Wha the Fuh?
Let me see if I have this straight...
Following the invasion we had millions of Iraqi documents that we lacked the personnel to translate.
It was believed that within those millions of documents would be some that would substantiate the Bush Administration's claims that Saddam had viable nuclear and WMD programs at the time of the invasion.
To find out if such documents were within the trove, the Bush Administration, against the advice of the intelligence community, placed these millions of documents on the internet, so the whole world could sort through them.
As it turns out, there actually were documents from Saddam's pre-Gulf War One WMD and nuclear programs, including, it is said, plans for how to build a nuclear bomb.
Now, if you're a reasonably intelligent human being and you truly believed that Saddam had such programs and that documents supporting these programs might be among those released, wouldn't it occur to you that actual plans for the assembly of these things might be among the documents? Wouldn't it further occur to you that the people most likely to be in a position to take advantage of such a document dump would be those in whose language the documents are written, a large number of whom are currently waging war against the United States? How, in any real world, could this have seemed like a good plan?
It occurs to me that the Bush Adminstration didn't really believe that Saddam had a viable nuclear weapons or WMD program at the time of the invasion and so they, forgetting that the whole world knew he had such programs in 1991, figured no such documents would appear. This would be consistent with invading a country you believed had such weapons when common sense would tell you that the single act most likely to make someone like Saddam use such weapons would be to invade his country. That's one possibility. Another is that this crew in the White House is just too incapable of planning far enough ahead to anticipate anything ever going wrong with anything they ever attempt. There is a large and growing body of evidence to indicate that this is so.
In any case, this whole episode is one more reminder of how "serious" Bush and the Republican party are about national security.
Following the invasion we had millions of Iraqi documents that we lacked the personnel to translate.
It was believed that within those millions of documents would be some that would substantiate the Bush Administration's claims that Saddam had viable nuclear and WMD programs at the time of the invasion.
To find out if such documents were within the trove, the Bush Administration, against the advice of the intelligence community, placed these millions of documents on the internet, so the whole world could sort through them.
As it turns out, there actually were documents from Saddam's pre-Gulf War One WMD and nuclear programs, including, it is said, plans for how to build a nuclear bomb.
Now, if you're a reasonably intelligent human being and you truly believed that Saddam had such programs and that documents supporting these programs might be among those released, wouldn't it occur to you that actual plans for the assembly of these things might be among the documents? Wouldn't it further occur to you that the people most likely to be in a position to take advantage of such a document dump would be those in whose language the documents are written, a large number of whom are currently waging war against the United States? How, in any real world, could this have seemed like a good plan?
It occurs to me that the Bush Adminstration didn't really believe that Saddam had a viable nuclear weapons or WMD program at the time of the invasion and so they, forgetting that the whole world knew he had such programs in 1991, figured no such documents would appear. This would be consistent with invading a country you believed had such weapons when common sense would tell you that the single act most likely to make someone like Saddam use such weapons would be to invade his country. That's one possibility. Another is that this crew in the White House is just too incapable of planning far enough ahead to anticipate anything ever going wrong with anything they ever attempt. There is a large and growing body of evidence to indicate that this is so.
In any case, this whole episode is one more reminder of how "serious" Bush and the Republican party are about national security.
posted by Stephen Green at 1:31 PM
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