Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson made sure we were 100% wrong on WMDs

Thanks to CIA employees like Valerie Plame, Western intelligence agencies were 99 percent wrong four years ago on whether Saddam Hussein still was pursuing or stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

Thanks to her husband, Joseph Wilson, the West was 100 percent wrong on WMDs.

On the one area where intelligence sources were right – that Saddam sought uranium from Africa in the last years of his regime – Wilson’s leaks of false information to the press in May 2003 panicked the White House to retract the truth.

Right about liberation. Of course, we were 100 percent right about Saddam’s fascist repression. It was real, and it had to end. Democracy was overdue in Iraq.

By continuing his repression, Saddam violated U.N. Resolution 688, which was part of the 1991 cease-fire agreement. By refusing the cooperate with U.N. arms inspectors, he violated his probation.

In the end, it wasn’t Plame’s duty or Wilson’s duty or British MI5’s duty or the CIA’s duty to prove Saddam was seeking, building or stockpiling WMDs. It was Saddam’s obligation, as a repeat mass murderer, to prove he had abandoned WMDs.

Excellent chronology. For one of the best chronologies I’ve seen on the Plame-Wilson fiasco, click here. If you’ve tried to ignore this complicated controversy until now, this post at Sweetness & Light has the details to make everything clear.

I can’t wait to see how the Plame-Wilson movie shows Wilson, in March 2003, publicly claiming Saddam had WMDs and was involved in nuclear arms trading, and then, two months after the Iraq invasion, publicly claiming he had no doubt Saddam had no WMDs and no involvement in pursing even the uranium for nuclear arms.

If, after studying the chronology, you can think of Plame and Wilson as competent or honest, you’re really not thinking at all.

Frank Warner

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See also: Exit interview: 14 questions no one asked President Bush.

Comments

[Kevin]

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