Writing about the new book by John Diamond, "The CIA and the Culture of Failure: U.S. Intelligence From the End of the Cold War to the Invasion of Iraq" (Stanford University Press) the SFGate says this about how the CIA contributed to the Iraq invasion rationale:
It seems clear that the only piece missing from the rationale to make all of these separate facts come together to make ANY sense at all is Israel.
Israel.
As I have said before, my theory is that the pressing reason for us to have invaded was that Israel was feeling understandably nervous at Saddam's various threatening actions and his speeches alluding to having WMD's.
They were going to take action against Iraq but their doing so without any reason beyond sketchy intelligence reports and the suspicion of WMD's surely would have prompted an Islamic response along the lines of, "The Zionists have attacked our brother Saddam (who has seen the light recently as shown by his support of martyr families in Palestine, his addition to the Iraqi flag of the phrase, "Allahu Akbar" and the construction of a beautiful palace in an Islamic motif) and we must respond en masse."
A response by mujahideen defending Iraq would have taken place inside of Israel as well as outside. With a Muslim population between 15 - 18% the numbers of Holy warriors who might have been mobilized by Israel's defensive preventive strike on Iraq could not be predicted but the estimate could reasonably have been expected to be sobering in numbers and effect. It could have lead to great instability in the region and around the world. The ramifications of an unprovoked Israeli attack on Iraq would have been potentially more serious to world peace than was our invasion of Iraq.
We had the Cease Fire Resolutions as a legal justification and we believed the WMD's existed and that Saddam had hidden them just as he had successfully hidden the existence of a nuclear weapons production plant during the 1991 War. He hid that plant so well that even though it was only 9 - 18 months away from going on line we had no clue it existed. We dropped bombs on everything we though was of danger or threat and the bombs hit targets all around this plant. But it escaped all damage.
And Saddam KNEW he'd been able to fool us once so it was a reasonable guess to think we might be overlooking Saddam's WMD's in 2002 as he duped us again.
And that ties in to the Bush malaprop. Fool me once, shame on you...we won't get fooled again.
To be continued.
Many people grow up with the mindset that it is acceptable to make any number of mistakes in life as long as you learn from them and those folks can identify with the adage, "don't make the same mistake twice."
Bush's twisted saying gets laughs but I think it provides an insight into his way of viewing himself and his administration's performance. You may fool me once but I won't get fooled again. And I'd bet that personal characteristic of his, as much as any one quality of leadership, may have been what has kept us safe since 9/11/01. Being fooled again was NOT in George W. Bush's personal range of acceptable behavior.
He knew that Saddam was up to something. We know the Israelis had to have been worried about what that
something was. We know they do not take potential existential threats lightly. We can guess they might have told GWB that they were going to take pre-emptive action.
They might have even outlined the 3 competing scenarios to show him the necessity of taking Saddam out.
Doing nothing: Possible destruction of Israel followed by US retaliation to annihilate Iraq, followed by possible Holy War.
Israeli action: Round the clock strikes on Iraq to seek and destroy targets which might pose a WMD or first strike threat to Israel as well as
any other military targets. Followed by possible organized military responses from Iraq's allied Arab nations. And/or a call to arms of all Muslims to rise up against Israel (the SMALL Satan) and the USA (the GREAT Satan).
US action: Possible diplomatic condemnation by a few nations. We would incur battlefield losses. But due to the nature of Saddam's rule we should be greeted as liberators. And we had a legal justification for going in and we had given Saddam a good warning. All that remained was the final warning and if that did not force Saddam to disarm or seek exhile we would use force to accomplish that result.
What the Israelis and few pundits in the United States were able to recognize is that the search for the perpetrator of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, was just about as close to a mission impossible as there could be.
Historically, armies go to Afghanistan only to lose and retreat in humiliation. Practically speaking, after a couple of years and billions of dollars it's quite possible we'd have nothing more to show for the lives and treasure spent there than the shadow of a ghost in those mountains.
President Bush had to be looking at Afghanistan as the War We Couldn't Win but that at this crucial period of time when we needed to satisfy the American people that we were doing SOMETHING to combat terrorism past or terrorism future, that an effort to take out Saddam was long overdue and something that could reap big rewards down the line, and so it still may.
Thus, in that way of looking at things one can see how the Bush Administration might have needed a way to add some emotional urgency to the situation to justify our taking action NOW in Iraq instead of Afghanistan and not waiting for more solid proof which might never come, to attack Saddam, or awaiting proof which might appear as a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv.
In summary, I believe Bush saw a balance sheet which showed that our attacking Saddam or forcing him to leave was the best of several different courses of action. I believe that EVERYTHING he did was predicated on keeping America safe and preventing a larger, more destructive war and to help prevent our being militarily humiliated in Afghanistan.
I believe the very real possibility of WMD's, without concrete proof one way or the other, was the lynchpin in all of the military actions taken.
If Saddam had confessed and proven he had no WMD's he'd have been attacked by Iran or Saudi Arabia, but Israel would have felt no threat and we would not have had the need to act so quickly.
But we would still be fruitlessly searching for 7 years for OBL in the mountains of Afghanistan with little to show for it.
We'd be in our second humiliating Viet Nam. This one because we'd have spent billions of bucks and thousands of lives on a wild ghost chase.
I don't care how symbolic catching bin Laden might be, there has to be some point when you ask yourself, 'how many good dollars and precious lives are you going to throw down a hole?'
That question might be one the Obama administration will have to answer in the months to come.