Three Blind Mice
- 03.27.2008 - 10:35 AMThe AP is reporting that Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service organized a Saddam-financed trip to Iraq for three Democratic lawmakers in October 2002. The indictment doesn’t name the lawmakers, but the dates of the trip match up with a trip to Iraq taken by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan, and Mike Thompson of California—all three anti-Iraq War.
The trip was allegedly arranged by Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a Michigan charity official who worked with Iraqi intelligence. Saddam supposedly paid Al-Hanooti 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil in exchange for getting the Democrats over to Iraq. During the trip the three lawmakers called for diplomatic approaches to handling Saddam.
The three Democrats have said that they had no idea that Saddam had sponsored their trip. I’m sure that’s true. It goes to show just how adept the Iraqi dictator had become at working American officials (and other world leaders) like puppets. But still: three anti-war U.S. Reps were flown to Iraq on Saddam’s dime in order to defend his kleptocratic regime. And the anti-war crowd dares to call those of us who supported the invasion naïve?
Just imagine if the pleas of the three were heeded. Just imagine if we didn’t, after all, invade Iraq–and then this story broke. What might the headline read if we had continued to “contain” Saddam inside his box of butchery these past five years and the tale of 2 million barrels in exchange for U.S. compliance came out?
“Blood For Oil” just about covers it, don’t you think?
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March 27th, 2008 at 10:51 AM
Shorter Abe Greenwald: people who were right about Saddam not being a WMD threat are obviously traitors.
Since these three lawmakers were right to, in the article’s words, “express skepticism about the Bush administration’s claims that Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction,” it seems highly unlikely that they were dupes of anybody. A dupe, by definition, is wrong, and these guys were right. Since they were right, and since there is no proof that they themselves were paid off by Saddam, the conclusion is that Greenwald is just furious that the evil unserious moonbats were proven wrong, while the “serious” pro-war people turned out to be dupes of Ahmad Chalabi.
March 27th, 2008 at 10:56 AM
I wrote: that Greenwald is just furious that the evil unserious moonbats were proven wrong
No doubt the above will be taken as a Freudian slip (I know deep down that the WMDs were all moved to Syria!) but I meant to write “right.”
I should add that in 2002-3, there was already an idea that anyone who was right about Iraq was actually a dupe of Saddam. The evil long-winded sock puppet transcribes an interview Peter Jennings did with an Iraqi on ABC as the war was beginning: the Iraqi said what most Iraqis felt - that they didn’t appreciate having their country invaded and bombed by foreigners - and everybody, including Jennings, suspected that this was some kind of Saddamite plant.
Well, that was 2003. But you’d think that by 2008 people would realize that it’s better to be right about Iraq than it is to be wrong.
March 27th, 2008 at 11:09 AM
” three anti-war U.S. Reps were flown to Iraq on Saddam’s dime in order to defend his kleptocratic regime. And the anti-war crowd dares to call those of us who supported the invasion naïve?”
I don’t see the connection you are making. he secretly lobbied them to hopefully stop a war that has proven disasterous for his people and ours.
it was a futile effort, unfortunately.
too bad he didn’t have a much bigger expense account
March 27th, 2008 at 11:15 AM
Far fewer of his people have died since he was deposed. This has proven “disasterous” (sic) for them exactly how?
March 27th, 2008 at 11:19 AM
bruce- way way more of his people have died since he was deposed. got anything else?
March 27th, 2008 at 12:26 PM
Saddam was the scum of the earth, and people who cozied up to him before the war, such as Sean Penn, are odious, and some war opponents on the left were no doubt naive about the régime and its manipulations.
Greenwald, in his typically odious and hyperbolic way, tries to turn this rather banal example of left-liberal naïveté into a retrospective justification of the decision to go to war and presumably the conduct of the war. Nonsense.
Consider the mistaken assumptions, false rationales, and strategic blunders associated with this disaster:
* That the internaitonal inspectors were mistaken, and Saddam was in possession of WMD, or was about to acquire them.
* That Iraq, hostile to us though it was, had more than a tangential connection to Al Qaida.
* That Iraq posed a significant threat to fundamental national interests of the United States.
* That taking out Saddam would be beneficial to Israel’s security and would advance the “peace process” beyond the stage of an eternal ritual.
* That democracy could be easily implanted in an artificial, ethnically and religiously divided country with a tradtiion of political murder.
* That overwhelming technical prowess would enable us to depose Saddam in a blitzkrieg with a force of 150,000, and that would be that.
* That in spite of Vietnam, Algeria, Palestine, Northern Ireland, we didn’t need to plan for an insurgency.
* That Iran would derive no strategic benefit from the use of American force to empower the Shi’ite majority in Iraq.
* That our Cold-War-armed all-volunteer military would not be overburdened if the Iraq adventure did not end quickly and victoriously.
* That the Iraqi Army and Ba’ath bureaucracy would depart in peace, and be replaced by competent friendlies.
* That GOP hacks who didn’t speak Arabic or Kurdish and had little Middle Eastern experience could competently manage the occupation of an Iraq traumatized by dictatorship, where family and tribal affiliations, religious zeal and taqqiya (deception) were major motivators.
Etcetera, etcetera, and so forth.
The (mostly venial) sins and follies of the left critics do nothing to make the neoconservative agenda any less wicked and destructive.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:29 PM
It won’t matter to the left. The ideological blinders prevent any retrospective analysis; they are convinced they are correct, and anything is excusable in the pursuit of their goals. It reminds me of when the Soviet intelligence files were opened and it was revealed how deeply the KGB had infiltrated the Western media. Newspapers like The Guardian in the UK had become little more than KGB fronts. These same outlets had been telling us incessantly that every Soviet evil had some moral equivalence to something in the US. There were no mea culpas. It was just time to Move On to the next ideological battle.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:36 PM
Imagine for a moment that Bonior hadn’t retired and was House Majority leader.
Not that the media would play that up. (Add to the Spitzer, Acevedo-Vila, Kilpatrick scandals and one might conclude that Democrats have been abusing their power after only two years.)
And of course even now, the media’s covering up for him. I critiqued a front page article in the Washington Post yesterday, that takes Sen. Obama’s “post-partisanship” as a given and portrays anyone who disagrees as an unfair attacker. (And that’s even while acknowledging that Sen. Obama was ranked most liberal by the National Journal.)
Sen. Obama, if he wins the nomination may have to pivot, but he’ll get plenty of help from his cheerleading section.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:58 PM
Rob, how did you get lester to prove your point?
lester, “…way more people have died…”. Oh? And how do you know that? The mass graves that continue to show up containing thousands are certainly Saddams victims. 150, 000 Kurds alone we slaughtered by that madman Saddam. Are you saying Americans killed more?
Its OK for the Iraqis to be pissed that we are there (your contention, not mine) but we are supposed to accept 9/11?
These 3 congressmen were fools then are are today…
March 27th, 2008 at 1:39 PM
Good try, Abe. I don’t think the media or the Democrats would acknowledge anything like what you suggest, if Saddam had talked us out of invading in 2003. But it’s an interesting new factoid that Saddam arranged the trip of the CODEL.
It’s always entertaining to see the absolute certainty of those who say “Bush was wrong! Bush was wrong! Bush was wrong!” about Iraqi WMD.
The exact truth is that we don’t know how much WMD Saddam had or where it went, for sure. The assessment, today, that “Saddam had no WMD” doesn’t square with either what we found in the country after the invasion (chemical rounds, chemical agents, 500 tons of uranium, some of it partially enriched, blueprints for a centrifuge, weapon scientists on the regime payroll, government records of using Oil-for-Food revenues for WMD programs, as outlined in the Duelfer report), or with the intelligence before it, which included the conclusions of UNMOVIC inspectors throughout the 1990s (Saddam’s holdings could not be fully accounted for, on the basis of their observations, largely because Saddam prevented them from conducting inspections), as well as intelligence from US and foreign sources.
You will find that the US intelligence community has never concluded that Saddam had no WMD. This is because there is no basis for drawing that conclusion. Given the prior evidence of his WMD programs, and the opportunity he had to remove the highest-value elements of the programs from the country in the year before the final UN inspection in early 2003, along with reports from multiple sources that that is what happened, dismissing all that evidence and simply concluding that Saddam in fact had no WMD would be bad analysis and bad intelligence. Saddam also had a long history of dispersing and hiding his highest-value assets, as well as sending them out of the country when invasion loomed — as he did in 1980 with his newest Mirage fighter aircraft, when the war with Iran broke out; and as he did again in 1991, when he sent his new MiG-29s to Iran just before the air campaign of Desert Storm was launched. Sending his best stuff out of the country was Saddam’s M.O. — along, of course, with burying aircraft in the sand, and barrels of chemical agents in farmers’ fields.
The biggest dupe in the world is the one who demands to see and inspect, who waits and allows his inspections to be stalled for months or years, and who then takes what he doesn’t find, when he finally gets in, as certain evidence that it was never there. North Korea put us through those shenanigans in the late 1990s, when US intelligence suspected a particular facility there, and after more than a year of stalling international inspectors, Pyongyang finally allowed them in, in exchange for benefits from the US; and the inspectors — SHOCK! — found a series of “empty tunnels.”
Well, sure. After months of stalling, I could pass off Cheyenne Mountain as a series of empty tunnels. The “intel failure/Bush lied” people believe their narrative not because it fits all the facts, or even because it fits more of them than the “Saddam had WMD programs” analysis fits. The “no WMD” narrative actually fits far fewer of the facts and intelligence data points. Since we did, in fact, find plenty of chemical warheads and agents in Iraq, more than enough to supply terrorists with, and since the possibility that Saddam would supply terrorists with such forms of WMD was the concern Bush invariably expressed in making his case to the people, the conformity of our later findings with his concern, and his intentions, is the most strikingly coherent aspect of this whole thing.