Well, I hope that, sixty years from now, Iraq is keepin’ it together. If so, it will be no thanks to Lyin’ Paulie, who very unsurprisingly forgets to discuss his pre-war “best guess” that the proposed invasion would cost between $10 and $100 billion, and loudly pooh-poohed those weak sisters who thought it might run closer to $200 billion. Well, the bill now looks closer to $2 trillion, but, well, comparisons are odorous, are they not?
Want lies? Paul’s got ‘em. And misdirection? The guy’s a master. Check this out:
The price of removing Saddam was high, in both military and civilian blood and in treasure. But he was clearly a danger to the Iraqi people and to the region; and his rule was not going to end peacefully, or even with his own death, as his sons could have carried on for another generation. Even though the Iraq Survey Group, which produced the definitive report on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, could not find the stocks of chemical and biological weapons that virtually all foreign intelligence agencies believed he had, it also concluded that Saddam planned to rebuild his WMD capabilities as soon as he could free himself from sanctions. He also posed a more immediate danger because terrorists, including Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, had already begun operating from Iraqi territory to plan terrorist attacks in Europe and the Middle East.
It has become almost fashionable to say that Saddam was a useful counterbalance to Iran. But was it useful when he started a war with Iran that cost a million lives, including massive use of chemical weapons?
Wolfowitz must be “consulting” with the Saudis these days, because he goes out of the way to defend them against the charge that they pressured Bush I to allow Saddam to massacre the Kurds and Shi-ites in the aftermath of the 1991 war. And certainly they weren’t to blame: George H.W. was. He was the one who encouraged them to rebel, even though he and Secretary of State Jim Baker and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had already decided that Saddam was to be kept in power, something that Wolfowitz surely knew at the time, since he was a member of the first Bush administration as well.*
Naturally, Wolfowitz claims that the U.S. didn’t want to take Iraq’s oil, and naturally he makes no mention of Israel at all, even though those were the two reasons why we really invaded Iraq. And, naturally, he wants us to start another war, this time in Syria. No cost estimates for this one, unfortunately.
Afterwords
I’ve previously fulminated on these topics here and here.
*I guess I already said that, but, well, I’m a little pissed. I’m glad to know that the Saudis were worried about the Shi-ites. Now if they’d only stop pumping out billions of dollars of vicious anti-Semitic propaganda all over the world, I might even like them.
