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Cheney: Weapons Report Justifies Iraq War

By TOM RAUM, Associated Press Writer

MIAMI - Vice President Dick Cheney asserted on Thursday that a finding by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq that Saddam Hussein's government produced no weapons of mass destruction after 1991 justifies rather than undermines President Bush's decision to go to war.

The report shows that "delay, defer, wait wasn't an option," Cheney told a town hall-style meeting.

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"The headlines all say no weapons of mass destruction stockpiled in Baghdad. We already knew that," Cheney said.

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He said other parts of the report were "more intriguing." Cheney's comments reflect a GOP strategy to use portions of the report, including abuses of Iraq's "fuel for food" program, to try to move discussion away from the central conclusions on the absence of weapons of mass destruction.

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Although the report says Saddam's weapons program had deteriorated since the 1991 Gulf War and did not pose a threat to the world in 2003, it also says Saddam's main goal was the removal of international sanctions.
"As soon as the sanctions were lifted he had every intention of going back" to his weapons program, Cheney said.

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"The suggestion is clearly there by Mr. Duelfer that Saddam had used the program in such a way that he had bought off foreign governments and was building support among them to take the sanctions down," Cheney said.
Thus there was no reason to wait to invade Iraq to give inspectors more time to do their work, Cheney said.
"The sanctions regime was coming apart at the seams," Cheney told a later forum in Fort Myers. "Saddam perverted that whole thing and generated billions of dollars. ... He used the funds to corrupt others."

On Wednesday, the former head of the U.N. weapons inspection team, Hans Blix, said: "Had we had a few months more (of inspections before the war), we would have been able to tell both the CIA and others that there were no weapons of mass destruction (at) all the sites that they had given to us."
Duelfer's report said what ambitions Saddam harbored for such weapons were secondary to his goal of evading the sanctions, and he wanted weapons primarily not to attack the United States or to provide them to terrorists but to oppose his older enemies, Iran and Israel.

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... it also says Saddam's main goal was the removal of international sanctions.
"As soon as the sanctions were lifted he had every intention of going back" to his weapons program, Cheney said.

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Originally posted by rue:
Then the 'irrelevant' UN worked, I take it.

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The details could buttress Washington's contention that important players were preventing the U.N. program from squeezing Saddam, forcing the United States to launch a war to topple him.

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Originally posted by SignyM:

To toppple Saddam because.... uh, why? If WMD were shown not to exist, why would the USA want to "topple" Saddam? The sanctions worked. They were designed to keep WMD out of Saddam's hands, not to topple Saddam's regime for no particular reason. And Blix was a couple of months from proving that there were no WMD despite lack of cooperation from some parts of the UN.

And by suggesting that the USA would invade Iraq ANYWAY, even if the sanctions worked (i.e. no WMD were found) you are basically concluding that the reason for the invasion was never about WMD at all.

In other words, as I've been saying since before we invaded... "It's all about the oil" It's ALWAYS been about the oil"

Right?

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Yes, but do we invade nations because they have "plans" to have sanctions removed and then "potentially" further those plans to develop nuclear technology and then "maybe" WMD? Which BTW they would still need an intecontinental ballistic delivery system to be a threat to us.

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Originally posted by SoupCatcher:
I haven't read the new report so I'm basically just pulling together other bits of information from earlier in the summer right off the top of my head. At one point in time, the only evidence we had for the food for oil corruption came from Chalabi. There were two investigations. The one headed by Chalabi's people came up with the evidence but wouldn't share with the one headed by Bremer's people. Then their hard drive and all of their computer back-ups went down at the same time so they weren't able to verify the evidence. It just sounded hinky and, in hindsight, Chalabi probably wasn't the most reliable source. So I'm wondering if the new report made use of evidence that was in addition to that claimed by the Chalabi group.

On the other hand (and this may be the ugly American showing through in me ) it's not too surprising that there would be corruption.

I'm shocked, shocked, that there would be corruption in a third world country. (said in my best Claude Rains impersonation).

The new administration rationale for invading Iraq (and, by extension, the new rationale being passed around the internet) - they didn't have WMD, they didn't have the infrastructure in place to create WMD, but they were going to get rid of the sanctions and then start working on creating the programs to build WMD - makes the threat from Iraq seem very distant indeed. Not imminent. Not immediate. Not impending. Not 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin and material for 500 tons of sarin. Not a mushroom cloud over one of our cities.


There are three kinds of people: fighters, lovers, and screamers.

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Originally posted by Geezer:
I can even imagine that if France and Britain had deposed Hitler then, that some of the same comments about "premature pre-emption" we see about Iraq would have been made.

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:

Isn't this a hindsight/20-20 kind of a thing? I think if they had deposed Hitler it would have been seen as premature. And why not? History is not a mechanical progression. You can't know what is going to happen in a year or two, or even a few months.

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Remember "The invasion of Iraq is gonna be a cakewalk?"

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And since we're on the subject, what about the dangerous forces alive in the U.S. today? Our Masters have made it quite clear that if anyone fails to oppose terrorism the way we want them to oppose terrorism we very likely might bomb the hell out of them and invade. When does the United State's beligerance become a big enough threat for the world to seek to depose our leaders?

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Historically, tyrants and dictators left alone to build their forces generally end up causing no end of trouble. Some might think it better to stop them before they get too big.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
SO let me get this straight... if we had invaded Germany, deposed Hirohito, invaded China and killed Mao and his cadre, invaded Italy and killed Moussilini, and bumped off Stalin then things would have been much different. And you're right! All we had to do was invade six or seven nations and we'd all have been OK.

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The point is that at any moment, there are literally DOZENS of "potential" enemies. So while we were invading Iraq, N Korea and Iran were busy forwarding their nuclear plans, and Pakistan and India have certainly not held still with theirs. And what about Brazil? It refuses to let in the IAEA. What about Israel? It's an open secret that they have nuclear and CWA capability. What about S Korea? THEY were conducting forbidden enrichment experiments just recently. And Russia??

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The point of THAT is we let our policy be swayed by corporations, and we seem almost invariably to promote despotic structures that promise cheap resources and/or cheap labor. We never seem to learn the lesson that if we had encouraged structures that did not actively exploit their own people and create extreme differences in wealth, the world would be a MUCH more stable place today.

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Originally posted by Geezer:
SO let me get this straight... if we had invaded Germany, deposed Hirohito, invaded China and killed Mao and his cadre, invaded Italy and killed Moussilini, and bumped off Stalin then things would have been much different. And you're right! All we had to do was invade six or seven nations and we'd all have been OK.

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I doubt that you and I will ever agree on the neo-colonialist thing. I'm sure we're less that lily-white, but I'd say less grey that most developed countries.

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My time machine needs a new widget, but without being able to go and check, I'd bet we aren't going to get any real commercial benefit out of Iraq. If we're lucky we'll leave them with a more-or-less democratic government and an army well-trained enough to keep the insurgency down to a dull roar.

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Originally posted by Geezer:

Amazing how many times France and Russia come up in these articles. As Capt. Renault would say, "Round up the usual suspects."

"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Excerpted from USAToday article, "Cheney uses WMD report to defend Bush" datelined 7 October found at http://tinyurl.com/6omdr
"The sanctions regime was coming apart at the seams," Cheney told a later forum in Fort Myers. "Saddam perverted that whole thing and generated billions of dollars. ... He used the funds to corrupt others."

The new GOP strategy contained some risks to Bush: Some of the countries possibly implicated in wrongdoing in the program include U.S. allies in Iraq, particularly Poland, as well as Russia — countries the administration does not want to alienate.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
So... we should go bomb or invade any nation that we "think" is going to be a threat. Even if I thought that was the right thing to do, then Bush did a heckuva bad job prioritizing, wouldn't you say?

So, since our hindsight is working 20/20 maybe your crystal ball is too. Who would you have George invade? Russia? Brazil? N Korea? Saudi Arabia? China? How would you prioritize? Which nations would you start invading, in what order, and why? Or would you just use nukes? And what do you suppose the world reaction would be???

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And since you can tell who's going to be a major pain in the butt ahead of time, why did we fund the Taliban and Saddam and continue our cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia? Who would you STOP supporting in view of them being dictators, potential threats and/or destabilizing forces? Karimov? Sharon? Hugo Chavez? Musharef?

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Your notion is like jailing someone ahead of time because they fit a profile. We don't have enough jails to even think of it, and if we tried all that we would do is create a lot of very disaffected criminals.

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I'd just as soon kick them all to the curb, if I wasn't more concerned about what would follow their ouster.

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Originally posted by SignyM:

We're the only developed nation with over 800 military installations around the world. That says a lot about our level of gray. Germany and France may cut deals and so forth, but they haven't militarily taken over a whole lot of countries in the last 50 years or so, have they?

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Geezer, your arguments are falling apart for lack of reality, and your bias is showing through the seams. If you're SERIOUSLY contemplating the "preventive" invasion scenario, then you need to go stand in the corner with Cheney and "Let's contract it out" Rumsfeld.

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Originally posted by NeutrinoLad
Geezer, Ghoulman, et. al., as you are educated about this, you wouldn't happen to have the list of American companies and agencies that were also cited as bribe recipients but is being kept secret as a matter of "national security", would you?

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excerpted from "A discreet way of doing business with Iraq" http://tinyurl.com/3udtn
*editted to add: the article is subscription only, not sure how I got past that, but the link might not work. Here is a reprint of the article: http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/02.23D.Cheney.Circumvented.htm

Millions of dollars of US oil business with Iraq are being channelled discreetly through European and other companies, in a practice that has highlighted the double standards now dominating relations between Baghdad and Washington after a decade of crippling sanctions.

Though legal, leading US oil service companies such as Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger, Flowserve, Fisher-Rosemount and others, have used subsidiaries and joint venture companies for this lucrative business, so as to avoid straining relations with Washington and jeopardising their ties with President Saddam Hussein's government in Baghdad.

By submitting their contracts to the UN via mainly French subsidiaries, many of which do little more than lend their name to the transaction, the companies are treated as European, rather than US or Japanese, applicants.

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Official records on these subjects are misleading, although instructive. According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories... These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to cover all the actual bases we occupy globally. The 2003 Base Status Report fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo -- even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained ever since by Kellogg, Brown & Root. The Report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, although the U.S. military has established colossal base structures throughout the so-called arc of instability in the two-and-a-half years since 9/11....

The report deceptively lists only one Marine base, Camp Butler, when in fact Okinawa "hosts" ten Marine Corps bases, including Marine Corps Air Station Futenma occupying 1,186 acres in the center of that modest-sized island's second largest city. (Manhattan's Central Park, by contrast, is only 843 acres.) The Pentagon similarly fails to note all of the $5-billion-worth of military and espionage installations in Britain, which have long been conveniently disguised as Royal Air Force bases. If there were an honest count, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases in other people's countries, but no one -- possibly not even the Pentagon -- knows the exact number for sure, although it has been distinctly on the rise in recent years.

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Major U.S. oil companies and a Houston oil investor were among those who received lucrative vouchers that enabled them to buy Iraqi oil under the U.N. oil-for-food program, according to a report prepared by the CIA's chief arms inspector.
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The 918-page report says that four American oil companies — Chevron, Mobil, Texaco and Houston-based Bay Oil — and three individuals, including Oscar Wyatt, were given vouchers and got 111 million barrels of oil between them from 1996 to 2003. The vouchers allowed them to profit by selling the oil or the right to trade it.

The other individuals, whose names appeared on a secret list kept by the former Iraqi government, were Samir Vincent of Annandale, Va., and Shakir Al-Khafaji of West Bloomfield, Mich., according to the report by the inspector, Charles Duelfer.

The fact that these companies and individuals received oil from Iraq does not mean that they did anything illegal, experts on the program said. Such allocations may have been proper if the individuals and companies received appropriate U.N. approval.

In interviews on Friday, spokesmen for the oil companies and for Houston-based El Paso Corp., which assumed control of the assets of the company once run by Wyatt, said the transactions had been legal. But each confirmed that they had received subpoenas from a federal grand jury in New York, which is investigating "transactions in oil of Iraqi origin" as part of the oil-for-food program, according to a federal financial filing by El Paso Corp.

Wyatt got lion's share
The largest of the allocations went to Wyatt, who the list said had received allocations totaling 74 million barrels. At the profit rates of 15 cents to 85 cents per barrel that were reported in the arms inspector's study, he could have earned $23 million.

The names of the American companies and citizens who benefited from the voucher scheme were not included in the published report prepared by the Iraqi Survey Group that was released Wednesday by the CIA, because the names of American individuals cannot be publicly disclosed under privacy laws. But the names were contained in unedited copies given to the White House and to several congressional committees.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
PS- I'm doing my best to imitate Soupcatcher.

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Originally posted by NeutrinoLad:
Until the bribes got big enough.

Geezer, Ghoulman, et. al., as you are educated about this, you wouldn't happen to have the list of American companies and agencies that were also cited as bribe recipients but is being kept secret as a matter of "national security", would you?

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Originally posted by SignyM:



Geezer- The book I was thinking of is "Blowback" by Chalmers Johnson but it might actually be in "Sorrows of Empire" (same author). Anyway, here's a quote from "Sorrows" for your perusal while I go rummage for those books.

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As expected, most are in the countries of NATO allies, along with Japan and South Korea.

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Originally posted by SignyM:

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As expected, most are in the countries of NATO allies, along with Japan and South Korea.

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Just to demonstrate how you cherry-pick your information, when you listed the "top ten" Air Force Bases in Japan as family housing, you just "happened" to use the list that was sorted by function which listing FAMILY HOUSING AND ADMIN FIRST. I guess you didn't "happen" to notice that??? Even though you had to go past the first 170 pages or so to find it??

The top Japanese installations each over 1 million square feet of building space are (top down):

Kadena AFB 5,7 Msqft
USMC Camp, Zukaren OK 3,8
USMC Camp, Makimota OK 3,5
Sagami gnl depot 3,1
Zukeran fmly hsg 2,9
Kakiminato sv annex 2,3
Misawa AFB 1,1
USMC camp, Futemma OK 1,1
Navy base, Atsugi 1,0
Makiminato svc annex 1,0

In total, 96% of installations are devoted to air strips and hangars, USMC camps, docks, ammo dumps, etc. LESS THAN 5% are devoted to family housing, admin, recreation etc. So our military presence in Japan, and by extension to rest of the list, is not such a benign collection of famliy housing, is it?

Geezer, have you abandoned even a PRETENSE of objectivity? The point of having installations (I DID say installations, not bases) all over the world is not to place them in hostile areas but to be able to project military power anywhere we want. If any other nation were to have HALF the installations that we do, we would be rightly and deeply concerned about their military ambitions!

Our BASES in "British Indian Ocean" sound pretty benign (It's part of the Commonwealth after all) until you realize that Diego Garcia is how we projected power into Iraq. From a military viewpoint, the US has its footprint over pretty much the whole world except China and Russia.

I'm beginning to wonder if maybe Ghoulman isn't right about you.

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The US military presence in Japan and on Okinawa began at the end of World War II. Although the US occupation in Japan ended in 1952, US administration continued on Okinawa until 1972. In 1951, when the San Francisco Peace Treaty was officially recognized, Okinawa legally became a possession of the United States. In 1972, control of Okinawa was reverted to Japan.

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The Philippines became an integral part of emerging United States security arrangements in the western Pacific upon approval of the Military Bases Agreement in March 1947. The United States retained control of twenty-three military installations, including Clark Air Base and the extensive naval facilities at Subic Bay, for a lease period of ninety-nine years. United States rather than Philippine authorities retained full jurisdiction over the territories covered by the military installations, including over collecting taxes and trying offenders, including Filipinos, in cases involving United States service personnel.

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