Let's Look Within Ourselves for Iraq's WMD by Jacob G. Hornberger

Jacob G. Hornberger writes:

"Why were U.S. officials so certain that Saddam had WMD? Because they knew that the United States was one of the nations that had supplied them to him. The entire experience will ultimately go down as one of the biggest setups in history. Give a dictator WMD, encourage him to use them against others, and then invade his country for possessing them...

"But something went wrong along the way. What all the brilliant and calculating U.S. politicians and bureaucrats never figured on was that Saddam Hussein had already “disarmed”... that he could be telling the truth when he repeatedly told the world that he had, in fact, destroyed his WMD... that he might in fact have complied with the UN resolutions... that Saddam Hussein had in fact rid Iraq of the WMD that the United States and other Western nations had delivered to him during the 1980s.

"And so the principal justification for the invasion and war of aggression had to be shifted in the minds of the American people – to a supposed love for the Iraqi people, manifested by a need to “liberate” them, and to a purported devotion to “spreading democracy” in the Middle East, both of which could be achieved with a brutal war and military occupation that would kill upwards of a 100,000 Iraqi citizens, not to mention the tyranny and chaos that the war and occupation have produced...

"To do otherwise – to admit that tens of thousands of innocent people have been killed, maimed, tortured, sexually abused, and murdered as a result of a mistake or a lie is simply too painful, psychologically...

"After all, if love for the Iraqi people was the principal rationale for the war, then why the imposition and continuation of the brutal sanctions against the Iraqi people for some 11 years preceding the invasion? When it became increasingly clear that the sanctions were contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, wouldn’t people who were concerned about the well-being of the Iraqi people have called for the sanctions to be lifted? But they didn’t...

"... as the brutal effect of the sanctions imposed against Iraq increasingly became clear, year after brutal year, the U.S. response was to implement a deadly and corrupt new government policy on top of the old deadly and corrupt policy... the infamous “oil-for-food” program... a program that actually entrusted money to Saddam Hussein – the brutal dictator who we were told was refusing to disarm his WMD – in the supposed hope that he would use the money for the well-being of the Iraqi people. What a cruel joke...

"It is impossible to overstate the horrific consequences of an imperial foreign policy based on “regime change” that U.S. officials, especially those in the CIA, State Department, and the Pentagon, have wrought for the American people..."

Let's Look Within Ourselves for Iraq's WMD by Jacob G. Hornberger