Why We Fight Page #8

the hands off all those foreign advisors.

In the after action report by the CIA,

on what they had done in the Iran in 1953

they said:
We're going to

get some blowback from this.

We then made a puppet out

of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Who was a friend of ours.

He was an asset in the CIA's computers.

We did so because he was anti-Iranian.

He was very fearful that the revolution in Iran

which spread into his country

easier for went to war with Iran.

The war was extremely bloody.

It went on throughout the 1980s.

Unfortunately for Saddam Hussein

he began to lose the war.

At that point in comes the United States

and the former Donald Rumsfeld

sent to Saddam Hussein by President Reagan...

to tell him we will supply

you with intelligence.

We will supply you with the weapons

you may need through covert means.

It is why Washington say:

We know Saddam Hussein had weapons

of mass destruction. We have the receits.

This is what we mean by blowback.

He remained a friend of ours right up to his

envasion in the summer of 1990 of Quveit.

We became alarmed when he invaded Quveit,

that he could also go on and

invade Soudi Arabia itself.

The largest preserves of oil on earth.

We station troops inside Arabia.

It was a mistake in every sense of the term.

Remember, Osama bin Laden had said:

I resent the government

of Saudi Arabia for using

Americans to defend Saudi Arabia against Iraq.

At that point we began to fear that we're going

to lose our position in Saudi Arabia.

With the second largest source of proven

reserves on earth are in Iraq.

This leads us now to demonize

our previous ally and

to prepare the American public for

the thought that we must take him out.

I'm retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel.

Retired from military after 20 years.

I initially started in the Air Force.

Then they trained me

as a communicational electronics officer

and I did that for about 15 years.

And once I joined the

Pentagon, I became political...

military affairs officer for Middle East.

Things went strange from the

very beginning of my assignment.

Within a week or so it became clear

to me that war was gonna happen.

This toppling was going to happen.

And it was just the matter of

bringing American people...

up to speed and gain them behind this effort.

A number of people from outside of the Pentagon,

political appointees were

flowing into our office.

And they were working Iraq issues.

These political appointees that we had

came from very small set of think tanks.

As Eisenhower said: The military industrial

complex is really three components.

There's a military professionals, there is

defense industry, and there is Congress.

There is now fourth component,

and that is the think tanks.

One of the little known

secrets in Washington is that

palsy isn't really generated

very much within the palsy apparatus.

A great number of the ideas come

from outside the government.

From various think tanks like the

project for The New American Century.

Saddam Hussein. Here's the

man, here he is in this box.

I wouldn't exaggerate the influence of

the project The New American Century.

That's a very small think tank.

But in some respects we argue

for elements of the Bush doctrine,

before the Bush doctrine existed or

before George W. Bush became President.

The group included principals

like Rumsfeld, but it also included

a large number of people more or less

unknown to the American public.

And these people all know each other.

They'd all work together before

the Bush admininstration.

I used to write speeches for

Don Rumsfeld in the Pentagon.

And we came up with this phrase that

weakness is provokative, strength detours.

I reported on the Rebuilding America's Defenses

even before September 11th.

The Defense budget was too low,

it looked ahead to the kinds of wars

that we've now ended up fighting

in Afganistan and in Iraq.

What think tanks do is come up with

new rationalisations and new threats.

That's what they're paid to do.

Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a terrorist state.

I think Iran is a terrorist state.

North Korea is a very special problem.

They can build nuclear weapons and

they're perfectly capable of exporting them.

And we cannot allow that.

These are states that are like host,

but in a way fund international terrorism.

Encourage international terrorism.

They have to be eliminated.

This was almost completely adopted

by the administration in part,

because the people who wrote this

had open board into the admininstration.

We must prevent the terrorists

and regimes who seek

chemical, biological or nuclear weapons

from threatening the United States.

It is not at all accidental that

when President names our enemies

in the 2002 State of the Union

message as 'the access of evil'.

He includes Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

So in a real way we have this new phenomenon

where think tanks are now a part of

what we used to think as the

military industrial complex.

Eisenhower may well have been predicting

these people when he talked about:

If we didn't keep an eye on

the military industrial complex,

we would see what he called a

disastrous rise of misplaced power.

People making policy, who have

zero accountability to the voter.

So throughout the summer something was

operating in the Pentagon that was unique.

In August of 2002 it was announced

to us that all those folks,

who had come in, made up this expanded Iraq...

desk would be called the

Office of Special Plans.

The Office of Special Plans was created

in the Rumsfeld Department of Defense

in order to produce the

intelligence that the President

and the vice president wanted

making an enemy out of Iraq.

The Office of Special Plans had one

primary job and that was to produce

the set off talking points on the

topic of Iraq, WMD and terrorism.

And we were to use them in

any document that we prepared,

exactly as they were written in their entirety.

We were, myself included, very familiar with

what the intelligence was saying about Iraq.

But the problem was when you look

at what was in these talking points,

you could tell it was designed

to convince the reader

that Iraq and Saddam Hussein specifically

constituted a major serious terrible evil threat

to not just his neighbours,

but to the United States.

This regime has the design for nuclear weapon,

was working on several different

methods of enriching uranium

and recently was discovered seeking significant

qualities of uranium from Africa.

And that would be the statement.

He's actively seeking it and

this means that he's a danger.

But the intelligence actually said

that Saddam Hussein in the late 80s

actively sought materials

in Africa, but he hasn't...

done anything like that in the past 12 years.

The statement would act

like he did it yesterday.

Taking bits of intelligence

out of context, without...

the qualifiers, without the rest of the story.

And placing it as a bullet and

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