San Jose Mercury News - September 14, 2003
Ex-U.S. diplomat says White House is in full retreat from Iraq reality By Joseph Wilson
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The truth is, the administration has never leveled with the American people on the war with Iraq.
It is true that many people outside the administration, including me and many leading Democrats, thought Saddam had residual stocks of weapons of mass destruction; disarmament was a legitimate international objective supported unanimously by the United Nations Security Council. But we did not need to rush to war before exploring other, less risky options.
Invasion, conquest and occupation was always the highest-risk, lowest-reward choice. The intrusive U.N. inspections were disrupting Saddam's programs and weakening him in the eyes of his key supporters, including in the Iraqi military. That would explain why the United States, according to reports, was able to thoroughly infiltrate the army before the onset of hostilities and obtain commitments from Iraqi generals to send their troops home rather than have them fight.
The administration short-circuited the discussion of whether war was necessary because some of its most powerful members felt it was the best option -- ostensibly because they had deluded themselves into believing that they could easily impose flowering democracies on the region.
A more cynical reading of the agenda of certain Bush advisers could conclude that the Balkanization of Iraq was always an acceptable outcome, because Israel would then find itself surrounded by small Arab countries worried about each other instead of forming a solid block against Israel. After all, Iraq was an artificial country that had always had a troublesome history.
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