democratic party after the debacle. They failed upward.

bee_rider 3y ago

I guess there’s a whole book about it, so I could look it up if I wasn’t lazy. But I am. I don’t get Saddam’s described point of view here. Even if he assumed the CIA was all-seeing and, as a result, aware that he had canceled his programs, wouldn’t the fact that we were building (from his point of view) an intentionally fabricated case to invade his country indicate that we really intended to invade it? Why would we fabricate a cause to attack him, if we weren’t planning on it?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
vundercind 3y ago
He seemed to realize near the end, and offered improved access for inspections. But we’d already spent billions moving forces into place, so nothing short of his surrender was gonna cut it by then (if it ever would have—inspectors were active and said they had pretty good access until we told them to GTFO because we were coming in no matter what they said)
resolutebat 3y ago
The article notes that Saddam was being deliberately ambiguous in public communications about whether he actually had WMDs, in order to scare his enemies. It's only natural to assume to the US was doing the same.

lapcat 3y ago

Everyone sane knew at the time that Iraq had no WMD, and this was merely a pretense for invasion. The United Nations weapons inspectors were in Iraq and found absolutely nothing! Because of course there was nothing. The biggest idiots, as usual, were in our government. Or maybe they knew the truth too and just didn't care. You had to have known they were full of crap when Rumsfeld said, "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." The last sentence would be almost hilarious if it didn't lead to so much death and devastation.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
arp242 3y ago
> Everyone sane knew at the time that Iraq had no WMD I think that's far too strong. Just because UN inspectors couldn't find anything didn't necessarily mean there wasn't anything to find. It's easy to say in hindsight "well of course there weren't any WMDs!" but with the knowledge of what was available to the public, it really wasn't that clear, and it very well could have been true. The evidence was fabricated because people thought there really were WMDs: "we know Saddam has WMDs, we just can't find good evidence for it, so we'll just have a little white lie now and find the evidence later, and it will all work out fine".
- lapcat 3y ago
  > Just because UN inspectors couldn't find anything didn't necessarily mean there wasn't anything to find. I mean... that's the best evidence for or against. Are you going to believe the UN inspectors on the ground in Iraq, or are you going to believe CIA "analysts" who never met foreign interference they didn't like? The CIA is one of the least trustworthy organizations in history. > It's easy to say in hindsight "well of course there weren't any WMDs!" but with the knowledge of what was available to the public, it really wasn't that clear, and it very well could have been true. I said it with foresight. And I was far from the only one. Before the invasion there were massive anti-war protests worldwide.

mjevans 3y ago

Offhand, weren't there 'expert witnesses' that reported what the government wanted to hear as well? Edit: This might be what I'm remembering... """ On 5 February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the UN to present evidence that Iraq was hiding unconventional weapons. However, despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service and the British Secret Intelligence Service that the source was untrustworthy, Powell's presentation included information based on the claims of Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed "Curveball", an Iraqi emigrant living in Germany who also later admitted that his claims had been false.[80] """ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War#Pre-war_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War#Pre-war_events

Ygg2 3y ago

I call BS. They invaded on a Michael Bay level of unbelievablity[1]. They invaded cause they wanted to invade. [1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/movie-plot-the-rock-inspired-mi6-sources-iraqi-weapons-claim-chilcot-report https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/movie-plot-t...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]