Well considering the people in the best position to know if Iraq had any WMDs were the UN Inspectors, who couldn’t confirm that all had been destroyed gave weight to what I described earlier as ‘perfectly reasonable to assume’ they still had some.
ah, ok I guess there's a bit of a difference between believing they had anything like enough weaponised or weaponisable WMD to pose any sort of a threat as the US & UK governments were saying at the time to justify the march to war, vs believing that Iraq may have had the odd little bit of something left somewhere vs Iraq having absolutely nothing left to be found at all.
Reading the weapons inspectors
reports again, there was absolutely nothing in them to back up the US, UK position, but yes, they do tend to support the middle option to some extent. At the same time though, if you looked at those reports from the perspective of the people writing them, it'd be very unlikely that you'd ever get a report that categorically stated that a country definately didn't have any wmd programme, especially when they were only part way into their work schedule, as they couldn't provide categorical proof of a negative.
Scott Ritters assessment at the time was quite instructive on this IMO
There’s no doubt Iraq hasn’t fully complied with its disarmament obligations as set forth by the Security Council in its resolution. But on the other hand, since 1998 Iraq has been fundamentally disarmed: 90-95% of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capacity has been verifiably eliminated... We have to remember that this missing 5-10% doesn’t necessarily constitute a threat... It constitutes bits and pieces of a weapons program which in its totality doesn’t amount to much, but which is still prohibited... We can’t give Iraq a clean bill of health, therefore we can’t close the book on their weapons of mass destruction. But simultaneously, we can’t reasonably talk about Iraqi non-compliance as representing a de-facto retention of a prohibited capacity worthy of war. (page 28)
We eliminated the nuclear program, and for Iraq to have reconstituted it would require undertaking activities that would have been eminently detectable by intelligence services. (page 32)
If Iraq were producing [chemical] weapons today, we’d have proof, pure and simple. (page 37)
[A]s of December 1998 we had no evidence Iraq had retained biological weapons, nor that they were working on any. In fact, we had a lot of evidence to suggest Iraq was in compliance. (page
What I do not accept is that the media was involved in the conspiracy – yes they were briefed, yes they were lied too, but they certainly weren’t part of the conspiracy as is evidence from the amount of coverage that was questioning of the governments and their evidence.
conspiracy is probably too strong a word, but IMO there were significant sectors of the media who were actively complicit in the deception of the british public via the media that led to war.
Essentially in he UK we had the Sun, Times, Telegraph, Mail, Star and Express with a combined readership of around something like 19 million with an editorial policy of actively supporting the march to war lined up against the Mirror, Guardian and Independent with a readership of around 9 million actively opposing the war. In terms of setting editorial policy, I don't think it's a coincidence that the antiwar papers are all owned by some sort of relatively independent trust or wide shareholding, whereas the pro war papers were wholly or majority owned by tycoons including mordoch, conrad black, Lord Rothmere, Richard Desmond etc.
Now, I'm not saying that all these media tycoons would have been sat down in a big meeting and given every single detail of the plan and their role within it, as would be the case if they were active conspirators. That would have been pretty stupid and entirely unecessary. These are establishment players, who can pretty much be relied upon to ensure their media outlets tow the party line anyway, but in this case I'd expect that words would have been had both here and in the US to make sure they were fully on message, as the media outlets they controlled would have been seen as being absolutely vital in terms of tipping the balance of public and parliamentary opinion in favour of a war based on such a flimsy premise.
But, it’s an interesting idea that they couldn’t trust using a small team of highly trained and dedicated military personnel for such a conspiracy operation for fear of being found out, yet some seem to think they could trust hundreds, if not thousands, of media people to be in on the conspiracy.
IMO rumsfeld and Cheney are just too experienced to go for plans with such obvious potential for blow back. This is particularly the case when they had a CIA that was openly hostile to them and their ideas, and felt that it had been effectively left out to dry by them over the 911 intelligence failings that were largely Rumsfeld and Cheney's fault in the first place (for ignoring the CIA's warnings that AQ posed the biggest threat to the US interests). If you've made enemies of the CIA, then you'd be incredibly naive to start mounting black ops to plant WMD's in Iraq, and these 2 didn't get where they were then by being incredibly naive.
Basically I think that they partly presumed that Saddam would have kept something tucked away in reserve somewhere*, but also knew that essentially once anyone was in a position to know for sure that WMD's weren't going to be found, it'd be way too late as the war would already have been fought, and the billions upon billions of dollars of prize money contracts would have already been issued to the corporate interests they represented, the dice for any new oil contracts with Iraq would be loaded heavily in their favour (or so they thought), and they'd have re-established the US dominance in the region that had been threatened when Saddam went rogue at the end of the 80's. They basically knew that if and when Bush was forced to let them go, they'd be able to seemlessly slip back into power in the corporate world in the knowledge that they'd managed to get the US embroiled in 2 wars that'd easily keep the contracts flowing for most of the rest of their lives one way or another.
*a serious misreading of Saddam's likely reaction to his early 90's situation, and the power of a feared dictator to ensure that slightly irrational decisions, such as destroying all WMD in a way that can't easily be verified, will be enacted rapidly by everyone without a severe death wish lest they be the ones to get caught out by an inspection... as history shows.
