The former MI5 director general Eliza Manningham-Buller today delivered a withering assessment of the case for war against Iraq, saying it had significantly increased the terrorist threat to Britian.

Giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Manningham-Buller said the threat posed by Saddam Hussein before the US-led invasion in 2003 was low.

But the toppling of Saddam allowed Osama bin Laden to gain a stronghold in Iraq and radicalised young Muslims in Britain, she said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/20/i...addam-mi5-chief

Saddam Hussein and his military were eliminated because the neocons in the Bush administration saw them as a threat to Israel. Tony Blair didn't have the smarts or guts to join the French and Germans and tell Bush to back off, so the UK got pulled into the invasion of Iraq. Funny thing is that Iraq under the Shiites is probably going to become over the next five years a bigger threat to Israel than Hussein, a Sunni, ever would have been.

True, but I think the Israelis wanted a radicalised Iraq as opposed to a secular, westernised Iraq under Saddam. It's much easier to win western support (and sympathy) for their carpet bombing missions and totally destroy an already weakened Iraq when the target are bearded mullahs in robes rather than men in suits.

More from Lady Manningham-Buller:



http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/20/i...ller?intcmp=239

Saddam was never a threat to Israel before the first Gulf War and certainly not after it when he was contained by coalition forces. In fact, Saddam was the U.S.'s second greatest ally in the middle east until August of 1990 when, with the consent of the U.S. Ambassador, April Glasspie, he attacked Kuwait then refused to retreat on orders from GHW Bush.

The reason Dub got us into the shooting action was that, during the campaign, Ahmed Chalabi, who was on the run from Saddam, dumped a lot of money - that he had stolen from the U.S. -into the campaign and persuaded Wolfawitz that Dub would be paraded through the streets of Baghdad as the great liberator of the 21st century.

Sorry to disagree td, but I think that your rationale is a post-invasion attempt by some folks to re-write history. It's true that Bush was fed a line that US troops would be welcomed as liberators in Iraq, but it was a US-Israeli think tank that had formulated a plan to eliminate Saddam Hussein even before George Bush became President.

In 1996, long after you suggest that the Iraqis were no longer seen as a threat to Israel, a conservative think tank in America assembled for the then-incoming Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, what it called a "New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000." Many of the Americans who served on what was essentially an Israeli project, including Richard Pearle, Doug Feith and David Wurmser, all of whom went on to become the main architects of Bush's invasion of Iraq seven years later.

This is what the think tank wrote about Saddam and Iraq in 1996:

"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions."

Analyzing this 1996 report after Bush had already invaded Iraq, one analyst noted the continuity of "the continued commitment of Israel to overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq both because Saddam Hussein poses a direct threat to Israel and in order to exert pressure on Syria whom the authors feel poses an equal threat to Israel." http://www.counterpunch.org/martin07012004.html

For political reasons which are obvious, no one involved in the US decision to invade Iraq would ever admit, back then or now, that American lives and money were sent and lost to achieve what was essentially an Israeli objective. To be sure, convincing Bush that invading Iraq was in America's interests - and that he would be hailed as a hero for doing so - was part of the process of pushing Bush into war. The invention of non-existent WMD, which was abetted by "secret" Israeli intelligence, was part of the clincher. But that doesn't alter the fundamental fact that it was the Israelis and their influential friends in Washington who wanted and got Bush to fight the war they had planned for years.

It grieves me to say this, but in the scenario you have outlined and supported so well, had Gore won the election in 2000, we would most likely be in the same position we are now.

One of the reasons given by the neo- cons was that Saddam was paying for new houses for those Palestinians whose homes had been destroyed by the Zionist entity. You will recall that house demolition and forcing families onto the streets has, for a long time, been enjoyable entertainment for our Zionist buddies; the sight of a widow and her orphaned children standing in the rubble of their home with their pathetic belongings seems to provide an amusing "buzz".

Saddam was interfering with this by rebuilding the homes. The victims of his war crimes weren't that important; they were Muslim.

Sorry but I'm not sure I follow your point. Care to expand what you mean?

Sure: If the significance of Bush's role in generating that war is thus reduced, then it stands to reason that Israel's getting what it wants from the U.S. does not depend on the enthusiasm of the U.S. President.

At the time of the 2000 election, the Republican Party was solidly pro-Israel (I was a member of McCain's organization, "Straight Talk" during his run for the presidential nomination in 2000. I withdrew from the organization and from him when I saw him campaigning with GWB during the general election.) and we dominated both houses of the congress. This was aided by the millions donated to the campaigns of almost all Republican and some Democratic congressmen by the Israeli PAC.

If Gore had been elected, (and he received Israeli PAC money, too) the only difference between his administration and Bush's administration vis-a-vis the war would have been the predisposition to war with Iraq. With that predisposition removed, the likelihood of the U.S. attack on Iraq would have depended on four variables:

1. The Israeli's ability to sustain its attack on Hans Blix's report on the lack of WMD's in Iraq without the support of the U.S. misinformation promotion. Bear in mind, a great deal of the public's concern about WMD's was the safety of the U.S. personnel in the area. (Only Americans believe all our military people who go to war are supposed to come back alive.) If Gore had accepted the Blix report and Blix had been wrong, he would have been an instant lame duck president. With all the propaganda being launched by the neocon press, I believe he would have favored at least some action to further contain Saddam Hussein.

2. How would the economy swing under Gore? The neocons, working with Clinton, produced the first budget surplus in half a century. They did not want to lose that. It bought them inroads into the Democratic Party's dominance in California and Illinois. However, if Congress was willing to cut loose with the money, it would have wanted bang for its buck. And, with the Military Industrial Complex chafing at the bit, Gore would have to consider the military plan.

3. What were U.S. intelligence and Pentagon assessments for success? If the assessments indicated a short and decisive war, which most of them did, he would have been hard put to not go in. On "Meet the Press," Dick Cheney told Tim Russert it would be a "cakewalk." Must be some cake.

4. How he handled 911. If he did as Bush did and used it to generate fear and sustain that fear by leaving Osama bin Laden to run free, he would have to go to war to give the population some sense of security. (Please don't remind me that Iraq had nothing to do with 911. When the collective psyche is overwhelmed by fear and panic, it does not want to know that there is a difference. All they want to know is that those who attacked us were of the same race and/or culture. This time "...the enemy of my enemy was not my friend, just another raghead with a different religion.") What happened on 911 was an actual attack on U.S. soil. Not the first, but the first of such magnitude. Arabs did it. Moslems did it. Iraqis are Arabs, Iraqis are Moslems.

The one major thing that would have kept Gore from actually going to war was bearing the stigma of ordering the first preemptive strike. I don't know how much impact that would have had on him. His place in history is important to him. It might have been the zephyr that blew him one way or the other.

I am not sure that that the influence of the think tank affected the decision to go to war that much. There were only two recommendations to come out of it that were adopted by the Bush Admin.: The war to remove Saddam and the preemptive strike. It was important that the U.S. use it first so that Israel could adopt it as policy without criticism from the West. Incidentally, nearly all the participants in that think tank were Israeli nationals with the obvious agenda. That could have diminished its effectiveness with a Gore administration.
Besides:
Think tanks "think," they do not "do;"
Governments "do," they do not "think;"
The people do not "think" or "do;"
They just "think they do."

Aren't you glad you asked?

I don't follow that at all. It was Bush's election that allowed the neocons and their US-Israeli collaborators to come to power and use the pliable Bush/Cheney team to launch their invasion of Iraq.

Men like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, Doug Feith and David Wurmser, all zionist supporters who let the Israeli agenda dominate their thinking - to the prejudice of US interests - probably would have invaded Iraq even sooner had 9-11 not intervened. Even after Bush was forced to invade Afghanistan because of the AlQueda connection, the neocons still managed to divert precious men and materials into their Iraqi project, which is largely responsible for the mess that Afghanistan remains today.

Assuming that 9-11 would have happened anyway, if Gore had been elected, I don' t think there's much chance that any Iraq invasion would have occurred. What probably would have happened is that Gore would have pursued a Clinton-style surgical attack on a more massive scale, with special forces deployed to kill Osama Bin Laden and his top operatives, followed by a prompt exit from the country. By insisting on invading Iraq before the Afghan job was accomplished - to fit Israel's objectives, not America's - the neocon gang virtually ignored the paramount mission, which was to kill Bin Laden and Al Queda, allowing Afghanistan to descend into the chaos it has become today.