I don’t even know where to begin with this story. The U.K. Guardian reports today that the Iraqi defector who convinced the U.S. that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction now says he fabricated that story:
Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.
“Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right,” he said. “They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.”
So: The U.S. went to war, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and many thousands of lives, on a pretext created by an unreliable defector who made the whole thing up. And either lots of CIA officials, and people up to and including Colin Powell, believed this character (who had no corroborating evidence, of course, because there wasn’t any) or they used what they knew was dubious intelligence to dupe the public.
You wonder: If everyone who has a good reason to gripe about his or her former country goes and makes up a story like this, how many wars will we wind up fighting?
It’s kind of like the old commie-plot days, when the very mention of the word “communist” could ruin someone’s life.