When Christopher Hitchens is on, he is on, and his evisceration of the claims that Saddam never went uranium-shopping in Africa is another intellectual smackdown from the master of the art form:
In February 1999, Zahawie left his Vatican office for a few days and paid an official visit to Niger, a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore. It was from Niger that Iraq had originally acquired uranium in 1981, as confirmed in the Duelfer Report. In order to take the Joseph Wilson view of this Baathist ambassadorial initiative, you have to be able to believe that Saddam Hussein’s long-term main man on nuclear issues was in Niger to talk about something other than the obvious. Italian intelligence (which first noticed the Zahawie trip from Rome) found it difficult to take this view and alerted French intelligence (which has better contacts in West Africa and a stronger interest in nuclear questions). In due time, the French tipped off the British, who in their cousinly way conveyed the suggestive information to Washington. As everyone now knows, the disclosure appeared in watered-down and secondhand form in the president’s State of the Union address in January 2003.
The idea that Ambassador Wilson’s report somehow debunked the claims of Saddam seeking uranium from Africa are lies, pure and simple – lies propagated by the Ambassador himself. The Senate inquiry into the matter found quite the opposite:
Conclusion 13. The report on the former ambassador’s trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts’ assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq.
Which led The Washington Post to all but outright call Ambassador Wilson a liar. Nothing Wilson claimed: that there was no evidence that the Hussein regime was seeking uranium from Niger, that he was not sent on the recommendation of his wife, or that he had seen the forged papers relating to Niger have turned out to be true. Despite the very public revelations about Wilson’s untruthfulness, many on the left still treat him as a hero and an icon – proving that the only “truth” that matters to some is what’s convenient to their partisan ideology.
Hitchens’ life purpose at this point is a futile attempt to restore his professional integrity in the wake of supporting a war that turned out to be an epic mistake. His only audience is the dwindling number of die-hard neocons like yourself seeking similar validation for a discredited ideology that’s falling apart around you. Like Hitchens, you wanna convince yourself (and as many others who will listen) that the Titanic isn’t REALLY sinking.
Which is the same silly blather we’ve all heard time and time again… the same people who wouldn’t known an Ayatollah from an armadillo suddenly think they’re experts on the Middle East.
If the left would actually think about their position, they’d see how untenable it really is. If we leave Iraq now, do you honestly think things would get better? Anyone with two brain cells can see the necessity of not allowing that to happen – and if the democratic option fails, things will get a whole shitload worse. You think this is civil war? Civil war is when population centers get shelled. Civil war isn’t a few dozen murders a day, civil war would involve a few thousand people dying every day.
All you do is sit around the sidelines and bitch. Just admit it, you want the US to fail. You want Iraq to go to hell, because that would vindicate your pissant little worldview. You could sit and gloat about how right you are, and if a couple million brown people die, well fuck ’em.
The more I see from the left, the more I see the arrogance, racism, and ignorance that will get a hell of a lot of people killed. I don’t give a damn whether supporting this war is popular – it sure as hell is right.
Whew!!!! That was the most exasperating tantrum I’ve seen from someone on the right…..all morning. Insofar that Iraq was a secular state in a region dominated by Muslim extremists, they were far from public enemy #1 and much closer to an unwilling ally. Saddam Hussein, while a monster, was contained. The pre-war rhetoric about his global-domination ambitions are now proven to have been unfounded.
Will things “get better” in Iraq? Nope. Not if we go and not if we stay. I’ve always had ethical issues about destroying their country and then forcing them to fix the mess, but we’ve held their hand through a chain of democratic elections and nearly three years of Security Force training. The foundation has been laid to give Iraq a stable government. At what point have we accomplished what we need to before we let them take the reins, for better or for worse? Iraq as a commonwealth of the United States is not an acceptable solution, but that’s the only foreseeable endgame if we don’t embrace some sort of near-term exit strategy.
And just for the record, why don’t you save idiotic strawmen about “racism” to Cynthia McKinney. She does it much convincingly than Casper-white neocons who’ve made two election cycles of political hay out of a “fear the brown man” message.
The Duelfer Report says otherwise. Saddam Hussein was actively training and supporting terrorist groups. Al-Qaeda was very likely one of them.
Again, think – al-Qaeda’s biggest beef with us was our presence on the Arabian peninsula. The only way we could maintain containment of Iraq would be to maintain that presence.
And again, think. Iraq would have collapsed at some point. What would have happened then? Would the suddent organic collapse of the Hussein regime been a good thing from the region? When Iraqi refugees start pouring into other countries in the region? When Turkey starts worrying about an independent Kurdistan? When Iran invades again? How is that better than the status quo?
And again, why is that? The only rational justification that can come out of that argument boils down to “those brown people are just too stupid to get democracy.” The argument that Iraqi culture is inimical to democracy can’t be justified without reaching towards racist grounds. It predisposes that Kurds, Shi’ites, and Sunnis can never reach accord, can never live in a democratic society, and Iraq is damned to sectarian warfare.
How is that not a racist contention? If Arabs can’t be democratic, then all the are is chattel to be ruled by one iron-fisted dictator after another. Didn’t we already try that route with the Shah? Look where that got us.
That is a reasonable question to ask. The short answer is “not until things are ready”. The Iraqis are starting to take over security, but our goal is to ensure that the Iraqi military can win if a civil war ever comes. When we leave, someone has to be able to keep the peace. Until the Iraqi police and military can do that, we simply cannot leave.
If it were just a question of training, three years wouldn’t be enough. But it’s a question of training recruits in a middle of a war zone and trying to deal with the sectarian tensions as well.
Yes, it would sure as hell be easy to prop up some dictator and let him keep everyone in line through force. The problem with that strategy is that’s how we got into this mess in the first place.
If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the world right now:
The origin of Islamic terrorism comes from the disconnect between the Arab world and their governments.
The only way to win this war is to end that disconnect. When the Muslim Brotherhood says “Islam is the solution” they’re speaking to millions of disinfranchised Muslims who have no power except through Islam. That’s why the call of jihad is heard so strongly throughout the Muslim world.
It all comes down to this: either we democratize the Middle East and solve the problem once and for all, or eventually some group, be it al-Qaeda or another group we’ve never heard of, will launch an attack the likes of which we have never seen. And then we will have to respond in kind.
You, me, and the Iraqi people better damn well hope this enterprise succeeds, because if it doesn’t, our situation is gonna look like a fucking picnic in comparison. As in a very strong chance that we lose a few cities and a few countries become uninhabitable wastelands for generations.
One would think that the left, which wraps itself in the concepts of democracy, human rights, liberalism, and free speech would actually want to fight for those things in Iraq. But no, they’ve practically become cheerleaders for defeat. At some level them want Iraq to fail. Is it not better to stand for the values of democracy, even if the road to that end is difficult then cheer for and advocate its defeat?
Then again, I guess that’s the difference there. The left talks about patriotism, democracy, liberalism, and all those other terms, but they value their own pissant political agenda more than they do the values they’re supposed to stand for.
Sorry, Jay. Try again:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/008174.php
We know that the only source of the Niger-Uranium story were the forged documents from Italian intel. Not the French, not the British – who actually have both withdrawn their support for the connection, guess you didn’t get that memo. The US, French, and British all recieved the same documents – the documents that were proven to be forgeries.
And your out-of-context quote from the Senate report is another one of your distortions. I notice that it doesn’t actually say in that paragraph what the analysts actually thought, which was that there was no Niger-Iraq connection.
In other words – Wilson’s report that there was no Iraq connection didn’t change analysts’ position that there was no Iraq connection. Imagine that.
Apparently you don’t expect people to read your links, Jay?
No it wasn’t. The British never saw the forged memo. The British independently confirmed their findings that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Furthermore, other investigations into the issue have found the same thing.
Again, the British have not withdrawn their position on Iraq and Niger. Their intelligence was sourced differently than the forged documents, and it has been well-known for some time that Niger has been a center for the illicit trade in raw uranium ore. Both the British and the French did state that Iraqi trade representatives had travelled to Niger and that they were seeking to purchase uranium.
And if Iraq wasn’t looking for uranium from Niger, why would Zahawie travel to Niger? To buy goats? Why would Wilson note that Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf was also in Niger? No one has said that Iraq was successful in procuring uranium from West Africa, but only one with partsan blinders on can argue that he wasn’t actively looking to do so.
The Senate Report and the Butler Report both vindicate the Administration’s statements, and the rest is just spin.
“And again, think. Iraq would have collapsed at some point. What would have happened then?”
By this measure, should we not “pre-emptively” invade Pakistan now. After all, Musharav (sp?) won’t be around forever, and what will happen in his absence?!?!
“The only rational justification that can come out of that argument boils down to “those brown people are just too stupid to get democracy.†The argument that Iraqi culture is inimical to democracy can’t be justified without reaching towards racist grounds”
Well, if I express misgivings to the ability of the Israelis and Palestinians to ever fully settle their centuries-old rivalry, does that make me a “racist” or an anti-semite? There are long-standing ethnic tensions between the Shi’ites, Sunnis, and Kurds that I can’t see resulting in a long-standing (or most likely even short-term) democracy, particularly if that democracy is constructed of the sort of religious tenor that Iraqis just voted in. That has nothing to do with “racism”….only common sense.
“The short answer is “not until things are readyâ€. ”
In which case the “short answer” is not an answer at all. The voters of Iraq have expressed their desire for us to leave by an overwhelming mandate. If you’re suggesting their requests for us to leave should go unheeded, perhaps it’s you who believes they’re “too stupid for democracy”.
The difference being that Musharraf doesn’t have a history using WMDs – and technically, we already have 20,000 US troops right next door should anything happen.
Let’s accept that as true for just a moment. We’ll say Iraq can’t sustain democracy – the ethnic tensions are too great. What then? We can’t leave Iraq to fester. Putting a strongman in charge is hardly a great idea – see Chile and Iran.
If democratization fails, sooner or later things will get catastrophic. Which is why we have every interest to see democratization succeed.
And again, that whole argument boils down to the notion that Iraqis are just too stupid to support democracy. What if you change the argument and said that whites, Asians, and blacks can’t live in peace? Would that not be racist? So why is it acceptable to pass the same judgement onto Iraqis?
What?! What planet are you from? The majority of the UIA list doesn’t support our withdrawal. Ayatollah Sistani doesn’t support our withdrawal. The Kurds don’t want our withdrawal. The Accord Front doesn’t want our withdrawal.
The Iraqis aren’t stupid. They know if we leave, the shit hits the fan. They haven’t voted against our presence, and until the Iraqi people can really trust the security forces to keep them safe, they’re not going to kick out the one group that’s the final firewall against anarchy.
Except for the fact that they’ve done no such thing.
Is it really that hard for people to not keep making stuff up?
Doesn’t it count for anything that even the White House has repudiated the Niger uranium story?
This is a great blog with great discussion. Keep up the good work, author and commentors a like.
I’m sorry, but that’s just plain false. The Italian government’s own investigation of the forgery has revealed that the French, UK, and US all saw the memo in one version or another, and sources in each of those services has confirmed that it was the sole source of speculation about the Niger-uranium connection. British intel has never offered any evidence whatsoever beyond the Italian memo to support the idea that Saddam sought uranium from Niger.
The Senate report, as I just quoted, actually states the exact opposite; and the Butler report, which provides no sources or evidence for its conclusions, is nothing more than further dissembly from a government completely unwilling to face its own failure in the Niger-uranium debacle. French intel and the CIA both warned the Bush administration that the Niger statement could be supported by absolutely no credible evidence. And the conclusion of both Colin Powell and the Defense Intelligence Agency was that it was “highly unlikely” that Niger would sell uranium to Iraq.
Nice try, but I voted for Bush (I just didn’t drink the cult of personality koolaid), so the “partisan” card doesn’t play with me. And the idea that Saddam trying to buy something no one would sell him is some kind of casus bellum is simply one more transparent prop by the people who refuse to acknowledge anything untoward about Bush.
Except they haven’t. They repudiated the forged documents, which is why the contents of the SOTU mentioned British Intelligence. The British didn’t even see the forged documents until after the SOTU speech.
It doesn’t help at all that they backtracked when they shouldn’t have, thinking (incorrectly) that the British sources were the same as the forged documents. The Butler Report later concluded that Iraq was indeed seeking uranium in Africa:
http://www.factcheck.org/article222.html
The Butler report, again? The Butler report offers no evidence or support for its conclusions. It’s little more than a press release, basically.
Only in your little fantasy world. Again:
—
—
—
No, the Senate Report said no such thing. Again, they confirmed that Wilson’s own testimony supported the case that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. The British intelligence on the matter had nothing to do with the forged documents. They British did not even see those documents until after they had already made their determination.
Furthermore, the Financial Times found significant evidence of illicit attempts to sell uranium to hostile regimes from Niger buttressed by multiple European intelligence agencies:
—
It shows that Iraq had an active interest in restarting his nuclear program – which is a conclusion that the Duelfer Report also confirmed. Iraq was under sanctions and a cease-fire agreement that specifically prohibited him from trying to obtain uranium, yet it is quite clear he did it anyway.
I take it you don’t have so much as a clue of what you speak. Lord Butler had full access to British Intelligence for his independent review of intelligence in regards to WMD issues. His report (which can be found here) is exhaustively sourced.
Here’s a hint: trying to make a bunch of allegations that have been throughly debunked years ago is not exactly a sign of great mental acumen or argumentative skills…
Jay, please. You’re embarassing yourself when your arguments come right from the consistently inaccurate “Annenburg Fact Check”. Too bad they seldom check their facts. No intelligence service, French, US, UK, or otherwise has offered any tangible evidence for the Niger claim. The only known source is the forged Italian document.
If you have additional sources, and not just the assertion of sources, I’d like to see them. And I realize that you don’t apparently expect any of your readers to follow your links – otherwise you wouldn’t dissemble as brazenly as you do – but if you could point out the specific citation in the Butler report that substantiates the Niger claim, that would be nice. Or perhaps you already know as well as I do that there’s no such cite in a report that concludes:
Sure – Italy, France, and the UK. Those are your “European Intelligence Agencies.” Oh, wait – those are the same exact agencies who recieved the forged documents! Funny, that.
I take it you haven’t actually read any of your sources. If you’ve got a source for evidence of the Niger claim that isn’t, ultimately, based on the forged documents, not only would I like to see it, but most of the major newspapers would, as well. Probably the CIA, too, who has since repudiated the Niger claim and, even at the time, asked that it be taken out of the state of the union address.
The British Government says otherwise. Unless you’re accusing them of lying. And Annenburg are liars too? Give me a break – you’re making yourself out to be a loon.
So now I’m a liar too. Again, anyone can follow those links. You’re simply full of shit.
No, there is no such quotation. Conclusion 502 of the Butler Report doesn’t say any of that – here’s a direct link to the page. Again, you don’t bother to link to any sources – you can’t even lie well.
Do you really take everyone for an idiot?
The Niger documents were not the sole source. You keep repeating this line of crap despite the fact that the official British investigation has quite clearly said the opposite.
The British could not by using the Niger documents as their sole source, because they specifically identified the Congo as another source for uranium being sought by the Hussein regime – the Niger documents made absolutely no mention of this.
Secondly, the CIA did not ask for the 16 words to be removed although former DCI Tenet said that he thought they should have been later on.
You can keep repeating the same line of crap over and over again, but it doesn’t make it any more true.
Gosh, a government lie? Who ever heard of such a thing!
I’m still waiting for your alternate source. Good luck with that.
So what’s the other source? We know that the British intel services had seen transcriptions of the forgeries; obviously, since the forgers had been shopping them around for years. And nobody’s come forward with any other potential source except the Niger documents.
Put two and two together, Jay, and put down the koolaid.
Absolutely wrong again. Tenet repeatedly asked Stephen Hadley and Condi Rice for the language to be removed from Bush’s speeches starting as early as October 2002, and on several other occasions. The memos are on the internet. I’m just not sure where you get these outlandish fables, Jay.
The claim that Saddam was seeking uranium in any active sense is just ludicrous on the face of it. Saddam didn’t have a functional nuclear program since 1991, so what would he have been seeking uranium for? And, as Wilson correctly pointed out, how would he expect the sudden ramp in Niger’s uranium processing to go undetected? And once detected, how would he have expected to keep his weapons program hidden?
Your arguments are nothing more than quotes taken out of context and bald, unsupported assertions. You can pretend that you’re providing “sources” all you like but anybody who actually reads your links can see your ham-handed attempts to distort the issue.
“The majority of the UIA list doesn’t support our withdrawal”
I can’t find a recent poll on the matter, only the claims of numerous individuals (such as U.S. Generals) that the Iraqis overwhelmingly want us out. This poll is two years old, but I can’t imagine there has been a groundswell of new support for American occupation among Iraqis since 2004.
Oops, I forgot to give the link
http://www.arabnews.com/?article=46915
So, you’re accusing Lord Butler of being a liar now?
Give me a break…
Click on the link. Read the actual text of the conclusion you claim to have quoted. The IAEA interviewed Zahawie, conflrmed his trip to Niger, and said they believed he was lying when he said he wasn’t there to discuss uranium. The IAEA did not say that Iraq was not seeking uranium, but instead stayed officially neutral on the manner.
But then again, why bother with facts when you just make things up?
And what, praytell was Zahawie doing in Niger? Discussing shipments of goats?
OK, hotshot, if they’re so easy to find, provide links. In fact, given that you’ve been lying through your ass the whole time, I know you won’t. Because Tenet never asked for those words to be removed. Again, I provided the text of Mr. Tenet’s statement where he said he should have asked for their removal. If he did ask for them to be removed, what the hell is he apologizing for,
Except if they click on the links, and they have the capability of reading, they’ll quickly see you’re full of shit, and not even remotely adept at covering it.
I can only conclude that you’re a troll or a complete idiot. Either way, you’ve warn out your welcome.