America's top law enforcement official/holy avenger has informed us that the war against Iraq was justified, even if no weapons of mass destruction are ever found:
Saddam's willingness to use such weapons was sufficient cause to overthrow his regime, Ashcroft told reporters, alluding to the use of chemical and biological arms against Iraqi Kurds in 1988 and during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.
"Weapons of mass destruction including evil chemistry and evil biology are all matters of great concern, not only to the United States but also to the world community. They were the subject of U.N. resolutions," Ashcroft said.
Reporters let it go that noted ailurophobe and breast fetishist Ashcroft quite possibly believes that all chemistry and biology is evil. Except for whoever designed that stuff they force feed to hunger striking Muslim Americans, that is.
Spared us a lot of bad PR, that did.
The Bush spin machine is on the heavy duty cycle these days......Kay's resignation and subsequent comments serve as the latest example of the administration's shady reasoning for going to war. (no WMDs, the ability to deploy them in 45 mins, Saddam's ties to Al Queda, on and on).
The Bushniks seem to be hanging their hats on one thing: regardless of whether we find WMD's in Iraq, removing Saddam Hussein was a good thing in and of itself.
How so? Shortly after Gulf War I NPR aired a segment saying that, basically, the CIA had ruled out assassinating Hussein as an option (at the time anyway) because if he were taken out, even crazier people were waiting to seize power. Taking out a bad guy is only a demonstrable gain if you can ensure that another bad guy doesn't step in.
We don't know how the transfer of power will shake out in Iraq, but I'm not too optimistic about the flourishing of open democracy. Bush demonstrated an embarrassing passion for sending our troops into harm's way at the start, and now he's showing a similarly embarrassing desire to pull them before the country is stabilized. If we withdraw before we've given the country the chance to sustain its own free political system, then this really will all have been for naught.
While there's no question that Saddam was a bad man who did bad things, the real question is how should we spend our limited resources most effectively?
I don't think we did a good job answering that question. We disrupted or destroyed a lot of lives, borrowed a ton of money, and used up vast amounts of international good will, to get one bad guy who's not really all that distinguishable from a host of other bad guys, some of whom (like Kim Jong Il) actually are threatening their neighbors with WMD.
I think Kay's interim, declassified report contains an oblique reference on page 548 (footnote 21) to calico cat cloning facilities.
Given the contempt that Bush & Pals have shown for open democracy here at home, I doubt his commitment - much less his ability - to produce democracy in Iraq. Heck, he even opposes direct elections. (Anyone else having flashbacks to Florida? He didn't really want the people's votes counted there, either.)
The two things that seem most clear to me are:
1) Our intelligence regarding WMD was so inaccurate because the Bush Administration pressured the CIA, DIA and others to report what it wanted to hear - and disregarded any information that conflicted with their premise.
2) This president intended from the first day of his administration to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power - and had 9/11 not provided him an excuse (albeit a flimsy one), he would have invented another.
Whatever. These clowns will tow the party line regardless of what we do or do not find in Iraq. Anyone with a brain would notice that the decision to go to war was finalized before the justification for doing so.