GOP's Senator John Warner and "The Road to Iraq"

The closer we get to Bush's "surge" and the increasing likelihood that Bush will force us into war with Iran if not also with Syria, the more important I believe reading Unclaimed Territory, with attorney/blogger Glenn Greenwald, becomes. Here's his latest:

Long-time Bush and Iraq war supporter John Warner today announced his support for a resolution opposing the President's "surge" plan. While looking for a document relating to Sen. Warner's announcement, I came across this transcript from March 6, 2003, where Warner appeared on CNN with Larry King, along with Sen. Chris Dodd and Bob Woodward, to talk about the imminent invasion of Iraq. I don't have any particularly new observations to make about this, but nonetheless, it really never ceases to amaze what was said during this time period.The behavior of our political and journalistic elite in the lead-in to the war is truly one of the dark and shameful periods in our history -- truly embarrassing, even painful, to read:

KING: What if Saddam Hussein tonight in a fit of sanity decides he totally wants to cooperate. That's it. Whatever Bush ask for short of exile. What does he do?

WARNER: You asked me what does he say, and my reply to that would be, he has no credibility.

KING: But he can't -- that's nothing.

WARNER: But he could establish credibility with quick and prompt actions.

KING: Like.

WARNER: And they'd have to manifest themselves as compliance with the Security Council resolutions all of them. But especially 1441. I am going to disarm, here it, is go find it. Not hide-and- seek. . . .You know, I asked George Tenet, CIA director basically what you just stated, and he's written a letter, it arrived in my office an hour ago. And he states, we have now provided all of the information that we could to the inspectors. Yet they have not uncovered anything. Because Saddam Hussein from the very beginning after 1991, decided that he's going have to endure some type of inspection regime as he continues to build weapons and he's become very skillful to keep these manufacturing base of weapons of mass destructions active, mobile and beyond the ability of any inspections to really catch it. And this is proof of it. We've given them all the information, they can't find it.

KING: What's his purpose, he's inviting war. . . .

WARNER: The group of nations agreed on [the inspections], and I think Hans Blix tried to make it work. But he's been outsmarted.

That reasoning is so Orwellian it's actually scary, even four years later. The less evidence we found that Saddam had WMDs, the more that meant we had to go to war. That's because the failure of Hans Blix to find the weapons meant that Saddam had hidden them very deeply, nefariously and deliberately -- he had outsmarted Blix -- and that "proved" that Saddam harbored ill intentions, which meant we had to go to war against him, otherwise he would use those weapons against us. Warner actually used the word "proof" to describe the failure of U.N. inspectors to find WMDs - that was "proof" that WMDs had been hidden by Saddam.