Fear of Clowns

Everybody loves the documentary Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War. It is a worthwhile watch. A particularly poignant part is a segment documenting how the claim of Iraq seeking "significant quantities of uranium from Africa" made it into President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address when in October, the CIA told White House speech writers and senior staff not to mention the claim in the Cincinnati speech. Meet the Press' Tim Russert asked Condoliza Rice how the claim got back into a presidential speech. Rice replied, "It's not a matter of getting back in, it's a matter, Tim, that three plus months later people didn't remember that [CIA Director] George Tenet had asked that it be taken out of the Cincinnati speech."

Uncovered does an excellent job of exposing many of the fallacious claims about nuclear, biological and chemical weapons that made up the backbone of the case for war.

However, 20/20 vision need not to have been acquired in hindsight; the claims presented by those pushing for war were subject to rational analysis before as well as after the fact. Here's two examples:

At a joint press conference on September 7, 2002, both George Bush and Tony Blair cited a "new" IAEA report which supposedly claimed Iraq has restarted it's nuclear weapons program:

• PRIME MINISTER BLAIR: [...] We only need to look at the report from the International Atomic Agency this morning showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapons sites to realize that [...]

  Q: Mr. President, can you tell us what conclusive evidence of any nuclear -- new evidence you have of nuclear weapons capabilities of Saddam Hussein?

  THE PRESIDENT: We just heard the Prime Minister talk about the new report. I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access, a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need.

The IAEA immediately issued a press release stating there was no such new report. It was fiction. Here is an actual IAEA report:

• "Since the resumption of Security Council mandated activities in Iraq, the IAEA has conducted sixty-eight inspections, including inspections at a Presidential Site and at six sites that had not previously been inspected. Inspections have been carried out without prior notification to Iraq except where notification was necessary to ensure that specific support from the counterpart would be available at the facility (e.g. a crane for the removal of Agency air samplers), and immediate access has been provided by the Iraqi authorities. No evidence of prohibited activities has been detected, though the results of the collection of environmental samples are not yet available."

A second example of a clearly faulty claim regards a former chemical weapons facility in Fallujah, claimed to have been rebuilt to resume chemical weapon production:

• "At Fallujah and three other plants, Iraq now has chlorine production capacity far higher than any civilian need for water treatment."
  http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/iraqdecade.pdf (PDF)
  
  
• "Iraq has rebuilt key portions of the Tareq State Establishment. Tareq includes facilities designed specifically for Iraq’s chemical weapons program and employs key figures from past programs."
  - Colin Powell http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2003/17300.htm

Reality: There was nothing nefarious going on at the Tareq plant (alternately spelled "Al-Tariq"):

• "The Fallujah II site comprises the headquarters of the Al-Tariq Company and a factory area. Only the factory area was inspected. Two separate chemical plants are in the factory area and their major activity is the production of phenol and chlorine. The chlorine plant is currently inoperative.

  "The site contains a number of tagged dual-use items of equipment, which were all accounted for. All key buildings were inspected in addition to the chlorine and phenol plants. The objectives of the visit were successfully achieved."
  Joint UNISCOM/IAEA statement, http://www.iraqwatch.org/un/IAEA/iaea-inspex-011703.htm

Glen Rangwala complied an exhaustive analysis of such faulty claims made in the case for invading Iraq. Before the war. It's too bad Congress and the American public paid so little attention to what was being said by persons not in the Executive Branch of the US government before deciding that "Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more."

// posted by Erik @ 1/15/2004 05:48:00 PM
permalink | email post: