I got called in by an officer on the
Joint Staff who told me that he said you
know we’re gonna invade Iraq I said but
why and he said I don’t know he said I
guess because we don’t know what else to
do but in fact the why of it went back a
decade to the spring of 1991 it went
back to the argument inside the
Republican Party about whether or not
the Gulf War should have ended with the
capture of Baghdad in the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein and in 1991 when I talked
to secretary Wolfowitz you know he said
we didn’t get rid of Saddam Hussein and
and we should have he said we’ve only
got five or 10 years to clean up the
Middle East these old Soviet surrogate
regimes like Syria and Iraq get rid of
them before the next superpower comes
along the challenges we didn’t foresee
that we’d actually be using force
aggressively to change regimes and it
appeared full-blown after 9/11 and
somehow in the minds of the American
people the attack run by Osama bin Laden
based out of Afghanistan became part of
Saddam Hussein and to retaliate and make
sure that and it was phrased in many
different ways there was effort in the
intelligence community to prove that
Saddam Hussein had somehow been
connected to the strikes in New York and
against the Pentagon and then there was
the idea that well but he might have
some weapons of mass destruction
biological chemical nuclear weapons that
he could give to terrorists despite the
fact that Saddam Hussein and al Qaida
couldn’t have been further apart in
terms of working together as allies as
you put him under enough pressure maybe
you know they would team up against the
United States but we created that
pressure against Saddam Hussein for our
own reasons what were those reasons
we’ve never really heard there was no
single reason there was yes there was
some weapons of mass destruction
possibly
we’re still there but we’d had 10 years
for the UN special commission we’d had
the strikes Operation Desert Fox and
December of 98 taking out all the sites
that we knew about then through
intelligence maybe there was some
unaccounted for scuds that they said had
been fired into training maybe yes maybe
no maybe there was some material that
you could culture material that you can
grow bio weapons in but there wasn’t
much that I knew of and so and I’d been
reading all the intelligence until I
retired so I began to see that and I
thought back to the conversation with
Wolfowitz and I thought what I’d been
told inside the Pentagon and I began to
smell something that didn’t smell
Joint Staff who told me that he said you
know we’re gonna invade Iraq I said but
why and he said I don’t know he said I
guess because we don’t know what else to
do but in fact the why of it went back a
decade to the spring of 1991 it went
back to the argument inside the
Republican Party about whether or not
the Gulf War should have ended with the
capture of Baghdad in the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein and in 1991 when I talked
to secretary Wolfowitz you know he said
we didn’t get rid of Saddam Hussein and
and we should have he said we’ve only
got five or 10 years to clean up the
Middle East these old Soviet surrogate
regimes like Syria and Iraq get rid of
them before the next superpower comes
along the challenges we didn’t foresee
that we’d actually be using force
aggressively to change regimes and it
appeared full-blown after 9/11 and
somehow in the minds of the American
people the attack run by Osama bin Laden
based out of Afghanistan became part of
Saddam Hussein and to retaliate and make
sure that and it was phrased in many
different ways there was effort in the
intelligence community to prove that
Saddam Hussein had somehow been
connected to the strikes in New York and
against the Pentagon and then there was
the idea that well but he might have
some weapons of mass destruction
biological chemical nuclear weapons that
he could give to terrorists despite the
fact that Saddam Hussein and al Qaida
couldn’t have been further apart in
terms of working together as allies as
you put him under enough pressure maybe
you know they would team up against the
United States but we created that
pressure against Saddam Hussein for our
own reasons what were those reasons
we’ve never really heard there was no
single reason there was yes there was
some weapons of mass destruction
possibly
we’re still there but we’d had 10 years
for the UN special commission we’d had
the strikes Operation Desert Fox and
December of 98 taking out all the sites
that we knew about then through
intelligence maybe there was some
unaccounted for scuds that they said had
been fired into training maybe yes maybe
no maybe there was some material that
you could culture material that you can
grow bio weapons in but there wasn’t
much that I knew of and so and I’d been
reading all the intelligence until I
retired so I began to see that and I
thought back to the conversation with
Wolfowitz and I thought what I’d been
told inside the Pentagon and I began to
smell something that didn’t smell
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