Remember "Yellowcake"?

Remember "Yellowcake"?

Remember the concerns about Saddam Hussein's efforts to buy this uranium ore in Africa? The concerns that the left said were entirely manufactured? So what's with this July 5, 2008 Las Vegas Sun story?

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program _ a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium _ reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.
The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" _ the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment _ was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.
...

Accusations that Saddam had tried to purchase more yellowcake from the African nation of Niger _ and an article by a former U.S. ambassador refuting the claims _ led to a wide-ranging probe into Washington leaks that reached high into the Bush administration.
Tuwaitha and an adjacent research facility were well known for decades as the centerpiece of Saddam's nuclear efforts.
Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.

Just A Reminder That Democrats Are Lying About This

Just A Reminder That Democrats Are Lying About This

A very nice collection of video of various Democrats with access to intelligence reports, explaining why the Iraq War was necessary.




Argue that the Bush Administration (and many foreign governments) were too prepared to believe untrustworthy sources with their own agendas (such as the Iraqi National Congress). Argue that the Bush Administration did a lousy job with the occupation. Argue that they used the precautionary principle (the one that supposedly justifies destroying the global economy because maybe global warming is anthropogenic). But this continual "Bush Lied, People Died" that Democrats are pushing is dishonest.

An Astonishing Source For This

An Astonishing Source For This

The Washington Post is one of the leading liberal newspapers in the U.S. It is also one of the leading newspapers in the U.S., regardless of political orientation. A lot of very ordinary papers around the country rely on the Washington Post and New York Times for wisdom and news. It is therefore astonishing to see this piece by the Editorial Page Editor of the Washington Post, which appeared March 9, 2008:

Search the Internet for "Bush Lied" products, and you will find sites that offer more than a thousand designs. The basic "Bush Lied, People Died" bumper sticker is only the beginning.
Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, set out to provide the official foundation for what has become not only a thriving business but, more important, an article of faith among millions of Americans. And in releasing a committee report Thursday, he claimed to have accomplished his mission, though he did not use the L-word.
"In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent," he said.
There's no question that the administration, and particularly Vice President Cheney, spoke with too much certainty at times and failed to anticipate or prepare the American people for the enormous undertaking in Iraq.
But dive into Rockefeller's report, in search of where exactly President Bush lied about what his intelligence agencies were telling him about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and you may be surprised by what you find.
On Iraq's nuclear weapons program? The president's statements "were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates."
On biological weapons, production capability and those infamous mobile laboratories? The president's statements "were substantiated by intelligence information."
On chemical weapons, then? "Substantiated by intelligence information."
On weapons of mass destruction overall (a separate section of the intelligence committee report)? "Generally substantiated by intelligence information." Delivery vehicles such as ballistic missiles? "Generally substantiated by available intelligence." Unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to deliver WMDs? "Generally substantiated by intelligence information."
As you read through the report, you begin to think maybe you've mistakenly picked up the minority dissent. But, no, this is the Rockefeller indictment. So, you think, the smoking gun must appear in the section on Bush's claims about Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to terrorism.
But statements regarding Iraq's support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information." Statements that Iraq provided safe haven for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda "were substantiated by the intelligence assessments," and statements regarding Iraq's contacts with al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information." The report is left to complain about "implications" and statements that "left the impression" that those contacts led to substantive Iraqi cooperation.
In the report's final section, the committee takes issue with Bush's statements about Saddam Hussein's intentions and what the future might have held. But was that really a question of misrepresenting intelligence, or was it a question of judgment that politicians are expected to make?
After all, it was not Bush, but Rockefeller, who said in October 2002: "There has been some debate over how 'imminent' a threat Iraq poses. I do believe Iraq poses an imminent threat. I also believe after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated. . . . To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? I do not think we can."

I've linked to a variety of reports, from both Congress and the British Parliament, that come to similar conclusions: a heck of a lot of the world's intelligence services (not just ours) believed that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, had significant chemical WMD capabilities, and that there was serious risk that Iraq would use WMDs again--and there was no guarantee that they wouldn't be directed against us, perhaps through terrorist proxies. As this article goes on to point out why the truth on this matters:

But the phony "Bush lied" story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong.
And it trivializes a double dilemma that President Bill Clinton faced before Bush and that President Obama or McCain may well face after: when to act on a threat in the inevitable absence of perfect intelligence and how to mobilize popular support for such action, if deemed essential for national security, in a democracy that will always, and rightly, be reluctant.
For the next president, it may be Iran's nuclear program, or al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan, or, more likely, some potential horror that today no one even imagines. When that time comes, there will be plenty of warnings to heed from the Iraq experience, without the need to fictionalize more.

There's plenty that Bush screwed up after we invaded Iraq. He won the war; he very nearly lost the occupation, and more importantly, the costs that we have paid there have very nearly sunk the War on Terror (and the Republican Party) as a legitimate cause. In retrospect, it might have been better to have waited for Iraq to have set off a nuclear weapon in Baltimore, or New York City, Miami, or London. At least the leftists making excuses for terrorism would have shut up long enough to win the war.

A Profoundly Serious Criticism

A Profoundly Serious Criticism

This is a profoundly serious criticism of the Bush Administration coming from someone who was part of it. From the May 27, 2008 Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

WASHINGTON — In a book due out Monday, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan offers a blistering review of the administration and concludes that his longtime boss misled the nation into an unnecessary war in Iraq.
"History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided — that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder," McClellan wrote in "What Happened," due out Monday. "No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact."
"What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary," he wrote in the preface.
...

In Iraq, McClellan added, Bush saw "his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness," something McClellan said Bush has said he believes is only available to wartime presidents.
The president's real motivation for the war, he said, was to transform the Middle East to ensure an enduring peace in the region. But the White House effort to sell the war as necessary due to the stated threat posed by Saddam Hussein was needed because "Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitions purpose of transforming the Middle East," McClellan wrote.
"Rather than open this Pandora's Box, the administration chose a different path — not employing out-and-out deception, but shading the truth," he wrote of the effort to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, an effort he said used "innuendo and implication" and "intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary."
"President Bush managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option," McClellan concluded, noting, "The lack of candor underlying the campaign for war would severely undermine the president's entire second term in office."

Now, there's a lot of argument about the intelligence involved. I have been prepared to accept that Hussein's past history argued that if the intelligence was ambiguous, the precautionary principle would argue for taking action. And the British Parliament's Butler Report did find some serious evidence.

Still, I find myself asking this rather serious question: if, as McClellan says, he could see that Bush was intentionally misleading the nation into war back then, why didn't McClellan say anything? Why didn't he quit his job and blow the whistle? This would have been a serious malfeasance of office issue; perhaps even an impeachable offense. So why did McClellan stay in his job until forced out in 2006? One's obligations to the nation on something as momentous as going to war should take precedence over personal loyalty. It makes me wonder how much of this is that McClellan is trying to sell a book.

My Respect for Harvard Just Went Up

And my contempt for the mainstream media just went up, too. A couple of Harvard economists have produced a paper about media support for withdrawal and insurgent attacks. The abstract:

Are insurgents affected by information on US casualty sensitivity? Using data on attacks and variation in access to international news across Iraqi provinces, we identify an “emboldenment” effect by comparing the rate of insurgent attacks in areas with higher and lower access to information about U.S news after public statements critical of the war. We find in periods after a spike in war-critical statements, insurgent attacks increases by 5-10 percent. The results suggest that insurgent groups respond rationally to expected probability of US withdrawal. As such counterinsurgency should consider deterrence and incapacitation rather than simply search and destroy missions.

Hmmm. Or perhaps the search and destroy missions need to take place at the New York Times and NBC? I'm just kidding about that!

A Short Sigh of Relief

The latest National Intelligence Estimate concludes that Iran, which was working on developing nuclear weapons some years back--stopped in 2003. From the December 3, 2007 New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains on hold, contradicting an assessment two years ago that Tehran was working inexorably toward building a bomb.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to be major factor in the tense international negotiations aimed at getting Iran to halt its nuclear energy program. Concerns about Iran were raised sharply after President Bush had suggested in October that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to “World War III,” and Vice President Dick Cheney promised “serious consequences” if the government in Tehran did not abandon its nuclear program.

The findings also come in the middle of a presidential campaign during which a possible military strike against Iran’s nuclear program has been discussed.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran’s ultimate intentions about gaining a nuclear weapon remain unclear, but that Iran’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.”

“Some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways might — if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible — prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program,” the estimate states.

Instapundit suggests that something else happened in 2003 that might have changed Iranian ambitions. Perhaps he means, "We invaded Iraq, and scared Iran witless."

Or perhaps (and this is my guess), Iran was developing WMDs because they were afraid that Iraq was doing so (just like we thought Iraq was doing). Without the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iraq, Iran might well have decided that they had better things to spend their money on.

Of course, if Iran did stop development of nuclear weapons because we invaded Iraq, this would be an example of a positive unintended consequence. But Bush, the U.S., and the Coalition of the Willing, won't get any credit for it, you can be sure.

Since I'm Sure The Clarification Won't Be Distributed As Widely As The First Quote

From the September 17, 2007 Washington Post:

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been "essential" to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Greenspan, who was the country's top voice on monetary policy at the time Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, has refrained from extensive public comment on it until now, but he made the striking comment in a new memoir out today that "the Iraq War is largely about oil." In the interview, he clarified that sentence in his 531-page book, saying that while securing global oil supplies was "not the administration's motive," he had presented the White House with the case for why removing Hussein was important for the global economy.

"I was not saying that that's the administration's motive," Greenspan said in an interview Saturday, "I'm just saying that if somebody asked me, 'Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?' I would say it was essential."

Iraq's Suicide Bombers

Over at Captain's Quarters, there's a discussion of an internal Iraqi document recently released that shows that Iraq was recruiting suicide bombers in March of 2001:

A few days ago, I posted a translation of a document culled from the captured Iraqi documents that the US found during Operation Iraqi Freedom. This particular memo, dated March 17, 2001, comes from a brigadier general in the Iraqi Air Force and requests a list of volunteers from all units under his command for suicide attackers. The memo explicitly explains the targets for these terrorist attacks, as the original translation from Joseph Shahda shows:

The top secret letter 2205 of the Military Branch of Al Qadisya on 4/3/2001 announced by the top secret letter 246 from the Command of the military sector of Zi Kar on 8/3/2001 announced to us by the top secret letter 154 from the Command of Ali Military Division on 10/3/2001 we ask to provide that Division with the names of those who desire to volunteer for Suicide Mission to liberate Palestine and to strike American Interests and according what is shown below to please review and inform us.

When I posted this document, readers of this blog questioned the accuracy of the translation. People know that Joseph translated this for Free Republic, a strongly pro-war website, and that it was distributed by Laurie Mylroie, another pro-war commentator. Skeptics felt that this pedigree lent itself to a possibly warped interpretation of the memo. While the accuracy of the translation remained in question, the actual text -- which showed an active Iraqi terror program aimed at Americans -- would not get the attention it deserved.

In order to solve this problem, I decided to hire two Arabic translators on my own.

Those Arabic translators came up with essentially the same results.

Now, if only the Bush Administration would try and defend itself.

Investor's Business Daily also covers this document, and reminds everyone:

Though little noticed by the press, during a July 2004 visit to Kazakhstan the Russian president said that between 9-11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, "Russian special services and Russian intelligence several times received . . . information that official organs of Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the U.S. and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian locations."

This new document, said Darling, "would seem to refute a long-standing contention among members of the U.S. intelligence community that Iraq ceased its involvement in international terrorism after its failed 1993 plot to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush." Darling cites former National Security Council official Richard Clarke's book "Against all Enemies," which contends that the NSC, the CIA and the FBI all agreed Iraq posed no terrorist threat to the U.S.

Equally embarrassing to our spies is another newly released document from 1999 detailing plans for a "Blessed July" operation.

According to the English translation on the Foreign Military Studies Office's Joint Reserve Intelligence Center Web site, Saddam's older son Uday ordered 50 members of the fanatical "Fedayeen Saddam" group to stage bombings and assassinations in Iraq and Europe — including London, where 10 people were assigned.

Excerpts from a long, recently declassified report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command's Iraqi Perspectives Project will be published in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Looking at the "Blessed July" document, Foreign Affairs notes this "regime-directed wave of 'martyrdom' operations against targets in the West (was) well under way at the time of the coalition invasion."

What Happened to the WMDs?

What troubles me is how little coverage this is getting. This is one of the major news stories of the year--and the news media are ignoring it. Guess why?

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is studying 12 hours of audio recordings between Saddam Hussein and his top advisers that may provide clues to the whereabouts of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The committee has already confirmed through the intelligence community that the recordings of Saddam's voice are authentic, according to its chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who would not go into detail about the nature of the conversations or their context. They were provided to his committee by a former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, who says he received them from a former American military intelligence analyst.

Mr. Loftus will make the recordings available to the public on February 17 at the annual meeting of the Intelligence Summit, of which he is president. On the organization's Web site, Mr. Loftus is quoted as promising that the recordings "will be able to provide a few definitive answers to some very important - and controversial - weapons of mass destruction questions." Contacted yesterday by The New York Sun, Mr. Loftus would only say that he delivered a CD of the recordings to a representative of the committee, and the following week the committee announced that it was reopening the investigation into weapons of mass destruction.

You remember that I mentioned that Hussein's vice air marshal (number two in the Iraqi Air Force) says that the WMDs were flown and driven to Syria? Well, the news story mentions him, also:

Mr. Hoekstra has already met with a former Iraqi air force general, Georges Sada, who claims that Saddam used civilian airplanes to ferry chemical weapons to Syria in 2002. Mr. Hoekstra is now talking to Iraqis who Mr. Sada claims took part in the mission, and the congressman said the former air force general "should not just be discounted." Mr. Hoekstra also said he is in touch with other people who have come forward to the committee - Iraqis and Americans - who claim that the weapons inspectors may have overlooked other key sites and evidence. He has also asked the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, to declassify some 35,000 boxes of Iraqi documents obtained in the war that have yet to be translated.

"I still believe there are key individuals who have not been debriefed and there are key sites that have never been investigated. I know there are 35,000 boxes of documents that have never been translated. I am frustrated," Mr. Hoekstra said.

This gets worse. Sada isn't the only one giving information about the WMDs--and it appears that our intelligence agencies are refusing to pursue this:

He added, "Right now, it's not my job to investigate the specific claims. We are doing this a little with Sada. But we still don't fully understand what happened in Iraq three years after the invasion, three years after we control the country. There are enough people coming to the committee, Sada is not the only one, saying, 'you really ought to look under this rock.' This gives me cause to take up the issue again."

...

The chairman of the House intelligence panel said he is frustrated with the American intelligence community's lack of curiosity on following up these leads, particularly the story from Mr. Sada. "I talked to one person relatively high up in DNI, and I asked him about this and asked are they going to follow up, and he looked at me and said, 'No we don't think so.' At this point, I guess you guys don't get it.

"I am trying to find out if our postwar intelligence was as bad as our pre-war intelligence, " Mr. Hoekstra said.

I can't figure out if the problem with the intelligence agencies is that their political motivations are driving this (remember that CIA has long been a hotbed of liberal intellectuals, which explains why they missed the collapse of the Soviet Union--see Harry T. Rositzke's Managing Moscow for an example of this), or if it is simple incompetence.

The Jawa Report points out that just because these recordings indicate that Iraq had WMDs does not mean that they actually had them. As I pointed out in September of 2003:

Fox News this evening interviewed a Newsweek reporter named Weisskopf who said that it appears that it may not have been that Hussein was misleading the rest of the world, but that the heads of some Iraq's WMD programs were misleading Hussein! Why?

Weisskopf suggested that these officials misled Hussein about the extent and availability of WMDs in order to keep funding going for their programs. This is, when you think about it, not too terribly surprising. Hussein was, to put it mildly, not all that knowledgeable about the sciences. As long as Hussein thought his scientists were building WMDs, they had jobs, and not too much chance of being tortured to death.

There's another reason that I can think of why they might have lied to Hussein. At the end of World War II, Hitler was giving orders to move various German Army units around--units that no longer existed. No one dared tell Hitler that these units no longer existed. If WMD program officials had been accepting money for programs that produced nothing, they would have been understandably very reluctant to have this news get to Hussein. Perhaps the intercepted messages that led the U.S. to believe that Iraq had WMDs available on 45 minute notice were like those phantom German Army units--who wants to tell Hussein that they don't exist?

A Time magazine article of the time (which has, unfortunately, gone into the "premium content" zone) pointed out:

Saddam's underlings appear to have invented weapons programs and fabricated experiments to keep the funding coming. The Mukhabarat captain says the scamming went all the way to the top of the mic to its director, Huweish, who would appease Saddam with every report, never telling him the truth about failures or production levels and meanwhile siphoning money from projects. "He would tell the President he had invented a new missile for Stealth bombers but hadn't. So Saddam would say, 'Make 20 missiles.' He would make one and put the rest in his pocket," says the captain. Colonel Hussan al-Duri, who spent several years in the 1990s as an air-defense inspector, saw similar cons. "Some projects were just stealing money," he says. A scientist or officer would say he needed $10 million to build a special weapon. "They would produce great reports, but there was never anything behind them."

If Saddam may not have known the true nature of his own arsenal, it is no wonder that Western intelligence services were picking up so many clues about so many weapons systems. But it helps answer one logical argument that the Administration has been making ever since the weapons failed to appear after the war ended: why, if Saddam had nothing to hide, did he endure billions of dollars in sanctions and ultimately prompt his own destruction? Perhaps because even he was mistaken about what was really at stake in this fight.