'60 Minutes' Blames Screwball Iraqi Scientist for Iraq War

'60 Minutes' Blames Screwball Iraqi Scientist for Iraq War, Ignoring American Intellectuals

Last night '60 Minutes' did a piece on "Curveball," the Iraqi scientist who fled to Germany in the late 90s and in 2002 provided "intelligence" that Saddam was preparing chemical and biological weapons. Curveball claimed that a dozen technicians had died in an accident at the plant. In the runup to war, former Sec'y of State Colin Powell told the U.N. as much, disgracing himself forever. The plant was said to be an agricultural seed-purification plant; it turned out to be one.
'60 Minutes' takeaway was that Curveball perpetrated one of the most costly "conjobs" in history.
This is like blaming a matchbook for the California wildfires. The U.S. Administration got conned because it wanted to get conned. It wanted war, and was happy to twist intelligence.
It is interesting that one of 60's most reliable sources in this piece was Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. Wilkerson is used to show how the CIA manipulated General Powell. It is unfortunate that '60 Minutes' doesn't trust Wilkerson to talk about the larger issues here, the neocons' drive for war, their bad ideas that propelled this disaster. When Walt and Mearsheimer's paper on the Israel lobby first appeared in the London Review of Books, Wilkerson taught it at the two colleges he was teaching at then (and there was "pushback" against his doing so, he said). Powell himself has blamed the war ideas on the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (in Karen DeYoung's bio). Too bad that CBS can't place the blame for bad intelligence where it belongs, in the intellectuals who figured out that we could bring democracy by force to the Middle East, and who have always overlooked Israel's problems with democracy... More?