An amazing exchange from Jim Lehrer’s interview this evening with Iyad Allawi, which opens and shuts the case on the latter’s credibility about anything.
JIM LEHRER: What would you say to somebody in the United States who questions whether or not getting rid of Saddam Hussein was worth the cost of more than a thousand lives now and billions and billions of U.S. dollars?
PRIME MINISTER IYAD ALLAWI: Well, I assure you if Saddam was still there, terrorists will be hitting there again at Washington and New York, as they did in the murderous attack in September; they’ll be hitting also on other places in Europe and the Middle East.
So, if we hadn’t <$Ad$>invaded Iraq we’d be experiencing repeated 9/11s, with similar events in Europe in the Middle East.
Is it necessary to say that, despite all the bad things Iraq’s Baathist regime represented and did, there is no evidence (pace Laurie Mylroie) that it ever attempted, let alone succeeded in mounting, any sort of terrorist attack on the American mainland?
Presumably the dramatic loss of credibility suffered if the US had failed to invade Iraq would have led to a sudden reversal of Baathist policy and a sudden unleashing of a wave of Mukabarat terrorist strikes on the American mainland.
Every so often you just have to sit back and marvel at the Twilight Zone we’re living in at the moment.
Here we have a US-installed foreign head of state, whose travel schedule is determined by the US State Department, visiting the US to buoy the president’s election campaign and spouting demonstrable lies in order to support a retrospective rationale for war that the White House wants Americans to believe but lacks the gall to state explicitly.
