October 19, 2021
IT DIDN'T MATTER:
'He lied': Iraqis still blame Powell for role in Iraq war (ASSOCIATED PRESS, 10/18/2021)
"He lied, lied and lied," said Maryam, a 51-year-old Iraqi writer and mother of two in northern Iraq who spoke on condition her last name not be used because one of her children is studying in the United States."He lied, and we are the ones who got stuck with never-ending wars," she added.As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell oversaw the Persian Gulf war to oust the Iraqi army in 1991 after Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.But Iraqis remember Powell more for his U.N. presentation justifying the invasion of their country more than a decade later by casting Saddam as a major global threat who possessed weapons of mass destruction, even displaying a vial of what he said could have been a biological weapon. Powell had called Iraq's claims that it had no such weapons "a web of lies."
Nevermind that we did, of course, find WMD in Iraq, if not of the sort Secretary Powell warned of, the point is that W was going to take down Saddam regardless.
In his legalistic brief to the UN, the President laid out the case for the war and it did not depend on finding WMD. It was a simple matter of enforcing international law, UN mandates, and Western morality.
Because none of that was sufficient to move the actual nations at the UN, nor the left in Britain, W allowed Powell and Tony Blair to base their personal cases on a WMD threat. But recall that when the PM warned that he might not be able to carry the House, W told him not to worry about it; we'd do it ourselves and the Special Relationship would not be impacted. Likewise, he was skeptical about the Secretary getting UN approval, but didn't care whether he got it. Their refusal to enforce their own sanctions had already made them risible,
Sure, it would have been better if Mr. Powell had stuck to W's script rather than following CIA "intelligence" but he was never going to save Saddam, no matter what he did. And that is, literally, what not going to war would have done: left a genocidal tyrant in power. Note that all these indictments of the war are coming right after Iraq held free and fair elections. This is what the critics actually oppose.
Drop here!
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 19, 2021 12:00 AM