Because I should.

Curveball was one of many Iraqis with a (probably legitimate) grudge against the Hussein patriarcy, and who was prepared to lie to defeat a brutal dictator. However, the US not only took his story at face value, they also embellished it, crediting Curveball as an eye witness (which he never claimed).

And in case that wasn’t crazy enough, Colin Powell then went to the UN with an embellished version of the evidence that Germany and others knew to be unreliable, and the US knew that Germany knew it was unreliable. The whole thing was a press campaign.
The US weren’t trying to convince Germany and France to authorise a war since they all knew it was fake . They were trying to convince the world that Germany and France were cowardly peaceniks who were going against the evidence of WMD.

I’d say it was just as bad as Viet Nam, except it was worse. Viet Nam also had a manufactured casus belli and was the result of us being unable to de-escalate due to machoism, but at least JFK/Nixon had the Cold War as an excuse.

With GW2, We still don’t really know why Bush did it. Al-Qaeda in Iraq… WMDs … all lies.

Curveball, however, was essentially US-made because it was intentionally harvested from the “noise” of intelligence sources and trumpeted as a “proof” Saddam’s nuclear ambitions.

The two incidents are only comparable in showing that you never have to look hard to find dubious grounds for war.

Those sanctions and the No-Fly zone were placed in lieu of a war, because of Sadaam’s systematic oppression of the Kurds and Shiites, after GW1.

The sanctions only hurt Iraq’s people because Sadaam let them hurt them.

I don’t often have to appear British (or American), but when I do, I prefer http://www.tunnelbear.com/

Wasn’t that the real reason we went over there to line the pockets of the war-profiteers so that domestic infrastructure could be created to electronically enslave us?

Imagine if J. Edgar had just dropped the phony pretense and just joined forces with the Mobsters.
(Hoover blackmailed politicans with his blackmail file cabinet, every politician [with ANY skeletons] is obviously electronically enslaved too, now. All it takes is access to the right info and you can have them tap-dancing for ya! Tapity-tap-tap!)

You just can’t hand the keys to America to Orwellian Authoritarians without a good excuse, so we went to Iraq for WMD, I mean, FOR NO GOOD REASON.

Thanks a lot, Curveball-dude.
Seriously, Mission Accomplished, you got the box open, which was the real goal.

He explained that when the first Iraq war was argued for, it wasn’t just that Iraq had invaded Kuwait, but they made a big deal of things like turning babies out of incubators. It sold him at the time. Later, though, the testimonial turned out to be unsubstantiated, organized as part of a PR campaign, and the source was revealed to be the ambassador’s daughter.

I wasn’t old enough at the time to know about that, and it was a surprise to me. I don’t think I’ve heard it mentioned since. So it seems like each war, new people have to learn the same lessons all over again.

fixed that for you

Having been against the Iraq War makes us all ‘unserious.’ Having questioned the bullshit they were pushing on us makes us all ‘unserious.’ I guess it takes being an idiot and believing the bullshit, or being a mass-murderer and pushing the bullshit to make someone ‘serious’ and worth listening too.

That cannot be laid at Curveball’s feet, and without excusing him, it may be that he hoped that getting the US to invade would end the sanctions and allow reconstruction. Indeed, that’s what should have happened – with or without invasion  – but the GWB administration comprehensively failed to plan or execute reconstruction.

Anyone seen Dick Cheney lately?

I really hope a bunch of meddling kids pull a Scooby-Doo on Mr. Curveball there. “Now let’s see who you really are!”