A preemptive war for letter envelopes and watermelon jam: they didn't show up in the satellite photos

To my dismay, people continue to criticize those of us who were right in our assessments of what we'd not find in Iraq. I was told yesterday by a friend who still supports the invasion, "You want France and the UN to make the decisions affecting our national interest, I do not. You want to listen to Blix ..."

Patriotic dissent

Indeed some of us did give an ear to Hans Blix while everyone else - including Al Frankin - was making jokes about the "Blixie Chicks". And no matter how much people try to ignore it, the fact remains that we did not find that Iraq was churning out horrible poisons.

At least some of us who showed resolve to stick with the inspections don't want our allies to be responsible for our national interest - that some say we do speaks volumes of how difficult it is to criticize someone for being right.

We do wish America to act in our own international interest, however. No matter what position in the world some may try to claim for us, we do need to cooperate with the rest of the world - "co-operate".

Without help and resources from a truly broad range of friends across the shining seas, we'd be left with little more than soybeans, paper pulp, weapons, perpetual political campaigns and that old time religion. We live on a sphere too big to steer it's course alone, or even with a select group of willing nations. Facing up to that fact makes our own plains no less fruited, our mountains no less majestic, our cities no less gleaming, our God no less graceful and our patriot's dreams no less beautiful.

Some of us grew up in an America that taught the greatest thing we can do is to think for ourselves and not be afraid to consider an unpopular path into the future. The path some of us saw through the briar patch of Iraq would have taken us through while suffering barely a scratch.

Instead of being patient in our resolve, our nation hastily took a short cut, thorns be damned. Today is the 511th day our nation has been rolling in the thicket, getting more bruised and bloodied, and some still claim taking the shortcut was the right thing to do. Incredibly, some even claim it was we who wanted to take the wrong path.

In a nutshell, my protest sprung from a strong conviction that the only moral reason to employ military force is to end a deadly conflict already in progress, and then only as the last option. If there is a God, he lives within all of us equally - solving problems through war is killing God himself. Killing God to be on the safe side is an idea that can only be embraced by those with a pornographic lust for violent solutions.

The question whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or not was barely tangential to the core of my opposition to starting a war. I supported inspections, backed up by the threat of force: it was right to have amassed a presence in the region to show Hussein the world meant business - the rascal was not the easiest to reason with. But as it turned out, he was just a coward in a spider-hole anyway.

Nonetheless, using our position of global leadership and power to reach a world consensus on UNSCR 1441 and securing Hussein's cooperation with it are two of the very few Bush administration achievements for which I applaud them. At the same time, I deride them for beginning the debate with talk of "regime change" - it was clear from the start the real intention was to invade Iraq, not to ensure Hussein had disarmed. We were told over and over the problem was "the nature of the regime itself". But the White House did indeed succeed in recommencing inspections, and for that they should be commended. By getting inspectors back in, they undid Clinton's mistake of forcing inspectors out of Iraq in 1998 (and don't believe for a second that Hussein "kicked them out" - the head of the UN inspections team withdrew the inspectors for their safety ahead of Clinton's bombing campaign, Operation Desert Fox - just as the last inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq ahead of Bush's invasion.)

Compounding and frustrating my aversion to solving problems with violence was the fact the alleged Iraqi threat was a bunch of garbage smoked through an opium pipe. We were told that the evidence Iraq had begun to build and stockpile weapons of mass destruction was photographic and we were actually shown these photographs. Photos of entire industrial complexes - spreading over acres, at work churning out evil poisons and enriching uranium for nuclear bombs: "We know they're doing it, because we're watching them do it!"

Satellite photos do not lie, or do they?

Journalists inside Iraq reported the facilities weren't used for making weapons. This was before inspectors had returned to Iraq - the first inspections mandated by UNSCR 1441 took place November 27, 2002. Several weeks before, on October 8, 2002, the Department of Defence had held a press briefing to fancifully explain why the photographs President Bush had spoken of the preceeding day were actually weapons factories. Here is a verbatim transcription from a flowchart used to describe the deception, the hasty capitalization retained:

It was maybe reasonable to believe the explanation for the moment. Journalists don't have the expertise or sophisticated equipment required to detect the infinitessimally small traces of chemicals or spores of anthrax that weapons inspectors do, so on it's own, the explanation was believable. Most reporters probably wouldn't even have a Geiger counter with which to determine if uranium had recently been processed at a location. Maybe Hussein was just tricking some gullible reporters.

What the inspectors saw from the ground

Once inspectors were in Iraq, the moment of suspending disbelief ended. It should be noted that there were many Americans in the UN inspection team, selected by the CIA. Here are some excerpts from the inspectors' public reports:

Did the inspectors conclusively verify that Iraq had disarmed and was producing no weapons of mass destruction? No. Why not? Because President Bush had no resolve to follow through with the inspections his administration so fabulously made possible. Instead he "reluctantly" launched "military operations to disarm Iraq".

US reaction to inspectors' initial findings

The US media failed to accurately report what the inspectors were finding - or rather what they were not finding. Instead, the mantra of the march to war remained based on observations from outer space instead of under the same rooftops pictured in the photos. We've maybe forgotten why many people were convinced by the evidence - we've just accepted that they were. The case was photographs which tell 1,000 words each.

Click on the thumbnails for the full slide. These are taken from the Pentagon presentation to the press, on the day after President Bush spoke of the photographic evidence that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction. First a slide titled "Nuclear Program DECEPTION". The photograph is of the "al Qaim Phosphate Plant & Uranium Extraction Line" and is dated April 1, 2002. Below the photo are the words "Currently active". The presenter noted to the Pentagon reporters for which the presentation was given, "If you look at the picture, you'll see it's an active facility." So there you go. Photographic evidence that Iraq was refining uranium.

This is of the "Radwaniyah facility". The presenter noted, "This facility is about 18 square kilometers inside. The rough boundaries of the site are marked in red, and we have superimposed in approximate scale the size of the White House and the White House grounds over this site. And you can make a visual comparison as to its rather enormous size." Eighteen square kilometers is six square miles. Yes, a very big facility indeed. Could hold many weapons of mass destruction. Interestingly enough, after we invaded and didn't find the things we were looking for, we stared hearing "It is important to keep in mind that even the bulkiest materials we are searching for, in the quantities we would expect to find, can be concealed in spaces not much larger than a two-car garage" (Dr. David Kay, testimony to Congress, October 2, 2003)

Astoundingly, the "photographic evidence" of the threat continued to be cited even after we'd been inside the buildings. As the march to war happened two Sopranos seasons prior to this writing, a review of a the literally graphic case that Iraq was building is in order. Each item supported by a (Powell) in the following outline was given by Secretary Powell on March 5, 2003 after we had been examining the buildings from inside for nine weeks. The rest of the information was given in the lead-up to inspections. Everything that's not in quotes is a paraphrasing, links to the source of each claim are found below this synopsis:

We know Iraq is building chemical weapons because we have surveillance photos that prove it.Bush They're shipping these things around through a wear-house at al Musayyib, south of Baghdad. Here are satellite photos of them doing it.Powell Look at the Radwaniyah facility - it's enormous! For comparison, this is how big the White House would look.DoD Saddam Hussein has amassed large stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, Sarin and mustard gas.Rumsfeld

Here is a satelite photo of Iraq building biological weapons at Abu Ghraib. Note in the photo that the facility is larger than it was in 1991.DoD The biological weapons program is now active and larger and more advanced than before the Gulf War.Powell Saddam Hussein has amassed large stockpiles of biological weapons, including anthrax, botulism, and other toxins.Rumsfeld

In total, they have 20 industrial plant sized production facilities.White House

They are on a world-wide hunt for materials with which to build a nuclear bomb.White House They're trying to obtain these materials from 11 countries.Powell They are rebuilding facilities to enrich uranium.Bush We know this because we have satelite photos.Bush Here is the photographic evidence.DoD The evidence we have is clear. "We cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."Bush

"Iraq is exploring ways of ... targeting the United States."Bush Right now, on September 19, 2002 as I testify to Congress, Saddam Hussein could kill 2 million Americans. "No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."Rumsfeld

Powell State Department, Colin Powell's "Remarks to the United Nations Security Council" February 5, 2003
Bush White House, "President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat", October 7, 2002
DoD Department of Defense, "DoD News Briefing", October 8, 2002
Rumsfeld Department of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld's Testimony to the Senate Armed Service Committee, September 19, 2002
White House White House, "Denial and Deception" fact sheet, September 12, 2002

President Bush's explanation

President Bush on July 14, 2003 explained the errors in judgement this way, "It's the same intelligence, by the way, that my predecessor used to make the decision he made in 1998 ... And we gave [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." That he seemed to have forgotten he succeeded in getting the inspectors back in during 2002 and 2003 deserves no comment. On his claim that the intelligence, although flawed, had everybody fooled for a long time - that everybody "knew" Hussein was hording terrible weapons, I'll let someone else respond:

"I expect Saddam Hussein to let inspectors back into the country. We want to know whether he's developing weapons of mass destruction."
- President George W. Bush
January 16, 2002

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