Useful Fools

David Kay, a very credible person, has said that he is very disturbed by the pre-war “intelligence failure” regarding Iraq’s WMD capability.

The question that begs asking is: Why?

Given what we know today, it is unlikely that anybody in Iraq knew the true state of their WMD situation. Saddam thought he had the weapons. His army division commanders thought that adjoining units had the weapons, and they and our SIGINT people heard contingent orders given to use them.

It took David Kay most of a year, with over a thousand people and almost total access to Iraq to determine that Iraq didn’t have significant stockpiles of WMDs. He never determined that they had no WMDs at all (and he did find botulism seed-stock in a home refrigerator). He found a program to produce ricin (the biological weapon so far favored by Al Qaeda) that was active right up to the war. Our intelligence correctly determined that Saddam did not have any significant active nuclear weapons developmentility.

Kay determined that after 1998, the Iraqi regime became seriously dysfunctional. It lost its cohesion, and with that, any true control or knowledge of exactly what was taking place with its WMD capability. Individuals were apparently taking money from the regime for producing WMDs, but they didn’t produce them. More dangerous, they may have sold their expertise or even material to terrorists. Kay said that a market environment was forming, or had already formed, for WMD expertise. Becasue of this, he judged that Iraq was more dangerous than the situation thought to exist pre-war.

Is it possible that the intelligence failure that concerns Kay is not about WMD stockpiles, but rather the failure to detect the deteriorating state of the Iraqi regime, with the attendant loss of control over WMDs?

Almost all attention to the “failure of pre-war intelligence” about Iraq concerns the incorrect determination that Iraq had significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Almost all of the controversy revolves around the failure to find these stockpiles, and the realization that they probably didn’t exists.

But stockpiles of WMDs are irrelevant to the war’s rationale. The war was fought as part of a wider war against terrorism. Terrorists have little use for large quantities of WMDs. After all, they have neither storage nor delivery capabilities (except in a few unlikely scenarios).

Of more interest to terrorists is small quantities of highly lethal agents, or nuclear weapons. Intelligence correctly determined that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons, nor the capability to rapidly produce them. This leaves radiological, chemical and biological agents.

A likely terrorist scenario is the release of a relatively small (liters) of a chemical agent into a population concentration such as a sporting event. Another is the release of a biological agent, which in the case of Anthrax requires a few grams to a few kilograms, and in the case of an infectious agent requires from microliters to a few liters of agent.

Small amounts of either chemical or biological agents can be produced quickly in any reasonably equipped laboratory. Such laboratories were discovered hidden in a number of secret police offices and safe houses.

It is these capabilities, combined with the known expertise of Iraqi scientists and technicians, which created the possibility of transference of WMDs to terrorists.

The lack of use of WMD’s by Iraq, and our subsequent inability to find any of the weapons has been used by anti-Bush forces in all sorts of silly ways, with lots of headlines.

More interesting is the question of why Saddam apparently didn’t have WMD’s by the time of the war, and yet caused his country to suffer 12 years of UN sanctions. After all, his lack of cooperation with inspectors was the strongest evidence that he had WMDs and was the cause of continued sanctions!

When asked, shortly after capture, Saddam said he resisted the inspections (an action which kept the sanctions in force) because he didn’t want his privacy in his palaces violated!

What if he is telling the truth?
Read the rest of this entry »

Omar, at Iraq The Model has an eloquent and fascinating discourse on these subjects. Examples:

we give conspiracy theory-fortified milk to our babies once they pass the age of 6 months.
…calling all of you to support the just struggle between civilization on one side and terrorism and dictatorship on the other.

Zeyad, blogger of Healing Iraq writes:

I was ashamed and depressed watching those brainwashed and deluded demonstrators in London carrying signs calling for abandoning Iraq and for an end to aggression. While I can understand people who hold peaceful principles against wars in general but nevertheless wish to see Iraq free and prosperous, I fail to understand the logic behind the thinking that appeasing and understanding terrorists will make this world a better place. It was all the same ‘No blood for oil’, ‘Not in my name’, ‘Bush is Hitler’, ‘Stop the war’, ‘End the occupation’, ‘Bring the troops home’ nonsense over and over again. It was almost like one of our masira’s in the dark times of the previous regime. If those people truly dislike Bush they should have kept their mouths shout about other issues which they can never understand and sticked to anti-Bush slogans. The only thing that warmed my heart was watching different self-respecting people carrying banners that said ‘Mr. Bush you are most welcome, this lot does not speak for me’. I ditto that and add that this lot surely does not speak for Iraqis either. I’m sure Saddam is proud of you and clapping his hands in glee watching from whatever gutter he is hiding in right now. The fact that Al-Arabiyah station decicated two whole hours covering these demonstration while not a single subtitle about the anti-terrorism crowds marching in Iraq only disgusted me the more.

I guess those demonstrators chose to ignore the hundreds of innocent Turk Muslims and Jews that were killed and maimed the last few days in Istanbul, the Italian peacekeepers in Nassiriyah, the Lebanese families in Saudi Arabia, the Iraqi police, school children, UN and Red Cross workers in Baghdad, the Iraqis that were praying in Najaf, the Spanish tourists in Casablanca, the demonstrating students in Iran, and decided to spill tears for the poor Iraqi militants, the innocent Taliban, and the peace loving leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Why the hypocricy? Why the double standards? Someone seriously needs to teach these people the mechanisms of cause and effect. They are having it all jumbled up in their topsy-turvy view of the world. I can only say SHAME on you.

Read the whole thing.

Rantingprofs asks whether, if the UN was put in charge of Iraq, they should work from Jordan or Cyprus… a nice bit of sarcasm.

Someone else (Lilek) finally noticed that Salam Pax is an ungrateful wretch. Useful Fools pointed out Salam’s lousy attitude some time ago and found this response from Salam:
Read the rest of this entry »

Reuters breathlessly reports:

The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War,

This statistic has no meaning. It is an attempt to draw a parallel where one doesn’t exit; to create a link between the terrible and controversial experience of Vietnam and the situation in Iraq. It is not news at all, it is propaganda.
Read the rest of this entry »

So far, we have been “walking softly” in Iraq, seeking to gain the support of the population. But some areas have proven, not surprisingly, essentially hostile. Thes are in the “Sunni triangle,” populated by many people who have lost their unfair advantages in Iraqi society and want them back. These people have Sunni religious and family ties to Saddam’s tribe (Saddam himself socialist, not religious) and were favored under Saddam.

They have been responsible for a large number of the post-war assaults on US troops. The latest was the downing of the Chinook and Blackhawk helicopters.

As might be expected, attempts to win the “hearts and minds” of these folks are not very successful, and even those who probably support us or just want peace and freedom are suppressed by the regime remnants.

……………………………………………………
Read the rest of this entry »

While the Democrats and their tame press scramble frantically to convince the American people that the Iraq war was about an imminent threat (never stated by the Administration) and the the poor, ignorant Democrat congressmen were “mislead” by the administration into voting for the war, information comes out vindicating the war, and also vindicating the “Axis of Evil” designation for Iraq and North Korea.

In the Washington Post, Bill Gertz and Stephen Dinan write:
Read the rest of this entry »