John McCain, like Hillary Clinton and many other Washington warriors, justifies the Iraq war by insisting that before we invaded every intelligence service in the world thought Saddam Hussein had WMD. McCain repeated the claim for the umpteenth time just last week. Since he’s never called on this particular brazen lie, it appears the press either can’t read or has no short term memory.
Because the British didn’t think anything of the kind. Remember the Downing Street memos? The chief of British intelligence returned from Washington meetings with top NSC officials in 2002 and concluded:
Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
Also in 2002, Hans Blix of the UN and Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA reported to the UN Security Council on their renewed inspections of Iraq’s potential WMD sites. They found no evidence of WMD, and expected their remaining unresolved questions would find answers with further inspections.
Maybe John McCain doesn’t consider our closest ally’s intelligence to be of any value. They do eat jellied eel after all. Plus they don’t play baseball. Perhaps he feels the United Nation’s exhaustive inspections were untrustworthy. It must have something to do with those black helicopters. And it’s true the CIA, or at least its leadership, thought the Iraqis had WMD, although only conjecture and no facts supported that conclusion. Then again, as Tim Wiener writes in Legacy of Ashes, the CIA also thought it could win the Korean war covertly, thought the Soviet Union had 500 ICBMs aimed at the US (they had four), thought they could drive the Soviets out of Hungary, didn’t think Castro was a communist, didn’t know about the collapse of the Soviet Union until it happened, helped Saddam Hussein rise to power, etc.
Of course McCain and the other Iraq war mongers were shocked, shocked when the administration’s own inspectors, the Iraq Survey Group, produced the Duelfer Report after the invasion and found no WMD in Iraq. Oops. Guess we started a major war, displaced millions, racked up hundreds of thousands of casualties, spent hundreds of billions, all for nothing. Shucks. But John McCain would be the first to tell you it was an honest mistake. Wasn’t it?