more on the 16 (s)words

simon weighs in on the niger forgeries again in response to some comments here:

"It was a one-way trip, they were going to war come-what-may so it didn't really matter how dodgy or poor the actual docs were, they were designed to bolster the UK (dossier) case for war, they only had to pass muster (by degree) once, and because the plot was a fiction from top to bottom it was unlikely from the outset to fool all the people all the time.

I would go as far as to say that they were probably designed NOT to fool the INR/IAEA analysts, because to do so would then become a demonstrable act of war-making on the basis of fabricated and false grounds.

I do wonder if they were designed from the outset to get the mention they did in the 2003 SOTU address.

Was the wording "The British government has learned that..." part of a concerted effort to show that the WMD claims were multinational in origin and therefore more believable, as well as secondarily intended to show that the drive for war to remove Saddam was not a purely US interest?

The timetable that had the war starting as it did, in March of 2003, may have been written well in advance, indeed it did appear to have been set in stone some considerable time beforehand, simply because of its inflexibility in allowing Hans Blix to finish his work.

Were the SOTU speech claims about uranium, as they were spoken, a specific part of the original blueprint for war?"

sheesh. i'm getting dizzy. (note that simon is talking in questions, not statements)

The docs were designed to be caught in advance by the IAEA, but yet also designed to get into the SOTU? that far in advance? not a chance (in my book, at least). the real world is way too unpredictable for that.

a friend suggested that the egadministration didnt really grab onto the niger claims until late 2002, when all the other claims (aluminium tubes etc) started to fall apart. i'm not intimately familiar with the details - but that narrative would appear to coincide with some of eriposte's theories (and again, im not intimately familiar) that the Wilson/Niger claims seemed to sit dormant for many months, until they were suddenly resurrected (i'm guessing around oct 02) in support(!) of the niger claims.

re:

"Was the wording "The British government has learned that..." part of a concerted effort to show that the WMD claims were multinational in origin and therefore more believable...?"

i'm pretty sure that the answer is 'no'. the 'british' attribution was wiggle room around the fact that the CIA wouldnt allow direct attribution. i'm almost positive of that. and if i'm right about that, then it goes a long way to proving my point that the forgeries were so amateur that it was unlikely they they could have possibly achieved their purported goal. (Simon will reply that the goal was to get it in the british dossier - which they did, successfully - and i dont really have an answer to that, apart from the fact that the USG tried to get the same comments in the cincinatti speech in october and were rebuffed, resulting in the 'british' headfake in the sotu.)