Important reading: Former ambassador Joseph Wilson IV
speaking about policy and politics surrounding the 2003 Iraqi war
| BACKGROUND: In early 2002, the Office of the Vice President requested a check of reports that Iraq was purchasing uranium from Niger. The British claimed to possess a document showing that Iraq had recently made an agreement to obtain yellowcake from Niger. American intelligence was not shown the document, nor was it told the details about how it was obtained. As it turned out, the document was a crude forgery with glaring errors (dates, people involved). When the contents of the document were shared in 2003 with the IAEA, that organization was able to determine in two days that the document was bogus. In early 2002, a former ambassador to several African states, Joseph Wilson IV, was dispatched to check out the Niger-uranium story. He went to Niger, and determined to his satisfaction that there was no truth to the British claim. He reported back, and presumed that the OVP and intelligence agencies were told of his findings. However, the Iraq-Niger claim did manage to get into the State of the Union address - but in less specific terms. "Africa" was mentioned instead of "Niger", and it was attributed to British intelligence because the U.S. could not verify the claim. By June of 2003, and in light of the failure to find any WMD in Iraq, closer scrutiny was given to the SOTU and in particular to the line about Africa. That was when the public learned that a "former ambassador" had gone to check out the story. The issue became so hot that the former ambassador wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times in early July, identifying himself as Joseph Wilson IV. In the Op-Ed, Wilson was critical of the Bush administration's handling of intelligence and of the case it made for war. |
On 14 June 2003, Joseph Wilson IV gave a speech at the Education for Peace in Iraq center.
The Education for Peace in Iraq center has a website with a small item about Wilson, but it's only about his more recent New York Times Op-Ed.
The archives section only goes forward to May 2003. Their website is slow, and they have a note about technical problems.UPDATE: A webpage has (re)emerged which lists all of the speakers at the June 14 forum held at the Education for Peace in Iraq center. Wilson is listed near the bottom of the page, where you can listen to an MP3 (either as an audio stream or after downloading).. |
On 10 July 2003, Democracy Now reported on the speech.
Democracy Now has a website with a page about Wilson's speech.
It can be heard with RealAudio (the link is here) To hear Wilson, go to the 30-minute mark. |
No transcripts of Wilson's speech could be found on either the Education for Peace in Iraq or Democracy Now websites.
A transcript (below) was made from the audio feed.
In the speech, Wilson speaks about an "unnamed former ambassador." He is referring to himself.
The speech: (emphasis and formatting added)
To those of you who are going out and lobbying tomorrow, I want to assure you that that American ambassador who has been cited in reports in the New York Times and in the Washington Post and now in the Guardian over in London, who actually went over to Niger on behalf of the government - not of the CIA, but of the government - and came back in February of 2002 and told the government there was nothing to this story. Later called the government after the British white paper was published and said, "You all need to do some fact-checking and make sure the Brits aren't using bad information in the publication of a white paper. And who called both the CIA and the State Department after the president's State of the Union, and said to them, "You need to worry about the political manipulation of intelligence if in fact the president is talking about Niger when he mentions Africa."
That person was told by the State Department that "Well, you know, there's four countries that export uranium." That person had served in three of those countries so he knew a little about what he was talking about when he said, "You really need to worry about this." But I can assure you that that "retired ambassador to Africa," Nicholas Kristof called him in his article, is also pissed off and has every intention of insuring that this story has legs. I think it does have legs. It may not have legs over the next two or three months, but when you see American casualties moving from one to five or to ten per day, and you see Tony Blair's government fall because in the UK it is a big story, there will be some ramifications I think here in the United States. So I hope you will do everything you can to keep the pressure on because it is absolutely bogus for us to have gone to war the way we did.
As I used to say when I was doing my interviews before the war, the issue of weapons of mass destruction is primordial. It is important. It was absolutely vital that we correct the policing operation associated with Resolution 687, which was the resolution that said Saddam shall not have weapons of mass destruction. That was the piece that was broken. Correcting that, which we did essentially by 1441, was the right thing to do. Going from 1441 to an invasion, conquest, and occupation war was not the right thing to do.
I am struck also by some of the numbers that keep turning around in my head as I look at this. The president said, "I've got four reasons for going to war in Iraq."
One, weapons of mass destruction,
which was handled by 1441 unanimously, but that wasn't going to get him to war so long as you had an inspection process in place.
Two, terrorism.
We wanted to stamp out terrorism. This was part of our war on terrorism. Now here in the United States on September 11th 2001 we suffered the loss of two buildings in New York and severe damage to one building in Washington, and we suffered the loss of roughly 3,000 lives. In Iraq during the "Shock and Awe" bombing campaign, we now know that over 3,000 Iraqis were killed. We ought to assume that the better part of Baghdad currently suffers from Post Traumatic Shock Syndrome in addition to everything else they suffer from. And lord knows how many buildings in downtown Baghdad and elsewhere in the country were destroyed.
And it was one thing to watch the war on Fox News, CNN, and ABC, where everybody tried to put a bigger American flag on their TV station than the next person. It was quite another thing to watch the war through the lens of al-Jazeera or any of the other Arabic newspapers. Where every child that was killed or maimed, or every building that was hit, or Baghdad in flames by night, resonated in a far different way than it resonated in the United States.
Now in our war on terrorism, how can we possibly assume that the anger that we felt when 3,000 of our fellow citizens were killed, is not going to be felt in spades, not just in Iraq where 3,000 deaths represents by, relative to the total population, ten times the number of deaths that we suffered in our terrorist attack. Or throughout the rest of the world.
So if in fact, you buy into the idea that this is part of our war on terrorism, guess what? We have created - and the polls show this - an entire generation of Arabs who essentially is going to hate the United States and Americans. And if they remain disaffected they are a wonderful recruiting tool for al Qaeda and al Qaeda-like organizations, going forward.
Of course, we didn't find any terrorists when we got to Iraq. Just as we haven't yet found any weapons of mass destruction, though on that score I remain of the view that we will find biological and chemical weapons. And we may well find something that indicates that Saddam's regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons. It's not surprising if you live in the part of the world where you do have a nuclear armed country - enemy of yours - that is just a country away from you.
The third reason of course, the president mentioned, was the transfer of weapons of mass destruction from a rogue nation and a rogue government to international terrorists.
George Tenet testified up on the Hill, and his testimony was - I wrote something similar in an article I wrote for the San Jose Mercury News - he testified that, "Yeah, it was entirely possible that Saddam would transfer weapons of mass destruction to international terrorists, but only in extremis." That essentially if you are an autocratic thug which Saddam is, and was - certainly was, he's still a thug even if he no longer has the totalitarian powers he once had - you're not going to give up control of something to a group that you don't have any control over. It just doesn't make any sense, particularly given the fact that Saddam's not a dumb man. He's a sociopath. He's a killer. He's not dumb. He knew and has known for years that anytime anything happens to American interests, the first place we look is at Iraq.
On September 10th, Saddam was riding high. There was absolutely no reason for him to be involved on September 11th. He had essentially worked his way pretty much back into the Arab League. The sanctions regime had been eased so he could get more of the stuff that he needed both to enrich himself and keep his country's population at bay. There's absolutely no reason for him to have been involved in September 11th. And indeed, it's clear that he wasn't. Even though, by the time we went to war the majority of the population thought it was Iraqis who had been involved in September 11th.
The fourth reason ...
And oh, by the way, if you buy into the transfer theory, guess what? That transfer has probably already occurred. You've heard recently reports to the effect that we did not secure the nuclear site, for example, until it had been thoroughly looted. Lord know how many other high priority weapons of mass destruction sites were not secured. If ever there was an indication this was not a weapons of mass destruction war, it ought to be in the sloppiness of the battle plan that did not have the securing of these sites on the first day.
The fourth reason that the president gave was the liberation of the Iraqi people,
which is indeed a noble cause. And everybody who has ever been to Iraq or who knows anything about the Baath regime of Saddam Hussein, knows that it is, or was one of the two most repressive and most dangerous and most belligerent regimes towards its own people, in the world.
The question really comes down to whether it is the job of American soldiers to go over and liberate Iraqi people. And the argument that I would make is that every time we've had this debate - and it happens every four years when we do the Quadrennial Review - we conclude that it is the role of the American military to defend the national security of the United States. We have other organizations. We have other tools. We won the Cold War. We liberated Eastern and Central Europe without killing Rumanians, Bulgarians, Poles, Czechs, Slavs. It takes a little more patience. It takes a little more creativity. People in the intelligence community, people in the diplomatic community, people in the economic sanctions community, people in the political community, have to work a lot harder. It doesn't show up on your television screens as "Shock and Awe," the burning of Baghdad at night. Or the firebombing of Dresden. But it yields results. But this administration could not be patient.
The other figure of course, that strikes me, is we've got about 180 Americans dead. Another 40 or 50 Allied troops dead. That is roughly four times the amount of Iraqis from the Diaspora who actually showed up when the Pentagon said it was going to raise an Iraqi liberation force. Now I don't know how hard the Pentagon went out and recruited Iraqis from the Diaspora of roughly four million. And I don't really know how many Iraqis are of that fighting age. But I do know, and as you see on the streets of Tehran today, that in order to have a liberation strategy you have to have people who are willing to fight for their own liberation. Otherwise you will never get that "liberation bounce" that Ken Adleman promised us, that Richard Perle promised us, when they said Iraqis would be cheering from the rooftops at our marching in there.
And I have always said that no matter how much the Iraqis hated Saddam Hussein, we ought not to assume that that was automatically going to transfer for love and affection for the Americans. 'Cause first and foremost, Iraqis are an extraordinarily proud people. They have a long and distinguished history. More of them remember the exploits of Saladin and Nebuchadnezzar than Americans remember Washington, Lincoln, or Al Gore. (laughter) I mention Al Gore because it's more recent. They know what it's like to be conquered. They were under the Ottomans for several hundred years. They know what it's like to be conquerors. They don't like being conquered. They particularly don't like to be conquered - or one should have assumed from the very beginning they weren't going to like being conquered - by a couple of countries that have been in the forefront of maintaining economic sanctions on the population for twelve long years. Which economic sanctions devastated the middle class - the glue that holds a society together. This is a proud people that we had already brought to it's knees over twelve years.
We could have done this much differently.
Now there were three or four different foreign policy agendas in play here, only one which was true.
There was the weapons of mass destruction agenda, which was handled by 1441.
There was the terrorism agenda, which was handled by Afghanistan.
When Carl Levin and I debated Jim Woolsey and John McCain on Nightline, Ted Kopple started the evening by saying, "There's an old Arab saying ..." (I think actually it's a Chinese saying but he said it was an Arab saying) "that says, 'Sometimes to get the monkey's attention, you kill the chicken'". Well we did that. We did that in Afghanistan.
And if in fact the monkeys whose attention we were trying to get were the other two countries of the Axis of Evil - North Korea and Iran, let me suggest to you that there were two lessons they took away from it.
- One was, "We'd better get nuked up real quick so that if these guys decide to come after us we have our deterrence in place."
- And two was, "They're not going to come after us. We're too strong. They went after the weak sister. They went after the country whose army they had already defeated twelve years ago. Whose army they'd kept under economic sanctions, whose population they'd kept under economic sanctions for twelve years, and whose anti-aircraft and other defenses they had run a several month long campaign to deteriorate and degrade before they ran the march to Baghdad."
Which by the way, as valiant as our solders was, this was not the liberation of Paris. The only thing that slowed down our juggernaut getting into Baghdad was the speed limit signs on the highways going up there. And I mean no disrespect to our military in this. We run military campaigns very well. But we were not running a military campaign against the elite of the elites. As somebody said, "This was like the New York Yankees playing Podunk High." And even our military - I used to be political advisor to Commander in Chief Armed Forces Europe, I still have contacts with command - even some of our military officers were absolutely dismayed at the slaughter they were inflicting on poorly trained, poorly equipped, Iraqi conscripts on the way up there. All this will come back to haunt us.
Weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, liberation, were the three agendas.
The real agenda in all of this of course, was to redraw the political map of the Middle East.
Now that is code, whether you like it or not, but it is code for putting into place the strategy memorandum that was done by Richard Perle and his study group in the mid-90's which was called, "A Clean Break - A New Strategy for the Realm." And what it is - cut to the quick - is if you take out some of these countries, some of these governments that are antagonistic to Israel then you provide the Israeli government with greater wherewithal to impose its terms and conditions upon the Palestinian people - whatever those terms and conditions might be. In other words, the road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad and Damascus. Maybe Tehran. And maybe Cairo and maybe Tripoli if these guys actually have their way. Rather than going through Jerusalem.
Now it's pretty clear to me, looking at the way in which the Palestinians and the way Hamas has reacted to the road map, that in fact, you've got real problems on two fronts in the Middle East now.
But that is the real agenda.
You can put weapons of mass destruction out there.
You can put terrorism out there.
You can put liberation out there.
- Weapons of mass destruction got hard-headed realists on board - through a bunch of lies as I've said.
- Terrorism got everybody who was still reacting viscerally to 9-11 on board.
- And liberation got liberals, bleeding hearts, on board. Americans who hate dictators, on board.
End of speech
NOTE: We are well aware that when speaking about Israel one must be careful, lest the argument be misconstrued as modern day form of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. However, we felt that Wilson was a person of long experience whose views were worthy of exposition - especially since he is a key figure in the current Niger affair.
posted by Quiddity at 7/16/2003 12:26:00 PM 
