PittsburghThoughts

Don't ever say that it can't get worse,  

Juan Cole has been unflinchingly reporting on the Iraq war since it began. His anti-war, anti-bush blog: Informed Comment didn't start out that way. He originally supported an intervention to remove Saddam but was suspicious of the administration's rationales for war. He is a well respected, although, controversial academic and speaks Arabic (Modern Standard as well as Lebanese and Egyptian dialects), Persian, and Urdu, and is familiar with Turkish.

He has translated the transcript, published by El Pais of Bush's conversations of Bush's conversation with Spanish leader Jose Maria Aznar on 22 February, 2003, at Crawford, Texas. His may be the first transcript available online.

While Ari Flesischer was staging a charade press conference about Bush's meeting with Anzar, allegedly to discuss the Columbian terrorist organization, FARC, the press conference quickly turned to the question of the upcoming U.N. resolution on the use of force against Iraq. Here, Fleischer and the press play a little game of footsie, indicating the seriousness with which the whole question of war was considered, http://usinfo.state.gov/articles/washfile-english/2003/02/20030222213319DDenny @ pd.state.gov0.704632.body.html:

Q: Can you give us some color from the Aznar meeting? Did he get a tour of the ranch? What did they have for lunch?

MR. FLEISCHER: They did have a tour this morning, the President driving his pickup truck. And similarly, on the way to the news conference, the President drove his pickup truck. It's one of the few times he gets to drive; he relishes it. He wishes the drive could be as long as the news conference. And he drove back. Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Aznar were seated in the back seat of the pickup truck. And in the bed of the pickup truck was Blake Gottesman and Eric Draper.

Cole asserts, according to his translation of the afore mentioned document, that Bush had already assured Aznar that an invasion of Iraq was going forward with or without a final U.N. Resolution. At that point, Colin Powell had already made his flawed case to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003 and after failing to gain U.N. support, the U.S., together with the UK and small contingents from Australia, Poland, Denmark, launched the invasion on March 20, 2003.

Juan Cole makes these assertions:

The first is that the transcript shows that Bush intended to disregard a negative outcome in his quest for a UN Security Council resolution authorizing a war against Iraq. Bush wanted such a resolution. He expressed a willingness to use threats and economic coercion to secure it. But he makes it perfectly clear that he will not wait for the UNSC to act beyond mid-March. He also explicitly says that if any of the permanent members of the UNSC uses its veto, "we will go." That is, failure to secure the resolution would trigger the war.

Uh, that is the opposite of the way it is supposed to work. If you can't get a UNSC resolution, and you haven't been attacked by the state against whom you want to go to war, then you are supposed to stand down.

Both because he set a deadline beyond which his "patience" would not stretch (the poor thing had already waited four months; I mean, is he a toddler that he lacks elementary patience?), and because he specified a UNSC veto as a signal for his launching of the war, Bush made it very clear that he was willing to trash the charter of the United Nations and to take the world back to the 1930s,to an era of mass politics when powerful states launched wars of choice at will on the basis of fevered rhetoric and fits of pique.

The second claim that I made was that Bush was aware of, and rejected, an offer by Saddam Hussein to flee Iraq, probably for Saudi Arabia, presuming he could take out with him a billion dollars and some documents on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. Both provisions were intended by Saddam to protect him from later retaliation. The money would buy him protection from extradition, and the documents presumably showed that the Reagan and Bush senior administrations had secretly authorized his chemical and biological weapons programs. With these documents in his possession, it was unlikely that Bush would come after him, since he could ruin the reputation of the Bush family if he did. The destruction of these documents was presumably Bush's goal when he had Rumsfeld order US military personnel not to interfere with the looting and burning of government offices after the fall of Saddam. The looting, which set off the guerrilla war, also functioned as a vast shredding party, destroying incriminating evidence about the complicity of the Bushes and Rumsfeld in Iraq's war crimes.