We Probably Gave Powell the Wrong Speech

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,462782,00.html  
The former chief of the CIA's Europe division, Tyler Drumheller, discusses the United States foreign intelligence service's cooperation with Germany, the covert kidnapping of suspected terrorists and a Bush adminstration that ignored CIA advice and used whatever information it could find to justify an invasion of Iraq.

This article is a truly interesting read. I mean, we gace the Secretary of State the wrong speech? I guess that mistakes indeed were made.
At this point, one is supposed to smack one's forehead and fulminate about the Bush regime which indeed should be changed, but what's the point of that? We pretty much got what we asked for. And if we did not take the time to see the little man dancing behind the curtain in his flak jacket, operating all the controls of our Oz-like fugue state following the September attack.
I do not mean to diminish the importance of the Action Against Terror. The recent events in Birmingham, England demonstrates that a goodly number of evil mad men do indeed exist in our world and whom we had been hitherto able to ignore. Now we cannot.

However, the unsuccessful attempt to chivvy Osama bin Laden from his lair in Afghanistan and to capture him should have been a wake-up call to us. Slipped through our fingers? It never ceases to amaze me that when we beat the drums to war, we are wise and competent; when things go wrong, mistakes were made, we cannot know everything, the body-armor was in the mail to Iraq, and so on, and so on.

If Sam bin Laden had been apprehended and incarcerated, we might have thought the war was over.

That could not be allowed to happen.

Therefore, Sam must be allowed to slip away, and a REAL war must started.

Once again, I caution you that I am not necessarily implying that things were done intentionally. Bad stuff and stupid stuff may occur unintentionally. However, the bad results of evil done unintentionally is just as bad as that done with intent. The victim of murder and the victim of manslaughter 1 see no distinction; only the judicial system does.

At which point, we come to the object of the posting.

)(=)(=)(=)(=)(=)( : : : : ( an emoticon termed "the stipled-back centipede" that is used to indicate long, arduous detours from the point. particularly note the tracks left behind.)

My three nephews, who have names, but whom I call 6, 6, and their brother 6, have asked me why I was so positive that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs. I mean, right from the get-go I had been adamant about it. Did I possess some arcane knowledge? Or did the fact that my Arabic teacher had a sister who had a niece whose next-door neighbor had a daughter married to a second-cousin of a nephew of Tarik Aziz have anything to do with it? Scarey. I don't know. I mean, I do go to the same church as Tarik Aziz, meaning that he is a Christian - and don't think he wasn't soundly given the raspberries about that at the meetings at Saddam Central! - and I think he was the same denom as I. Now they are trying to prove he shot blokes and mollies, which, come to think of it, is something a Christian might do.

All I can say about the WMDs ( or ' WiMDoos' as I have taken to calling them...you can not take me to task for this macabre jocularity, for I have spent my entire life under the threat of Wimdoos, and if I want to crawl under my school desk to protect myself from the blast and pray that God spare us from wimdoos, it is my right!) is that I paid a great deal of attention during 2002 and 2003. I relied on the BBC, the Guardian, some Belgian paper dont j'oublie le nom, Al Ahram from Cairo, and The Christian Science Monitor and my local Daily Bugle.
I was fortunate here, for most of the US media were co-opted as well as being embedded. The truth was very hard to discern for news readers and viewers. I never watched FOX, except as an 'exception' that proves the rule type thingey: find something, read, see what FOX says, if FOX says things which fly in the face of all reason ( freequently the case, unfortunately), then I have 'proofed' the rule...or the proposition...or the matter under scrutiny.

At some point, probably after the UN inspectors had been there quite a long time and repeatedly said that they found nada, I found no evidence anywhere for WMDs. I repeat, everything given out by our government had absolutely no proof of anything, and Secretary Powell's speech to the UN - and I recall Adlai Stevenson during the Missile Crisis-would have gotten a 'C' at best for 'Show and Tell'.
Sometimes my certainty faltered, but I never wavered. So I was right. Big deal. My parents were convinced in the opposite direction, and they still believe the Wimdoos are there, hidden under some mountain in the north-east, probably next to Frederick Barbarossa, King Arthur, and some other fabled characters, waiting for the fullness of time to return.

My father, when pressed to it, says if they'd give some financing and some hi-tech metal detectors like those used on the beach to find coins and bottlecaps, he'd go and find the WMDs, that is, if he were 10 years younger. He is contemptuous of this generation. His generation fought and beat the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire in less time than the Iraqi war has lasted, then for dessert they fought the Cold War.

Maybe if we all just learned to live together with war. War gets a lot of bad press now. Back in '02 it was a fresh, young ingenue, just starring in its first big role. Now it's a tired, evil, jaded virago.
Learn to love War. According to the Vice President, we shall have this one at least for 3 or 4 administrations. They did not tell us that back in '02. That would have ruined the surprise.