If Congress has some spare change for new investigations available, how about doing something real rather than continually trying to resuscitate one or another version of the GOP’s attempts to demonize their Democratic Party opponents via endless spending of public funds on chasing conspiracy theories and largely discredited allegations.
The British just shamed Congress by comparison with the release of a report on their Iraq Inquiry, being referred to as the Chilcot Report.
The Guardian ran a good summary of “key points from the Iraq inquiry,” which of course reflect back on U.S. policy failures.
There’s one especially relevant these days, critical errors in post-invasion Iraq that led to the rise of ISIS (The Guardian: “UK foreign secretary: US decision on Iraqi army led to rise of Isis“).
Hammond, giving evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee, said: “Many of the problems we see in Iraq today stem from that disastrous decision to dismantle the Iraqi army and embark on a programme of de-Ba’athification.
“That was the big mistake of post-conflict planning. If we had gone a different way afterwards, we might have been able to see a different outcome.”
The influx of professional soldiers into groups such as al-Qaida in Iraq and later Isis had increased the threat that the organisations posed, he said. “It is clear a significant number of former Ba’athist officers have formed the professional core of Daesh [Isis] in Syria and Iraq, and have given that organisation the military capability it has shown in conducting its operations.”
The Intercept has been digging around in the report and the newly declassified documents that are included.
They track back to warnings given before the second Iraq invasion in 2003 that Western military action would trigger a terror response.
Just as the British did, multiple Western intelligence agencies have long recognized (usually in secret) that at the top of the list of terrorism’s causes is the West’s militarism and interference in predominantly Muslim nations — as a 2004 Pentagon-commissioned report specified in listing the causes of terrorism: “American direct intervention in the Muslim world”; our “one-sided support in favor of Israel”; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, “the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.” The report concluded: “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies.” Countless individuals who carried out or plotted attacks on the West have said the same.
From another piece in The Intercept:
The Downing Street Memo, sometimes called the “smoking gun” document of the Iraq war, was leaked to the U.K.’s Sunday Times in 2005 (and the original has now been declassified as part of the Chilcot Report).
According to the Downing Street Memo, the British cabinet — including Blair — was informed by Richard Dearlove, then head of British intelligence, that the U.S. government was being consciously deceptive about its case for war. Dearlove, the memo reads, “reported on his recent talks in Washington. … Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
There’s so much material that it’s hard to map a strategy for digging beyond the surface. I’m just starting with the published accounts of what’s in the report, and looking towards jumping into specific sections of the report later.
Weekend reading, I guess.
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After the report was released, Tony Blair held a two-hour press conference. Although he stopped short of saying he was mistaken in committing the Brits to Bush’s invasion, he displayed profound regret at the consequences. At one point he even seemed to break down. Contrast that with Bush’s response: through a spokesman, he said he was bicycling with wounded warriors on the ranch and thought the world was a better place without Saddam.
The Chilcot report also discloses exchanges between Bush and Blair that indicate Blair had committed the Brits to go with the U.S. whatever Bush might decide — the summer before the invasion.
I’m frankly dismayed at the lack of coverage this report has received in the U.S. press. Even the New York Times buried it on a back page yesterday.
De gustibus non est disputandum
hmmn,
cum res non potest agere
An intelligence official, Tim Dowse, told the committee that British officials were nervous enough about United States suspicions that aluminum tubes acquired by Mr. Hussein could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium that they had initially kept the subject out of a British summary of Iraq’s weapons projects published in 2002.
After Vice President Dick Cheney had talked about the tubes on American television, “we felt that it would look odd if we said nothing on the subject,” Mr. Towse said. “It would open us up to questions.”
So the report mentioned the tubes but noted “we couldn’t confirm that they were intended for a nuclear program.”
Such questions about the prewar intelligence were left unresolved, despite Mr. Blair’s oft-repeated desire for a “smoking gun.”
Mr. Blair stressed on Wednesday that the report concluded that he had not invented or distorted intelligence. But he won little sympathy: The current leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, apologized for the party’s having led Britain into the war, and the governing Conservatives were happy to let the Labour Party eat itself up over Mr. Blair and Iraq.
The sense that Britain was led into carnage by a foolish devotion to the United States has had lasting consequences and made members of Parliament reluctant to authorize further military action alongside Washington. — NYT
Emma Sky, the heretofore underappreciated British diplomatist, seems to have had it right, clearly more and more now in sustained lucid appearences on the BBC, clearly portrayed from her brilliant book “The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq”, describing from her pithy perspective as British advisor, transported,slammed in, as directed by her government really early on a plane to clueless Basra to in her sense “apologise” to the populace overall, then only to be directed as a lone human being on the spot to report as, of all things, something called Government Coordinator of Kirkuk in Iraqi Kurdistan in the most vacuous of circumstances – eventually leading to her coordination later as British advisor to the US General Odierno, whom she delightfully describes, to himself actually over coffee, as successfully being more dangerous than Atilla the Hun in her most illuminating book on Blairites in the wake of W and his US politics.
“The Unravelling” is a far more intimate reportage than anything else, sorting out our bold entry into Iraq from a most proper British template. The Chilcot Report and Tony Blair’s extensive response last Monday inevitably document it all.