Curveball throws a change-up, Bush swings and misses

By Michael J.W. Stickings

But Bush wanted so badly to swing that it didn't really matter who was pitching and what the pitch was. Any evidence of Iraqi WMDs, even the fabricated testimony of a largely discredited "source," would do:

The defector who convinced the White House that Iraq had a secret biological weapons programme has admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war.

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."

Well, he got what he wanted, but at a pretty high cost, and of course in the process Bush and the American warmongers squandered pretty much the entirety of America's credibility, something Obama has worked to win back, if not entirely successfully so far.

But it wasn't all about Curveball. He was just willing to lie at the right time and conveniently provided the unsupported "evidence" the warmongers (and the intelligence community) were looking for. The decision to go to war had already been made, shortly after 9/11 but really long before in the minds of Wolfowitz et al., and the warmongers were going to find something, anything to support their reckless cause. It didn't really matter.

Bush and the rest were duped, yes, but they were willing to be duped, that's the point, and they either allowed themselves to believe that this was incontrovertible evidence or knew it wasn't and built their public case for war on it anyway. Either way, the American people were misled by leaders who had their own not-so-secret agenda, a terrible and terribly mismanaged war was launched, and the rest, as you know, is disastrous history, even if Saddam is no longer in power.