WMD I

wolfowitz vanity fair interview..

"He said that the USA had chosen Iraq's alleged stocks of chemical and biological weapons to justify going to war for bureaucratic reasons. In the words of Wolfowitz, search and liquidation of weapons of mass destruction allegedly held by Iraq "became the main argument for going to war with Iraq because all arms of the bureaucracy could agree on this argument."

The main reason of war in Iraq, Wolfowitz says, was that the USA wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Another reason for going to war with Iraq, a secondary one but not less important in this case, was that the USA could withdraw the troops from Saudi Arabia when the war in Iraq is over. At that, US's influence in the Middle East wouldn't suffer at all. Paul Wolfowitz didn't specify where the US troops would be removed then; he only mentioned that the troops "would become a permanent irritant to al-Qaeda terrorists." It has been reported long ago already that Americans planned to set up military bases on the Iraqi territory. Certainly, the Pentagon refuted the information, but it sounded unconvincing at that.

It seems that British Prime Minister Tony Blair is the only man who still believes that Iraq actually holds weapons of mass destruction."

.. exposing tony to more ridicule..

"Prime Minister Tony Blair last night insisted he had secret proof that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq in his strongest signal yet that coalition forces believe they may have begun to uncover leads to Iraq's alleged deadly arms cache.
Stung by claims that the Government exaggerated the threat from Saddam, Blair said he was waiting to publish a 'complete picture' of both intelligence gained before the war and 'what we've actually found'."

..following "sexier" lingo affair [sounds familiar does it not ;-)]- z-analysis here..

"On the very day that Tony Blair was staging a triumphant visit to see his "boys in Basra,” the British press was revealing that Downing Street had doctored a dossier on Iraq's weapons program to make it "sexier.” This is according to a senior British official who claims intelligence services were unhappy with the assertion that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were ready for use within 45 minutes, The Guardian reports.

And yet if you were watching the news on TV, rare were the admissions that the news was managed, manicured, sanitized and spun. It all seemed so authoritative even when it wasn’t. It was produced to be believable even when it wasn’t.

As Linda McQuaig wrote in the Toronto Star: "Accordingly, a terrified American public was kept under the mistaken illusion that Saddam Hussein had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and would soon strike America if America didn't strike first."