Again, that was freely available in the public domain for six months before we invaded Iraq. Anyone who cared to know the truth could know it at the time. Just prior to Colin Powell's infamous speech to the UN Security Council, the top UN weapons inspector Hans Blix blasted the speech that Powell was about to give ("US Claim Dismissed by Blix"):
The chief UN weapons inspector yesterday dismissed what has been billed as a central claim of the speech the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, will make today to the UN security council.
Hans Blix said there was no evidence of mobile biological weapons laboratories or of Iraq trying to foil inspectors by moving equipment before his teams arrived.
In a series of leaks or previews, the state department has said Mr Powell will allege that Iraq moved mobile biological weapons laboratories ahead of an inspection. Dr Blix said he had already inspected two alleged mobile labs and found nothing: "Two food-testing trucks have been inspected and nothing has been found."
Dr Blix said that the problem of bio-weapons laboratories on trucks had been around for a while and that he had received tips from the US that led him to inspect trucks in Iraq. The Iraqis claimed that the trucks were used to inspect the quality of food production.
He also contested the theory that the Iraqis knew in advance what sites were to be inspected. He added that they expected to be bugged "by several nations" and took great care not to say anything Iraqis could overhear.
Furthermore, a couple of weeks after Powell's speech, it was embarrassingly revealed in Newsweek that a top Iraqi defector--Iraqi weapons chief Gen. Hussein Kamel-- had told his American debriefers in 1995 that Iraq's WMD capabilities had been dismantled after the Gulf War. In the transcript (here, pdf) on p. 13, Kamel said: "All weapons-- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed."
Coupled with the complete lack of WMDs uncovered by the UN inspection teams headed by Hans Blix, it was openly obvious that Iraq WMDs posed no threat whatsoever to anyone, because they quite simply did not exist. Then, years later, we got additional confirmation from the Downing Street Memos, with their start revelations that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
We now have a wealth of other material clearly showing that Ridge's implied meaning is simply and utterly false. However, if you simply take his literal meaning, it's arguably defensible--but utterly damning. Sure the decision may have been based on "keep[ing] America safe"--a decision made by a bunch of pee-in-their-pants chickenhawks with guilty consciences for having allowed the most spectacular terrorist attack in world history to happen on their watch.
Such men were so mentally and morally compromised that actual evidence simply did not play any role in what "keep[ing] America safe" meant to them. They "trusted their gut", not after looking at all the facts, but instead of looking at them. That men of stupendously bad judgment--so bad, in fact, that it can't really be called judgment at all--might be trying to "keep America safe" does not even begin to be a legitimate defense of their perfidy in deceiving the public.
But for Ridge, that's exactly what it does. Bush and Cheney were America's leaders. This alone is enough to exempt them from any sort of critical scrutiny.
Maddow's framework typifies the essence of liberalism and Enlightenment reason: we base our actions on reality, we reason from reality, and when we find out we have been mistaken, we go back and learn why were mistaken, so that we do not make the same mistakes again.
Ridge, on the other hand, typifies the conservative mind. He does not learn. He cannot learn. Because he cannot question mistakes made by leaders. He can question mistakes made by underlings, but since the big decisions are not made by underlings, he can never question the big decisions. And thus he is incapable of learning the big lessons.
No wonder conservatism is utterly doomed to failure, after failure, after failure, after failure. What else could such a belief system possibly produce?
Psychotic Fugue
Let's examine the relevant part of the transcript, in order to see how Ridge exhibits the classical defense of the Bush/Cheney record, refusing to learn or admit anything in retrospect. I'll break it down into segments, so we can see what's happening in its details.
MADDOW: .... You were a crucial authoritative part of making what turned out to be a false case to the American people about Iraq being a threat, and us needing to attack them.
February 2003, you said on ABC, "I agree that as the president has said, the world community has said this is a rogue regime that has chemical biological weapons, trying to develop nuclear weapons, has means of delivery. That's the reason this individual needs to be disarmed. The point in fact is that the world community has known for 12 years he's got chemical biological weapons, means of delivery, and that's precisely the reason of the United States and its partners are trying to disarm Saddam Hussein. He's a threat to his region, he's a threat to our allies. He's a threat to us."
You made that case on national television a month before we started invading. Do you regret that?
RIDGE: No.
MADDOW: Do you think it's true?
RIDGE: At the time, I think it's true, and subsequent to that, the president's leadership and the things we have done have kept America safe.
This statement by Ridge came about a week after Powell's UN speech. As already noted, Powell's speech had been pre-buted in advance by Blix. It was subsequently torn to shreds by British researcher Glen Rangwala. Powell even went so far as to claim that a truck parked outside a shed was a "signature" for chemical weapons. Me? I think it was a signature that the driver was inside playing pinochle. In addition to everything I've already said, Bush was in the process of trying--and failing--to get the UN to pass another resolution authorizing an invasion of Iraq. When it was clear that attempt with fail, the US decided to abandon that route, and simply invade without UN authorization. So much for Ridge's dishonest attempt to portray us as having the world's support for what we were doing.
As for the intelligence itself, Ridge may not have known at the time what a bunch of hooey that was, but he damn sure should have. At that point, the UN weapons inspectors had been in Iraq for a couple of months, and found nothing. If the argument was that the Iraq was skillfully hiding the WMDs, then the answer should have been to keep looking-as Blix pointed out.. So long as inspectors were in Iraq, looking for WMDs, there was simply no way that those WMDs could constitute a threat. The real fear for the Bush Administration, was that eventually everyone would be convinced that there were no WMDs, and thus there was no justification for invasion. And that is why we invaded--not to prevent Iraq from using WMDs, but to prevent the UN inspectors from proving that there were no WMDs in the first place.
Maddow's program continued:
MADDOW: Do you think that Saddam Hussein was a threat to us at the time that we invaded?
RIDGE: Based on not only the intelligence we had, but the intelligence we got from--that was shared, I believe, it's been known by the Brits and by the French, they had used weapons of mass destruction, that he was, again, several intelligence agencies thought he still had them. And I believed--I believed that if he had a weapon of mass destruction, a radiological, a crude radiological device, a nuclear device or something, for him to, if he had them, did I believe that he would give them to al Qaeda if he had them? The answer was yes.
Everyone knows that Saddam had usedWMDs in the past. He did so when were allies, and were not about to call attention to it. Other intelligence agencies did have some evidence that he still had them-but of course, we failed to tell them that we had Gen. Kamel telling us otherwise. So, in short, we had helped deceive other intelligence agencies, and that's supposed to support our position? Plus, other agencies were strongly doubting that assessment by the time Ridge made those claims in February 2003. After more than two months of fruitless weapons searching, folks were starting to smell a rat.
Finally, Ridge's belief that Saddam would have handed over a radiological weapon--which he did not have--to his ideological arch-nemesis is simply proof that Ridge is just as clueless about Mideast politics as anyone else in the Bush Administration is. One might as well believe that Karl Rove was eager to help Barack Obama defeat John McCain.
Next, we find Ridge grasping at three straws. First was the already-mentioned claim that other intelligence agencies still believed the false intelligence about WMDs that our agencies had helped keep alive. Second, he raised the even more absurd notion that the WMDs might still exist, but we just hadn't found them yet--a claim that he's not even willing to try to defend, he just raised it to add to the confusion, nothing more. How intellectually dishonest can you get? Third... well, I'll talk about that afterwards.
Roll tape:
And so the president...
MADDOW: That's what you...
RIDGE: ... was going into Iraq--I said it and I believed it at the time.
MADDOW: You believed it at the time.
RIDGE: Yes.
MADDOW: You don't still believe it, do you?
RIDGE: Well, it's pretty clear that the intelligence communities of several countries who had assessed his--who claimed that he had weapons of mass destruction, we haven't found them. So again...
MADDOW: Do you think they might still be there and we just haven't found them?
RIDGE: I doubt it. I think we covered that country. But there were other reasons to go in. That was the one that was--that everybody focused on, and everyone who has been critical of the president for going into Iraq said we never found them. But I think the president made the decisions based on the facts and the intelligence as he knew it at the time, and I think it was the right decision at the time.
Third was Ridge saying, in effect, "So what if we lied about WMDs? We kicked butt, and the American people always go for that sort of thing." Maybe so. But that's still illegal. It's fraud to take the country to war under false pretenses.
Finally, Maddow challenged Ridge on the credibility of his claim that the poor widdle President had been tricked by the evil, evil (but very patriotic) spies. This is where we see him incapable of considering that his Dear Leader could ever do anything fundamtnally wrong:
MADDOW: You don't think that the administration, Vice President Cheney, your longtime friend, President Bush, the--the intelligence system set up under Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, you don't think they had any role in skewing the intelligence to a foregone conclusion? You think it was an intelligence community--intelligence community error and not a politicized decision? Really?
RIDGE: Yes. Yes. I know some of these men better than I know others, but I don't think any one of these men would have contrived in their own mind a scenario without in their own mind and heart substantive belief based on information they received that the threat was real.
There's no way that anybody in that group--I just--they would commit our blood and our treasure to a cause if they didn't think it was necessary to commit our blood and treasure to a cause to keep America safe. The intelligence may have proven to be false, but there was no doubt in my mind that they were motivated to keep America safe.
In retrospect, we can say that the intelligence was faulty. Actually, we discovered a couple of times that when we raised the threat level, a couple of years later, there was one instance where it turned out to be faulty, but sometimes you don't have the luxury of waiting. In this instance, if you thought they had weapons of mass destruction, the United Nations had sanctioned them so many times and nothing ever happened, and somebody had to make a move. And I find it rather difficult to think that anybody in this country would believe that people in charge of their government, Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, would commit our blood and our treasure to a cause if they didn't truly believe in their heart and their mind that it wasn't to protect America. I just reject that notion.
Well, at least he can't picture Democrats doing what Buch and Cheney very clearly did do.But I'm not really sure that's a good thing. In fact, I'm pretty certain it's not.
And here's Rachel asking Ridge, WTF?
MADDOW: I think that is an eloquent argument, and I have to tell you, I think you making...
(CROSSTALK)
MADDOW: I think you making that argument right now is why Republicans after the Bush and Cheney administration are not going to get back the country's trust on national security. To look back at that decision and say, we got it wrong but it was in good faith and not acknowledge the foregone conclusion that we are going to invade Iraq that pervaded every decision that was made about intelligence--looking back at that decision-making process, it sounds like you're making the argument you would have made the same decision again. Americans need to believe that our government would not make that wrong a decision, that would not make such a foregone conclusion--take such a foregone conclusion to such an important issue, that the intelligence that proved the opposite point was all discounted, that the intelligence was combed through for any bit that would support the foregone conclusion of the policy makers.
The system was broken. And if you don't see that the system was broken and you think it was just that the intel was wrong, I think that you're one of the most trusted voices on national security for the Republican Party, and I think that's the elephant in the room. I don't think you guys get back your credibility on national security until you realize that was a wrong decision made by policy makers. It wasn't the spies' fault.
I don't know that Ridge was actually making a very eloquent argument. "Compared To What?" I guess. But Rachel's response was pretty damn good. Still, I think the argument goes deeper than that. GOP credibility does not just depend on the stand-alone act of being able to admit that mistakes were made at the top. GOP credibility depends on being able to escape from the entire framework of conservative argumentation that Ridge has just regurgitated, and from the set of norms associated with it--a set of norms that requires authoritarian deference to its leaders, so that no fundamental re-learning is possible, and that requires the repeated affirmation of arguments past, no matter how many times they have been discredited and disproven.
This, then, is where Ridge makes his most basic argument, as quoted above, really just repeating what's just said above, but in more compact form:
RIDGE: Well, I think you're suggesting that it was only--that it was driven by, quite obviously, the people who made the decision knew more about the threat than you and I do. And, again, I think it's a pretty radical conclusion to suggest that men and women entrusted with the safety of this country would predicate a decision upon any other bases other than to keep America safe. Later on, it may have proven that some of the information was inaccurate, but there were plenty of reasons to go into Iraq at the time; the foremost was weapons of mass destruction. That obviously proven to be faulty. But the fact of the matter is, at that time, given what they knew--and they knew more than you and I did--it seemed to be the right thing to do, and the decision was made in what they considered to be the best interests of our country.
We have been litigating it now for about five or six years. I guess we're going to continue to litigate it, and historians--and the final history hasn't been written, because if Iraq--if some form of self-governance, some form of democracy ultimately is achieved in Iraq--and it's not going to look exactly like ours, but the Muslim world does admire freedom of speech; the Muslim world does admire democracy, as difficult as it is over there--the notion that we went in improperly will be obviously reversed, and the history has yet to be written.
So, once again, Ridge is arguing, "So what if we killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis? They're thank us someday, and George W. Bush will be a hero after all, so Booyah!"
MADDOW: Reversed?
RIDGE: Democracy in Iraq--well, democracy in Iraq will make a huge difference not just for the men and women and the people and the families in Iraq, but for the entire region for a lot of reasons.
MADDOW: If you can go back in time and sell the American people on the idea that 4,000 Americans ought to lose their lives and we ought to lose those trillions of dollars for democracy in Iraq, you have a wilder imagination than I do.
We were sold that war because of 9/11. We were sold that war because of the threat of weapons of mass destruction from this guy who didn't have them, and our government should have known it. And, frankly, a lot of people believe that our government did know it, and that it was a cynical decision. And maybe everybody wasn't in on it, maybe that is a radical thing to conclude, but I think that...
RIDGE: I don't share that point of view. You do.
MADDOW: I know.
Maddow may have gotten a bit carried away and inadvertently given Ridge a bit of rhetorical cover there. But the cover is only rhetorical, since the evidence is overwhelming that there was no credible evidence of an Iraqi threat when we invaded. The swiftness with which Cheney orchestrated the outing of Valerie Plame in response to Joe Wilson's Op-ed is itself more than adequate proof of how fragile their phony case for war actually was--and how well they knew how fragile it was.
In short, Ridge is basically no different than Dick Cheney at this point. He's just done a better job of not making an obvious fool and asshole out of himself. But when you set aside his decorous manners, and look at the content of what he's arguing, he's not just no better than Cheney-he's actually worse. Worse because he's got people like Maddow treating him with kid gloves, and letting him spout off more lies than she can possibly respond to in a single sitting. |
