Customer Reviews

The WMD Mirage: Iraq's Decade of Deception and America's False Premise for War (Publicaffairs Reports)

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Americans absolutely love conspiracy theories. It seems that it is much easy to believe in a conspiracy with 'they' being out to get you than to simply say that a bunch of people screwed up. And now it seems that we've finally found one to, hopefully, replace the conspiracy that killed Kennedy and perhaps even the one about the UFO's at Roswell.

The truth appears to be bad enough. The intelligence agencies of the United States, Britain, Australia, Israel, Germany, France and Russia all got it wrong. (Yes, France and Russia believed in the WMD's as well but didn't want an invasion because they were getting preferential oil pricing from Iraq to trade for weapons.)

The real problem here is that if we believe in a conspiracy, then we won't feel it necessary to take the steps to fix the real problem.

This book has been dismissed as centrist propaganda by one reviewer. I don't know what that is, left wing I know, right wing I know. Centrist to me says that the writer is trying to be unbiased - and that's what I really want to read. It seems to me that the book is pretty fairly balanced. My only real complaint is that it doesn't have an index, and with its format, it is sometimes difficult to go back and see where it said something.

For another report, the article in the Atlantic in the January/February 2004 by Kenneth M. Pollack titled Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong is highly recommended - It's available on line at no charge.

This compilation of documents, edited by a New York Times reporter, is nothing but centrist propaganda. It focuses on "failures" of the CIA and intelligence-gathering, but includes NOTHING on the Office of Special Plans, the Lie Factory in the Pentagon that deliberately spun intel to support the neoconservative agenda of war-on-Iraq-no-matter-what and reported directly to Cheney. The excellent Mother Jones article called "The Lie Factory" has yet to be expanded into a book as far as I know, but look for it on the Mother Jones website. The best book on the subject is Bamford's A PRETEXT FOR WAR (see my review). The Carnegie Endowment for Peace was a source of excellent information debunking the Bush Administration's case for war long before the war was launched. The idea that "everyone thought the threat was real" until the post-war discovery of no weapons is nonsense, nothing but post-hoc propaganda which serves to justify the war.

See HOODWINKED: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War by John Prados for a much better analysis of the "WMD" issue, with full documentation (see my review). The very category WMD is a propaganda device which lumps nuclear weapons in with the much less dangerous chemical and biological weapons, thus magnifying the threat from the latter. The mass media acceptance of the term WMD is one of the biggest victories of the neoconservatives.

There was a Senate committee report on the WMD intel that came out in the summer of 2004. It was eclipsed in the media by the 9/11 report. But that Senate committee report was supposed to have a follow-on, a Part 2, that examined the deliberate distortion of intel by the Bush Administration -- no surprise, the GOP-run Senate has never issued that report.

The "intel incompetence" line is very convenient for Bush and Cheney -- it absolves them of responsibility for an unnecessary war. But it is far from a secret that they were itching for "regime change" in Iraq from the day they occupied the levers of power. Was the Pentagon Office of Special Plans a hallucination, or did Feith report to Cheney with intel cooked to support an invasion? Just look at Powell's pitiful presentation to the U.N. -- that's all they had? Obviously a decision had been made and the lack of evidence be damned. This is not an exotic conspiracy theory, and it's not "having it both ways." The CIA was not calling the shots -- the CIA incompetence from the P.O.V. of Rumsfeld, Cheney & Bush was not that they exaggerated the threat, but rather that they couldn't produce convincing evidence that a threat existed to support the plan for war. This has been in plain sight all along, and it is a blatant after-the-fact coverup to bury the truth in a blizzard of misleading official reports.

If you don't believe me, and you're inclined to think this is a "stupid conspiracy theory," check out the books by Bamford and Prados, check out the Mother Jones article, and check out the website of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- look for the article "Origins of Regime Change in Iraq" by Joseph Cirincione, who was then the Director of the Non-Proliferation Project at CEIP, which traces the neocons' unceasing efforts between 1991 and 2003.