Justification of the Iraq war

Since October 2001 , the warring governments of the United States and Great Britain cited a growing acute threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and a connection with the terrorist network Al-Qaeda , which carried out the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 , as the reasons for the 2003 Iraq war . A large majority of the US population believed this information before and for years after the invasion of Iraq.

The stated reasons for the war were highly controversial internationally. The weapons inspectors appointed by the UN , some anti-terrorism experts and members of parliament contradicted the government statements before the war and referred to missing or unreliable sources. No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. The July 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission refuted the aforementioned connection with Al-Qaeda. Up until 2007, further investigation reports refuted the other reasons for the war. Government and intelligence officials mutually assigned responsibility for the false information.

Many historians and investigative journalists judge the false justification for the war as a deliberate, campaign-like deception, which was intended to induce sufficient approval for the decision to go to war. Others see the false information as mistakes covered by the assumptions made by the secret services at the time. The British Chilcot report of 2016 confirmed all the concerns raised before the decision to go to war, but rather excluded any deliberate misleading by the UK government.

Many opponents of the war consider the economic and geopolitical interests of the USA and Great Britain, especially in oil , to be the real causes of the war.

prehistory

Containment policy

After the Cold War in 1990, the USA, as the only remaining superpower, saw itself hardly threatened militarily. However , during the Second Gulf War in 1991, Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein used R-17 missiles against Israel . Concerns about short- and medium-range ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction in the possession of so-called rogue states then grew .

US President George Bush senior pursued a containment policy towards Iraq . In August 1990, UN Resolution 661 called for Iraq's complete withdrawal from occupied Kuwait and imposed extensive economic sanctions. Despite its effectiveness, a coalition of states authorized by UN Resolution 678 forcibly expelled the Iraqi army from Kuwait from January to March 1991. The United States and Great Britain largely destroyed Iraq's attack capability and infrastructure. However, they left Saddam Hussein in power as a counterweight to Iran.

On April 3, 1991, UN Resolution 687 imposed an indefinite ceasefire, called for the disarmament of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and, surprisingly, extended the economic sanctions indefinitely. The condition for their repeal was now: "Iraq must have cooperated in all respects." The resolution set the goal of a region completely freed from NBC weapons , so it also required Iraq's neighboring states to end all relevant armaments programs. However, the UN Security Council did not pursue this goal any further. Its member states themselves supplied Iraq with components and materials for NBC weapons in the 1980s. In 2002 five states in the region (Egypt, Iran, Israel, Libya, Syria) had chemical weapons , three of them also biological weapons , and Israel also atomic weapons .

Using the blanket condition in Resolution 687, the US and Great Britain opposed any relaxation of sanctions to Iraq. According to the UN, millions of Iraqis died as a result of these consequences between 1991 and 2003, while the regime was strengthened. The UN's oil-for-food program , which came into force in December 1996, did little to improve the situation.

From 1991 to 1998, United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspectors destroyed about 90% of the weapons of mass destruction found and 980 of Iraq's 1,000 ballistic missiles. However, the conflict persisted because of ever new accusations from the USA and Great Britain and Iraq's intransparent tactics. The UN Security Council passed 13 UN resolutions by 2003 to effectively end Iraq's supposed development of NBC weapons.

Bush's successor, Bill Clinton, took over the containment policy and refused military intervention in the Middle East. But after the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections, calls for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein were raised in the United States. In January 1998 he refused to continue the current weapons inspections. The neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) then issued an open letter to Clinton calling for an early military attack on Iraq with the aim of removing his regime from power. This is the only way to rule out the possibility of Iraq using weapons of mass destruction and threatening them with them. In October 1998 the US Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act with a large majority : Iraq should not receive any weapons of mass destruction, the country's democratic opposition should be supported and a regime change should be sought. Clinton signed the law and declared that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was morally and security-politically imperative. This was the goal for future Iraq policy. Clinton failed to implement it, however, and withheld most aid to them in the face of the fragmented Iraqi opposition.

In December 1998, the UN inspectors broke off their investigation after the US had announced air strikes on suspected Iraqi arms factories. Clinton had it bombed with Operation Desert Fox without a UN mandate . Because the USA also used data from the inspectors for this purpose, Iraq did not allow them to re-enter. That is why UNSCOM did not submit a final report. However, its head Scott Ritter ruled in 1999: By the end of 1998 Iraq had dismantled its chemical and biological weapons program and destroyed its long-range missiles so that it no longer threatened neighboring countries. The surveillance of Iraqi arms factories has worked and can be effectively continued under UN sovereignty.

In response to pressure from the USA and Great Britain, UN Resolution 1284 in November 1999 required new weapons inspections under UN sovereignty and with more powers. Iraq refused until November 2002 because it feared the disclosure of inspection results for military attacks.

Decision to overthrow the regime

As the US President-elect (November 2000), George W. Bush integrated the PNAC into his administration: Donald Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz his Deputy, Richard Armitage Vice-Secretary of State, Richard Perle Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee . On January 30, 2001, the National Security Council (NSC) first discussed regime change in Iraq. According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill , this goal was clear, only the way to get there had been discussed. In February, Bush met Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair and discussed future Iraq policy with him as a matter of priority. On February 16, both governments bombed some of the outskirts of Baghdad beyond the no-fly zones, signaling an aggressive stance against Saddam Hussein's regime. The then Federal Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer supported these attacks during his visit to the USA on February 22, 2001. US Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that the containment was successful and that Iraq could no longer attack its neighbors.

In April 2001, security advisor Paul Wolfowitz called in the cabinet to turn to Iraq, which must have supported the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center . In doing so, he contradicted the anti-terrorism specialist Richard Clarke , saying that the priority should be to combat al-Qaeda. By July 2001, the Department of Defense was developing plans for a possible military intervention in Iraq, which Rumsfeld hoped would give the US “a significantly improved position in the region and elsewhere”. Initially, however, plans to support Iraqis in exile with weapons were favored.

As a result of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 , Rumsfeld ordered his assistants to quickly obtain information as to whether Saddam Hussein, not just Osama bin Laden , could be beaten at the same time. You should collect everything about it, including things that are not related to the event. Richard Perle advised Bush to blame states that harbor terrorists. Bush followed suit in his evening address. The next day, Bush's cabinet discussed the reaction. There was consensus that war should be initiated as quickly as possible in Afghanistan against the Taliban regime there, which supported Al-Qaeda. Rumsfeld demanded to attack Iraq at the same time and to proclaim this war goal publicly in order to oblige allied states to do so. Powell contradicted this: The US population expected an effective attack on al-Qaeda first. Bush then included the Iraq war in his medium-term planning.

In November 2001, he updated the Department of Defense's contingency plans for an attack on Iraq. On November 27th, Rumsfeld ordered General Tommy Franks to prepare for a quick “beheading” of Iraq so that its government would not have time to deploy troops. A unilateral approach should be noted as a possible option. To create an occasion for war, Rumsfeld wanted to demand new inspections. Wolfowitz warned that one should not only emphasize Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but must also describe Saddam Hussein's barbaric dictatorship in detail and redistribute material from the early 1990s. On December 18, the US State Department indicated internally that the US could only win over the Germans and French for a war in Iraq if they can prove ties between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, use all diplomatic means to disarm Iraq and a UN mandate for the attack would reach. On December 16, Powell reiterated that Iraq's regime had been successfully contained and, unlike in 1991, no longer posed a threat to the region. The US government, like the UN, is seeking renewed weapons inspections in Iraq and is considering promoting an internal coup.

On January 29, 2002, in his State of the Union address to the US Congress , Bush affirmed that Iraq was part of an axis of evil . He will not allow such states and their “terrorist allies” to acquire weapons of mass destruction and thereby threaten the USA. Commentators considered the speech almost synonymous with a declaration of war . On February 13th, Bush announced that he would “keep all options open” and “not let his cards be looked at”. In March he interrupted a meeting of senators with the words: "Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out." Vice President Dick Cheney told Blair that the US would overthrow Saddam Hussein if necessary without its allies. On March 14th, Bush's security advisor Condoleezza Rice Blair said: Bush still has to consider “how to convince the international public that military action against Iraq is necessary and justified.” On April 5, Bush publicly announced that he was now determined that “Saddam has to go”. The US government therefore considered his violent overthrow to be inevitable and only considered how to obtain the approval of other states.

Like Powell, Blair initially did not want Iraq to be involved in the war on terror . An option paper requested by him for his upcoming visit to Bush stated on March 8, 2002 that an Iraq war would not result in a regime overthrow or self-defense, but only with the danger of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's violation of UN Resolution 687 from 1991 legitimize. Secretary of State John Williams was commissioned to prepare a media campaign for an invasion with a UN mandate. At their meeting in April 2002, Blair advised Bush to seek a UN mandate to better convince Europeans of an attack on Iraq. In June 2002, Bush ordered the 101st Airborne Division, 3rd US Army, and 5th Corps to prepare for the attack. To this end, the United States Army Air Forces and the British Royal Air Force bombed vital infrastructure in the southern no-fly zone of Iraq (Operation Southern Focus) . At the end of June, Bush ordered the invading forces to be transferred to the Persian Gulf. After his visit to the USA, Richard Dearlove , head of MI6 , told Blair on July 23 that the US government considered Saddam Hussein's military disempowerment to be “inevitable” and was trying to adapt the intelligence reports to this goal. Thereupon Blair decided to take part in the Iraq war. His Foreign Minister Jack Straw found the justification for the war “thin”, since Saddam Hussein did not threaten neighboring states and had fewer weapons of mass destruction than Libya, North Korea or Iran. In order to justify military violence more easily in legal terms, Iraq should be given an ultimatum to allow UN weapons inspectors back into the country. If the Iraq regime rejects this as expected, more Europeans would approve of the regime change. The minutes of this meeting ( Downing Street Memo ) became known on May 1, 2005.

Conflict over UN participation

On July 17, 2002, the former UNSCOM director Scott Ritter stated that Iraq could not preserve any old stocks of B and C weapons for longer than three or five years and that it had only been able to manufacture these resources since 1998 with newly built factories. So far, the secret services have not presented any facts. He therefore believes the US was using the inspection requirement as a means to justify its intended war.

On August 4, 2002, Brent Scowcroft , security advisor to former US President Bush Sr., issued an urgent warning on US television against an attack on Iraq. On August 5, Colin Powell warned Bush about the costs and possible consequences of the Iraq war, such as destabilization of the region and damage to the global economy, and emphasized the need for the UN to be involved. Blair told Bush on September 7th that unilateral action would jeopardize approval of the war in Britain and Western Europe. Even James Baker , Lawrence Eagleburger and George Kennan warned before the Iraq war or alone.

On September 12, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told the General Assembly that Iraq must immediately resume inspections and cooperate fully. Otherwise the UN Security Council would have to take its responsibility seriously. At the same time, he warned that each state should only defend itself in the event of an attack. In addition, there is no substitute for a UN mandate. Bush then demanded a UN resolution that would ultimately require UN arms control officers to enter Iraq immediately, and otherwise threaten war. Otherwise the UN would lose its credibility and become irrelevant. By September 16, in talks with Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri , Annan obtained the written unconditional entry permit for the UN inspectors and announced it personally. In doing so, he prevented the US government from using refused inspections as an opportunity to launch a direct attack on Iraq. Over the next two months, the UN Security Council negotiated the text of the resolution. Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted it to force Iraq to uncover all the details of its weapons programs in order to be able to attack it either because of missing information or because of information about remaining weapons of mass destruction. France attempted this with the counter-proposal that the war decision should only be made unanimously after the final report of the inspectors.

On September 17, the US government adopted the new National Security Strategy . She declared that the United States must defend freedom and justice worldwide because these principles apply everywhere and no nation can exempt itself from them. It claimed the right of the US President to wage preventive wars for national self-defense, even without a UN mandate, in order to avoid an acute threat to the USA in the first place. This "Bush Doctrine" was renewed in 2005 and remained in force until January 2009.

In early October, the CIA submitted a secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to the Senate Intelligence Committee that alleged Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It had been compiled from older reports in a few days and was intended to subsequently corroborate relevant information from government representatives. As a result, the United States Congress authorized the US President by a large majority on October 10 to launch a unilateral Iraq war on the grounds that Iraq was continuing its NBC weapons programs, contrary to its international obligations. He supports and hosts terrorist organizations, including members of Al Qaeda. He continues the brutal repression of his civilian population, threatening peace and stability in the region. He had planned an assassination attempt on George Bush senior, held a US citizen hostage and fired thousands of times at the military who were enforcing UN resolutions. The attacks of September 11, 2001 highlighted the grave danger that terrorist groups could acquire weapons of mass destruction. Iraq has shown the ability and will to use these weapons and is threatening the US either by launching a surprise attack with them or by passing them on to terrorists who would carry out such an attack. The risk of extreme damage as a result justifies US self-defense. UN Resolution 687 announced the use of all necessary means to force the complete cessation of Iraq's ABC programs. The Iraq resolution of the Congress of 1998 demands the disempowerment of the Iraq regime if it does not fulfill the UN requirements. The US President is thus authorized to take military measures against Iraq.

On September 24, 2002, the British government published the Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction dossier . It claimed Iraqi bi and chemical weapons, a resumption of its nuclear weapons program, uranium purchases in Africa and the operational readiness of weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. The sources were kept secret. The 19-page dossier Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation followed on February 3, 2003 . It was intended to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the ongoing UN inspections and the need for a military strike. On this basis, a majority in the British Parliament decided on March 18, 2003 to support the Iraq war.

New UN inspections

Hans Blix, 2002

On November 8, 2002, the UN Security Council passed UN Resolution 1441 . According to this, the newly created UNMOVIC and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) under the direction of Hans Blix should jointly examine all selected civil and military facilities in Iraq without prior notice and also be allowed to interview Iraqi scientists abroad. The resolution once again ultimately called on Iraq to comply with these conditions and all previous resolutions. She threatened "serious consequences" if Iraq obstructed the inspections and withheld NBC armaments programs. The UN Security Council should determine whether and when this case occurred and what consequences it should have. So the resolution did not legitimize the use of military force.

Iraq then let the inspectors enter. They started work on November 27, 2002. On December 8, Iraq submitted a 12,000-page arms report to the UN on time. The non-permanent members of the Security Council received only a 3500-page short version of it. In early January 2003, Blix stated that Iraq had been cooperating satisfactorily with the inspectors so far. No ballistic missiles, no production facilities for nuclear weapons and no biological weapons have been found. The information in Iraq's arms report is 95% likely to be correct. Questions about old stocks of chemical and chemical weapons are still open. Iraq had bindingly agreed to clarify this amicably.

Blair sought a second UN resolution for a military operation since the beginning of 2003. The British Attorney General Peter Goldsmith , in agreement with the legal advisors of the British Foreign Office, had repeatedly and clearly stated on July 23, 2002 that such a UN mandate was absolutely necessary for legal military intervention. The desire for regime change is not a legal basis for military action. Self-defense and humanitarian intervention were not necessary in this case. An appeal to older UN resolutions is legally problematic. Blair had replied that since the Iraqi regime was producing the prohibited weapons of mass destruction, the only way to enforce the UN requirements was through regime change. That is why his striving for the UN war mandate is an attempt to provide a legal cover for the decision to overthrow the regime on the side of the USA.

Blair asked Goldsmith in early 2003 not to give written advice until the UN inspections were complete. On January 30th, Goldsmith reaffirmed in a note for Blair that UN Resolution 1441 does not authorize military force according to the correct interpretation and demands a new decision by the UN Security Council. On January 31st, Bush announced to Blair: If the US does not receive a UN mandate, military action will follow anyway. The start of the bombing was dated March 10th. Diplomacy must be guided by this planning. Blair agreed to do anything to disarm Saddam Hussein. If they could be obtained, a second UN resolution would be beneficial as reinsurance for later aid from other states. He did not say that it was legally necessary. Both doubted that the inspectors would ever find anything and disagreed on how to get other states to agree to the war. Bush considered three options for provoking Iraq to war, including flying a US spy plane painted in the colors of the United Nations over Iraq. If Iraq fired on it, it would have broken the UN resolution.

In order to achieve the UN war mandate, Colin Powell tried to fully substantiate Iraq's violations of the requirements of Resolution 1441 on February 5, 2003 in a 70-minute speech. Because the evidence did not convince them, the veto powers France, Russia and China, as well as most of the non-permanent council members, including Germany, voted against the war resolution. In addition, Germany and France presented a plan for more weapons inspectors and possibly the use of blue helmet soldiers . The US government then gave up its pursuit of a UN war mandate.

The final report of UNMOVIC of March 7, 2003, after more than 500 inspections, revealed no finds of prohibited weapons and no traces of their manufacture, not even in places that the CIA had indicated as likely weapons factories. He confirmed information from Rolf Ekeus (UNSCOM) and the Iraqi exile Hussein Kamel , according to which Iraq had destroyed all of its chemical and chemical weapons by 1995 and had stopped the programs for them. Blix said it was incredible that the CIA was absolutely certain that these weapons existed but had absolutely no knowledge of where they were. As early as February, he had asked the Western secret services to provide positive evidence, as the non-existence of these weapons in all of Iraq could hardly be proven. Now he has asked for two to three months more time to rule out weapons hiding in previously uninspected locations in Iraq. The US and Great Britain refused.

Justifications

Operational bio and chemical weapons

Colin Powell on February 5, 2003 before the UN Security Council

→ Main articles : Iraq's Biological Weapons Program  and Iraq's Chemical Weapons Program

In annual reports for the US Congress from 1998 to mid-2002, the CIA had repeatedly emphasized a lack of evidence for renewed B and C weapons programs in Iraq. To determine whether they existed, CIA Director George Tenet had requested new inspections on February 7, 2001, since the air surveillance of Iraq was insufficient. The October 2002 NIE then claimed, however, that Iraq had built up large stocks of sarin , mustard gas , VX and many other chemical weapons for years and could use them to attack the USA. The information was largely based on outdated estimates of Iraqi arms supplies from 1991 and unreliable statements from Iraqi exiles. The CIA relied on their statements because they had no agents in Iraq since 1998 and the government had requested evidence since September 11, 2001. On questions of Bush (December 2002) and Powell (January 2003) called Tenet, the evidence according to witnesses as "foolproof" (slam dunk) and a "rock solid" (rock solid) .

In accordance with this, Colin Powell summarized the main reasons for the war on February 5, 2003 before the UN Security Council. He named Iraq's main violations of UN Resolution 1441: obstruction of UN inspections, hiding of weapons stores and factories, operational B and C weapons, construction of atomic bombs, possession of long-range missiles and contacts with al-Qaeda terrorists. He claimed mobile chemical weapons factories on rails and roads for which there were eyewitness reports. In addition, he showed 3D computer graphics of trucks. You could kill tens of thousands of people in a month with anthrax or botulin . To this end, he quoted almost verbatim statements by an Iraqi defector whom the CIA had not interrogated and whom they called "Curveball". As a result of this presentation, support for the Iraq invasion grew from 50 to 57 percent, according to surveys in the United States.

Construction of atomic bombs

→ Main article : Iraqi nuclear program

After September 11, 2001, the CIA determined that Osama bin Laden had tried to buy nuclear weapons or nuclear-weapon- grade uranium since 1993 . He should also have had contacts with Abdul Qadeer Khan , the designer of atomic bombs for Pakistan . This in turn had contacts with Islamist organizations and was suspected of the worldwide trade in nuclear weapons technology. As a result of these findings, concerns grew in the US government that al-Qaida could acquire nuclear weapons through dictatorial third countries. Even this very possibility should be prevented under all circumstances. The western secret services knew that Iraq had ended its previous nuclear program in 1998 at the latest. The IAEA had ascertained this and found no prohibited activities in addition since 1997. In 1999 the UN Security Council confirmed this result. On February 12, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld had publicly assured that Iraq is currently unlikely to be a nuclear threat.

The New York Times reported on September 8, 2002: Iraq has tried, according to government officials, to buy 60,000 aluminum tubes in Niger that are intended for centrifuges for uranium enrichment . The United States intercepted a shipload of these tubes destined for Iraq. According to reports from nuclear experts from April 2001, the tubes were only suitable for the construction of ordinary rocket launchers such as those in Iraq. Yet Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney now often claimed Iraq's well-advanced nuclear bombing program. When inquiring about evidence, they invoked source protection. One does not know when Saddam Hussein will have these bombs, but one cannot wait until “the final proof appears in the form of an atomic mushroom cloud”. On September 18, Rumsfeld claimed that Iraq was less than five years from building atomic bombs. In October 2002, internal CIA notes doubted Iraq had tried to buy and had atomic bomb-making materials. These reservations were also in the summary of the NIE for Bush. However, nine internal CIA reports then supported the claim that the tubes were intended for a nuclear program.

Public relations experts included another allegation, questioned by the CIA, in the British dossier of September 24, 2002: Iraq had tried to buy a significant amount of yellowcake (uranium oxide, enrichable uranium) in an unnamed country in Africa . The purpose is unclear because Iraq does not have a civil nuclear energy program. According to witness statements in March 2003, George Tenet informed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the same day that between 1999 and 2001 Iraq had attempted to buy 500 tons of uranium oxide from Niger. The amount is enough for an atomic bomb. He wanted to dispel doubts as to whether the intercepted aluminum tubes were actually intended for banned centrifuges. On September 26, Powell testified before the committee that the uranium purchase confirmed Iraq's ongoing nuclear ambitions. Both statements convinced enough Congressmen to agree to the war authorization for Bush. On December 19, 2002, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs publicly accused Niger for the first time of selling uranium to Iraq and asked why Iraq was hiding the purchase. Both states denied that.

In his speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, Bush spoke of aluminum tubes and originally wanted to mention the uranium purchase as well. Tenet arranged for this passage to be deleted from the draft speech due to a lack of evidence. On January 29, 2003, Bush claimed in his government statement: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. - The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant amounts of uranium from Africa. ”This time Tenet had not been informed in advance of the draft speech.

In his UN speech, Powell refrained from making a statement about the uranium purchase because he classified it as unreliable after Bush's January speech. He also referred to the expert dispute that had been ongoing since April 2001 over the aluminum tubes Iraq had bought, but did not mention that leading nuclear experts from three countries and the UN inspectors had declared the tubes unsuitable for centrifuges in detailed reports. He claimed they were much thicker than would be necessary for comparable US rocket launchers. Just days earlier, intelligence analysts had explained this statement to him as inaccurate and advised him not to. Like Rice and Cheney before, Powell relied on this single piece of physical evidence because it was the only way to make a renewed Iraqi nuclear program, dangerous for the United States, plausible.

Working with Al-Qaeda

After September 11, 2001, the US Congress authorized Bush by law to take all necessary measures against states, organizations and individuals who were involved in the attacks on that day. In order to justify the intended regime change in Iraq with this law, representatives of the US government suggested a direct link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. On September 25, Bush declared that the two "worked together" (work in concert) . The following day he said there were al-Qaida members in Iraq, which had long-standing close ties with terrorist groups. This could only mean the small terrorist group Ansar al-Islam , which had been fighting the Kurds in northern Iraq, which was not controlled by Saddam Hussein, since the summer of 2001 . On November 19, Rumsfeld mentioned significant "interaction between al Qaeda and people in Iraq". He referred to a stay of the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Baghdad in the summer of 2002, but did not provide any details when asked. Zarqawi was portrayed as a member of Al Qaeda with no evidence. Neither congressional committees nor allied states received or found evidence of this. In June 2002, an internal CIA report ruled out Zarqawi's contacts with Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party .

In order to obtain the approval of the US Congress for the planned Iraq war, the Bush administration justified this with his visit to Baghdad after Zarqawi's departure from Iraq. On September 27, Rumsfeld alleged "bulletproof evidence" of their connection. On October 7, 2002, Bush claimed that Iraq had trained al-Qaeda members to make bombs and to use poisons and deadly gases. The danger is that al-Qaeda will become an outgrowth of Saddam's madness and hatred and his ability to spread weapons of mass destruction worldwide. Following the October 10 congressional resolution, the government alleged that Al Qaeda hijacker pilot Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague . Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and Chief of Staff Lewis Libby began urging the CIA in January 2003 to confirm this meeting in writing. They refrained from doing so only after the responsible CIA clerk threatened to resign and Tenet supported them. In his January 2003 government statement, Bush said: "Imagine those 19 hijackers with different weapons and plans - this time armed by Saddam Hussein." On February 5, 2003, Powell told the UN that Iraq was "harboring" Zarqawi and had him Al-Qaeda allies allowed base in Baghdad; this network trains terrorists in an Ansar al-Islam camp in the use of poison and explosives. On February 11, 2003, Powell interpreted a video message from Osama bin Laden, contrary to its wording, as "partnership" with Iraq. Bin Laden had called on the Muslims to fight against the Americans in the event of an attack on Iraq, but at the same time criticized its “pagan” and “apostate” regime.

On February 6, 2003, Blair ruled out Iraq's involvement in the 9/11 attacks, but also claimed that there was an acute danger that Iraq would transfer weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. There are indications that the operators of a chemical weapons factory in northern Iraq are selling these substances worldwide. Connections to Al-Qaeda cannot be ruled out either. Bush declared on March 6th: September 11th 2001 showed what terrorists could do with four planes. One will not wait to see what terrorists or terrorist states can do with weapons of mass destruction. On March 17, Bush declared: Iraq has supported, trained and hosted terrorists, including representatives from Al Qaeda.

After Saddam's fall, when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, some government officials revived theses that the CIA had already withdrawn. On September 14, 2003, Cheney claimed that Atta had actually met an Iraqi in Prague. In October, Pentagon Secretary of State Douglas J. Feith , head of the Office of Special Plans , sent Congress a list of all intelligence reports known to him about alleged contacts between Iraqis and Al Qaeda members. The conservative magazine The Weekly Standard published parts of it in November and claimed under the title Case closed : An " operational relationship" including training with weapons of mass destruction between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein from 1990 to 2003 is now documented. 50 numbered items on the list marked only the main highlights of this relationship. Bin Laden and his representative Aiman ​​az-Zawahiri met two Iraqi officers in Afghanistan in December 1998. In December 2000, the Saudi Arabian National Guard learned that Saddam Hussein wanted to help with al-Qaeda attacks on US bases in their country and was therefore put on alert. For W. Patrick Lang, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Middle East, the list showed rather unsuccessful contact attempts by both sides and thus the failure of a working relationship. The Ministry of Defense declared the leaked list "inaccurate", saw the disclosure as a betrayal of secrets and announced legal action.

Human rights violations

The Saddam Hussein regime had committed numerous mass murders since 1979, above all in the war against Iran (1980–1988) against Iranians and Kurds , and later against Iraqi Shiites . These crimes were made possible by legal and illegal arms deliveries from Western countries. In addition, the regime had up to 290,000 people "disappeared" by 2003. There were no western protests.

In contrast to the wars of intervention of the 1990s, the USA and Great Britain justified the Iraq war only secondarily with the protection of the human rights of the Iraqi population. In March 2003, her references to Saddam Hussein's previous crimes were primarily intended to highlight the threat posed by alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Only after none of these weapons were found did the humanitarian rationale come to the fore.

Some liberal authors also advocated the overthrow of the regime, regardless of the motives of the US government. Michael Ignatieff, for example, said that Iraqis were now better protected from torture and gas attacks, and demanded that human rights activists accept Saddam's overthrow as a step towards the liberation of Iraqis because they had for decades urged governments to act against brutal dictators. The positive effects of the Iraq war are ethically to be valued higher than legitimate motives.

In November 2003, Blair claimed that the remains of 400,000 people had been found in mass graves in Iraq. The statement was widely used, classified as credible and also adopted by the development agency USAID . In July 2004, however, Blair's spokesman admitted that it was wrong: around 5,000 bodies have so far been found in those graves (55 of 270).

Democratization

As a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union , members of the US government had been calling for further expansion of the market economy and democratization of dictatorships since 1990 , especially in regions of particular US interest. The neoconservative Republicans urged the US hegemony to be used to spread the market economy model and to overthrow the Saddam regime. According to Robert Kagan, they did not rely on intelligence. They expected that a democratic Iraq would contribute to the democratization of the entire region, spread American values, deter other dictatorships from aspiring to become a great power, help secure the oil supply of the USA and, in the long term, improve the protection of Israel . After September 11, 2001, this justification for the war was not in the foreground, but the terrorist threat to the USA. The Iraq invasion was justified as a " forward defense ", also so that traditional conservatives would agree. Paul Wolfowitz declared on May 29, 2003 that Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction were never the US government's main reason for war. The focus was on because every employee of the relevant US authorities could agree to this reason.

In historical retrospect, the democratization intention is considered to be the main reason for war. In February 2003, for example, US President Bush advocated a domino theory that a democratic Iraq would show the “power of freedom” to transform the entire region and to inspire its people to follow this example. Dick Cheney reiterated in April 2003 that democracy in the Middle East is what drives Bush. After no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq and Bush had been re-elected, he justified the invasion in his 2005 government declaration primarily with the goal of democratization.

Breach of UN resolution 1441

Since Powell's UN speech, the US and UK have claimed that Iraq had hidden weapons of mass destruction from inspectors, thereby breaking UN Resolution 1441. In doing so, they moved away from the fact that only positive evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction would prove this breach.

After meeting John Bellinger , NSC's legal advisor, on February 11, 2003 , Peter Goldsmith moved closer to his point of view. In his 13-page legal opinion of March 7th, which became known in 2005, he named older UN resolutions as a possible legal basis for military action if Iraq was demonstrably not fully cooperating with the UN inspectors. However, a criminal court would probably not accept this reasoning. In his brief report of March 17th, Goldsmith declared the impending war to be legal without reservation, without proving the breach of UN Resolution 1441 and without referring to statements to the contrary in the UNMOVIC report of March 7th.

According to this legal opinion, the warring states argued: UN Resolution 678 of 1990 threatened Iraq with "all necessary measures" to restore peace and stability in the region. After the Gulf War, UN Resolution 687 of 1991 only suspended this threat until Iraq would completely and verifiably disarm its weapons of mass destruction by the UN inspectors. A material breach of this resolution would reinstate the authority for coercive violence. UN Resolution 1441 of 2002 established this ongoing breach and threatened "serious consequences" if Iraq did not fully cooperate with the UNMOVIC inspectors within the specified period. Their final report of March 7, 2003 noted open points where Iraq had not cooperated. Thus the members of the Security Council are entitled to enforce the complete disarmament imposed in UN resolution 687 with military force. On the same day, Bush gave Saddam Hussein an ultimatum to leave Iraq. On March 19, 2003, despite the veto of three Security Council members, he ordered the attack.

Exhaustion

No bio and chemical weapons

Iraq's alleged mobile bio-weapons factories have been in doubt since May 2003. The CIA claimed they had found suitably equipped trucks, but withdrew the information shortly afterwards as an error. On June 8, 2003, Powell denied that the trucks found were ordinary hydrogen tankers. Because of the well-known deceptions of the Iraqis, the search needs patience. Dick Cheney again claimed in January 2004 that the trucks found were evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Tenet, on the other hand, referred on February 5 to contradicting witness statements. Media reports revealed that it was false statements by Iraqis in exile such as “Curveball”. On April 3, Powell admitted that rolling arms factory sources he had previously reviewed had not proven solid. This is a failure of the CIA that needs to be cleared up.

The US government's 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group (ISG) found no weapons of mass destruction. According to their final report (Duelfer Report) of September 30, 2004, Iraq had stopped the relevant programs by 1995 at the latest and had not hidden any remaining stocks or made them abroad. But the Saddam regime planned to restart the illegal weapons programs after the inspections and sanctions. In Baghdad, several laboratories continuously produced various poisons in small quantities for assassinations and secret service operations after 1991. On January 12, 2005, the US declared the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to be over.

Only after the resignation of ISG leader David Kay in January 2004 did Bush allow the US Senate to examine the intelligence reports on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He insisted on appointing the examiners himself. The seven-member Robb Silberman Commission was only allowed to meet non-publicly and was not allowed to deal with the US government's handling of intelligence information. From February 5, 2004 to March 31, 2005, she interviewed hundreds of experts and viewed thousands of documents with the result that the secret services were completely wrong on almost every point about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. For years, the CIA kept previous assumptions about the remaining stocks of weapons and armaments programs in Iraq unchecked and also relied on unreliable information from foreign intelligence agencies. CIA employees would not have intentionally distorted this, but believed in their assumptions at the time. None of the respondents changed statements under political pressure. The report relieved Bush and Cheney of any responsibility for misrepresentation.

On March 28, 2004, “Curveballs” contacts with the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi , whom the USA had previously paid for information on mobile bio-weapons factories and who had planned to succeed Saddam Hussein, became known. David Kay described "Curveball" as "a manufacturer through and through". The adoption of his statements is a serious case of lack of due diligence. The Federal Intelligence Service (BND) announced that it had interrogated "Curveball" since 1999 and had sent its statements to the CIA in 2002, but had warned against their unreliability. In doing so, he contradicted CIA information that the BND had misled them about "Curveball's" statements. The CIA admitted that no CIA representative had questioned him directly.

Investigative journalists explained how "Curveball's" statements got into Powell's speech. The first draft of this was written by Dick Cheney's staff under Lewis Libby. Many of the false statements in it came from the Office for Special Plans (OSP) of Pentagon advisor Paul Wolfowitz. Powell had rejected this draft, but some statements from it remained in the speech. An informant from Saddam's political advisory staff had denied "Curveball's" information. A CIA officer had raised concerns about her inclusion in the speech on February 3, 2003. The answer he received was that the war was already a done deal. Thereupon Tyler Drumheller , the head of the CIA responsible for Europe, pointed out to Tenet that "Curveballs" was unreliable. Nevertheless, Powell quoted his statements almost verbatim in his speech. Drumheller stated that he had already rejected the sentence about the rolling bioweapons labs at the end of January 2003 as an error and personally informed Tenet and his representative, John E. McLaughlin. He had been promised to remove the mistake from the draft speech, although “Curveballs” was the only valid statement about Iraq's biological weapons. Powell's secretary, Lawrence Wilkerson , said that Tenet had assured Powell of the reliability of "Curveball's" information when asked. Tenet and McLaughlin did not remember that dialogue. On September 9, 2005, Powell stated: When examining the sources, some intelligence officials were hiding their concerns. His UN speech was the "low point" of his career. Nevertheless, Saddam Hussein's fall made him happy.

On November 5, 2007, the CBS Corporation announced "Curveballs" real name Rafid Ahmed Alwan , his false statements about his job and the warnings of the BND against his unreliable statements. Alwan said he lied to the BND and the CIA to help overthrow Saddam. According to the former head of the BND , August Hanning , the USA asked the BND on September 25, 2001 to provide "Curveball's" information on Iraq. The BND warned them several times not to present this information as secure. He himself reported his concerns to Tenet in a letter. He was assured not to use the information for Powell's UN speech. The US would have deliberately misused the BND to justify the Iraq war. He complained in writing about it. The CIA did not comment. Drumheller confirmed that he had sent Hannings warning letter to Tenet. Tenet denied this, claiming that he only learned of the BND's doubts about Alwan's statements in 2005.

No building of atomic bombs

→ Main articles : Plame Affair  and Fair Game - Nothing is more dangerous than the truth

On November 20, 2001, Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick , the US ambassador to Niger, reported that the French owners of the uranium mines in Niger considered it impossible to buy 500 tons of uranium (one sixth of the annual production) because of the strict controls. A US State Department analyst agreed: Iraq would not dare to be caught doing such a big purchase. French investigators had confirmed this and classified the purchase documents presented to them as forgery. Nevertheless, they had sent a team to Niger that found no sign of illegal uranium sales. US General Carlton W. Fulford traveled to Niger in February 2002 and found nothing either. In the same month, diplomat Joseph C. Wilson traveled to Niger on behalf of the CIA to investigate Iraq's suspected uranium purchase. Questioning dozens of officials for two weeks, he found that there was no purchase agreement with Iraq and that Niger's uranium mines were closely monitored. His report on it corroborated earlier reports by the US ambassador. After Bush claimed Iraq was buying uranium in Africa on January 29, 2003, Wilson asked the State Department which country Bush was referring to. He was assured that the Niger was not meant. However, without Wilson's knowledge, the ministry had listed the alleged uranium purchase in Niger on a list of violations by Iraq against Resolution 1441 and, when the IAEA was asked for months, sent documents about the alleged purchase agreement.

On March 7, 2003, IAEA Director Mohammed el-Baradei told the UN Security Council that these documents were an overt forgery. The team of his representative Jacques Baute discovered within a few hours that they had been attributed with forged signatures to ministers of Niger who had long since ceased to be in office, and that they contained gross spelling errors and clipped copies. Also, not a single near large amount of the uranium allegedly sold had disappeared from Niger's strictly controlled mines and was reported missing. The IAEA did not find out who had forged the documents. The US and UK authorities did not deny the counterfeit, but neither did anything to solve it. Powell declared the matter closed on March 9, 2003; the forgery was made abroad, not in the USA.

The European states found the other evidence presented by the USA doubtful. On March 14, Senator Jay Rockefeller, on the Senate Intelligence Committee, petitioned FBI Director Robert Mueller to investigate the forgery. On March 31, 2003, journalist Seymour Hersh described the process and asked how the forgery got into Bush's January speech. Has the government lied to itself or purposely given bad information? According to Hersh, a CIA official said the CIA did not receive the uranium purchase documents until after Bush's speech and knew that they were untrustworthy. Analysts from the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had doubted the authenticity. But they waited to see whether Powell would withdraw the statement himself. Someone must have deliberately circulated the forged documents. That could not have happened without the knowledge of the CIA. The process should be clarified in the interests of US foreign policy.

For three months, Wilson unsuccessfully urged relevant government officials to withdraw the false testimony in official government speeches. Condoleezza Rice could not name the origin of the statement, but repeated in June 2003 that Saddam Hussein had tried to make atomic bombs. Then Wilson reported on July 6, 2003 in the New York Times about his trip to Africa. It should be clarified whether the government rejected his result as inaccurate or intentionally ignored it because of preconceived judgments about Iraq.

Government officials Lewis Libby, Karl Rove, and Richard Armitage attempted to discredit Wilson's statements by exposing his wife Valerie Plame's agent activities days later . Because of this, a covert questioning of Iraqi scientists that Plame's CIA unit had carried out had to be ended. The questionnaire revealed no traces of a nuclear program in Iraq, but confirmed its discontinuation in 1991. Libby was charged with willful treason and convicted in June 2007 of perjury and obstruction of justice. Bush released him from prison but let his sentence stand. In this way he prevented the process from continuing and who had ordered the betrayal of secrets to be discovered.

When confronted with questions about the false statement about the uranium purchase, Bush and Rice blamed the CIA: They had fully examined Bush's January speech. Rice admitted there had been longstanding concerns about the statement. These were noted in the NIE. However, she did not find out about the forgery of the purchase documents until March 2003 and only in June about Wilson's trip. Tenet then declared on July 12th that he was responsible for examining Bush's speech. The uranium purchase statement should never have gotten into this. According to CIA witnesses, the impetus for this came from the expert Robert G. Joseph from the National Security Council. He pointed out that the British had already included the statement in their dossier, i.e. viewed it as reliable. Joseph, in turn, pointed out that the CIA had raised no concerns about him. Greg Thielmann, State Department Weapons Proliferation Expert , saw the government's default expectation as the cause of the error: 'We know the answers, give us the information that backs those answers.'

No cooperation with Al Qaeda

The 9/11 commission found no evidence of Iraq's cooperation with al-Qaeda. It showed that Saddam Hussein had refused or ignored all requests for assistance from al-Qaeda members since 1990. There was no meeting between Atta and an Iraqi in Prague because Atta was in Florida in April 2001. The staff report on this topic was published before the final report in July 2004.

The Senate Intelligence Committee checked the information from 15 US services and found that Iraq had no prior knowledge of the al-Qaeda attacks. Although the CIA made some chance contacts between al-Qaeda members and Iraqis likely in the 1990s, it did not infer a formal relationship and avoided any judgment that Iraq and al-Qaeda had cooperated in terrorist attacks. Senator Carl Levin , chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services , separately examined the pre-war warnings issued by the intelligence services; his report was published on October 21, 2004.

On September 8, 2006, the Senate Intelligence Committee released another report on the Bush administration's justifications for war. He found no evidence of any links between the Saddam regime and Al Qaeda. Iraq offered no refuge to the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Although he was in Baghdad in 2002, Saddam Hussein did not know this and ordered Zarqawi's arrest when he found out. He mistrusted all Islamist groups and rejected all requests from Al Qaeda for material or operational help. Osama bin Laden has also refused any cooperation with Iraq. The report cited a warning from the Iraqi intelligence chief to Saddam that the West was fabricating a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda as a reason for war, and a CIA report denying the Saddam regime's contact with Zarqawi. The report backed this up with original documents and explained the ideological differences between the secularist Ba'ath Party and the Islamists. According to the report, the Iraqi leadership had no active nuclear program and no mobile laboratory for the production of biological weapons. Nevertheless, two days later, Condoleezza Rice again claimed Iraq's connection with al-Qaeda. Army inspector General Thomas F. Gimble confirmed in April 2007 that there was no such connection. The Defense Research Institute's Joint Advanced Warfighting Program examined around 600,000 documents confiscated during the occupation of Iraq. There was no trace of any direct connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. Only older contacts between Iraq and terror groups in the Gaza Strip have been confirmed .

On February 9, 2004, Bush publicly admitted for the first time that doubts about intelligence reports on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were well founded. Nevertheless, the overthrow of the regime was necessary. In December 2005, after the parliamentary elections in Iraq, Bush declared "that many of the intelligence services' findings were proven to be false." At the same time, he claimed that the states that were not involved in the Iraq war also had this false level of information. In 2006, however, he declared: No one in his government had suggested that Iraq had ordered the September 11, 2001 attacks. On December 26, 2008, in his last interview as President of the United States, Bush declared: "The greatest regret of my entire presidency must have been the failure of the intelligence services on Iraq." He wished that their information had been different. But even if the information was correct, the war would have taken place because “Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors in to determine whether or not the UN resolutions were being adhered to.” The first statement is an example of a twisted logic of language, because Bush only one regretted failure of others, not one's own; the second is seen as a strange suppression of the fact that, from November 2002, Iraq had allowed inspectors to enter freely and examine all places of their choice. Tony Blair also apologized on October 25, 2015 only for "the fact that the information we were given was wrong" and "for the mistake in our understanding of what would happen after Saddam was removed," not for the war self.

No protection of human rights

Amnesty International (AI) has been documenting crimes committed by the Saddam regime against minorities in Iraq on a regular basis since 1980. However, these reports found no response from Western governments. It was not until December 2002 that a British government report accused Saddam Hussein of “systematic terror”. AI criticized the timing and tenor of this publication as war propaganda: The “selective attention” to human rights violations in Iraq was “a cold and calculated manipulation of the work of human rights activists”.

Kenneth Roth , head of Human Rights Watch , said on February 17, 2003: The US would not wage the impending Iraq war "for the welfare of the people of Iraq" because it did not meet its own human rights standards. In January 2004 Roth declared a comparison of the Iraq war with the Kosovo war of 1998 to be inadmissible, since Saddam's regime had violated human rights in 1988 but not in March 2003 to the extent that humanitarian intervention would have justified. Since there was no mass murder of Saddam Hussein in 2003, “the first and most important criterion for an intervention was not met. Nor was the motive for attacking Saddam primarily humanitarian. When the war started, Saddam's human rights violations were at most a marginal issue. "

Human rights activists judge the escalation of violence to conditions similar to civil war, the increase in terrorist attacks, the establishment of Islamist terror groups and war crimes by soldiers of the occupying powers during the occupation of Iraq from 2003-2011 as a devastating political failure, often also as the criminal consequences of a war of aggression that is contrary to international law.

Manipulation of intelligence reports

In Britain, by February 5, 2003, political scientist Glen Rangwala ( Cambridge University ) discovered that the government's second Iraq dossier was largely a plagiarism from 12-year-old sources. The journalist Richard M. Smith named four authors in June 2003 who had edited the dossier on behalf of the government. On May 29, 2003, BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan accused Blair's Secretary of State, Alastair Campbell , of requesting that the information available for the September dossier be exaggerated (“sex up”). Only a week before its publication, the 45-minute claim was inserted despite concerns from experts.

Then the set House of Commons , the Foreign Affairs Committee one (FAC), which tested the intelligence of the British Parliament before the Iraq war in June of 2003. It found no excessive political influence by Campbell on the contents of the September dossier. Its authors only reproduced the assumptions made at the time, as shared by the International Institute for Strategic Studies shortly before. However, their assumptions were based on the dogma that had grown from UNSCOM's experience that Saddam Hussein was systematically deceiving the inspections and hiding his armaments programs. It was therefore not considered that a lack of evidence could indicate a lack of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The British government then asked the BBC to uncover its source and claimed days later that it knew the source. On July 15, 2003, former UNSCOM inspector David Kelly revealed himself to the FAC as an informant for the BBC; he was subsequently summoned to testify. On July 18, he was found dead; the signs pointed to suicide . The January 28, 2004 Hutton report of Kelly's death revealed e-mails from Blair's offices. After that, Blair's officials found the first version of the dossier to be too harmless because it did not result in any acute attack capability by Iraq on Britain. MI6 boss Richard Dearlove admitted that the 45-minute risk was misinterpreted and "overemphasized" in the dossier. The original statements of an allegedly reliable senior Iraqi officer would only have referred to the possible battlefield of Iraq itself, not to long-range attacks. Other officials said they expressed concern about trusting a single source with such a strong statement.

Even so, the Hutton report exonerated Blair and Campbell. Since the Iraq Survey Group simultaneously labeled all of Blair's pre-war information as incorrect, the latter set up another five-person investigative commission under Lord Robin Butler under parliamentary pressure . It did not meet publicly and concluded: The Iraqi officer mentioned by Dearlove had sent the 45-minute allegation about Iraqi exiles in London (Iraq National Accord) to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and had received a post in the interim government of Iraq after Saddam's fall. The SIS had only three other sources on Iraqi B- and C-weapons in Iraq and after Saddam's fall they rejected their information as unreliable, which the SIS had withheld from Blair and the Hutton Commission. Only the Butler Commission received access to the pre-war knowledge of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). She largely clarified the genesis of the September dossier and criticized the fact that Blair had wrongly described it as "extensive, detailed and authoritative". In doing so, it discredited an essential basis of British war approval. Butler left the political consequences of this to parliament and the voters.

From the meeting between Blair and Bush in April 2002, minutes of the talks appeared, which documented the decision of both parties to change the regime even without a UN mandate. In June 2009, Blair's successor, Gordon Brown , set up a five-person commission under John Chilcot . In his 2011 interrogation, Campbell claimed that the September dossier was only intended to impartially present the available evidence, not to justify the war. General Michael Laurie , the former head of the Defense Intelligence staff responsible for air surveillance in Iraq, contradicted this in a letter to Chilcot: The dossier was written precisely for the war. His staff had made it clear to the JIC that no evidence of weapons of mass destruction equipment could be found in Iraq. It was clear to him that the authors of the dossier were under political pressure to make every fact appear as threatening as possible. The conclusions in the dossier went beyond those of the usual intelligence reports. For the first time, an expert involved in the creation of the dossier confirmed the BBC's suspicion of manipulation in May 2003.

The final report of the Chilcot Committee was originally supposed to appear a few months after the 2011 witness interviews. However, it was delayed several times, among other things because the British government did not approve the e-mail traffic between Blair and Bush and many witnesses did not want their testimony to be published. On October 19, 2015, a note from Colin Powell dated March 2002 came out that Blair would definitely join a US military operation in Iraq. Blair had assured British voters at the time that he was not planning to participate in the war. The report was published in 2016.

Methodical campaign

Four experts from the British Carnegie Endowment for International Peace criticized in October 2004 that the US government had "systematically misrepresented" the danger posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. One could have known before the war that Saddam Hussein did not pose any direct threat from ABC weapons and ballistic missiles. Although his supply of B-weapons was uncertain, it was not enough to justify a war. At some point in 2002 politicians began to unduly influence the intelligence services. Repeated unannounced visits by Dick Chemey to the CIA and demands for unsubstantiated reports have put intelligence officials under pressure to pass more threatening judgments on Iraq. National Intelligence Council Vice Chairman Stuart Cohen pointed out that the keyword " imminent threat " was not used in the 2002 NIE. Joseph Cirincione again replied that, in retrospect, the process of hazard analysis had clearly broken after nine months of unsuccessful searches in Iraq. The NEVER was far off.

The Center for Public Integrity headed by Charles Lewis presented 935 public false statements made by eight government officials between September 11, 2001 and 2003 about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links with al-Qaeda. The team of journalists defined all allegations as "false statements" insofar as they did not correspond to the information available to the government at the time according to the intelligence reports known up to then. He placed both series of statements side by side in a time table to enable direct comparison. The vast majority of false statements were made from August 2002 to the congressional resolution in October 2002 and then again from January 2003 to the start of the war in March 2003. Powell's UN speech of February 5, 2003 reached its peak. Lewis spoke when presenting the results on January 28, 2008 by a "carefully orchestrated campaign of untruths" that was "methodically propagated". A White House spokesman on the same day dismissed the study as "grossly flawed" for ignoring supporters of the Iraq invasion in Congress, overseas, and intelligence agencies. However, the US government had requested and planned the invasion much earlier and by July 2002 alone. The “coalition of the willing” was only formed after the United States lost its vote in the UN Security Council.

Because of this campaign, which lasted until the war and beyond, according to surveys at the end of 2002, 70 to 90% of the US citizens surveyed believed that Saddam Hussein would sooner or later attack the USA with weapons of mass destruction. Between 45% and 66% believed he supported the al-Qaida perpetrators on September 11th. Immediately after the attacks, only 3% of those questioned believed this. After Powell's UN speech, support for the Iraq invasion in the US rose from 50% to 57%, according to a Gallup poll. In February 2003, 72% of respondents thought it very or fairly likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks, even though the government did not claim it, only suggested it. 76% believed Saddam supported Al Qaeda. In August 2004, 50% of the Americans surveyed still believed that, although the 9/11 Commission report had invalidated this. In July 2006, 64% of the US citizens surveyed still believed that Iraq had close contacts with Al Qaeda prior to September 11, 2001. In a survey in August 2006, 85% of the US soldiers stationed in Iraq answered that their mission was " Retribution for Saddam's Role "in 9/11.

On May 26, 2004, the New York Times was the only newspaper in the United States to apologize for its uncritical reporting before the Iraq war. Some reports have shown, unchecked, information scattered by government officials from a small group of Iraqi exiles as reliable, without taking into account their interest in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Information that was subsequently recognized as incorrect was sometimes not corrected at all or only corrected in inconspicuous marginal notes on the back of the newspaper. Four out of six specific examples mentioned came from articles by Judith Miller . The newspaper hired an additional editor to oversee such reports.

Breach of international law

According to most international lawyers, the Iraq war broke the prohibition on wars of aggression and preventive wars under Article 2 of the UN Charter and the UN Security Council's monopoly on the use of force in defense wars . The warring governments knew that. On March 7, 2003, Goldsmith warned Blair against prosecution for the crime of war of aggression. The USA and Great Britain had proposed such a criminal case against Saddam Hussein in 1990 because of the occupation of Kuwait.

On January 24, 2002, the Center for Constitutional Rights noted the consensus of over 1,000 law professors and legal organizations in the United States that any preventive war against Iraq would be a crime under the UN Charter. The Center for Economic and Social Rights (sponsor: Ford Foundation , New York City) summarized the reason for this again at the beginning of March 2003: Since Iraq did not attack the USA armed and was not involved on September 11, 2001, there is no right for self-defense according to Article 51 of the UN Charter. The customary law of pre-emptive intervention only applies in the event of a sudden, overwhelming, inevitable attack that leaves no other means or time for concern. Anticipatory self-defense is out of the question, especially since the USA and Great Britain, despite their advanced intelligence skills, have not presented any evidence of weapons of mass destruction or of an acute intention to attack Iraq. After 550 inspections in four months, UNMOVIC found neither supplies of these weapons nor the ability of Iraq to use them against the USA or Great Britain. Even Iraq's neighboring states have denied that military intervention was necessary to protect them. The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal of 1946 unanimously condemned every preventive war against a hypothetical future danger as the “highest international crime”; this judgment has been incorporated into the UN Charter. The justification of the Iraq war as a humanitarian intervention should bypass the necessary UN mandate. The same states that have tried to do so have systematically ignored Iraq's human rights violations in the 1980s. A war justified in this way would deprive the UN of power and empower each individual state to arbitrarily use military force without being responsible for general legal principles. The US policy on Iraq thus threatens the purpose of the UN and global security. 44 international lawyers in Australia (March 5, 2003) and 16 others in Great Britain (March 7, 2003) publicly stated that, according to all available current information, the war was illegal. None of the UN resolutions since 1990 justify it. Managed without a UN mandate, it would seriously undermine international law. Even with a UN mandate, it is not ethically a just war , nor is it wise or humanitarian. To lead it would mean a fatal breach of the founding principles of the UN laid down in the UN Charter.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan repeated on March 12, 2003 that the impending attack on Iraq without a UN mandate would be a violation of the UN charter. After that, he often stated that the Iraq war was not conducted in accordance with the UN Charter, but avoided calling it “illegal”. In September 2003 he warned that the concept of preventive war would lead to the collapse of the international order. In September 2004 he stated in an interview: After the final report of the inspectors, a second resolution should have decided on the conclusion from the results. When asked, he replied: Yes, measured against the UN Charter, the Iraq war was illegal. This sparked violent protests by the US government, which saw it as an interference in the ongoing election campaign for the re-election of US President Bush. The reaction showed a known structural weakness of the UN: you or individual states cannot legally sanction breaches of the UN Charter by member states of the UN Security Council and have too few soldiers of their own to enforce UN resolutions without the military power of these states. The vast majority of international lawyers confirm Annan's view: According to Resolution 1441, only the Security Council would have been empowered to determine the material breach of the conditions by Iraq and to decide the serious consequences that follow. In their view, previous resolutions 678 (which had been implemented in 1991) and 687 (which did not threaten military consequences) did not provide a legal basis.

Bush withdrew Bill Clinton's accession to the Rome Statute in May 2002 and prohibited the transfer of US citizens from third countries to the International Criminal Court (ICJ) by means of bilateral treaties and protective laws. The ISGH can only prosecute war crimes committed by US citizens if they affect large parts of a civilian population, if US courts do not want to or cannot indict them themselves, or if the UN Security Council transfers relevant cases to the ISGH. That is not expected in the foreseeable future.

Since 2008, international law professor Francis A. Boyle and former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi have been calling for charges against George W. Bush and members of his cabinet in the USA for the murder of US soldiers killed in the Iraq war and for a joint conspiracy to commit murder. They claim that proven deliberate false assertions (lies) in the pre-war propaganda campaign constitute a "malicious intent" offense for murder. Boyle considered such an indictment legally possible while Bush was in office, despite his immunity . Bugliosi calls for the death penalty for Bush and wrote an indictment in book form. It is intended to enable any district or state attorney in the United States to bring charges against at least one US soldier who has been killed in his or her area of ​​responsibility. The book became a bestseller. Reviewers consider a conviction of Bush for murder to be hopeless because one would have to prove an agreed-upon deception of the population, a plan to murder American soldiers, a circumvention of American law or a conspiracy by Bush with Iraqi rebels to kill his own soldiers and there is no precedent for this .

Few courts have so far ruled on the Iraq war. The German Federal Administrative Court ruled in June 2005 that a Bundeswehr officer could, for reasons of conscience, refuse to give orders regarding possible indirect support for American troops because of serious concerns about the legality of the Iraq war.

In January 2010, a judicial commission in the Netherlands under the former constitutional judge Willibrord Davids ruled that the Iraq war was contrary to international law. The appeal to earlier UN resolutions is not sustainable. Jan Peter Balkenende's government relied on questionable information from the USA and Great Britain and, against the Netherlands' foreign policy tradition, decided in August 2002 to participate in the war with almost no discussion. The report contributed to Balkenende's subsequent defeat and had repercussions on the British Chilcot investigation .

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission , which is not recognized by the UN, convicted Bush and Blair in absentia under Malaysia's criminal law in November 2011 for the illegal invasion of Iraq. In May 2012, she convicted Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and some lawyers from the US administration at the time for torturing people imprisoned as a result of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. She handed the case over to the ISGH.

War opponents in London in 2002

Other possible reasons for war

Petroleum interests

Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the region after Saudi Arabia. Even before the war began, political observers and journalists suspected that the US government wanted to set up a pro-American government in Iraq to meet the interests of the influential US oil industry , to secure the US oil supply and to strengthen its influence in OPEC . The US government denied this from the start.

According to Paul O'Neill, at the NSC meeting on January 30, 2001, Rumsfeld painted the advantages of a US-dependent Iraq, including access to and possibly control of its oil fields. He stressed that he was not aiming for regime change, but for the control of the means of mass destruction that was possible. The Defense Intelligence Agency under his authority prepared detailed maps of Iraqi oil fields, pipelines and lists of national and international contract partners for their future exploitation. In early February, Cheney established an Energy Task Force on behalf of Bush . This met regularly with lobbyists of the American oil industry without informing the US Congress. On February 3, 2001, Bush ordered the NSC to work with this lobby group. His administration viewed access to new oil fields as a national security issue , in accordance with the 1980 Carter Doctrine .

The economist Joseph E. Stiglitz declared before the war: The influence of oil interests on President Bush is undeniable, as his energy policy and promotion of the domestic oil industry show. But the consequences of the Iraq war for the oil price are unpredictable. If a democratic regime is put in place, it could greatly expand Iraq's oil production in order to raise funds for reconstruction. That would lower the oil price sharply and thus drive the oil industry of the USA and other oil-exporting countries into ruin. Or turmoil in the Muslim world could cut the US oil supply from this region and thus increase the price of oil. As with the 1973 oil crisis, this could have enormous negative consequences for the global economy.

William Nordhaus , who later won the Nobel Prize, also argued in January 2003 that, from an economic point of view, “oil cannot be an essential reason for war”.

In fact, the amount of oil imported from Iraq to the US had not changed significantly compared to pre-war years. Since 1997, the net imports of crude oil to the USA have been falling.

Regardless of these facts, Elmar Altvater saw the motives for the invasion in securing the strategic oil supply for the USA. The urgency of this goal has increased due to the fact that the global oil production maximum will be exceeded with increasing consumption worldwide. Altvater points out that Vice President Cheney submitted a report in May 2001 that showed a 68% increase in US import requirements for 2020. The occupation of the country is said to cover this increased demand and at the same time deny competitors access to the Iraqi oil fields.

In fact, hardly any American bidders were involved in the auctioning of oil rights in Iraq; Rather, companies from China and Russia were awarded the contract.

The petrodollar theory, according to my intention of Saddam Hussein, the future to accept only the euro instead of the dollar for oil deliveries, significantly influenced the war decision. If other countries had followed this example, this would have had fatal consequences for the USA. Germany and France, on the other hand, would have benefited as euro countries - they refused to participate in the war. In May 2003, after the US victory, OPEC passed a formal resolution to continue to settle oil bills in dollars.

The political scientist Herfried Münkler , on the other hand, argues that the USA intervened during the Kuwait war to ensure that the oil price was fixed on the world market. That is something different from the classic imperialist interest in bringing a central resource under political control. If the US had only wanted to push the world market price for oil down in the short term, the best way to do this would have been to end the Iraq embargo. Other security experts drew the conclusion that the “oil grab,” as critics also called the Iraq war, was too risky with regard to a possible embargo and even counterproductive in the long term. Political scientist Stephan Bierling also believes that the assumption that the invasion should have brought Iraq's oil reserves under the control of the USA because the American oil companies had pushed for the "lifting of US and UN sanctions" has been refuted. The main reason for the war was not concrete economic and geostrategic interests, but rather "to set an example by demonstrating one's own power and to change the risk calculation of all potential enemies of the USA after the attacks of September 11th". Iraq was the “easiest opponent” because “16 Security Council resolutions” had already been passed against it and it seemed easier to defeat than North Korea or Iran, for example.

In fact, ten years after the Iraq war began, the US doesn't have a single major oil deal with Baghdad. Der Spiegel comments: “The USA, which was once accused of having waged a war on resources in Iraq ('blood for oil'), will in future only play a dwindling role in this resource-rich country. China is taking advantage of this weakness - and is ignoring the Iraqis. "

Private Sector Interests

While the high cost of the war on terrorism weakened the US economy as a whole, some private companies made huge profits from US government contracts for war zones. The bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting set up by the US Congress named in its 2011 results report primarily ten companies that had received billions of US dollars for their activities in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kellogg, Brown and Root , then a subcontractor of Halliburton , received an order worth $ 48 billion for future military relief services from then US Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney before 2001 . The company Blackwater and Triple Canopy received at least 3.1 billion US dollars.

A Congressional inspection of US funds for the reconstruction of Iraq found that at least $ 8 billion of it was wasted on corruption. Many contracts with private companies operating in Iraq came about without tenders and competing applications. Many of the big contractors have been the biggest sponsors of US President George W. Bush's election campaigns and members of Congress who supported the Iraq war.

Geostrategic Interests

In 2010, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz named another reason for war in an interview. Accordingly, there were "bureaucratic reasons" to make the presence of US troops in neighboring Saudi Arabia superfluous. With Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, the US already had three bases in the Gulf, the management of which was easier than that in Saudi Arabia, and the removal of the stationed troops, which were a burden on Saudi Arabia, would in the long term make the situation more peaceful in the area Lead east.

There is also a connection to Israel's position as an ally of the USA and the dominant party in the Middle East conflict, since Israel would have been freed from a threat by the fall of the regime. The compensation paid by the Saddam regime to the survivors of Palestinian suicide bombers whose houses were destroyed by the Israeli occupation forces after they had previously fired at Israel with rockets and other weapons is also mentioned as a specific point of reference .

See also

• Yinhe Incident

literature

Documents

• John Ehrenberg, J. Patrice McSherry, Jose Ramon Sanchez (Eds.): The Iraq Papers. Oxford University Press, 2010, ISBN 0-19-539858-0 .
• Philip Taylor: The War in Iraq, A Failure of Honesty: Top Secret Documents Prove That Many of the Justifications for the Invasion of Iraq, Were Presented Deceptively. BookSurge, 2008, ISBN 978-1-4392-1140-3 .

prehistory

• George Packer: The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014, ISBN 978-0-374-29963-7 .
• Michael MacDonald: Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq. Harvard University Press, 2014, ISBN 0-674-72910-2 .
• Jack Fairweather: A War of Choice: Honor, Hubris and Sacrifice: The British in Iraq. Vintage Digital, 2012, ISBN 978-0-09-954233-9 .
• James P. Pfiffner, Mark Phythian (Ed.): Intelligence and National Security Policymaking on Iraq. Texas a & M University Press, 2008, ISBN 1-60344-067-4 .
• David Todd Kinsella: Regime Change: Origins, Execution, and Aftermath of the Iraq War. Thomson / Wadsworth, 2007, ISBN 978-0-495-18883-4 .
• Mark Danner: The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History. New York Review Books, 2006, ISBN 1-59017-207-8 .
• John Davis: Presidential Policies And the Road to the Second Iraq War. Ashgate, 2006, ISBN 0-7546-4769-2 .
• James Mann: Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet. Penguin, 2004, ISBN 978-1-101-10015-8 .
• Bob Woodward: Plan of Attack: The Definitive Account of the Decision to Invade Iraq. Simon & Schuster, 2004.
• Hans-C. Graf Sponeck, Andreas Zumach: Iraq - Chronicle of a wanted war. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2nd edition 2003, ISBN 3-462-03255-0 .
• Raymond W. Copson: Iraq War. Background and Issues. Nova Science Publishers, 2003, ISBN 1-59033-833-2 .
• Milan Rai: War Plan Iraq: 10 Reasons Against War with Iraq. Verso Books, 2002, ISBN 1-85984-501-0 .

Justifications

• John M. Schuessler: Overselling the Iraq War. In: Deceit on the Road to War: Presidents, Politics, and American Democracy. Cornell University Press, 2015, ISBN 0-8014-5359-3 .
• Joseph M. Hoeffel: The Iraq Lie: How the White House Sold the War. Progressive Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1-61577-792-1 .
• Mary Cardaras: Fear, Power, and Politics: The Recipe for War in Iraq after 9/11. Lexington Books, 2013, ISBN 0-7391-7994-2 .
• Jane K. Cramer, A. Trevor Thrall (Eds.): Why Did the United States Invade Iraq? Routledge, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-415-78213-5 .
• Richard Bonin: Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi and the Selling of the Iraq War. Anchor, 2012, ISBN 978-0-385-53503-8 .
• Kurt Eichenwald: 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars. Touchstone, 2012, ISBN 978-1-4516-6938-1 .
• Bob Drogin: Curveball: Spies, Lies and the Man Behind Them: The Real Reason America Went to War in Iraq. Ebury Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-09-192304-4 .
• Michael Isikoff, David Corn: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. Broadway Books, 2007, ISBN 978-0-307-34682-7 .
• James Bamford: A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies. Anchor, 2005, ISBN 1-4000-3034-X .
• Dilip Hiro: Secrets and Lies: The True Story of the Iraq War. Politico, 2005, ISBN 1-84275-128-X .
• Sheldon Rampton, John Stauber: The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq. Penguin, 2006, ISBN 978-1-58542-509-9 .
• Rodney Stich: Iraq, Lies, Cover-Ups, and Consequences. Diablo Western Press, 2005, ISBN 0-932438-22-9 .
• Joseph C. Wilson: The Politics of Truth: A Diplomat's Memoir: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity. PublicAffairs, 2005, ISBN 0-7867-1551-0 .

German edition: Politics of Truth. The lies that can cost Bush the future. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-10-049220-X .

• Nicholas Jackson O'Shaughnessy: Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction. Manchester University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-7190-6853-3 .
• Hans Blix: Mission Iraq. Truth and lies. Droemer / Knaur, 2004, ISBN 3-426-27337-3 .
• Sheldon Rampton, John Stauber: Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq. Tarcher, 2003, ISBN 1-58542-276-2 .
• Christopher Scheer, Robert Scheer, Lakshmi Chaudhry: The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq. Seven Stories Press, 2003, ISBN 1-58322-644-3 .

media

• Stanley Feldman, Leonie Huddy: Going to War in Iraq: When Citizens and the Press Matter. University of Chicago Press 2015, ISBN 978-0-226-30423-6 .
• Sabine Wilhelm: Covering the war in Iraq: Frame choices in American and German national newspapers. Akademikerverlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-639-43252-7 .
• Marcy Wheeler: Anatomy of Deceit: How the Bush Administration Used the Media to Sell the Iraq War and Out a Spy. Vaster Books, 2007, ISBN 0-9791761-0-7 .
• Danny Schechter: When News Lies: Media Complicity and the Iraq War. Select Books, 2006, ISBN 1-59079-073-1 .
• Ralph D. Berenger: Global Media Go to War: Role of News and Entertainment Media During the 2003 Iraq War. Marquette Books, 2004, ISBN 0-922993-10-6 .

legality

• Craig M. White: Iraq: The Moral Reckoning. Lexington, 2012, ISBN 978-0-7391-3894-6 .
• Albert L. Weeks: The Choice of War: The Iraq War and the Just War Tradition. ABC-Clio, 2009, ISBN 0-275-99111-3 .
• Vincent Bugliosi: The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. Vanguard Press, 2008, ISBN 1-59315-481-X .

German edition: charges of murder against George W. Bush. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-423-24714-6 .

• Phil Shiner, Andrew Williams (Eds.): The Iraq War and International Law. Hart Publishing, 2008.
• Jeremy Brecher and others (Eds.): In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond. Metropolitan Books, 2007.
• Jörg Arnold (Ed.): The Iraq War and International Law. Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-8305-0559-0 .
• Dominic McGoldrick: From '9-11' to the 'Iraq War 2003'. International Law in an Age of Complexity. Irish Academic Press, 2004, ISBN 1-84113-496-1 .

Interests

• Gore Vidal: Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta. Clairview, 2004, ISBN 1-902636-41-4 .

Web links

Commons : Justification for the Iraq war  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Der Spiegel, September 18, 2003: Attack on Iraq: Chronicle of an announced war
• Rachel Maddows: Hubris - Selling the Iraq War (Documentary from MSNBC, June 27, 2014)
• John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt (Foreign Policy, January / February 2003): An Unnecessary War
• Lie by Lie: The Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline (8/1/90 - 2/14/08)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Andrew Futter, Ballistic Missile Defense and US National Security Policy: Normalization and Acceptance After the Cold War. Routledge, 2013, p. 3 f.
2. ↑ Hans-C. Graf Sponeck, Andreas Zumach: Iraq - Chronicle of a wanted war. 2nd edition 2003, pp. 33-34.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Hans-C. Graf Sponeck, Andreas Zumach: Iraq - Chronicle of a wanted war. 2nd edition 2003, pp. 37-39
4. ↑ Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick: The Untold History of the United States. Gallery Books, 2013, ISBN 1-4516-1352-0 , p. 518.
5. ↑ Hans-C. Graf Sponeck, Andreas Zumach: Iraq - Chronicle of a wanted war. 2nd edition 2003, pp. 41-48.
6. ^ Gregory Schneider: The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution. Rowman & Littlefield, 2009, ISBN 0-7425-4285-8 , p. 203.
7. ↑ Michael MacDonald: Overreach , 2014, p. 15.
8. ↑ Scott Ritter: Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem - once and for all. Simon & Schuster, 1999, ISBN 0-684-86485-1 , p. 126 ff.
9. ↑ Hans-C. Graf Sponeck, Andreas Zumach: Iraq - Chronicle of a wanted war. 2nd edition 2003, p. 113 f.
10. ^ ^{A b} Ron Suskind: The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill. Simon & Schuster, New York 2004, ISBN 0-7432-5546-1 , p. 85 and p. 96.
11. ^ JMO Sharp: Tony Blair and the Special Relationship. In: Jane K. Cramer, A. Trevor Thrall (Eds.): Why Did the United States Invade Iraq? Routledge, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-415-78213-5 , p. 174.
12. ↑ US Embassy Israel, February 2001: Transcript Excerpts: Powell, German Foreign Minister on Iraq ( Memento of the original from June 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; Terry H. Anderson: Bush's Wars. Oxford University Press, 2011, ISBN 0-19-974752-0 , p. 59. 
13. ↑ George Packer: The Assassins' Gate , 2014, p. 39 f.
14. ↑ Bernd Greiner: 9/11. The day, the fear, the consequences. Munich 2011, p. 122 f.
15. ↑ George Packer: The Assassins' Gate , 2014, p. 40.
16. ↑ Bob Woodward: Bush at War. - America at war. Heyne, Munich 2003, p. 73 f.
17. ↑ Bernd Greiner: 9/11. The day, the fear, the consequences. Munich 2011, pp. 100-102.
18. ↑ Clarence Lusane: Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice: Foreign Policy, Race, and the New American Century. Praeger Frederick, 2006, ISBN 0-275-98309-9 , p. 111 ; Colin L. Powell (December 16, 2001): Interview on NBC's Meet The Press with Tim Russert.
19. ↑ Bruce P. Montgomery: Richard B. Cheney and the Rise of the Imperial Vice Presidency. Praeger, 2009, p. 148 ; Bernd Greiner: 9/11. The day, the fear, the consequences. Munich 2011, pp. 102-104.
20. ^ JMO Sharp: Tony Blair and the Special Relationship. In: Jane K. Cramer, A. Trevor Thrall (Eds.): Why Did the United States Invade Iraq? New York 2012, p. 175.
21. ↑ Michael Knights: Cradle of Conflict: Iraq and the Birth of Modern US Military Power. Naval Institute Press, 2005, ISBN 1-59114-444-2 , pp. 255-260.
22. ^ Mark Danner: The Secret Way to War , 2006, p. 48.
23. ^ Robert Dover, Michael S. Goodman (eds.): Learning from the Secret Past: Cases in British Intelligence History. Georgetown University Press, 2011, p. 109 ; Bernd Greiner: 9/11. The day, the fear, the consequences. Munich 2011, p. 105.
24. ^ Fred Kaplan (Slate, June 15, 2005): Let's Go to the Memo. What's really in the Downing Street memos? ( Memento of the original from December 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
25. ↑ Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick: The Untold History of the United States. 2013, p. 516 ; CNN, Jul 17, 2002: Scott Ritter: Facts needed before Iraq attack.
26. ↑ Bernd Greiner: 9/11. The day, the fear, the consequences. Munich 2011, pp. 105-107.
27. ↑ Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick: The Untold History of the United States. 2013, p. 516.
28. ^ Stanley Meisler: Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in a World of War. John Wiley & Sons, 2008, ISBN 0-470-36139-5 , pp. 239-242.
29. ↑ George W. Bush: The National Security Strategy of the United States. Morgan James Publishing, 2009, ISBN 1-60037-586-3 .
30. ^ Albert L. Weeks: The Choice of War: The Iraq War and the Just War Tradition. 2009, pp. 151-153.
31. ^ ^{A b} Robert Jones: Internet Forensics. O'Reilly Media, 2005, p. 154 ; Glen Rangwala (February 5, 2003): Intelligence? the British dossier on Iraq's security infrastructure.
32. ↑ Hans-C. Graf Sponeck, Andreas Zumach: Iraq - Chronicle of a wanted war. 2003, pp. 114-117.
33. ^ David Welch, Jo Fox: Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern Age. Palgrave, 2012, ISBN 0-230-24627-3 , p. 351.
34. ^ Philippe Sands: Operationalizing the UN Charter on the Use of Force. In: Antonio Cassese (Ed.): Realizing Utopia: The Future of International Law. Oxford University Press, 2012, ISBN 0-19-969166-5 , pp. 348-350.
35. ↑ Vincent Bugliosi: The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. 2008, p. 149 ; Don van Natta (New York Times, March 27, 2006): Bush Was Set on Path to War, British Memo Says.
36. ↑ Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick: The Untold History of the United States. 2013, p. 517.
37. ^ Mara Miller: The Iraq War: A Controversial War in Perspective. Enslow Publishers, 2010, ISBN 0-7660-3488-7 , p. 34.
38. ↑ Christopher Burns: Deadly Decisions: How False Knowledge Sank the Titanic, Blew Up the Shuttle and Led America Into War. Prometheus Books, 2008, ISBN 1-59102-660-1 , p. 234.
39. ↑ Bruce P. Montgomery: Richard B. Cheney and the Rise of the Imperial Vice Presidency. Praeger Frederick, 2009, ISBN 0-313-35620-3 , p. 153 f.
40. ↑ Mary Cardaras: Fear, Power, and Politics: The Recipe for War in Iraq after 9/11. 2013, p. 82 ; Tim Weiner: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Penguin, 2012, p. 566 and p. 1076, fn. 568.
41. ^ D. Christopher Kayes: Organizational Resilience: How Learning Sustains Organizations in Crisis, Disaster, and Breakdown. 2015, p. 121 ; US State Department (archive): Secretary Powell at the UN: Iraq's Failure to Disarm.
42. ↑ Bernd Greiner: 9/11. The day, the fear, the consequences. Munich 2011, p. 124.
43. ↑ Dennis Loo, Peter Phillips, Howard Zinn: Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney. Seven Stories Press, 2011, p. 116 and p. 148.
44. ↑ Dennis Loo, Peter Phillips, Howard Zinn: Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney. 2011, p. 121 and p. 148.
45. ↑ ^{a b} Seymour M. Hersh (The New Yorker, March 31, 2003): Who Lied to Whom? Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq's nuclear program?
46. ↑ Christina Gerhardt (Berkeley): Noble Lies to Ignoble Truths. Bush's Performances of Leo Strauss's Political Theory. In: Birgit Haas (Ed.): Power: Performativity, Performance and Political Theater since 1990 (Film - Medium - Discourse). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-3040-0 , p. 76.
47. ↑ Bernd Greiner: 9/11. The day, the fear, the consequences. Munich 2011, pp. 107-112; Ron Suskind: The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11. Simon & Schuster, 2007, ISBN 978-0-7432-7110-3 , p. 249.
48. ↑ ^{a b} David E. Sanger, James Risen (New York Times, July 12, 2003): After the War: Intelligence; CIA Chief takes Blame in Assertion on Iraqi Uranium.
49. ^ David Barston, William J. Broad (New York Times, Oct. 3, 2004): How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence.
50. ↑ James A. Thurber: Rivals for Power: Presidential-congressional Relations. Rowman & Littlefield, 3rd Edition 2005, ISBN 0-7425-3683-1 , p. 290 ; Thomas Jäger (Ed.): The world after 9/11: Effects of terrorism on the world of states and society. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011, p. 440.
51. ↑ ^{a b} Jeffrey Smith (Washington Post, April 6, 2007): Hussein's Prewar Ties To Al-Qaeda Discounted.
52. ^ New York Times, October 3, 2002: Threats and Responses: The Congressional Resolution; Bush strikes deal for House backing on action in Iraq
53. ↑ Bernd Greiner: 9/11. The day, the fear, the consequences. Munich 2011, p. 111.
54. ↑ ^{a b} Steven L. Danver (ed.): Popular Controversies in World History: Investigating History's Intriguing Questions. ABC-Clio, 2010, ISBN 1-59884-077-0 , p. 348 f.
55. ↑ James A. Thurber: Rivals for Power: Presidential-congressional Relations. 3rd edition 2005, p. 291.
56. ↑ Dominic McGoldrick: From '9-11' to the 'Iraq War 2003'. International Law in an Age of Complexity. 2004, p. 18 ; BBC, February 6, 2003: Transcript of Blair's Iraq interview.
57. ↑ Ole R. Holsti : American Public Opinion on the Iraq War. University of Michigan Press, 2011, ISBN 0-472-03480-4 , p. 44 ; Walter Pincus (Washington Post, November 18, 2003): CIA Seeks Probe of Iraq-Al Qaeda Memo Leak.
58. ↑ Human Rights Watch (2003): Estimation of missing persons under the rule of Saddam Hussein
59. ^ Richard Ashby Wilson (ed.): Human Rights in the 'War on Terror'. Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0-521-85319-4 , pp. 11 f.
60. ^ Jean Bricmont: Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War. Monthly Review Press, 2007, ISBN 1-58367-148-X , p. 142 ; The Guardian, Nov. 20, 2003: Transcript: the Bush-Blair press conference ; Peter Beaumont (The Guardian, July 18, 2004): PM admits graves claim 'untrue'.
61. ↑ Michael Heazle, Iyanatul Islam (ed.): Beyond the Iraq War: The Promises, Pitfalls And Perils of External Interventionism. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1-84542-632-0 , p. 27.
62. ^ Wolfowitz reveals Iraq PR plan , The World Today , May 29, 2003
63. ↑ James P. Pfiffner, Mark Phythian (Ed.): Intelligence and National Security Policymaking on Iraq. 2008, pp. 17-36.
64. ^ Philippe Sands: Lawless World: Making and Breaking Global Rules. Penguin, 2006, pp. 335-340.
65. ^ Phil Shiner, Andrew Williams (eds.): The Iraq War and International Law. 2008, p. 71 f.
66. ↑ CNN, June 8, 2003: Colin Powell Holds Media Availability (transcript).
67. ↑ Bob Drogin Greg Miller (Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2004): Iraqi Defector's Tales bolstered US Case for War.
68. ↑ Christopher Marquis (New York Times, April 3, 2004): Powell Blames CIA for Error on Iraq Mobile Labs ; Clarence Lusane: Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice: Foreign Policy, Race, and the New American Century. 2006, pp. 112-114.
69. ^ Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, With Addendums, September 30, 2004. Bernan Association, 2005, ISBN 0-16-072492-9 ; German text
70. ^ Loch K. Johnson: Strategic Intelligence: Understanding the hidden side of government. Praeger Security International, 2007, ISBN 0-275-98942-9 , p. 104 ; Report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (PDF).
71. ^ Richard Bonney: False Prophets: The Clash of Civilizations and the Global War on Terror. Peter Lang, 2008, ISBN 1-906165-02-5 , p. 322, fn. 40 ; Luke Harding (The Guardian, April 2, 2004): Germans accuse US over Iraq weapons claim.
72. ↑ James A. Swanson: The Bush League Of Nations: The Coalition Of The Unwilling, The Bullied And The Bribed: The Gop's War On Iraq And America. CreateSpace, ISBN 1-4382-1195-3 , p. 62.
73. ^ ^{A b} D. Christopher Kayes: Organizational Resilience: How Learning Sustains Organizations in Crisis, Disaster, and Breakdown. 2015, p. 121.
74. ↑ Kent M. Bolton: US National Security and Foreign Policymaking After 9/11: Present at the Recreation. Rowman & Littlefield, 2007, ISBN 0-7425-5900-9 , p. 290 ; Erich Follath and others (Der Spiegel, March 22, 2008): You are partly to blame.
75. ↑ Powell: "Schandfleck my career" - FAZ from September 9, 2005
76. ^ John Prados (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 234, November 5, 2007): The Record on Curveball.
77. ↑ Die Welt, August 27, 2011: "USA abused BND for Iraq war".
78. ↑ Stephen Gray: The New Spymasters: Inside the Modern World of Espionage from the Cold War to Global Terror. St. Martin's Press, 2015, ISBN 0-312-37922-6 , p. 138.
79. ↑ Sheldon Rampton, John Stauber: The Best War Ever , 2006, p. 27.
80. ^ ^{A b} Joseph Wilson: Testimony on Iraq War before US House Committee. In: Roger Chapman, James Ciment (eds.): Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints and Voices. Routledge, 2nd edition 2015, p. 2910 ; Joseph C. Wilson (New York Times, July 6, 2003): What I Didn't Find in Africa , Part 1 , Part 2
81. ↑ Graham Thomas Jr., Keith A. Hansen: Preventing Catastrophe: The Use and Misuse of Intelligence in Efforts to Halt the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Stanford University Press, 2009, ISBN 0-8047-6360-7 , p. 117.
82. ↑ 9/11 Commission (Ed.): Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. United States Government Printing Office, US 2004, ISBN 0-16-072304-3 , p. 66.
83. ↑ James A. Thurber: Rivals for Power: Presidential-congressional Relations. 3rd edition 2005, p. 292.
84. ↑ Senator Carl Levin, Senate Armed Services Committee, October 21, 2004: Report of an Inquiry into the Alternative Analysis of the Issue of an Iraq-al Qaeda Relationship.
85. ↑ Vincent Bugliosi: The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. 2008, pp. 146-148.
86. ↑ ^{a b} Ole R. Holsti: American Public Opinion on the Iraq War. 2011, p. 44.
87. ↑ "Süddeutsche Zeitung" of February 27, 2004: Bush as President: A Brief Foreign Policy Review , queried on February 7, 2010
88. ↑ America Service (December 14, 2005): Iraqi elections are a turning point for democracy ( Memento of the original from October 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
89. ↑ Craig M. White: Iraq: The Moral Reckoning. 2012 p. 82 ; Joseph Russomanno: Tortured Logic: A Verbatim Critique of the George W. Bush Presidency. Potomoc Books, 2010, ISBN 1-59797-513-3 , p. 327, fn. 266.
90. ↑ Richard Osley (The Independent.UK, October 25, 2015): Tony Blair apologizes for 'mistakes' over Iraq War and admits 'elements of truth' to view did invasion helped rise of Isis.
91. ↑ Hans-C. Graf Sponeck, Andreas Zumach: Iraq - Chronicle of a wanted war. 2nd edition 2003, p. 13 f.
92. ↑ Die Welt, February 17, 2003: "A war would not be waged for the good of the people in Iraq"
93. ↑ Human Rights Watch, January 22, 2004: Kenneth Roth on the lack of comparability with the Kosovo war ( Memento from June 11, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
94. ↑ Der Spiegel, January 26, 2004: The Bush administration does not fight for the hearts of the people ( Memento of July 14, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
95. ↑ ^{a b c d} Stuart Farson, Mark Phythian: Commissions of Inquiry and National Security: Comparative Approaches. Praeger Frederick, 2010, ISBN 0-313-38468-1 , pp. 64-67.
96. ↑ Christopher Andrew, Richard J. Aldrich, Wesley K. Wark (Eds.): Secret Intelligence: A Reader. Routledge Chapman & Hall, 2009, ISBN 0-415-42023-7 , pp. 231 f.
97. ^ Peter Fray (The Age, September 17, 2003): Spy chief regrets '45 minute 'Iraq weapons claim.
98. ↑ Glenmore S. Trenear-Harvey: Historical Dictionary of Atomic Espionage. Scarecrow Press, 2011, ISBN 0-8108-7180-7 , pp. 45 f.
99. ↑ Jack Fairweather: A War of Choice: Honor, Hubris and Sacrifice: The British in Iraq. 2012, p. 363, fn. 12 ; Andrew Gilligan (The Telegraph, July 21, 2013): The betrayal of Dr David Kelly, 10 years on.
100. ↑ The Week, October 29, 2015: Chilcot Inquiry, now longer than War and Peace, 'out by July'.
101. ^ Iraq Inquiry - Home. In: www.iraqinquiry.org.uk. Retrieved October 3, 2016 . 
102. ^ Julian Borger (The Guardian, October 1, 2004): Carnegie group says Bush made wrong claims on WMD.
103. ^ Charles Lewis: 935 Lies , New York 2014, pp. Xiii f. (Prologue) and 253-259 (Appendix B: The Iraq War Card) ; Charles Lewis, Mark Reading-Smith (2008): Iraq: The War Card. False pretenses.
104. ↑ Bruce Morton (CNN, March 1, 2003): Selling an Iraq-al Qaeda connection.
105. ↑ PIPA poll on Aug. 20, 2004 (Engl.) ( Memento of the original July 3, 2013 Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
106. ^ Charles Lewis: 935 Reads: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America's Moral Integrity. PublicAffairs, New York 2014, ISBN 978-1-61039-117-7 , pp. 261 f., Fn. 3.
107. ^ Martin Armis: The Real Conspiracy behind 9/11. Times, September 2, 2006 (paid); Text online
108. ↑ John Ehrenberg (Ed.): The Iraq Papers. 2010, p. 550 ; New York Times, May 26, 2004: From the Editors: The Times and Iraq.
109. ^ Stephan Bierling: History of the Iraq War: The Fall of Saddam and America's Nightmare in the Middle East. Beck, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-406-60606-9 , p. 84 ; Clemens E. Ziegler: NATO war in Kosovo in 1999 and war in Iraq in 2003: international law investigation into the universal ban on violence and its exceptions. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 3-631-58021-5 , p. 354; Andreas von Arnauld, Michael Staack: Security versus Freedom? Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-8305-1705-4 , p. 15; Kai Ambos, Jörg Arnold (Ed.): The Iraq War and International Law. 2004, p. 142.
110. ^ Phil Shiner, Andrew Williams (eds.): The Iraq War and International Law. 2008, p. 157.
111. ↑ Jeremy Brecher and others (eds.): In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond. 2007, pp. 30-32.
112. ↑ Dominic McGoldrick: From '9-11' to the 'Iraq War 2003'. International Law in an Age of Complexity. 2004, p. 16 ; The Guardian, March 7, 2003: War would be illegal.
113. ↑ Stephen Paine: Smoke & Mirrors. 2007, ISBN 0-615-14671-6 , p. 209.
114. ^ Stanley Meisler: United Nations: A History. Grove Press, 2nd Edition 2011, ISBN 0-8021-4529-9 , p. 365 ; BBC, September 16, 2004: Excerpts: Annan interview.
115. ^ John McClintock: The Uniting of Nations: An Essay on Global Governance. Peter Lang, 2010, ISBN 9052015880 , p. 150 f.
116. ^ Christian Dominice: Some legal Aspects of the Military Operation in Iraq. In: Jeremy Brecher and others (eds.): In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond. 2007, p. 34.
117. ^ Rüdiger Robert (Ed.): Federal Republic of Germany - Political System and Globalization. 4th edition 2007, Waxmann, ISBN 978-3-8309-1873-8 , p. 232 f.
118. ↑ Konrad Schüttauf (Ed.): Globalization - Problems of a New World Order. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, ISBN 3-8260-3529-1 , p. 70, fn. 20 ; Vincent Bugliosi: murder charges against George W. Bush. Munich 2008, p. 273 f.
119. ↑ Francis A. Boyle: Indicting President Bush for Murdering US Troops in Iraq. (Interview, June 9, 2008) In: Francis Boyle: Tackling America's Toughest Questions: Alternative Media Interviews. Clarity Press, 2013, p. 36 ff.
120. ↑ Vincent Bugliosi: Charges against George W. Bush for murder. Munich 2008, especially pp. 91–108.
121. ↑ The Ethical Spetacle, September 2008: The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. A book review by Thomas G. Vincent ; Sadakat Kadri (Telegraph, August 16, 2008): Review: The Prosecution of George W Bush for Murder by Vincent Bugliosi.
122. ↑ Bundesverwaltungsgericht.de, January 15, 2015: Non-binding order for violating the freedom of conscience of a Bundeswehr soldier during the IRAQ war.
123. ^ Philippe Sands: Operationalizing the UN Charter on the Use of Force. In: Antonio Cassese (Ed.): Realizing Utopia: The Future of International Law. Oxford University Press, 2012, ISBN 0-19-969166-5 , p. 350 ; The Guardian, Jan. 12, 2010: Iraq invasion violated international law, Dutch inquiry finds.
124. ↑ Michael Maisel (Huffington Post, Aug. 5, 2014): What Actually Constitutes A War Crime?
125. ↑ NBCnews, March 7, 2014: The Rachel Maddow Show 'for Thursday, March 6, 2014. (transcript)
126. ↑ Joseph Stiglitz: Rumors of War. In: Irwin Abrams (Ed.): The Iraq War and Its Consequences: Thoughts of Nobel Peace Laureates and Eminent Scholars. World Scientific Publications, 2013, ISBN 9812385908 , p. 173.
127. ↑ https://www.zeit.de/2003/04/Ein_Krieg_ums_Oel_ist_oekonomischer_Unsinn/seite-2
128. ^ US Imports from Iraq of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products . eia.gov. Retrieved July 28, 2012.
129. ↑ Concentration of US crude oil imports among top five suppliers highest since 1997.
130. ↑ Elmar Altvater: Oil Empire in Der Sound des Sachzwangs , ed. v. Sheets for German and international politics. Bonn and Berlin 2006, pp. 185–187.
131. ↑ Iraq: No Oil for War. In: DiePresse.com. December 14, 2009, archived from the original on July 6, 2019 . 
132. ↑ Behrooz Abdolvand , Matthias Adolf: Der Petrodollar. The real motive for the Iraq war? January 2004
133. ^ Herfried Münkler: The new Gulf War. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2003, p. 48.
134. ^ Stephan Bierling: History of the Iraq War. The fall of Saddam and America's nightmare in the Middle East , Munich: CH Beck, 2010, p. 109.
135. ^ Stephan Bierling: History of the Iraq War. The fall of Saddam and America's nightmare in the Middle East , Munich: CH Beck, 2010, p. 100.
136. ↑ Iraq - USA loses influence . In: Der Spiegel No. 1 / December 31, 2012, p. 56. The background to the report is the fact that ExxonMobil is giving up its stake in West Kurna-1, one of the largest oil fields in the world, and is putting its shares up for sale. PetroChina is interested in taking over the 50 billion investment. The withdrawal is not voluntary, but a consequence of the business that the group has with the Kurdish north. The Iraqi government does not tolerate separate contracts between foreign oil companies and the autonomous region.
137. ↑ Center for Public Integrity (March 19, 2013 to May 19, 2014): Invasion of Iraq, 10 years later.
138. ↑ "Baghdad's weapons were not the main reason for war". Retrieved December 10, 2014 . 
139. ↑ Ulrich Tilgner: The Staged War: Deception and Truth in the Fall of Saddam Hussein . 2003, p. 175 .
140. ↑ Robert Fisk: We're Tired of Being Lied to , The Independent / Znet, February 15, 2003
141. ↑ "Badger, KB, Klingst"? Timetable to Jerusalem - The Time, April 30, 2003
142. ↑ Clemens Ronnefeldt (International Reconciliation Alliance): Iraq: End the war that has started - prevent its escalation.