Tales from another war

I swear, from time to time I wonder whether I overdo it on this page, that maybe I'm losing my penchant for balance. But then I come across something like this, and it makes me want to beat the ever living piss out of someone all over again. According to testimony offered this week in the UK pursuant to a public inquiry into how the Brits found themselves at war in Iraq (God save the Brits for actually having the balls to do this by the way), it was revealed that:

An Iraqi taxi driver may have been the source of the discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, a Tory MP claimed today.

...

In the report he wrote: "Under pressure from Downing Street to find anything to back up the WMD case, British intelligence was squeezing their agents in Iraq for information. One agent did come up with something: the '45 minutes' or something about missiles allegedly discussed in a high level Iraqi political meeting.

"But the provenance of this information was never questioned in detail until after the Iraq invasion, when it became apparent that something was wrong. In the end it turned out that the information was not credible, it had originated from an émigré taxi driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border, who had remembered an overheard a conversation in the back of his cab a full two years earlier.

"Indeed, in the intelligence analyst's footnote to the report, it was flagged up that part of the report probably describing some missiles that the Iraqi government allegedly possessed was demonstrably untrue. They verifiably did not exist.

Greenwald does a nice job detailing the extent to which this particular claim was amplified and repeated, both in the UK and in the US, in aid of drumming up support for the invasion.

For a long time, I just operated under the presumption that the intelligence leading up to the war, about Iraq's capabilities and Saddam's threat to us, was just mistaken. It wasn't - what the Brits are showing us now, in the clearest possible terms, is that the guys on the ground told us everything they knew, and by and large they had it right. It was our country's leadership that deliberately distorted, amplified, and manufactured whatever they could get their hands on, in order to justify a course of action on which they had already decided.

Tens of thousands dead. Hundreds of thousands wounded. Trillions spent. And while Saddam may be gone, the Shia government that replaced him shows signs of being just as bad as he was (which is saying something, for sure). They can't guarantee fair elections, or protect the populace from terrorists. They're certainly not an example for their Arab neighbors to follow. What in the name of all that is holy did we do this for? And how can we look ourselves in the mirror every single day as Americans and in the full light of day chalk it all up to reasonable policy differences, and flawed attempts to find the best of all bad options? What will we ever have the balls to call criminal, ever again?

So no - readers of this page will have to look elsewhere for a balanced approach to death and destruction. And to anyone outraged at the Bush administration given the rearview look on Iraq, but who still insists on giving Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt as he prosecutes his war in Afghanistan, don't look here for comfort. I'm not accusing the President of grossly fudging the case for a troop surge in Afghanistan, or deliberately misleading anyone for that matter - he doesn't need to be as bad as Bush for me to make my case. What I am saying is that claiming to pursue virtuous ends with bombs and bullets is the hallmark of fools and tyrants, no matter whether you're from Crawford or Chicago. And even more important that that, what I'm saying is Don't. Trust. Anyone.