WHY DID THE UNITED STATES invade Iraq? It still isn't possible to be sure - and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War. Richard Haass said that he will go to his grave not knowing the answer. It was something that some people wanted to do. Before the invasion, Americans argued not just about whether a war should happen, but for what reasons it should happen - what the real motives of the Bush administration were and should be. Since the invasion, we have continued to argue, and we will go on arguing for years to come. Iraq is the Rashomon of wars.

Based on two stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke (Rashomon and In a Grove), it describes a rape and murder through the widely differing accounts of four witnesses, including the perpetrator and, through a medium, the murder victim. The story unfolds in flashback as the four characters--the bandit Tajomaru (Mifune), the murdered samurai Takehiro (Mayasuki Mori), his wife Masako (Machiko Kyo), and the nameless woodcutter (Takashi Shimura)--recount the events of one afternoon in a grove. Each story is self-serving, and all are mutually contradictory, leaving the viewer unable to determine the truth of the events.

COHEN: I mean, the problem is, the Russians don't trust us anymore. We've broken so many promises to them. And it's not just Putin and Medvedev, it's the Russian policy class. They see us as aggressive.

I've been in Moscow within the last three or four years listening to debates, where intelligence officers close to the military and what used to be called the KGB, literally have accused Putin of appeasing America - appeasing him...

And one of them even joked, when he went to Munich to give that speech, "Well, he should go to Munich. That's where he belongs...

I mean, forgive me, Nick. But all of these things that Nick said we've given Russia over the years are said to be, where I grew up down in Kentucky, worth about as much as hot spit. They're nothing. You get to sit at the table with a bunch of NATO people, while NATO moves toward you. It's not about humiliation. I think this psychological factor is not as important. Let's do some counterfactual reasoning.

We wake up tomorrow morning. There are large Russian military bases in Canada. There are large Russian military bases in Mexico. The Russians are building a radar that could neutralize and track our long-range missiles. That's what the Czech radar, the one in the Czech Republic will be able to do, according to physicists at MIT.

The Russians don't believe this is about Iran. And why would they believe that?

So, we wake up. We look to Canada. We look to Mexico. And what do we do? One, an American president would be impeached if he didn't respond. There would be hysteria in this country.

On peace with the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert said in the interview: "We face the need to decide but are not willing to tell ourselves, yes, this is what we have to do. We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories. We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace."

Elsewhere in the interview, when discussing a land swap with the Palestinians, he said the exchange would have to be "more or less one to one."

In an interview with the Yedioth Aharonoth daily, Olmert said that as a hard-line politician for decades he had not been prepared to look at reality in all of its depth.

"Ariel Sharon spoke about painful costs and refused to elaborate," Olmert told the daily. "I say, we have no choice but to elaborate. In the end of the day, we will have to withdraw from the most decisive areas of the territories. In exchange for the same territories left in our hands, we will have to give compensation in the form of territories within the State of Israel."

At the age of 63, just moments before his departure from premiership, Ehud Olmert has reached an extraordinary epiphany. In order to make peace with the Palestinians and the Syrians, Israel must withdraw from "nearly all the territories, if not all." As he told Yedioth Aharonoth in a holiday interview, even East Jerusalem must be given to the Palestinians.

Whoa.

What an epiphany: In order to make peace with the Arabs, we must give them land. How come we never thought of that before? And where was Olmert when the Israeli left, and the whole international community, was repeatedly exhausting this claim? Was he really among the screaming spokesmen for the camp opposing all agreements and all compromises? Or was that just the evil child within him, and not actually the real Olmert? Olmert is repenting now for his sins: For 35 years, he said, "I was not prepared to see reality in all its depth." Now he is regretting his vote in Knesset against a peace agreement with Egypt, as well as his stubborn refusal to annex even a millimeter of Jerusalem's wide border. But most regretfully, he has reached this realization too late for it to have any influence.

• The British foreign intelligence agency MI-6 made contact with the head of Iraqi Intelligence Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti before the war and learned from him that Iraq had no WMDs. He also explained Saddam's motivation for wanting to trick Iran into thinking that he did. Given the importance of Iraq's chemical weapons in avoiding defeat in the Iran-Iraq war this is understandable.
  
  This information was passed on to the Bush administration months before the start of the war. It also corroborates the information given to the CIA by the Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri saying the same thing. The Sabri case and many other facts relating to this are described on the previous post on this blog The Bush Administration's WMD Case for the Iraq War: Intelligence Sought to Justify a Decision Already Made. This further information from Suskind reinforces the conclusion of that post, that Weapons of Mass Destruction were not the primary motivation on the part of the Bush administration for wanting to invade Iraq.
  
  
• Suskind goes on to recount how the letter revealed in 2003 (purported to have been written in 2001) from Habbush to Saddam describing Iraqi involvement with the 9/11 hijackers was a forgery ordered by either the White House or the Vice President's office.
  
  This claim is most important for possible legal action against either Cheney or Bush because there is a law saying that the CIA cannot be used to propagandize the population of the US itself.
  
  
• Iran contacted the United States in 2003 through the British offering to work against Al Qaeda working out of Iran. The US ended up snubbing these efforts. In an interview on Democracy Now, Ron Suskind describes the relevance of this and how it sheds light on the Iraq war for being a behavior modifying example for rogue states:

  Here, we have an extraordinary moment in 2003. You know, you talk about why did we go into Iraq. Clearly, when you talk to neocons, what they do come up with is that it was a great experiment in behaviorism. The view was Saddam Hussein was actually an easy mark, that he was captive and toothless. That was the view. And we'll make an example of him to show other rogue dictators not to express similar temerity in challenging America. That was the concept, especially in terms of the fact that WMD are now carried on civil technology. You can't stop these dictators from getting weapons of mass destruction. There wasn't a way essentially to stop that from happening, so the word in the White House documents is, how do we dissuade them, other people? Saddam would have been--that's the idea--the example.
  
  Now, interestingly, what happens at this point is, you know, as we are moving to war in this period, this snubbing of Saddam Hussein, rather, this making an example of Saddam, actually has a yield, Amy. The Iranians, once we have 150,000 troops in Iraq, are like, my goodness, well, their behavior is actually getting shaped. They say to the British, who they still have relationships with, they say, "You know, maybe it's time for us to meet with the Americans." And they all but crawl across broken glass to say, "Can we help, at this point? You know, we get it, alright?" Interestingly, they were ready to help with al-Qaeda, which had a group inside of Iran under house arrest. The Shura Council at that point was talking to a group of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia about buying Russian suitcase nukes. All of that, of course, got people very agitated. Iran also said, "We can help with Iraq. We can help with Afghanistan. We know these countries."
  
  What happened is, at this point, a CIA chief flies over there. He's not used to doing these sorts of missions. He's late in the flight. He gets the wrong hotel...
  
  ...Ultimately, we end up snubbing the Iranians and all but creating--at this moment, remember, this is the "real men go to Tehran" moment for the administration. We've snubbed the Iranians and all but create the oppositional Iran that has caused such havoc in the years since.

  This adds further evidence to the willingness to cooperate demonstrated by the pre-Ahmedinajad Khatami regime which was snubbed and ignored by the Bush administration. Another example is described in the following post outlining the grand bargain deal offered by the Iranians to the Americans through the Swiss.
  
  
• Joe Wippl, who was the CIA chief of station in Germany advised the German intelligence agency not to allow the CIA to have access to the now infamous Iraqi informer Curveball. He was the former taxi driver who gave the bogus information about the mobile biological weapons labs. More is said about him in the HIPJ Iraq WMD post.
  
  Ron Suskind conjectures, albeit without conclusive evidence, that Wippl told the Germans this at the behest of Vice President's office and the Defense Intelligence Agency who wanted to cover up how shoddy of a source curveball was. The Vice President's office later recommended Wippl for congressional liaison from the CIA, a "plum job". Unnamed sources in Suskind's book speculate that this was a reward for telling the Germans not to hand over curveball to the CIA.