The biggest con

Max Fisher’s essay in the Times on March 19 was particularly obtuse because it dwelt on the inability to determine US motivation. Fisher quoted Richard Haass, a senior official at the Department of State at the time of the invasion, who currently heads the Council on Foreign Relations, concluding inscrutably that the decision to go to war “was not made. A decision happened, and you can’t say when or how.”

But we know exactly who made the decision to go to war, and we certainly know when and why that decision was made. The decision itself had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction or with the bogus claim that Saddam was somehow involved in the tragedy. The decision was about regime change. CIA prepared a spurious intelligence estimate in October 2022, which served as the basis for the spurious speech that Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the United Nations in February, 2003. Senior officials at the State Department tried to keep Powell from bivouacking at the CIA where the speech was drafted and pushed by senior Agency officials led by deputy director John McLaughlin.

Fisher, moreover, cites Elizabeth Saunders, a Georgetown University scholar, who argues that “if you want to prevent this from happening again, you need to get the diagnosis right.” Does Saunders really believe that US policy makers actually learn lessons from history? Is Saunders familiar with previous US wars against Mexico in the 1840s, Spain in the 1890s, and North Vietnam in the 1960s that were initiated on the basis of lies and disinformation.

Fisher concludes with the ill-advised argument from Saunders that no matter how much we know about the facts of the 2003 invasion, “some of it will remain fundamentally unknowable.”

What is in fact unknowable is whether honest leadership from Secretary of State Powell, CIA director George Tenet, CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, and a CIA willing to tell truth to power could have created more opposition to the war from the Congress, the media, and the public.

In the Washington Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the paper’s bureau chief in Baghdad at the time of the invasion, argues that “Iraq is recovering” from what he gently terms US “recklessness.” Chandrasekaran faults the United States for going to war without a “real plan” for the “liberation of Baghdad.” As a senior faculty member at the National War College in 2002-2003, I received classified briefings from the Pentagon that made it clear there was never a plan for the post-war or the so-called liberation because the United States goal was to remove Saddam Hussein and then leave. No senior Pentagon staffer expected US forces to remain in Iraq beyond the four to six months needed to remove Hussein, which explains the absence of “planning and staffing.”

Excerpted: ‘Still Spinning the Iraq War 20 Years Later’. Courtesy: Counterpunch.org