From the woman who uncovered the letter by Ronald Reagan where he admitted to thinking that sex was “tinged with evil” until a “fine old gentlemen” counseled him to observe the primitive Polynesians (really!), comes reason number infinity squared for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
In an interview with the BBC, Dr. Kiron Skinner, now of the Hoover Institution, formerly of Rummy’s Feith and Bum corps (also know as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board), was asked to react to an earlier BBC interview with outgoing UN Chief Kofi Annan.
In that piece, Mr. Annan said that the situation in Iraq was now worse than it was under Saddam Hussein and worse than the civil war that gripped Lebanon in the 1980’s.
For Dr. Skinner’s response, let’s all make the jump. . . .
Dr. Kiron Skinner, who has worked extensively with former Secretary of State George Schultz and current one Condoleezza Rice, was asked to respond to a lengthy interview between the BBC’s Lyse Doucet and the Secretary General where Mr. Annan sadly regretted his inability to stop the US from going to war.
Dr. Skinner chastised Annan, saying that, “There were many reasons for going into Iraq, not just to search for weapons of mass destruction, but most importantly, perhaps, because Iraq was in violation of a host of UN resolutions put in place at the end of the last Gulf War.” She continued that, thusly, “The US did not invade Iraq—it entered a conflict that had not ended.”
(The BBC has yet to post a transcript of the Skinner piece, but I wrote this down as I heard it, and I believe my quotes are close to verbatim.)
Asked to comment on the continued violence and the failures of White House war policy, Skinner said, “Emerging democracies often war with one another.”
One wonders which emerging democracies she includes in her assertion. As I see it, she could only be referring to Iraq and the Untied States.