by James Boyd

Created on: June 10, 2009   Last Updated: June 17, 2009

Who's to blame for the Iraq war quagmire?

The person who bears the responsibility for the mess we are in in Iraq is George W. Bush. As President, he led the push to start a war with Iraq. In the near-hysteria following 9-11 there was a mood in this country; to follow the advice of Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles: "Well, shoot something." Bush, who had long had a fixation on Iraq, jumped at the chance to blame that country. The talk coming from the administration was all about the "overwhelming" evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They also tried to link Iraq directly to al-Qaeda and to the events of September 11.

There are two distinct issues about Iraq's possession of banned weapons. One, did they indeed possess large stockpiles of these devastating weapons? Two, if they had them, what should we do? There is a great deal of reliable evidence that Iraq did, at one time, possess a variety of chemical weapons and that they were trying to produce biological and nuclear weapons. We know they had chemical weapons because they obtained them from us.

Donald Rumsfeld had personal and specific knowledge of the kind and amount of chemical weapons that were available to the Iraqi government, because Rumsfeld was personally responsible for arranging the delivery of these weapons to Iraq.

There were inspectors in Iraq searching for (and not finding) the stockpiles of banned weapons and the facilities for producing them. Everybody knows that Saddam kicked the inspectors out. The problem with this, like a lot of common knowledge, is that it is not true. The inspectors were withdrawn for two reasons. One is that they said the Iraqis had stopped cooperating with them. The Iraqi government claimed the reason for that was they had found that at least one of the inspectors was not a bona fide inspector at all, but was actually a spy for the military of a foreign government (the U.S.). That is correct. The man later admitted being a "plant" who was placed on the inspection team to provide data that might be useful for a future invasion.

The other reason for the withdrawal of the inspection team was that the British and the U.S. were about to commence a series of heavy air strikes aimed at radar and anti-aircraft facilities. They did not want the inspectors in the country during those air strikes.

No evidence was found that Iraq had any banned weapons stockpiled anywhere in the country, nor was any evidence found that the country was manufacturing or even

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