Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsAn Invitation to War
Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2005
This is a polished proposal for the invasion of Iraq. It was highly praised in 2002. In retrospect, it was a bit too candid:
"Assembling a coalition would be infinitely easier if the United States could point to a smoking gun with Iraqi fingerprints on it -- some new Iraqi outrage that would serve to galvanize international opinion and create a pretext for invasion. Saddam's pursuit of nuclear weapons is the real reason for invading, but because estimates vary widely on how long it will take for Iraq to do so, and because some countries simply assert Iraq is not doing so and dismiss all of the evidence to the contrary, that may not appear to be an imminent enough threat to justify the march to war, especially for those countries (such as France, Russia, and Turkey) which do not want to see Saddam overthrown."
No doubt Feith and Wumser in the Office of Special Plans took this to heart ("Within a very short period of time, they began to find links that nobody else had previously understood or recorded in a useful way" - Richard Perle, PBS Frontline Oct 2003). Niger yellowcake, Al Qaeda ties, aluminum tubes, unmanned drones, mobile bio-labs, plagiarized studies, and "smoking gun in the form of mushroom cloud" followed. All were needed to create "outrage" to sell invasion.
The lies are now blissfully forgotten, and felonious collaborator Chalibi firmly controls the Oil Ministry. Most countries failed to buy the sales pitch (maybe they didn't want to see international law overthrown: they were right about the threat).
Is this important? Reinhard Heydrich was tasked to provide an incident on the German-Polish border to justify invasion in 1939. His `attack' on a Gleiwitz radio station (`Operation Himmler') murdered KZ prisoners in Polish uniforms to provide a `smoking gun.'
This book, and the invasion it helped engender, became illegal when it's claims (WMD, etc) failed to materialize post invasion. It can not, and should not, so easily be excused as `faulty intelligence.' It was then (and remains) an invitation to aggressive war.
"Any resort to war - to any kind of war - is a resort to means that are inherently criminal. War inevitably is a course of killings, assaults, deprivations of liberty, and destruction of property. An honestly defensive war is, of course, legal, and saves those conducting it from criminality. But inherently criminal acts cannot be defended by showing that those who committed them were engaged in a war, when war itself is illegal." -Justice Robert H. Jackson; Nüremberg 1945.
The author is worth reading (I enjoyed this book in 2002, but wasn't convinced). His proposition was then (given the inspections option), and is now, as illegal as crimes prosecuted at Nüremberg. He has since has moved on to targeting Iran.
Meanwhile, American firms feast on Iraqi oil and no-bid reconstruction. Four years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar remain at large.
