There is - forgive the expression, but I'm all-for alliteration - a "corollary canard" which the U.S. press refuses to let die, namely, that in the run-up to the war, Bush had claimed that Iraq represented an "imminent threat."

As has been pointed out in the blogosphere ad infinitum, Bush never said any such thing, which is just as well, since "pre-emption" is predicated on a threat not yet being imminent!

In light of CIA Director George Tenet's address yesterday, the press are making much ado about Tenet denying that the CIA ever represented the threat from Iraq as being imminent - as if Bush was shown to be gravely at-odds with his own Intelligence Chief.

Having been provoked by some anti-war people announcing that they somehow knew "all along" that "Iraq had no WMD," I have a post on my site in which I examine aspects of Tenet's remarks, relating them to the casuistry of the decision to go to war.

http://paulcraddick.typepad.com/fragmenta_philosophica/2004/02/wmdmia_vi.html

Bush made three points in the run-up to the war with Iraq:

1) We couldn't wait until Iraq's WMD were an imminent threat;

2) Iraq sponsored terrorism;

3) Iraq represented an exceptionally repressive regime which needed to be turned out.

The "45 minute" whinge in Britain is as inconsequential in the grand scheme of things as the "imminent threat" whinge in the U.S.

Both are purely party political, anti-incumbent sophistry.

The allegation that the WMD was a defensive weapon is belied by the facts. What attack was going on when Saddam gassed the Kurds. I believe he also used the waepons in an offensive capacity against Iran. Chemical weapons were certainly used in an offensive capacity in World War I.

The hissy fit over the 45 minute launch time appears to be over whether this information added a sense of urgency to the decision process. Yet, none of those doing the griping really thought they only had a few minutes to decide on whether to vote in favor of the war. They were going to vote against even if the intelligence proved accurate.

It strikes me that the antiwar crowd, like the defeated Saddamites, having been defeated, wants to continue to fight an insurgency against the winners. Not only will they not concede defeat, they will not concede that they were wrong. It is getting harder and harder to have any respect for that crowd, much less their arguments.

Good post Merv.

Recommend fellow bloggers to a post dated Feb 05, 8.21pm. on Merv's web site:

http://www.prairiepundit.blogspot.com, apt analogy to today's supposed predicament. Plus ca change ...

Good post Merv.

Recommend fellow bloggers to a post dated Feb 05, 8.21pm. on Merv's web site:

http://www.prairiepundit.blogspot.com, apt analogy to today's supposed predicament. Plus ca change ...

Has anyone else noticed that the same anti war/anti Bush people who are screaming that he shouldn't have crushed Saddam unless the intelligence was 100% certain are the same envirochondriacs who are screaming that Bush and the U.S. should throw billions and billion of dollars to stop global warming even though the evidence for the certainty of global warming is far less solid than the intelligence on the horrors of Saddam was. Or is it just that they hate Bush (and Blair) so much that nothing they do will escape the most intense and irrational criticism?

Well Melanie, the 45-Minutes matter is what led to the death of David Kelly. It is what caused that recovering alcoholic in No10 to give in to his obessional neurosis and seek to crush all disagreements and used Kelly as a weapon against Gilligan's hyperbole.

For this reason, it is as well to ask if any country could prepare chemical and biological weapons for attack within 45-minutes....could Russia ? Could the USA ? Could France ? Could China ?

Kelly was astounded based on his experience of the USSR (and do watch Channel 5 on 13 Feb for his life story) that anyone could credit Iraq wit this capability.

Further, such weapons are notoriously hard to apply except in very concentrated areas, and the response to such use would be withering as Saddam was told in 1991 according to PM John Major.

So, if Adolf Hitler was unprepared to use such weapons against Britain; and Churchill did not use the anthrax bombs he ordered in the US; and the atom bomb was not dropped on Halle as first intended; I do not think we could realistically assume Saddam Hussein would initiate a War on the US/UK with an opening strike on Cyprus.

When I heard Blair talk about this and saw the headlines of the ES I burst out laughing.....it was so ridiculuous but obviously frightened Labour MPs.

It shows how ill-educated our legislators are, how mediocre Blair is, and how stupid Campbell thinks journalists are......with regular air patrols over Iraq and AWACs planes flying daily patrols over the Mid-East such a launcher would not be observed, and 45 minutes !!!!

When you were younger Melanie they told you the Soviets could be at the Channel Ports in 24 hours, and that you had 3 minutes warning (Fylingdales) of a Soviet nuclear attack......after the planned war in 1952 passed without effect......we never proposed a pre-emptive strike on the GDR or USSR where the missiles were stationed; nor over the siting of SS-20, SS-21, SS-23 rockets in the GDR in 1977.

Frankly, Blair needed to psyche himself up and "45-Minutes" belongs alongside "24 Hours to Save the NHS" and other such "Look at me - I am important - I am Tony" rhetoric. No wonder Kelly wondered if they were space-cadets in No10

Blair didn't need to put the 45 minute claim in the dossier & his speech. And it is now most unfortunate that he did.
But look at BBCi's "Have your Say". There are many comments from people claiming that they were misled into thinking missiles could strike the UK, perhaps with nuclear warheads.
There is no way that anyone should have been given that impression by the dossier or speech. How can they have come to that view? Especially people who should be well informed, if moved to comment on the "Have your say" threads.

Of course Jon Snow of Channel4 News pretends that Blair held such views. His daily "snowmail" 5 Feb said of the 45 minute threat -

" Prime Minister was clearly of the impression that it referred to long-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting Britain."

In the period after the publication of the September dossier up to the start of was there were some 45,000 Parliamentary Questions on Iraq. NONE OF THEM focussed on the 45-minute issue. This is the best measure of what MPs were thinking about at the time. So cut out all this hindsight stuff.

Then came the day of the Commons debate in March - the culmination of all the arguments, with the Government looking as though it might lose the vote. Huge tension. Massive public interest. NOWHERE in the debate was the 45-minute issue mentioned. It is all there in black and white - in Hansard. Look it up in your library if you don't believe this - Hansard records all debates word-for-word.

The main themes were - UN Resolution 1441 and what it meant, and general discussion of how evil Saddam was.

It was only when Gilligan raised the 45-minute issue, telling porkies about his meeting with Dr Kelly - AFTER the war - that all this hullaballoo started.

This whole issue is synthetic. And it is becoming boring. Those who opposed the war will never accept the truth. And the Today programme and John Humphrys dig themselves deeper and deeper - proving beyond peradventure that they are biased.

THAT is the main criticism of Hutton. He nailed Gilligan's lie, and he exposed the woeful incompetence of BBC mangemment and the Board of governors. But he did NOT show that Gilligan's lie was entirely in keeping with the drip-drip-drip of bias on the Today programme. The issue was blown into prominence by a double-act - Gilligan and John Humphrys. It is well beyond time for Humphrys to be censured for his direct part in the affair. Hopefully the BBC internal enquiry will lead to this. But it will probably whitewash the ongoing failings of the Today programme to give us unvarnished news.

I mentioned above the misrepresentation of Blair's views by Jon Snow.
I see that Jeremy Clarkson attributes similar views to Blair (i.e. that Saddam had inter-continental missiles) in Clarkson's column in today's Sun.
With such willful misrepresentation of the dossier & Blair's public statements, is there any wonder that the public are angry?
It is disgraceful that the opponents of government "spin" are so unprincipled in their arguments.

Well done Melanie, Merv. Frank for keeping up the fight, but I despair...we've won the arguments, but are losing the propoganda. The country is mad.

The the regime preservers (war opponents) have been proved utterly wrong on all the major issues, but this only breeds their self-righteous fury. That's why they seize on such pieces of straw like the 45 minute debate. The first question on this week's any questions: is Tony Blair a liar or a fool? Not one panelist challenged the basic lie behind this question. Next week's opener from the Beeb: When did the prime minister stop beating his wife?

The moral-humanitarian case and the security case for removing Saddam were overwhelming, and Blair and Bush understood it. 25 million Iraqi's have now been freed from rule by a psychotic killer and the Baathist Nazi party. And this moral imperative is intrinsically linked to the security case: killer regimes like this breed pyschosis and terror.

And in addition to all the security threat issues others have made, a final question to Regime preservers from Christopher Hitchens: as we speak, Al Quada Islamic-fascists and ex-Fedaayen-Saddamists are working openly together to resist the horror of democracy, a free press, womens rights and human rights in Iraq. This Saddamite-Al Quada connection is now evident for all to see. Now where do you think that little friendship was going?

Jesse

KJN: Bzzzzzzzz!
Nicholas Parsons: Keith?
KJN: Repetition.
NP: Indeed! Keith, you have just a minute to talk about weapons of mass destruction.
KJN: Well, the evidence on WMD has been presented, and I think we've all sifted it and drawn our conclusions. The strategy used by the professionals in the debate (including our esteemed host) seems to be to bore the public into submission. Perhaps they are afraid that if they let the other side have the last word, they will be seen as giving silent consent. As someone else said, it's time to move on. I

Kenneth Williams: Bzzzzzz!
NP: Kenneth?
KW: Hesitation.

etc

In amongst the many arguements about WMD`s we have forgotten one important aspect...terrorists need financial support first and foremost in order to conduct their campaigns, Gerry Adams knew this and would go on a "celebrity" tour of the USA when the IRA were low on funds, because he knew in doing so the money would be pouring in from irish american communities in Boston to keep the "struggle" going...and so it is with middle eastern terrorism, they need financial aid to do what they do, and who was the major sponsor of this kind of terrorism..yes, saddam hussein...that is one reason why the war was just...terrorism slowly dies without strong financial backing.

Jesse: I know you'll never get it, but some of us don't give a rat's arse what kind of government Iraqis or any other foreigners have. We just want Britain to defend itself at its own coastline, mind its own business, spend the taxes we reluctantly contribute on the welfare of other Britons and let the rest of the world go to Hell or Heaven in its own way.

I wouldn't give a drop of blood or a bent 5p piece for "moral-humanitarian" warfare, and if I were an Iraqi I'd feel that the one thing worse than being invaded and occupied was being told it was all for my own good by a bunch of global-capitalist looters.

How do we even know that a majority of Iraqis didn't prefer Saddam? You don't rule for 30 years and fail to win two big wars purely by terrorising everyone. That's a view so childish as to be fit only for the couch-potato dupes of US neoconnerie, wobbling obesely at the thought of the latest "Homeland Security" alert.

I bet that within 10 years some puppet installed by the USA will have turned into another Saddam. Ever since Stalin, most of the world's dictators have been sponsored at one time or another by bungling American global strategists.

If you read about the French defeat in 1940, you will find that a major cause lay in the tendency of French politicians of that era to view every issue primarily through the lens of how they could use it to denounce their political opponents...rather than through the lens of what was best for France. It's worrisome that so much of this same fatal spirit now seems to exist in the U.S. and the U.K.

"Al Quada Islamic-fascists and ex-Fedaayen-Saddamists are working openly together to resist the horror of democracy, a free press, womens rights and human rights in Iraq. This Saddamite-Al Quada connection is now evident for all to see. Now where do you think that little friendship was going? "

You might add Turkish Special Forces who probably set up the bomb-attack at Erbil against the Kurds. This is where Iran and Syria and Turkey have a common enemy: The Kurds.

David Foster you certainly have a different variant. Most people think France - with more tanks than Germany, should have whipsawed the Wehrmacht.......but as Churchill noted...."Where is the Reserve?" and Weygand same "Aucune".......

If you put your weakest divisions at the end of the Maginot Line and Hitler drives through there with his Panzerarmee, you might expect a massive artillery barrage to flatten it....but nothing there, so it was easy to rollup the BEF to the coast and split the French forces.

It was poor generals not squabbling politicians...France had loads of Dewoitine 520 aircraft in storage which were a match for the BF109.....it is just they were militarily incompetent.

They could also have destroyed Germany in September 1939, the West Wall was incomplete and therer were obver 109 Allied Divisions facing a mere 13 scratch German units defending the western border.

France was defeated by low-grade generals not politicians.

W J Phillips,

"Jesse: I know you'll never get it, but some of us don't give a rat's arse what kind of government Iraqis or any other foreigners have"

To that, I have nothing to say.

The Northern Free Region of Iraq has been protected for over 10 years by the US/Uk airforce. According to text book conspiracy, it should now be a cosy U.S client state. In fact, it's a social democracy, with a respected democratic socialist primeminster, Dr. Barham Salih. It has used oil revenues to build hospitals, universities and schools. It has a flourishing free press. It is an open and democratic society. The Saddamites and fundamentalists look on it with hatred and fear - hence the bombing of the PUK headquaters the other week.

Iraq may be a mess in 10 years time. I hope not. Northern Free Iraq gives us some hope that an indigenous, free and fair society can emerge. That matters to us, even selfishly, as, by and large, socially just democracies don't attack you, sponsor terrorism, or try and blow you up.

"How do we even know that a majority of Iraqis didn't prefer Saddam?"

Every scientific poll conducted in the country, from the pre-war International Crises Group survey, to the more recent YouGov polls, have ahown majority support for coalition action and continued presence.

If this bores you, no one is forcing you to hang hang around.

Jesse.

Hey! I suggest that all you supporters of the very EXPENSIVE war and occupation help pay the U.S. tax payers for same—Melanie, we shall accept your contributions. International security is EVERYONE'S business!

Had we spent the money on things to improve international relations and the state of the world, we might not have so many Islamofascist terrorists blowing up things in the West.

". . . but some of us don't give a rat's arse what kind of government Iraqis or any other foreigners have. We just want Britain to defend itself at its own coastline, mind its own business, spend the taxes we reluctantly contribute on the welfare of other Britons and let the rest of the world go to Hell or Heaven in its own way.

I wouldn't give a drop of blood or a bent 5p piece for "moral-humanitarian" warfare, and if I were an Iraqi I'd feel that the one thing worse than being invaded and occupied was being told it was all for my own good by a bunch of global-capitalist looters. . . " WJ Phillips

Hear, hear! "Islamic democracy" is an OXYMORON! The are murdering their own as well as ours:

Assassinations Tear Into Iraq's Educated Class

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/international/middleeast/07ASSA.html?th=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1076163290-B3XiER6nrdmxMnU4c+hxpw

Put a fence around the Muslim nations who don't want to secularize and leave them to allah!

Lili

Hello Lilith, back on a high ! You should reduce the dosage of those pills

Romulus...no question that the French generalship was poor...but who made the decisions to put these generals in command and leave them in command? Who was responsible for poor procurement decisions with regard to the French Air Force? Who decided not to attack Germany in 1936 when the Rhineland was occupied?
Who created a climate which demoralized many (by no means all) of the troops? Poor political decisions lead to poor military decisions and outcomes.

Suggested reading: "To Lose a Battle" by Alastair Horne; "Assignment to Catastrophe" by General Edward Spears; "France 1940" by General Andre Beaufre. I've developed a particular interest in this era because, as you suggest, the collapse in 1940 is something that should not have happened (contrary to common belief that it was somehow inevitable)..and that turned out to be a hinge point of the century.

"Hello Lilith, back on a high ! You should reduce the dosage of those pills"

LOL sure Romy. Just as soon as you reduce your dosages of Viagra, Metamucil and Geritol. ;-)

While you are weaning yourself you might want to read this:

Regional Terror Groups Seen as Growing Threat

" The landscape of the terrorist threat has shifted, many intelligence officials around the world say, with more than a dozen regional militant Islamic groups showing signs of growing strength and broader ambitions, even as the operational power of Al Qaeda appears diminished.

Some of the militant groups, with roots from Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Caucasus to North Africa and Europe, are believed to be loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda, the officials say. . . "

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/international/asia/08TERR.html?8br

Oh, no problem for the Brits, they are not in Europe. ;-)

Lili

The point about the 45 min claim is that it highlights the fact that the public and parliament were misled by the executive. Simple as that. What don't you understand about that?

Lilith; all groups are 'loosely affiliated' with Al-Qaeda that is its nature.

So why don't you send US troops to help the Russians in cHechnya and stop these suicide bombings in Moscow ? If they can go to the Panski Gorge, why not Chechnya ?

Watching Question Time last week was a surreal experience; it seems everyone is sufficiently brainwashed that the audience laughed whenever Peter Hain tried to explain the Government's position. Perhaps we deserve to be nuked.

"Perhaps we deserve to be nuked. "

What , for laughing at Peter 'Perma-tan' Hain ?

You jest !

;@are 'loosely affiliated' with Al-Qaeda that is its nature.

So why don't you send US troops to help the Russians in cHechnya and stop these suicide bombings in Moscow ? If they can go to the Panski Gorge, why not Chechnya ?"

The issue is Islam, Romy!

They are all doing it because Islam is militant and violent and wants to take over the world one way or the other. See?

I wasn't even for going to Iraq. Why would I want to send our people to Russia? The Russians will take care of it. Just as the Euros must take care of their own turf. Remember, I think everyone should do and pay their share—YOU included! ;-)

Lili

Well Lilith paying more than my share is my complaint; how many members of your family fought in Iraq in 1991 or 2003 ?

Just why do you think the Russians can handle Chechnya ? They have not managed it in 10 years so far; and the technqiques of subway bombing are directly transferable to New York, or London....the bombings in Paris were not yet as devastating.