Outtakes From The Lost Kristol Tapes

The March, 2003 C-Span segment with Daniel Ellsberg and Bill Kristol contained far too much Kristolian goodness to fit into the piece I wrote about it. Here's more:

KRISTOL: I've thought ever since [the Gulf War in 1991] it would be great to liberate Iraq. I hoped we could do it peacefully, as many people did, we tried with sanctions and inspections and political pressure on Saddam. That ended up not working.

This is an interesting, impressive piece of honesty. According to the relevant UN resolutions, the goal of the sanctions and inspections was to disarm Iraq, not remove Saddam. But removing Saddam, disarmed or not, was America's goal, and so we wanted to use the sanctions to cause Iraq so much economic pain that Saddam would be overthrown in a coup. For that reason, the US repeatedly said that it would never allow the sanctions to be lifted as long as Saddam remained in power, international law be damned. (The inspections were also used as cover for spying to effectuate a coup.)

So Kristol, in a shocking and rare departure, was telling the truth. Later, during the 2004 presidential debate, George Bush would also be surprisingly honest:

Sanctions were not working. The United Nations was not effective at removing Saddam Hussein.

According to international law, the sanctions had worked. They had given Iraq the incentive to disarm. But according to America, the sanctions had not worked.

Of course, neither Kristol nor Bush will ever tell the whole truth: that Iraq's refusal to cooperate with inspections was due to the fact there was no point from their perspective. It wasn't because Saddam was "bluffing."

—Jonathan Schwarz