David Kay: No WMD but Lots of Corruption
David Kay, the former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq has been in the news lately. Instead of stockpiles of WMD, he found evidence widespread corruption, lying and theft:
David Kay, who resigned last week as the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, now says he didn’t find stockpiles of WMD — or evidence of a nuclear program well under way in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — and he blames it on a greatly flawed intelligence system and analysis.
Kay summarizes his conversations with Iraqi scientists:
They describe in Iraq that was really spinning into a vortex of corruption from the very top in which people were lying to Saddam, lying to each other for money; the graft and how much you could get out of the system rather than how much you could produce was a dominant issue.
To the suggestion that the Bush administration mislead the American people to justify the Iraqi war, Kay replies:
Clearly, the intelligence that we went to war on was inaccurate, wrong. We need to understand why that was. I think if anyone was abused by the intelligence it was the president of the United States rather than the other way around.
He goes on to offer a new justification for the war:
I think Baghdad was actually becoming more dangerous in the last two years than even we realized. Saddam was not controlling the society any longer. In the marketplace of terrorism and of WMD, Iraq well could have been that supplier if the war had not intervened.
Not only did the Bush administration claim that Saddam had WMD, it has repeatedly argued we toppled one of the world’s most brutal dictators. How can he be a dictator if he had no control?
Kay is saying that the president was “abused by the intelligence.” There is a parallel here that I want you to consider. Saddam’s scientists were telling Saddam what he wanted to hear, taking the money and producing nothing. The intelligence organizations were also paid for “intelligence” that didn’t really exist. That intelligence became our WMD against Iraq; it was used to rally the country to support an invasion of Iraq.
Kay is painting Bush as a victim of the intelligence community. Was Saddam a victim of his scientists? Or do people tell their bosses what they want to hear so they can keep their jobs? The U.S. had been looking for regime change in Iraq since before Bush was elected. Wouldn’t that predispose the administration to pay for intelligence that justified it’s desire to invade?
There is a selective pressure going on here of the type that I’ve discussed in previous posts. When mysticism and delusion gain control, those who can lie and cheat with the best of them are better adapted to survive in that environment. Those with evidence that contradicts the delusions are selected out, denied advancement, fired, called unpatriotic and even traitors.
Rather than being a victim, it is far more likely that Bush and Co. got the kind of “intelligence” that they were willing to pay for.
The same process will come into play in the upcoming election. The candidate that can best tell the American people what we want to hear will be rewarded with control over our lives for the next four years.
The corruption of the mind by mysticism and delusion IS a WMD.
| Go to Home - Most Recent Posts