Iraq Restricts U.S. Forces

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

If Iraq does go under (and with the Iran funneling money and supplies to fundamentalist groups) it will only end up strengthening Iran's position in the region (if it hasn't already). The Bush administration were bad players on the geopolitical chessboard - basically gave the game away to Iran at our expense.

The war was only "legal" in the sense that the US and UK met the bare minimum conditions necessary under UN rules (Oh and because Alberto Gonzales said so ) - going through the motions to get a second UN resolution (and getting the member votes from the Coalition of the bullied and the oppressed), to which the outcome was a foregone conclusion. It was obvious from the outset the the decision had been made to go to war, regardless of whether or not Saddam complied with the weapons inspectors.

Certainly seems to have been the thinking in the UK government - though we had no shortage of political manoeuvering where the Blair Government trashed the BBC for a minor misreporting of one story and then tried to fix the deck with a dubious Hutton report that absolved Blair and his hatchet man Alaistair Campbell from claims that they "sexed up intelligence" to cook the books and justify war. Apparently we're supposed to believe that the September dossier (and the dodgy dossier) that was presented to Parliament and the public (from Alaistair Campbell's office, mind) did not use questionable intelligence claims.

*cough* Bullsh!t *cough* *cough*

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Since when did the US require the consent of the Security Council to make an engagement legal?

Sine "the United Nations officially came into existence on October 24, 1945, after the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, China, and France, as well as a majority of the other signatories, had ratified the United Nations Charter."

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Link

Revealed: How the Road to War was Paved with Lies

...UN inspectors who left Iraq just before the war started were searching for four categories of weapons: nuclear, chemical, biological and missiles capable of flying beyond a range of 93 miles. They found ample evidence that Iraq was not co-operating, but none to support British and American assertions that Saddam Hussein's regime posed an imminent threat to the world. On nuclear weapons, the British Government claimed that the former regime sought uranium feed material from the government of Niger in west Africa. This was based on letters later described by the International Atomic Energy Agency as crude forgeries.

On chemical weapons, a CIA report on the likelihood that Saddam would use weapons of mass destruction was partially declassified. The parts released were those which made it appear that the danger was high; only after pressure from Senator Bob Graham, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the whole report declassified, including the conclusion that the chances of Iraq using chemical weapons were "very low" for the "foreseeable future". On biological weapons, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told the UN Security Council in February that the former regime had up to 18 mobile laboratories. He attributed the information to "defectors" from Iraq, without saying that their claims - including one of a "secret biological laboratory beneath the Saddam Hussein hospital in central Baghdad" - had repeatedly been disproved by UN weapons inspectors.

On missiles, Iraq accepted UN demands to destroy its al-Samoud weapons, despite disputing claims that they exceeded the permitted range. No banned Scud missiles were found before or since, but last week the Secretary of State for Defense, Geoff Hoon, suggested Scuds had been fired during the war. There is no proof any were in fact Scuds. Some American officials have all but conceded that the weapons of mass destruction campaign was simply a means to an end - a "global show of American power and democracy", as ABC News in the US put it. "We were not lying," it was told by one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." American and British teams claim they are scouring Iraq in search of definitive evidence but none has so far been found, even though the sites considered most promising have been searched, and senior figures such as Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister, intelligence chiefs and the man believed to be in charge of Iraq's chemical weapons program are in custody.

Robin Cook, who as Foreign Secretary would have received high-level security briefings, said last week that "it was difficult to believe that Saddam had the capacity to hit us".Mr Cook resigned from the Government on the eve of war, but was still in the Cabinet as Leader of the House when it released highly contentious dossiers to bolster its case. One report released last autumn by Tony Blair said that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, but last week Mr Hoon said that such weapons might have escaped detection because they had been dismantled and buried. A later Downing Street "intelligence" dossier was shown to have been largely plagiarized from three articles in academic publications. "You cannot just cherry-pick evidence that suits your case and ignore the rest. It is a cardinal rule of intelligence," said one aggrieved officer. "Yet that is what the PM is doing." Another said: "What we have is a few strands of highly circumstantial evidence, and to justify an attack on Iraq it is being presented as a cast-iron case. That really is not good enough." ...

I guess such thought provoking articles never appeared in the US press...

Yeah the plagiarised stuff was incredible

I have to say that I was impressed by Claire Short and Robin Cook - they were the straight ones in Blair's cabinet who wouldn't shill for Blair - and the only thing that will get the bastards these days is to be outed in the press for claiming a box of mint imperials on their expense reports.