Maybe you'll believe some of these:
What was the invasion of Iraq really about?
Not intelligence ...
"Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested publicly for the first time yesterday that Iraq might have destroyed chemical and biological weapons before the war there, a possibility that senior American officers in Iraq have raised in recent weeks."
-- New York Times, 28 May 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/28/international/worldspecial/28RUMS.html
.. not defence ...
"The decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main
justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for 'bureaucratic
reasons', according to the US deputy defence secretary [Paul Wolfowitz]."
-- BBC News, 29 May 2003
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2945750.stm
... not to contain unconventional weapons ...
"The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency warned the United States for the third time yesterday of the danger of radioactive contamination in Iraq because of looting at nuclear sites and called on the Bush administration to allow his safety and emergency response teams to enter the country."
-- Washington Post, 20 May 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13249-2003May19.html
... not law and order ...
"In the months before the Iraq war the Pentagon ignored repeated warnings that it would need a substantial military police force ready to deploy after the invasion to provide law and order in the postwar chaos, US government advisers and analysts said yesterday."
-- The Guardian, 28 May 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,965067,00.html
... not concern for people ...
"People are confused that U.S. military forces, assumed to be all-powerful, have delivered little. They are unsettled by the lawlessness that has encouraged religious forces to step into the breach and vigilantes to dole out their own brand of justice. They are bitter at the promises -- yet unfulfilled -- of a better life that would follow the war. To many of its residents, Baghdad is a capital both liberated and occupied, but most of all just bewildered."
-- Washington Post, 27 May 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41990-2003May26.html
... not regional stability ...
"Now the tyrant has gone, and governments around the world are nervously wondering what this much suspected group of men mean to do next. With Baghdad still burning, the neo-cons' most senior official, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, popped up to say that 'there has got to be change in Syria'. That comment ushered in two weeks of harsh diplomatic pressure from the Bush administration about the other Baath regime, though
Mr Wolfowitz quickly added that 'change' did not, in this case, mean regime change."
-- The Economist, 24 April 2003
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1731327
(subscription)
... not international security ...
"The United States may have scaled back its military operations in
Afghanistan, but continuing insecurity poses a threat to the implementation of democracy and the eradication of terrorism in the Central Asian nation."
-- Far East Economic Review, 30 May 2003
http://www.feer.com/articles/2003/0306_05/p020region.html (subscription)
... not respect for international law ...
"Amnesty said that the detention by the US of more than 600 foreign nationals, including Britons, at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba was a human rights scandal and that the prisoners should be released or charged. The UK, too, was accused of serious human rights violations. The report said that 13 foreign nationals had been interned without charge in 'inhuman and
degrading conditions' in high-security prisons under the Home Secretary's
Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act."
-- The Independent, 29 May 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=410465
... not respect for human rights ...
"The United States is illegally holding thousands of Iraqi prisoners of war and other captives without access to human rights officials at compounds close to Baghdad airport ... The International Committee of the Red Cross so far has been denied access to what the organisation believes could be as many as 3,000 prisoners held in searing heat. All other requests to inspect conditions under which prisoners are being held have been met with silence
or been turned down."
-- The Observer, 25 May 2003
http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,963176,00.html
... and certainly not to curtail terrorism ...
"The bombings in Riyadh bring the battle against terrorism back to where al-Qaeda began. Mr bin Laden came from Saudi Arabia, as did 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the September 11th attacks. Since the fall of their hosts in Afghanistan, the Taliban, many al-Qaeda operatives are thought to have fled to Arab countries."
-- The Economist Global Agenda, 21 May 2003
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1791578
(subscription)
Perhaps it was really about something else, afterall ...
"Iraq's resumption of oil exports under a new government would expose OPEC to considerable uncertainty. Iraq has the world's second-largest proven oil reserves. Flows of Iraqi oil to the world market unconstrained by OPEC quotas could further erode the cartel's already limited ability to set prices and might even trigger a price war, eating into the profits of its member countries. Such an outcome would surely delight the Bush administration as well as buyers of gasoline in the United States, the world's largest oil consumer."
-- Washington Post, 17 May 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1289-2003May16.html
Trouble is, as many of us predicted, America's vengeful and violent
response to September 11 has only made the world more unstable and more vulnerable ...
"No sensible opponent doubted that the world's most powerful military could easily crush such a lesser foe. The real issue was and remains very different: Will the Iraq war increase America's national security, as the Bush Administration has always promised and now insists is already the case, or will it undermine and diminish our national security, as thoughtful critics believed?"
-- Stephen F. Cohen, in The Nation, 19 May 2003
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030602&s=cohen
Scrat, We'll await your answers. c.i.
