ISIS just stole $425 million and became the ‘world’s richest terrorist group’

[JackRiddler]

47. The propaganda ministries? "Of the world"?

All of the world's "intelligence communities" agreed? Really?

Saddam wanted to pretend he had some nasty gear? That's a real surprise -- you'd think he had a legitimate fear that some insane country on the other side of the globe would come and bomb Iraq. If only he'd had some nukes and delivery systems, the foreign aggression might have been deterred, and the half-million or more people murdered in the war and its aftermaths might still be alive.

Problem is, the actual inspectors on the ground, the most credible ones, made clear that Iraq didn't have this machinery. (And again, if Iraq did, that was no justification for an aggressive invasion!)

Every state that can afford it maintains big agencies (or several) that specialize in lies, propaganda, deception, covert warfare, surveillance of their own populations, political policing, espionage, collaboration with criminal elements and the breaking of laws (their own and those of other countries). You can call these self-perpetuating criminal cultures "intelligence communities," if you like. Anything that comes out of them is going to be self-interested. Sometimes it's in their self-interest to be truthful.

No "conspiracy" (a concept you injected here) is required to expect that some of them might not want to directly contradict their American counterparts (like the NATO partners), or might want to see the Americans invade Iraq (like Saudi and Israel did, for example). Nevertheless, I'll take what Schroeder and Chirac did a lot more seriously than what their spook shops said.

As for the FBI, it is a political police. Like any political police, it extracts the confessions it desires. And what does it matter if Saddam genuinely believes he was successful in fooling the other countries. That doesn't mean they believed it.

Again, if the US and UK had believed their own bullshit, they might have hesitated before striking. They struck KNOWING the target would be helpless.

Anyway, if Democrats had not voted to authorize the aggression, we presumably wouldn't be having this discussion, because you wouldn't need to come up with excuses.