The former president gave a short eloquent speech in Dallas at the memorial service for five police officers murdered by a sniper. In a slap at Donald Trump, a man loathed by the Bush family, W. said: “We do not want the unity of grief nor do we want the unity of fear. We want the unity of hope, affection and high purpose.”
.. The section details suspicious ties between the hijackers — 15 out of 19 were Saudis — and other Qaeda operatives to the Saudi royal family. In one instance, the first Qaeda prisoner in C.I.A. custody post-9/11 had a phone number that belonged to a company that took care of Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s Colorado home. The former Saudi ambassador was so close to the Bushes he was known as Bandar Bush... If the 28 pages had been released back in 2002, the revelations might have helped stop the Iraq invasion by refocusing attention where it belonged: on possible real links between Al Qaeda and Saudi royals, rather than the fantasy links between Al Qaeda and Saddam pushed by Dick Cheney... W. told Blair he was “ready to kick ass.”
I read the UK’s huge Iraq War report. It’s even more damning than you think.
When you read the British government’s intelligence assessments, they predict, plus or minus a few details, exactly what happened after the war. The UK had ample warning that Iraq would collapse after the invasion and make the problem of terrorism worse — but it went to war anyway.
.. It predicted that sectarian tensions, as well as the legacy of authoritarian rule, would pose a serious threat to post-invasion stability.
“Sunni hegemony, the position of the Kurds and Shia, enmity with Kuwait, infighting among the elite, autocratic rule and anti-Israeli sentiment will not disappear with Saddam,” the DIS report explains. “We should also expect considerable anti-Western sentiment among a populace that has experienced ten years of sanctions.”Fixing these problems, the DIS argued, would require an extraordinary and lengthy commitment of American resources.
.. The United States, too, knew of the war’s risks. According to Chilcot’s findings, “the State Department judged that rebuilding Iraq would require ‘a US commitment of enormous scope’ over several years.”
Yet the United States failed to plan for postwar sectarian infighting and had no serious plan for rebuilding Iraqi institutions after the invasion.
.. This, Chilcot judges, owed principally to Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense. “Many in the DoD anticipated US forces being greeted as liberators who would be able leave Iraq within months, with no need for the US to administer the functions of Iraq’s government after major combat operations,” Chilcot concludes.
.. “The UK wanted [the UN] and the IAEA to have time to complete their work, and wanted the support of the Security Council, and of the international community more widely, before any further steps were taken. This option was foreclosed by the US decision.”
.. The UK leadership thought that standing up to America would threaten their partnership. This probably wasn’t true — the US and France get along fine nowadays. But the UK leadership thought it was, and that made all the difference.