Anders Fogh Rasmussen Quotes
Iraq has WMDs. It is not something we think, it is something we know. Iraq has itself admitted that it has had mustard gas, nerve gas, anthrax, but Saddam won't disclose. He won't tell us where and how these weapons have been destroyed. We know this from the UN inspectors, so there is no doubt in my mind.
As a member of NATO, the Prime Minister was given the same faulty intelligence that the Bush Administration gave to Congress, our allies and gave to Colin Powell to brief the United Nations. All were similarly misled. There were no WMDs in Iraq and Iraq did not even have an active program to develop them.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Danish Prime Minister, Statement in Support of the Danish Participation in the Invasion of Iraq, 2003
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This information was proven false after the invasion of Iraq. The British were persuaded it was true because the US intelligence had reached the same conclusions. And the Americans were much more confident that Saddam was actively producing WMDs because British intelligence said so. In reality, both intelligence agencies relied on the same set of false information to reach this conclusion. There was no Iraq nuclear program and no chemical or biological weapons production either. The major British-American reason for initiating the Iraq war was without foundation. It is still debated whether it was a deliberate strategy on the part of the Bush administration and the American neo conservatives or just bad intelligence on both sides of the Atlantic.
It is with this certainty that the Vice President led the effort to invade Iraq in a preemptory war. After the invasion it was discovered that Iraq did not have any nuclear weapons or any other WMDs. Further, Iraq had no WMD development program of any kind. The rationale for the Iraq War was nill.
Powell's Performance was a great boost for U. S. foreign policy because he was so respected for his integrity. Powell persuaded much of the diplomatic community that the United States was justified in invading Iraq. Tragically, what Powell said was not true. He had been given false and doctored information by the CIA, the Vice President, and others at the White House. Powell lost the great respect that much of the diplomatic world had for him, and the affect on him was personally devastating. He took no more public positions. The change in American public opinion about Powell that resulted was dramatic even though Powell himself was deceived.
Kay was chasing around Iraq trying to find the weapons that the George W. Bush administration had said definitely existed. Based on the weapons existence, the United States went to War in Iraq. No weapons were ever found.
A little over a decade later, it was the conservative President who was condemning Saddam Hussein for gassing his own people and justified the Iraq War in part over that. And in 2007 Saddam having been toppled from power, he was tried for this crimes against humanity with the major charge being his gassing of the Iraqi Kurds. He was hanged for the “liberal hate speech” which had turned into conservative hate speech, but was a correct accusation regardless of which political pole was making it. There were few issues where most Americans were as unanimous as Saddam’s guilt in the gassing of the Kurds with Limbaugh and Saddam’s relatives being about the only people who saw it as propaganda.
He was the leader of the team that followed to invading troops into Iraq to find the nuclear and other WMDs that the CIA had said were deployed and ready to be used. They found none. Worse for the CIA, there were not even any development programs ongoing. The CIA Director was furious with Kay for admitting the CIA gross error. Kay was given minor assignments thereafter even though he was the best WMD analyst we had.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen RSKmd is a Danish politician who was the 24th Prime Minister of Denmark from November 2001 to April 2009 and the 12th Secretary General of NATO from August 2009 to October 2014. He became CEO of political consultancy Rasmussen Global and founded the Alliance of Democracies Foundation. He serves as a Senior Adviser to Citigroup. He also served as a senior advisor at The Boston Consulting Group.
