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June 21, 2003
It has taken a long time to be said. And it should have been said before the war not way after it was finished.
What is it? It is this.
"AUSTRALIA went into Iraq because of its alliance with the US, not because of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and not to liberate its people."
(I will quibble about 'went into'. It should be 'invade'.)
That was said by Paul Kelly. It is to his credit that he said it, and then backs it up with this:
"The reason the US went to war was to destroy Hussein's regime and to remake the Middle East. Iraq's WMD capability was a lesser factor and a rationale used to win world opinion to the cause."
(Kelly doesn't say why the US needed to remake the Middle East. Why isn't this sort of stuff put on the table).
The WMD capability was a rationale, says Kelly, because "the UN would never sanction a war for the sole aim of regime change" or we can add, for the US to remake the Middle East for its own geopolitical reasons. So they hunted around for rationales that would be persuasive to shift public opinion. It is in the 'hunting around' that the problem lies. Two levels of discourse exist: a secret inner government circle one and a simplistic public one.
Democracy dies behind closed doors.
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Kelly must be another of those Staussians.. you know, it is right and proper, noble even, to mislead the little people in the service of a greater cause understood only by the initiates. And working or even ignoring the refs falls into the same category. Ends justify means.
I wonder if the whole WMD stink isn't the result of all this unregulated Straussian thinking. Perle, Wolfowitz and their acolytes know that if THEY were Saddam, they'd sure have developed massive reserves of WMD, no doubt about it. In fact they have done so despite not being Saddam. So they were fooled into thinking Saddam shared their Machiavellian principles, ergo, he's got lots of nukes. He MUST have.
But he didn't. Given their track record where truth has proved more recalcitrant than they expected, expect soon to see smoking gun trucks or pipes or some fucking thing that will end up being exposed as a fake months later when the media can safely ignore or downplay it.
Call me cynical.