alex chiang: web 6.0

For those of you who haven’t read the Downing Street memo, go ahead and take a look. It’s been described as a “smoking gun” that proves that the war in Iraq was based on a whole lot of nothing. The CS Monitor has an article that wonders why no one in the US is upset about this revealation.

Me, I don’t know what to believe. I read The Threatening Storm a while back and was rather convinced by its premise that if Saddam didn’t have WMD at the time, he was trying his damndest to get them. As such, I supported the initial invasion of Iraq, even if the pretenses given to the American public were false. To my mind, the end here of removing Saddam did justify the means.

Now, after having read this memo, the most disturbing line is about ” the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” What does that mean? Did Pollack get it completely wrong? Or does this line refer to lying about certain specific facts at the time in order to justify an invasion?

My interpretation is the latter, since I have a hard time believing that a former CIA intelligence officer whose specialty was Iraq would write an entire book that was completely off. Should the Bush administration be held accountable for lying to the public? Yes. The key question, though, is: was Saddam dangerous enough to the world where any means necessary was justified to oust him? I don’t know. Pollack posited that it was a matter of when and not if Saddam got nukes, and that when he got them, he was definitely going to use them.

Of course, it’s a bit silly to base an entire worldview around one book, but still, I believe the man had a point. And it’s because of his conclusion that I’m conflicted now. I suppose the point of my rambling in this entry is to show you that international politics is most emphatically not black and white and that it’s not easy to use power wisely. Anyone who wishes to cast holier-than-thou moral aspersions on Bush’s administration for this war is naive, in my opinion.