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One of the greatest questions of the Iraq War, and a question with significant implications for our understanding of the competence of the 'deep state', Pentagon and intelligence services in general, is this:
Why didn't the CIA fake evidence of WMDs in Iraq?
As time has passed since 2003, the 'mainstream' antiwar narrative, in which every important person supposedly 'knew' there were no WMDs but advocated for invasion anyway, has been shown to be largely ridiculous. It is likely, as discussed by Jervis and others who have done the most research into the cause of the intelligence failures in Iraq, that a substantial proportion of the intelligence establishment, including senior officials at the CIA and MI6, considered it highly likely that Saddam was, at the least, in posession of extensive chemical weapon stocks. The long since retired head of MI6 at the time said just this year that he was convinced they were there:
They weren't united about what to do, hence certain Cheney actions, and they didn't have much proof, thus the Office of Special Plans and intense efforts to convince Powell etc to act, but even many of those who didn't advocate invasion believed it was likely that he had these weapons. Most crucially, as Jervis argues, they overfocused on Saddam's refusal to allow international weapons inspectors as almost a guarantee that he was hiding WMDs, because why else would he refuse them? (Saddam ultimately claimed, under interrogation in 2004, that he refused to allow them because he didn't want Iran to find out how 'degraded' his weapon stocks were.)
So why, after it became clear weeks - and certainly months - into the invasion that there were no WMDs, did the US 'deep state' (including the intelligence services, perhaps with Pentagon assistance and/or with WH approval) not fake them? This anti-conspiracy is critically important for a few reasons:
It would likely have been significantly easier to fake chemical and/or biological weapon stocks in Iraq than to commit many of the other conspiracies placed at the foot of Western Intelligence services or the 'deep state'. The US didn't destroy its own chemical weapon stocks until 2022, and anthrax would be a trivial process for a small, highly focused internal intelligence unit to acquire or manufacture. No 'Bush planned 9/11' tier conspiracy theory is required, this would have been a focused, limited program in the vein of countless mid-late 20th century US intelligence operations involving a small number of operatives. While the coalition alleged variably the existence of (official link) chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, the nuclear allegations were extremely vague and largely amounted to the idea that Iraq 'might' have started such a program, or that Saddam had 'met with' nuclear scientists or tried to acquire nuclear material.
It was not, therefore, necessary to manufacture the presence of nuclear weapons or nuclear material, for which a longer, riskier and more complex supply chain would be necessary. The presence of moderate stocks of chemical weapons, plus some anthrax, would have been sufficient to make the pre-war claims largely accurate, or at least accurate enough to be respectable.
It's unlikely the international press would have trusted the denials of ex-Baathist officials or scientists around planted evidence, and in the event of requiring an eyewitness, only a few people would had to have been paid. Even if the fakes weren't universally believed, they would have sowed enough FUD that US motives for the war wouldn't have been thoroughly discredited. There was no need to 'prove' the full extent of the pre-war allegations, only to lend them broad credence. 'There were no WMDs in Iraq' served as a major argument used by people hostile to the policies of the Bush and Blair administrations after 2003, led to major protests and enquiries, and soured the popular perception of those governments extensively.
The Iraq War led to a climate in which CIA regime change operations supported by boots-on-the-ground became substantially less easy to slip through the political process. Even if we assume that (a) the CIA was ambivalent about an invasion, thus the OSP and (b) that the CIA didn't particularly care to prop up the careers of neoconservative politicians who suffered if they didn't find WMDs, the number of US regime change ops, and the number of direct military interventions involving ground soldiers, have declined significantly since 2003, even relative to the 1990s. Military involvement was (beyond those existing engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan) limited to Syria, Libya and some support for Yemen and Ukraine, civil involvement to Ukraine and a couple of others, and the Iraq War's intelligence failures have led to a political climate in which committing ground soldiers to foreign conflicts is extremely unpopular. The presence of WMDs would have made all this significantly easier. For example, the CIA's failed rebel training program in Syria was in part a consequence of the US' steadfast refusal under Obama and Trump to support their regime change operation with a substantial number of ground forces.
Categories of explanation:
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What do you think?
The WMD hoax was engineered by Zionists in the American government under the newly-formulated Office of Special Plans, specifically as a workaround to slush fabricated intelligence from Israel to the Pentagon, working around the CIA. The goal was to formulate a propaganda narrative to instigate the United States into fighting a regional rival of Israel, Saddam Hussein.
Douglas Feith Himself, along with Richard Perle, another architect of the Iraq war, authored the Clean Break Memo.
The Clean Break memo was a policy document created by Feith, Perle, and Netenyahu:
From the memo:
So the authors of this memo, in collaboration with Netenyahu, use their influence in the highest positions of American government to fabricate intelligence for WMDs (and also intelligence that Iraq was responsible for the post-9/11 Anthtrax attack which seems to be a memory-holed event in the context of 9/11. Israeli intelligence distributed the claim that Anthrax was given to a hijacker by an Iraqi spy in Prague, which was discounted by American intelligence agencies including the CIA but still became part of the WMD narrative leading up to the war.).
So to answer your question:
The WMD hoax was fabricated by Zionists, who formed special working groups and offices to slush false intelligence around the CIA. The CIA is not chiefly responsible for the WMD hoax or the Iraq/Al-Qaeda in Praque anthrax hoax, and was critical of the OSP and the intelligence provided by the OSP. The CIA did not have an incentive to fabricate evidence for a deception campaign that was not of their own making.
The OSP was not in a position to fabricate the evidence for WMDs on the ground, nor was that ever its goal. Its goal was to get America involved in a war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam on behalf of the sate of Israel, and it succeeded. Fabricating physical evidence for WMDs was not necessary for their goals, or even for their coverup. The leading theories for why America was manipulated into the Iraq War surround Bush's neuroses and Big Oil conspiracies. So fabricating physical evidence was not necessary for them to accomplish their goals or even to get away with their crimes.
There were some attempts to forge a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. A big question is, who forged the Habbush Letter? I don't think it was the CIA.
Single-issue posting is officially against the rules. Your cooldown on "Jews did it" arguments has not adequately expired, so I'm banning you for three days.
His reply was about as expected as the sun rising tomorrow, so there’s no need, really.
2rafa, if my reply was so expected then why does your post demonstrate a lack of understanding of the dynamic between the OSP, Bush Administration, and CIA/intelligence apparatus? The genuine confusion among the CIA and intelligence apparatus is not evidence of a non-conspiracy, it's the consequence of having traitors with loyalty to a foreign ethnostate having such influence at the highest levels of foreign policy and intelligence.
By characterizing the OSP as little more than a couple PNAC lackeys pushing for war woefully mischaracterizes the reality of the situation. Maybe some in the CIA believed the WMD narrative, but the primary question is from whence did the WMD narrative actually come? Since I've explained this to you a few times by now, maybe I'll just leave it to The Guardian to paint a clearer picture:
I think it's a little to ridiculous, in this context, to conclude that the CIA's deferral from fabricating physical evidence for WMDs is evidence of a non-conspiracy. The confusion sown by the Zionist influence in our foreign policy apparatus was genuine, but the confusion is not evidence of a non-conspiracy, it was itself the outcome of a conspiracy.
It's ridiculous to even call it a "conspiracy theory": the Zionists who got together in secret and wrote a memo creating some plans, which included overthrowing Hussein, and then the very same people go and carry out those plans... well that's a conspiracy theory. No, it's just called Narrative Control, it's icky to relate this all to Zionist influence, you will get banned for it even in free-speech forums. You are supposed to talk about Bush family vendettas or Big Oil, it's low-status to identify the Zionists who actually got together in a room to write down plans to do something, and then they went and did that thing.
And in any case, contrary to the CIA which retained skepticism of the intelligence linking WMDs or Al-Qaeda to Iraq, Israel was fabricating intelligence, including the claim that an Iraqi spy gave a 9/11 hijacker Antrhax while in Prague (what's the "non-conspiratorial" explanation for this false story becoming a casus belli for the WMD narrative and Iraq war??).
And it was Israeli sources which were the source of the "the WMDs were real, but they were moved to Syria so you should, uh you know, Spread More Democracy when you get the chance.":
Our "greatest ally", folks.
The main thing you don't understand is that among all these issues the physical evidence matters the least of all, narrative control is far more important. Fabricating intelligence, sowing confusion, making it low-status for people to directly identify the behavior of groups of people who are acting on a deep loyalty to a foreign ethnostate... that's how it works.
The reason we haven't gone to war with Iran (yet) is because of how disastrous the wars actually were on the ground. The lack of evidence for WMDs is not the primary reason for it. The lack of evidence for WMDs, what that actually does, is expose the behaviors of Zionists in the American foreign policy apparatus, but as you yourself show, this doesn't matter either because as long as you control the narrative and make it low status to say "hey look, those people got together to plan to do something and then they went and did that thing" you are going to get away with it regardless of something so unimportant as the physical evidence.
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