Amidst?yesterday’s CSPAN coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was a?Hudson Institute panel discussion?on what is being considered as the definitive history of the leadup to the Iraq war — Douglas Feith’s War and Decision.
Despite lack of coverage in the mainstream media, I’d?heard Feith?on talk radio prior to watching yesterday’s forum.?In my view, the mainstream media is more or less?ignoring the book is because Feith — supported by extensive documentation — makes the case the the run-up to the decision to invade Iraq was anything but hasty.
Feith addressed?Saddam Hussein’s ‘strange’?WMD policy:
We actually found in Iraq Saddam’s WMD program. We found chemical and biological weapons programs. He had put his nuclear program in a kind of suspended animation. Our intelligence community said he had an active program before the war. That was a mistake. It was a kind of dormant program, but he had kept the long lead item in place, which was his teams of technicians. We found after the war —while we did not find the stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons —- we found?facilities, we found personnel, we found materiel, we found capabilities. We found that Saddam had put himself in a position where in 3-5 weeks he could have manufactured the chemical and biological weapons stockpiles that we thought we would find…….
…He wanted, on the one hand, not to retain the stockpiles because he wanted to get out from under the economic sanctions and he was apparently thinking he one day was going to have to be inspected in order to get out form under those economic sanctions and he did not want the inspectors to find stockpiles. On the other hand, he did want people against whom he had used chemical weapons in the past —- the Iranians and his own Kurds and Shiites —– to believe he had chemical weapons. So he basically persuaded every intelligence service around the world that he had these chemical and biological weapons stockpiles. He persuaded his generals that he had it, he persuaded everybody in the U.S. government that he had it, and it was a very strange policy that Saddam Hussein was pursuing.
