Juan Cole - Bush allowed Baghdad looting to hide his families involvement in WMDs (chad)

I originally posted about this on my blog last week when all the talk was about the Bush / Anzar transcripts and how they showed that no matter what President Bush was going to invade Iraq.

Not the way I read them but people can disagree.

What I can't figure out is how Juan Cole gets from there to here:

The second claim that I made was that Bush was aware of, and rejected, an offer by Saddam Hussein to flee Iraq, probably for Saudi Arabia, presuming he could take out with him a billion dollars and some documents on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. Both provisions were intended by Saddam to protect him from later retaliation. The money would buy him protection from extradition, and the documents presumably showed that the Reagan and Bush senior administrations had secretly authorized his chemical and biological weapons programs. With these documents in his possession, it was unlikely that Bush would come after him, since he could ruin the reputation of the Bush family if he did. The destruction of these documents was presumably Bush's goal when he had Rumsfeld order US military personnel not to interfere with the looting and burning of government offices after the fall of Saddam. The looting, which set off the guerrilla war, also functioned as a vast shredding party, destroying incriminating evidence about the complicity of the Bushes and Rumsfeld in Iraq's war crimes. Aznar asked Bush if he would grant Saddam these guarantees, and Bush roared back that he would not.

I'm not a regular reader of Cole's blog but the last time I did read it he didn't seem quite so unhinged. Maybe the fact that we may actually succeed in Iraq despite his and every other Democrats best efforts has finally pushed him around the bend.

posted by xgenghisx at 04:19 PM

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